trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The challenge of writing Utopia
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2016-12-24T17:35:43.565Z

The story itself has been posted here.

Tomorrow, to celebrate a certain well-known event, I'll be posting another story of a Utopia. Unlike the previous attempt, this is utopia on hard mode.

What does that mean? Well, utopias are pretty hard to write anyway. Writing needs challenges for the characters, and that's trivially easy in a dystopia (everything is a challenge), a fake utopia (the challenge is to to look beneath the facade, and fight the secret enemy), or even imperfect utopias (the challenge is to solve the remaining problems). Iain M. Bank's Culture illustrates another way you can write about utopias and keep them interesting: by having an external foe as a challenge.

I avoided all those tricks. The challenge then was to write about a genuine utopia, one that people would enjoy living in, without any hidden flaws or enemies, internal or external. And these had to be real people doing things they wanted to do, rather than idealised people doing things they should do. Basically a real utopia has to contain internet trolls and various fanatics, and still be a great place for everyone.

The setting is a future Earth that is full-fledged techno-utopia, full of powerful artificial intelligences (with human-friendly goals, of course), uploads (human minds run on computers), massive technological developments, and the beginning of universal space colonisation.

In one sense, this made the story easier to write - nobody argues over the last leg of lamb needed to prevent starvation. In another sense, it made it much harder. Any human could desire to purge themselves of sinful thoughts, upgrade themselves to superintelligence, or copy themselves ten trillion times. And the AIs could perfectly grant them their wish - but should they? If so, do they let arbitrarily bad consequences happen? And if not, how do they go about forbidding things in a utopia? And what happens to disputes between humans - like when one person wants to join a group and the members of the group don't want to let them in? Can you prevent social nastiness - but then what about those people who want to be nasty?

You can read the story to see how well or badly I've answered these challenges. The Utopia was inspired a lot by Eliezer's fun sequence, Scott Alexander's Archipelago, and LARP. The general principles are that there has to be a functioning society behind everything, that people can bec...
Meetup : Denver Area LW January Meetup
by PonchoPal — 2016-12-24T05:52:14.681Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW January Meetup

WHEN:
03 January 2017 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4955 S Ulster St Ste 103, Denver, Colorado 80237

Darcy's Pub

Come for food, drink, and good conversation! We should be in the library in the back.

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW January Meetup
Meetup : Denver Area LW January Meetup
by PonchoPal — 2016-12-24T05:48:15.656Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW January Meetup

WHEN:
03 January 2017 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4955 S Ulster St Ste 103, Denver, Colorado 80237

7PM-10PM

Come for food, drink, and good conversation! We should be in the library in the back.

Discussion article for the meetup : Denver Area LW January Meetup
Inflated Bubbles
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-12-23T16:55:43.000Z

[After 3,000 words on statistics, I deserve a condescending politics / culture war post. I have put these posts under the “hedgehog alert” category because if that’s not your cup of bitter acid rain, you should enjoy this hedgehog instead.]

Minority Retort

I made a claim in Climbing the Horseshoe that even Sarah Constantin misunderstood, which means that I wrote it poorly. I’ll try to spell it out again, and set it apart from other arguments.

My point was that it’s important to recognize when you’re holding an unpopular opinion and to change your tactics accordingly. Even if normatively you are right and everyone is wrong, instrumentally you should pursue your goals one way if 5% share your goals and worldview and another way if 80% do. For example, shaming others and calling them names (e.g. bigot or traitor) works (sometimes) if you’re part of the majority and doesn’t work if you’re part of the fringe.

Even if your entire social circle shares your views, you have to be cognizant of the amount of support your position has in the broad public. It’s not quite what outside view is, but it requires a similar mental process of stepping outside your immediate surroundings. Here are a couple of examples from my own life:

I’m an atheist, and many of my friends are atheist, but I realize that on a national scale atheists are a tiny minority (~4%). If I want to promote atheism, I should be able to tell the difference between ardent religious zealots and the median American who believes in God and goes to church every other week but isn’t a talking snake-ist. When I talk with the latter about atheism, I politely explain for example how an atheist can share the intuition that murder is wrong with a holy book. I don’t tell anyone who believes in a deity that they’re a deluded fanatic.

I’m a left-libertarian, and I engage intellectually with many left libertarians. For example, I think that regardless of how much welfare we have raising the minimum wage will hurt the poor because it dminishesthe employability of the 102 million adult Americans who don’t have a job and increases the prices they pay. I also think that regardless of where the minimum wage is, we should have more unconditional welfare to help the poor (whether food stamps or basic income). And yet, I’m aware

...
New LW Meetup: Kyiv
by FrankAdamek — 2016-12-23T16:44:08.393Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 23rd. The following week's summary is here.

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

Kyiv: 29 December 2016 18:15 (+0200): 29 December 2016 06:15PM

The following 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:

[Berlin] AI safety Berlin: 07 January 2017 04:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery: 28 December 2016 07:40PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, 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, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), Singapore, St. Louis, Vancouver, Warsaw, Waterloo.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can ...
Triaging mental phenomena or: leveling up the stack trace skill
by RomeoStevens — 2016-12-23T00:15:14.321Z

Related: The 5-Second Level; Attention control is critical for increasing/altering motivation

Epistemic Status: sharing a hypothesis that's slowly been coalescing since a discussion with Eliezer at EAG and got catalyzed by Anna's latest LW post along with an exercise I have been using. n=1

Mental phenomena (and thus rationality skills) can't be trained without a feedback loop that causes calibration in the relevant direction. One of my guesses for a valuable thing Eliezer did was habitual stack traces causing a leveling up of stack trace resolution i.e. seeing more fine grain detail in mental phenomena. This is related to 'catching flinches' as Anna describes, as an example of a particularly useful phenomena to be able to catch. In general, you can't tune black boxes, you need to be able to see individual steps.

How can you level up the stack trace skill? Triaging your unwillingness to do things, and we'll start with your unwillingness to practice the stack trace skill! I like 'triage' more than 'classify' because it imports some connotations about scope sensitivity.

In order to triage we need a taxonomy. Developing/hacking/modding your own is what ultimately works best, but you can use prebuilt ones as training wheels. Here are two possible taxonomies:

Note whether it is experienced as

Distracting Desire

Aversion

Laziness

Agitation/Annoyance

Ambiguity/Doubt

Note whether it is experienced as

Mental talk

Mental images

Sensations in the body

Form the intention to practice the stack trace skill and then try to classify at least one thing that happens. If you feel good when you get a 'hit' you will be more likely to catch additional events.

You can try this on anything. The desire for an unhealthy snack, the unwillingness to email someone etc. Note that the exercise isn't about forcing yourself to do things you don't want to do. You just want to see more clearly your own objections to doing it. If you do it more, you'll start to notice that you can catch more 'frames' or multiple phenomena at the same time or in a row e.g. I am experiencing ambiguity as the mental talk "I'm not sure how to do that" and as a slightly slimy/sliding away sensation followed by aversion to feeling the slimy feeling and an arising distracting desire to check my email. Distinguishing between actual sensations in the body and things that only seem like they could maybe be ...
Meetup : Kyiv: 29 December 2016 18:15 (+0200)
by networked — 2016-12-22T22:24:07.989Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 29 December 2016 18:15 (+0200)

WHEN:
29 December 2016 06:15:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lva Tolstoho St, 3, Kyiv, Ukraine

On the agenda are short self-introductions and topical discussion.
You can find more information about the upcoming meetup (in Ukrainian) here: https://www.meetup.com/Less-Wrong-Kyiv/events/236403936/. If you plan on coming, please join our group and RSVP on Meetup.com so that we know how many people to expect. If you join the group you will get email notifications about future meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 29 December 2016 18:15 (+0200)
Custom games that involve skills related to rationality
by Alexander230 — 2016-12-22T21:03:20.779Z

There are some custom games created by me and some other members of Moscow LW community. These games involve skills related to rationality, like fallacy detection, or inductive rule guessing with trying to falsify the hypothesis. We often play these games on our meetups.

I've translated these games to English, so anyone can print the rules and game materials and play.

1. Fallacymania. Main goals of this game is to help people notice fallacies in arguments, and of course to have fun. The game requires 3-20 players (recommended 4-12), and some materials: printed A3 sheets with fallacies (5-10 sheets), card deck with fallacies (you can cut one A3 sheet into cards, or print stickers and put them to common playing cards), pens and empty sheets, and 1 card deck of any type with at least 50 cards (optional, for counting guessing attempts). Rules of the game are explained here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKY3lQTVBuODRjRU0

This is the sheet of fallacies, you can download it and print on A3 or A2 sheet of paper:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKRXZ5N2tZcDVlMW8

Also you can use this sheet to create playing cards for debaters.

Printed versions of Fallacymania are now available for purchase on The Game Crafter:

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/fallacymania-eng- - English version

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/fallacymania-rus- - Russian version

Here is my github repo for Fallacymania; it contains script that generates fallacy sheets and cards (both English and Russian versions) from text file with fallacies and their descriptions:

https://github.com/Alexander230/fallacymania

And there is electronic version of Fallacymania for Tabletop Simulator:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=723941480

2. Tower of Chaos. This is party game where you will guess the secret rule by performing experiments with people on Twister mat. The game requires 2-15 players (recommended 4-7). This game is not so casual as it seems: you have to thoroughly test your hypothesis before telling it if you want to win. Rules are here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKYU41VG9nMVpmM1k

3. Scientific Discovery. This is modification of Zendo, but with simultaneous turns of players. Also it has more focus on good hypotheses testing, and there is less important to hide hypotheses and intentions from other players than in original Zendo.

https://drive.google...
Fractal Discussion Groups
by  — 2016-12-22T15:03:31.402Z

One problem with current discussion groups is that they naturally gravitate towards a single world view.

When people in a community find a double crux which ends up in statements that currently can't collect evidence for, what should the community do?

If the community tries to stick as one then discussion will be dominated by X vs not X. Both sides will be frustrated by the inability to progress or elaborate their view point. People will likely stop participating in discussions that they don't think are fruitful. This will have a network effect pushing the conversation in one direction.

It is important to keep discussion around not X inside the community as there long as there is some chance. So we need a community structure that can keep them around, but out of the way of the people that believe X. There should be a high level view of what is going on in both the X and the not-X sub-communities so that strategies can be decided upon.

To this end we should try the following structure. An email list is created for a certain question - E.g. How can we create clean energy for our future? When an un-provable statement is found that email list should split it two.

In the sub-group you are not allowed to question the un-provable statement. You must take it as given if you want to discuss there. Any disagreement must be done in the original group.

All the topics subject and a summaries posted in both the sub-lists will get posted to the level above (but not the replies).

The grand parent list will only get a daily summary of the new topics of the grandchild list, And the great-grand parent list and above will only get numbers of posts happening in the great-grandchild list and below.

So lets take our energy future example further.

Let us say the first double crux found is: "Non-stellar fusion is possible/easy in the next 20 years". The community can agree that if we can find non-stellar fusion in 20 years they should work towards that. But they disagree that it can be found within that time. So the community splits, then splits again (the fusion side splitting between tokamaks and containment fusion, the other side between clean fission and renewables etc etc until there are bits of the community that can work together to explore that solution).

If you subscribe to the original list you will get discussion of the future of fusion but also summaries of discussion ...
Bioelectronic medicine: a very brief overview
by sarahconstantin — 2016-12-22T04:03:53.153Z

Drugs that affect the nervous system get administered systemically. It's easy to imagine that we could do much more if we could stimulate one nerve at a time, and in patterns designed to have particular effects on the body.

"Neural coding" can detect the nerve impulses that indicate that a paralyzed person intends to move a limb, and build prosthetics that respond to the mind the way a real limb would. A company called BrainGate is already making these. You can see a paralyzed person using a robotic arm with her mind here.

A fair number of diseases that don't seem "neurological", like rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis, can actually be treated by stimulating the vagus nerve. The nervous system is tightly associated with the immune and endocrine systems, which is probably why autoimmune diseases are so associated with psychiatric comorbidities; it also means that the nervous system might be an angle towards treating autoimmune diseases. There is a "cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway", involving the vagus nerve, which inactivates macrophages when they're exposed to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and thus lessens the immune response. Turning this pathway on electronically is thus a prospective treatment for autoimmune or inflammatory diseases. Vagus nerve stimulation has been tested and found successful in rheumatoid arthritis patients, in rat models of inflammatory bowel disease, and in dog experiments on chronic heart failure; vagus nerve activity mediates pancreatitis in mice; and vagus nerve stimulation attenuates the inflammatory response (cytokine release and shock) to the bacterial poison endotoxin.

Here is a detailed roadmap from this Nature article about the research that would need to be done to make bioelectronic medicine a reality.

We'd need much more detailed maps of where exactly nerves innervate various organs and which neurotransmitters they use; we'd need to record patterns of neural activity to detect which nerve signals modulate which diseases and experimentally determine causal relationships between neural signals and organ functions; we'd need to build small electronic interfaces (cuffs and chips) for use on peripheral nerves; we'd need lots of improvements in small-scale and non-invasive sensor technology (optogenetics, neural dust, ultrasound and electromagnetic imaging...
A quick note on weirdness points and Solstices [And also random other Solstice discussion]
by Raemon — 2016-12-21T17:29:42.254Z

Common knowledge is important. So I wanted to note:
Every year on Solstice feedback forms, I get concerns about songs like "The X days of X-Risk" or "When I Die" (featuring lines including 'they may freeze my body when I die'), that they are too weird and ingroupy and offputting to people who aren't super-nerdy-transhumanists
But I also get comments from people who know little about X-risk or cryonics or whatever who say "these songs are hilarious and awesome." Sunday Assemblies who have no connection to Less Wrong sing When I Die and it's a crowd favorite every year.
And my impression is that people are only really weirded out by these songs on behalf of other people who are only weirded out by them on behalf of other people. There might be a couple people who are genuinely offput the ideas but if so it's not super clear to me. I take very seriously the notion of making Solstice inclusive while retaining it's "soul", talk to lots of people about what they find alienating or weird, and try to create something that can resonate with as many people as possible.

So I want it to at least be clear: if you are personally actually offput by those songs for your own sake, that makes sense and I want to know about it, but if you're just worried about other people, I'm pretty confident you don't need to be. The songs are designed so you don't need to take them seriously if you don't want to.
-
Random note 1: I think the only line that's raised concern from some non-LW-ish people for When I Die is "I'd prefer to never die at all", and that's because it's literally putting words in people's mouths which aren't true for everyone. I mentioned that to Glen. We'll see if he can think of anything else
Random note 2: Reactions to more serious songs like "Five Thousand Years" seem generally positive among non-transhumanists, although sometimes slightly confused. The new transhumanist-ish song this year, Endless Light, has gotten overall good reviews.
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery
by Alexander230 — 2016-12-20T21:36:55.682Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery

WHEN:
28 December 2016 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to Moscow LW community makeshift games! In that games, some rationality skills are involved, so you can practise while you playing!

FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Details about the game: http://goo.gl/BtRVhB

Tower of Chaos: funny game with guessing the rules of human placement on a Twister mat.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/u9qgc3

Scientific Discovery: modified version of Zendo with simultaneous turns for all players.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/jVxBSU

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 3 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery
Meetup : Kyiv: 21 December 2016 18:15 (+0200)
by networked — 2016-12-20T19:36:13.614Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 21 December 2016 18:15 (+0200)

WHEN:
21 December 2016 06:15:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lva Tolstoho St, 3, Kyiv, Ukraine

This is a preliminary free form meetup for those who want to see more LessWrong meetups in Kyiv. Among other things, we want to discuss what we'd like the future meetups to be like. The meetup will be held at the "Chasopys" anti-cafe.

You can expect a few people from the previous meetup and the LessWrongRussian Slack chat there. For an ongoing discussion check out #kyiv_meetups on https://lesswrongru.slack.com/ (go here to register for the Slack).

Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 21 December 2016 18:15 (+0200)