trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
by Viliam — 2016-05-17T08:26:07.420Z

Hi, do you read the LessWrong website, but haven't commented yet (or not very much)? Are you a bit scared of the harsh community, or do you feel that questions which are new and interesting for you could be old and boring for the older members?

This is the place for the new members to become courageous and ask what they wanted to ask. Or just to say hi.

The older members are strongly encouraged to be gentle and patient (or just skip the entire discussion if they can't).

Newbies, welcome!

The long version:

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

A few notes about the site mechanics

To post your first comment, you must have carried out the e-mail confirmation: When you signed up to create your account, an e-mail was sent to the address you provided with a link that you need to follow to confirm your e-mail address. You must do this before you can post!

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missin

...
Meetup : LW-cologne meetup May
by EGI — 2016-05-16T20:26:20.363Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW-cologne meetup May

WHEN:
21 May 2016 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Marienweg 43, 50858

Monthly LW-cologne meetup. Please pm me if you wish to attend and are not in our Doodle.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW-cologne meetup May
Meetup : Melbourne Social: May
by Maelin — 2016-05-16T13:33:05.749Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social: May

WHEN:
20 May 2016 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Alchemist's Refuge, 328 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne 3000

This month's Melbourne Social Meetup is on as scheduled!
(Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/224476817935623 )
Social Meetups are casual get-togethers held on the third Friday of each month. They are informal affairs where we sit around and chat over a few drinks and a meal. Sometimes we will play games as well.
Where? Alchemist's Refuge, downstairs at 328 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne CBD
When? Friday 20th May, starting from 6:30pm. Start time is loose so show up whenever. We are usually there until about 11pm.
Dinner? We usually go for a late dinner after the event. Recently we've been going to Father's Office which offers late night a la carte dining at half price.
Games? The Refuge has a few games available for borrowing. Feel free to bring a game if you'd like to play! It's usually pretty easy to rustle up a group.
Contact? Any issues or questions, contact Richard on 0421231789.
Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social: May
Open Thread May 16 - May 22, 2016
by Elo — 2016-05-15T23:35:24.011Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Information Hazards and Community Hazards
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-05-14T20:54:36.238Z

Information Hazards and Community Hazards

As aspiring rationalists, we generally seek to figure out the truth and hold relinquishments as a virtue, namely that whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be.

The only case where this does not apply are information hazards, defined as “a risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.” For instance, if you tell me you committed a murder and make me an accessory after the fact, you have exposed me to an information hazard. In talking about information hazards, we focus on information that is harmful to the individual who receives that information.

Yet a recent conversation at my local LessWrong meetup in Columbus brought up the issue of what I would like to call community hazards, namely topics that it would be dangerous to talk about in a community setting. These are topics that are emotionally challenging and hold the risk of tearing apart the fabric of LW community groups if they are discussed.

Now, being a community hazard doesn’t mean that the topic is off-limits, especially in the context of a smaller, private LW meetup of fellow aspiring rationalists. What we decided to do is that if anyone in our LW meetup decides a topic is a community hazard, we would go meta and have a discussion about whether we should discuss the topic. We would examine whether discussing it would be emotionally challenging and how challenging it would be, whether discussing it holds the risk of taking down Chesterton’s Fences that we don’t want taken down, whether there are certain aspects of the topic that could be discussed with minimal negative consequences, or if perhaps only some members of the group would like to discuss it and then they can meet separately.

This would work differently in the context of a public rationality event, of course, of the type we do for a local secular humanist group as part of our rationality outreach work. There, we decided to use moderation strategies to head off community hazards at the pass, as the audience includes non-rationalists who may not be capable of discussing a community hazard-related topic well.

I wanted to share about this concept and these tactics in the hope that it might be helpful to other LW meetups.
Attention! Financial scam targeting Less Wrong users
by Viliam_Bur — 2016-05-14T17:38:56.715Z

Recently, multiple suspicious user accounts were created on Less Wrong. These accounts don't post any content in the forum. Instead, they are used only to send private messages to the existing users.

Many users have received a copy of the same message, but different variants exist, too. Here are the examples I know about. If you have received a different variant, please post it in a comment below this article:

Hi good day. My boss is interested on donating to MIRI's project and he is wondering if he could send money through you and you donate to miri through your company and thus accelertaing the value created. He wants to use "match donations" as a way of donating thats why he is looking for people in companies like you. I want to discuss more about this so if you could see this message please give me a reply. Thank you!

hi. ive made 500k+ the last half year on esport betting and i can show proof. i was a great poker player before that so i have reason to believe i am good and wellsuited at this. i want to offer free education to one of the efw people that have their priorities straight in this world and will work towards minimising existential risk. the higher intelligence the better. ultimately i would like to offload some work to someone because currently i am gettin gquite a bit burnt out and i would like to study finance, and having someone take advantage of the incredible ineffeciencies in this area is of huge importance. i would like to discuss this with someone and how to make it real, and have exchange of thoughts on all of the aspects on how to best do it. i can post proof and make donations to miri to show im serious so that we or someone else could have a discussion about it

I don't know yet about anyone who replied and got scammed, so this is all based on indirect evidence. If you got scammed, please tell me. If you are ashamed, I can publish your story anonymously. Your story could help other potential victims.

Most likely, the scheme is the following:

The scammer will send you money.

Then they will ask some of the money back because they changed their mind, or they mistakenly sent you more than they wanted, or their financial situation suddenly changed, or whatever.

After receiving the money from you, they will flag the original transaction as a fraud, so they get back the money they originally sent you, plus the mon

...
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Results
by namespace — 2016-05-14T17:38:39.338Z

Foreword:

As we wrap up the 2016 survey, I'd like to start by thanking everybody who took
the time to fill it out. This year we had 3083 respondents, more than twice the
number we had last year. (Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lhg/2014_survey_results/)
This seems consistent with the hypothesis that the LW community hasn't declined
in population so much as migrated into different communities. Being the *diaspora*
survey I had expectations for more responses than usual, but twice as many was
far beyond them.
Before we move on to the survey results, I feel obligated to put a few affairs
in order in regards to what should be done next time. The copyright situation
for the survey was ambiguous this year, and to prevent that from happening again
I'm pleased to announce that this years survey questions will be released jointly
by me and Scott Alexander as Creative Commons licensed content. We haven't
finalized the details of this yet so expect it sometime this month.
I would also be remiss not to mention the large amount of feedback we received
on the survey. Some of which led to actionable recommendations I'm going to
preserve here for whoever does it next:
- Put free response form at the very end to suggest improvements/complain.
- Fix metaethics question in general, lots of options people felt were missing.
- Clean up definitions of political affilations in the short politics section.
In particular, 'Communist' has an overly aggressive/negative definition.
- Possibly completely overhaul short politics section.
- Everywhere that a non-answer is taken as an answer should be changed so that
non answer means what it ought to, no answer or opinion. "Absence of a signal
should never be used as a signal." - Julian Bigelow, 1947
- Give a definition for the singularity on the question asking when you think it
will occur.
- Ask if people are *currently* suffering from depression. Possibly add more
probing questions on depression in general since the rates are so extraordinarily
high.
- Include a link to what cisgender means on the gender question.
- Specify if the income question is before or after taxes.
- Add charity questions about time donated.
- Add "ineligible to vote" option to the voting question.
- Adding some way for those who are pregnant to indicate it on the number of
children question would be nice. It might be onerous however s...
Social effects of algorithms that accurately identify human behaviour and traits
by Stefan_Schubert — 2016-05-14T10:48:27.159Z

Related to: Could auto-generated troll scores reduce Twitter and Facebook harassments?, Do we underuse the genetic heuristic? and Book review of The Reputation Society (part I, part II).

Today, algorithms can accurately identify personality traits and levels of competence from computer-observable data. FiveLabs and YouAreWhatYouLike are, for instance, able to reliably identify your personality traits from what you've written and liked on Facebook. Similarly, it's now possible for algorithms to fairly accurately identify how empathetic counselors and therapists are, and to identify online trolls. Automatic grading of essays is getting increasingly sophisticated. Recruiters rely to an increasing extent on algorithms, which, for instance, are better at predicting levels of job retention among low-skilled workers than human recruiters.

These sorts of algorithms will no doubt become more accurate, and cheaper to train, in the future. With improved speech recognition, it will presumably be possible to assess both IQ and personality traits through letting your device overhear longer conversations. This could be extremely useful to, e.g. intelligence services or recruiters.

Because such algorithms could identify competent and benevolent people, they could provide a means to better social decisions. Now an alternative route to better decisions is by identifying, e.g. factual claims as true or false, or arguments as valid or invalid. Numerous companies are working on such issues, with some measure of success, but especially when it comes to more complex and theoretical facts or arguments, this seems quite hard. It seems to me unlikely that we will have algorithms that are able to point out subtle fallacies anytime soon. By comparison, it seems like it would be much easier for algorithms to assess people's IQ or personality traits by looking at superficial features of word use and other readily observable behaviour. As we have seen, algorithms are already able to do that to some extent, and significant improvements in the near future seem possible.

Thus, rather than improving our social decisions by letting algorithms adjudicate the object-level claims and arguments, we rather use them to give reliable ad hominem-arguments against the participants in the debate. To wit, rather than letting our algorithms show that certain politicians claims are false and that his argument...
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part One (Meta and Demographics)
by namespace — 2016-05-14T06:09:15.175Z

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis

Overview

Results and Dataset

Meta

Demographics (You are here)

LessWrong Usage and Experience

LessWrong Criticism and Successorship

Diaspora Community Analysis

What it all means for LW 2.0

Mental Health Section

Basilisk Section/Analysis

Blogs and Media analysis

Politics

Calibration Question And Probability Question Analysis

Charity And Effective Altruism Analysis

Survey Meta

Introduction

Hello everybody, this is part one in a series of posts analyzing the 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey. The survey ran from March 24th to May 1st and had 3083 respondents.

Almost two thousand eight hundred and fifty hours were spent surveying this year and you've all waited nearly two months from the first survey response to the results writeup. While the results have been available for over a week, they haven't seen widespread dissemination in large part because they lacked a succinct summary of their contents.

When we started the survey in march I posted this graph showing the dropoff in question responses over time:

So it seems only reasonable to post the same graph with this years survey data:

(I should note that this analysis counts certain things as questions that the other chart does not, so it says there are many more questions than the previous survey when in reality where are about as many as last year.)

2016 Diaspora Survey Stats

Survey hours spent in total: 2849.818888888889

Average number of minutes spent on survey: 102.14404619673437

Median number of minutes spent on survey: 39.775

Mode minutes spent on survey: 20.266666666666666

The takeaway here seems to be that some people take a long time with the survey, raising the average. However, most people's survey time is somewhere below the forty five minute mark. LessWrong does a very long survey, and I wanted to make sure that investment was rewarded with a deep detailed analysis. Weighing in at over four thousand lines of python code, I hope the analysis I've put together is worth the wait.

Credits

I'd like to thank people who contributed to the analysis effort:

Bartosz Wroblewski

Kuudes on #lesswrong

Obormot on #lesswrong

Two anonymous contributors

And anybody else who I may have forgotten. Thanks again to Scott Alexander, who wrote the majority of the survey and ran it in 2014, and who has also been generous enough to license his part of the survey under a cr

...
2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part One (Meta and Demographics)
by namespace — 2016-05-14T06:07:07.173Z

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis

Overview

Meta

Demographics (You are here)

LessWrong Usage and Experience

LessWrong Criticism and Successorship

Diaspora Community Analysis

What it all means for LW 2.0

Transition into non-core/bonus sections.

Mental Health Section

Basilisk Section/Analysis

Blogs and Media analysis

Calibration Question And Probability Question Analysis

Charity And Effective Altruism Analysis

When we started the survey in march I posted this graph showing the dropoff in question responses over time:

So it seems only reasonable to post the same graph with this years survey data:

(I should note that this analysis counts certain things as questions that the other chart does not, so it says there are many more questions than the previous survey when in reality where are about as many as last year.)

Almost two thousand eight hundred and fifty hours were spent surveying this year and you've all waited nearly two months from the first survey response to the results writeup. While the results have been available for over a week, they haven't seen widespread dissemination in large part because they lacked a succinct summary of their contents. What you are reading now will of course be that summary. First, some statistics on the survey itself:

Survey hours spent in total: 2849.818888888889
Average number of minutes spent on survey: 102.14404619673437
Median number of minutes spent on survey: 39.775
Mode minutes spent on survey: 20.266666666666666

The takeaway here seems to be that some people take a long time with the survey, raising the average. However, most people's survey time is somewhere below the forty five minute mark. LessWrong does a very long survey, and I wanted to make sure that investment was rewarded with a deep detailed analysis. Weighing in at over four thousand lines of python code, I hope the analysis I've put together is worth the wait. Before I continue I'd like to thank people who contributed to the analysis effort:

Bartosz Wroblewski (Bawr on #lesswrong)

Kuudes on #lesswrong

Obormot on #lesswrong

Two anonymous contributors

And anybody else who I may have forgotten. Thanks again to Scott Alexander, who wrote the majority of the survey and ran it in 2014, and who has also been generous enough to license his part of the survey under a creative commons license along with mine.

Demographics

The 2014 survey gave ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-05-13T16:05:38.784Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 13th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
Sao Paulo - Meetup de maio: 21 May 2016 02:00PM

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:

Moscow: Fermi calculations, VNM-rationality, paranoid calibration game: 15 May 2016 02:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games: 16 May 2016 06:15PM
San Jose Meetup: Park Day (III): 15 May 2016 03:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - June: 05 June 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - July: 03 July 2016 04:00PM
Vienna: 14 May 2016 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 15 May 2016 03:30PM

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, 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 notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfu...
Meetup : Moscow: Fermi calculations, VNM-rationality, paranoid calibration game
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-05-12T22:45:24.908Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Fermi calculations, VNM-rationality, paranoid calibration game

WHEN:
15 May 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
ул. Большая Дорогомиловская, д.5к2

Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.

Pad with the details about 15.05.2016 meetup.

We're meeting at "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Fermi calculations, VNM-rationality, paranoid calibration game
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games
by rocurley — 2016-05-12T20:02:49.448Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games

WHEN:
16 May 2016 06:15:39PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St. San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games!

You can call 301-458-0764 to be let in.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games