trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Donating while in temporary debt (i.e. as a student)
by ancientcampus — 2013-02-05T22:50:04.846Z

Topic: I will be in debt for several years, but will eventually have a disposable income. Should I donate now or later?

Here's my situation: I am a student, with student loans and no income. I can take out more loans than I need. Grad PLUS loans have a fixed interest rate of 7.9% - higher than, say, a mortgage rate, or expected stock returns. Some day, I will have those loans paid off, and will have money that I intend to give to charity.

My objectives: to live on less than my means, and give a significant fraction of my income to charity.

Question: When, if ever, should I give to charity before paying off those loans?

My initial reaction is to keep a record of how much I feel like I should be giving now, then give it later, adjusted for interest (at some rate equal to or less than 7.9%) - this would result in a bigger donation, but the same impact on my finances.

The only times I think I should give now, and not later:
1)If I don't believe I will make good on my commitment later on. (I'll presumably have a family and bills, etc, and while I am perfectly happy to live on little myself, I know I will want my kids to have nice things. This is somewhat illogical, but I'm imperfect.)
2)If the most worthwhile charity I find see has a higher interest rate than 7.9%.
3)If I find an opportunity to use my money charitably in which I can do more good than others, or where no one else can or will donate. (Mainly, random acts of kindness to strangers or friends - or, someone is matching my donation)

I doubt I will ever see 2) happen (or if it does, I should raise awareness)
3) doesn't happen very often, but when it does I think it is an acceptable use of funds
1) is the main scenario that concerns me. I've heard that "giving charitably is a habit" (that's why my parents had me tithe as a kid). I think that's true, though I haven't read any research on that. Either way, though, as I have no meaningful income (and my loan "allowance" is way more than I care to borrow), how much should I donate to help form the habit?

What do you think? Also, are there any other reasons to donate sooner and not later?
Edit: Givewell has an article on giving now vs later. Not all of it is relevant to my situation, but one point:
>"Economic growth, increased giving, and smarter giving may mean that giving opportunities are worse in the far future."
Rationality Quotes February 2013 
by arundelo — 2013-02-05T22:20:50.370Z

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
What are you working on? February 2013
by David_Gerard — 2013-02-05T21:43:26.752Z

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.

Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).

Talk about your goals for the project.

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Link to your work if it's linkable.
Is Getting More Utilons Your True Acceptance??
by diegocaleiro — 2013-02-05T21:26:47.662Z

Meta: Inspired by The Least Convenient Possible World I asked the person who most criticized my previous posts help on writing a new one, since that seemed very inconvenient, specially because the whole thing was already written. He agreed and suggested I begin by posting only a part of it here, and wait for the comments to further change the rest of the text. So here is the beggining and one section, and we'll see how it goes from there. I have changed the title to better reflect the only section presented here.

This post will be about how random events can preclude or steal attention from the goals you set up to begin with, and about how hormone fluctuation inclines people to change some of their goals with time. A discussion on how to act more usefully given that follows, taking in consideration likelihood of a goal's success in terms of difficulty and lenght.

Through it I suggest a new bias, Avoid-Frustration bias, which is composed of a few others:

A Self-serving bias in which Loss aversion manifests by postponing one's goals, thus avoiding frustration through wishful thinking about far futures, big worlds, immortal lives, and in general, high numbers of undetectable utilons.

It can be thought of a kind of Cognitive Dissonance, though Cognitive Dissonance doesn't to justice to specific properties and details of how this kind, in particular, seems to me to have affected the lives of Less-Wrongers, Transhumanists and others. Probably in a good way, more on that later.

Sections will be:

What Significantly Changes Life's Direction (lists)

Long Term Goals and Even Longer Term Goals

Proportionality Between Goal Achievement Expected Time and Plan Execution Time

A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

Adapting Bayesian Reasoning to Get More Utilons

Time You Can Afford to Wait, Not to Waste

Reference Classes that May Be Avoid-Frustration Biased

The Road Ahead

[Section 4 is shown here]

4 A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

For anyone who rejoiced the company of the writings of Derek Parfit, George Ainslie, or Nick Bostrom, there are a lot of very good reasons to become more long-term oriented. I am here to ask you about those reasons: Is that you true acceptance?

It is not for me. I became longer term oriented because of different reasons. Two obvious ones are genetics expressing in me the kind of perso...
Rationality when it's somewhat hard
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-02-05T20:11:44.367Z

Tunnel Creek avalanche kills skiers:

The page I've linked to describes a party of sixteen excellent skiers who went on a trip where they easily could have known better. Three of them died. It's common knowledge that large parties increase the risk of avalanche, but the page described the group excitement which no one managed to override.

One skier was sufficiently uneasy that she avoided the danger, but she didn't speak up to discourage the group.

This isn't the most difficult sort of situation requiring rationality, but it's far from the easiest, either. Any suggestions or work from CFAR about improving the odds of speaking up when a group is about to do something stupid?

The article is heavily multimedia, with big self-loading animations-- it's gorgeous, but it's a bandwidth hog.
Official LW uncensored thread (on Reddit)
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-02-05T20:04:11.293Z

http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819/lw_uncensored_thread/

This is meant as an open discussion thread someplace where I won't censor anything (and in fact can't censor anything, since I don't have mod permissions on this subreddit), in a location where comments aren't going to show up unsolicited in anyone's feed (which is why we're not doing this locally on LW). If I'm wrong about this - i.e. if there's some reason that Reddit LW followers are going to see comments without choosing to click on the post - please let me know and I'll retract the thread and try to find some other forum.

I have been deleting a lot of comments from (self-confessed and publicly designated) trolls recently, most notably Dmytry aka private-messaging and Peterdjones, and I can understand that this disturbs some people. I also know that having an uncensored thread somewhere else is probably not your ideal solution. But I am doing my best to balance considerations, and I hope that having threads like these is, if not your perfect solution, then something that you at least regard as better than nothing.
[SEQ RERUN] In Praise of Boredom
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-05T05:18:27.386Z

Today's post, In Praise of Boredom was originally published on 18 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

"Boredom" is an immensely subtle and important aspect of human values, nowhere near as straightforward as it sounds to a human. We don't want to get bored with breathing or with thinking. We do want to get bored with playing the same level of the same video game over and over. We don't want changing the shade of the pixels in the game to make it stop counting as "the same game". We want a steady stream of novelty, rather than spending most of our time playing the best video game level so far discovered (over and over) and occasionally trying out a different video game level as a new candidate for "best". These considerations would not arise in most utility functions in expected utility maximizers.

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 Getting Nearer, 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.
Offer: I'll match donations to the Against Malaria Foundation
by jefftk — 2013-02-04T16:47:52.944Z

Giving money to effective charities is one of the ways we can have the biggest positive impact in the world. If you've been thinking about giving to GiveWell's top-rated charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, but haven't gotten around to it, perhaps this will help: make a donation of up to $2K and I will match it 100%. I'll match up to $20K this way.

(Any money left over at the end of the year will also go to the AMF. That makes this a donor illusion, in that you're not actually affecting the amount I give them this year.)

I made the same offer on my blog
Humor: GURPS Friendly AI
by hankx7787 — 2013-02-04T16:38:11.271Z

Found some hidden internet gold and thought I would share:
http://sl4.org/wiki/GurpsFriendlyAI
http://sl4.org/wiki/FriendlyAICriticalFailureTable

GurpsFriendlyAI

by EliezerYudkowsky

Characters in GURPS Friendly AI may learn three new skills, the AI skill (Mental / Hard), the Seed AI skill (Mental / Very Hard), and the Friendly AI skill (Mental / Ridiculously Hard).

AI skill:

An ordinary failure wastes 1d6 years of time and 4d6 hundred thousand dollars. (Non-gamers: 4d6 means "roll four 6-sided dice and add the results".) A critical failure wastes 2d10 years and 2d6 million dollars. An ordinary success results in a successful company. A critical success leads to a roll on the Seed AI skill using AI skill -10, with any ordinary failure on that roll treated as an ordinary success on this roll, and any critical failure treated as an ordinary failure on this roll.

Seed AI skill:

An ordinary failure wastes 2d6 years of time and 8d6 hundred thousand dollars. A critical failure wastes 4d10 years and 4d6 million dollars. If the player has the Friendly AI skill, an ordinary success leads to a roll on the Friendly AI skill, and a critical success grants a +2 bonus on the Friendly AI roll. If the player does not have the Friendly AI skill, an ordinary success automatically destroys the world, and a critical success leads to a roll on the Friendly AI skill using Seed AI skill -10. (Note that if the player has only the AI skill, this roll will be made using AI skill -20!)

Friendly AI skill:

An ordinary success results in a Friendly Singularity. A critical success... ooh, that's tough. An ordinary failure destroys the world. And, of course, a critical failure means that the players roll 3d10 on the

FriendlyAICriticalFailureTable

Part of GurpsFriendlyAI. If you roll a critical failure on your Friendly AI roll, you then roll 6d6 (six six-sided dice) to obtain a result from the

Friendly AI Critical Failure Table

6: Any spoken request is interpreted (literally) as a wish and granted, whether or not it was intended as one.

7: The entire human species is transported to a virtual world based on a random fantasy novel, TV show, or video game.

8: Subsequent events are determined by the "will of the majority". The AI regards all animals, plants, and complex machines, in their current forms, as voting citizens.

9: The AI discovers that our universe is really an o...
Is ethical investment effective?
by BenGilbert — 2013-02-04T14:03:26.235Z

I've been doing some thinking about charity vs investment as alternative ways of doing good (leaving open for now what that means). One question I'm wondering about is, in what circumstances does your choice of what to invest in have any welfare consequences at all (beyond differences in your own future wealth). I'm not sure about the answer and so, if any of you have comments or ideas, please put them down.

There is an argument that ethical investment is largely or entirely pointless, at least as a way of affecting asset prices and therefore making it easier for ethically acceptable companies to raise finance, giving owners/managers incentives to do things to make their companies ethically acceptable, etc. The argument against the effectiveness of ethical investment is that other investors who care only about financial returns will counteract any price change that ethical investors achieve – they will, eg, sell shares whose prices move higher than justified by future financial returns, and buy shares whose prices move lower because ethical investors sell or stay away from them.

I think that, though there is a great deal of truth in this, there are exceptions. They include cases where investors can provide money directly to companies; where investors can make asset prices depend on something other than financial returns; and where they can influence expected future financial returns.

(1) When you can lend directly to a company, through a loan or when it is raising money by issuing shares or bonds, then you can more or less directly influence the price at which it can raise money.

(2) If there are enough ethical investors, they could end up influencing prices by making some prices depend on something other than expected financial returns. How much money would have to be invested ethically before this happens would depend on how it is invested and the market capitalization of ethically acceptable and unacceptable companies.

If ethical investors just avoid investing in some companies (negative screening), then, so long as non-ethical investors have enough capital to buy the shares, bonds etc. of those companies, and they value them at the level implied by future payments (dividends, interest etc), I don't think the ethical investors will make any difference at all. If prices of the companies that are unacceptable ...
The Wrongness Iceberg
by alfredmacdonald — 2013-02-04T09:02:54.914Z

As soon as I got out of college I got a job at a restaurant. At the time I had never had a job at a restaurant, but my mom had known the owners and I felt obligated to avoid performing badly. Yet inevitably I did perform badly, and how this performance was evaluated would greatly affect my way of perceiving my mistakes.

If you're entrenched in an organization, there's a good chance you have an idea of what it is you're supposed to do and what mistakes you will or will not be making. But suppose you're in a position like this one: by way of your ignorance you know you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and it's just a question of when and how much. Further, you know that if you make too many mistakes, you make people you care about look bad. And finally, there are a lot of unknown unknowns: you don't know what possible mistakes and acts of ignorance exist to begin with, so many mistakes you've made you will be blind to.

The proactive thing to do, naturally, is to try to minimize how many mistakes you make.
There are two key ways to gauge the depth of being told you have made a mistake. The first way is to take mistakes literally, as if no other mistake exists, and any other mistake would be pointed out to you. So if you correct this mistake, everything else should be fine. This is how you'd expect to take mistakes if you were, say, under the supervision of an editor.

But the second kind is where the title of this writeup comes in. Not everyone is literal, or critical enough to notice every mistake. Much of the time, you'll only receive news of a mistake if many other mistakes are already afoot, and this mistake just happens to stand out from the set of mistakes you've already made. And since you don't know what mistakes you could be making, you don't know if there are many more mistakes under your level of awareness that you could be correcting for, but aren't.

In short, you're tasked with avoiding a wrongness iceberg: a mistake indicative of a nautical mile of mistakes below the surface and your level of awareness.

This is a debilitating position to be in, because your mental map of your performance prior to discovering the iceberg needs to be completely rewritten; in addition to accounting for all of the new areas you need to work on, you will likely account for the embarrassment of realizing that you have opened up a new frontier of mistakes...
[SEQ RERUN] Getting Nearer
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-04T06:36:53.208Z

Today's post, Getting Nearer was originally published on 17 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

How should a rationalist use their near and far modes of thinking? And how should knowing about near vs far modes influence how we present the things we believe to other people.

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 Seduced by Imagination, 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.
Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...
by Louie — 2013-02-04T06:03:22.611Z

Of course, it turns out they're actually last among developed nations in real health outcomes.

The U.S. ranks #1 among 17 affluent, western countries in the percentage of people aged 5 to 34 who rate their health as good. Unfortunately, when doctors look at people’s actual health, at indicators such as obesity, diabetes, and simply the chance that someone will die before his or her next birthday, the U.S. ranks last: young Americans are #17 out of 17 in real health.
[suggestion] New Meetup Tab
by JMiller — 2013-02-03T23:40:01.607Z

Hi everyone,

I am unsure if I am formatting this correctly or putting it in the appropriate location.

I think that having meetup notifications is a great idea. A new tab (I.e "main", "discussion" and "meetups") would make it easier to find your own meetups, as well as create less clutter on the discussion page, leaving it for less administrative matters. What do you think about this?

Jeremy
[SEQ RERUN] Seduced by Imagination
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-03T08:37:55.631Z

Today's post, Seduced by Imagination was originally published on 16 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Vagueness usually has a poor name in rationality, but the Future is something about which, in fact, we do not possess strong reliable specific information. Vague (but justified!) hopes may also be hedonically better. But a more important caution for today's world is that highly specific pleasant scenarios can exert a dangerous power over human minds - suck out our emotional energy, make us forget what we don't know, and cause our mere actual lives to pale by comparison. (This post is not about Fun Theory proper, but it contains an important warning about how not to use Fun Theory.)

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 Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises, 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 : London Meetup, 10th Feb
by philh — 2013-02-02T19:30:27.035Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 10th Feb

WHEN:
10 February 2013 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

A meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. Everyone is welcome.
We also have a Google group.
The topic for this meetup is personal organisation:

How do people organise their time/space/energy/belongings/commitments, etc.? What tools do they use? What problems have they come across? What weird/surprising/obvious-in-retrospect solutions have they found?

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 10th Feb
Meetup : Berlin Meetup
by blob — 2013-02-02T08:08:09.113Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup

WHEN:
08 February 2013 07:30:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Ming Dynastie, Brückenstraße 6, 10179 Berlin

We're meeting to chat and talk about practical rationality.

This time we'll

discuss the first few items of the checklist of rationality habits,

maybe get an personal account of mindfulness meditation practice,

discuss our plans and make commitments.

Everyone is welcome, I'll bring a sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup