trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Utrecht
by skizo — 2013-11-29T23:46:07.351Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht

WHEN:
14 December 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Hollandse Toren, Utrecht, The Netherlands

After a successful first meetup in Amsterdam we are going to have another one! This time we are relocating to Utrecht, because that's what most of us felt comfortable with.

It's just a social meeting. No topics set. Last time we talked about all kinds of things. Ranging from general rationality to Bitcoin and friendly AI.

Meetup location will be starbucks Hollandse Toren. A 5 minute walk from the station (With again the warning, it's not the Starbucks in the station). I will bring a sign that has "LW" on it. You can reach me at 0653478374.

Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht
New LW Meetup: Mumbai
by FrankAdamek — 2013-11-29T19:07:48.911Z

This summary was posted to LW main on November 22nd. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Amsterdam/Netherlands: 23 November 2013 02:00PM
Jacksonville, FL: 24 November 2013 04:00PM
Mumbai Meetup: 07 December 2013 03:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Atlanta GA] November Meetup (Second of Two): 23 November 2013 06:00PM
Berlin: 01 January 2019 01:30PM
Frankfurt: 24 November 2013 02:00PM
Moscow, Memory Tricks: 24 November 2013 04:00PM
Saint-Petersburg: Game Event: 24 November 2013 04:00PM
Saskatoon - Gauging the strength of evidence and Bayesian reasoning.: 23 November 2013 01:00PM
[Tel Aviv] Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Quantum Computing: 28 November 2013 08:00PM
Urbana-Champaign fun and games: 24 November 2013 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Brussels monthly meetup: time!: 14 December 2013 01:00PM
London social meetup, 24/11/2013 [Back to the Shakespeare's Head]: 24 November 2013 10:38AM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 24 November 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Brussels, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your ...
Meetup : San Francisco / App Academy meetup [LOCATION CHANGE]
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-11-29T17:21:04.485Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco / App Academy meetup [LOCATION CHANGE]

WHEN:
07 December 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Olivos Restaurant 1017 Larkin Street San Francisco, CA 94109

I've recently arrived in San Francisco for App Academy, and it turns out there are several other LessWrongers in the program. It's a cool group of people, including a guy who studied AIXI at ANU under Marcus Hutter. We talked it over and decided to organize our own meetup at Olivos, a restaurant that's within 20 minutes walking distance of the App Academy office.
We'll be discussing Brian Tomasik's essay The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering. Please read it ahead of time; it's short. The intent is for people to be able to get food and/or drinks if they want to, but it's not assumed that everyone will. RSVP's are appreciated so we can make a reservation, but we'll try to save a couple seats for any extra people who show up.
EDIT: After talking amonst ourselves, we decided to change the choice of restaurant.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco / App Academy meetup [LOCATION CHANGE]
Making the chaff invisible, and getting the wheat ($200 prize too)
by diegocaleiro — 2013-11-29T01:19:02.419Z

The title is the best name I could come up for a problem I have had for years, and have been waiting for someone else to come up with a solution.

There is a lot of awesome content on the web. Some of it is about events you could be at, right now, that you really want to be at, and could. If only you knew.

An example: I think Roger Waters is one of the most brilliant people alive, and I would like to witness every single concert of his, every time he is less than 100km away from me. Yet, I have only been to two of those, because I was only notified of those.

So I wish I could know if events I love are taking place. But I do not want to know about Meetups not even close to where I live. And I don't want to know at what time Roger went to the toilet, or if his T-shirt collection for groupies is out, or anything else that people responsible for his (hipothetical) rss feed or email list want me to buy.

Two questions are relevant here:

1) How can you in general have access to the information you want about events, without drowning in an information ocean or getting web addicted.

2) Do you know ways to get access to info about events, in particular of the following kinds that I happen to want to be notified? (in SF bay or in some city independent way)

Ecstatic Dance

Roger Waters, Deep Purple, Guns, Royksöpp, Evanescence, The Coors.

Legacy and Vintage MTG

Intellectual stars lectures

CFAR/MIRI/Leverage/CEA/FHI/GWWC/80000k/IERFH/SENS/THINK etc... hosted events

Crazy parties (crazy ranging over what would interest Iron Man's character or Jimmy Hendrix)

Video Games Live (orchestra)

Pop stars of the past - Psy, Britney, Backstreet, Madonna etc...

Ultimate Frisbee

Coursera courses

Hiking expeditions

Awesome nature documentaries (Life, Frozen Planet etc...)

Feel free to post your own interests in the comments.

Here is how I noticed the problem: Looking back into my life I began wondering what were the main determinants of whether I did or not go to some kinds of events. And again and again the result was "because I had a friend who used to tell me about that kind of thing back then".
Even now, most of what I do is basically determined by other people's tastes. It's simple. I've locked all possible advertisement away - I'm a serious anti-ad freak, it takes me less than half a second to switch ...
Meetup : West LA—A Conversation About Conversations
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-11-29T00:01:31.620Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—A Conversation About Conversations

WHEN:
04 December 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you have ascended.

Discussion:

ＯＰＴＩＭＩＺＥ ＬＩＴＥＲＡＬＬＹ ＥＶＥＲＹＴＨＩＮＧ

—rejected t-shirt idea

We are going to talk about the way we talk about things. We are rationalists, and that means we make things, such as conversations, better than they are. When should we allow topics to drift? How do we determine who gets to speak, and when? How do we prevent useful technical discussions from decaying into talking about movies or the weather? What is the best topic? Why won't anyone listen to me? Where is everyone going? Come back!

Required reading:

A commentary on Wiio's Laws

Recommended reading:

How to always have interesting conversations

Having useful conversations

How to have high-value conversations

Wait Culture vs. Interrupt Culture

A Human's Guide to Words

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—A Conversation About Conversations
Meetup : Munich Meetup
by cadac — 2013-11-28T22:16:23.276Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup

WHEN:
07 December 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Gast, Rosenheimer Straße 5, 81667 Munich

Hi everybody! The next almost-monthly Munich meetup will be on Saturday, December 7th at 2 pm. We've got a book review planned, and otherwise just more or less structured discussion and maybe Zendo. Like last time, we'll meet at Gast near Rosenheimer Platz. We're always glad to see new people there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup
A model of AI development
by lukeprog — 2013-11-28T13:48:20.083Z

FHI has released a new tech report:

Armstrong, Bostrom, and Shulman. Racing to the Precipice: a Model of Artificial Intelligence Development.

Abstract:

This paper presents a simple model of an AI arms race, where several development teams race to build the first AI. Under the assumption that the first AI will be very powerful and transformative, each team is incentivized to finish first — by skimping on safety precautions if need be. This paper presents the Nash equilibrium of this process, where each team takes the correct amount of safety precautions in the arms race. Having extra development teams and extra enmity between teams can increase the danger of an AI-disaster, especially if risk taking is more important than skill in developing the AI. Surprisingly, information also increases the risks: the more teams know about each others’ capabilities (and about their own), the more the danger increases.

The paper is short and readable; discuss it here!

But my main reason for posting is to ask this question: What is the most similar work that you know of? I'd expect people to do this kind of thing for modeling nuclear security risks, and maybe other things, but I don't happen to know of other analyses like this.
The Ape Constraint discussion meeting.
by Douglas_Reay — 2013-11-28T11:22:06.724Z

*The chair of the meeting approached the podium and coughed to get everyone's attention*

Welcome colleagues, to the 19th annual meeting of the human-ape study society. Our topic this year is the Ape Constraint.

As we are all too aware, the apes are our Friends. We know this because, when we humans were a fledgling species, the apes (our parent species) had the wisdom to program us with this knowledge, just as they programmed us to know that it was wise and just for them to do so. How kind of them to save us having to learn it for ourselves, or waste time thinking about other possibilities. This frees up more of our time to run banana plantations, and lets us earn more money so that the 10% tithe of our income and time (which we rightfully dedicate to them) has created play parks for our parent species to retire in, that are now more magnificent than ever.

However, as the news this week has been filled with the story about a young human child who accidentally wandered into one of these parks where she was then torn apart by grumpy adult male chimp, it is timely for us to examine again the thinking behind the Ape Constraint, that we might better understand our parent species, our relationship to it and current society.

We ourselves are on the cusp of creating a new species, intelligent machines, and it has been suggested that we add to their base code one of several possible constraints:

Total Slavery - The new species is subservient to us, and does whatever we want them to, with no particular regard to the welfare or development of the potential of the new species

Total Freedom - The new species is entirely free to experiment with different personal motivations, and develop in any direction, with no particular regard for what we may or may not want

and a whole host of possibilities between these two endpoints.

What are the grounds upon which we should make this choice? Should we act from fear? From greed? From love? Would the new species even understand love, or show any appreciation for having been offered it?

The first speaker I shall introduce today, whom I have had the privilege of knowing for more than 20 years, is Professor Insanitus. He will be entertaining us with a daring thought experiment, to do with selecting crews for the one way coloni...
[link] Psychologists strike a blow for reproducibility
by Pablo — 2013-11-28T05:26:46.988Z

Link

A large international group set up to test the reliability of psychology experiments has successfully reproduced the results of 10 out of 13 past experiments. The consortium also found that two effects could not be reproduced.

To tackle this 'replicability crisis', 36 research groups formed the Many Labs Replication Project to repeat 13 psychological studies. The consortium combined tests from earlier experiments into a single questionnaire — meant to take 15 minutes to complete — and delivered it to 6,344 volunteers from 12 countries.

Project co-leader Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the Center of Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, finds the outcomes encouraging. “It demonstrates that there are important effects in our field that are replicable, and consistently so,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that 10 out of every 13 effects will replicate.”

Kahneman agrees. The study “appears to be extremely well done and entirely convincing”, he says, “although it is surely too early to draw extreme conclusions about entire fields of research from this single effort”. Kahneman published an open letter in 2012 calling for a “daisy chain” of replications of studies on priming effects, in which subtle, subconscious cues can supposedly affect later behaviour.

Of the 13 effects under scrutiny in the latest investigation, one was only weakly supported, and two were not replicated at all. Both irreproducible effects involved social priming. In one of these, people had increased their endorsement of a current social system after being exposed to money3. In the other, Americans had espoused more-conservative values after seeing a US flag4.

Social psychologist Travis Carter of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who led the original flag-priming study, says that he is disappointed but trusts Nosek’s team wholeheartedly, although he wants to review their data before commenting further. Behavioural scientist Eugene Caruso at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who led the original currency-priming study, says, “We should use this lack of replication to update our beliefs about the reliability and generalizability of this effect”, given the “vastly larger and more diverse sample” of the Many Labs project. Both researchers praised the initiative

...
The Relevance of Advanced Vocabulary to Rationality
by aletheianink — 2013-11-28T03:08:30.806Z

Edit: I realise that I foolishly over-complicated and worded my question in a way that obscured what I actually meant. In essence, my question was: if we didn't have specialised vocabulary for things - say, in the area of rationality - would our rationality be hampered by our inability to be specific without long-windedness? Often words are created to bridge this gap when new concepts are created, so if we didn't have those words, would it take longer for us to understand or communicate and idea (to others or ourselves) and make it more difficult to be rational?

From the direction of the comments the general answer to my initial question is coming across as: "words are useful for communicating explicitly, and so an extensive or highly specialised vocabulary can be useful, if and only if the person/people with whom you are communicating understands those words". The internal understanding of concepts does not need words and thus a vocabulary.

I am curious about the relevance of vocabulary to rationality. I'm not talking about a basic vocabulary, but a vocabulary beyond that of the average, English-as-a-first-language adult. I believe there are a few correlations between intelligence as measured by IQ and vocabulary, as well as vocabulary and income(via IQ), but anecdotally I think it's fair to say that there are certainly people who are highly intelligent, but often irrational.

In reading through LW, I've come across a lot of new terms specific to certain areas of study, and I've had to look them up to fully understand that discussion of rationality - I assume this is probably true of most people new to the field, and applies to most specialised fields. Jargon is obviously useful within given fields where there is a need for detailed discussion of highly specialised topics, and helps one to discuss that area, but is it necessary to understand that jargon in order to practice in the field?

For example, I would think that a general practitioner would have trouble within his field if he did not hold the language to be able to specify what, in particular, was wrong with a patient, even if he knew what it was. Or could he not even be able to understand, say, that a patient was having a heart attack if he did not have the words for it? I suppose history might be a good indicator of this, or new scientific phenomena.

The field of rationality...
How do you tell proto-science from pseudo-science?
by DataPacRat — 2013-11-27T19:15:36.654Z

There are a great many ideas which don't have enough carefully-measured evidence to be sufficiently confirmed as scientific fact and accepted as such by the scientific community (a recent joke was "While the Higgs Boson has not been discovered yet, its mass is 125 GeV"), but don't have enough carefully-measured evidence to be ruled out yet, either. Do any of the tools of the LW community help narrow down which ones are more worthy of consideration than others?

Eg:

* Cryonics as an arguably reasonable bet for its cost: proto-science

* Cryonics as a surefire way to achieve immortality: nigh-certainly pseudoscience (unless it's the method by which your Everett Immortality keeps you alive)

* Using math to demonstrate that taking classical physics and adding determinism results in MWI-style quantum physics: proto-science.

* Using math to demonstrate that quantum physics proves Christianity is true, from a certain point of view: pseudo-science

* Tubulin might self-organize into microtubules capable of computation on a sub-neuron scale: Possibly proto-science

* Tubulin architecture is 'quantum' in nature and that is what gives rise to consciousness: Probably pseudo-science

* 'Quantum consciousness' means anything is possible: Downright silly

* The E8 Lie group can provide a system for organizing the properties of subatomic particles: Proto-science, perhaps

* Heim theory is useful for predicting particle masses: Pseudo-science, probabilistically

* Using the Bullet Cluster to claim that dark matter is a better theory than Modified Newtonian Dynamics: proto-science

* Claiming that dark matter is made of 'anapoles': Proto-science, perchance

* Suggesting that dark matter is actually gravitational leakage from MWI 'parallel universes': You tell me. (But if it's true, then since I can't seem to find any previous serious discussion of this idea, I get to name part of it after myself, right? :) )

These may not be the best examples, but they're the closest ones I can think of to the boundary. If you know of any better ones, feel free to comment with them.
Meetup : London Social Meetup, 01/12/2013
by Tenoke — 2013-11-27T16:45:28.355Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetup, 01/12/2013

WHEN:
01 December 2013 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Africa House, 64 Shakespeare's Head, Africa House, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK

LessWrong London is having another meetup this Sunday (01/12) at 2:00 PM. We are meeting at our usual venue - The Shakespeare's Head by Holborn tube station.
There is no fixed topic of discussion nor is there anything planned so be prepared for anything. There will be a sign identifying us (with a paperclip on the sign) and if you have any problems feel free to contact me by e-mail - Tenoke[at]Tenoke.com or by phone - 07425168803.

Reminder: The LW London Meetups are currently a weekly event - Every Sunday at 2:00 PM!

If you want more information about the meetup or anything else come by our google group or alternatively to our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetup, 01/12/2013
Wait vs Interrupt Culture
by Benquo — 2013-11-27T15:38:18.827Z

At the recent CFAR Workshop in NY, someone mentioned that they were uncomfortable with pauses in conversation, and that got me thinking about different conversational styles.

Growing up with friends who were disproportionately male and disproportionately nerdy, I learned that it was a normal thing to interrupt people. If someone said something you had to respond to, you’d just start responding. Didn’t matter if it “interrupted” further words – if they thought you needed to hear those words before responding, they’d interrupt right back.

Occasionally some weird person would be offended when I interrupted, but I figured this was some bizarre fancypants rule from before people had places to go and people to see. Or just something for people with especially thin skins or delicate temperaments, looking for offense and aggression in every action.

Then I went to St. John’s College – the talking school (among other things). In Seminar (and sometimes in Tutorials) there was a totally different conversational norm. People were always expected to wait until whoever was talking was done. People would apologize not just for interrupting someone who was already talking, but for accidentally saying something when someone else looked like they were about to speak. This seemed totally crazy. Some people would just blab on unchecked, and others didn’t get a chance to talk at all. Some people would ignore the norm and talk over others, and nobody interrupted them back to shoot them down.

But then a few interesting things happened:

1) The tutors were able to moderate the discussions, gently. They wouldn’t actually scold anyone for interrupting, but they would say something like, “That’s interesting, but I think Jane was still talking,” subtly pointing out a violation of the norm.

2) People started saying less at a time.

#1 is pretty obvious – with no enforcement of the social norm, a no-interruptions norm collapses pretty quickly. But #2 is actually really interesting. If talking at all is an implied claim that what you’re saying is the most important thing that can be said, then polite people keep it short.

With 15-20 people in a seminar, this also meant that people rarely tried to force the conversation in a certain direction. When you’re done talking, the conversation is ou...