trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Joint Configurations
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-31T00:28:58.826Z

Today's post, Joint Configurations was originally published on 11 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The laws of physics are inherently over mathematical entities, configurations, that involve multiple particles. A basic, ontologically existent entity, according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics, does not look like a photon - it looks like a configuration of the universe with "A photon here, a photon there." Amplitude flows between these configurations can cancel or add; this gives us a way to detect which configurations are distinct. It is an experimentally testable fact that "Photon 1 here, photon 2 there" is the same configuration as "Photon 2 here, photon 1 there".

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 http://lesswrong.com/lw/bb7/seq_rerun_configurations_and_amplitude/, 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.
Setting up LW meetups in unlikely places: Positive Data Point
by  — 2012-03-30T21:19:49.029Z

Meeting fellow LessWrongians in meat space is a great opportunity to participate in interesting discussions and to make new friends. But there aren't that many places in the world (hopefully, yet) where regularly active meetup groups exist. Here is a story of how I realised that setting up LW meetup groups is much easier than I thought; and an idea of an approach to help build more LW communities in real life.

When I co-organised the LW meetup group in Cambridge, there was already a group of friends irregularly discussing LW related topics. Strangely, it took us some time before we actually realised that we should announce a meetup on the LW website. Once we did that, our group exploded in numbers and we have had regular meetups almost every week.

Of course, Cambridge, UK is a place where we expected to be successful in forming a meetup group. It is small and the concentration of usual target audience of LW is extremely high. I thought we were lucky with the location that creating a regular meetup group proved to be so easy.

Then I had an idea of an experiment. I was travelling to Budapest last week for 3 days to visit my family and I thought that I would simply try to organise a meetup there. In the worst case, I would spend a couple of hours in a cafe reading a book. My guesstimate was that 3-4 of my friends (whom I reminded several times) and maybe 1-3 people I don't actually know would turn up.

I was surprised to find that 14 people attended the meetup, two of them travelling all the way from Bratislava to Budapest. We spent almost 4 hours in a fantastic discussion, a mailing list was created, and a second meetup is happening tomorrow. My experiment produced a result I didn't expect.

One data point is not sufficient to draw conclusions, but this result suggests that further experiments should be tried. It may just be that many cities have reached a critical number of active LessWrongians and regular meetups can start happening. Which is trivially of positive net effect.

Therefore, I would encourage people to consider getting out there and trying to set up meetup groups in their areas. But since this requires individuals actually willing to assume the role of organisers, this may not be as easy as it sounds. Fortunately, there is a document currently in development that aims to provide some help with this: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/bak/draf...
Pascal's mugging and Bayes
by Dmytry — 2012-03-30T19:55:44.917Z

Suppose that your prior probability that giving $1000 to a stranger will save precisely N beings is P(1000$ saves N beings)=f(N) , where f is some sort of probability distribution.

When the stranger makes a claim that he will torture N beings unless you give him the $1000 , the probability has to be increased to

P(1000$ saves N beings | asking for $1000 to save N beings) = f(N) * P(Asking for $1000 to save N beings | 1000$ saves N beings) / P(asking for $1000 to save N beings)

The probability is increased by factor of P(Asking for $1000 to save N beings | 1000$ saves N beings) / P(asking for $1000 to save N beings) <= 1/ P(asking for $1000 to save N beings)

If you are attending philosophical events, and being pascal-mugged by a philosopher, the 1/P(asking for $1000 to save N beings) can be less than 100 . Being asked then only raises the probability by at most factor of 100 over your f(N). If there was only one person in the world who came up with Pascal's mugging, the factor is at most a few billions.

edit: Note (it may not be very clear from the post) that if your f(N) is not small enough, not only should you be Pascal-mugged, you should also give money to random stranger when he did not even Pascal-mug you - unless the utility of the mugging is very close to 1000$.

I think it is fairly clear that it is reasonable to have f(N) that decreases monotonously with N, and it has to sum to 1 which implies that it has to fall off faster than 1/N . So the f(3^^^3) is much much smaller than 1/(3^^^3) . If one is not to do that, one is not only prone to being Pascal-mugged, one should run around screaming 'take my money and please don't torture 3^^^3 beings' at random people.

[Of course there is still a problem if one is to assign prior probability to N via Kolmogorov's complexity, but it seems to me that it doesn't make much sense to do so as such f won't be monotonously decreasing]

Other issue is the claim of 'more than 3^^^3 beings', but any reasonable f(N) seem to eat up that sum as well.

This highlight a practically important problem with use of probabilistic reasoning in decision making. A proposition may be pulled out of immensely huge space of similar propositions, which should give it appropriately small prior; but we typically don't know of the competing propositions, especially when it was transmitted from person to person, and substitute 'do we trust that...
Meetup : Cambridge, MA first-Sundays meetup
by jimrandomh — 2012-03-30T17:55:25.558Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA first-Sundays meetup

WHEN:
01 April 2012 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139

We're meeting at our usual place at MIT this Sunday, April 1st at 2pm. Since this is taking place on All Fools' Day, pranking the group is encouraged.

Meetups happen on the first and third Sundays of every month, regardless of whether an announcement is posted. You can get email reminders of meetups, and notifications of irregularly-scheduled meetups, by joining the meetup.com group.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA first-Sundays meetup
Meetup : Second Budapest Meetup
by  — 2012-03-30T16:45:29.150Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Second Budapest Meetup

WHEN:
31 March 2012 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Szent Istvan ter 4-5, Budapest

Meeting at California Coffee Company Basilica (coffee shop), Szent Istvan ter 4-5. link.

Please come and bring friends. If you have questions, contact katyusha.

BudLW mailing list: link.

Discussion article for the meetup : Second Budapest Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Budapest, Houston, Madison, Ohio/Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-03-30T16:08:01.631Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

[Ohio/Washington DC] Interest in Reason Rally meetup?: 24 March 2012 04:14PM
Houston Meetup: 25 March 2012 01:00PM
First meetup in Budapest: 25 March 2012 06:00PM
Brussels meetup: 14 April 2012 11:00AM

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: 24 March 2012 01:30PM
Monthly Bay Area meetup: 24 March 2012 07:00PM
Madison Monday Meetup: 26 March 2012 06:30PM
Small weekly Berkeley meetup: 28 March 2012 07:00PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 06 April 2012 08:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, 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!

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, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present mo...
Collaborative project: New rationality materials page
by  — 2012-03-30T12:43:13.758Z

As you are probably aware, we have a new front page featuring a graphic of a brain. One of the links on the front page, "A source of edited rationality materials," links to the Less Wrong meetup group resources page. A number of users have suggested that this isn't the best page to show off to new readers, and lukeprog has requisitioned a new page to replace it.

I've volunteered to create this new page, but I'd like it to be a collaborative community project.

I'd like this new page to contain a few introductory paragraphs about Less Wrong followed by an index of some of our best content. At the moment, though, this project is still in the brainstorming phase, so this is just a tentative plan. I'd like to hear your thoughts about what the page should contain, including its content, layout, and organization. You can help out by editing the wiki page or by leaving suggestions and feedback in the comments below. Your input is always welcome, even if it's just "This is a terrible idea" or "I think this post should be in there."

Link to the wiki page.
Examine your assumptions
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-03-30T11:28:40.050Z

There's a story you've probably heard:

During World War II, the British RAF's Bomber Command wanted a survey done on the effectiveness of their aircraft armouring. This was carried out by inspected all bombers returning from bombing raids over Germany over a particular period. All damage inflicted by German air defences was noted and the recommendation was given that armour be added in the most heavily damaged areas.

However a new group, run by Patrick Blackett, the Operational Research Section, analysed the survey report, and came to a different conclusion. Blackett suggested that, instead, the armour be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage in the bombers which returned. He reasoned that the survey was biased, since it only included aircraft that returned to Britain. The untouched areas of returning aircraft were probably vital areas, which, if hit, would result in the loss of the aircraft.

It is a useful fable, but in the context presented it seemed unlikely, given the attitudes of Bomber Harris. So I went looking for further information, and found the story of BC-ORS written by Freeman Dyson:

"A Failure of Intelligence" (Part 1) (Part 2)

which is a great read, but fails to mention any such incident.

What I did find, however, on further searching, was the work of Abraham Wald. Wald was a Jewish mathematician from Romania who in 1943 published a series of 8 memoranda via the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University while working for the National Defense Research Committee in America. These were republished collectively in 1980 as "'A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors." by the Center for Naval Analyses, and are still in use today.

In 1984 Mangel and Samaniego published a fairly accessible summary of Wald's work in the Journal of the American Statistical Association (Vol 79, Issue 286, June)

"Abraham Wald's Work on Aircraft Survivability"

So it seems that Wald is the one who should get the credit for being the first to try to compensate for the evidential problem. Tragically he himself died in an airplane crash, just a few years later (in 1950, aged 48).

The 'bible' on this topic, Robert Ball's "The Fundamentals of Aircraft Combat Survivability Analysis and Design" confirms the problem is a real one, and mentioned the F-4...
[SEQ RERUN] Configurations and Amplitude
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-30T04:39:57.466Z

Today's post, Configurations and Amplitude was originally published on 10 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A preliminary glimpse at the stuff reality is made of. The classic split-photon experiment with half-silvered mirrors. Alternative pathways the photon can take, can cancel each other out. The mysterious measuring tool that tells us the relative squared moduli.

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 Quantum Explanations, 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.
Meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2012-03-30T04:35:26.443Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup

WHEN:
02 April 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St., Madison, WI

Two suggestions, both which we can do on Monday:

I'm pretty sure there are major life hacks that folks are using that we didn't get around to describing. Email the list, or email me, or mention at the meetup that you'd like to talk about one, and I'll make sure that you actually get a chance to describe it. ;)

Let's play Zendo! (http://www.koryheath.com/games/zendo/) Because it's an awesome game, and because it teaches relinquishment of false hypotheses better than anything else I know.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
Katla on Katja
by KatjaGrace — 2012-03-30T03:59:10.000Z

I don’t have time to write, but apparently Katla has time for all kinds of marginally valuable activities. Here are her latest thoughts:

So apparently Katja has been learning about all kinds of fascinating philosophy stuff for like seven months. Am I the only one to notice that she hasn’t mentioned any of it here? Yes, she’s entitled to spend less time here now that she has more impressive avenues for failing to get her writing read. And it makes sense she would have less time to blog about other topics. But given that she purportedly spends all her time reading and writing about philosophy, I’d expect her to have the odd thing to post on it.

So I asked her what’s up with this. She said that since she’s reading like Ramsay and Quine and people who have been dead for years, presumably anything she has to say about them in her first half hour of thinking about it has already been said. Which just goes to show that she’s completely unfamiliar with philosophy, and strengthens my hypothesis that the whole story is a ruse to hide the fact that she’s run out of interesting things to blog about.

But more amusingly, notice that she doesn’t apply this argument to all the other things she feels entitled to have opinions on. I’m pretty sure she knows that people have studied psychology extensively before. Written about the very issues she writes about. And she hasn’t read them. Same goes for ethics, and public policy, and almost everything that she writes about. She’s nowhere near the cutting edge of these topics. She doesn’t even study them seriously. What’s the difference? Probably just that she doesn’t have to go and have lunch with the psychologists.

Here’s a logical argument for you. Either you readers are familiar with old philosophy or you are not. If you’re not, what does it matter to you whether someone else already wrote something long ago? You haven’t read it. What does it matter to you if what you read here is wrong? You’re probably wrong anyway, so you’re not going to get any wronger. And if you can’t even tell wrong philosophy from right philosophy by reading it, what hope have you got?

If on the other hand you do know about old philosophy, then you get to set Katja straight on it. Which will be fun for you, funny for the rest of us, and even funnier for the rest of us because she will insist on claiming is valuable for her too.

Sounds like win win! What

...
Australian Green Party leader Bob Brown talks about global democracy, X-risk, and immortality
by Broggly — 2012-03-30T00:18:24.379Z

It's interesting to see someone with actual political power (with balance of power in the Senate and being part of the Lower House coalition) talking about the Great Filter.

However, recent astronomy tells us that there are trillions of other planets circling Sunlike stars in the immensity of the Universe, millions of them friendly to life. So why has no one from elsewhere in the Cosmos contacted us?

Surely some people-like animals have evolved elsewhere. Surely we are not, in this crowded reality of countless other similar planets, the only thinking beings to have turned up. Most unlikely! So why isn't life out there contacting us? Why aren't the intergalactic phones ringing?

Here is one sobering possibility for our isolation: maybe life has often evolved to intelligence on other planets with biospheres and every time that intelligence, when it became able to alter its environment, did so with catastrophic consequences. Maybe we have had many predecessors in the Cosmos but all have brought about their own downfall.

That's why they are not communicating with Earth. They have extincted themselves. They have come and gone. And now it's our turn.

An Earth parliament for all. But what would be its commission? Here are four goals:

Economy.

Equality.

Ecology.

Eternity.

... Eternity is for as long as we could be. It means beyond our own experience. It also means 'forever', if there is no inevitable end to life. Let's take the idea of eternity and make it our own business.

...The pursuit of eternity is no longer the prerogative of the gods: it is the business of us all, here and now.
Doing "Nothing"
by Voltairina — 2012-03-29T23:17:40.608Z

It might be a useful habit to remember, whenever you're making a choice about some situation, that "doing nothing" is never actually an available option. Even if you avoid doing the task you're considering, you're still making some kind of choice about how you spend your time, and you're still doing something relative to that task. For example, if the task is "paint the barn" the alternative is "leave the bare barn exposed to the elements", not "store the barn in some impermeable stasis field and return to paint it later". Being able to clearly articulate what that "nothing" slot entails, its consequences and rewards, might be a helpful way to motivate yourself to make better choices.

I am working on internalising this, because if I don't think about it, a part of me tends to just think that I'm doing the equivalent of sticking the task in an atemporal stasis field instead of leaving it unattended. If I don't exercise, I don't stay "the same amount fit". I get weaker (or, as aelephant points out, I could be getting stronger, during a recovery period - in which case "doing nothing" (as far as exercise) is the better option, after evaluation) . If I don't study, I don't stay "the same amount knowledgeable". I forget. Sure, there are things which remain effectively "in stasis" - Olympus Mons will probably stay about the same whether I climb it in ten years (somehow) or a hundred years - but I won't be the same by then. Or things that are so transient and commonplace that they might as well be in stasis - If I'm thinking of going somewhere, I might think, "I might miss catching this taxi cab, but I miss cabs all the time, there are always more cabs, and I can catch another one". But subjectively static opportunities are rare.
Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28
by AnnaSalamon — 2012-03-29T20:48:48.227Z

“I do not say this lightly... but if you're looking for superpowers, this is the place to start.”

--Michael Curzi, summer 2011 minicamp participant

Who: You and a class full of other aspiring rationalists and world-optimizers, from around the world.

What: Two 3-day weekend minicamps and one 8-day minicamp, filled with hands-on activities for applying rationality to your life, your goals, and the making of a better world. (See details in the FAQ.)

When and where: We're running three camps, so that we can do this for three sets of participants: May 11-13 and June 22-24 for the 3-day camps, and July 21-28 for the eight-day camp, all in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Why: Because you’re a social primate, and the best way to jump into a new way of thinking, make friends, and accomplish your goals is often to spend time with other primates who are doing just that.

Other reasons:

Hang out and explore the Bay Area with two dozen other people like you who are smart, interesting, and passionate about rationality

Attend bonus sessions about style, body language, and confidence-building.

Get help charting out career paths; and, entirely optionally for those interested, connect with folks at the Singularity Institute about optimal philanthropy.

Instructors:

Eliezer Yudkowsky
Anna Salamon
Julia Galef

Andrew Critch
Luke Muehlhauser
Michael Smith

Cost: $650 for the three-day programs; $1500 for the week-long program. This includes lodging[1], meals, and tuition.

(Note that this *still* isn't quite enough to make running minicamps sustainable in the long-run; a lodging + meals at retreat centers start at around $90 per person per night, the "three-day camps" include four nights, and these workshops take a staff of about 5 full-time people for over a month each prior to each workshop, most of us at $3k/month, counting curriculum development time (plus miscellaneous expenses). We are trying to strike a compromise between "charge enough that we can run more camps" and staying affordable, especially for our start-up phase; costs will probably go up in following years.)

Three days (or a week) isn’t long enough to learn rationality, but it's long enough to learn how to learn rationality, and to get some momentum toward doing so.

Come meet us, and see what you can do.

Apply now.

Frequen...