trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Berkeley: Dungeons & Discourse
by Nisan — 2013-03-03T06:13:05.399Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Dungeons & Discourse

WHEN:
06 March 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

This week's meetup is about Scott's philosophy RPG Dungeons and Discourse. Here is the comic strip that inspired Dungeons & Discourse:

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/

Scott's rulebook is available here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/22/dungeons-and-discourse-third-edition-the-dialectic-continues/

It includes an epic narration of the first campaign/musical, The King Under The Mountain. There's an html version of that here, complete with music:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8kn/king_under_the_mountain_adventure_log_soundtrack/
I'm going to print out a couple copies of the rulebook. The purpose of the meetup is to do some combination of the following:

Look at the rules.

Kibitz about the rules.

Ask each other to explain all the references.

Ask each other how role-playing games work.

Make characters (just for fun).

Listen to Less Wrong filk.

Decide whether or not to join a group to play Scott's upcoming campaign Fermat's Last Stand.

We will not be starting a campaign at this meetup this week. You can have fun at this meetup even if you don't intend to play or DM the campaign! If you do want to play the campaign, I encourage you to post to the coordination thread on Scott's blog:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/26/fermats-last-stand-coordination-thread/

There are people interested in playing in Berkeley and in the South Bay.

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: Dungeons & Discourse
[SEQ RERUN] Cynical About Cynicism
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-03T03:28:45.182Z

Today's post, Cynical About Cynicism was originally published on 17 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Much of cynicism seems to be about signaling sophistication, rather than sharing uncommon, true, and important insights.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was An African Folktale, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
The VNM independence axiom ignores the value of information
by kilobug — 2013-03-02T14:36:53.279Z

Followup to : Is risk aversion really irrational?

After reading the decision theory FAQ and re-reading The Allais Paradox I realized I still don't accept the VNM axioms, especially the independence one, and I started thinking about what my true rejection could be. And then I realized I already somewhat explained it here, in my Is risk aversion really irrational? article, but it didn't make it obvious in the article how it relates to VNM - it wasn't obvious to me at that time.

Here is the core idea: information has value. Uncertainty therefore has a cost. And that cost is not linear to uncertainty.

Let's take a first example: A is being offered a trip to Ecuador, B is being offered a great new laptop and C is being offered a trip to Iceland. My own preference is: A > B > C. I love Ecuador - it's a fantastic country. But I prefer a laptop over a trip to Iceland, because I'm not fond of cold weather (well, actually Iceland is pretty cool too, but let's assume for the sake of the article that A > B > C is my preference).

But now, I'm offered D = (50% chance of A, 50% chance of B) or E = (50% chance of A, 50% chance of C). The VNM independence principle says I should prefer D > E. But doing so, it forgets the cost of information/uncertainty. By choosing E, I'm sure I'll be offered a trip - I don't know where, but I know I'll be offered a trip, not a laptop. By choosing D, I'm no idea on the nature of the present. I've much less information on my future - and that lack of information has a cost. If I know I'll be offered a trip, I can already ask for days off at work, I can go buy a backpack, I can start doing the paperwork to get my passport. And if I know I won't be offered a laptop, I may decide to buy one, maybe not as great as one I would have been offered, but I can still buy one. But if I chose D, I've much less information about my future, and I can't optimize it as much.

The same goes for the Allais paradox: having certitude of receiving a significant amount of money ($24 000) has a value, which is present in choice 1A, but not in all others (1B, 2A, 2B).

And I don't see why a "rational agent" should neglect the value of this information, as the VNM axioms imply. Any thought about that?
[LINK] Well-written article on the Future of Humanity Institute and Existential Risk
by ESRogs — 2013-03-02T12:36:39.402Z

This introduction to the concept of existential risk is perhaps the best such article I've read targeted at a general audience. It manages to cover a lot of ground in a way that felt engaging to me and that I think would carry along many readers who are intellectually curious but may not yet have had exposure to all of the related prerequisite ideas.

Omens: When we peer into the fog of the deep future what do we see – human extinction or a future among the stars?

Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a chipped-off section of bone dug from a local quarry of limestone. Plot recognised it as a femur at once, but he was puzzled by its extraordinary size. The fossil was only a fragment, the knobby end of the original thigh bone, but it weighed more than 20 lbs (nine kilos). It was so massive that Plot thought it belonged to a giant human, a victim of the Biblical flood. He was wrong, of course, but he had the conceptual contours nailed. The bone did come from a species lost to time; a species vanished by a prehistoric catastrophe. Only it wasn’t a giant. It was a Megalosaurus, a feathered carnivore from the Middle Jurassic.

Plot’s fossil was the first dinosaur bone to appear in the scientific literature, but many have followed it, out of the rocky depths and onto museum pedestals, where today they stand erect, symbols of a radical and haunting notion: a set of wildly different creatures once ruled this Earth, until something mysterious ripped them clean out of existence.

[...]

There are good reasons for any species to think darkly of its own extinction. Ninety-nine percent of the species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct, including more than five tool-using hominids.

[...]

Bostrom isn’t too concerned about extinction risks from nature. Not even cosmic risks worry him much, which is surprising, because our starry universe is a dangerous place.

[discussion of threats of supernovae, asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, nuclear weapons, bioterrorism ...]

These risks are easy to imagine. We can make them out on the horizon, because they stem from foreseeable extensions of cur

...
[Video] Brainwashed - A Norwegian documentary series on nature and nurture
by GLaDOS — 2013-03-02T12:34:03.084Z

Related: The Blank Slate, The Psychological Diversity of Mankind, Admitting to Bias

"Hjernevask" a well known (in Norway at least) documentary series that I am sure will be interesting to rationalists here is now available with English subtitles online. Produced by Ole Martin Ihle and Harald Eia a Norwegian documentarian and comedian, it casts a light on both ways in which we know people to be different as well as the culture that is academia in the Nordic country and probably elsewhere as well.

The Series

The Gender Equality Paradox - Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?

The Parental Effect - How much influence do parents really have on their children? To what degree is intelligence inherited?

Gay/Straight - To what extent is sexual preference innate? Are there differences between heterosexual and homosexual brains? Is homosexuality a result of a choice or is it innate?

Violence - Are people from some cultures more aggressive than others?

Sex - Are there biological reasons men have a greater tendency than women to want sex without obligation?

Race - Are there significant genetic differences between different peoples?

Nature or Nurture - Is personality acquired or inherited?

The link go to the YouTube videos with English subtitles. Because linkrot sucks I'm providing another source for the videos.

Some Commentary

There was very little in the series that I found new and disagreed with some presentations. But this is not surprising given my eccentric interest in humans. (^_^) I found the interviews with the scientists and academics interesting and think that overall the series presents a good overview something well worth watching especially considering some of the debates I've seen taken place here recently. (;_;)

I'm somewhat frustrated by the frequent posts warning us about the dangers of Ev. Psych reasoning. (It seems like we average at least one of these per month).

It seems like a lot of this widespread hostility (the reaction to Harald Eia's Hjernevask is a good example of this hostility) stems from the fact that ev. psych is new. New ideas are held to much higher standard than old ones. The early reaction to ev. psych within psychology was characteristic of this effect. Behaviorists, Fr

...
Rationality Quotes March 2013
by Jayson_Virissimo — 2013-03-02T10:45:48.626Z

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

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, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Meetup : Cambridge First-Sunday Meetup
by jimrandomh — 2013-03-01T17:28:01.249Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge First-Sunday Meetup

WHEN:
03 March 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
25 Ames St Cambridge, MA

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups recur on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bldg 66], room 148.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge First-Sunday Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups: Berlin, Cambridge UK, Durham, Frankfurt, London, NYC, Vancouver, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-03-01T16:34:49.336Z

This summary was posted to LW main on February 22nd. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

First meetup in Frankfurt (Main) : 22 February 2013 06:30PM
(Durham) RTLW HPMoR discussion, chapters 39-43: 23 February 2013 11:00AM
Berlin Meetup: 23 February 2013 07:30PM
Vancouver!: 23 February 2013 03:00PM
London Meetup, 24th Feb: 24 February 2013 02:00PM
Washington DC Show and tell meetup: Economics II: 24 February 2013 03:00PM
Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM
Moscow, Expanding rationality: 03 March 2013 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup 9th March: 09 March 2013 04:00PM

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

Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-03]: 24 February 2013 11:00AM
(NYC) Effective Altruism Dinner Party: 24 February 2013 07:30PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 01 March 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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

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

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsb...
Positive Information Diet, Take the Challenge
by diegocaleiro — 2013-03-01T14:51:45.444Z

I looked for Information Diet in Lesswrong search, and found something amazing:

On Lukeprog's Q and A as the new executive director, he was asked:

What is your information diet like? (I mean other than when you engage in focused learning.) Do you regulate it, or do you just let it happen naturally?

By that I mean things like:

Do you have a reading schedule (e.g. X hours daily)?

Do you follow the news, or try to avoid information with a short shelf-life?

Do you significantly limit yourself with certain materials (e.g. fun stuff) to focus on higher priorities?

In the end, what is the makeup of the diet?

Etc.

To which he responded:

I do not regulate my information diet.

I do not have a reading schedule.

I do not follow the news.

I haven't read fiction in years. This is not because I'm avoiding "fun stuff," but because my brain complains when I'm reading fiction. I can't even read HPMOR. I don't need to consciously "limit" my consumption of "fun stuff" because reading scientific review articles on subjects I'm researching and writing about is the fun stuff.

What I'm trying to learn at this moment almost entirely dictates my reading habits.

The only thing beyond this scope is my RSS feed, which I skim through in about 15 minutes per day.

Whatever was the case back then, I'll bet is not anymore. No one with assistants and such a workload should be let adrift like that.

Citizen: But Lukeprog's posts are obviously brilliant, his output is great, even very focused readers like Chalmers find Luke to be very bright.

Which doesn't tell much about what they would have been were he under a more stringent diet. Another reasonable suspicion is that he was not actually modelling himself correctly, since he obviously does have an information diet

The Information Diet Challenge is to set yourself an information diet, explicitly, and follow it for a week.

Many ways of countering biases have been proposed here, but I haven't found a post dealing with this specific, very low hanging fruit one.

If you want inspiration, Ferriss has some advice here.

... but that is not the Positive Information Diet yet...

Information diets are supposed to constrain not everything you intake, but only what you intake instrumentally. If you just love reading about tensors and fairy tales, don't include them in what you won't avoid. What matters is to know that you'll avo...
Meetup : Paderborn Meetup March 6th
by Just_existing — 2013-03-01T14:10:48.782Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup March 6th

WHEN:
06 March 2013 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Gownsmen's Pub, Uni Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100, Paderborn

We are meeting once again in Paderborn.

The topics of this evening are not yet determined, but will be in the next days, or develop during the meetup. Highly interesting talk can be expected.

If you live in the area consider dropping by :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup March 6th
Meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-04]
by Sohum — 2013-03-01T09:08:34.183Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-04]

WHEN:
03 March 2013 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity JCR, Cambridge, UK

Meetup! This week, we'll be continuing our reading group of Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 For Beginners. These are explicitly designed as introductory posts, and this is just our fourth session, so dive right in with us if you're new!

We'll be covering Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen today. We'll also have a short administrative session at the end; let's say around 11:45.

See you there!

-Sohum

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-04]
On the goodness of Beeminder
by KatjaGrace — 2013-03-01T02:31:26.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Beeminder.com improves my life a lot. This is surprising: few things improve my life much, and when they do it’s usually because I’m imagining it. Or because they are things that everyone has known about for ages and I am slow on the uptake (e.g. not moving house three times a year, making a habit of eating breakfast, making habits at all). But Beeminder is new, and it definitely helps.

One measurable instrumental benefit of Beeminder is that I have exercised for half an hour or an hour per day on average since last October. Previously I exercised if I needed to get somewhere or if the fact that exercise is good for people crossed my mind particularly forcibly, or if some even less common events occurred. So this is big. It seems to help a lot for other things too, such as working, but the evidence there is weaker since I used to work pretty often anyway. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep better track.

Unlike many other improvements to my life, I have some guesses about why this is so useful. But first let me tell you the basic concept of Beeminder.

Take a thing you can measure, such as how many pages you have written. Suppose you measure this every day, and enter the data as points in a graph. Suppose also that the graph contains a ‘road’ stretching up ahead of your data, to days that have not yet happened. Then you could play a game of keeping your new data points above the road. A single day below the road and you lose. It turns out this can be a pretty compelling game. This is basically Beeminder.

There are more details. You can change the steepness of the road, but only for a week in the future. So you can fine-tune the challengingness of a goal, but can’t change it out of laziness unless you are particularly forward thinking about your laziness (in which case you probably won’t sign up for this).

There is a lot of leeway in what indicators you measure, and some I tried didn’t help much. The main things I measure lately are:

number of 20 minute blocks of time spent working. They have to be continuous, though a tiny bit of interruption is allowed if someone else causes it

time spent exercising weighted by the type of exercise e.g. running = 2x dancing = 2 x walking

points accrued for doing tasks on my to-do list. When I think of anything I want to do I put it on the list, whether it’s watching a certain movie

...
Meetup : London Meetup, 10th March
by philh — 2013-03-01T00:32:33.625Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 10th March

WHEN:
10 March 2013 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

A fortnightly meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. We meet every other Sunday at 2pm. Everyone is welcome.

We also have a Google group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 10th March
Constructive mathemathics and its dual
by MrMind — 2013-02-28T17:21:34.629Z

I have stumbled upon an interesting and, as far as I know, new concept: thinking about the duality between constructive and paraconsistent logics, I've noticed that while the meta-theory of intuitionistic logic (constructive mathematics) is very well understood and studied, the meta-theory of the dual logic is not. If we understand constructive mathematics from an epistemological point of view, as an accretion of truth from an empty base, we ought to be able to think about a sort of destructive mathematics, that starts from the totality of assertions and proceeds by expunging falsity. This seems to have surprising consequences for things like theism, Tegmark universe(s), the Many World Interpretation and so on, but first I need to cover some background informations. This I will do in the present post, while in the next I'll present the concept and some of its applications.

There is a variety of philosophical programs known as constructive mathematics, but their common denominator is to refuse the classic way of conceiving truth and adhere instead to a concept known as verificational existence. That is, for a mathematical formula A to be accepted as true, there must be a construction (a direct proof) of A. On the same level, for a mathematical formula to be denoted false, a constructivist accepts only a proof of (this symbol denotes the negation of A). If neither of such proofs exist, then a constructivist refuse to impose a truth value upon A. This has as consequence the refusal of the general formula , ( denotes logical disjunction), valid in classical logic, a principle called in Latin tertium non datur (TND), which means "a third is not given". For a constructivist nonetheless the principle still holds ( denotes logical conjunction), because it is still viewed as impossible that there exists a valid proof of A and of its opposite. This one is called ex contraditione quodlibet (ECQ), which means "anything from a contradiction".

The simple excision of TND from classical logic gives a logical system called intuitionistic logic (because it was developed under the intuitionistic program of constructive mathematics), which has many, many interesting properties.

A logical calculus developed on these fundamental consideration is aimed at preserving justification rather than truth: intuitionistic proofs, instead of carrying from true formulas to...