trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup: Futurology / Open Discussion
by iarwain1 — 2016-02-17T20:24:48.533Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup: Futurology / Open Discussion

WHEN:
28 February 2016 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1852 Reisterstown Rd, Pikesville, MD 21208

Discussion Topic: Officially futurism, transhumanism, x-risks, etc. Unofficially whatever people feel like talking about.

Place: Panera Bread in Pikesville

My contact info:

Cell: 443-453-6673 (might not pick up if I don't recognize the number, so leave a message)

Email: nyratynaqre@tznvy.pbz (rot13'd to avoid spam)

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area Meetup: Futurology / Open Discussion
The ethics of eating meat
by  — 2016-02-17T19:03:38.689Z

I have grown up in a family of meat-eaters and therefore have been eating meat all my life. I until recently I have never spent much time thinking about it. I justified my behaviour by saying that animal lives do not matter, because they are not self-conscious and animal pain does not matter, because they have no memory of pain and therefore, as soon as the actual pain is over it is like it has never happened.

In the recent weeks I have spent some time to properly think this through and form an informed believe about whether I can justify eating meat. I would like to hear your thoughts about my thought process and results, because this is a decision that I really don’t want to get wrong.

I have Identified 5 possible problems with meat consumption.

Meat requires us to kill animals.

Factory farmed animals are in a considerable amount of pain for most of their life.

Meat productions requires much more space than producing plants, and therefore might contribute to the world hunger

Some Studies claim that meat, especially if factory farmed, is unhealthy.

Meat production is bad for the environment (partly because of point 4, but also for other reasons)

I have decided to ignore problems 4-5 at the beginning, because admitting that they are true would impose weaker restrictions on me. If I come to the conclusion, that I don’t want to eat meat for reason 1, I could no longer eat any meat and reason 2 would forbid me to eat factory farmed meat, which would essentially bring my meat consumption down to something close to zero.

Reasons 4 and 5 would limit my meat consumption far less, since I do lots of other things that are unhealthy (like eating candy and snacks) or harmful to the environment (like traveling by plane) and while I might come to the conclusion that I want to reduce my meat consumption for reasons 4-5, I expect to have many situations left, where eating meat gives me enough utility to still do it in spite of that reasons.

Reason 3 would also be important, but I am fairly sure, that the problem mostly lies with the lack of spending power in poorer countries, and that it will not lead to more food in Africa if I stop eating meat. For that reason I did not do further research on this.

So what I did was to think about problems 1 and 2 and decide to revisit 4 and 5 if I come to the conclusion that 1 and 2 still ...
A scheme for safely handling a mixture of good and bad predictors
by jessicata — 2016-02-17T05:35:55.000Z

Paul has written about an open
problem:
can we use active learning to get a good predictor, if all we have is a
mixture of a good predictor and some possibly bad predictors? I'd like to
propose a refinement to the scheme.

A simplified version of Paul's problem is the following.
Suppose we have n predictors. These predictors might, for example, predict
how a human would answer a given question. One is known to be good; the rest
may be arbitrarily evil. We don't know which predictor is good. How do
we use this set of predictors to imitate a human almost as well as the good predictor?

Paul proposes using active learning to identify questions on which these
predictors disagree, then asking them to the human. This allows
the system to eliminate some predictors from consideration when they
make bad predictions. However, if any of the predictors is evil, then
it might intentionally disagree with the good predictor on a "weird" question,
which causes bad results when it is asked to the human. This seems like
a serious problem, since due to simulation warfare,
it does not seem unlikely for one of the predictors to actually be evil.

I propose the following refinement. The system should consider a stream of questions
coming in and answer each one before seeing the next. It should examine each
question and see if the predictors that have scored well in the past disagree
significantly on their predictions of the answer to this question. If so, then
it should ask the question to the human, output the human's answer, and give each
predictor a score based on how good its prediction of the human's answer was. If not, then it can go
ahead and output the consensus prediction. Ideally, we could prove that this
algorithm will not ask the human very many questions (preferably, not much more
than linear in n). This setting is similar to the setting of online
selective sampling,
especially the KWIK
("knows what it knows") variant.

A single predictor cannot cause the system to ask the human an arbitrary question.
It can bide its time and wait for a particular question to come up naturally,
but this does not give it much power: a question that would come up
naturally is unlikely to be bad to ask to the human, if the rest of the system
is set up correctly.

One problem is that the predictors might disagree at an inopportune time,
when we would really prefer for the system not

...
Critique on my attempt to teach rationality
by Bound_up — 2016-02-17T04:17:35.448Z

Inspired by the call to go forth and make rationality reign...

I've started a blog at http://www.bettertoknow.wordpress.com

It teaches discussion/debate techniques by showing them at work in a dialogue about the existence of God.

I don't expect theists to read it much, but atheists will be able to discuss theology (and everything else) more effectively with theists (and everyone else) after reading it.

With that in mind, I'd much appreciate critique of the plan and execution.

Am I thinking clearly? Am I expressing the ideas well? Am I taking too long to say things, using too great inferential distances, or strawmanning?

And on another level, am I using the wrong website to blog? Are my posts too long? Are they missing some important element? Should I be doing anything differently?
The Value of Those in Effective Altruism
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2016-02-17T00:59:34.180Z

Summary/TL;DR: this piece offers Fermi Estimates of the value of those in EA, focusing on the distinctions between typical EA members and dedicated members (defined below). These estimates suggest that, compared to the current movement baseline, we should prioritize increasing the number of “typical” EA members and getting more non-EA people to behave like typical EA members, rather than getting typical EAs to become dedicated ones.

[Acknowledgments: Thanks to Tom Ash, Jon Behar, Ryan Carey, Denis Drescher, Michael Dickens, Stefan Schubert, Claire Zabel, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Ozzie Gooen, Linchuan Zheng, Chris Watkins, Julia Wise, Kyle Bogosian, Max Chapnick, Kaj Sotaja, Taryn East, Kathy Forth, Scott Weathers, Hunter Glenn, Alfredo Parra, William Kiely, Jay Quigley, and others who prefer to remain anonymous for looking at various draft versions of this post. Thanks to their feedback, the post underwent heavy revisions. Any remaining oversights, as well as all opinions expressed, are my responsibility.]

This article is a follow-up to "Celebrating All Who Are In Effective Altruism"

Introduction

There has been some discussion recently of whether the EA movement is excessively or insufficiently oriented toward getting typical EA members to become dedicated ones. The crux of this discussion, from a mechanistic movement building perspective, is whether, compared to the current baseline:

1) The EA movement should put more efforts into attracting as many value-aligned people to the EA movement as possible and keeping them in the movement, as well as getting non-EA members to behave more like typical EAs, or

2) The EA movement should more efforts into getting all of those in the EA movement to become as engaged as possible, at the expense of some people becoming disengaged due to this pressure and others not wanting to join because of the perception of high demands.

Which one will contribute most to global flourishing?

Semantics

A sub-branch of this discussion has focused on the terminology to use in describing those more or less engaged in the EA movement. My position is that the level of engagement is not binary, but lies on a spectrum, as noted here. For the sake of clarity and without claiming these are the optimal terms to use broadly, this piece will use “typical” for those who are ...
A possible training procedure for human-imitators
by jessicata — 2016-02-16T22:43:52.000Z

Some proposed ways to train a system to imitate a human imitate a human involve having one system imitate a human, while another system tries to tell the first system apart from an actual human. If the first system can get classified as human by the second system, then (one might think) it is imitating a human well, as long as the second system is sufficiently smart.

I described a possible problem with these approaches in a LessWrong thread:

Here's a scenario that doesn't seem completely implausible. Suppose Bob is someone whose public key is easily available on the internet. The first AI will read things on the internet and output a message. Some of the message will get put on the public internet. Bob suspects that the AI might have secretly sent him a message (e.g. giving him advice on which stocks to buy). So he tries using his private key to decrypt some of the AI's output (e.g. the lowest-order bits in some images the AI has output).

Knowing that Bob (or someone else like Bob) will likely do this, the AI (which has access to Bob's public key, due to reading the internet) encrypts a message with Bob's public key, and puts the ciphertext in the lowest-order bits of some image. The ciphertext looks like random noise to the second AI. Maybe the plaintext contains both actual stock tips and some dangerous messages that trick Bob into running an unrestrained copy of the first AI (I'm assuming the AI is good at psychological manipulation).

As Paul says later in the thread, the underlying problem is that it is easy for the first AI to change its output in an important way without the second AI noticing.

Here's a proposed way of implementing human-imitation while avoiding this problem. The human-imitator is a single AI that is given a prefix of a string produced by a human and predicts the next bit. It is rewarded for predicting the next bit accurately (using some proper scoring rule). We can use this system to imitate a human by sampling from its implied probability distribution over strings, bit by bit. If the system is very good at predicting the next bit in a human-produced string, then this implied probability distribution will be an accurate prediction of the human string.

Unfortunately, predicting the string bit-by-bit might be computationally harder than producing a string that is hard to tell apart from what a human would produce. Here's an exten

...
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game
by Alexander230 — 2016-02-16T20:41:12.529Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game

WHEN:
24 February 2016 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

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

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

Details about the game are here: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH

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

Details about the game are here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKVXVfcTlCZEVKaEE

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKMmptT0FJanU2d2s

Training game: all players try to train the subject to guess and make some action without words, using only positive reinforcement. Details:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzyKVqP6n3hKdy1CZnE4X1BvVDg

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

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 2.5-3 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training game
Meetup : Moscow 2nd LW group meetup
by Alexander230 — 2016-02-16T20:34:54.085Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow 2nd LW group meetup

WHEN:
03 March 2016 07:30:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Москва, ул. Дубининская, 20

Welcome to the next Moscow 2nd LW group meetup!

Our plan:

A talk about Explanation Freeze.

FallacyMania game ( https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH ).

Meetup schedule is here: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/-3--ld9akfpWqDxSWH7dzaPC8

Come to "Nauchka", ul.Dubininskaya, 20. Entrance through the Central children library #14. Nearest metro station is Paveletskaya. Map is here: http://nauchka.ru/contact-information/ . If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Meetup begins at 19:30, the length is 1.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow 2nd LW group meetup
Should we admit it when a person/group is "better" than another person/group?
by Adam Zerner — 2016-02-16T09:43:48.330Z

This sort of thinking seems bad:

me.INTRINSIC_WORTH = 99999999; No matter what I do, this fixed property will remain constant.

This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:

a.impactOnSociety(time) > b.impactOnSociety(time)

a.qualityOfCharacter > b.qualityOfCharacter // determined by things like altruism, grit, courage, self awareness...

Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:

This race is inherently better than that race. I refuse to change my mind, regardless of the evidence brought before me.

But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:

Based on what I've seen, I think that the median member of Group A has a higher qualityOfCharacter than the median member of Group B. I don't think there's anything inherently better about Group A. It's just based on what I've observed. If presented with enough evidence, I will change my mind.

Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.

I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.
Meetup : MelbLW Social Meetup: Feb 2016
by Maelin — 2016-02-16T08:27:36.873Z

Discussion article for the meetup : MelbLW Social Meetup: Feb 2016

WHEN:
19 February 2016 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Bull and Bear Tavern, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000

This month's LessWrong Melbourne social meetup is on again this week!

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/182819988751813/

Our social meetups run on the third Friday of each month. They are casual get-togethers where we chat about topics of interest over a few drinks and a meal. Sometimes we play games as well.

Where? The Bull & Bear Tavern, 347 Flinders Ln, Melbourne VIC 3000

When? From 6:30pm on Friday 19th Feb. Feel free to show up later, though. We typically stay at the main venue until about 11pm.

Dinner? The Bull & Bear serve decent pub food and we usually get some wedges etc to share. If you would like to wait, we usually go out for dinner/supper afterwards.

Games? Feel free to bring a game along if you'd like to play!

Contact? Any questions or issues, contact Richard on 0421231789

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : MelbLW Social Meetup: Feb 2016
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2016-02-16T02:48:51.413Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
21 February 2016 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

x-posted from list. Gathering in courtyard from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing (7:00 pm).

This week, we will be hanging out, playing games, and engaging in fun conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

Feb. 28: Mini Talks

Mar. 6: Game Design

Mar. 13: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Meetup : LW Cologne meetup
by EGI — 2016-02-15T23:49:46.979Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetup

WHEN:
27 February 2016 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln

If you are new and did not fill in our Doodle, please PM me. Otherwise everyone is welcome

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetup
Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality
by ScottL — 2016-02-15T13:03:09.532Z

I have been thinking for a while that it would be useful if there was something similar to the Less Wrong Canon on Rationality for the CFAR material. Maybe, it could be called the 'CFAR Canon on Applied Rationality'. To start on this I have compiled a collection of descriptions for the CFAR techniques that I could find. I have separated the techniques into a few different sections. The sections and descriptions have mostly been written by me, with a lot of borrowing from other material, which means that they may not accurately reflect what CFAR actually teaches.

Please note that I have not attended any CFAR workshops, nor am I affiliated with CFAR in any way. My understanding of these techniques comes from CFAR videos, blogs and other websites which I have provided links to. If I have missed any important techniques or if my understanding of any of the techniques is incorrect or if you can provide links to the research that these techniques are based on, please let me know and I will update this post.

Warning:

Learning this material based solely on the descriptions written here may be unhelpful, arduous or even harmful. (See Duncan_Sabien's full comment for more information on this) It is because the material is very hard to learn correctly. Most of the techniques below involve in one way or another volitionally overriding your instinctual, intuitive or ingrained behaviours and thoughts. These are thoughts which not only often feel enticing and alluring, but that also often feel unmistakably right. If you are anything like me, then you should be very careful if you are trying to learn this material alone. For you will be prone to rationalization, taking shortcuts and making mistakes.

My recommendations for trying to learn this material are:

learn it deeply and be sure to put what you have learnt into practice. It will often help if you take notes on what works for you and what doesn't. Also take note of the 'Mindsets and perspectives that help you in discovering potential situations that you could end up valuing' section as these are very important.

get the help of experts or other people who have already expended great amounts of effort in trying to implement this material like the people at cfar. This will save you a great amount of stress and effort as it will allow you to avoid a plethora of potential mistakes and inefficiencies. If you rea

...
Less Wrong Karma Chart Website
by ScottL — 2016-02-15T12:36:12.932Z

As a learning exercise, I wrote a web app which shows some charts on your karma score.

I recommend just going to the website and trying it out, but here is a description of it as well if you're interested. To use it just enter your user id in the text box at the top and then press the go button. It will show that it is loading and after a while five charts will be shown.

The first chart is a time series chart which shows you when you have posted a comment or discussion post. This chart allows you to zoom in on any desired area.

The second chart is a time series chart which shows you when you have posted a main post. This chart allows you to zoom in on any desired area.

The third chart shows your cumulative score. This chart allows you to zoom in on any desired area.

The fourth chart shows proportions, i.e. how many comments/posts you have made and how many were positive, neutral or negative.

The fifth and final chart shows information on your total positive and negative scores. This chart allows you to drill down and see where your points have originated from, i.e. from comments or discussion posts or main posts.

Please note that it may take a while to load. I am scraping all the information from your users page. It shouldn't take too long though. On my computer it takes less than a minute to load all the information on my karma score, but it did take around half an hour to load Eliezer_Yudkowsky's karma information. YMMV depending on what computer you are using. It is not your score that determines how long it will take, but the amount of comments and posts that you have made. I recommend using chrome as I haven't tested it in any other browsers.

The karma calculated by LessWrong also might be slightly different to what my web app shows. For example, my webapp shows Eliezers karma total score as 290096 and in LessWrong it is 290174. I am pretty sure that my code is right since I counted one example out and I do know of one bug in the LessWrong code that would effect the total score. There are also other things that LessWrong takes into account that I don't, e.g. karma awards and the troll tax. The difference shouldn't be too major, though, so it shouldn't be a big problem.

The website is hosted on github and the code can be found here.

TLDR: Try out the Less Wrong Karma Chart Website and let me kno...
Open Thread Feb 16 - Feb 23, 2016
by Elo — 2016-02-15T02:12:37.805Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), 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 be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
by AnnaLeptikon — 2016-02-14T13:47:46.220Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna

WHEN:
12 March 2016 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Kaisermühlenstraße 24, Vienna

Location:
often depicted wrong, come to U2 Stadlau

Event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/447851665414100/
(join the group Rationality Vienna)

Topic:
not defined yet
= room for open microphone
(means collecting topics in the beginning and then voting on preferences and order, means that also you can prepare some short talk or discussion!)
or the proposal of a full/long lecture

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna