trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Low hanging productivity - improving your workspace
by Elo — 2016-08-09T12:14:00.014Z

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/low-hanging-productivity/

Tl;dr - Simple changes to workspaces like a big screen can make a big difference.

This week I spent a few days away from my usual desk. I have been house sitting. I didn't think too much of it; I tend to carry with me a portable lifestyle. My laptop, some power blocks for my phone, and various supplies that make for easy "office"-ing around the place. I usually don't carry a charger with me because when I know I will be gone a while I will take it with me.

I have always liked a portable office. The ability to stop, and continue later at ease was always important to me. However recently I moved into a new place and set up a desk. I figured I would tryX where X is workspaces (a post for the future). I never set up a workspace for the reason of it not being portable. The interesting thing that has surprised me this week is that I miss my big screen (which was a gift - I might have never bought myself a big screen).

For whatever reason, the ability to view more space at once makes me more productive. Combined with Linux's natural tendencies to have several desktop environments with simple switching. My laptop screen is about 19in. Which is plenty. The new screen is about 1.5x that. I never thought it would be useful, it took me years to do it. If it broke today, I would be willing to spend up to $900 to get it back (which is more than six times the price of a new screen). Right now I wonder how productive I might be with a 3rd screen... Or a 4th. (or a 3D virtual reality work environment with screenspace limited by my eyeballs not my screen resolution...)

I feel like (along with other habits) I am probably working at 120% of what I was working before. A fair chunk of which I owe to the extra screenspace.

Questions for today:

What part do you remember adding to your workspace to help you be more productive.

What's the coolest most awesome or productive workspace that you have seen in action? How hard would that be to get for yourself?

How can you make your current workspace a tiny bit more productive in anticipation for things you have to do tomorrow?

Meta: This took 45mins to write.
People who lie about how much they eat are jerks
by Elo — 2016-08-08T03:45:49.420Z

Originally posted here: http://bearlamp.com.au/people-who-lie-about-how-much-they-eat-are-jerks/

Weight loss journey is a long and complicated problem solving adventure. This is one small factor that adds to the confusion. You probably have that one friend. Appears to eat a whole bunch, and yet doesn't put on weight. If you ever had that conversation it goes something like,

"How are you so thin?"
"raah raah metabolism"
"raah raah I dont know why I don't put on weight"
"Take advantage of the habit"

Well I have had enough. You're wrong. You're lying and you probably don't even know it. It's not possible. (Within a reasonable scope of human variation) Calories and energy are a black box system. Calories in, work out, leftovers become weight gain, deficit is weight loss. If a human could eat significantly more calories for the same amount of work and not put on weight we would be prodding them in a lab for breaking the laws of physics on conservation of mass and conservation of energy.

So this is you, you say you gain weight no matter what you eat and that's scientifically impossible. Now what? You probably don't mean to break the laws of physics (and you probably don't actually break them). You genuinely absentmindedly don't notice when you scoff down whole plates of food and when you skip dinner because you didn't feel like it (and absentmindedly balance the calories automatically). It's all the same to you because you naturally do that.

This very likely is about habits, and natural habits that people have. If for example John has the habit of getting home and going to the fridge, making dinner because it's usually the evening. Wendy doesn't have the habit. She eats when she is hungry. Not having a set mealtime sometimes means that she gets tired-hungry and has a state of being too exhausted to decide what to eat and too hungry to do anything else that would help solve the problem. But for Wendy she doesn't get home and automatically cook dinner. (good things and bad things come from habits.)

Wendy and john go to a big lunch together. They both eat 150% of the calories they should be eating for that meal, and they don't mind - enjoying food is part of enjoying life. It was a fancy restaurant with good food. ...
Open Thread, Aug. 8 - Aug 14. 2016
by Elo — 2016-08-07T23:07:27.792Z

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.
Meetup : Australian-ish Online Hangout
by Calien — 2016-08-07T10:40:47.443Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Australian-ish Online Hangout

WHEN:
20 August 2016 07:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Canberra

It's back! Hopefully with fewer technical issues, since we'll try jitsi this time. I'll post the link on the night.
https://www.facebook.com/events/929800947145935/
Tell us what you've learned recently, ask for rationalist advice, talk about cool stuff, show me your cat, and so on.
We tend to go until late, so if you can't make it for the official time, you're welcome to pop in anyway.
People outside Australia are welcome too! We've heard from New Zealanders, Europeans, Americans...

Discussion article for the meetup : Australian-ish Online Hangout
Advice to new Doctors starting practice
by anandjeyahar — 2016-08-07T08:27:10.018Z

Hi all,

Please read the Disclaimers at the end of the post first, if you're easily offended.

Generalists(general medicine):

Get extremely unbeatable at 20 Questions(rationality link). It'll help you make your initial diagnoses(ones based on questions about symptoms) faster and more accurate.

Understand probability, bayes theorem and how to apply it** This will help you interpret the test results, you ordered based on the 20 questions.

Understand base rate fallacy, and how to avoid being over confident.

Understand the upsides and downsides of the drugs you prescribe. Know the probabilities of fatal and adverse side-effects and update them with evidence(Bayes' theorem mentioned above) as you try out different brands and combinations.

Know the costs and benefits of any treatment and help the patient make a good decision based on the cost-benefit analysis of treatment combined with the probabilities of outcome.

Ask and Keep a history of medical records and allergies of the patient and till their grand parents.*

Be willing and able to judge, when a patient is better off with a specialist. Try to keep in touch with Doctors nearby and hopeful all types of specialists.

Explain the treatment options and pros and cons in easy language to the patients. It'll reduce misunderstandings and eventually dis-satisfaction with the treatment.

Resist the urge to treat patients as NPCs. Involve them in the treatment process.

Meditate

Find a hobby, that you can keep improving on till the end of life.

Be aware of the conflict of interest between the patient and the pharmaceutical companies.

Have enough research skills to form opinions on base rates/probabilities in different diseases and treatment methods as needed.

If you're in a big hospital setup, make sure you've the best hospital administration.
Medical expertise is only relevant once you see the patient. Your ability to judge the evidence requires getting access to it; this means you need to be able to correctly send requests, get the data back, and keep all this attached to the correct patient.Scheduling, filing and communication. Lacking these, medical expertise is meaningless.

Specialists:

Basically the same skill sets as above. One difference is in the skill level and you should customize that as needed.

For ex: You would need to be able to explain the treatment options and the probabilis

...
Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes
by James_Miller — 2016-08-06T19:10:16.968Z

“In 2015, there were roughly 214 million malaria cases and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.” While we don’t know how many humans malaria has killed, an estimate of half of everyone who has ever died isn’t absurd. Because few people in rich countries get malaria, pharmaceutical companies put relatively few resources into combating it.

The best way to eliminate malaria is probably to use gene drives to completely eradicate the species of mosquitoes that bite humans, but until recently rich countries haven’t been motivated to such xenocide. The Zika virus, which is in mosquitoes in the United States, provides effective altruists with an opportunity to advocate for exterminating all species of mosquitoes that spread disease to humans because the horrifying and disgusting pictures of babies with Zika might make the American public receptive to our arguments. A leading short-term goal of effective altruists, I propose, should be advocating for mosquito eradication in the short window before rich people get acclimated to pictures of Zika babies.

Personally, I have (unsuccessfully) pitched articles on mosquito eradication to two magazines and (with a bit more success) emailed someone who knows someone who knows someone in the Trump campaign to attempt to get the candidate to come out in favor of mosquito eradication. What have you done? Given the enormous harm mosquitoes inflict on mankind, doing just a little (such as writing a blog post) could have a high expected payoff.
Meetup : Munich Meetup in August
by Valeriy — 2016-08-06T10:19:09.640Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in August

WHEN:
13 August 2016 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
JetBrains Event Space, 5th floor, Elsenheimerstr. 47a, Munich

Hello everybody.
I think it would be great to have a LessWrong meeting in August. However, since it's holiday/vacation time, I am not sure how many are around so please indicate if will or may join.
Activities:
- I can give a short talk about deliberate practice and its possible application to applied rationality.
- Discussion of interesting books for the summer break: tell about the last book that impressed you, learn about new books from others.
- Other contributions are welcomed and encouraged. Please leave a comment if there is a topic or an article you want to discuss.
- We can always play Zendo :-)

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup in August
Darknet Mining for Proactive Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence
by morganism — 2016-08-06T01:19:06.138Z

They are using machine learning to comb the darknets, capturing about 300 threats a week.

About 90% hack application and backdoor recognition, that is for sale, and about 80% hacker forum vulnerability identification.

"These threat warnings include information on newly developed malware and exploits that have not yet been deployed in a cyber-attack"

https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08583
Meetup : Moscow: Non-Omniscience, On rationalist communication, ACH training, games
by Slava Matyukhin — 2016-08-06T00:34:59.982Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Non-Omniscience, On rationalist communication, ACH training, games

WHEN:
07 August 2016 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, 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 07.08.2016 meetup.

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Non-Omniscience, On rationalist communication, ACH training, games
Meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-08-05T16:06:14.954Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
07 August 2016 08:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1726 reisterstown road pikesville maryland 21208

Pikesville DoubleTree - Hilton, at the restaurant / bar or at one of the tables outside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Weekly Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-08-05T15:42:58.017Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on August 5th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Bay City Meetup: 19 August 2016 01:25PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

European Community Weekend: 02 September 2016 03:35PM
[Gen Con/Indianapolis] Gen Con: Applied Game Theory: 06 August 2016 02:00PM
New Hampshire Meetup: 09 August 2016 07:00PM

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

[Austin] Welcome Scott Aaronson to Texas: 13 August 2016 06:00PM
[Melbourne] Language – The Stuff of Thought (Rationality Dojo - Melbourne): 07 August 2016 03:30PM
San Francisco Meetup: Projects: 08 August 2016 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - August 2016: 07 August 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - September 2016: 04 September 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - October 2016: 02 October 2016 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Outdoor Fun & Games: 07 August 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 ...
New Pascal's Mugging idea for potential solution
by kokotajlod — 2016-08-04T20:38:54.341Z

I'll keep this quick:
In general, the problem presented by the Mugging is this: As we examine the utility of a given act for each possible world we could be in, in order from most probable to least probable, the utilities can grow much faster than the probabilities shrink. Thus it seems that the standard maxim "Maximize expected utility" is impossible to carry out, since there is no such maximum. When we go down the list of hypotheses multiplying the utility of the act on that hypothesis, by the probability of that hypothesis, the result does not converge to anything.
Here's an idea that may fix this:

For every possible world W of complexity N, there's another possible world of complexity N+c that's just like W, except that it has two parallel, identical universes instead of just one. (If it matters, suppose that they are connected by an extra dimension.) (If this isn't obvious, say so and I can explain.)
Moreover, there's another possible world of complexity N+c+1 that's just like W except that it has four such parallel identical universes.

And a world of complexity N+c+X that has R parallel identical universes, where R is the largest number that can be specified in X bits of information.

So, take any given extreme mugger hypothesis like "I'm a matrix lord who will kill 3^^^^3 people if you don't give me $5." Uncontroversially, the probability of this hypothesis will be something much smaller than the probability of the default hypothesis. Let's be conservative and say the ratio is 1 in a billion.
(Here's the part I'm not so confident in)
Translating that into hypotheses with complexity values, that means that the mugger hypothesis has about 30 more bits of information in it than the default hypothesis.

So, assuming c is small (and actually I think this assumption can be done away with) there's another hypothesis, equally likely to the Mugger hypothesis, which is that you are in a duplicate universe that is exactly like the universe in the default hypothesis, except with R duplicates, where R is the largest number we can specify in 30 bits.
That number is very large indeed. (See the Busy Beaver function.) My guess is that it's going to be way way way larger than 3^^^^3. (It takes less than 30 bits to specify 3^^^^3, no?)
So this isn't exactly a formal solution yet, but it seems like it might be on to something. Perhaps our expected utility conv...
Superintelligence and physical law
by AnthonyC — 2016-08-04T18:49:19.145Z

It's been a few years since I read http://lesswrong.com/lw/qj/einsteins_speed/ and the rest of the quantum physics sequence, but I recently learned about the company Nutonian, http://www.nutonian.com/. Basically it's a narrow AI system that looks at unstructured data and tries out billions of models to fit it, favoring those that use simpler math. They apply it to all sorts of fields, but that includes physics. It can't find Newton's laws from three frames of a falling apple, but it did find the Hamiltonian of a double pendulum given its motion data after a few hours of processing: http://phys.org/news/2009-12-eureqa-robot-scientist-video.html
Meetup : SF Meetup: Projects
by maia — 2016-08-04T00:44:27.342Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Projects

WHEN:
08 August 2016 06:15:57PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1597 Howard St., SF

We’ll be meeting to work on projects!

Near the beginning, we’ll go around and talk about what we’ll be working on, then do a couple of pomodoros quietly. At some point we’ll break into general conversations and socializing.

For help getting into the building, please call: three zero one, three five six, five four two four.

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 : SF Meetup: Projects
Motivated Thinking
by Bound_up — 2016-08-03T23:27:16.009Z

I'm playing around with an article on Motivated Cognition for general consumption

I think it's one of the most important things to teach someone about rationality (any other suggestions? Confirmation bias, placebo, pareidolia, and the odds of coincidences come to mind...)

So, I've taken the five kinds of motivated cognition I know of

(Motivated skepticism)

(Motivated stopping)

(Motivated neutrality)

(Motivated credulity)

(Motivated continuation)

added a counterpart to "neutrality," and then renamed neutrality.

The end result being six kinds of motivated cognition, three pairs of two kinds each, which are opposites of each other. Also, each pair has one kind that beings with an S and the other that begins with a C, which is good for mnemonic purposes.

So, I've got

Stopping and Continuation - Controls WHICH arguments you put in front of yourself (Do you continue because you haven't found what supports you yet, or do you stop because you have?)

Self-deprecation and Conceit - these control WHETHER you judge an argument in front of you (Do you refuse to judge ("Who am I to judge?") clear arguments that oppose your side or do you judge arguments you have no capacity to understand (the probability of abiogenesis, for example) because it lets you support your side?)

Skepticism and Credulity - Controls HOW you judge arguments (Do you demand higher evidence for ideas you don't like, and less for ideas you do? Do you scrutinize ideas you don't like more than ideas you do? Do you ask if the evidence forces you to accept, or if it allows you to accept an idea?)

I'm thinking of introducing them in that order, too, with the "Which/Whether/How you judge" abstraction.

Anybody see better abstractions, better explanations, better mnemonic techniques? Any advice of any kind on how to teach this effectively to people? Other fundamentals to rationality? (Maybe the beliefs as probabilities idea?)
[link] MIRI's 2015 in review
by Kaj_Sotala — 2016-08-03T12:03:04.398Z

https://intelligence.org/2016/07/29/2015-in-review/

The introduction:

As Luke had done in years past (see 2013 in review and 2014 in review), I (Malo) wanted to take some time to review our activities from last year. In the coming weeks Nate will provide a big-picture strategy update. Here, I’ll take a look back at 2015, focusing on our research progress, academic and general outreach, fundraising, and other activities.

After seeing signs in 2014 that interest in AI safety issues was on the rise, we made plans to grow our research team. Fueled by the response to Bostrom’s Superintelligence and the Future of Life Institute’s “Future of AI” conference, interest continued to grow in 2015. This suggested that we could afford to accelerate our plans, but it wasn’t clear how quickly.

In 2015 we did not release a mid-year strategic plan, as Luke did in 2014. Instead, we laid out various conditional strategies dependent on how much funding we raised during our 2015 Summer Fundraiser. The response was great; we had our most successful fundraiser to date. We hit our first two funding targets (and then some), and set out on an accelerated 2015/2016 growth plan.

As a result, 2015 was a big year for MIRI. After publishing our technical agenda at the start of the year, we made progress on many of the open problems it outlined, doubled the size of our core research team, strengthened our connections with industry groups and academics, and raised enough funds to maintain our growth trajectory. We’re very grateful to all our supporters, without whom this progress wouldn’t have been possible.