trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New LW Meetup: Southeast Michigan
by FrankAdamek — 2013-07-26T15:21:44.726Z

This summary was posted to LW main on July 19th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Southeast Michigan: 21 July 2013 02:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta Lesswrong: The Math of Bayes' Theorem: 21 July 2013 06:00PM
Bratislava Meetup V.: 22 July 2013 06:00PM
Cincinnati: Financial optimisation: 28 July 2013 04:00PM
Helsinki LW meetup: 20 July 2013 02:00PM
[Moscow] The Meet up: 21 July 2013 04:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 27 July 2019 01:30PM
Durham NC/Triangle Area: Meetup!: 01 August 2013 07:00PM
London Social - Direct Sunlight 2, Vitamin Boogaloo - July 21st : 21 July 2013 11:54AM
Melbourne Excursion: Comfort Zone Expansion: 20 July 2013 10:30AM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, Research Triangle NC, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, 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 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: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Fran...
The Argument From Marginal Cases
by jefftk — 2013-07-26T13:30:17.215Z

The argument from marginal cases claims that you can't both think that humans matter morally and that animals don't, because no reasonable set of criteria for moral worth cleanly separates all humans from all animals. For example, perhaps someone says that suffering only matters when it happens to something that has some bundle of capabilities like linguistic ability, compassion, and/or abstract reasoning. If livestock don't have these capabilities, however, then some people such as very young children probably don't either.

This is a strong argument, and it avoids the noncentral fallacy. Any set of qualities you value are going to vary over people and animals, and if you make a continuum there's not going to be a place you can draw a line that will fall above all animals and below all people. So why do I treat humans as the only entities that count morally?

If you asked me how many chickens I would be willing to kill to save your life, the answer is effectively "all of them". [1] This pins down two points on the continuum that I'm clear on: you and chickens. While I'm uncertain where along there things start getting up to significant levels, I think it's probably somewhere that includes no or almost no animals but nearly all humans. Making this distinction among humans, however, would be incredibly socially destructive, especially given how unsure I am about where the line should go, and so I think we end up with a much better society if we treat all humans as morally equal. This means I end up saying things like "value all humans equally; don't value animals" when that's not my real distinction, just the closest schelling point.

[1] Chicken extinction would make life worse for many other people, so I wouldn't actually do that, but not because of the effect on the chickens.

I also posted this on my blog.
Meetup : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2013-07-26T11:08:53.942Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
17 August 2013 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier dorée' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. As always, I'll have a sign. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form, to share your contact information.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
by KnaveOfAllTrades — 2013-07-26T02:35:56.816Z

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

A few notes about the site mechanics

To post your first comment, you must have carried out the e-mail confirmation: When you signed up to create your account, an e-mail was sent to the address you provided with a link that you need to follow to confirm your e-mail address. You must do this before you can post!

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you have any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

Replies to your comments across the site, plus private messages from other users, will show up in your inbox. You can reach it via the little mail icon beneath your karma score on the upper right of most pages. When you have a new reply or message, it glows red. You can also click on any user's name to view all of their comments and posts

...
Meetup : West LA Meetup—Introduction to Anthropics
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-07-26T00:51:00.460Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup—Introduction to Anthropics

WHEN:
31 July 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

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 3 hours, or for longer if you apply some skullduggery.

Discussion: The study of observer selection effects is called "anthropics" or "anthropic reasoning". As I am not an expert in anthropics, I will introduce the topic and some of its famous problems, clear up basic confusions, and caution against more advanced confusions.

Recommended reading:

Anthropic Principle Primer

Black Belt Bayesian posts tagged "anthropics"

Katja Grace's Anthropic Principles

Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains, Outlawing Anthropics, The Anthropic Trilemma

No Anthropic Evidence, in which Vladimir Nesov proves that you can't update your priors with anthropic observations.

Prior exposure to Less Wrong is mandatory. If you haven't memorized the core sequences, don't even bother showing up.

There will probably be a highly visible whiteboard.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup—Introduction to Anthropics
Meetup : Atlanta LessWrong: August Meetup 
by Nova_Division — 2013-07-25T20:29:17.051Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta LessWrong: August Meetup

WHEN:
04 August 2013 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Apt L. Decatur, GA 30033

For the first of our two planned August meetups, we will be continuing our work on group self-improvement and Bayesian reasoning, as well as having super fun social times with games and banter!

Agenda:

Introductions and Welcome to New Members!

Meta-Meetup Stuff: Creating a regularly scheduled, twice monthly, meeting time. Mini-presentations by members. Currently we have a series going on epistemology.

Self-improvement brainstorming: Each meetup, we will invite one member to volunteer for our "self-improvement group hacking/brainstorming." The volunteer will discuss an issue with their lives, be it physical, emotional, intellectual, or philosophical, and invite feedback and brainstorming from other members to improve their lives.

Meetup Educational Experiences! We've done meditation, and we've been working on a series of Bayesian Reasoning Preliminaries on Probability and Confidence Intervals. We will continue with conditional probability and move towards rockin' us some Bayes' Theorem. Games, Social Time, Free Discussion

Please contact me if you have allergies to cats, as our meeting space has two. As always, vegan, gluten-free snacks will be provided. Feel free to bring additional snacks and drink!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta LessWrong: August Meetup
The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-07-25T18:46:13.486Z

Q. Are the current high levels of unemployment being caused by advances in Artificial Intelligence automating away human jobs?

A. Conventional economic theory says this shouldn't happen. Suppose it costs 2 units of labor to produce a hot dog and 1 unit of labor to produce a bun, and that 30 units of labor are producing 10 hot dogs in 10 buns. If automation makes it possible to produce a hot dog using 1 unit of labor instead, conventional economics says that some people should shift from making hot dogs to buns, and the new equilibrium should be 15 hot dogs in 15 buns. On standard economic theory, improved productivity - including from automating away some jobs - should produce increased standards of living, not long-term unemployment.

Q. Sounds like a lovely theory. As the proverb goes, the tragedy of science is a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact. Experiment trumps theory and in reality, unemployment is rising.

A. Sure. Except that the happy equilibrium with 15 hot dogs in buns, is exactly what happened over the last four centuries where we went from 95% of the population being farmers to 2% of the population being farmers (in agriculturally self-sufficient developed countries). We don't live in a world where 93% of the people are unemployed because 93% of the jobs went away. The first thought of automation removing a job, and thus the economy having one fewer job, has not been the way the world has worked since the Industrial Revolution. The parable of the hot dog in the bun is how economies really, actually worked in real life for centuries. Automation followed by re-employment went on for literally centuries in exactly the way that the standard lovely economic model said it should. The idea that there's a limited amount of work which is destroyed by automation is known in economics as the "lump of labour fallacy".

Q. But now people aren't being reemployed. The jobs that went away in the Great Recession aren't coming back, even as the stock market and corporate profits rise again.

A. Yes. And that's a new problem. We didn't get that when the Model T automobile mechanized the entire horse-and-buggy industry out of existence. The difficulty with supposing that automation is producing unemployment is that automation isn't ne...
The difference between Determinism & Pre-determination
by RogerS — 2013-07-25T11:41:57.559Z

1. Scope

There are two arm-waving views often expressed about the relationship between “determinism/causality” on the one hand and “predetermination/predictability in principle” on the other. The first treats them as essentially interchangeable: what is causally determined from instant to instant is thereby predetermined over any period - the Laplacian view. The second view is that this is a confusion, and they are two quite distinct concepts. What I have never seen thoroughly explored (and therefore propose to make a start on here) is the range of different cases which give rise to different relationships between determinism and predetermination. I will attempt to illustrate that, indeed, determinism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for predetermination in the most general case.

To make the main argument clear, I will relegate various pedantic qualifications, clarifications and comments to [footnotes].

Most of the argument relates to cases of a physically classical, pre-quantum world (which is not as straightforward as often assumed, and certainly not without relevance to the world we experience). The difference that quantum uncertainty makes will be considered briefly at the end.

2. Instantaneous determinism

To start with it is useful to define what exactly we mean by an (instantaneously) determinist system. In simple terms this means that how the system changes at any instant is fully determined by the state of the system at that instant [1]. This is how physical laws work in a Newtonian universe. The arm-waving argument says that if this is the case, we can derive the state of the system at any future instant by advancing through an infinite number of infinitesimal steps. Since each step is fully determined, the outcome must be as well. However, as it stands this is a mathematical over-simplification. It is well known that an infinite number of infinitesimals is indeterminate as such, and so we have to look at this process more carefully - and this is where there turn out to be significant differences between different cases.

3. Convergent and divergent behaviour

To illustrate the first difference that needs to be recognized, consider two simple cases - a snooker ball just about to collide with another snooker ball, and a snooker ball heading towards a pocket. In the first case,...
Meetup : Moscow: Miscellaneous Rationality
by Yuu — 2013-07-25T08:39:45.663Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Miscellaneous Rationality

WHEN:
04 August 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 16:00 with “LW” sign inside the hall. And we will also check the entrance at 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Applied rationality exercises.

Short presentations about useful discussions and regression to the mean.

Discussion about setting goals.

Game session: the Liar's dice or the Resistance.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with more photos!

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Miscellaneous Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-07-25T04:36:01.374Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 96. The previous thread is at almost 300 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.

Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, .

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Meetup : Chicago: Discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Nic_Smith — 2013-07-25T03:03:40.490Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago: Discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow

WHEN:
03 August 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Corner Bakery, 360 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL

We'll be discussing the beginning of Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow as part of a series of meetups for this book.

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago: Discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow
Useful Questions Repository
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-07-25T02:58:35.717Z

See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository, Useful Concepts Repository, Bad Concepts Repository

I just got back from the July CFAR workshop, where I was a guest instructor. One useful piece of rationality I started paying more attention to as a result of the workshop is the idea of useful questions to ask in various situations, particularly because I had been introduced to a new one:

"What skill am I actually training?"

This is a question that can be asked whenever you're practicing something, but more generally it can also be asked whenever you're doing something you do frequently, and it can help you notice when you're practicing a skill you weren't intending to train. Some examples of when to use this question:

You practice a piece of music so quickly that you consistently make mistakes. What skill are you actually training? How to play with mistakes.

You teach students math by putting them in a classroom and having them take notes while a lecturer talks about math. What skill are you actually training? How to take notes.

A personal example: at the workshop, I noticed that I was more apprehensive about the idea of singing in public than I had previously thought I was. After walking outside and actually singing in public for a little, I had a hypothesis about why: for the past several years, I've been singing in public when I don't think anyone is around but stopping when I saw people because I didn't want to bother them. What skill was I actually training by doing that? How to not sing around people.

Many of the lessons of the sequences can also be packaged as useful questions, like "what do I believe and why do I believe it?" and "what would I expect to see if this were true?"

I'd like to invite people to post other examples of useful questions in the comments, hopefully together with an explanation of why they're useful and some examples of when to use them. As usual, one useful question per comment for voting purposes.
Meetup : Philadelphia informal meetup
by mare-of-night — 2013-07-25T01:31:13.076Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Philadelphia informal meetup

WHEN:
28 July 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1414 S Penn Square, Philadelphia, PA

There has been some interest in reviving the Philadelphia LessWrong meetup group. We're going to start with an informal meetup at the coffee shop La Colombe, tentatively from 3:00 to 4:30 (but will likely extend past the planned time).

Our plan for the meeting:
1) Get to know each other
2) Talk about our goals for the group, and what we can contribute
3) Brainstorm ideas for future activities and discussions

The discussion topic is "optimizing working in groups". We might or might not get to it, depending on how long the rest takes and what people feel like talking about.

We have been using a mailing list to communicate. Feel free to join. If you'd like to come to future meetups, please mark which times are convenient for you on the calendar.

Discussion article for the meetup : Philadelphia informal meetup
Meetup : London Meetup - Achieving Better Goals
by kerspoon — 2013-07-24T23:39:08.266Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup - Achieving Better Goals

WHEN:
04 August 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, London, WC2B 6BG

LessWrong London are having another awesome meetup and we would love for you to come!

The plan is to meet at The Shakespeare Inn, 200m from Holborn Underground at 2pm on Sunday 4th August. We will officially finish at 4pm but honestly people tend to enjoy it so much they want to stay longer, and regularly do. We will have a sign with the LessWrong logo on it so you can find us easily.

This meetup is all about creating goals and turning them into actionable objectives. If you went to Rikk's Meetup then hopefully you already have a few goals in mind but don't worry if you didn't.

If you have any questions, or are thinking of coming, feel free to email me (James) at kerspoon+lw@gmail.com. Otherwise, just turn up!

Hope to see you there,
James

P.S err on the side of turning-up, we're friendly, and it's fun :)

"Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making
people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and have fun."

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup - Achieving Better Goals