trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Sydney Meetup - May
by taryneast — 2015-05-16T00:13:42.287Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - May

WHEN:
27 May 2015 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
565 George Street, Sydney, Australia 2000

Regular location - City of Sydney RSL
The restaurant on Level 2

Regular time (starting about 6:30)

Come for general socialising and interesting discussions with like-minded people, or join the discussion on what you'd like from the Less-Wrong Sydney community.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - May
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2015-05-15T21:09:55.205Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
17 May 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

Note: due to possible showers and/or thunderstorms, the 'outdoors' part is postponed.

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Note: Feel free to send an email to the Google Group - lesswrong-dc - if you have a game you wish to recruit people to play in advance. This is especially useful for games that take 3+ hours, as you would want to start playing by 3:30 to be sure of finishing by 7:00.

The WMATA major track work schedule has buses replace trains between College Park and Greenbelt; weekend service adjustments include single-tracking and reduced service on all lines, with trains running every 18-24 minutes. The Verizon Center calendar for May 17 is empty.

Upcoming meetups:

May 24: Value of Information (discussion of the decision-making concept)

May 30: MIRI Q&A (explanation of MIRI - what it is, why it exists, what it does, etc.)

Jun 7: Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
An Informal Conjecture on Proof Length and Logical Counterfactuals
by Scott Garrabrant — 2015-05-15T20:31:01.000Z

During the May 4-6 MIRI workshop on decision theory, I made the following conjecture: If ϕ and ψ are sentences such that the length of the shortest proof of ϕ→ψ is much shorter than the proof of ϕ→¬ψ, then ψ is a legitimate counterfactual consequence of ϕ.

You may be thinking that this conjecture seems like it cannot be correct. This is the intuition that most of us shared until we started looking for (and failing to find) good counterexamples. After many failed attempts, we started referring to it as "The Trolljecture." Multiple people from the workshop are currently working on writing up posts related to it. However, the conjecture is not very formal. The purpose of this post is just to give some background for those posts and to discuss the why we are keeping the conjecture in this informal state.

There are a three ways in which this conjecture is not formal. I do not see a way to make any of these formal without disrupting the spirit of the conjecture.

What do we mean by "legitimate counterfactual consequence"?

What do we mean by "much shorter"?

What do we mean by "length of the shortest proof"?

I will address these issues one at a time. The term "legitimate counterfactual consequence" does not have a formal definition. If it did, many open problems in decision theory and logical uncertainty would be solved. Instead, it is a pointer to a concept that humans seem to have some intuitions about. The best I can do is give some examples of legitimate counterfactual consequence and hope that we are talking about the same cluster of things.

Regardless of whether or not P=NP, "P=NP" is a legitimate counterfactual consequence of "3SAT∈P," while "P≠NP" is NOT a legitimate counterfactual consequence of "3SAT∈P."

In Newcomb's problem, "The box is empty" is a legitimate counterfactual consequence of "I two-box." This is true regardless of whether or not I am a two-boxer.

Note that just because ϕ→ψ, it does not necessarily follow that ψ is a legitimate counterfactual consequence of ϕ.

In this post, the notation ψ∈C(ϕ) is used for "ψ is a legitimate counterfactual consequence of ϕ." They mean the same thing.

The term "much shorter" probably could have been defined but most ways to define it seem arbitrary, and the exact definition does not matter much. There are some ways to define it which feel less arbitrary. We could just say that there exists a computable function

...
New LW Meetup: Oslo
by FrankAdamek — 2015-05-15T17:23:58.619Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 8th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Dublin: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
Oslo LessWrong Meetup: 22 May 2015 05:15PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13: 13 June 2015 01:30PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Bangalore LW Meetup: 09 May 2015 09:18AM
BYU-I: 08 May 2015 05:30PM
Cologne meetup: 09 May 2015 05:00PM
Dublin: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Munich] May Meetup: 16 May 2015 03:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Short Talks: 11 May 2015 06:00PM

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

Brussels - The Art of Not Being Right: 09 May 2015 01:00PM
Canberra: Putting Induction Into Practice: 09 May 2015 06:00PM
Durham, NC (RTLW) Discussion Meetup: 16 April 2026 07:00PM
London meetup: 10 May 2015 02:00PM
Tel Aviv Meetup: Social & Board Games: 12 May 2015 07:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: xkcd Discussion: 10 May 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 po...
In a world… of venture capital
by Zvi — 2015-05-15T14:02:10.000Z

On Twitter, Robin Hanson asked a question yesterday I have given a lot of thought to, which is why the bigger venture capital firms dominate the market and make oversize profits while the other firms taken together make almost no profits. Most industries do not work that way, so this requires explanation. I attempted to explain my view on Twitter, but was largely unsuccessful. Marc Andreessen did a better job of explaining a fully compatible position, but Twitter still is not the best medium for a question this important and complex, so I am going to consider the question here in more detail. I agree with everything Marc said, but my view of the problem is that it goes deeper, and is more insidious, than his observations imply.

Consider a start-up whose business plan requires venture funding. Most companies that require venture funding need to get such funding, or at least are better off seeking such funding, multiple times; there will be seed money, then a series A, then a series B, and so forth. It would not make sense in the first funding round to give the company enough money to see itself all the way through to stable profitability, since most companies will fail long before that happens and the company is not yet worth enough to take that large an investment.

A goal of every start-up is to avoid having ‘down’ rounds where the valuation of the company declines. These rounds are essentially doom for a Silicon Valley style technology-based startup, as they play havoc with the equity table, reduce the available incentive pie and send the signal that the company is doing poorly and could not avoid sending the signal that the company is doing poorly. Often the company more or less falls apart rather than attempting to soldier on, to free up valuable human capital.

Being a start-up is essentially a giant signaling game played on multiple meta levels; starting a business is not about doing business. Starting a new business is about raising investment. MetaMed is a great example of this phenomenon. We made the deadly mistake of thinking of MetaMed as a business that was trying to turn a profit and grow organically, rather than a start-up whose ‘profits’ would come from selling its stock to investors at a higher price. Even in the explicit context of a profitable case, this was still true. If we had closed an additional $100,000 case and made a marginal profit of $...
Meetup : Los Angeles: Growth Mindset
by abramdemski — 2015-05-14T21:40:39.986Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Los Angeles: Growth Mindset

WHEN:
20 May 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica blvd, LA, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Growth mindset. What is it? Is it good? Bad? Ugly? Will we all become growth-mindset zombies, constantly excusing our shortcomings with "yet... growth mindset"? Or shall we transcend the pedestrian constraints of life-so-far? Yvain's recent growth-mindset commentary will set the tone. We officially begin at 7pm, but people are often quite early.

Recommended Reading:

The first article in Yvain's four-part sequence will be the official reading; the others are listed here for convenience:

No clarity around growth mindset... yet

I will Never Have the Ability to Clearly Explain my Beliefs About Growth Mindset

A Pox on Growth Your Houses

Growth of Office

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : Los Angeles: Growth Mindset
Subsuming Purpose, Part II: Solving the Solution
by OrphanWilde — 2015-05-14T19:25:14.510Z

Summary: It's easy to get caught up in solving the wrong problems, solving the problems with a particular solution instead of solving the actual problem. You should pay very careful attention to what you are doing and why.

I'll relate a seemingly purposeless story about a video game to illustrate:

I was playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms some years ago, and was trying to build the perfect city. (The one city I ruled, actually.) Enemies kept attacking, and the need to recruit troops was slowing my population growth (not to mention deliberate sabotage by my enemies), so eventually I came to the conclusion that I would have to conquer the map in order to finish the job. So I conquered the map. And then the game ending was shown, after which, finally, I could return to improving cities.

The game ending, however, startled me out of continuing to play: My now emperor was asked by his people to improve the condition of things (as things were apparently terrible), and his response was that he needed to conquer the rest of Asia first, to ensure their security.

My initial response was outrage at how the game portrayed events, but I couldn't find a fault in "his" response; it was exactly what I had been doing. Given the rest of Asia, indeed the rest of the world, that would be exactly what I would have done had the game continued past that point, given that threats to the peace I had established still existed. I had already conquered enemies who had never offered me direct threat, on the supposition that they would, and the fact that they held tactically advantageous positions.

It was an excellent game which managed to point out that I have failed in my original purpose in playing the game. My purpose was subsumed by itself, or more particularly, a subgoal. I didn't set out to conquer the map. I lost the game. I achieved the game's victory conditions, yes, but failed my own. The ending, the exact description of exactly how I had failed and how my reasoning led to a conclusion I would have dismissed as absurd when I began, was so memorable it still sticks in my mind, years later.

My original purpose was subsumed. By what, exactly, however?

By the realities of the game I was playing, I could say, if I were to rationalize my behavior; I wanted to improve all the cities I owned, but at no point ...
Trolley Problems: Conveniently Inconvenient Worlds Considered
by Zvi — 2015-05-14T18:51:40.000Z

The basic trolley problem is under-specified. In the basic case (no one will ever know what you did or did not do, a transfer saves N people and dooms M other statistically identical people) I hold that the answer is clearly switch if and only if N>M.

But sometimes it gets more complicated than that. And hilarious. I was thinking, since absurd situations are quite useful in clarifying philosophical positions, it might be worth taking these situations seriously (without taking ourselves too seriously, but then I try never to do that.)

The Time Traveler

This one seems easy at first glance, since it seems cannot possibly get it wrong. If you fail to save the man now then the man cannot be on the other track from ten minutes from now, and since you have already observed him there, not saving him creates a paradox, so you save him. This, however, is a trap caused by poor decision theory and that answer costs you a million points.

Using correct decision theory, you would realize that if you would in this situation switch the track and cause the older version to die, then this means that the person on the tracks will die. However, if you do not switch the track, then this creates a paradox, which means that the situation on the tracks will never come to exist, since it cannot be self-consistent. Therefore, by being a person who would not close the time loop, you prevent the situation from ever happening, and chances seem much better that the result would be either there being no one on at least one of the tracks, there being different people on the tracks (which results in a possible choice that can only improve matters), or not being the one caught in a no-win ethical dilemma if one even exists at all, all of which seem like a clear win.

Do not be the type of person that would, when given the opportunity to close a time loop, fails to close a loop they would prefer did not exist! Or, of course, be the one who fails to close a loop that is doing good work.

The Cancer Caper

Math on this one is pretty easy. Both sides have one brilliant cancer researcher, and a brilliant cancer researcher’s positive impact is far bigger than the negative impact of a serial killer. A serial killer that only kills lesser cancer researchers is probably doing more harm than a normal serial killer, so that is a win. If 14% of cancer researchers are Nazi sympathizers, and Hitler is alive...
Meetup : 'The Most Good Good You Can Do' (Effective Altruism meetup)
by SoerenMind — 2015-05-14T18:32:18.446Z

Discussion article for the meetup : 'The Most Good Good You Can Do' (Effective Altruism meetup)

WHEN:
31 May 2015 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Utrecht

We'll discuss Peter Singer's new book about effective altruism. The book gives an overview of the EA movement, and some very nice personal stories of people who devote a significant part of their lives on doing good effectively.

You can buy the book on bol.com, amazon and probably in many other (web)shops.

New people are very welcome!

We'll make sure the discussion is interesting for people who haven't found the time to read the book.

Practical

Note that the location has been changed to the La Place. We have this Google Doc where anyone can make suggestions, also for the coming meetups. And feel free to join our facebook group as well.

Location: La Place at central station, top floor

If you have trouble finding us you can reach Sören at 0031684140766 or Imma (0031610524989).

Discussion article for the meetup : 'The Most Good Good You Can Do' (Effective Altruism meetup)
Mistakes I’ve made, part 2: Father Christmas
by KatjaGrace — 2015-05-14T18:31:14.000Z

I believed in Father Christmas for longer than I believed in God. This is mostly surprising because it is unusual. There was both more evidence for Father Christmas, and more motivation to propel cognition.

I stopped ‘believing’ in Father Christmas in grade seven, when my drama teacher cavalierly mentioned his unreality. It wasn’t shocking—more a feeling of something I knew somewhere in my heart being made official. It was a bit embarrassing.

How could I neglect to explicitly infer the lack of a Father Christmas until then?

I don’t think my epistemic failures here were embarrassing for a human, given the proliferation of supernatural objects of belief, and the fact that Father Christmas alone among them actually leaves concrete stuff that you wish for.

My guess is that most people do better, not by noticing their confusion, but by interacting more with other children. Noticing confusion would also alert people to the implausibility of other supernatural things (unless perhaps it is the very evidence for Father Christmas which makes him confusing). And contact with subject matter experts is known to be a good prophylactic against being wrong.

But what if I wanted to instruct my past self on how to independently notice that Father Christmas was implausible? What should have been clues, to someone fairly ignorant about the world?

Father Christmas purportedly travels very fast, and delivers more presents than might fit in a sleigh. Also his sleigh can fly. From a child’s perspective though, many things travel very fast. Especially ones that fly. Not usually ones that are propelled by reindeer, but it wouldn’t be shocking if the reindeer were not the main engine, or if the illustrations portrayed the vehicle somewhat whimsically. Having a lot of presents could also be explained by being able to move things fast. Father Christmas himself would also have to move very fast, compared to a human. Though it also shouldn’t be surprising if much of his effort were outsourced; we also say that Steve Jobs made the iPhone. Nonetheless, one could notice that these speeds were suspiciously high.

This would require some understanding of contemporary technology, since such speeds are not obviously inconceivable for any technology. This is complicated by the world being big and varied. For instance, these days I sometimes hear that people elsew...
Meetup : London meetup
by philh — 2015-05-14T17:35:18.467Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London meetup

WHEN:
24 May 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Lincoln's Inn Fields, London

The next LW London meetup will be on May 10th. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

If the weather is nice, we'll be in Lincoln's Inn Fields. If not, we'll be in our usual Shakespeare's Head, just around the corner. If you have difficulty finding us, my number is 07792009646. (Coincidentally, that is still my number even if you don't have difficulty finding us.)

About London LessWrong:

We run this meetup approximately every other week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....

Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London meetup
Less Wrong Podcast Queries
by Cariyaga — 2015-05-14T11:52:42.828Z

I have a friend for whom I wish to purchase the Less Wrong podcasts that are available on Castify, as they have difficulty reading articles of any length (due to a combination of reading comprehension issues and being easily distracted from it). I've a few questions before I start doing so, however.

First, regarding the quality of the audioblogs themselves. Are they good quality for listening to? Moreover, is the material they cover comprehensible? I must confess, I've never been much of an audio learner myself, so I can't say for certain whether Less Wrong would translate well to such a format, but of those for whom that is not an issue, have you found the Less Wrong casts to be understandable sufficiently well for a first-time listener? If not, is there any advice I might offer them in their listening?

Further, while my reading of Less Wrong was somewhat random, I'd like to know in which order I should provide those articles that are available on Castify. I may have to perform my own reading of some of the more necessary articles, if they are not present early in the casts (Knowing about Biases Can Hurt People, for instance, I feel should be one of the first posts they hear).

Thanks for any help you can offer.
[link] Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-05-13T21:11:05.519Z

Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes by Wei Ji Ma et al 2006

Recent psychophysical experiments indicate that humans perform near-optimal Bayesian inference in a wide variety of tasks, ranging from cue integration to decision making to motor control. This implies that neurons both represent probability distributions and combine those distributions according to a close approximation to Bayes’ rule. At first sight, it would seem that the high variability in the responses of cortical neurons would make it difficult to implement such optimal statistical inference in cortical circuits. We argue that, in fact, this variability implies that populations of neurons automatically represent probability distributions over the stimulus, a type of code we call probabilistic population codes. Moreover, we demonstrate that the Poissonlike variability observed in cortex reduces a broad class of Bayesian inference to simple linear combinations of populations of neural activity. These results hold for arbitrary probability distributions over the stimulus, for tuning curves of arbitrary shape and for realistic neuronal variability.

Note that "humans perform near-optimal Bayesian inference" refers to the integration of information - not conscious symbolic reasoning. Nonetheless I think this is of interest here.