trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Salt Lake City UT — Open Possibilities and Improv Skills
by hamnox — 2014-02-23T00:04:54.267Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City UT — Open Possibilities and Improv Skills

WHEN:
09 March 2014 02:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Kafeneios Coffeehouse, 258 W 3300 S, Salt Lake City UT

Less Wrong Meetup

"Why should I come to this meetup?" you may ask.

Well, maybe you should and maybe you shouldn't. It all depends. Do you want to:

Learn and try the classic exercise of thinking on your feet in a casual, low-risk environment.

Have a blast keeping an interesting story going with off-the-wall ideas.

Explore the possible connection between the skills you can pick up with improv and the skills useful for meta-success, e.g. Accepting the situation at hand, Being Specific, Building on opportunities.

And as always, Do you feel like:

Getting specific feedback and positive reinforcement on valuable habits of good thinking and success.

Receiving empathy and support for struggles with akrasia and intellectual integrity.. and maybe brag a little after you've won the battle.

Hanging out with just generally awesome people? (We certainly do. Which is why you should definitely come!)

Any of that interest you? All you have to do is:

Show up at Kafeneios Coffeehouse on March 8th @ 3pm
* (258 W 3300 S, Salt Lake City)

Find us near the center of the first big room. I'll be the one with the whiteboard.

Bring your observations on what you've been up to since last meetup, if you've got any to share.

Leave your politics, or other ideas that you identify with or are emotionally invested in, at the door.

If you're the kind of person that likes to be ahead of the game, check out these links:
http://www.dangoldstein.com/howtoimprovise.html
http://improvencyclopedia.org/references//David_Alger%60s_First_10_Rules_of_Improv.html

Thank you for your time, and thank you for being part of the most fun, engaging, and all-around rewarding social group I know.

If you have any questions or if there is anything at all bothering you, please don't hesitate to message me. And please err on the side of asking; it costs little to address your concerns if they're trivial and costs a lot to ignore them if they're not.

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City UT — Open Possibilities and Improv Skills
Meetup : Philadelphia-- Debugging in Meatspace
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-02-22T18:18:10.823Z

The discussion prompt William Burroughs's "The discipline of DE (do easy)"
http://melancholia.typepad.com/melancholia/2009/07/do-easy.html

WHEN: 23 February 2014 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: Nam Phuong, 11th & Broad St., Philadelphia, PA

Meets every two weeks. Forum/mailing list: groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-philadelphia
Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - Structure
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-02-22T16:57:52.048Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - Structure

WHEN:
04 March 2014 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Fehnweg 4, 22415 Hamburg, Germany

We will be at another location again: Fehnweg 4, 22415 Hamburg in the northern part of Hamburg reachable from the center in about 30mins by public transportation.

As we didn't really get around to procrastination last time we commited to have and follow an agenda this time:

Open beginning until we are complete

Introduction and agenda presented by moderator

Short presentation about procrastination and dealing with it (G.Z.).

Break for discussion and games

Possibly we will have a short presentation about theme-centered interaction to improve our communication culture (S.Z.)

Break for discussion and games

A short list of LessWrong topics that might be interesting for the 'newbies'.

Time for discussing these LW topics

Planning of next meetup

Free form meetup

The meetup is at my home and I will provide for food and drisks but you may bring sweets.

The Meetup is open-ended (again) which judging from the last times means significantly past midnight.

The mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-hamburg

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - Structure
LessWrong Hamburg Second Meetup Notes: In need of Structure
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-02-22T16:20:30.798Z

Review of our second Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - about Procrastination

When I arrived late there already was a discussion about the benefits and content of LessWrong. I didn't take a clear organizers role and instead let the meetup mostly run itself. This worked OK but also led to the planned topic procrastication falling off the table until very late when it was discovered that there was actually more interest in it than everybody seemed to have assumed.

There were phases where the discussion was dominated by everyday topics and not focussed. This was partly because some participants knew each other well and played topics back and forth. This kept the others out. I could have moderated this but wasn't clearly aware of it until it was explicitly and friendly made a topic.

Despite the unstructured format we got the following positive results:

I had brought Emotions Revealed by Ekman (and other books) and left it lying on the table. Page turning led to the faces test and we took the test and discovered which emotions we could read or differentiate best and least. See also Emotion in the LW Wiki.

A diabetes glucose test was demonstrated (curiosity overcame fear of being needled) and one actually had an unexpectedly elevated reading.

When discussing how to stop smoking we turned up one option that convinced one participant: When relocating next month he will try to find a non-smoker flat-sharing community.

We noticed that our communication cultures differed and talked about guess and ask cultures and how we could improve (I saw that this was a topic at the recent Berkeley Meetup).

We noticed that that we had difficulty finding structure and made an explicit agenda for the next meetup.

We planned the next meetup and chose a moderator to keep us more focussed.

Lessons:

Suitable books laying about can direct discussion to productive topics.

Lively discussions about off-topics eat time and can keep participants out - but also provide casual athmosphere.

Missing meetup structure can cause dissatisfaction with content uncertainness about direction.

(none of these surprising)

We also played a game (Set), had some fun, took photos and planned a next meetup.
Is love a good idea?
by Adam Zerner — 2014-02-22T06:59:16.874Z

I've searched around on LW for this question, and haven't seen it brought up. Which surprises me, because I think it's an important question.

I'm honestly not sure what I think. One one hand, love clearly leads to an element of happiness when done properly. This seems to be inescapable, probably because it's encoded in our DNA or something. But on the other hand, there's two things that really make me question whether or not love is a good idea.

1) I have a very reductionist viewpoint, on everything. So I always ask myself, "What am I really trying to optimize here, and what is the best way to optimize it?". When I think about it, I come to the conclusion that I'm always trying to optimize my happiness. The answer to the question of, "why does this matter?" is always, "because it makes me happy". So then, the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you. I question whether this type of thinking is optimal, and personally, whether or not I'm even capable of it.

2) It seems so obsessive, and I question whether or not it makes sense to obsess so much over one thing. This article actually explores the brain chemicals involved in love, and suggests that the chemicals are similar to those that appear in OCD.

Finally, there's the issue of permanence. Not all love is intended to be permanent, but a lot of the time it is. How can you commit to something so permanently? This makes me think of the mind projection fallacy. Perhaps people commit it with love. They think that the object of their desire is intrinsically desirable, when in fact it is the properties of this object that make it desirable. These properties are far from permanent (I'd go as far as to say that they're volatile, at least if you take the long view). So how does it make sense to commit to something so permanently?

So my take is that there is probably a form of love that is rational to take. Something along the lines of enjoying each others company, and caring for one another and stuff, but not being blindly committed to one another, and being honest about the fact that you wouldn't do anything for one another, and will in fact probably grow apart at some point.

What do you guys think?
17 Rules to Make a Definition that Avoids the 37 Ways of Words Being Wrong
by mathnerd314 — 2014-02-22T05:16:30.782Z

Eliezer's writing style of A->B, then A, then B, though generally clear, results in a large amount of redundancy.

In this post, I have attempted to reduce the number of rules needed to remember by half. The numbers are the rules from the original post.

So, without further ado, a good definition for a word:

can be shown to be wrong37 and is not the final13 authority18 19

has strong justifications33 for the word's existence32 and its particular definition,20 which leave no room for an argument17 22

agrees with conventional usage4

explains what context the word depends on36

limits its scope to avoid overlap with other meanings25

does not assume that definitions are the best way of giving words semantics12

directs a complex mental paintbrush35 to paint detailed pictures of the thing you're trying to think about23

is a brain inference aid13 that refers to and instructs one on how to find a specific/unique24 similarity cluster21 that is apparent from empirical experience28 29 30, the cluster's size being inversely proportional to the word's length31

is not a binary category9 11 and cannot be used for deductive inference27

requires observing only14 a few3 real-world1 properties that can be easily5 verified2 and are less abstract6 than the word being defined (in particular, the definition cannot be circular16)

is not just a list of random properties10 21

contains no negated properties10 33

specifies exhaustively all of the correct connotations of the word25 26

makes the properties of a random object satisfying the definition be nearly independent34

has examples6 which satisfy the definition, including the original example(s) that motivated the definition being given15 and typical/conventional examples7

tells you which examples are more typical or less typical9

captures enough characteristics of the examples to identify non-members8

And there you go. 17 rules, follow them all and you can't use words wrongly.
Meetup : NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6
by KenChen — 2014-02-21T21:04:58.409Z

Discussion article for the meetup : NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6

WHEN:
05 April 2014 12:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Highgarden, 851 Park Place, Brooklyn, NY 11216

Saturday

3:30pm Opening ceremony

4:00pm "Legal Concerns Surrounding Startups" by Dave Carlson

6:30pm Dinner ordering

7:00pm "Goal Factoring Workshop" by Ben Landau-Taylor

9:00pm Stupid questions live thread

10:00pm Uncake

10:30pm Open discussion

Sunday

9:00am Breakfast served

10:00am Unconference

1:30pm Lunch break

2:30pm Startup idea discussion

5:00pm Closing ceremony

Attendees are encouraged to arrive early Saturday afternoon to have time to settle in.

"Legal Concerns Surrounding Startups" by Dave Carlson

Attorney David Carlson will discuss general legal issues that arise when forming a start-up, including:
- Structuring the start-up.
- Precautions when seeking VC funding.
- Common traps for the unwary when dealing with legal documents.

The presentation will be very informal; the goal is to focus on whichever topics the audience is most interested in. The discussion may not be recorded.

Disclaimer (because of course there is a disclaimer):

The presentation will, necessarily, focus on general legal issues rather than on anyone's specific legal problems. Accordingly, the presentation will not constitute "legal advice" for specific situations, which depend on the evaluation of precise factual circumstances.

Goal Factoring Workshop by Ben Landau-Taylor

Do you ever find yourself saying, “Unfortunately, I have to… X?” Goal factoring teaches you to systematically break down everything obvious and non-obvious you’re accomplishing, and ask about ways you could achieve those factors separately and more effectively – a new perspective on everything from reading habits to email etiquette to outings with friends.

Stupid Rationality Questions

On Saturday night, we'll answer all your Stupid Rationality Questions! Ever have questions that you were too embarrassed to ask? Submit them now using the link below, and we'll discuss those in person.

Submit your stupid rationality questions anonymously:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1FDTZwQIRLdNa_neTsdgExVi5cTICLrqvhmAxLCE1Thw/viewform

Unconference

On Sunday, we'll be holding an unconference, starting at 10:00 AM. This will be a highly participatory event, and participants are invited

...
RESCHEDULED: NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference. NOW: 4/5 - 4/6
by KenChen — 2014-02-21T20:55:43.256Z

We are rescheduling the megameetup, to accommodate more members of the NYC community, and to be closer to the date of the next CFAR NY workshop.

Reposting the description with updated details here:

On the weekend of April 5-6, the NYC community will be hosting a megameetup and rationality unconference. Everyone who can make the trip is strongly encouraged to come. There will be presentations, interesting discussions, and cake.

This will be an unconference, and as such will be a highly participatory event. There won't be scheduled presentations -- participants will sign up on the day of the event (15-minutes per presentation) in order to present.

If you'd like to help out, or if you need crash space, please send me a PM.

If you already commented on whether you are coming, please post again on the meetup page here: http://lesswrong.com/meetups/x3

Location:

Highgarden
851 Park Place
Brooklyn, NY 11216
Meetup: Philadelphia, February 23: Debugging in Meatspace
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-02-21T16:43:47.648Z

1:00 PM, February 23, Nam Phuong (Vietnamese restaurant), 1100 Washington Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19147 (west side of street, just south of Washington)

The Discipline of DE by William Burroughs.

DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE. You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Consider the weight of objects: exactly how much force is needed to get the object from here to there? Consider its shape and texture and function. Where exactly does it belong? Use just the amount of force necessary to get the object from here to there. Don't fumble, jerk, grab an object. Drop cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest.

Some related links.

If you want to be on a mailing list for the meetup, here's the google group.
New LW Meetup: Yale
by FrankAdamek — 2014-02-21T16:28:42.944Z

This summary was posted to LW main on February 14th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Yale: Initial Meetup: 16 February 2014 02:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Bratislava Meetup X.: 24 February 2014 06:00PM
Hamburg - about Procrastination: 21 February 2014 07:00PM+1:00 (MET)
Montreal Less Wrong - Easy Lifehacks: 19 February 2014 07:00PM
Princeton NJ Meetup: 22 February 2014 01:00PM
Saint Petersburg sunday meetup: 16 February 2014 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup: February: 26 February 2014 06:30PM

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:

Austin, TX: 15 February 2020 01:30PM
[Berlin] Community Weekend in Berlin: 11 April 2014 04:00PM
London VOI meetup 16/2, plus socials 9/2 and 23/2: 23 February 2014 02:00PM
Vienna: 15 February 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, 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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happ...
Intelligence Metrics with Naturalized Induction using UDT
by Squark — 2014-02-21T12:23:35.889Z

Followup to: Intelligence Metrics and Decision Theory
Related to: Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem

A central problem in AGI is giving a formal definition of intelligence. Marcus Hutter has proposed AIXI as a model of perfectly intelligent agent. Legg and Hutter have defined a quantitative measure of intelligence applicable to any suitable formalized agent such that AIXI is the agent with maximal intelligence according to this measure.

Legg-Hutter intelligence suffers from a number of problems I have previously discussed, the most important being:

The formalism is inherently Cartesian. Solving this problem is known as naturalized induction and it is discussed in detail here.

The utility function Legg & Hutter use is a formalization of reinforcement learning, while we would like to consider agents with arbitrary preferences. Moreover, a real AGI designed with reinforcement learning would tend to wrestle control of the reinforcement signal from the operators (there must be a classic reference on this but I can't find it. Help?). It is straightword to tweak to formalism to allow for any utility function which depends on the agent's sensations and actions, however we would like to be able to use any ontology for defining it.

Orseau and Ring proposed a non-Cartesian intelligence metric however their formalism appears to be too general, in particular there is no Solomonoff induction or any analogue thereof, instead a completely general probability measure is used.

My attempt at defining a non-Cartesian intelligence metric ran into problems of decision-theoretic flavor. The way I tried to used UDT seems unsatisfactory, and later I tried a different approach related to metatickle EDT.

In this post, I claim to accomplish the following:

Define a formalism for logical uncertainty. When I started writing this I thought this formalism might be novel but now I see it is essentially the same as that of Benja.

Use this formalism to define a non-constructive formalization of UDT. By "non-constructive" I mean something that assigns values to actions rather than a specific algorithm like here.

Apply the formalization of UDT to my quasi-Solomonoff framework to yield an intelligence metric.

Slightly modify my original definition of the quasi-Solomonoff measure so that the confidence of the innate model becomes a

...
Jobs and internships available at the Centre for Effective Altruism: new 'EA outreach' roles added
by tog — 2014-02-21T11:50:45.044Z

I recently posted on LessWrong main about the jobs and internships currently available at the Centre for Effective Altruism. (As I mentioned, effective altruism in general and CEA in particular have been discussed many times on LessWrong, so these opportunities might be of interest to some readers!) We're just starting a new project to do effective altruism outreach and 'marketing' (much like what Peter Hurford discusses in this post), so have added some new roles in this to the recruitment round; there's a full description of them here. If you're interested, apply by 5pm GMT on February 28th, and if you know anyone who might be, do pass it along!
Meetup : West LA—Practical Taoism
by OpenThreadGuy — 2014-02-21T08:05:38.146Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Practical Taoism

WHEN:
26 February 2014 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into the Del Taco. I will bring a Rubik's Cube and put it on a table, in case you require visual confirmation that You Are In The Right Place before asking anyone whether you're in the right place.

Parking is, well, I don't actually know. There's a sign that says the local lot allows only 45 minutes, but that may or may not be enforced. Others have reported that it's easy to find less time-unlimited parking nearby, although not as guaranteed.

Discussion:

Look at your Internet argument. Now look at http://ow.ly/nt1B3 Now look at your Internet argument. Your Internet argument is now stupid. Actually, your internet argument was already stupid.—St. Rev

If you have political opinions, you are a fool. If you think your political opinions matter, you are doubly the fool. If you think it's important that other people share your political opinions: fool. If you actually spend a significant portion of your time trying to get people to have the same political opinions as you, you cannot be redeemed. These are the facts that we must face, because you and I are but human and do not understand society. Metapolitical opinions, of course, are completely rational and not at all subject to these considerations.

We will be discussing Michael Huemer's paper In Praise of Passivity, of which section 4 is practical advice given its conclusions. Hence practical Taoism: useful inaction.

Recommended Reading:

Politics is the Mind-Killer

A Fable of Science and Politics

The Coalition Politics Hypothesis

Rah Local Politics

In Praise of Passivity, by Michael Huemer

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. However, I would very much like it if someone, anyone, anyone at all, were to read the material beforehand.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Practical Taoism
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Bridging laws
by Manfred — 2014-02-20T03:23:31.605Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Bridging laws

WHEN: 23 February 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE: 412 W. Elm St, Urbana, IL

RobBB has made some recent posts about how an agent's representation of the world can interact with its perceptions and plans. That seems like a good topic, so let's discuss it.

Bonus question: If an agent represents its utility as a function over states of the world including itself, can it still wirehead?

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Bridging laws