trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Copenhagen, Dallas, Graz, London, Longmont, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Sydney, Vancouver, Washington
by FrankAdamek — 2012-05-04T16:41:45.739Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Longmont Sparkfun Soldering Competition Field Trip: 28 April 2012 11:00AM
Graz Meetup: 28 April 2012 11:21PM
First Copenhagen meetup: 29 April 2012 05:00PM
Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 5!: 29 April 2012 12:00PM
Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 4/29/12: 29 April 2012 01:00PM
Washington DC meetup: 29 April 2012 03:00PM
Vancouver Cafe Meetup!: 29 April 2012 01:00PM
Less Wrong sydney - Prediction gambles and location testing: 03 May 2012 06:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

London: 01 May 2012 06:30PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 04 May 2012 06:30PM
Cambridge, MA First Sunday Meetup: 06 May 2012 02:00PM
Cambridge, MA Third Sunday Meetup: 20 May 2012 02:20PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup h...
[SEQ RERUN] The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-04T06:05:51.602Z

Today's post, The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? was originally published on 13 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The failure of first-half-of-20th-century-physics was not due to straying from the scientific method. Science and rationality - that is, Science and Bayesianism - aren't the same thing, and sometimes they give different answers.

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 The Failures of Eld Science, 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.
Why do people ____?
by magfrump — 2012-05-04T04:20:36.854Z

The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.

As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.

And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."

But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?

And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?
Comments on Pascal's Mugging
by  — 2012-05-03T21:23:28.151Z

There seems to be some continuing debate about whether or not it is rational to appease a Pascal Mugger. Some are saying that due to scope insensitivity and other biases, we really should just trust what decision theory + Solomonoff induction tells us. I have been thinking about this a lot and I'm at the point where I think I have something to contribute to the discussion.

Consider the Pascal Mugging "Immediately begin to work only on increasing my utility, according to my utility function 'X', from now on, or my powers from outside the matrix will make minus 3^^^^3 utilons happen to you and yours."

Any agent can commit this Pascal's mugging (PM) against any other agent, at any time. A naive decision-theoretic expected-utility optimizer will always appease the mugger. Consider what the world would be like if all intelligent beings were this kind of agent.

When you see an agent, any agent, your only strategy would be to try to PM it before it PMs you. More likely, you will PM each other simultaneously, in which case the agent which finishes the mugging first 'wins'. If you finish mugging at the same time, the mugger that uses a larger integer in its threat 'wins'. (So you'll use the most compact notation possible and things like, "minus the Busy Beaver function of Graham's number utilons".)

This may continue until every agent in the community/world/universe has been PMed. Or maybe there could be one agent, a Pascal Highlander, who manages to escape being mugged and has his utility function come to dominate...

Except, there is nothing stipulating that the mugging has to be delivered in person. With a powerful radio source, you can PM everyone in your future light-cone unfortunate enough to decode your message, potentially highjacking entire distant civilizations of decision-theory users.

Pascal's mugging doesn't have to be targeted. You can claim to be a Herald of Omega and address your mugging "to whoever receives this transmission"

Another strategy might be to build a self-replicating robot (itself too dumb to be mugged) which has a radio which broadcasts a continuous fully general PM, and send it out into space. Then you commit suicide to avoid the fate of being mugged.

Now consider a hypothetical agent which completely ignores muggers. And mugs them back.

Consider what could happen if we...
Meetup : Washington DC meetup
by rocurley — 2012-05-03T20:24:46.161Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC meetup

WHEN:
12 May 2012 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Portrait Gallery, central plaza

Please note the date has changed; sorry for the inconvenience. Topic will be the recent critique of SI by givewell. http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC meetup
Meetup : SLC Meetup: Social Hacking Presentation
by hamnox — 2012-05-03T19:48:58.126Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SLC Meetup: Social Hacking Presentation

WHEN:
05 May 2012 01:49:28PM (-0600)

WHERE:
810 East 3300 South, Salt Lake City, UT

Meeting in the Calvin E. Smith Library

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Discussion article for the meetup : SLC Meetup: Social Hacking Presentation
Urgent: Subjects needed for rationality measure development
by Drewsmithyman — 2012-05-03T19:38:46.371Z

Hello everyone,

We at the Center For Applied Rationality (formerly known as the Center for Modern Rationality) need to measure the impact of our minicamps and develop rationality measures, and for this we need a group of test subjects. The interview portion will take about 5-10 minutes and the total time required will be about 30 minutes. All of it will be conducted online. If you are interested we also need you to be willing to fill out some follow-up surveys, questionnaires, etc. in one year, when it will also take about half an hour. The interviews and follow-up surveys will be interesting; you will be helping us conduct proper science; and you will get some information back which should provide you with some new self-knowledge, or at least entertainment.

The interviews will be fairly anonymous; we won't share your personal information with anyone. But, you MUST NOT discuss anything related to the interview with other people, ESPECIALLY not with other less wrongers, as that could mess up our entire process. We'd prefer for that not to happen, understandably.

If you are interested in doing this, please fill out this form. Thank you!

If anything in this process does not seem to be working, please send me an email at Drewsmithyman@gmail.com and let me know. Thank you for your time, and we hope to be interviewing many of you quite soon!
No independence of irrelevant alternatives (picture proof)
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-05-03T17:48:21.815Z

Back in the old days, when people were wise and the government was just, I did a post on the Nash bargaining solution for two player games. Here each player has their own utility function and they're choosing amongst joint options, and trying to bargain to find the best one. What was nice about this solution is that it is independent of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): once you've found the best solution, you can erase any other option, and it remains the best.

In order to do that, the Nash bargaining solution makes use of a "disagreement point", a special point that provides a zero to both utilities. This seems - and is - ugly. Can we preserve IIA without this clunky disagreement point?

By the title of the this post, you may have guessed that we can't. Specifically, assume the outcome is symmetric across both players (i.e. permuting the two utility functions preserves the outcome choice), the outcome is Pareto-optimal (any change will reduce the utility of at least one player) and there is no outside canonical choices for the utility functions (no special scales, no zeroes, no disagreement points). Then IIA must fail. It fails under weaker conditions as well, but the above lead to an easy picture-proof. And picture proofs are nice.

So assume there are five possible choices, whose utility values for the two players are (0, 3), (1.2, 2.6), (2, 2), (2.6, 1.2), (3, 0). These are graphed here:

The choice set is symmetric and the green point (2, 2) is Pareto-optimal and on the axis of symmetry. Hence by the assumptions, the green point must be the outcome chosen. Now further assume IIA, and we will derive a contradiction.

First, by IIA, we can erase the losing points (2.6, 1.2) and (3, 0). Then we can rescale the utility functions: the utility function graphed on the x axis is divided by two, while the utility graphed on the y axis has 2 subtracted from it. These changes are illustrated here:

This results in a final setup of (0, 1), (0.6, 0.6) and (1, 0):

But this is obviously wrong: symmetry implies the correct outcome should be the blue point (0.6, 0.6), not the green (1, 0) which was the outcome before we removed the "irrelevant" extra points. We have derived a contradiction, and IIA must fall.
Seeking links for the best arguments for economic libertarianism
by Bart119 — 2012-05-03T17:28:24.900Z

[see 'Update' below]

I know discussions of actual applied politics are to be avoided. I don't want to start one.

But I thought LessWrong people might be a source for where the best arguments have been made for libertarianism in the economic sense (not why you should stay out of people's bedrooms). Even better, arguments for some degree of socialism in the same place would be nice. It seems there is a natural continuum. To pick one specific realm: anywhere from 0% to 100% of a person's income could be allocated for redistribution to even things out. Where to put that number will inevitably be a matter of grubby politics (won't it?). But still, arguments for why we should have a low number or a high number must involve some basic disagreements which could be (hopefully) separated into different values, different estimated probabilities, and different attempts to apply a rational analysis.

The world is dripping with partisan analyses along these lines (with "warfare" rules). Where are the best ones that avoid that failing?

I considered posting this under "dumb questions" but I judged that it's not really a question about LessWrong per se.

Update: Thank you to all who took the time to reply. Perhaps I'm learning about how some would start applying consequentialism to a real-life problem. I expected people to point me to discussions about what's right and what's fair -- which is what I'd expect in most other forums. But I guess here my responders so far are taking this to be a sort of question for technocrats who can work out the utility. So my next question will be about consequentialism once I've thought about it a little more.
Fiction: A Setting Justifying the Epistemic Aggressiveness Of A Religion Stand-in
by  — 2012-05-03T15:33:10.282Z

I've just been thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know) and remembering my religious days, and one of the things that made me so anxious back then, and made adopting atheism so gratifying, what the sheer drought of information. I had so many, so many questions, and there were no satisfying answers to be found.

How do souls work? When one dies, what does bodiless existence feel like? What happens in Resurrection Day, do cripples come back as such? Do transsexuals come in the body they identify with? Is it a matter of self-image?

How does God intervene in the gaps? What will Paradise be like? How will society be organized? Will there be further education? Will human nature be radically changed to accomodate eternity? What about Hell? How does it work? What's the point of it?

And what does that verse mean? And what does that other? And what if the letter of the law, once centuries have passed and context has changed, goes against its spirit? What would God actually want me to do? Why am I supposed to guess? Why is it so important that my faith in Him be groundless and unsubstantiated? Why has He stopped giving orders directly, why has he relied on fallibe intermediaries and easily-tampered-with books?

So, abundant questions, very few, very vague answers. Important questions, too, an eternity of one's afterlife depends on them! So, I was wondering: is it possible to come up with a fictional setting, resembling the Theist-Abrahamic vision of the world, but mundane (perhaps a game? a computer simulation? a F(?)AI run society?) in which this drought of information is actually justified?

As an example of what I'm going for, Warhammer 40K's Imperium of Man gives us an example of a textbook fascist society whose every single trait is perfectly justified by the setting's rules. (See the "actually has something consistent to say about utilitarianism" subsection).

In what kind of world would a Supreme Authority's information-management policies resemble God's, and make sense? I'm not saying "be good" or even "be fair", just "make sense". Even in a Kafka-ish, "nonsensical" way.
Meetup : First Berlin meetup
by blob — 2012-05-03T15:30:26.852Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Berlin meetup

WHEN:
05 June 2012 07:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
52.525856,13.387371

It's the first public meetup in Berlin! Some local LW readers have met before, but the meetups were never announced beforehand. We're very interested in getting to know other like-minded people in the area.

We'll be meeting in the Trattoria Peretti, Friedrichstr. 133, in their courtyard if the weather permits it. I'll bring a sign. If you plan to attend, please let me know so I can make sure we get a well-sized table.

Note that google maps gets the location wrong for Friedrichstr. 133. The correct location is approximately 52.525856,13.387371.

Discussion article for the meetup : First Berlin meetup
Another reason why a lot of studies may be wrong
by Richard_Kennaway — 2012-05-03T11:17:11.885Z

It appears that standard lab rats and mice are all morbidly obese. Using them as model organisms may give misleading results that fail to transfer to humans, or even to healthy rats and mice.

Article in the Slate.

PNAS version.

Does this reduce the whole calorie-restriction thing to nothing more than the advice to not be a fat slob? Well, maybe not, according to the author, but it has to make one wonder.
Meetup : Less Wrong Sydney - Bayes and Fun Theory
by Oklord — 2012-05-03T11:11:17.701Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Sydney - Bayes and Fun Theory

WHEN:
21 May 2012 06:00:17PM (+1000)

WHERE:
77 Liverpool Street, Sydney, Australia, Level 2

As suggested via the FB group, this coming meeting's topic will be Bayes and Fun theory. Now looking for Bayes games!

We are making this regular now - So every 3rd week, alternating Mondays/Fridays. As before, we will meet at Cafe Norita for a topic as yet fleshed out. Join us on facebook for more info, or comment here for your suggestions!

http://www.facebook.com/groups/219526434802422/

P.S. Just a congratulations to the "Post Hocs" (so classy guys) on their win at last meetings' Fact or Crap game. Their superior use of confidence values to justify wild guessing was sublime!

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Sydney - Bayes and Fun Theory
[SEQ RERUN] The Failures of Eld Science
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-03T03:30:12.105Z

Today's post, The Failures of Eld Science was originally published on 12 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A short story set in the same world as "Initiation Ceremony". Future physics students look back on the cautionary tale of quantum physics.

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 Many Worlds, One Best Guess, 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.
[POLL] Do You Feel Oppressed? 
by maia — 2012-05-03T02:42:27.005Z

At Reason Rally a couple of months ago, we noticed that a lot of atheists there seemed to be there for mutual support - because their own communities rejected atheists, because they felt outnumbered and threatened by their peers; the rally was a way for them to feel part of an in-group. Reason Rally is definitely an event that selects for people who feel excluded by their communities most of the time. But there may be a different concentration of people who have had this sort of experience on LessWrong, and we wondered what that concentration was.

Hence, this survey: LessWrong Members and their Local Communities.

If I get a decent sample size, I will post the data for all to enjoy.

EDIT: I added two questions about current and previous religious views to the poll. If you took it before 11:30PM EST 5/2, I'd appreciate it very much if you would take the time to retake it. :)
Punctuality - Arriving on Time and Math
by Xachariah — 2012-05-03T01:35:57.920Z

In hindsight, this post seems incredibly obvious. The meat of it already exists in sayings which we all know we ought to listen to: "Always arrive 10 minutes earlier than you think early is," "If you arrive on time, then you're late," or "Better three hours too soon than one minute too late." Yet even with these sayings, I still never trusted them nor arrived on time. I'd miss deadlines, show up late, and just be generally tardy. The reason is that I never truly understood what it took to arrive on time until I grokked the math of it. So, while this may be remedial reading for most of you, I'm posting this because maybe there's someone out there who missed the same obviousness that I missed.

Statistical Distributions

Everyone here understands that our universe is controlled and explained by math. Math describes how heavenly bodies move. Math describes how our computers run. Math describes how other people act in aggregate. Wait a second, something's not right with that statement... "other people". The way it comes out it's natural to think that math controls the way that other people act, and not myself. Intellectually, I am aware that I am not a special snowflake who is exempt from the laws of math. While I had managed to propagate this thought far enough to crush my belief in libertarian free will, I hadn't propagated it fully through my mind. Specifically, I hadn't realized I could also use math to describe my actions and reap the benefit of understanding them mathematically. I was still late to arrive and missing deadlines, and nothing seemed to help.

But wait, I'm a rationalist! I know all about the planning fallacy; I know to take the outside view! That's enough to save me right? Well, not quite. It seemed I missed one last part of the puzzle... Bell Curves.

When I go to work every day, the time from when I do nothing but getting ready to go to work until the time that I actually arrive there (I'll just call this prep time) usually takes 45 minutes, but sometimes it can take more time or less time. Weirdly and crazily enough, if you plot all the prep times on a graph, the shape would end up looking roughly like a bell. Well that's funny. Math is for other people, but my behavior appears like it can be described sta...
[SEQ RERUN] Many Worlds, One Best Guess
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-02T04:48:25.600Z

Today's post, Many Worlds, One Best Guess was originally published on 11 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Summarizes the arguments that nail down macroscopic decoherence, aka the "many-worlds interpretation". Concludes that many-worlds wins outright given the current state of evidence. The argument should have been over fifty years ago. New physical evidence could reopen it, but we have no particular reason to expect this.

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 If Many-Worlds Had Come First, 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.