trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup
by EvelynM — 2011-11-04T16:26:57.437Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup

WHEN:
09 November 2011 08:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Bean Cycle, 144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

Our weekly get together of interesting people you'd like to meet.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup
Meetup : Madison Monday Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2011-11-04T16:18:56.993Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup

WHEN:
07 November 2011 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St., Madison, WI

Along with the usual likely discussions and likely games, I'll run some exercises on group estimation and Fermi calculations, and then we'll play a few rounds of Paranoid Debating.

eta: And, if you're in Madison and haven't already, be sure to sign up for the Madison mailing list

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup
Meetup : Paris, Sunday November 13
by Emile — 2011-11-04T14:39:59.939Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris, Sunday November 13

WHEN:
13 November 2011 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Café des Arts et Métiers‎, 51 Rue Turbigo, Paris

The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, November 13, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum (and not in the Café that's inside the Museum, like last time, because on Sundays you can't get to it without a Museum ticket).

There should be at least Morendil, kilobug and me - and maybe you too!

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris, Sunday November 13
FHI Essay Competition
by Gedusa — 2011-11-04T13:28:30.778Z

This competition is only open to philosophy students.

Can philosophical research contribute to securing a long and prosperous future for humanity and its descendants?

What would you think about if you really wanted to make a difference?

Crucial considerations are questions or ideas that could decisively change your entire approach to an issue. What are the crucial considerations for humanity’s future? These could range from deep questions about population ethics to world government, the creation of greater than human intelligence, or the risks of human extinction.

The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University wants to get young philosophers thinking about these big questions. We know that choosing a PhD thesis topic is one of the big choices affecting the direction of your career, and so deserves a great deal of thought. To encourage this, we are running a slightly unusual prize competition. The format is a two page ‘thesis proposal’ consisting of a 300 word abstract and an outline plan of a thesis regarding a crucial consideration for humanity’s future. We will publish the best abstracts on our website and give a prize of £2,000 to the author of the proposal we deem the most promising or original.
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Houston, Fort Collins, Melbourne, Canberra, Zurich
by FrankAdamek — 2011-11-04T13:18:15.749Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Houston Meetup: 30 October 2011 02:00PM
Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Wednesday 7pm: 02 November 2011 07:00PM
Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 04 November 2011 07:00PM
Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th: 05 November 2011 11:00AM
First Zurich LW Meetup: 12 November 2011 03:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 29 October 2011 01:30PM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

Despite the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, we've decided to continue posting an overview of upcoming meetups 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 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 happening: Chicago, Helsinki, London, Madison, WI, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
Anthropic Decision Theory IV: Solving Selfish and Average-Utilitarian Sleeping Beauty
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-11-04T10:55:19.530Z

A near-final version of my Anthropic Decision Theory paper is available on the arXiv. Since anthropics problems have been discussed quite a bit on this list, I'll be presenting its arguments and results in this, subsequent, and previous posts 1 2 3 4 5 6.

In the previous post, I looked at a decision problem when Sleeping Beauty was selfless or a (copy-)total utilitarian. Her behaviour was reminiscent of someone following SIA-type odds. Here I'll look at situations where her behaviour is SSA-like.

Altruistic average utilitarian Sleeping Beauty

In the incubator variant, consider the reasoning of an Outside/Total agent who is an average utilitarian (and there are no other agents in the universe apart from the Sleeping Beauties).

"If the various Sleeping Beauties decide to pay £x for the coupon, they will make -£x in the heads world. In the tails world, they will each make £(1-x) each, so an average of £(1-x). This give me an expected utility of £0.5(-x+(1-x))= £(0.5-x), so I would want them to buy the coupon for any price less than £0.5."

And this will then be the behaviour the agents will follow, by consistency. Thus they would be behaving as if they were following SSA odds, and putting equal probability on the heads versus tails world.

For a version of this that makes senses for the classical Sleeping Beauty problem, one could imagine that she to be awaknened a week after the experiment. Further imagine she would take her winnings and losses during the experiment in the form of chocolate, consumed immediatly. Then because of the amneia drug, she would only remember one instance of this in the tails world. Hence if she valued memory of pleasure, she would want to be average utilitarian towards the pleasures of her different versions, and would follow SSA odds.

Reference classes and copy-altruistic agents

Standard SSA has a problem with reference classes. For instance, the larger the reference class becomes, the more the results of SSA in small situations become similar to SIA. The above setup mimics the effect: if there is a very large population of outsider individuals that Sleeping Beauty is altruistic towards, then the gains to two extra copies will tend to add, rather than average: if Ω is large, then 2x/(2+Ω) (averaged gain to two created agents each ...
Selection Effects in estimates of Global Catastrophic Risk
by bentarm — 2011-11-04T09:14:43.364Z

Here's a poser that occurred to us over the summer, and one that we couldn't really come up with any satisfactory solution to. The people who work at the Singularity Institute have a high estimate of the probability that an Unfriendly AI will destroy the world. People who work for http://nuclearrisk.org/ have a very high estimate of the probability that a nuclear war will destroy the world (by their estimates, if you are American and under 40, then nuclear war is the single most likely way in which you might die next year).

It seems like there are good reasons to take these numbers seriously, because Eliezer is probably the world expert on AI risk, and Hellman is probably the world expert on nuclear risk. However, there's a problem - Eliezer is an expert on AI risk because he believes that AI risk is a bigger risk than nuclear war. Similarly, Hellman chose to study nuclear risks and not AI risk I because he had a higher than average estimate of the threat of nuclear war.

It seems like it might be a good idea to know what the probability of each of these risks is. Is there a sensible way for these people to correct for the fact that the people studying these risks are those that have high estimate of them in the first place?
[SEQ RERUN] Leaky Generalizations
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-04T04:31:10.922Z

Today's post, Leaky Generalizations was originally published on 22 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The words and statements that we use are inherently "leaky", they do not precisely convey absolute and perfect information. Most humans have ten fingers, but if you know that someone is a human, you cannot confirm (with probability 1) that they have ten fingers. The same holds with planning and ethical advice.

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 Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone), 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.
How to manipulate future self into being productive?
by Baldcat — 2011-11-04T04:24:54.483Z

I don't like doing much work. I would however, like my future self to do work so that my far future self will have better opportunities.

To clarify, I want these things for each specified self:

Current self: immediate gratification

Future self: work hard

Far future self: benefit from future self's work

The problem is, I expect that my future self will feel the same way and also want immediate gratification. What can I do now to achieve all 3 of those goals? How can I manipulate my future self into doing more work without having to do much work right now?
Any good visual images to explain complicated ideas?
by TheatreAddict — 2011-11-03T22:10:36.312Z

I'm not really looking for anything in particular, but I just recently took a look at http://lesswrong.com/lw/fc/you_are_a_brain/ at You Are a Brain presentation. It was really good, and helped things click for me. Does anyone else have any recommendations for extreme beginners? I'm interested in learning most anything really, I've read a few of the Sequences, like the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, How to Actually Change Your Mind, and half of Reductionism. The Quantum Physics section looks really cool, but unfortunately it's beyond me, as of now. I'm trying to get teachers to help me, but it appears to be beyond them as well. But anyway, if you don't have any videos, pictures, or presentations, do you at least have any good textbooks to recommend? For beginners?
[LINK] Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology Research
by  — 2011-11-03T20:12:24.560Z

An article in the NYT's about everyone's favourite messy science, you know the one we sometimes rely on to provide a throwaway line as we pontificate wisely about biases? ;)

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability.

The psychologist, Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg University, committed academic fraud in “several dozen” published papers, many accepted in respected journals and reported in the news media, according to a report released on Monday by the three Dutch institutions where he has worked ...

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. ...

In a prolific career, Dr. Stapel published papers on the effect of power on hypocrisy, on racial stereotyping and on how advertisements affect how people view themselves. Many of his findings appeared in newspapers around the world, including The New York Times, which reported in December on his study about advertising and identity.

In a statement posted Monday on Tilburg University’s Web site, Dr. Stapel apologized to his colleagues. “I have failed as a scientist and researcher,” it read, in part. “I feel ashamed for it and have great regret.” ...

Dr. Stapel has published about 150 papers, many of which, like the advertising study, seem devised to make a splash in the media. The study published in Science this year claimed that white people became more likely to “stereotype and discriminate” against black people when they were in a messy environment, versus an organized one. Another study, published in 2009, claimed that people judged job applicants as more competent if they had a male voice. The investigating committee did not post a list of papers that it had found fraudulent. ...

In a survey of more than 2,000 American

...
AI Challenge: Ants
by lavalamp — 2011-11-03T15:31:42.635Z

Aichallenge.org has started their third AI contest this year: Ants.

The AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. ... [Y]ou will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination. ... The current phase of the contest will end December 18th at 11:59pm EST. At that time submissions will be closed. Shortly thereafter the final tournament will be started. ... Upon completion the contest winner will be announced and all results will be publically available.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

I mentioned this in the open thread, and there was a discussion about possibly making one or more "official" LessWrong teams. D_Alex has offered a motivational prize. If this interests you, please discuss in the comments!
Anthropic Decision Theory III: Solving Selfless and Total Utilitarian Sleeping Beauty
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-11-03T10:04:34.447Z

A near-final version of my Anthropic Decision Theory paper is available on the arXiv. Since anthropics problems have been discussed quite a bit on this list, I'll be presenting its arguments and results in this, subsequent, and previous posts 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Consistency

In order to transform the Sleeping Beauty problem into a decision problem, assume that every time she is awoken, she is offered a coupon that pays out £1 if the coin fell tails. She must then decide at what cost she is willing to buy that coupon.

The very first axiom is that of temporal consistency. If your preferences are going to predictably change, then someone will be able to exploit this, by selling you something now that they will buy back for more later, or vice versa. This axiom is implicit in the independence axiom in the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms of expected utility, where non-independent decisions show inconsistency after partially resolving one of the lotteries. For our purposes, we will define it as:

Temporal Consistency: If an agent at two different times has the same knowledge and preferences, then the past version will never give up anything of value in order to change the decision of the future version.

This is appropriate for the standard Sleeping Beauty problem, but not for the incubator variant, where the different copies are not future or past versions of each other. To deal with that, we extend the axiom to:

Consistency: If two copies of an agent have the same knowledge and preferences, then the one version will never give up anything of value in order to change the decision of the other version.

Note that while 'same preferences' is something we could expect to see for the same agent at different times, it is not something the case for copies, who are generally assumed to be selfish towards each other. Indeed, this whole issue of selflessness, altruism and selfishness will be of great import for the agent's behaviour, as we shall now see.

Selfless Sleeping Beauty

Assume that Sleeping Beauty has an entirely selfless utility function. To simplify matters, we will further assume her utility is linear in cash (though cash for her is simply a tool to accomplish her selfless goals). Before Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep the first time, she will follow the following reasoning:

"In the tails world, future copies of m...
[SEQ RERUN] Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone)
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-03T04:29:45.039Z

Today's post, Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone) was originally published on 22 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Tackles the Hollywood Rationality trope that "rational" preferences must reduce to selfish hedonism - caring strictly about personally experienced pleasure. An ideal Bayesian agent - implementing strict Bayesian decision theory - can have a utility function that ranges over anything, not just internal subjective experiences.

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 Truly Part of You, 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.
What are the best ways of absorbing, and maintaining, knowledge?
by Arkanj3l — 2011-11-03T02:02:42.281Z

Recently, I've collapsed (ascended?) down/up a meta-learning death spiral -- doing a lot less of reading actual informative content, than figuring out how to manage and acquire such content (as well as completely ignoring the antidote). In other words, I've been taking notes on taking notes. And now, I'm looking for your notes on notes for notes.

What kind of scientific knowledge, techniques, and resources do we have right now in the way of information management? How would one efficiently extract useful information possible out of a single pass of the source? The second pass?

The answers may depend on the media, and the media might not be readily apparent. Example: Edward Boyden, Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, recommends recording in a notebook every conversation you ever have with other people. And how do you prepare yourself for the serendipity of a walk downtown? I know I'm more likely to regret not having a notebook on hand than spending the time to bring one along.

I'll conglomerate what I remember seeing on the N-Back Mailing List and in general: I sincerely apologize for my lack of citation.

Notes

I'm on the fence about Shorthand as a note-taking technique, given the learning overhead, but I'm sure that the same has been said for touch-typing. It would involve a second stage of processing if you can't read as well as you write, but given the way I have taken notes (... "non-linearly"...), that stage would have to come about anyway. The act of translation may serve as a way of laying connective groundwork down.

Livescribe Pens are nifty for those who write slowly, but they need to be combined with a written technique to be of any use (otherwise you're just recording the talk, and would have to live through it twice without any obvious annotation and tagging).

Cornell Notes or taking notes in a hierarchy may have been the method you were taught in high school; it was in mine. The issue I have had with this format is that I found it hard to generate a structure while listening to the teacher at the same time.

Mind-Mapping.

Color-coding annotations of text has been remarked to be useful on Science Daily.

Reading

Speed Reading Techniques or removing sub-vocalization would seem to have benefits.

Once upon a time someone recommended me the book, "How to Read a Book". Nothing ground-breaking -- outline the author's intent

...
[link]s Recent developments in life-extension
by JoshuaZ — 2011-11-02T20:54:41.444Z

Progeria is a very rare disease which causes children to undergo symptoms extremely similar to rapid aging, and generally dying before the age of 20. Recent results suggest that a fairly cheap drug may help reduce the aging systems, and it is possible it may have similar effects on normal humans. Lay summary by BBC and actual article

On a related note, in a strain of mice which age unusually quickly, there's been success delaying many symptoms of aging by removing senescent cells. Here is the relevant article in Nature.