trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : [ALERT] West LA [ALERT] Location Change!!
by OpenThreadGuy — 2014-02-06T08:50:24.171Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [ALERT] West LA [ALERT] Location Change!!

WHEN:
12 February 2014 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

WARNING

THE BAD THING WILL HAPPEN IF YOU GO TO THE OLD LOCATION

YOU WILL BE ALONE, AND SCARED

WE HAVE MOVED

We are now meeting in this Del Taco.

Parking is completely free, no chicanery required. This is because we have relocated to a Del Taco where parking is free.

Discussion: We have relocated. Do not go to the old location. We are now meeting in a Del Taco near Santa Monica Blvd. and Sepulveda Blvd. It is not a very classy place, but there is cheap food and plenty of room.

Recommended reading:

Please, do not go to the old location. Go to the new location. Seriously.

No prior knowledge or exposure to Less Wrong or Del Taco is necessary; this will be generally accessible. Only suffering and death awaits those who go to the wrong place.

Discussion article for the meetup : [ALERT] West LA [ALERT] Location Change!!
How big of an impact would cleaner political debates have on society?
by Adam Zerner — 2014-02-06T00:24:41.862Z

See this Newsroom clip.

Basically, their news network is trying to change the way political debates work by having the moderator force the candidates to answer the questions that are asked of them, not interrupt each other, justify arguments that are based on obvious falsehoods etc.

How big of a positive impact do you guys think that this would have on society?

My initial thoughts are that it would be huge. It would lead to better politicians, which would be a high level of action. The positive effects would trickle down into many aspects of our society.

The question then becomes, "can we make this happen?". I don't see a way right now, but the idea has enough upside to me that I keep it in the back of my mind in case I come up with a plausible way of implementing the change.

Thoughts?
[LINK] Cliffs Notes: "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", part 1
by philh — 2014-02-05T23:03:10.533Z

http://reasonableapproximation.net/2014/02/02/cliffs-notes-pttlos-part-1.html

A book sometimes cited on LessWrong as recommended reading is E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. I intend to write a series of posts reading this book, summarizing the key points, and solving the exercises. (There are no solutions in the book.)

The book has over 750 pages. This will take me a long time, if I finish at all. I'm not committing to finishing. For example, if this turns out not to be a thing worth doing, I hope that I will notice that and stop. I'm also not committing to any particular posting rate while I continue.

(I'm not cross-posting this because I expect to have to make edits and don't want to have to make them in two places.)
Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers
by Adam Zerner — 2014-02-05T22:54:26.519Z

See http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers.

The expected value of risky careers like startups if often much higher than less risky careers. However, this is more than offset by peoples' risk-aversiveness due to diminishing marginal utility. But... if you're an effective altruist, the money you make doesn't have diminishing marginal value. So... it seems that risky careers like startups are a good choice, if you're trying to maximize your positive impact.

What do you guys think?
Meetup : LW Melbourne - Last Practical Rationality Meetup
by  — 2014-02-05T06:18:51.306Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Melbourne - Last Practical Rationality Meetup

WHEN:
07 February 2014 07:15:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
491 Kings St, West Melbourne., Melbourne

We'll be having our last Friday night Practical Rationality Meetup this week. It will be the last meetup advertised on Meetup.com.
The session will be on the How To Change Your Mind sequence, and is designed for those with no prior knowledge of the sequences.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Melbourne - Last Practical Rationality Meetup
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Logical uncertainty
by Manfred — 2014-02-05T04:12:05.662Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Logical uncertainty

WHEN:
09 February 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
412 W. Elm St, Urbana, IL

I'm writing a sequence on logical uncertainty, so come ask me anything about it. Digressions encouraged. There may also be cookies.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Logical uncertainty
[LINK] Reinventing Explanation: Data Presentation as Intuition Pump
by VAuroch — 2014-02-05T01:00:44.457Z

A great article by Michael Nielsen on failures of intuition and ways to present data more effectively so that we don't get caught by those failures. It reminded me of concepts like log odds in common use around here, and also to the recent discussion of teaching rationality techniques to average people.
Meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup
by rocurley — 2014-02-04T19:17:36.358Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup

WHEN:
09 February 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
national portrait gallery

We'll be meeting to exchange books!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup
Beware Trivial Fears
by Stabilizer — 2014-02-04T05:40:25.958Z

Does the surveillance state affect us? It has affected me, and I didn't realize that it was affecting me until recently. I give a few examples of how it has affected me:

I was once engaged in a discussion on Facebook about Obama's foreign policy. Around that time, I was going to apply for a US visa. I stopped the discussion early. Semi-consciously, I was worried that what I was writing would be checked by US visa officials and would lead to my visa being denied.

I was once really interested in reading up on the Unabomber and his manifesto, because somebody mentioned that he had some interesting ideas, and though fundamentally misguided, he might have been onto something. I didn't explore much because I was worried---again semi-consciously---that my traffic history would be logged on some NSA computer somewhere, and that I'd pattern match to the Unabomber (I'm a physics grad student, the Unabomber was a mathematician).

I didn't visit Silk Road as I was worried that my visits would be traced, even though I had no plans of buying anything.

Just generally, I try to not search for some really weird stuff that I want to search for (I'm a curious guy!).

I was almost not going to write this post.

And these are just the ones that I became conscious of. I wonder how many more have slipped under the radar.

Yes, I know these fears are silly. In fact, writing them out makes them feel even more silly. But they still affected my behavior. Now, I may be atypical. But I'm sure I'm not that atypical. I'm sure many, many people refrain from visiting and exploring parts of the Internet and writing things on different forums and blogs because of the fear of being recorded and the data being used against them. Especially susceptible to this fear are immigrants.

In Beware Trivial Inconveniences, Yvain points out that the Great Firewall of China is very easy to bypass but the vast majority of Chinese people don't bypass it because it's a trivial inconvenience.

I would like to introduce the analogous and very related concept of a trivial fear: fear of low probability events that affects behavior in a major way, especially over a large population. Much more insidiously, the people experiencing these fears don't even realize they're experiencing it: because the fear is of small magnitude, it can be rationalized away easily.

In this particular case, the fear acts

...
Knightian Uncertainty from a Bayesian perspective
by JonahS — 2014-02-04T04:16:31.805Z

Some people have maintained that there are events to which there's no rational basis for assigning probabilities. For example, John Maynard Keynes wrote of "uncertainty" in the following sense:

"By `uncertain' knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty...The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence...About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know." (J.M. Keynes, 1937)

This sort of uncertainty is sometimes referred to as Knightian uncertainty.

MIRI is interested in making probabilistic predictions about events such as the creation of general artificial intelligence, which are without precedent, and which therefore cannot be assigned probabilities via frequentist means. Some of these events are presumably of the type that Keynes had in mind. At MIRI's request, I did a literature review looking for arguments against there being a rational basis for assigning probabilities to such events.

Definitions of subjective probability

One can attempt to define the subjective probability that an agent assigns to an event to be, intuitively, the number that it would assign if it were to make a very large number of predictions with a view toward, for each x, assigning probability x% to a collection of events of which x% actually occur. Eliezer discusses the mathematical formalism behind this in A Technical Explanation of a Technical Explanation.

Other definitions of subjective probabilities have been given by Ramsey (1931), de Finetti (1937), Koopman (1940), Good (1950), Savage (1954), Davidson and Suppes (1956), Kraft, Pratt and Seidenberg (1959), Anscombe and Aumann (1963) and Wakker (1989). (Fishburn (1986) gives a survey of the literature.) I have not studied the mathematical formalisms of most of these papers, but here's a definition inspired by them (one which is immune to some of the criticisms that have been raised against some of the definitions).

Assume that for each number p between 0 and 1, there is a random process R that yields an outcome O' with "objective" probability p. Here "objective" probability refers t...
Mind Hacks
by RyanCarey — 2014-02-03T19:32:22.512Z

I've been in the bay area for a week, and already I've heard so many tips and tricks for becoming smarter that I can barely keep track. I think this is a very good thing. If effective altruists and rationalists can become smarter, then it should improve the probability of favourable far-future outcomes. Note that:

1) cognitive enhancement fits with the ideas that you will achieve most of your impact in your middle age, and that increasing your career capital is integral to achieving impact.

2) it might be possible to reinvest returns from cognitive enhancement by doing further research into cognitive enhancement. This is not to say that an intelligence explosion could occur within a human substrate - our capacity to alter our neural structure and thinking speed is likely to run up against hard evolutionary constraints in a way that machine intelligence will not. Nonetheless, cognitively enhanced humans could have an advantage in the creation of a friendly AI team.

I suggest that we collate our mind hacks here. Then we can vote them all up and down. This will generate a list of 'top rated posts of all time', which could give hints for curriculum design to organisations like CFAR. Here are a few suggestions:

The reversal test for status quo bias

Thinking for five minutes of plans that can be executed in five minutes

Mind maps

Asana

Anki

Speed reading

Goal factoring

Caffeine

Modafinil

Nicotine

Creatine

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

and so on

Of course, if something is less plausibly obtainable than transcranial magnetic stimulation, then it won't get any votes at all and doesn't meaningfully belong on this list (e.g. deep brain stimulation, brain-computer interfaces)
Meetup : Moscow, Scholarship and Happiness
by Yuu — 2014-02-03T09:48:42.949Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Scholarship and Happiness

WHEN:
09 February 2014 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

We will gather at the same second entrance, but we will go to a room inside the building at 16:00. So please do not be late.

Workshop about acquiring scientific knowledge.

Short presentation about one of cognitive biases.

Stumbling on happiness for rationalists presentation.

We gather in the Yandex office, you need the second revolving door with the sign “Яндекс”, here is the photo of the entrance you need. You need to pass the first entrance and the bicycle parking on you way. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.

You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 16:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the second entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Scholarship and Happiness
Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
by Larks — 2014-02-02T22:32:10.247Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup

WHEN:
22 February 2014 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Small World Coffee, 14 Witherspoon St. Princeton, NJ 08540

We're going to have the second ever Princeton NJ meetup! Even better than the first! Feel free to come whether or not you came to the first.

A bunch of people game me their emails after the first one, but we made the mistake of going handwritten, so I suspect many people never got my email. In any case, there is to be a second meetup!

Planned events:

Paranoid debating. If you'd like, feel free to pick a numerical quantity for the rest of us to try and estimate.

Discussion of this arbitrarily chosen high-scoring post that I like.

Misc. delights.

Planning for future meetups, including a proper email list.

As such, we hereby precommit to being at Small World Coffee on Witherspoon from 1pm to 3pm. I realize that people suggested better venues last time but I forgot, and the first duty of dictators is to do something when anything is better than nothing.

By the sign of the paperclip so shall ye know us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
Rationality & Low-IQ People
by kokotajlod — 2014-02-02T15:11:59.505Z

This post is to raise a question about the demographics of rationality: Is rationality something that can appeal to low-IQ people as well?
I don't mean in theory, I mean in practice. From what I've seen, people who are concerned about rationality (in the sense that it has on LW, OvercomingBias, etc.) are overwhelmingly high-IQ.
Meanwhile, HPMOR and other stories in the "rationality genre" appeal to me, and to other people I know. However I wonder: Perhaps part of the reason they appeal to me is that I think of myself as a smart person, and this allows me to identify with the main characters, cheer when they think their way to victory, etc. If I thought of myself as a stupid person, then perhaps I would feel uncomfortable, insecure, and alienated while reading the same stories.

So, I have four questions:
1.) Do we have reason to believe that the kind of rationality promoted on LW, OvercomingBias, CFAR, etc. appeals to a fairly normal distribution of people around the IQ mean? Or should we think, as I suggested, that people with lower IQ's are disposed to find the idea of being rational less attractive?
2.) Ditto, except replace "being rational" with "celebrating rationality through stories like HPMOR." Perhaps people think that rationality is a good thing in much the same way that being wealthy is a good thing, but they don't think that it should be celebrated, or at least they don't find such celebrations appealing.
3.) Supposing #1 and #2 have the answers I am suggesting, why?
4.) Making the same supposition, what are the implications for the movement in general?

Note: I chose to use IQ in this post instead of a more vague term like "intelligence," but I could easily have done the opposite. I'm happy to do whichever version is less problematic.
Rationality Quotes February 2014
by A1987dM — 2014-02-02T13:35:38.227Z

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
How can I spend money to improve my life?
by Jonathan Paulson — 2014-02-02T10:16:52.975Z

On ChrisHallquist's post extolling the virtues of money, the top comment is Eliezer pointing out the lack of concrete examples. Can anyone think of any? This is not just hypothetical: if I think your suggestion is good, I will try it (and report back on how it went)
I care about health, improving personal skills (particularly: programming, writing, people skills), gaining respect (particularly at work), and entertainment (these days: primarily books and computer games). If you think I should care about something else, feel free to suggest it.
I am early-twenties programmer living in San Francisco. In the interest of getting advice useful to more than one person, I'll omit further personal details.
Budget: $50/day
If your idea requires significant ongoing time commitment, that is a major negative.
On Straw Vulcan Rationality
by LoganStrohl — 2014-02-02T08:11:54.705Z

There's a core meme of rationalism that I think is fundamentally off-base. It's been bothering me for a long time — over a year now. It hasn't been easy for me, living this double life, pretending to be OK with propagating an instrumentally expedient idea that I know has no epistemic grounding. So I need to get this off my chest now: Our established terminology is not consistent with an evidence-based view of the Star Trek canon.

According to TVtropes, a straw Vulcan is a character used to show that emotion is better than logic. I think a lot of people take "straw Vulcan rationality" it to mean something like, "Being rational does not mean being like Vulcans from Star Trek."

This is not fair to Vulcans from Star Trek.

Central to the character of Spock — and something that it's easy to miss if you haven't seen every single episode and/or read a fair amount of fan fiction — is that he's being a Vulcan all wrong. He's half human, you see, and he's really insecure about that, because all the other kids made fun of him for it when he was growing up on Vulcan. He's spent most of his life resenting his human half, trying to prove to everyone (especially his father) that he's Vulcaner Than Thou. When the Vulcan Science Academy worried that his human mother might be an obstacle, it was the last straw for Spock. He jumped ship and joined Starfleet. Against his father's wishes.

Spock is a mess of poorly handled emotional turmoil. It makes him cold and volatile.

Real Vulcans aren't like that. They have stronger and more violent emotions than humans, so they've learned to master them out of necessity. Before the Vulcan Reformation, they were a collection of warring tribes who nearly tore their planet apart. Now, Vulcans understand emotions and are no longer at their mercy. Not when they apply their craft successfully, anyway. In the words of the prophet Surak, who created these cognitive disciplines with the purpose of saving Vulcan from certain doom, "To gain mastery over the emotions, one must first embrace the many Guises of the Mind."

Successful application of Vulcan philosophy looks positively CFARian.

There is a ritual called "kolinahr" whose purpose is to completely rid oneself of emotion, but it was not developed by Surak, nor, to my knowledge, was it endorsed by him. It's an extreme religious practice, and I think the wisest Vulcans would consider it ...
Arthur Chu: Jeopardy! champion through exemplary rationality
by syllogism — 2014-02-02T08:02:13.976Z

http://mentalfloss.com/article/54853/our-interview-jeopardy-champion-arthur-chu

I'm not sure I've ever seen such a compelling "rationality success story". There's so much that's right here.
The part that really grabs me about this is that there's no indication that his success has depended on "natural" skill or talent. And none of the strategies he's using are from novel research. He just studied the "literature" and took the results seriously. He didn't arbitrarily deviate from the known best practice based on aesthetics or intuition. And he kept a simple, single-minded focus on his goal. No lost purposes here --- just win as much money as possible, bank the winnings, and use it to self-insure. It's rationality-as-winning, plain and simple.
Meetup : Washington DC: HPMOR Discussion (maybe Worm too?)
by rocurley — 2014-02-02T00:28:33.438Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: HPMOR Discussion (maybe Worm too?)

WHEN:
02 February 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to talk about HPMOR and also maybe worm.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: HPMOR Discussion (maybe Worm too?)
February 2014 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2014-02-01T20:54:43.924Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Fallacy Categorization
by Mestroyer — 2014-02-01T20:14:52.154Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Fallacy Categorization

WHEN:
02 February 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
40.109545,-88.227318

For types of arguments commonly called fallacies,
Why can using this kind of argument mislead you?
When can a similar argument be a good one?
Is this argument flat-out nonsense, or is it weak Bayesian evidence? (http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/)
Why do people make this argument? Does it have roots in cognitive biases? In useful heuristics?
If this is a fallacy in moral arguments, can it be a good argument to humans with not-too-uncommon moral preferences?

We'll be running through this list, or a similar one:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

Coordinates are: 40.109545,-88.227318
Meetup will be held in the the Courtyard Cafe in the Illini Union, on the ground floor.

Cross posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Fallacy Categorization