trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Spectral signal in halo stars, ETI suspected.
by morganism — 2016-10-23T20:21:26.387Z

these folks went looking for a signal, and found it. Hidden in noise, it is a simple beacon, but you have to use a Fourier transform to pick it out.

The really strange thing is that is only found in the same spectral class stars as our sun.

To the authors, this suggests a beacon for contact.

To me, this suggests a targeting light, a probe wavefront that marks a system as biologically active, and marked for destruction by a machine culture. There is location info in the database, so it could be modeled, to see if it looks like a bootstrap wave, and would be curious if there is a string of supernovas behind it.

Since most of the found signals are in halo stars, it is more likely an invasion from another galaxy, then a local population.

Don't shout in the jungle at night....

http://phys.org/news/2016-10-stars-strange-aliens-contact.html

Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Analysis of 2.5 million SDSS spectra found signals predicted in a previous publication in only 234 stars overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031

And there are weird things happening in galactic clusters too. As i posted in the open thread, a super dense cluster is the only way to stop a hypervelocity attack on a home base whether a planetary or Dyson structure. You can't hit something something at a % of C, if there are a bunch of stars in the way.

Astronomers discover densest galaxy ever

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130924141701.htm

Ultraluminous X-ray bursts in two ultracompact companions to nearby elliptical galaxies. Nature, 2016; 538 (7625): 356 DOI: 10.1038/nature19822

The rise times of all of the flares were less than one minute, and the flares then decayed over about an hour.One source flared once to a peak luminosity of 9 × 1040 erg per second; the other flared five times to 1040 erg per second.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7625/full/nature19822.html
A Year of Putting a Numonit
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-10-23T07:03:36.000Z

Happy birthday to Putanumonit!

Come celebrate with me next Friday (10/28) at Zach Weinersmith’s BAH Fest West. If you move fast you can grab one of the few remaining $10 tickets. I’m giving a talk on the dumbest idea ever to solve the global food crisis. For a taste, here’s my performance from last year’s BAH Fest in MIT where I talked about sleepwalking and made fun of Max Tegmark. If I win, drinks on me.

My initial plan for the blog was to quietly practice writing for a few years until I feel I can produce something that deserves to be read. Instead, Scott Alexander linked to the third post I ever wrote and brought 5,000 readers along. In late December I decided that making Scott’s blogroll would be my goal for 2016. It happened on 12/29/2015. In May, “Shopping for Happiness” was the post of the day on The Browser, one spot ahead of Scott.

Thank you Scott! And thanks to everyone who shared, reddited, tweeted, The Browsered, Metafiltered and to everyone who told their mom. Thanks to everyone who commented, emailed me, and a huge thanks to wonderful people who joined me in donating to GiveDirectly.

Whenever a post of mine is shared there are discussions of it happening in 5 places at once (Reddit, LW, Facebook..) I do my best to engage with all of them, but I would love to consolidate most of the conversation here in the comments so it’s visible next to the post.

Two things to encourage this: first, I would like to remind everyone of my $5 reward policy for comments correcting major errors in my posts, like this one.

Second, here’s a rundown of the best comments of the year, with apologies to those I missed: scholar on male porn actors, blastmeister101 on national soccer success, my greatest fan on baby hatches, StrivingForConsistency on patterns in lottery tickets, Benjamin Arthur Schwab wrote an article on the game theory of dating in response to my article on the game theory of dating, Maggie taking first steps in LessWrongianism, BAS, entirelyuseless and JulianR on inequality, Chebky on thaumatology, Alexander Stanislaw pushing back on the GDA, Peter Gerdes disbelieves beliefs, best gamer mouse on the best gaming mouse.

One thing y’all aren’t helping me with is achieving my goal for this blog: becoming a better writer. You critique my ideas six ways to Sunday but never a grammar mistake, a poor...
What's the most annoying part of your life/job?
by Liron — 2016-10-23T03:37:55.440Z

Hi, I'm an entrepreneur looking for a startup idea.

In my experience, the reason most startups fail is because they never actually solve anyone's problem. So I'm cheating and starting out by identifying a specific person with a specific problem.

So I'm asking you, what's the most annoying part of your life/job? Also, how much would you pay for a solution?
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-10-23T00:26:25.104Z

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

WHEN:
23 October 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

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

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
New LW Meetup: Zurich
by FrankAdamek — 2016-10-21T10:47:45.030Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on October 21st. The following week's summary is here.

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

Zürich social Rationality meetup: 29 October 2016 05:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Munich Meetup in October: 29 October 2016 04:00PM
Stockholm: Mental contrasting: 21 October 2016 04:00PM

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

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery: 26 October 2016 07:40PM
NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Stories: 24 October 2016 06:15PM
Washington, D.C.: Technology of Communication: 23 October 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, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in or...
Transitive negotiations with counterfactual agents
by Scott Garrabrant — 2016-10-20T23:27:04.000Z

The main purpose of this post is to make the following minor observation: If an agents only acausally trade with other agents that they believe actually possibly exist, they can still end up effectively trading with agents that they know to be counterfactual. This is possible because the agent can believe there exists a middle man who believes that the counterfactual agent might exist. This may have consequences bargaining and decision theory, especially in cases like the counterfactual mugging.

Consider a counterfactual mugging problem. Agent A knows that the millionth digit of pi is a odd, and is in a counterfactual mugging problem. If Omega predicts that agent A will pay 1 dollar if the millionth digit of pi is odd, then agent B will receive 1000 dollars if the millionth digit of pi is even. I (nonstandardly) think of A and B as two different agents. A contains in memory a proof that the millionth digit of pi is odd, while B contains in memory a proof that the millionth digit of pi is even. Note that agent B does not exist, and is not even simulated by Omega, since the digit is in fact odd.

Agent B would really like agent A to pay the dollar, and may be willing to engage in acausal trade with agent A. However agent A knows that agent B does not exist, so there is not much that agent B can offer A.

Now, consider a third agent C that is uncertain about the millionth digit of pi. This agent believes that both of A and B have a 50% chance to exist, and both A and B know that C exists. B can acausally offer a trade to C in which C agrees to represent B in negotiations with A (for a price). Then C can represent B by trading with A to get A to pay a dollar.

(In one special case C is an earlier agent that becomes either agent A or B when it computes the digit of pi. In this case, perhaps negotiations are easier, since the three agents have the same goals.)
Attacking the grain of truth problem using Bayes-Savage agents
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2016-10-20T14:41:56.000Z

Motivated by the grain of truth problem, we propose a generalization of Bayesian inference that allows for incomplete models. Such a model can be thought of as a set of constraints on the environment which doesn't specify it completely. This means that in addition to ordinary (probabilistic) uncertainty, another ("Knightian") type of uncertainty is introduced. This new uncertainty is managed using Savage's minimax regret decision rule.

Motivation

The grain of truth problem, as described by Hutter (see problem 5j) concerns the interaction between several AIXI agents. Ideally, we expect that rational agents in multi-agent scenarios should converge to behavior corresponding to some reasonable solution concept in game theory, e.g. Nash equilibrium (for the purposes of this post I completely ignore stronger desiderata such as superrationality; also purely Bayesian agents often fail to do so because of insufficient exploration but this is also a problem mostly orthogonal to grain of truth). However, it is difficult to prove anything about multi-agent scenarios of AIXI since AIXI's prior is supported on computable environments whereas AIXI itself is uncomputable. This problem survives in bounded analogues: if we limit the computational complexity of environments included in the prior, the computational complexity of the agent itself will invariably be higher. Thus, two agents of equal power seem unable to "comprehend" each other.

There are several reasons this problems seem important to AI alignment:

The ability of an agent to operate in environments of complexity similar to that of the agent or even surpassing that of the agent seems an important desideratum for the mathematical formalization of intelligence. Without a formal understanding how this desideratum can be satisfied it is difficult to imagine any reliable theory of intelligent agents.

Arguably, self-improving agents need the capacity to understand systems that equal to themselves in complexity, more or less by definition.

Perhaps most importantly, IRL relies on the AI's ability to successfully reason about a complex agent (a human), presumably an agent that cannot be emulated precisely with the AI's computational power. CIRL relies on two-sided interaction between the AI and the human, where neither side can emulate the other. Thus, it seems impossible to

...
*How* people shut down thought because of high-status respectable halos
by NancyLebovitz — 2016-10-20T14:09:07.504Z

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/

A detailed look at the belief that high status social structures can be so much better than anything one can think of that there's no point in even trying to think about the details of what to do, and how debilitating this is.
Discussion of the essay
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories
by rocurley — 2016-10-20T04:17:36.768Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories

WHEN:
24 October 2016 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1769 15th St, San Francisco, CA

We'll be meeting to tell each other stories! Ideally, come with a story from your life (doesn't have to be about anything in particular) that you want to tell other people.

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

Format:

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

About these meetups:

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

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

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Stories
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Technology of Communication
by RobinZ — 2016-10-18T23:14:33.131Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Technology of Communication

WHEN:
23 October 2016 03:30:00PM (-0400)

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

We will be meeting in the courtyard to chat about tools people use to get information from one place to another, both in the past and in the present.

Upcoming meetups:

Oct. 30: Halloween Party

Nov. 6: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Technology of Communication
Meetup : Munich Meetup in October
by Valeriy — 2016-10-18T22:10:01.027Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in October

WHEN:
29 October 2016 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Cafe Anna, Gabelsbergerstraße 69, Munich

Hello all,
new month, new LW meeting. After the nice meeting last month we had an idea of discussing cognitive biases in conspiracy texts. As always everyone is encouraged to suggest own topics or articles.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in October
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery
by Alexander230 — 2016-10-18T21:00:42.115Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery

WHEN:
26 October 2016 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to Moscow LW community makeshift games! In that games, some rationality skills are involved, so you can practise while you playing!

FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Details about the game: http://goo.gl/BtRVhB

Tower of Chaos: funny game with guessing the rules of human placement on a Twister mat.

Game rules: https://goo.gl/u9qgc3

Scientific Discovery: challenging table game with guessing the rules about items placement on the table.

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 3.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery
Meetup : Stockholm: Mental contrasting
by pepe_prime — 2016-10-18T20:24:08.473Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm: Mental contrasting

WHEN:
21 October 2016 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lindstedtsvägen 3, Room 1537

Last week, we had only enough time for an intro to TAPs. This week, we will dive into mental contrasting, in a workshop held by David_Kristoffersson.

Ever had a valuable goal that you knew you could do, yet you somehow didn’t feel motivated to follow through with it?

Enter mental contrasting. Mental contrasting “translates cerebral thoughts of success into concrete emotions of motivation”. It combines naturally with TAPs (implementation intentions).

Bring a bugs list, or a goal you want to achieve -- a goal you haven’t had consistent motivation for.

The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up. If you want to influence future meetup times, fill out this poll.

Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm: Mental contrasting
Meetup : NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox
by Raemon — 2016-10-18T02:50:01.727Z

Discussion article for the meetup : NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox

WHEN:
17 December 2016 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Ethical Culture Society - 2 West 64th Street, New York NY

Every winter, people across the US East Coast (and beyond!) travel to New York City, to celebrate humanity's triumph against the darkness. Come to sing songs, to connect with people from the rationality and secular communities, and (this particular year), to hear the complete story of smallpox, from its earliest appearances to its eventual eradication, and more. (Note: To pay for the venue, tickets are available at www.secularsolstice.com)

Discussion article for the meetup : NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox
The Moral Of The Story
by Scott Alexander — 2016-10-18T02:22:45.000Z

[content warning: puns. This is mostly self-plagiarism from my Tumblr and Twitter]

Once upon a time there was a small desert village with a single well outside town. One day a young woman went to the well to fetch water, and the well heard her crying, and asked “What’s wrong?”

She stopped her sobbing and asked the well “You can talk?”

“Yes,” said the well. “Long ago, the witch who lives in this town gave me life so I could serve as a guardian to the townspeople.”

“Alas,” said the young woman. “I am the daughter of that witch. She lived in peace with the townsfolk for many years. But the new mayor, who is a violent and hateful man, riled the people up against her, and they burned her at the stake. I am young and still do not know very much magic. I tried to curse them, but my curses fizzled. Now I worry I will never avenge my mother’s death.”

“Do not be afraid,” said the well. “I will take care of this.”

The next morning, when the Mayor came to fetch water from the well, he heard an odd noise coming from the bottom. He peered over as far as he could to see what was happening. Then an impossibly long arm shot up from the bottom of the well, grabbed the mayor, and pulled him into the well shaft. There was a horrible crunching sound, and nobody ever saw the Mayor again. The townsfolk apologized to the witch’s daughter, and they all lived happily ever after.

Moral of the story: Living well is the best revenge.

Pixar’s movie Up won the Academy Award for “Best Picture” and was widely hailed as one of the best children’s films of the decade. In fact, some people argued it was too good, and that kids were ignoring school, chores, and other responsibilities to watch it again and again. They said that along with the cute plot, the short, catchy name gave it an almost drug-like addictive quality. This made a lot of people very angry, and Pixar agreed to give its addictive must-watch movies longer names in the future.

Moral of the story: Do not call Up what you cannot put down.

There’s a new report out of CERN that a team of scientists has unraveled the structure of the photon. Apparently this started years ago when some equations showed that photons acted like tiny “hands” – structures with a “palm” and radiating “fingers” – which “crawl” across time/space and “grab” the solid particles they interact with. This explained most of the properties of light but wasn’t an exact match f...
Open thread, Oct. 17 - Oct. 23, 2016
by MrMind — 2016-10-17T07:02:08.902Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, 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 start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Astrobiology IV: Photosynthesis and energy
by  — 2016-10-17T00:30:46.138Z

Originally I sat down to write about the large-scale history of Earth, and line up the big developments that our biosphere has undergone in the last 4 billion years. But after writing about the reason that Earth is unique in our solar system (that is, photosynthesis being an option here), I guess I needed to explore photosynthesis and other forms of metabolism on Earth in a little more detail and before I knew it I’d written more than 3000 words about it. So, here we are, taking a deep dive into photosynthesis and energy metabolism, and trying to determine if the origin of photosynthesis is a rare event or likely anywhere you get a biosphere with light falling on it. Warning: gets a little technical.
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/energy-metabolism-and-photosynthesis/
In short, I think it’s clear from the fact that there are multiple origins of it that phototrophy, using light for energy, is likely to show up anywhere there is light and life. I suspect, but cannot rigorously prove, that even though photosynthesis of biomass only emerged once it was an early development in life on Earth emerging very near the root of the Bacterial tree and just produced a very strong first-mover advantage crowding out secondary origins of it, and would probably also show up where there is life and light. As for oxygen-producing photosynthesis, its origin from more mundane other forms of photosynthesis is still being studied. It required a strange chaining together of multiple modes of photosynthesis to make it work, and only ever happened once as well. Its time of emergence, early or late, is pretty unconstrained and I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to say one way or another if it is likely to happen anywhere there is photosynthesis. It could be subject to the same ‘first mover advantage’ situation that other photosynthesis may have encountered as well. But once it got going, it would naturally take over biomass production and crowd out other forms of photosynthesis due to the inherent chemical advantages it has on any wet planet (that have nothing to do with making oxygen) and its effects on other forms of photosynthesis.
Oxygen in the atmosphere had some important side effects, one which most people care about being allowing big complicated energy-gobbling o...
Meetup : Zürich social Rationality meetup
by Marko — 2016-10-16T09:52:40.791Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Zürich social Rationality meetup

WHEN:
29 October 2016 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Elle'n'Belle Limmatstrasse 118, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland

There seem to be quite a few new Rationality interested people in Zürich now. Come and meet us! No program.

Discussion article for the meetup : Zürich social Rationality meetup