trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
VARIABILITY OF NUCLEAR DECAY RATES
by morganism — 2016-11-13T23:57:23.988Z

I came across a utube vid about this is 08 or so, a talk at a convention, and it intrigued me, but didn't know anyone was working on studying it. The guy set up a counter in the basement, and was tracking Cesium decay, to compare to a Web clock, IIRC. Can't find it now, topic is swamped, and duckgo swamped with creationist blogs, i guess they like the idea of radiodating flaws.

After many dueling papers, it appears the big neutrino sensor in Japan has seen the same, seasonal variability in their data too, so appearing more legit.

http://news.stanford.edu/2016/11/09/stanford-solar-physicist-unlocks-easier-way-observe-peculiar-particles-reveal-inner-workings-sun/

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11207-016-1008-9

MIT collection

VARIABILITY OF NUCLEAR DECAY RATES

Original paper:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092765050900084X

https://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283

"Unexplained periodic fluctuations in the decay rates of 32Si and 226Ra have been reported by groups at Brookhaven National Laboratory (32Si), and at the Physikalisch–Technische–Bundesanstalt in Germany (226Ra). We show from an analysis of the raw data in these experiments that the observed fluctuations are strongly correlated in time, not only with each other, but also with the time of year."

and a review article, from the old Analog magazine!

Radioactive Decay and the Earth-Sun Distance

https://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw147.html

This paper consolidates the data on six of the studies, while taking some simple, EM measurements of the Plank length variation that seems to coincide fairly closely with the decay rate data. Both are trailing the actual distance measurements by up to a month, which is pretty strange in its own right.

pdf

http%3A%2F%2Ffile.scirp.org%2Fpdf%2FOPJ_2016063013301299.pdf

Along with the Plank variation, lots of other explanations have been floated, my favorite being the link to a possible Dark Matter reservoir, that may reside in the Sun. This may also be one of the possible factors in the appearance of possible discrepancies in physics parameters at large Z regions of the universe, including some Type Ia supernova, that are used as distance markers.

The Sun Goes Through Seasonal Changes Too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7BWrWBABJw

Annual Modulation of Dark Matter: A Review

https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3339

Constraining spacetime vari...
Matching donation fundraisers can be harmfully dishonest.
by Benquo — 2016-11-11T21:05:21.242Z

Anna Salamon, executive director of CFAR (named with permission), recently wrote to me asking for my thoughts on fundraisers using matching donations. (Anna, together with co-writer Steve Rayhawk, has previously written on community norms that promote truth over falsehood.) My response made some general points that I wish were more widely understood:

Pitching matching donations as leverage (e.g. "double your impact") misrepresents the situation by overassigning credit for funds raised.

This sort of dishonesty isn't just bad for your soul, but can actually harm the larger world - not just by eroding trust, but by causing people to misallocate their charity budgets.

"Best practices" for a charity tend to promote this kind of dishonesty, because they're precisely those practices that work no matter what your charity is doing.

If your charity is impact-oriented - if you care about outcomes rather than institutional success - then you should be able to do substantially better than "best practices".

So I'm putting an edited version of my response here.

Matched donation fundraisers are typically dishonest

In the typical matched donation fundraiser, a large donor pledges to match the donations from everyone else, up to a specified level, such as $500,000. The charity can then claim to other donors that this is an unusually good time to give, because for each dollar they give to the charity, the charity will receive an additional dollar from the matching donor.

There are two levels on which such matched donation offers tend to be dishonest:

The match is often illusory.

Even when the match is real, it only motivates donors by overassigning credit.

GiveWell explains the problem of illusory matching fairly well:

We know that donors love donation matching. We know that if we could offer donation matching on gifts to our top charities this giving season, our money moved would rise. And we know that we could offer donation matching if we thought it was the right thing to do: there are donors planning six-figure gifts to our top charities this year who would almost certainly be willing to structure their gifts as “matches” if we asked. [...]

But we’ve decided not to do this because we would feel dishonest. We’d be advertising that you can “double your gift,” but the truth would be that we just

...
The Developmental Role of Play
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2016-11-11T19:41:53.933Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/the-developmental-role-of-play-443549cfed3b

When I was a kid, maybe around 8 or 9, I had a cabinet full of Legos. To the casual observer it was a few messy shelves crammed with plastic blocks, but to me it was a portal into another world. Opening it up I’d see little buildings and people resting in suspended animation, and as I turned my attention to them they came alive. Through them I’d become heroes and villains fighting over secret bases, explorers searching the universe, and old friends hanging out and having fun. Hours would pass without notice, and more than once I had to be forced to bed or I would have played all night.

But somewhere between turning 11 and 12 the portal closed. I’d still open the cabinet and try to get my characters to come alive, but I had to work harder and harder to will them into existence until eventually I couldn’t do it anymore. Whatever magic I had possessed was gone and all I had left was anthropomorphic plastic.

I was reminded of this when reading Mike Plotz’s thoughts on Bateson and play, and it got me thinking about play from the perspective of Kegan and developmental psychology. It’s straightforward to claim that my tweenage self developed from one psychological stage to another and in the process changed my play preferences, but that opens up deeper questions. Why did I lose a form of play? Why couldn’t I do something I could previously do? Did I gain anything for my loss? And what does this suggest about the value of the developmental perspective?

To begin, I’ll let Mike present Bateson’s view on play and it’s role in communication (emphasis mine):

Play is thus an exploratory behavior, a way of being that goes some way towards a kind of what-if reconnaissance of potentially dangerous territory without taking the extreme risks that the “real thing” would entail. Really fighting to establish dominance might lead to life-threatening injuries, while play-fighting is similar enough to the the real thing to determine who would likely dominate. Compare this function to that of dreams, which also serve as a way for the organism to simulate dangerous scenarios safely.

[…]

Returning to the phenomenon of play as described in the previous section, it’s now clear that play itself is demarcated in its own frame, which establishes a context in which certain behaviors are interpreted in

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-11-11T18:47:37.240Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 11th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Amsterdam] Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!: 13 November 2016 03:10PM
Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup: 13 November 2016 08:00PM

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:

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
Moscow social meetup: Party games!: 04 December 2016 02:00PM
NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging: 14 November 2016 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - December 2016: 04 December 2016 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 26 November 2016 03:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 17 December 2016 03:00PM
Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!: 13 November 2016 03:10PM

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, 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 ...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging
by rocurley — 2016-11-11T17:04:45.793Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging

WHEN:
14 November 2016 06:15:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA

We’ll be meeting to solve each other’s problems!

Here’s how it works: we’ll have everyone brainstorm silently for a few minutes, then go around and summarize what problems we might like to work on; then people can break up into smaller conversations according to problems they think they could be most helpful with. This format is now what I'd call "tried and true".

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Group Debugging
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-11-11T13:43:54.509Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
13 November 2016 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
Yudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown.
by MrMind — 2016-11-11T11:30:22.339Z

Sorry for the slightly clickbait-y title.

Some commenters have expressed, in the last open thread, their disappointment that figureheads from or near the rationality sphere seemed to have lost their cool when it came to this US election: when they were supposed to be calm and level-headed, they instead campaigned as if Trump was going to be the Basilisk incarnated.

I've not followed many commenters, mainly Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and they both endorsed Clinton. I'll try to explain what were their arguments, briefly but as faithfully as possible. I'd like to know if you consider them mindkilled and why.

Please notice: I would like this to be a comment on methodology, about if their arguments were sound given what they knew and believed. I most definitely do not want this to decay in a lamentation about the results, or insults to the obviously stupid side, etc.

Yudkowsky made two arguments against Trump: level B incompetence and high variance. Since the second is also more or less the same as Scott's, I'll just go with those.

Level B incompetence

Eliezer attended a pretty serious and wide diplomatic simulation game, that made him appreciate how difficult is to just maintain a global equilibrium between countries and avoid nuclear annihilation. He says that there are three level in politics:

- level 0, where everything that the media report and the politicians say is taken at face value: every drama is true, every problem is important and every cry of outrage deserves consideration;

- level A, where you understand that politics is as much about theatre and emotions as it is about policies: at this level players operate like in pro-wrestling, creating drama and conflict to steer the more gullible viewers towards the preferred direction; at this level cinicism is high and almost every conflict is a farce and probably staged.

But the bucket doesn't stop here. As the diplomacy simulation taught him, there's also:

- level B, where everything becomes serious and important again. At this level, people work very hard at maintaining the status quo (where outside you have mankind extinction), diplomatic relations and subtle international equilibria shield the world from much worse outcomes. Faux pas at this level in the past had resulted in wars, genocides and general widespread badness.

In August fifty Republican security advisors signed a letter condemnin...
Meetup : Moscow social meetup: Party games!
by Alexander230 — 2016-11-09T20:41:44.098Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow social meetup: Party games!

WHEN:
04 December 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, Strelbishensky pereulok, 10

Welcome to the social meetup! Main theme of this meetup is party games; and some of them are party versions of our rationality training games.

The games planned for this meetup:

Tower of Chaos: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKVXVfcTlCZEVKaEE

Codenames; there will be classic game, and modification with fallacies instead of words.

FallacyParty: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKdXh5UmpxeExxRlU

Training Game Party: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKdy1CZnE4X1BvVDg

Secret quests: some of you know what is it :-)

Enigmatic mat and Twister: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKek8xeDJtdUlRZk0

Address of meetup:

Strelbishensky per., 10, ap.60, 3rd porch, code 60B3112, 5th floor. Nearest metro station: Vystavochnaya. If you have questions, call me 8-905-527-30-82 or write me on e-mail alexander230r@gmail.com (it's better to call if you're searching the way before the meetup).

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow social meetup: Party games!
This is the way the world… is
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-11-09T05:32:59.000Z

10% of the world’s countries experience violent regime change once a year on average. In middle income countries regimes last 12.5 years on average. 90% of the world’s countries could expect a political revolution, coup d’état or violent change in a human lifetime. Throughout history, that number has been even higher especially when you include the risk of foreign invasion.

Trump is not the Mongol hordes.

My great-grandparents fled the Nazis, my grandfather’s brother was sent to a Gulag, my parents grew up in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union. I’m incredibly lucky to have grown up in first-world democracies, but good things aren’t the default state of the world. Good people need to work hard for good things, and sometimes there are setbacks.

What struck me the most about today is how inevitable someone like Trump seems in retrospect. There was no jihadi terror attack this week, no freak blizzard in Detroit keeping democrat voters at home. And to be honest, the candidate was barely electable. And still, the people who wanted Trump got their wish. They were always the (electoral college) majority, now we just know that it so.

The world didn’t become worse today, we just found out that it was like this. If you were a naïve optimist like me and didn’t anticipate this seriously enough, you were wrong. I was wrong.

If you’re in shock that Trump won, I am writing this to help you confront the denial. Yesterday, I asked you to overcome your anger. If you want to bargain about the state of the world, I recommend doing so by donating to an effective charity and actually changing the world for the better.

It’s OK to be depressed for a while. I recommend gin and Civilization VI. For an extra challenge, try to win a cultural victory while maintaining open borders and free trade with all the other civs.

But, it would be nice if we could all get to the acceptance stage pronto, the world needs people who have their shit together. These aren’t the biggest stakes our generation will face in our lifetimes, and we should cast off naïve optimism if we are to do better in the future.

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived

...
Meetup : Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!
by  — 2016-11-08T18:02:59.597Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!

WHEN:
13 November 2016 03:10:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

Ready for another meetup? Last time was a terrific success, so we want to build on that (also EAGx Oxford is in two weeks, and noone wants to wait three weeks).

So, next meeting will be coming Sunday, at Coffee Company nearby Amsterdam Amstel Station.

This time - besides having fun - we want to try discussing some Less Wrong blog posts (also fun, really!). The four below are selected from the 'How to actually change your mind' sequence. Changing your mind in view of new evidence is thé core skill of epistemic rationality. If there's one thing cognitive research has taught us, it's that we're rightfully calling it a skill: it's hard, it has to be practiced, and it's important.

On cutting your losses: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i9/the_importance_of_saying_oops/
On completing patterns: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/
On rationalisation: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ju/rationalization/
On post-hoc justifications: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kq/fake_justification/

In addition, everyone is encouraged to read around if they feel like it!

See you on Sunday!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #6 - Still Amsterdam!
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Gardening
by RobinZ — 2016-11-08T02:45:44.894Z

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

WHEN:
13 November 2016 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

Due to an event, the meetup will be moved to the Luce Center, third floor on the F Street side of the building.

We will be meeting in the courtyard to talk about gardening. One of the regulars will be bringing a bunch of seed catalogs and leading the discussion.

Upcoming meetups:

Nov. 20: Cooking

Nov. 27: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Gardening
The Day After Tomorrow
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-11-07T23:47:05.000Z

Are you rooting for Donald Trump tomorrow? Please read the text in red. On Hillary’s side? Please read the parts in blue.

Imagine: it’s Tuesday night and the result is beyond doubt – a landslide for Crooked Hillary. What do you plan to do? Retreat in disgust from mainstream American discourse and retrench in your bubble? Claim that the “system is rigged” against you? You should be embarrassed, that’s what a leftist would do.

Imagine: it’s Wednesday morning and your next president fuhrer is Donald Trump. What do you plan to do? Scream that the American voters are idiots? Threaten violence and civil disobedience? How very Trump of you.

There are 324,118,787 people in America. The president is just one of them, and so are you. We all shape the kind of country we live in.

Do you hate Hillary’s corruption? Choose integrity. Pick your leaders based on their actions, not their promises. Did the person talking about working class problems spend a single day working a blue collar job? Is the person warning you of foreigners quick to use offshore labor when they can save a buck? This country will be saved by men of principle leading men of principle, not by making compromise with sin.

Do you hate Trump because he’s disrespectful? Choose respect. Learn to respect people from faraway lands, with different tastes and strange beliefs. And by these I mean: Oklahoma, Nascar, Jesus. In case you forgot, respect doesn’t mean letting them live somewhere out of sight. It means respecting their voice and their choice.

Do you hate the lies of the mainstream media? Choose objectivity. Does Breitbart make money when they report the unvarnished truth or when they they post outrage clickbait? Don’t consume just the media that feels good, broaden your view and you’ll see a truer picture. What use is free speech if one doesn’t freely listen?

Do you hate Trump’s bold-faced lying? Choose truth. Do you share articles that attempt to get to the bottom of issues, or memes that make your opponents seem stupid? Be wary of bullshit that promotes a cause you support. Bullshit in the service of a good cause isn’t virtuous, it’s corrupting.

Do you hate the Democrats’ betrayal of American culture? Choose the best of that culture. Promote the best of America: the collective values and individual fre...