trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Nothing is Forbidden, but Some Things are Good
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-01-27T23:53:48.887Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/nothing-is-forbidden-but-some-things-are-good-b57f2aa84f1b#.t2m31g3qi

I recently wrote about my vegetarianism to casually document it for friends, and it proved to be more popular than anything else I’ve written lately. My guess is that it was popular because it was about something highly relatable that many people think about already — food choices — but maybe it was engaging because it was ultimately about morality. Since I don’t have much more to say about food, I’ll say some more things on morality to see if it proves similarly engaging to folks.

On my moral thinking I said this:

As you may have noticed, I became a vegetarian via preference utilitarianism, but stay a vegetarian to signal virtue. That would be pretty confused moral reasoning, except properly I don’t think morality is a category of thing that exists in the world and instead is an illusion created by seeing the world through a frame that does not include system relationships. But I do recognize preferences, my own preferences include a preference for the maximization of the preferences of others all else equal, and as a result I think in a way that generally aligns with the moral theory of preference utilitarianism, but if I had different preferences about the preferences of others I could just as easily be a deontologist or virtue theorist in terms of morality, so I see no problem in the contradictions that result from flatting my thinking into terms of morality.

Echoing this sentiment, a few days later this pithy line showed up in my Facebook feed:

The rules say we have to use consequentialism, but good people are deontologists, and virtue ethics is what actually works.

Depending on your thinking on morality it may sound to you like I’m being evasive and Eli is being too clever, but I think both of us are trying to convey that something more complex is going on that ends up doing weird things if you squeeze it into the abstraction of morality. Eli wrote extensively on this topic back in 2008, but you may not like his writing, be unwilling to sift through it all, or simply find it unconvincing, so I’ll try to cover the core of the issue here in my own way.

Morality concerns systems for reasoning about what is good and bad. It has two primary components we can examine: the systems themselves and the value judgements of right and wrong these systems operate on. Although some moral th...
New LW Meetup: Bogota
by FrankAdamek — 2017-01-27T18:55:25.531Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on January 27th. The following week's summary is here.

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

First Bogota, Colombia Meetup: 28 January 2017 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Sao Paulo - Meetup de janeiro: 28 January 2017 02:00PM

The following 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:

Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup: 29 January 2017 08:00PM
Denver Area LW February Meetup: 07 February 2017 07:00PM
[Detroit Metro / Ann Arbor], Michigan: 28 January 2017 04:20PM
Moscow: unconference: 29 January 2017 02:00PM
Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library: 03 February 2017 08:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging: 30 January 2017 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - February 2017: 05 February 2017 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 28 January 2017 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup: 29 January 2017 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Ann Arbor, Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Netherlands, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

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 m...
2017: An Actual Plan to Actually Improve
by  — 2017-01-27T18:42:39.599Z

[Epistemic status: mostly confident, but being this intentional is experimental]

This year, I'm focusing on two traits: resilience and conscientiousness. I think these (or the fact that I lack them) are my biggest barriers to success. Also: identifying them as goals for 2017 doesn't mean I'll stop developing them in 2018. A year is just a nice, established amount of time in which progress can actually be made. This plan is a more intentional version of techniques I've used to improve myself over the last few years. I have outside verification that I'm more responsible, high-functioning, and resilient than I was several years ago. I have managed to reduce my SSRI dose, and I have finished more important tasks this year than last year.

Inspiring blog posts and articles can only do so much for personal development. The most valuable writing in that genre tends to outline actual steps that (the author believes) generate positive results. Unfortunately, finding those steps is a fairly personal process. The song that gives me twenty minutes of motivation and the drug that helps me overcome anxiety might do the opposite for you. Even though I'm including detailed steps in this plan, you should keep that in mind. I hope that this post can give you a template for troubleshooting and discovering your own bottlenecks.

I.

First, I want to talk about my criteria for success. Without illustrating the end result, or figuring out how to measure it, I could finish out the year with a false belief that I'd made progress. If you plan something without success criteria, you run the same risk. I also believe that most of the criteria should be observable by a third party, i.e. hard to fake.

I respond to disruptions in my plans with distress and anger. While I've gotten better at calming down, the distress still happens. I would like to have emotional control such that I observe first, and then feel my feelings. Disruptions should incite curiosity, and a calm evaluation of whether to correct course. The observable bit is whether or not my husband and friends report that I seem less upset when they disrupt me. This process is already taking place; I've been practicing this skill for a long time and I expect to continue seeing progress. (resilience)

If an

...
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2017-01-27T18:29:18.396Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
29 January 2017 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Weekly Meetup
80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
by The_Jaded_One — 2017-01-26T21:44:33.229Z

this post is now crossposted to the EA forum
80,000 hours is a well known Effective Altruism organisation which does "in-depth research alongside academics at Oxford into how graduates can make the biggest difference possible with their careers".
They recently posted a guide to donating which aims, in their words, to (my emphasis)

use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to best promote the wellbeing of all. To find the highest-impact charities this giving season ... We ... summed up the main recommendations by area below

Looking below, we find a section on the problem area of criminal justice (US-focused). An area where the aim is outlined as follows: (quoting from the Open Philanthropy "problem area" page)

investing in criminal justice policy and practice reforms to substantially reduce incarceration while maintaining public safety.

Reducing incarceration whilst maintaining public safety seems like a reasonable EA cause, if we interpret "pubic safety" in a broad sense - that is, keep fewer people in prison whilst still getting almost all of the benefits of incarceration such as deterrent effects, prevention of crime, etc.

So what are the recommended charities? (my emphasis below)

1. Alliance for Safety and Justice

"The Alliance for Safety and Justice is a US organization that aims to reduce incarceration and racial disparities in incarceration in states across the country, and replace mass incarceration with new safety priorities that prioritize prevention and protect low-income communities of color."

They promote an article on their site called "black wounds matter", as well as how you can "Apply for VOCA Funding: A Toolkit for Organizations Working With Crime Survivors in Communities of Color and Other Underserved Communities"

2. Cosecha - (note that their url is www.lahuelga.com, which means "the strike" in Spanish) (my emphasis below)

"Cosecha is a group organizing undocumented immigrants in 50-60 cities around the country. Its goal is to build mass popular support for undocumented immigrants, in resistance to incarceration/detention, deportation, denigration of rights, and discrimination. The group has become especially active since the Presidential election, given the immediate threat of mass incarceration and deportation of millions of people."

Cosecha have a footprint in the news, for example&nbs...
The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring a project manager
by crmflynn — 2017-01-26T18:19:20.541Z

https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/project-manager/

Applications are invited for a full-time Research Project Manager with the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford. The post is fixed-term for 18 months from the date of appointment.

Reporting to the Assistant Director at the Future of Humanity Institute, the successful candidate will be responsible for coordinating, monitoring and developing the activities of the institute. The postholder will be based at FHI, Littlegate House, St Ebbe’s Street, OX1 1PT.

The postholder’s main responsibilities will include: coordinating, monitoring and helping to develop the activities of the FHI’ s research programmes and actively seeking funding for the activities of the Institute; organising meetings, workshops, seminars and conferences and working in collaboration with Professor Nick Bostrom and other researchers; acting as an ambassador for the Institute’s research, both within Oxford and externally and give regular advice to foundations, philanthropists and policymakers interested in reducing existential risk as well as producing reports for government, industry and other relevant organisations.

Applicants will be familiar with existing research and literature in the field and have excellent communication skills, including the ability to write for publication. He or she will have experience of independently managing a research project and of contributing to large policy-relevant reports. Previous professional experience working for non-profit organisations, and a network in the relevant fields associated with existential risk may be an advantage, but are not essential.

Candidates should apply via this link, and must submit a CV and supporting statement as part of their application. The closing date for applications is 12.00 midday on Thursday 2 February 2017. Please contact fhijobs@philosophy.ox.ac.uk with questions about the role, and fhiadmin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk with questions about the application process.
A majority coalition can lose a symmetric zero-sum game
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2017-01-26T12:13:49.380Z

Just a neat little result I found when thinking about Jessica's recent post.

For n players, let ai be the action of player i and si(a1,a2,...an) the reward of player i as a function of the actions of all players. Then the game is symmetric if for any permutation p:{1,...n}→{1,...n}

si(a1,a2,...an) = sp(i)(ap(1),ap(2),...ap(n))

The game is zero-sum if the sum of the si is always zero. Assume players can confer before choosing their actions.

Then it is possible for a majority coalition to strictly lose a zero-sum game, even in a deterministic game where they get to see their opponents' moves before choosing their own.

This seems counter-intuitive. After all, if one coalition has M players, the other has m players, with m<M, and there are no other players, how can the M players lose? Couldn't just m of the M players behave exactly as the smaller coalition, thus getting the same amount in expectation? The problem is the potential loses endured by the remaining M-m players.

For an example, consider the following 5 player colour game (it's a much simplified version of the game I came up with previously, proposed by cousin_it). Each player chooses one of two colour, blue or red. Then the players that selected the least commonly chosen colour(s) are the winners; the others are the losers. The losers pay 1 each, and this is split equally between the winners.

Then consider a coalition of three players, the triumvirate. The remaining two players - the duumvirate - choose different colours, red and blue. What can the triumvirate then do? If they all chose the same colour - say blue - then they all lose -1, and the duumvriate loses -1 (from its member that chose blue) and gains 4/1 (for the member that chose red). If they split - say 2 blue, 1 red - then the ones that chose blue lose -1, while the duumveriate loses -1 (from its member that chose blue) and gains 3/2 > 1 (from the member that chose red).

So the duumvriate can always win against the triumvirate.

Of course, it's possible for two members of the triumvirate to create a second duumvirate that will profit from the hapless third member. Feel free to add whatever political metaphor you think this fits.

Larger games

Variations of this game can make Jessica's theorem 2 sharp. Let the minority coalition be of size m (the majority coalition is of size M = n-m = qm+r for some unique q and 0≤r...
Meetup : SF Meetup: Group Debugging
by maia — 2017-01-26T06:13:01.881Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Group Debugging

WHEN:
30 January 2017 06:15:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1769 15th St., SF

We’ll be meeting to solve each other’s problems!

Here’s how it works: we’ll have everyone brainstorm silently for a few minutes, then go around and summarize what problems we might like to work on; then people can break up into smaller conversations according to problems they think they could be most helpful with. This format is now what I'd call "tried and true".

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Group Debugging
Meetup : Moscow: unconference
by Slava Matyukhin — 2017-01-25T18:55:09.038Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: unconference

WHEN:
29 January 2017 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups through other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a link to other meetup pages here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

There's one significant deviation from our traditional meetup structure: we're running an unconfenrence!

Read more about this meetup in FB event or VK.

We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: unconference
Value Journaling
by ProofOfLogic — 2017-01-25T06:10:52.180Z

I like to link to the Minding Our Way sequence on overcoming guilt a lot, but I've recently gone and added "information hazard" warnings to several of my posts which link there. Someone pointed out to me that the sequence destroys some people's current (guilt-based) motivation without successfully building up an alternative, making it a somewhat risky thing to try.

In light of that problem, I was thinking about what practices might help build up the kind of positive motivation that sequence is aiming at.

I was also listening to an audiobook on cognitive behavioral therapy. The book mentioned gratitude journaling, a practice which has proved surprisingly effective for boosting mood and getting longer and more refreshing sleep. The practice is simple: every week, write down five things which you were grateful for. (Once a week seems to be about right; writing more often is less effective.)

Gratitude journaling is the proven practice here, and if you want guaranteed results, you're better off trying it rather than the technique I'm going to describe here. But, we'd never have new techniques if someone didn't make them up!

I wanted to make a version of gratitude journaling which might be more suited to aspiring rationalists. I decided that it could be combined with the idea of value affirmation. Value affirmation (surprisingly) shows positive effects a year later, after just 15 minutes spent writing about what you value in life. Might it be useful to write about what we value more often? Perhaps repeating the value-affirmation exercise exactly would get old fast (since values do not change that much from week to week), but if we tie our values to things which happened recently, we get something which looks a lot like gratitude journaling.

That's the basic idea -- write about what you valued over the past week. What follows are my elaborations based on several weeks of trying it out.

Details

Value Inventory

Over the first week or so, it seemed useful to me to do the values journaling almost every day. I was still doing a lot of mapping out of what I value overall. (I suspect the right frequency of writing is "however much you feel like" -- reduced/eliminated effect size when doing gratitude journaling too often is likely tied to forcing it when you don't have much to say. But, that's just my speculation.)

I started a list of core values, which I kept adding to when I n...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup
by RobinZ — 2017-01-25T00:48:31.252Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup

WHEN:
29 January 2017 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to talk about the Less Wrong DC group - what people like and what people would like to change. Feel free to suggest new meetup topics!

Upcoming meetups:

Feb. 5: Typical Mind Fallacy

Feb. 12: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup
First impressions...
by ArisC — 2017-01-24T15:14:38.022Z

... of LW: a while ago, a former boss and friend of mine said that rationality is irrational because you never have sufficient computational power to evaluate everything rationally. I thought he was missing the point - but after two posts on LW, I am inclined to agree with him.

It's kind of funny - every post gets broken down into its tiniest constituents, and these get overanalysed and then people go on tangents only marginally relevant to the intent of the original article.

This would be fine if the original questions of the post were answered; but when I asked for metrics to evaluate a presidency, few people actually provided any - most started debating the validity of metrics, and one subthread went off to discuss the appropriateness of the term "gender equality".

I am new here, and I don't want to be overly critical of a culture I do not yet understand. But I just want to point out - rationality is a great tool to solve problems; if it becomes overly abstract, it kind of misses its point I think.
Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence
by Erfeyah — 2017-01-24T12:37:33.436Z

I would like to explore certain kinds of experiential knowledge that appear to me to be difficult to investigate rationally as the rational attitude itself might be the cause of a reluctance to explore. If this is already covered in one of the articles on the site please refer me to it.
In this thought experiment we will use the example of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a state in which a person realises they are dreaming while they are dreaming. The subtleties of the state are not relevant to this discussion.
Circumstances
[1] We will assume the experiment takes place at a time where the existence of the experience of lucid dreaming hasn't been scientifically proven yet. We will also assume that a proof is not possible in the current state of technological or methodological development.
[2] Person A has a (true) belief on the existence of lucid dreaming that is based on his personal experience of the state.
[3] He is trying to communicate the existence of lucid dreaming to someone else. Let us call him person B.
[4] Actually becoming lucid in a dream is quite a complex process that requires among other things1:
[4.1] Expending large amounts of effort.
[4.2] Following guidelines and exercises that appear strange.
[4.3] A time investment of significant length.
In the described circumstances we have an internal experience that has not be scientifically proven but is nevertheless true. We know this in our time through scientific studies but B does not know it in his world. Person B would have to actually believe in the existence of lucid dreaming and trust A to guide him through the process. But since there is no sufficient evidence to support the claim of A, the required effort is significantly large and the methods appear strange to those not understanding the state how can B rationally decide to expend the effort?
Proposed Conclusion

[5] People focusing on rational assessment can be mislead when dealing with experiential knowledge that is not yet scientifically proven, is not easily testable and has no obvious external function but is, nevertheless, experientially accessible.

1 Even if you disagree with the level of difficulty or the steps required please accept [4] and its sub-headings as being accurate for the duration of the argument.