trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Four Tips for Public Speaking
by palladias — 2013-04-15T14:56:51.866Z

TL;DR, I offered and promised in the Post Request Thread a guide to the four highest value tips I know for doing public speaking. Here they are, with explanations below:

Fortissimo! Don't apologize for talking

Know the first and last line of your comment before you open your mouth

Think about speeches/comments as having a narrative arc

Look for additional emotional tones to layer on the content

My background: I was a debater in college, but not in the Gatling-gun style of competitive debate. We did philosophical debate, where you only argued for propositions you actually believed. So, style was supposed to make it easier to get interested, but not be too Dark Arts-persuasive. I coached younger members on how to present their speeches and have spent a fair amount of time murderboarding people (helping people prepare for interviews or presentation).

I think the tools in this post are useful both for speeches you prepare and polish ahead of time, but also to be better at speaking coherently off the cuff (long and short form). You can check out my speaking style here. (I'm not using notes, and I didn't memorize a speech -- I memorized an arc which gave me room to improvise). So, here are the habits that help:

1) Fortissimo! Don't apologize for talking.

In E.L. Konigsberg's About the B'nai Bagels, the protagonist is preparing for his bar mitzvah and asks his brother for advice on how to sing his Torah portion. After listening to him, his brother has the following feedback:

“I have only one word of advice to give you”

“Give already”

“That word is fortissimo… it’s Italian for loud. When in doubt, shout, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“I should shout? Everyone will hear for sure how bad I am.”

“But, my dear brother, if you sing loud and clear, it will be easier on the audience. You’re making it doubly hard on them. Hard to listen to and hard to hear.”

Not everyone needs to be louder when they speak, but a lot of people who are uncomfortable with public speaking signal that discomfort in posture or vocal tone (a lot of freshman and sophomores had an about-to-cry sounding tension in their voices when they were speaking). If you're apologizing for talking, your

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[SEQ RERUN] Mandatory Secret Identities
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-15T07:08:06.432Z

Today's post, Mandatory Secret Identities was originally published on 08 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

This post was not well-received, but the point was to suggest that a student must at some point leave the dojo and test their skills in the real world. The aspiration of an excellent student should not consist primarily of founding their own dojo and having their own students.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Whining-Based Communities, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : Mountain View: Reinforcement
by fiddlemath — 2013-04-15T05:15:53.396Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: Reinforcement

WHEN:
16 April 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
167 Jasmine Ct, Mountain View, CA

I just read Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog. It's full of things relevant to our interests, like:

how to learn skills and good habits

how to unlearn unwanted behavior and bad habits

how to attach behavior to a trigger

and so on. I suspect this is fundamental stuff if you're interested in becoming an excellent human.

I'll basically present the contents of Don't Shoot the Dog, highlighting those points most salient to our interests. I'd love to have a conversation about what it'd look like to take these ideas seriously..

And also, let's play the Training Game, therein described, which sounds silly and enlightening. "Silly and enlightening" is my favorite combination. :D

Hope to see you there!

If you're in the San Francisco Bay area, consider joining the Bay Area Less Wrong mailing list.
Regular meetups in Mountain View and Berkeley, and other events, are announced and discussed there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: Reinforcement
Meetup : Buffalo - Thursday Meetup 
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-04-15T04:19:32.885Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo - Thursday Meetup

WHEN:
18 April 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University at Buffalo - North Campus 31 Capen Hall

Location: 31 Capen Hall is on the ground floor of Capen (under the main floor of the Capen Library). It is also near the Capen Cafe.

Hey Everyone,
We are delving back into the sequences and next in line is The Virtue of Narrowness (http://lesswrong.com/lw/ic/the_virtue_of_narrowness/). Its a pretty good read and I've got some good ideas for activities/games we could do to illustrate it.

On side note, I also came across this image recently (http://measureofdoubt.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/simplified-map.jpg) which got me thinking about our individual goals. Currently, we're focusing a lot of our time on Epistemic Rationality, while not really focusing any attention on Instrumental Rationality. Look it over and let me know what you guys want to work on for future meetups.

See you at UB!

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo - Thursday Meetup
Pay Other Species to Pandemize Vegetarianism for You
by diegocaleiro — 2013-04-15T03:10:47.407Z

(This post is completely jocose. If you can't take it, don't read it. I'm making fun of Rationalists, of Me, of homo economicus, of Vegans and of things I really praise, like Consequentialism and Outsourcing. It is not serious. The Sheldon Sarcasm sign has been lifted, your asperger side has been warned)

One of the features of rationality is that it allows you to mix different units.

By rationally behaving economically, you learn, for you, how many apples costs an orange.

Vegetarians and Vegans sell diminishing suffering. They claim to have the best price in the market, only Singularitarians and Existential Risk avoiding competes with their numbers. Utilitarians are a good target market.

Then a Lesswronger came and noticed that, and said: Well, why not buy someone to be a vegetarian for you, here.

Awesome price actually. You shock a few humans (notice that humans are animals, who clearly would rather be shocked than eaten), one of them enough to make him vegan.

So why not take this to the next level?

Figure out the reproductive cycle and eating habits of this beetle that makes people vegetarian. Make sure the evidence is solid.

Get a basement lab full of them.

Ship them alive to cities where more people consume meat. Wait for population growth.

Save a lot of animals!

Seems straightforward, but is it?

Also, are there similar strategies for other groups? Are there easy, but strange, shortcuts for selfish hedonists, immortalists, rational altruists? Utilitarian hedonists? The ancient school of negative utilitarianists? Cryonicists?
Looks like it was a completely different problem.... "LW Women: Submissions on misogyny" needs normal visibility
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-04-15T02:43:19.453Z

Edited to add: The post was probably always in Discussion, but if "r/discussion" is taken out of a url, the post looks like it's in Main but without proper notification. See the comments here for a bit more detail.

**********

LW Women: Submissions on Misogyny was moved from Discussion to Main, but doesn't appear in lists of Promoted, New, or (in the right sidebar) Recent posts. Comments to it aren't showing up in Recent Comments.

Edited to add: Comments are showing up in Recent Comments for Discussion.

I've brought this up twice-- in the comments and in the open thread-- and it doesn't seem to have made any difference.

I assume that this is an honest mistake or a site weirdness, but I'd really like the topic to get the attention it deserves. I'm also wondering whether other posts have gotten semi-lost the same way.

Edited to add: Is there a best place for bringing up site weirdnesses?
Meetup : Bielefeld Meetup April 17th
by Just_existing — 2013-04-14T21:29:10.370Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup April 17th

WHEN:
17 April 2013 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Grill/Bar Verve, Klosterplatz 13, Bielefeld

We are meeting once again in Bielefeld.

The topics of this evening are not yet determined, but will be in the next days, or develop during the meetup. Highly interesting talk can be expected.

If you live in the area consider dropping by :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup April 17th
[LINK] Climate change and food security
by  — 2013-04-14T11:11:37.440Z

A Guardian article on the impact of climate change on food security. This is worrying (albeit perhaps not a global catastrophic (or existential) risk). It has the potential to wipe out the gains made against extreme poverty in the last few decades.

Should we be so pessimistic? Climate change might be averted through government action or a technological fix; or the poorest might get rich enough to be protected from this insecurity; or we could see a second 'Green Revolution' with GM, etc. I've also seen some discussion that climate change could in fact increase food cultivation - in Russia and Canada for example.

How do people feel about this - optimistic or pessimistic?
Grad Student Advice Repository
by Stabilizer — 2013-04-14T09:28:39.349Z

There was some support for the idea of starting an advice repository for grad students much in the same tradition as the Boring Advice Repository and the Solved Problems Repository started earlier by Qiaochu_Yuan. So here goes.

Please share any advice, boring or otherwise, for succeeding at grad school. I realize that succeeding might mean different things to different people, but I believe most people largely agree with what it means in this context. Feel free to elaborate on what you believe it should mean, if you have views on the subject.

I am a theoretical physics grad student, so I'm personally more interested in advice for mathy disciplines (i.e. physics, math, CS), and I also suspect that there are many grad students from these disciplines on LessWrong; but advice for any discipline is welcome as well.

Advice is welcome from anyone, but please do mention your background for providing the advice so that people can weight the advice accordingly. For example, I would be more be open to listening to advice from someone who has completed a very successful PhD, than from someone who has simply interacted with a lot of grad students but has never been to grad school.

Also, feel free to link to advice from other sources, and maybe quote the most useful parts in what you read. Remember, this is meant to be a repository, so that people can come and find the advice, so don't worry if it seems to be something most people would've already read or known.

Thanks!
Bitcoin Cryonics Fund
by lsparrish — 2013-04-14T05:59:14.460Z

The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.

Details: I had added 10 bitcoins to get things started, and there were 4.75 worth of additional donations. These were partially lost when the hosted online wallet that I was using (MyBitcoin) was hacked, but 49% was recovered. As of today, after refunding part of the donated money, it is now worth 5.2675. I will be adding from my personal store to bring it up to an even 5.5. At $140 per coin, the new total is $770.

I've decided to follow the buy-and-hold strategy for at least another year, since it worked so well. I don't have exact details on what I'll do with it, but it will not be converted or spent for at least one year, and will eventually be used for promoting cryonics in some way.

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:

subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people

covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance due medical problems

cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology, the dying process, and other neglected areas of concern to cryonics

hiring a public relations team professionally to repair the image of cryonics

research to improve viability and reduce dehydration

empirical validation through scanning the connectome

Contributions can be made to:

1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo

(Updated, since the previous address was attached to my personal wallet on an outdated client, which was causing money to be moved out of it by accident. The above is a brainwallet with a reasonably secure passphrase, generated using Blockchain.info.)
[SEQ RERUN] Whining-Based Communities
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-14T03:15:31.187Z

Today's post, Whining-Based Communities was originally published on 07 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many communities feed emotional needs by offering their members someone or something to blame for failure - say, those looters who don't approve of your excellence. You can easily imagine some group of "rationalists" congratulating themselves on how reasonable they were, while blaming the surrounding unreasonable society for keeping them down. But this is not how real rationality works - there's no assumption that other agents are rational. We all face unfair tests (and yes, they are unfair to different degrees for different people); and how well you do with your unfair tests, is the test of your existence. Rationality is there to help you win anyway, not to provide a self-handicapping excuse for losing. There are no first-person extenuating circumstances. There is absolutely no point in going down the road of mutual bitterness and consolation, about anything, ever.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Extenuating Circumstances, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Proving Too Much
by Scott Alexander — 2013-04-14T00:05:09.000Z

The fallacy of Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. For example, if someone says “You can’t be an atheist, because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his existence as well.”

I love this tactic so much. I only learned it had a name quite recently, but it’s been my default style of argument for years. It neatly cuts through complicated issues that might otherwise be totally irresolvable.

Because here is a fundamental principle of the Dark Arts – you don’t need an argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in the amount of time your opponent has available.

In a presidential debate, where your opponent has three minutes, that means all you need to do is come up with an argument whose disproof is inferentially distant enough from your audience that it will take your opponent more than three minutes to explain it, or your audience more than three minutes’ worth of mental effort to understand the explanation.

The noncentral fallacy is the easiest way to do this. “Martin Luther King was a criminal!” “Although what you say is technically correct, categories don’t work in the way your statement is impl – ” “Oh, sorry, time’s up.”

But pretty much anything that assumes a classical Aristotelian view of concepts/objects is gold here. The same is true of any deontological rules your audience might be attached to.

I tend to get stuck in the position of having argue against those Dark Artsy tactics pretty often. And the great thing about Proving Too Much is that it can demolish an entire complicated argument based on all sorts of hard-to-tease-apart axioms in a split second. For example, After Virtue gave (though it does not endorse) this example of deontological reasoning:

I cannot will that my mother should have had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, except perhaps if it had been certain that the embryo was dead or gravely damaged. But if I cannot will this in my own case, how can I consistently deny to others the right to

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Reinforcement and Short-Term Rewards as Anti-Akratic
by Intrism — 2013-04-13T20:47:29.405Z

Related: Time and Effort Discounting, Akrasia, Hyperbolic Discounting, and Picoeconomics, The Power of Reinforcement, Basics of Animal Reinforcement, Basics of Human Reinforcement

I built a robot that feeds me candy when I get work done, to try to solve my akrasia problem. And, so far, it seems like it might actually work.

Naturally, the story starts with procrastination. I finish things the night before they're due. Or, sometimes, I don't. I'd like to fix that. One theory explains procrastination as a result of discounting, the idea that human brains discount long-term rewards in favor of short-term ones. For instance, my brain prefers watching Neon Genesis Evangelion now over nearly missing my project deadline in a few days. The same principle applies to consequences, and there are already tools like BeeMinder that are built to combat it. Its tagline, "bring long-term consequences near," is a very concise description of a clever way to short-circuit discounting. It's very interesting, but I'm not really comfortable with paying money as a consequence. Instead, I'm going to try a similar technique: bringing long-term rewards near.

There are already a lot of techniques about bringing long-term rewards near. Generally, they're called reinforcement learning. The classic reward in reinforcement is candy, which seems like a good idea: I like it, and I'm more than willing to abuse my youthful metabolism for productivity. And, in fact, there are a wide variety of folk solutions of that sort - advice to reward yourself with some candy once your work is done. I've tried those already, but they never seem to work out for me - I always seem to wind up cheating. I need to do something trickier.

CFAR describes reinforcement in a very striking way in some of their course materials: they call it "training your inner pigeon." Not only is that a nice, snappy turn of phrase, it illustrates the problem with attempting to self-administer rewards very nicely. Did Skinner's pigeons self-administer their rewards? No, of course they didn't. I shouldn't expect my inner pigeon to, either. So, my next step is to build a robot that gives me candy when I get stuff done.

Why do I think I can keep from cheating on the machine, when I couldn't restrain myself from cheating on regular old bags of candy? Well, I'm far from certain; it's my biggest...
Meetup : Munich Meetup
by Valeriy — 2013-04-13T20:46:53.228Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup

WHEN:
04 May 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Café at Gasteig, Rosenheimer Straße 5, 81667 München

The next Munich meetup will take place on May 4th. We will discuss the epistemology sequence and do some fun probability theory quiz. You are highly welcome to come and say hi, no matter how long you’ve been reading LessWrong. If you plan to attend, please (optionally) post a comment saying what topics you’d like to discuss. Also if you on Facebook, think about joining the group (see comments to the previous meetup).

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup
Worth remembering (when comparing ‘the US’ to ‘Europe’)
by Curiousguy — 2013-04-13T20:35:24.067Z

I posted the post below on my own blog a while back, but a friend of mine suggested that it might be a good idea to cross-post a little bit of my stuff here as well. I've made a few changes to the post at the bottom, but it's pretty much the same post as the one I posted back then. Okay, here goes:

...

People often note that it’s a bad idea to compare small European countries with a country that is so big that it is comparable in size to the continent that the small country is a part of. I’ll go into a bit more detail about the differences in this post.

So, in a comment I left over at MR I noted that:

‘The United States is 3 times as big as EU-15 used to be, and EU-15 included pretty much all of the countries in Western Europe that people from the US like to compare to their own country (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, UK, Sweden…)’

Here’s the map:

It’s not ‘completely true’, but it’s very close – the area of EU-15 was 3,367,154 km2 (link). The area of the United States is 9.83 million km2.

Some more random numbers, I used wikipedia’s numbers and I couldn’t be bothered to add links because it would have taken forever and nobody would follow them anyway – you can look it up if something sounds really wrong. Texas: 696,200 km2. France: 674,843 km2. (Metropolitan France – i.e. ‘France-France (+Corsica)’: 551,695 km2). Spain: 504,030 km2. California: 423,970 km2. Germany: 357,021 km2. Denmark: 43,075 km2. Netherlands: 41,543 km2.

The red bit in the picture below is larger than any country in Europe which is not Russia (or another way to visualize it: That bit is actually significantly larger than the Iberian Peninsula in the map above). Maybe the scales aren’t completely similar, but they’re actually not really that far off:

If you take a trip in Europe from Venezia, Italy to Amsterdam, Netherlands, you’ll travel ~1200-1300 kilometers depending on the route. The lenght and width of Texas are both in the neighbourhood of ~1,250 km.

Now, Arizona is another southern US state with an area of 295,254 km2 and a population of 6,4 million people. The Netherlands’ population is estimated at 16.85 million. If you combine the populations of Netherlands (16,85), Denmark (5,5) and Belgium (11 mill), those 33 million people are distributed over an area of ~115.0...