trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Coursera Public Speaking Course - LW Study Group?
by sixes_and_sevens — 2013-06-13T17:12:48.101Z

I originally asked this on the London Less Wrong mailing list, but then realised the internet doesn't just have a ten mile radius.

There's been some interest in public speaking on LW lately, and it cropped up a couple of times at the London practical meetup as an area people would like to work on. I volunteered to collate some exercises and resources on the subject.

Since then, I've noticed a Coursera course on public speaking which is starting in a little under two weeks. I've signed up for it, and would like to encourage other LessWrongers to sign up for it alongside me. My reasons for this are as follows:

- The course involves the option of recording your progress and sharing it with other participants. As several of us have discovered on the Less Wrong Study Hall, seeing the faces of people you chat to on the internet is fun, sociable and motivational.

- We can read posts and articles on the subject all day long, but having an externally-imposed syllabus will provide the structure and motivation to actually act on it.

- There is an aspect of rhetoric and persuasion to the course, (cf. 'dark arts'), and having epistemically hygienic fellows will help keep us on the straight-and-narrow.

- Turning a large number of aspiring rationalists into erudite and persuasive speakers can't be a bad thing.

So who else is in?

(Also, before anyone mentions it, yes, I am very, very aware of the existence of Toastmasters. They seem to be the default suggestion whenever public speaking comes up. For anyone who isn't aware of them, they are an international organisation of clubs practising communication and public speaking. Google them if you're interested. I'm not, for social- and time-commitment reasons.)
Meetup : Washington DC projects planning meetup
by rocurley — 2013-06-13T15:51:39.821Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC projects planning meetup

WHEN: 16 June 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA (courtyard)

This meetup, we'll be meeting to figure out what projects we want to do together, in response to the very positive response to this suggestion on the list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC projects planning meetup
Do Earths with slower economic growth have a better chance at FAI?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-06-12T19:54:07.143Z

I was raised as a good and proper child of the Enlightenment who grew up reading The Incredible Bread Machine and A Step Farther Out, taking for granted that economic growth was a huge in-practice component of human utility (plausibly the majority component if you asked yourself what was the major difference between the 21st century and the Middle Ages) and that the "Small is Beautiful" / "Sustainable Growth" crowds were living in impossible dreamworlds that rejected quantitative thinking in favor of protesting against nuclear power plants.

And so far as I know, such a view would still be an excellent first-order approximation if we were going to carry on into the future by steady technological progress: Economic growth = good.

But suppose my main-line projection is correct and the "probability of an OK outcome" / "astronomical benefit" scenario essentially comes down to a race between Friendly AI and unFriendly AI. So far as I can tell, the most likely reason we wouldn't get Friendly AI is the total serial research depth required to develop and implement a strong-enough theory of stable self-improvement with a possible side order of failing to solve the goal transfer problem. Relative to UFAI, FAI work seems like it would be mathier and more insight-based, where UFAI can more easily cobble together lots of pieces. This means that UFAI parallelizes better than FAI. UFAI also probably benefits from brute-force computing power more than FAI. Both of these imply, so far as I can tell, that slower economic growth is good news for FAI; it lengthens the deadline to UFAI and gives us more time to get the job done. I have sometimes thought half-jokingly and half-anthropically that I ought to try to find investment scenarios based on a continued Great Stagnation and an indefinite Great Recession where the whole developed world slowly goes the way of Spain, because these scenarios would account for a majority of surviving Everett branches.

Roughly, it seems to me like higher economic growth speeds up time and this is not a good thing. I wish I had more time, not less, in which to work on FAI; I would prefer worlds in which this research can proceed at a relatively less frenzied pace and still succeed, worlds in which the default timelines to UFAI terminate in 2055 instead of 2035.

I have various cute...
Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism?
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-06-12T18:50:31.353Z

Abstract: If you value the welfare of nonhuman animals from a consequentialist perspective, there is a lot of potential for reducing suffering by funding the persuasion of people to go vegetarian through either online ads or pamphlets. In this essay, I develop a calculator for people to come up with their own estimates, and I personally come up with a cost-effectiveness estimate of $0.02 to $65.92 needed to avert a year of suffering in a factory farm. I then discuss the methodological criticism that merits skepticism of this estimate and conclude by suggesting (1) a guarded approach of putting in just enough money to help the organizations learn and (2) the need for more studies should be developed that explore advertising vegetarianism in a wide variety of media in a wide variety of ways, that include decent control groups.

-

Introduction

I start with the claim that it's good for people to eat less meat, whether they become vegetarian -- or, better yet, vegan -- because this means less nonhuman animals are being painfully factory farmed. I've defended this claim previously in my essay "Why Eat Less Meat?". I recognize that some people, even those who consider themselves effective altruists, do not value the well-being of nonhuman animals. For them, I hope this essay is interesting, but I admit it will be a lot less relevant.

The second idea is that it shouldn't matter who is eating less meat. As long as less meat is being eaten, less animals will be farmed, and this is a good thing. Therefore, we should try to get other people to also try and eat less meat.

The third idea is that it also doesn't matter who is doing the convincing. Therefore, instead of convincing our own friends and family, we can pay other people to convince people to eat less meat. And this is exactly what organizations like Vegan Outreach and The Humane League are doing. With a certain amount of money, one can hire someone to distribute pamphlets to other people or put advertisements on the internet, and some percentage of people who receive the pamphlets or see the ads will go on to eat less meat. This idea and the previous one should be uncontroversial for consequentialists.

But the fourth idea is the complication. I want my philanthropic dollars to go as far as possible, so a...
Meetup : Berkeley: Hypothetical Apostasy
by Nisan — 2013-06-12T17:53:40.651Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Hypothetical Apostasy

WHEN:
12 June 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

Dear all, there will be a meetup at Zendo tonight. I'd like to try an exercise called Hypothetical Apostasy that was devised by Nick Bostrom:

Imagine, if you will, that the world's destruction is at stake and the only way to save it is for you to write a one-pager that convinces a jury that your old cherished view is mistaken or at least seriously incomplete. The more inadequate the jury thinks your old cherished view is, the greater the chances that the world is saved. The catch is that the jury consists of earlier stages of yourself (such as yourself such as you were one year ago). Moreover, the jury believes that you have been bribed to write your apostasy; so any assurances of the form "trust me, I am older and know better" will be ineffective. Your only hope of saving the world is by writing an apostasy that will make the jury recognize how flawed / partial / shallow / juvenile / crude / irresponsible / incomplete and generally inadequate your old cherished view is.

The meetup will begin on Wednesday at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Hypothetical Apostasy
Charity Effectiveness and Third-World Economics
by jimrandomh — 2013-06-12T15:50:22.330Z

In a recent Facebook status update, Eliezer Yudkowsky asked a question:

Does the causal model for GiveDirectly's positive effects imply that the government of those countries could achieve the same effects by printing money in the local currency and giving the same amount to the same recipients? "Yes" is a legitimate answer because it's a dreadful truth that many governments around the world are not increasing their money supply enough, and also that choosing the right recipients can redistribute value productively even when supplies of medium-of-exchange are already sufficient.

My first thought was object-level; the obvious answer is that some fraction of the money given will eventually be converted into imports, transferring the burden of inflation out and onto richer countries which can easily afford it. This seems plausible. If true, it implies that we should multiply our effectiveness estimates by dImports/d$, which is (asspull) 0.5. By this line of reasoning, direct giving is less effective than we thought, but still a reasonably good deal.

My second thought was that it's likely true that some developing country governments could improve their economies by printing and distributing money, but they won't because they're corrupt, and giving directly is a workaround to force that policy upon them. This seems plausible at first, but it feels forced; the leaders' incentives here are ambiguous, not clearly aligned against this sort of policy.

My third thought was that it's likely true that developing countries' governments could improve their economies by printing and distributing money, and they might not know this.

Sanity check. What sort of people do the poorest countries' governments have, in their economic advisory roles? Is anyone making a serious effort to connect good economists with governments that need them?

If developing countries are short on competent economic advisors at the top levels, and no one is working to fix this, then funding that charity would outperform direct giving by multiple orders of magnitude. But what reason do we have to think that a well-placed economist can make a difference? Well, history does contain at least one big, salient success story: Brazil, where a clever scheme halted hyperinflation and turned the economy around. And on a smaller scale, Otjivero-Namibia.

So now I have some questions for the efficient altru...
Meetup : [Boston] The Psychology of Marketing
by ModusPonies — 2013-06-12T15:21:05.221Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Boston] The Psychology of Marketing

WHEN:
16 June 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139

f you've ever asked the question "how can I use my knowledge of psychology to take over the world?", then this talk is for you. Through the dark art known as marketing, people have been exploiting human psychology for their own means before the phrase "cognitive bias" even existed. Learn the science behind marketing, how you can use these methods to aid or destroy the world, and how you can protect yourself from the bombardment of advertisements that surround us all.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are on the first and third Sunday of every month at 2pm in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : [Boston] The Psychology of Marketing
All-pay auction for charity?
by jefftk — 2013-06-12T12:46:02.879Z

While in a standard auction you have to pay your bid only if you win, in an all-pay auction you pay whether or not you win. The standard example is a dollar auction where you're selling a dollar. Bidding a penny to get a dollar seems reasonable, but someone else then might bid two cents. The bidding can keep going even past a dollar, and the more people fighting for the dollar the more the person selling it makes. Bidding-fee auctions are similar, where each bid you make costs money. You might remember Swoopo? They used to put up ads like "An iPad just sold for $21.32!" not mentioning that the participants overall had spent more than the retail cost of the iPad on bidding fees. Eventually people caught on and they went bankrupt.

In a less scammy vein, however, this is also how competitive prizes work. In the X-Prize teams spent over $100M in competition for a $10M prize. I can't find an estimate for how much people spent to win the $1M Netflix Prize but when you look at the number of people and number of teams it was probably well above $1M.

Could we use this for charity? Imagine a donor thought two charities were both excellent and had very similar returns, but they knew lots of other people strongly disagreed and preferred one or the other. By offering to donate $X to the charity that received the most in donations, could they move more than $X to the charity of their choice? It might be even better to make the criterion be the most independent donations of at least $Y, because getting more people to donate has value in terms of expected future donations.

(I suggested something similar a few months ago in a comment on my post on donation matching, but hadn't thought about prizes at the time.)
Tegmark's talk at Oxford
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-06-12T11:49:09.803Z

Max Tegmark, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), presents a cosmic perspective on the future of life, covering our increasing scientific knowledge, the cosmic background radiation, the ultimate fate of the universe, and what we need to do to ensure the human race's survival and flourishing in the short and long term. He's strongly into the importance of xrisk reduction.
How can I strategically write a complex bestseller? (4HS001)
by Neotenic — 2013-06-12T08:47:17.128Z

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
- Neil Gaiman

3:00 AM, Mexico City, 12 June 2013

Seven years ago I made a promise I didn't keep. I was 17 at the time, and mildly unaware of how complex and large the World is. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I could write a bestseller, come on, it is not that complicated. Just read a random bestseller, they are not even that smart anyway!

Mentor: Yeah, right, I dare you to go back home right now and write a bestseller, go!

Me: I'm busy with all this school stuff right now, so I have to do my homework and....

Mentor: Ok, ok, I'll concede we are very busy right now, how about in five years?

Me: Five years seems more than enough. Take a note, in five years time I'll have written a bestseller. I promise.

Somehow later on I got busy with cooking pasta I needn't eat and listening to gossip about people I didn't care. Not a good start.

It's never too late to start over though, and now is as good a time as any.

But wait! Humans are not automatically strategic right?

True. Also humans are not as good at detecting their own strategic failures and dead-ends as other humans. If we can't even face more than three minutes of work, how could we ever intuitively look at our work and see where it is bad?

Which is why it seems that the rational way to do it is to find a place where people trained at being strategic can pinpoint your failures and accomplishments as you go along, rewarding you for winning and twisting your mental knobs when you fail, so that over time, either you learn how to do it right, or you learn the right thing to do was something else altogether. This is the project. I'm hoping as an exercise in self-experimentation with Lesswrong rationality techniques that it both helps others who may be undertaking writing or related projects, and inspires others into remaining as strategic as they learned to be over time, or even more.
I won't write the book here, but I'll keep track of the writing process and everything involved around it here (killing plausible deniability of my goals), a...
Life hack request: I want to want to work.
by DanielLC — 2013-06-11T19:41:01.252Z

I have a master's project I'm having trouble working on. It's something I've wanted to do, and I even started working on, long before I started my master's degree. If I can't even enjoy that, then I'm doomed to spend eight hours a day doing something I hate for the rest of my life. Even if I manage to improve my willpower, I doubt I'll be very productive doing something I don't want to do.

Does anyone have any idea how I can enjoy working more?
Meetup : London Social - Exposure to Direct Sunlight - June 23rd
by sixes_and_sevens — 2013-06-11T13:43:42.232Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - Exposure to Direct Sunlight - June 23rd

WHEN: 23 June 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE: St James Park, London, SW1H

EDIT: morning of the 23rd, and the weather is looking good enough to chance it. Head for the park and we'll retreat to the pub if it takes a downturn.

The first London Social meetup will be taking place in St. James Park on Sunday June 23rd from 2pm.

Assuming the weather is nice, we'll be aiming to meet about here. I'll be bringing along some games and maybe some juggling equipment. If you have any of your own Apparatus of Awesomeness, feel free to bring it along.

If the weather is not nice, we will convene at the Old Star, which is just round the corner from St. James Park tube station. I'll update this post on the morning of the 23rd with confirmation of the venue, but the two locations are a short distance from each other. If in doubt, head to St. James Park tube and call me on +44 7887 718458 when you get there.

There is no set agenda or topic. We're going to have unstructured social fun like regular human beings. People will probably talk about utilitarian ethics and bitcoin and productivity systems, but also about dinosaurs and cake and fanfiction.

Bring a friend. Bring two if you can carry them.

(We also have a Google Group and a Facebook group. Why not join them?)

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - Exposure to Direct Sunlight - June 23rd
Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way! 
by ShannonFriedman — 2013-06-11T05:37:49.980Z

Trigger warning: Discussion of rape.

Example 1:

Say that each morning you tell yourself that you are lazy for not wanting to get out of bed to go to work, as a way to convince yourself to get up. Perhaps if the only variable you changed was to lower your level of guilt, you might not get out of bed to go to work, and would instead take the day off. So if you are running a motivation system that uses guilt, feeling guilt may well be something you do not want to get rid of. If you got rid of the guilt but stopped going to work, that would likely be a net negative for your life.

To contrast, with animal training, you reinforce behavior you want in the animal, and interrupt, redirect, or completely ignore (ie: no shaming or guilting) behavior you don't want. It's also a similar methodology that meditation uses. When you meditate, you are told to focus on a meditative object such as the breath. When your mind wanders from the meditative object, you are instructed to just return your attention to the meditative object, and to not in any way punish yourself for having wandered. Also, you are instructed to not punish yourself for punishing yourself for having your mind wander. Meditation does not use reward during the meditative process, although it's common to sound a beautiful chime which will give hedons at the end of a session, and people often perform a pleasant ritual before and/or after meditation that builds positive association with the activity of meditating. Example page of meditation instructions.

So, if you switch to a positive reinforcement motivational system, such as that which animal trainers use to train dogs, then guilt is counter-productive for motivation, because it is a form of punishment.

Example Summary:

If you only change one variable from a motivation system that uses guilt, then it may break the system, and be a net negative. However, there is likely a way to get a net utility gain by changing several variables of the system, such as by switching to a positive reinforcement based system where you add instant rewards that increase hedons and remove guilt and other punishments.

Example 2:

As it stands, there are many unreported rapes in American society. This excellent article debunks many myths about rape, including the classic myth that rapes are generally done by strangers using force:

A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk w

...
A personal history of involvement with effective altruism
by JonahS — 2013-06-11T04:49:45.858Z

Over the coming weeks, I intend to write up a history of the different parts of the effective altruist movement and their interrelations. It’s natural to start with the part that I know best: the history of my own involvement with effective altruism.

Interest in altruism rooted in literature

My interest in altruism traces to early childhood. Unbeknownst to me, my verbal comprehension ability was unusually high relative to my other cognitive abilities, and for this reason, I gravitated strongly toward reading. Starting from the age of six, I spent hours a day reading fiction. I found many of the stories that I read to be emotionally compelling, and identified with the characters.

My interest is altruism is largely literary in origin — I perceive the sweep of history to be a story, and I want things to go well for the characters, and want the story to have a happy ending. I was influenced both by portrayals of sympathetic, poor characters in need, and by stories of the triumph of the human spirit, and I wanted to help the downtrodden, and contribute to the formation of peak positive human experiences.

I sometimes wonder whether there are other people with altruistic tendencies that are literary in origin, and whether they would be good candidate members of the effective altruist movement. There is some history of artists having altruistic goals. The great painter Vincent van Gogh moved to an impoverished coal mine to preach and minister to the sick. The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck gave shelter to the homeless.

An analytical bent, and utilitarianism

When I was young, I had vague and dreamy hopes about how I might make the world a better place. As I grew older, I found myself more focused on careful reasoning and rationality.

In high school, I met Dario Amodei, who introduced me to utilitarianism. The ethical framework immediately resonated with me. For me, it corresponded to valuing the well being of all characters in the story — a manifestation of universal love.

This was the birth of my interest in maximizing aggregated global welfare. Maximizing aggregated global welfare corresponds to maximizing cost-effectiveness, and so this can be thought of as the origin of my interest in effective altruism.

I believe that I would have developed interest in global welfare, and in effective altruism, on my own accord, without...