trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Canberra: Life Hacks Part 2
by DanielFilan — 2014-04-14T01:11:27.419Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Life Hacks Part 2

WHEN:
25 April 2014 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
ANU Arts Centre

In Life Hacks Part 1, we discussed life hacks and everyone picked one to try out. In this meetup, we will discuss how well they worked, what it was like to try them, and any unexpected upsides or downsides. Even if you couldn't make it to the previous meetup, come anyway - you might well discover a life hack that you want to try! As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

In unrelated news, the Less Wrong Australia Mega-Meetup is coming up! It will be an awesome event filled with awesome people doing awesome things! Learn more and register here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/k23/meetup_lw_australia_megameetup/

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwcanberra/

Structured meetups are held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late at the XSite (home of the XSA), located upstairs in the ANU Arts Centre - http://www.anuxsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/XSite-Map-First-Amendment.jpg

There will be LWers at the Computer Science Students Association's weekly board games night, held on Wednesdays from 7 pm in the CSIT building, room N101.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Life Hacks Part 2
European Community Weekend in Berlin Impressions Thread
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-04-13T20:33:43.927Z

The European Community Weekend in Berlin is over and was a full sucess.

This is no report of the event but a place where you can e.g. comment on the event, link to photos or what else you want to share.

I'm not the organizer of the Meetup but I have been there and for me it was a great event. Meeting many energetic, compassionate and in general awesome, people. Great presentations and workshops. And a very awesome positive athmosphere.

Cheers to all participants!

Gunnar

PS. I get it that there will be an upload of the presentations by the organizers and maybe some report of the results some time later. Those may or may not be linked from this post.
Beware technological wonderland, or, why text will dominate the future of communication and the Internet
by VipulNaik — 2014-04-13T17:34:23.869Z

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are speculative. I don't have a claim to expertise in this area. I welcome pushback and anticipate there's a reasonable chance I'll change my mind in light of new considerations.

One of the interesting ways that many 20th century forecasts made of the future went wrong is that they posited huge physical changes in the way life was organized. For instance, they posited huge changes in these dimensions:

The home living arrangements of people. Smart homes and robots were routinely foreseen over time horizons where progress towards those ends would later turn out to be negligible.

Overoptimistic as well as overpessimistic scenarios of energy sources merged in strange ways. People believed the world would run out of oil by now, but at the same time envisioned nuclear-powered flight and home electricity.

Overoptimistic visions of travel: People thought humans would be sending out regular manned missions to the solar system planets, and space colonization would be on the agenda by now.

The types of products that would be manufactured. New products ranging from synthetic meat to room temperature superconductors were routinely prophesied to happen in the near future. Some of them may still happen, but they'll take a lot longer than people had optimistically expected.

At the same time, they underestimated to quite an extent the informational changes in the world:

With the exception of forecasters specifically studying computing trends, most missed the dramatic growth of computing and the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web.

Most people didn't appreciate the extent of the information and communication revolution and how it would coexist with a world that looked physically indinstinguishable from the world of 30 years ago. Note that I'm looking here at the most advanced First World places, and ignoring the point that many places (particularly in China) have experienced huge physical changes as a result of catch-up growth.

My LessWrong post on megamistakes discusses these themes somewhat in #1 (the technological wonderland and timing point) and #2 (the exceptional case of computing).

What about predictions within the informational realm? I detect a similar bias. It seems that prognosticators and forecasters tend to give undue weight to heavyweight technologies (such as 3D videoconferencing) and ignore the fact that the bulk of...
Meetup : LW Australia Mega-Meetup
by Ruby — 2014-04-13T11:23:34.500Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Australia Mega-Meetup

WHEN: 09 May 2014 05:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE: Kanangra Drive, Gwandalan NSW 2259

The organisers of LW Melbourne, LW Sydney, and LW Canberra are elated to announce the first-ever Less Wrong Australia Mega-Meetup!

What: Rationality-themed Weekend Retreat
Where: Point Wolstoncroft Sports and Recreation Centre, NSW
When: May 9-11, Friday evening - Sunday afternoon
Cost: $250*

*$280 after April 25

Enjoy and grow in the company of others who are committed to improving their rationality and to personal growth. The schedule is laden with sessions on rationality skills, revision and teaching of CFAR modules, prediction markets, lightning talks, and all round enlightenment.

The retreat will take place at an idyllic location on the eastern foreshore of Lake Macquarie. Expect glorious outdoors, BBQ, beer, boardgames, bushwalking, and activities selected by popular choice from rock climbing, archery, canoeing, kayaking, and sailing.

Registration is open now: http://goo.gl/425hyo

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Australia Mega-Meetup
Meetup : Buffalo LW - Thursday Meetup
by StonesOnCanvas — 2014-04-13T00:21:31.420Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW - Thursday Meetup

WHEN:
17 April 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Panera Bread 765 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY

Buffalo LW meetups occur twice a month (even when I fail to post on LW). Visit the meetup.com page for details: http://www.meetup.com/Less-Wrong-Buffalo/

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW - Thursday Meetup
Evaluating GiveWell as a startup idea based on Paul Graham's philosophy
by VipulNaik — 2014-04-12T14:04:12.832Z

Effective altruism is a growing movement, and a number of organizations (mostly foundations and nonprofits) have been started in the domain. One of the very first of these organizations, and arguably the most successful and influential, has been charity evaluator GiveWell. In this blog post, I examine the early history of GiveWell and see what factors in this early history helped foster its success.

My main information source is GiveWell's original business plan (PDF, 86 pages). I'll simply refer to this as the "GiveWell business plan" later in the post and will not link to the source each time. If you're interested in what the GiveWell website looked like at the time, you can browse the website as of early May 2007 here.

To provide more context to GiveWell's business plan, I will look at it in light of Paul Graham's pathbreaking article How to Get Startup Ideas. The advice here is targeted at early stage startups. GiveWell doesn't quite fit the "for-profit startup" mold, but GiveWell in its early stages was a nonprofit startup of sorts. Thus, it would be illustrative to see just how closely GiveWell's choices were in line with Paul Graham's advice.

There's one obvious way that this analysis is flawed and inconclusive: I do not systematically compare GiveWell with other organizations. There is no "control group" and no possibility of isolating individual aspects that predicted success. I intend to write additional posts later on the origins of other effective altruist organizations, after which a more fruitful comparison can be attempted. I think it's still useful to start with one organization and understand it thoroughly. But keep this limitation in mind before drawing any firm conclusions, or believing that I have drawn firm conclusions.

The idea: working on a real problem that one faces at a personal level, is acutely familiar with, is of deep interest to a (small) set of people right now, and could eventually be of interest to many people

Graham writes (emphasis mine):

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you

...
How relevant are the lessons from Megamistakes to forecasting today?
by VipulNaik — 2014-04-12T04:53:59.786Z

Disclaimer: This post contains unvetted off-the-cuff thoughts. I've included quotes from the book in a separate quote dump post to prevent this post from getting too long. Read the intro and the TL;DR if you want a quick idea of what I'm saying.

As part of a review of the track record of forecasting and the sorts of models used for it, I read the book Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change (1989) by Steven P. Schnaars (here's a review of the book by the Los Angeles Times from back when it was published). I conducted my review in connection with contract work for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, but the views expressed here are solely mine and have not been vetted by MIRI. Note that this post is not a full review of the book. Instead, it simply discusses some aspects of the book I found relevant.

The book is a critique of past forecasting efforts. The author identifies many problems with these forecasting efforts, and offers suggestions for improvement. But the book was written in 1989, when the Internet was just starting out and the World Wide Web didn't exist. Thus, the book's suggestions and criticisms may be outdated in one or more of these three ways:

Some of the suggestions in the book were mistaken, and this has become clearer based on evidence gathered since the publication of the book: I don't think the book was categorically mistaken on any count. The author was careful to hedge appropriately in cases where the evidence wasn't very strongly in a particular direction. But point #1 below is in the direction of the author not giving appropriate weight to a particular aspect of his analysis.

Some of the suggestions or criticisms in the book don't apply today because the sorts of predictions being made today are of a different nature: We'll argue this to be the case in #2 below.

Some of the suggestions in the book are already implemented routinely by forecasters today, so they don't make sense as criticisms even though they continue to be valid guidelines. We'll argue this to be the case in #3 below.

I haven't been able to locate any recent work of the author where he assesses his own work in light of new evidence; if any readers can find such material, please link to it in the comments.

TL;DR

A number of the technologies that Schnaars notes were predicted to happen before 1989 and didn't, have in fact happene

...
Quote dump for "megamistakes"
by VipulNaik — 2014-04-12T04:53:56.731Z

This post contains a dump of the less important quotes from Megamistakes that I omitted from the main post in order to keep it short.

#1: Quote dumps related to bad timing

On the fax machine, quote from p. 57 of the book:

Originally, the facsimile machine, or sending mail by phone, was targeted toward business customers. Although a bright future was predicted for those devices, it took nearly twenty years for the product to exhibit rapid growth. Twenty years ago, in 1968, Xerox and Magnavox were joined by Litton, Stewart-Warner, and a host of other entrants in an attempt to garner the lion's share of this growth market. They all believed it was "on the verge of a boom akin to that of the office copier." One executive predicted that the sales would climb to 500,000 units in just a few years, even though only 4,000 were currently in use for business corespondence.

The innovation failed to catch fire. It was too expensive and took too long to send a single document — ten 8 1/2-by-11-inch sheets in an entire day! No wonder companies called the courier.

By 1987 the situation had changed. Prices had been reduce dramatically, and performance had increased. Driven by consumer and small business purchases, sales skyrocketed to nearly 300,000 units in 1987. After twenty years, the balance between price and performance finally stirred a growth market for this innovation and warranted the optimism that had originally been applied to it. In the case of facsimile machines, change came much more slowly than expected.

The book later notes (p. 118):

Facsimile machines lingered for decades until technological advances enhanced the benefits and allowed price declines to spawn a larger market. Only now, after many false starts, has the market for facsimile machines exploded. The balance between price and performance has been struck. The machines send documents faster and cheaper, and are now a "hot" product.

Here are some of the technologies that Schnaars notes as failed predictions, but that have since emerged in a form approximately similar to what was predicted:

Computerphones (now implemented as smartphones, though the original vision was of similar phones as landline phones rather than mobile phones). Quote from p. 83:

The computerphone, a recent innovation which married the data processing capabilities of the personal computer to the voice and data communications

...
Meetup : Christchurch, NZ Inaugural Meetup
by free_rip — 2014-04-12T02:37:53.676Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Christchurch, NZ Inaugural Meetup

WHEN: 27 April 2014 04:30:00PM (+1200)

WHERE: James Hight Library, University of Canterbury, Room 901

Join us for the first Christchurch meetup!

It will be held in room 901, James Hight Library at the University of Canterbury. Just head in the front (only) doors to James Hight, find an elevator (don't take the stairs, they only go up one floor), go up to floor 9 and you'll find room 901 along one of the walls. If you're unsure of how to get there feel free to comment below, PM me for directions or PM me for a cell number in case you get lost.

I'll be there from 4pm, so arrive anytime 4-4.30 to chat and meet people. We'll start the planned activities at 4.30 and go for as long as people would like.

As for what the planned activities are to be - I'm open to suggestions! As a default, we'll start with a few introduction games, move onto discussing an article or two, and finish up with some fun (quick to learn) card games like Story Wars.

Update:

Introductions: I'm going to take some advice from my positive psychology textbook, and suggest we introduce ourselves by telling everyone about a time we showed great character (whatever that means to you). I'll give a few examples at the time, and we may have to turn off our 'anti-bragging' instincts, but it should be a good way to get things started in the theme for the night.

Discussion article: [How to be Happy](http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/). Read if you have time, if not show up anyway! It should be easy to contribute to. There'll also be some unstructured discussion and probably loads of great tangents.

Games: As stated above, I'll bring along Story Wars, a game where you try and win by telling the most believable story about how your fantastical character would beat all the others. We can play or not depending on how time is going and what people want to do.

Discussion article for the meetup : Christchurch, NZ Inaugural Meetup
Botworld: a cellular automaton for studying self-modifying agents embedded in their environment
by So8res — 2014-04-12T00:56:23.138Z

On April 1, I started working full-time for MIRI. In the weeks prior, while I was winding down my job and packing up my things, Benja and I built Botworld, a cellular automaton that we've been using to help us study self-modifying agents. Today, we're publicly releasing Botworld on the new MIRI github page. To give you a feel for Botworld, I've reproduced the beginning of the technical report below.

This report introduces Botworld, a cellular automaton that provides a toy environment for studying self-modifying agents.

The traditional agent framework, used for example in Markov Decision Processes and in Marcus Hutter’s universal agent AIXI, splits the universe into an agent and an environment, which interact only via discrete input and output channels.

Such formalisms are perhaps ill-suited for real self-modifying agents, which are embedded within their environments. Indeed, the agent/environment separation is somewhat reminiscent of Cartesian dualism: any agent using this framework to reason about the world does not model itself as part of its environment. For example, such an agent would be unable to understand the concept of the environment interfering with its internal computations, e.g. by inducing errors in the agent’s RAM through heat.

Intuitively, this separation does not seem to be a fatal flaw, but merely a tool for simplifying the discussion. We should be able to remove this “Cartesian” assumption from formal models of intelligence. However, the concrete non-Cartesian models that have been proposed (such as Orseau and Ring’s formalism for space-time embedded intelligence, Vladimir Slepnev’s models of updateless decision theory, and Yudkowsky and Herreshoff’s tiling agents) depart significantly from their Cartesian counterparts.

Botworld is a toy example of the type of universe that these formalisms are designed to reason about: it provides a concrete world containing agents (“robots”) whose internal computations are a part of the environment, and allows us to study what happens when the Cartesian barrier between an agent and its environment breaks down. Botworld allows us to write decision problems where the Cartesian barrier is relevant, program actual agents, and run the system.

As it turns out, many interesting problems arise when agents are embedded in their environment. For example, agents who...
Supply, demand, and technological progress: how might the future unfold? Should we believe in runaway exponential growth?
by VipulNaik — 2014-04-11T19:07:09.786Z

Warning: This is a somewhat long-winding post with a number of loosely related thoughts and no single, cogent thesis. I have included a TL;DR after the introduction, listing the main points. All corrections and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

It's commonly known, particularly to LessWrong readers, that in the world of computer-related technology, key metrics have been doubling fairly quickly, with doubling times ranging from 1 to 3 years for most metrics. The most famous paradigmatic example is Moore's law, which predicts that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law itself stood up quite well until about 2005, but one of its implications, based on Dennard scaling, broke down after that (see here for a detailed overview of the breakdown by Sebastian Nickel). Another similar proposed law is Kryder's law, which looks at the doubling of hard disk storage capacity. Chapters 2 and 3 of Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near goes into detail regarding the technological acceleration (for an assessment of Kurzweil's prediction track record, see here).

One of the key questions facing futurists, including those who want to investigate the Singularity, is the question of whether such exponential-ish growth will continue for long enough for the Singularity to be achieved. Some other reasonable possibilities:

Growth will continue for a fairly long time, but slow down to a linear pace and therefore we don't have to worry about the Singularity for a very long time.

Growth will continue but converge to an asymptotic value (well below the singularity threshold)beyond which improvements aren't possible. Therefore, growth will progressively slow down but still continue as we come closer and closer to the asymptotic value

Growth will come to a halt, because there is insufficient demand at the margin for improvement in the technology.

Ray Kurzweil strongly adheres to the exponential-ish growth model, at least for the duration necessary to reach computers that are thousands of times as powerful as humanity (that's what he calls the Singularity). He argues that although individual paradigms (such as Moore's law) eventually run out of steam, new paradigms tend to replace them. In the context of computational speed, efficiency, and compactness, he mentions nanotechnology, 3D computing, DNA computing, quantum computin...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-04-11T16:09:38.743Z

This summary was posted to LW main on April 4th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Las Vegas/Henderson, NV: 01 May 2014 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta: Problems With Friendly AI: A (non-technical) MIRI Book Review: 12 April 2014 07:00PM
Bratislava Meetup XI.: 07 April 2014 06:00PM
Bratislava Meetup XII.: 28 April 2014 06:00PM
Canberra Meetup: Life hacks part 1: 12 April 2014 07:00PM
Chicago: Seeing with Fresh Eyes Review: 05 April 2014 03:00AM
Frankfurt meetup: 17 April 2014 05:00PM
Hamburg - Report from Berlin: 26 April 2014 05:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 13 April 2014 03:00PM
Moscow Meet up: 06 April 2014 04:00PM
Munich Meetup: 06 April 2014 01:00PM
Sydney Social Meetup - April (Bridge walk): 10 April 2014 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - April: 23 April 2014 07:30PM
Tempe, AZ (ASU): 04 April 2014 06:30PM
Urbana-Champaign: Rationality and Cooking: 06 April 2014 12:01PM
Utrecht: More on effective altruism: 05 April 2014 05:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 05 April 2025 01:30PM
[Berlin] Community Weekend in Berlin: 11 April 2014 04:00PM
Boston - Schelling Day: 16 April 2014 07:00PM
Brussels - all fun and games: 19 April 2014 12:00PM
NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6: 05 April 2014 12:00PM
Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day: 20 April 2014 02:45PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 informa...
Meetup: Philadelphia, April 12, 1PM
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-04-11T08:24:08.260Z

WHEN: 12 April 2014 1:00 PM

WHERE: Philadelphia

The meetup is at Nam Phuong (llth and Broad) at 1:00 PM. This is a Saturday (change from the previous Sunday meetups).

Discussion prompt: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/17/not-just-a-mere-political-issue/

Discussion group/mailing list
Meetup : Phoenix/ASU Less Wrong
by Danny_Hintze — 2014-04-10T05:39:27.175Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix/ASU Less Wrong

WHEN:
12 April 2014 10:00:00AM (-0700)

WHERE:
300 E Orange Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281

We will be meeting up at Hayden Library. We're going to try a Saturday morning meetup to mix up the states of mind and see if we can bring some new people out of the woodwork.

We will probably continue what has so far been a productive search for topics of disagreement. We will also likely be discussing the Data Science Coursera study group.

Discussion article for the meetup : Phoenix/ASU Less Wrong