trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Four (Politics, Calibration & Probability, Futurology, Charity & Effective Altruism)
by namespace — 2016-09-10T03:29:49.957Z

INTRODUCTION HERE

Politics

The LessWrong survey has a very involved section dedicated to politics. In previous analysis the benefits of this weren't fully realized. In the 2016 analysis we can look at not just the political affiliation of a respondent, but what beliefs are associated with a certain affiliation. The charts below summarize most of the results.

Political Opinions By Political Affiliation

Miscellaneous Politics

There were also some other questions in this section which aren't covered by the above charts.

PoliticalInterest

On a scale from 1 (not interested at all) to 5 (extremely interested), how would you describe your level of interest in politics?

1: 67 (2.182%)

2: 257 (8.371%)

3: 461 (15.016%)

4: 595 (19.381%)

5: 312 (10.163%)

Voting

Did you vote in your country's last major national election? (LW Turnout Versus General Election Turnout By Country)

Group	Turnout

LessWrong
68.9%

Austrailia
91%

Brazil
78.90%

Britain
66.4%

Canada
68.3%

Finland
70.1%

France
79.48%

Germany
71.5%

India
66.3%

Israel
72%

New Zealand
77.90%

Russia
65.25%

United States
54.9%

Numbers taken from Wikipedia, accurate as of the last general election in each country listed at time of writing.

AmericanParties

If you are an American, what party are you registered with?

Democratic Party: 358 (24.5%)

Republican Party: 72 (4.9%)

Libertarian Party: 26 (1.8%)

Other third party: 16 (1.1%)

Not registered for a party: 451 (30.8%)

(option for non-Americans who want an option): 541 (37.0%)

Calibration And Probability Questions

Calibration Questions

I just couldn't analyze these, sorry guys. I put many hours into trying to get them into a decent format I could even read and that sucked up an incredible amount of time. It's why this part of the survey took so long to get out. Thankfully another LessWrong user, Houshalter, has kindly done their own analysis.

All my calibration questions were meant to satisfy a few essential properties:

They should be 'self contained'. I.E, something you can reasonably answer or at least try to answer with a 5th grade science education and normal life experience.

They should, at least to a certain extent, be Fermi Estimable.

They should progressively scale in difficulty so you can see whether somebody understands basic probability or not. (eg. In an 'or' question do

...
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Four (Politics, Calibration & Probability, Futurology, Charity & Effective Altruism)
by namespace — 2016-09-10T03:24:06.696Z

INTRODUCTION HERE

Politics

The LessWrong survey has a very involved section dedicated to politics. In previous analysis the benefits of this weren't fully realized. In the 2016 analysis we can look at not just the political affiliation of a respondent, but what beliefs are associated with a certain affiliation. The charts below summarize most of the results.

Political Opinions By Political Affiliation

Miscellaneous Politics

There were also some other questions in this section which aren't covered by the above charts.

PoliticalInterest

On a scale from 1 (not interested at all) to 5 (extremely interested), how would you describe your level of interest in politics?

1: 67 (2.182%)

2: 257 (8.371%)

3: 461 (15.016%)

4: 595 (19.381%)

5: 312 (10.163%)

Voting

Did you vote in your country's last major national election? (LW Turnout Versus General Election Turnout By Country)

Group	Turnout

LessWrong
68.9%

Austrailia
91%

Brazil
78.90%

Britain
66.4%

Canada
68.3%

Finland
70.1%

France
79.48%

Germany
71.5%

India
66.3%

Israel
72%

New Zealand
77.90%

Russia
65.25%

United States
54.9%

Numbers taken from Wikipedia, accurate as of the last general election in each country listed at time of writing.

AmericanParties

If you are an American, what party are you registered with?

Democratic Party: 358 (24.5%)

Republican Party: 72 (4.9%)

Libertarian Party: 26 (1.8%)

Other third party: 16 (1.1%)

Not registered for a party: 451 (30.8%)

(option for non-Americans who want an option): 541 (37.0%)

Calibration And Probability Questions

Calibration Questions

I just couldn't analyze these, sorry guys. I put many hours into trying to get them into a decent format I could even read and that sucked up an incredible amount of time. It's why this part of the survey took so long to get out. Thankfully another LessWrong user, Houshalter, has kindly done their own analysis.

All my calibration questions were meant to satisfy a few essential properties:

They should be 'self contained'. I.E, something you can reasonably answer or at least try to answer with a 5th grade science education and normal life experience.

They should, at least to a certain extent, be Fermi Estimable.

They should progressively scale in difficulty so you can see whether somebody understands basic probability or not. (eg. In

...
Brain Speed Test
by Nanashi — 2016-09-10T03:01:28.261Z

I've been experimenting with various nootropics lately, and wanted some way to have a frame of reference as to whether they work or not. So I put together this little tool:

http://2pih.com/reactiontest/

It's pretty rudimentary for the time being, but I'm definitely open to feedback on 1. Ways to improve it, 2. Different tests you'd like to see.
Meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-09-09T21:06:06.122Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
11 September 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1726 Reisterstown Rd, Pikesville, MD 21208, USA

Pikesville DoubleTree - Hilton, at the restaurant / bar or at one of the tables outside.

This is the last meeting for the next while in the Pikesville area. Next week we'll be moving back to the UMBC campus for the duration of fall semester.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-09-09T15:48:47.668Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 9th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Munich Meetup in September: 17 September 2016 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:

Melbourne: Lightning talks: 10 September 2016 03:30PM
Moscow LW meetup in "Nauchka" library: 09 September 2016 07:50PM
[Moscow] Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow: 17 September 2016 03:00PM
San Jose Meetup: Park Day (VIII): 11 September 2016 03:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - October 2016: 02 October 2016 04:00PM
[Tel Aviv] NLP for large scale sentiment detection: 13 September 2016 07:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Singing: 11 September 2016 03:30PM

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

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your 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, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cle...
[Link] How the Simulation Argument Dampens Future Fanaticism
by David Althaus — 2016-09-09T13:17:53.233Z

Very comprehensive analysis by Brian Tomasik on whether (and to what extent) the simulation argument should change our altruistic priorities. He concludes that the possibility of ancestor simulations somewhat increases the comparative importance of short-term helping relative to focusing on shaping the "far future".
Another important takeaway:

[...] rather than answering the question “Do I live in a simulation or not?,” a perhaps better way to think about it (in line with Stuart Armstrong's anthropic decision theory) is “Given that I’m deciding for all subjectively indistinguishable copies of myself, what fraction of my copies lives in a simulation and how many total copies are there?"
Meetup : Munich Meetup in September
by Valeriy — 2016-09-09T10:21:43.390Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in September

WHEN:
17 September 2016 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
JetBrains Event Space, Elsenheimerstr. 47a, 5th floor, Munich

A discussion of books/podcasts/talks/movies that you thought may be interesting for your fellow rationalists. Of cause you can suggest another discussion topic or activity.
This time the meeting starts a bit later so we can go for some food/drinks and socializing afterwards.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in September
Price dikes
by KatjaGrace — 2016-09-07T21:44:28.000Z

I like this comment, from Scott Alexander:

I think there’s a general principle that once you pass dumb regulations, it’s going to make bad things happen, and then if you try to solve those bad things by passing further regulations, you’re just going to get caught in an endless trap.

So first they regulate Mylan into a monopoly on EpiPens. Then they realize that made them too expensive, so they regulate that the government gets to set the price of drugs. Then drug companies stop making EpiPens to switch to more profitable unregulated drugs, so the government has to mandate that you’re not allowed to be a drug company unless you make a certain amount of EpiPens below cost. So drug companies leave the US and headquarter overseas to avoid that law, and then the government regulates that only drug companies headquartered in America can sell drugs in America. Then cheaper foreign drugs start coming in as contraband, so the government regulates that all packages must be inspected at the border. Then drug mules ingest contraband medications into their bodies, so now everyone entering the country needs to have an X-ray…

I agree there is a principle “regulating the economy is like playing whack-a-mole”. But why is it like that?

I think of artificially changing the price being much like artificially changing the water level. You can decree that the water should be five feet lower, so you can have a nice city on the would-be continental shelf. You can build a decent wall against the tide. But water seeks out every crack and weakness, and leaks through. You will spend forever mending leak after leak, and everything will always be a bit wetter than you hoped.

Why? Because every molecule of water is being forced downwards by gravity, and so is effectively scoping out your wall and seeing if it can move downwards through the bit of wall it is right next to. That means your entire wall is being carefully examined for leak opportunities, which are being immediately exploited by the molecules that found them.

If there are holes in the wall low down, most of the water will flow through those holes and higher up holes won’t be discovered. But when you fix the lower holes and push the water level further from its equilibrium, more holes will be found.

So it is with artificially distorted prices. If bread is sold at $0.03, and people are willing to pay $3.00 for it, and there isn...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing
by RobinZ — 2016-09-07T21:21:20.989Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing

WHEN:
11 September 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Meridian Hill Park

We will be meeting in the park to hang out and sing songs.

One of the members is bringing "Encore", a singing game.

Location: Meridian Hill Park is around 16th & W Streets NW (Google Maps); it's a few blocks away from the Columbia Heights or Woodley Park-Zoo Metro stations. We will be meeting near this entrance, toward the southwest corner.

Upcoming meetups:

Sep. 18: Steelmanning

Sep. 25: Outdoor Fun & Games

Oct. 2: Math Discussion

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing
[LINK] Collaborate on HPMOR blurbs; earn chance to win three-volume physical HPMOR
by plex — 2016-09-07T02:21:32.442Z

Collaborate on HPMOR blurbs; earn chance to win three-volume physical HPMOR.

I intend to print at least one high-quality physical HPMOR and release the files. There are printable texts which are being improved and a set of covers (based on e.b.'s) are underway. I have, however, been unable to find any blurbs I'd be remotely happy with.

I'd like to attempt to harness the hivemind to fix that. As a lure, if your ideas contribute significantly to the final version or you assist with other tasks aimed at making this book awesome, I'll put a proportionate number of tickets with your number on into the proverbial hat.

I do not guarantee there will be a winner and I reserve the right to arbitrarily modify this any point. For example, it's possible this leads to a disappointingly small amount of valuable feedback, that some unforeseen problem will sink or indefinitely delay the project, or that I'll expand this and let people earn a small number of tickets by sharing so more people become aware this is a thing quickly.

With that over, let's get to the fun part.

A blurb is needed for each of the three books. Desired characteristics:

* Not too heavy on ingroup signaling or over the top rhetoric.

* Non-spoilerish

* Not taking itself awkwardly seriously.

* Amusing / funny / witty.

* Attractive to the same kinds of people the tvtropes page is.

* Showcases HPMOR with fun, engaging, prose.

Try to put yourself in the mind of someone awesome deciding whether to read it while writing, but let your brain generate bad ideas before trimming back.

I expect that for each we'll want

* A shortish and awesome paragraph

* A short sentence tagline

* A quote or two from notable people

* Probably some other text? Get creative.

Please post blurb fragments or full blurbs here, one suggestion per top level comment. You are encouraged to remix each other's ideas, just add a credit line if you use it in a new top level comment. If you know which book your idea is for, please indicate with (B1) (B2) or (B3).

Other things that need doing, if you want to help in another way:

* The author's foreword from the physical copies of the first 17 chapters needs to be located or written up

* At least one links page for the end needs to be written up, possibly a second based on http://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/

* Several changes need to be mad

...
Meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow
by Alexander230 — 2016-09-06T19:33:28.665Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow

WHEN:
17 September 2016 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Большая Дорогомиловская, 5к2

Welcome to our custom made role playing game "Hogwarts and methods of rationality", inspired by HPMOR story! It will be intellectual role playing game with rationality-based minigames. You can read more detailed announce and description here: https://goo.gl/3vGLUn

Discussion article for the meetup : Role playing game based on HPMOR in Moscow
Jocko Podcast
by moridinamael — 2016-09-06T15:38:41.377Z

I've recently been extracting extraordinary value from the Jocko Podcast.

Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL commander, jiu-jitsu black belt, management consultant and, in my opinion, master rationalist. His podcast typically consists of detailed analysis of some book on military history or strategy followed by a hands-on Q&A session. Last week's episode (#38) was particularly good and if you want to just dive in, I would start there.

As a sales pitch, I'll briefly describe some of his recurring talking points:

Extreme ownership. Take ownership of all outcomes. If your superior gave you "bad orders", you should have challenged the orders or adapted them better to the situation; if your subordinates failed to carry out a task, then it is your own instructions to them that were insufficient. If the failure is entirely your own, admit your mistake and humbly open yourself to feedback. By taking on this attitude you become a better leader and through modeling you promote greater ownership throughout your organization. I don't think I have to point out the similarities between this and "Heroic Morality" we talk about around here.

Mental toughness and discipline. Jocko's language around this topic is particularly refreshing, speaking as someone who has spent too much time around "self help" literature, in which I would partly include Less Wrong. His ideas are not particularly new, but it is valuable to have an example of somebody who reliably executes on his the philosophy of "Decide to do it, then do it." If you find that you didn't do it, then you didn't truly decide to do it. In any case, your own choice or lack thereof is the only factor. "Discipline is freedom." If you adopt this habit as your reality, it become true.

Decentralized command. This refers specifically to his leadership philosophy. Every subordinate needs to truly understand the leader's intent in order to execute instructions in a creative and adaptable way. Individuals within a structure need to understand the high-level goals well enough to be able to act in a almost all situations without consulting their superiors. This tightens the OODA loop on an organizational level.

Leadership as manipulation. Perhaps the greatest surprise to me was the subtlety of Jocko's thinking about leadership, probably because I brought in many erroneous assumptions about the nature of a SEAL commander. Jocko

...
A collection of Stubs.
by Elo — 2016-09-06T07:24:25.839Z

In light of SDR's comment yesterday, instead of writing a new post today I compiled my list of ideas I wanted to write about, partly to lay them out there and see if any stood out as better than the rest, and partly so that maybe they would be a little more out in the wild than if I hold them until I get around to them. I realise there is not a thesis in this post, but I figured it would be better to write one of these than to write each in it's own post with the potential to be good or bad.

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/many-draft-concepts/

I create ideas at about the rate of 3 a day, without trying to. I write at about a rate of 1.5 a day. Which leaves me always behind. Even if I write about the best ideas I can think of, some good ones might never be covered. This is an effort to draft out a good stack of them so that maybe it can help me not have to write them all out, by better defining which ones are the good ones and which ones are a bit more useless.

With that in mind, in no particular order - a list of unwritten posts:

From my old table of contents

Goals of your lesswrong group – As a guided/workthrough exercise in deciding why the group exists and what it should do. Help people work out what they want out of it (do people know)? setting goals, doing something particularly interesting or routine, having fun, changing your mind, being activists in the world around you. Whatever the reasons you care about, work them out and move towards them. Nothing particularly groundbreaking in the process here. Sit down with the group with pens and paper, maybe run a resolve cycle, maybe talk about ideas and settle on a few, then decide how to carry them out. Relevant links: Sydney meetup, group resources (estimate 2hrs to write)

Goals interrogation + Goal levels – Goal interrogation is about asking <is this thing I want to do actually a goal of mine> and <is my current plan the best way to achieve that>, goal levels are something out of Sydney Lesswrong that help you have mutual long term goals and supporting short term goal. There are 3 main levels, Dream, Year, Daily (or approximate) you want dream goals like going to the moon, you want yearly goals like getting another year further in your degree and you wa

...
Meetup : NLP for large scale sentiment detection
by JoshuaFox — 2016-09-06T07:13:40.453Z

Discussion article for the meetup : NLP for large scale sentiment detection

WHEN:
13 September 2016 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Menachem Begin 125, Floor 36, Tel Aviv

https://www.facebook.com/events/1243291579035965/

Our speaker is Alon Rozental, Lead Data Scientist at Amobee.

The talk:

Sentiment analysis is about the modest task of taking a text and figuring out what it's positive or negative about. Turns out it's rather hard. This talk will discuss one approach to the problem, which issues it tackles (like millions sentences per day and high level negation), where it falls flat, plans to improve the process and how the heck do you deal with an emoticon of a dolphin or and eggplant.

Meeting each other to chat at 19:00, presentation at 19:30

Amobee, Menachem Begin 125, Floor 36, Tel Aviv

Discussion article for the meetup : NLP for large scale sentiment detection
Meetup : San Jose Meetup: Park Day (VIII)
by steven0461 — 2016-09-06T00:47:23.680Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Jose Meetup: Park Day (VIII)

WHEN:
11 September 2016 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
438 Coleman Ave, San Jose, CA 95110

You're invited to bring whatever you'd like to see at Park Day - balls, frisbees, food, etc. (Also, consider taking measures against the sun.) We'll carry a green blanket so you can recognize us. The idea is to gather outside near the listed address at the park entrance first, but probably walk elsewhere soon. If you can't find us or there's something else, please call me (Steven) at 510-6844565.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Jose Meetup: Park Day (VIII)