trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Six Ways To Get Along With People Who Are Totally Wrong*
by RobertWiblin — 2015-05-27T12:37:40.552Z

This is a re-post of something I wrote for the Effective Altruism Forum. Though most of the ideas have been raised here before, perhaps many times, I thought it might still be of interest as a brief presentation of them all!

--

* The people you think are totally wrong may not actually be totally wrong.

Effective altruism is a ‘broad tent’

As is obvious to anyone who has looked around here, effective altruism is based more on a shared interest in the question 'how can you do the most good' than a shared view on the answer. We all have friends who support:

A wide range of different cause areas.

A wide range of different approaches to those causes.

Different values and moral philosophies regarding what it means to 'help others'.

Different political views on how best to achieve even shared goals. On economic policy for example, we have people covering the full range from far left to far right. In the CEA offices we have voters for every major political party, and some smaller ones too.

Looking beyond just stated beliefs, we also have people with a wide range of temperaments, from highly argumentative, confident and outspoken to cautious, idiosyncratic and humble.

Our wide range of views could cause problems

There is a popular saying that 'opposites attract'. But unfortunately, social scientists have found precisely the opposite to be true: birds of a feather do in fact flock together.

One of the drivers of this phenomenon is that people who are different are more likely to get into conflicts with one another. If my partner and I liked to keep the house exactly the same way, we certainly wouldn't have as many arguments about cleaning (I'll leave you to speculate about who is the untidy one!). People who are different from you may initially strike you as merely amusing, peculiar or mistaken, but when you talk to them at length and they don't see reason, you may start to see them as stupid, biased, rude, impossible to deal with, unkind, and perhaps even outright bad people.

A movement brought together by a shared interest in the question ‘what should we do?’ will inevitably have a greater diversity of priorities, and justifications for those priorities, than a movement united by a shared answer. This is in many ways our core strength. Maintaining a diversity of views means we are less likely to get permanently stuck on the w...
Meetup : Rationality meetup in Prague #3
by kotrfa — 2015-05-27T09:24:46.972Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality meetup in Prague #3

WHEN:
30 June 2015 06:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Václavské náměstí 778/14, Praha 110 00

Hello,

this is third long-term planed meetup in Prague.

We are currently a group of five people regularly meeting every week or so. Our sessions are sometimes just talk about our life or we hold some presentations (technology, morality, ethics, transhumanism...). More about it here http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups#Prague.2C_Czech_Republic.

We all are open meeting new interesting people and even if you just want to hang out with us, don't hesitate to come!

You can recognize us by having paper with "LW" on it on our table. Meet up is going to be in Dobrá Čajovna s.r.o. (tea-room).

Looking forward to see you there! :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality meetup in Prague #3
SSC discussion: "bicameral reasoning", epistemology, and scope insensitivity
by tog — 2015-05-27T05:08:37.621Z

(Continuing the posting of select posts from Slate Star Codex for comment here, as discussed in this thread, and as Scott Alexander gave me - and anyone else - permission to do with some exceptions.)

Scott recently wrote a post called Bicameral Reasoning. It touches on epistemology and scope insensitivity. Here are some excerpts, though it's worth reading the whole thing:

Delaware has only one Representative, far less than New York’s twenty-seven. But both states have an equal number of Senators, even though New York has a population of twenty million and Delaware is uninhabited except by corporations looking for tax loopholes.

[...]

I tend to think something like “Well, I agree with this guy about the Iraq war and global warming, but I agree with that guy about election paper trails and gays in the military, so it’s kind of a toss-up.”

And this way of thinking is awful.

The Iraq War probably killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people. If you think that it was unnecessary, and that it was possible to know beforehand how poorly it would turn out, then killing a few hundred thousand people is a really big deal. I like having paper trails in elections as much as the next person, but if one guy isn’t going to keep a very good record of election results, and the other guy is going to kill a million people, that’s not a toss-up.

[...]

I was thinking about this again back in March when I had a brief crisis caused by worrying that the moral value of the world’s chickens vastly exceeded the moral value of the world’s humans. I ended up being trivially wrong – there are only about twenty billion chickens, as opposed to the hundreds of billions I originally thought. But I was contingently wrong – in other words, I got lucky. Honestly, I didn’t know whether there were twenty billion chickens or twenty trillion.

And honestly, 99% of me doesn’t care. I do want to improve chickens, and I do think that their suffering matters. But thanks to the miracle of scope insensitivity, I don’t particularly care more about twenty trillion chickens than twenty billion chickens.

Once again, chickens seem to get two seats to my moral Senate, no matter how many of them there are. Other groups that get two seats include “starving African...
New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function in mice
by Bound_up — 2015-05-27T02:33:00.116Z

The team reports fully restoring the memory function of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue.

"We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics."

The team says they’re planning on starting trials with higher animal models, such as sheep, and hope to get their human trials underway in 2017.

http://www.sciencealert.com/new-alzheimer-s-treatment-fully-restores-memory-function
Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning
by JonahS — 2015-05-26T19:23:05.879Z

Short version (courtesy of Nanashi)

Our brains' pattern recognition capabilities are far stronger than our ability to reason explicitly. Most people can recognize cats across contexts with little mental exertion. By way of contrast, explicitly constructing a formal algorithm that can consistently cats across contexts requires great scientific ability and cognitive exertion.

Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the same way that we can see patterns when we observe the world with our eyes. Reasoning plays a role, but a relatively small one. Sufficiently high quality mathematicians don't make their discoveries through reasoning. The mathematical proof is the very last step: you do it to check that your eyes weren't deceiving you, but you know ahead of time that your eyes probably weren't deceiving you.

I have a lot of evidence that this way of thinking is how the most effective people think about the world. I would like to share what I learned. I think that what I've learned is something that lots of people are capable of learning, and that learning it would greatly improve people's effectiveness. But communicating the information is very difficult.

It took me 10,000+ hours to learn how to "see" patterns in evidence in the way that I can now. Right now, I don't know how to communicate how to do it succinctly. In order to succeed, I need collaborators who are open to spend a lot of time thinking carefully about the material, to get to the point of being able to teach others. I'd welcome any suggestions for how to find collaborators.

Long version

For most of my life, I believed that epistemic rationality was largely about reasoning carefully about the world. I frequently observed people's intuitions leading them astray. I thought that what differentiated people with high epistemic rationality is Cartesian skepticism: the practice of carefully scrutinizing all of one's beliefs using deductive-style reasoning.

When I met Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell, I came to recognize that Holden's general epistemic rationality was much higher than my own. Over the course of years of interaction, I discovered that Holden was not using my style of reasoning. Instead, his beliefs were backed by lots of independent small pieces of evidence, which in aggregate sufficed to...
Exponential Finance Meetup(NYC)?
by skilesare — 2015-05-26T16:53:46.816Z

Anyone going to the Exponential Finance conference being put on by Singularity University next week? (Tuesday and Wednesday)

http://exponential.singularityu.org/finance/

I'm going to be there participating in the XCS challenge with my Democratic Hypercapitalism venture.

I've posted about it a couple of times here and here.

I'd love to meet up with some folks from the community and talk more about my ideas and rationality.
No peace in our time?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-05-26T14:41:23.429Z

There's a new paper arguing, contra Pinker, that the world is not getting more peaceful:

On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation

Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Abstract—We examine all possible statistical pictures of violent conflicts over common era history with a focus on dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of data. We apply methods from extreme value theory on log-transformed data to remove compact support, then, owing to the boundedness of maximum casualties, retransform the data and derive expected means. We find the estimated mean likely to be at least three times larger than the sample mean, meaning severe underestimation of the severity of conflicts from naive observation. We check for robustness by sampling between high and low estimates and jackknifing the data. We study inter-arrival times between tail events and find (first-order) memorylessless of events. The statistical pictures obtained are at variance with the claims about "long peace".

Every claim in the abstract is supported by the data - with the exception of the last claim. Which is the important one, as it's the only one really contradicting the "long peace" thesis.

Most of the paper is an analysis of trends in peace and war that establish that what we see throughout conflict history is consistent with a memoryless powerlaw process whose mean we underestimate from the sample. That is useful and interesting.

However, the paper does not compare the hypothesis that the world is getting peaceful with the alternative hypothesis that it's business as usual. Note that it's not cherry-picking to suggest that the world might be getting more peaceful since 1945 (or 1953). We've had the development of nuclear weapons, the creation of the UN, and the complete end of direct great power wars (a rather unprecedented development). It would be good to test this hypothesis; unfortunately this paper, while informative, does not do so.

The only part of the analysis that could be applied here is the claim that:

For an events with more than 10 million victims, if we refer to actual estimates, the average time delay is 101.58 years, with a mean absolute deviation of 144.47 years

This could mean that the peace since the second world war is not unusual, but could be quite typical. But this ignores the "per capita" aspect of violence: the more people, the more deadl...
Meetup : June Rationality Dojo: Logical fallacies & dojo structure discussion
by MelbourneLW — 2015-05-26T12:55:57.766Z

Discussion article for the meetup : June Rationality Dojo: Logical fallacies & dojo structure discussion

WHEN:
07 June 2015 03:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Jenny Florence Room, Level 3, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

[3:30pm start / arrival / preparation – formal dojo activities will commence at 4:00pm.]

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth, on the first Sunday of each month.

1) James Fodor will run a session on logical fallacies: Sloppy thinking, logical fallacies, and invalid reasoning are everywhere in life, and relatively few people have the ability to rigorously and critically examine arguments. We'll begin with a quick review of some key concepts in logic, such as the difference between validity and soundness, and also review some of the major types of logical fallacies and failure modes in reasoning. We'll then practise analysing real arguments, identifying where they go wrong, why they are problematic, and how they might be improved. (James is president of the University of Melbourne Secular Society, runs the group "Dealing With Disagreement", and is interested in epistemology, inter-faith dialogue, effective altruism, and applied rationality.)

2) A few of us recently met to discuss restructuring the Less Wrong Dojos. Patrick will report on our ideas, and we'll discuss.

3) As always, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Goals are recorded via Google Forms here -https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MCHH4MpbW0SI_2JyMSDlKnnGP4A0qxojQEZoMZIdopk/viewform, and Melbourne Less Wrong organisers have access to the form results if you wish to review the goals you set last month.

4) Lightning talks: Learnt something cool? Gained an insight from one of the Less Wrong sequences? Share it with Melbourne LW! Speakers are limited to 5 minutes including questions. If you have something you would like to present a lightning talk on, please let one of the organisers know, either beforehand or on the day.

The Dojo is likely to run until about 6:30pm, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, text or call Richard on 0421231789 or Chris on 0439471632

If you would lik

...
Dissolving philosophy
by  — 2015-05-26T10:45:11.174Z

Summary: a large chunk of the history of Western philosophy is about finding out by what kinds of less conscious algorithms does the human mind arrive to certain intuitions.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates runs around Athens talking with people, trying to find an answer to the question: "What is justice?" Two and half thousands of years later we still don't have a truly definitive answer. We can spend another thousand year or two pondering it, but I suspect it would be better to reformulate the question in a more answerable way. So let's look at what Socrates is trying to do here, what his method is and what is actual question is!

It is not an empirical, scientific question that can be answered by observing something whose existence is independent of the human mind. Rather the question is about a feature of the human mind, not of a feature of the external reality out there.

However Socrates is not simply conducting an opinion survey. He is not content simply finding 74% of Athenians think justice means obeying laws. Socrates also argues against definitions of justice he considers _wrong_.

So, apparently, justice in this question relates to something that does not exist outside the human mind, but we can still have wrong opinions about it.

The method Socrates is employing is the following. He assumes when people see an actual action, they can intuitively judge it just or unjust and that judgement will be seen as _correct_. Well, not always, but at least when they are dispassionate, and have no vested interest either. So according to Socrates, any definition of justice can be tested by thought experiments that are sufficiently dispassionate and disinterested for the audience that they will actually use their Justice Sensors to form a judgement about them, and not, say, their passion like anger or greed, or their interests.

What Socrates is doing here, then, is asking people to make an algorithm that predicts what acts will a dispassionate and disinterested observer find just or unjust.

Example: "I think justice is paying debts." "Okay dude, but what if you borrowed a sword from a friend and now you see he is really mad at people and wants to go on a murderous rampage. Would it be just / righteous / correct to pay the debt and return the sword now?" "Uh, no."

This means: "I propose this algorithm." "This algorithm predicts you would find hypothetical si...
Request for advices on small presentation about LW community
by efim — 2015-05-26T07:30:15.308Z

In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a small (~50m) presentation about LW community on "social sciences sunday" in Saint Petersburg.

Target audience - students, teachers and young recearcher mostly from social sciences and humanities.

I'm planning to at least mention in passing:

1) rationality: epistemological and practical division

2) virtues of rationality

3) big part of learning is by osmosis

4) about sequences => some ideas I found engaging (but those that are at the same time would be easier to explain in 10 minutes)- definetely about inferential distances and looking wise

maybe mention Milgrams experiments or anecdote about Pain and Gain motivation

5) study hall (I tried it just for a bit), meetups, related projects - CFAR (anything else?), International Insights, slatestarcodex?

There is also this:

I'm not sure LW is a good entry point for people who are turned away by a few technical terms. Responding to unfamiliar scientific concepts with an immediate surge of curiosity is probably a trait I share with the majority of LW'ers.

I am going to spend some more time prepairing and would probably have some good ideas, but I would be really great to have opinions from others. Am I missing something? Or if anyone had relevant experience?
Update on the Brain Preservation Foundation Prize
by Andy_McKenzie — 2015-05-26T01:47:20.018Z

Brain Preservation Foundation President Kenneth Hayworth just wrote a synopsis of the recent ongoings from the major two competitors for the BPF prizes. Here is the summary:

Brain Preservation Prize competitor Shawn Mikula just published his whole mouse brain electron microscopy protocol in Nature Methods (paper, BPF interview), putting him close to winning the mouse phase of our prize.

Brain Preservation Prize competitor 21st Century Medicine has developed a new “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” technique–preliminary results show good ultrastructure preservation even after storage of a whole rabbit brain at -135 degrees C.

This work was funded in part from donations from LW users. In particular, a grant to support the work of LW user Robert McIntyre at 21st Century Medicine that the BPF was able to provide has been instrumental.

In order to continue this type of research and to bolster it, BPF welcomes your support in a variety of different ways, including awareness-raising, donations, and volunteering. Please reach out if you would like to volunteer, or you can PM me and I will help put you in touch. And if you have any suggestions for the BPF, please feel free to discuss them in the comments below.
Ideas to Improve LessWrong
by Adam Zerner — 2015-05-25T22:55:00.818Z

This article is something that has been in my head for a while. I hadn't planned on doing a write-up so soon. I wanted to take the time to a) refine my ideas and b) figure out how to express them clearly before posting. But the recent post Less Wrong lacks direction made me change my mind. My thinking now is that I overestimated the downside (wasting peoples time with a less than fully thought out post) and that there's enough value to justify posting a rough draft now.

LessWrong has been one of the most amazing things I've experienced in my life.

I have learned a ton, and have "leveled up" quite a bit.

Knowing that there are this many other relatively rational people in the world and being able to interact with them is a truly amazing thing.

But I see so much opportunity for LW to do more. Below are some thoughts.

Easy

A way to discuss ideas for the site, vote on them, and incentivize the generation of good ideas. I sense that having this would be huge. a) I sense that there are a lot of good ideas out there in people's heads but that they haven't shared. b) I sense that by discussing things, there could be a lot of refinement of current ideas, and a lot of generation of new ideas.

More generally, my impression is that it'd be a good idea to subdivide sections for posts. Right now it's pretty much Main, Discussion or Open Thread. Ex. someone who has an idea to improve LW might not think it's "Discussion worthy" (or even "Open Thread worthy"), but I sense that if there were a section explicitly for "LW Ideas", they'd be a lot less reluctant to post. More generally, it'd justify more "bite sized posts" rather than requiring a full write-up.

One example of a subsection that I think would be cool is a Personal Advice section. The ability to post anonymously seems like it'd be a useful feature here. Other ideas for subsections: AMA!, Brainstorming/Unrefined Thoughts, I Don't Understand X, Contrarian Thoughts.

Social coordination:

Apartments/living together.

"What are you currently learning? What do you want to learn?". so8res recommends pairing up, and I agree.

Geographical map of users to facilitate friendships and/or dating. (This already exists. But it seems that a low proportion of LW users added a pin on the map. My impression is that because of network effects, the usefulness of this is very much a function of how many users ther

...
Less Wrong lacks direction
by casebash — 2015-05-25T14:53:30.972Z

I think the greatest issue with Less Wrong is that it lacks direction. There doesn't appear to be anyone driving it forward or helping the community achieve its goals. At the start this role was taken by Eliezer, but he barely seems active these days. The expectation seems to be that things will happen spontaneously, on their own. And that has worked for a few things (is. SubReddit, study hall, ect.), but on the while the community is much less effective than it could be.

I want to give an example of how things could work. Let's imagine Less Wrong had some kind of executive (as opposed to moderators who just keep everything in order). At the start of the year, they could create a thread asking about what goals they thought were important for Less Wrong - ie. Increasing the content in main, producing more content for a general audience, increasing female participation rate.

They would then have a Skype meeting to discuss the feedback and to debate which ones that wanted to primarily focus on. Suppose for example they decided they wanted to increase the content in main. They might solicit community feedback on what kinds of articles they'd like to see more of. They might contact people who wrote discussion posts that were main quality and suggest they submit some content there instead. They could come up with ideas of new kinds of contentLW might find useful (ie. Project management) and seed the site with content on that area to do that people understand that kind of content is desired.

These roles would take significant work, but I imagine people would be motivated to do this by altruism or status. By discussing ideas in person (instead of just over the internet), they there would be more of an opportunity to build a consensus and they would be able to make more progress towards addressing these issues.

If a group said that they thought A was an important issue and the solution was X, most members would pay more attention than if a random individual said it. No-one would have to listen to anything they say, but I imagine that many would choose to. Furthermore if the exec were all actively involved in the projects, I imagine they'd be able to complete some smaller ones themselves, or at least provide the initial push to get it going.