trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Shanghai Meetup Wednesday, 7:30
by Barry_Cotter — 2013-02-18T05:18:54.528Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup Wednesday, 7:30

WHEN: 20 February 2013 01:07:30PM (+0800)

WHERE: Salley Garden, 480 Yongjia Lu, near Yueyang Lu, Shanghai

Salley Garden 480 Yongjia Lu (near Yueyang Lu), (map), at 7:30 p.m

If someone else has a topic they want to talk about for a bit before we just talk, say it in the comments, otherwise I'll edit this next lunchtime with what we'll spend a while talking about before just chatting.

Last time we had four people from the mailing list show up apart from me and a friend. There was good conversation and good food but unfortunately we didn't get to board games.

All two times I've been there the food has been good. I hope to see some of you there.

I look like this, and will have a piece of paper with Shanghai Rationalists/ Less wrong on it.

It can be hard to find so directions are below

It's exactly in the middle of the block between Yueyang Lu & Taiyuan Lu, on the north side of Yongjia Lu. There's a Salley Garden sign at the entrance to the alleyway - head down there and it's on the left, next to Inferno. Here is what the entrance to the alleyway looks like. If you're coming from Yueyang Lu and you hit the police station, you've gone too far.

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup Wednesday, 7:30
[SEQ RERUN] Three Worlds Decide (5/8)
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-17T06:28:16.668Z

Today's post, Three Worlds Decide (5/8) was originally published on 03 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The Superhappies propose a compromise.

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 Interlude with the Confessor, 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.
Help me refactor my life
by MixedNuts — 2013-02-16T12:19:09.985Z

So I got stuck in a depressive rut once again and I'm making a fresh start. Give me advice!

I'll move. My plan is to find a cheap place somewhere in France, but anywhere in the EU's good. Having like-minded roommates would be a plus. Anyone wish to bask in my glorious presence? I'm a very accommodating roommate (I've complained about exactly one thing in two years of rooming with various people, and never refused a request), respond well to nagging, tend to keep to myself unless prompted, don't have many irritating habits I can think of (maybe I use too much dish soap?), and am generally good with kids. And if you're a mentally odd person who could use a bit of live-in help, boy are you in luck!

I'll poke around at jobs until I find one I can reliably handle. That means not having to focus too much and no heavy responsibilities. Working from home is best - programming or web dev or translation or editing. For meatspace jobs, maybe tutoring. Anyone have a bright idea? Anyone want me to normalise the tags in their music collection for a pittance?

I'll try to develop better mental hygiene. That includes hounding psychiatrists, maintaining my network of friends (social life is the one thing I'm really successful at these days), cultivating new hobbies, and tinkering with useful habits. Anyone have deep wisdom, or an old lockpicking kit to send me?

I'll make some long-term plans. Taking up my studies again and going for that cool engineering career is the obvious choice, but it might not be a reasonable goal by then. Anyone want to recruit me for seasteading or something?

I have enough savings to last me for a while and my parents haven't cut me off yet, so I can afford a few failures before my life's in order again. Other than that I can't predict very much about how dependable my meds, any of my friends, my shiny new boyfriend, or my own brain are.
[SEQ RERUN] Interlude with the Confessor
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-16T01:31:21.086Z

Today's post, Interlude with the Confessor (4/8) was originally published on 02 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Akon talks things over with the Confessor, and receives a history lesson.

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 The Super Happy People (3/8), 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.
Great rationality posts by LWers not posted to LW
by lukeprog — 2013-02-16T00:31:20.077Z

Ever since Eliezer, Yvain, and myself stopped posting regularly, LW's front page has mostly been populated by meta posts. (The Discussion section is still abuzz with interesting content, though, including original research.)

Luckily, many LWers are posting potentially front-page-worthy content to their own blogs.

Below are some recent-ish highlights outside Less Wrong, for your reading enjoyment. I've added an * to my personal favorites.

Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson, Rob Wiblin, Katja Grace, Carl Shulman)

Hanson, Beware Far Values

Wiblin, Is US Gun Control an Important Issue?

Wiblin, Morality As Though It Really Mattered

Grace, Can a Tiny Bit of Noise Destroy Communication?

Shulman, Nuclear winter and human extinction: Q&A with Luke Oman

Wiblin, Does complexity bias biotechnology towards doing damage?

Yvain (now moved here)

Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns *

The Great Stagnation

Epistemic Learned Helplessness *

The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting

The Rationalist Conspiracy (Alyssa Vance)

What Caring Is

The Real America of 2022

Why Most Online Medical Information Sucks

Reflective Disequilibrium (Carl Shulman)

Spreading happiness to the stars seems little harder than just spreading

Rawls' original position, potential people, and Pascal's Mugging

Philosophers vs economists on discounting

Utilitarianism, contractualism, and self-sacrifice

Are pain and pleasure equally energy-efficient? *

Rational Altruist (Paul Christiano)

Pressing Ethical Questions

Replaceability *

How Useful is Progress?

Alex Vermeer

15 Benefits of the Growth Mindset

Prince Mm Mm (Giles)

Anthropic Principle Primer

Entropy and Unconvincing Models
Cryo: Legal fees of $2500
by DataPacRat — 2013-02-15T18:43:01.328Z

I have just received a message from my lawyer, regarding the preparations of my cryo-based will, power of attorney, and related papers. The most significant quote reads as follows:
Due to the complex nature of your wishes and the undeveloped area of the law surrounding cryogenics and the transportation of a human body out of the country, your file has required and will require further extensive time and research to prepare and draft the necessary documents to ensure that your wishes are correctly stated and that they will be carried out upon your death. As such, in order to complete any further work on your behalf we will require a retainer from you in the amount of $2,500.00. Please contact our office to arrange the payment of the retainer. This can be paid by cheque, cash, credit or debit. Upon receipt of this retainer we will proceed to draft the documents in a manner that best ensures that your wishes regarding cryogenics are carried out.
This is somewhat more than I was hoping, and expecting, to pay. While I do have a line of credit which I can use to pay the immediate cost, I do not have sufficient income to pay off that cost any time soon, and I am thus debating whether or not to pay it.
One option that occurs to me is that if my law-firm is able to nail down a set of documents to maximize the odds of a Canadian cryonicist's will being properly carried out, then that would be to the benefit of a number of cryonicists, here and otherwise; perhaps even enough so that it could be in the interests of cryonicists here to help cover the legal fees, instead of having to hire new lawyers to separately re-develop the same paperwork. (It would be reasonably trivial for me to provide proof of my lawyer's existence and the retainer request.)
I'm also open to any other ideas that anyone here could suggest.
Meetup : Toronto - What's all this about Bayesian Probability and stuff?!
by Giles — 2013-02-15T17:28:03.102Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto - What's all this about Bayesian Probability and stuff?!

WHEN:
19 February 2013 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
54 Dundas St E, Toronto, ON

Place: Upstairs at The Imperial Public Library 54 Dundas St. E, near Dundas Station. Enter at the door on the right marked "library", go upstairs and look for the paperclip sign.

A lot of us enjoy reading the Less Wrong Sequences:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

...but there's a lot there that might seem confusing. Do we really try to live our lives according to a mathematical formula? Do we really hate frequentist statistics? Who are these mysterious organizations with their logos at the top of the page? What's the deal with the Harry Potter and My Little Pony stuff? How much of that math and science and philosophy is relevant to our daily lives?

This meetup is a chance to try and clear up some of these confusions.

It's also a chance for each of us to explain: what does rationality mean to you? What do you imagine a rational person as being like?

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto - What's all this about Bayesian Probability and stuff?!
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Cambridge UK, London
by FrankAdamek — 2013-02-15T17:00:38.924Z

This summary was posted to LW main on February 8th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Berlin Meetup: 08 February 2013 07:30PM
London Meetup, 10th Feb: 11 February 2013 02:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 February 2013 01:00PM
Moscow: Rationality in our daily life: 17 February 2013 04:00PM
Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th: 20 February 2013 07:00PM
First meetup in Frankfurt (Main) : 22 February 2013 06:30PM
Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 09 February 2019 01:30PM
Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-01]: 10 February 2013 11:00AM
Love and Sex in Salt Lake City: 16 February 2014 01:00PM

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, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area...
What are your rules of thumb?
by DataPacRat — 2013-02-15T15:59:00.457Z

I'm not as smart as I like to think I am. Knowing that, I've gotten into a habit of trying to work out as many general principles as I can ahead of time, so that when I actually need to think of something, I've already done as much of the work as I can.

What are your most useful cached thoughts?

A few of the rules-of-thumb I've already pre-cached include:

"Stay classy". Assume that whatever social interactions I have are going to come back to me in twenty years, so try not to make my future self too embarrassed; be as polite and respectful as feasible.

"The rule of threes: for anything important, try to have at least three sources, including at least one under your own control". Adapted from some wilderness survival books, it also applies to anything from home emergency kits to internet access to news sources.

"Assume I'm more likely than not going to get the worse side of the bargain." There are lots of people who are better than me at haggling, negotiating, and social sciences - in fact, I'm almost certainly somewhere down on the lower half of the bell-curve. So if it's possible to be taken advantage of in a deal, then I'm probably the one who's going to get taken advantage of.

"Assume I'm more likely than not going to get the worse side of the bargain." Applied to the field of ethics; if an ethical system says that it's moral to shoot someone for stealing an ice cream, then I assume that someone is going to mistake me for having stolen it and try to shoot me; or, if it's supposedly moral for a rich man to charge a thousand dollars for a bottle of water, I assume I'm going to be the one crawling in from the desert.

"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." I'm quite willing to steal ideas, including this phrasing of enlightened self-interest by Thomas Jefferson. (But I don't want this to become just another quotes thread.)

That should be a reasonable but not overwhelming sample of the sorts of ideas I mean, and am hoping to evoke more of with this post.
Is protecting yourself from your own biases self-defeating? 
by  — 2013-02-15T14:21:10.122Z

I graduated from high school and wish to further my education formally by studying for a bachelor's degree in order to become a medical researcher. I could, for instance, take two different academic paths:

Study Medicine at undergraduate level and then do a postdoctoral fellowship.

Study Biochemistry at undergraduate level, then study for a PhD at graduate level, and finally do a postdoctoral fellowship.

Since I will do these studies in Europe, they each take approximately the same amount of time, namely 6 to 8 years.

Do I want to do treat patients? No, I do not. But I am considering Medicine because it can be a buffer against my own mediocrity: in case I turn out to be a below average scientist, I will be screwed royally. From my personal job shadowing experience, Medicine, on the other hand, requires mere basic intellectual traits, primarily the ability to memorize heaps of information. And those I think I have. To do world-class research though I'd have to be an intellectual heavyweight, and of that I'm not so sure.

How do I decide what path to follow?

The reason I'm asking you strangers for advice is because I evidently have biases, such as the pessimism/optimism bias or the Dunning–Kruger effect, that impair my ability to reason clearly; and people who know me personally are likewise prone to make errors in advising me because of biases like, say, the Halo effect. (Come to think of it, thinking that I can't become an above average scientist is in itself a self-defeating prophecy!)

Do you think that one ought to always seek advice from total strangers in order to be safeguarded from his/her own biases?

PS: I apologize if I should have written this in a specific thread. I'll delete my article if that's necessary.
Unintentional bayesian
by  — 2013-02-15T10:46:17.282Z

Growing up in a very religious country, I was indoctrinated thoroughly both at home and at school. I used to believe that some Christian beliefs made sense. When I was 14 years old or so, I began contemplating death – I said to myself, “Well, after I die I go to Hell or Heaven; the latter is preferable, so I'd better learn as soon as possible how I can make sure I'll go to Heaven.”

So I went on to read frantically about Christianity. With every iota of information processed, I strayed away from this religion. That is, the more I read, the less anything pertaining to it seemed plausible. “Where the hell is Hell? Can I visit before I die? Why doesn't God answer my prayers to tell me? Why do some people get to talk to God but not me?”, I retorted. In retrospective, my greatest strength was genuine curiosity – I wanted to know as much as possible about the truthfulness of my religion.

The irony here is that wanting to become more Christian-like led to my abandoning of Christianity. But I continued to learn more about other religions as well, thinking that one might be truer than the other. Of course, none of them seemed every remotely plausible; I concluded that religions are false. I turned into an atheist without even knowing that that word existed!

Eventually I stumbled on some articles regarding non-religion and discovered that my lack of religious beliefs are called 'atheism'. Since then, I have abandoned more beliefs tied to, say, politics or nutrition, thanks to applying bayesian probability to my hypotheses.

I had been an unintentional bayesian for my whole life!

Have you had any similar experiences?

PS: This is my first article. I am looking forward to hearing feedback on it.

Edit #1: I should have used the term 'rationalist' instead of 'bayesian' because I didn't apply Bayes' theorem explicitly.
The Virtue of Compartmentalization
by b1shop — 2013-02-15T08:53:41.188Z

Cross posted from my blog, Selfish Meme.

I’d like to humbly propose a new virtue to add to Eliezer’s virtues of rationality — the virtue of Compartmentalization. Like the Aristoteian virtues, the virtue of Compartmentalization is a golden mean. Learning the appropriate amount of Compartmentalization, like learning the appropriate amount of bravery, is a life-long challenge.

Learning how to program is both learning the words to which computers listen and training yourself to think about complex problems. Learning to comfortably move between levels of abstraction is an important part of the second challenge.

Large programs are composed of multiple modules. Each module is composed of lines of code. Each line of code is composed of functions manipulating objects. Each function is yet a deeper set of instructions.

For a programmer to truly focus on one element of a program, he or she has to operate at the right level of abstraction and temporarily forget the elements above, below or alongside the current problem.

Programming is not the only discipline that requires this focus. Economists and mathematicians rely on tools such as regressions and Bayes’ rule without continually recanting the math that makes them truths. Engineers do not consider wave-particle duality when predicting Newtonian-type problems. When a mechanic is fixing a radiator, the only relevant fact about spark plugs is that they produce heat.

If curiosity killed the cat, it’s only because it distracted her from more urgent matters.

As I became a better programmer I didn’t notice my Compartmentalization-skills improving – I was too lost in the problem at hand, but I noticed the skill when I noticed its absence in other people. Take, for example, the confused philosophical debate about free will. A typical spiel from an actual philosopher can be found in the movie Waking Life.

Discussions about free will often veer into unproductive digressions about physical facts at the wrong level of abstraction. Perhaps, at its deepest level, reality is a collection of billiard balls. Perhaps reality is, deep down, a pantheon of gods rolling dice. Maybe all matter is composed of cellists balancing on vibrating tightropes. Maybe we’re living in a simulated matrix of 1’s and 0s, or maybe it really is just turtles all the way down.

These are interesting questions that sh...
Three Axes of Prohibitions
by daenerys — 2013-02-15T07:34:55.569Z

The Game of Thrones board game is similar to Diplomacy (so I hear: I've never actually played Diplomacy). You often need to make alliances to survive, but these alliances are weak. It is both expected and required that you will eventually break your alliances, otherwise you will lose. My first time playing this game, I made an alliance with a neighboring House which turned out to be unwise, and severely limited my options. To me, breaking an alliance to win a game (even if it was socially acceptable) didn’t feel right/wasn’t worth the negative feelings, and so I ended up stuck on my island for the whole of the game.

Instead of adapting by learning to be ok breaking alliances, which I considered to be a sub-optimal solution, I fixed the problem by targeting my alliance terms. Now, instead of a general alliance, my offers were along the lines of “I won’t attack you across this border for the next four rounds, if you agree to the same.”

This had the effect of actually strengthening my alliances. Limiting the terms of the alliance to something that could easily be complied with, meant that defecting was no longer expected. The cost goes down, and the benefits go up. In the previous game, both I and my ally would’ve had to leave our mutual border semi-defended, because we knew the alliance wouldn’t hold against a strong enough temptation of conquest. This was facilitated by the fact that the alliance was expected to be eventually broken. In the targeted alliance, I and my ally can leave our mutual border undefended, since we can expect the alliance to hold. This is facilitated by the fact that there would be social sanctions against breaking the alliance. (e.g. I wouldn’t form alliances with that person in future games, because I knew they would break them.)

This lead me to the thought that prohibitions seem to focus on three axes:

Specific/Vague Wording: When you ask for a favor, say “please” v. Be polite

Targeted/Broad Expectations: Don’t do this one thing v. Don’t do this whole class of things

Social expectation to comply/fudge: Don’t have sex with another (wo)man v “Don’t even look at another (wo)man!"

General Examples:

Speed limits- specific, targeted, but expected to fudge

Terms of use agreements- specific, broad, expected to fudge (no one even r

...
[SEQ RERUN] The Super Happy People (3/8)
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-15T07:06:03.175Z

Today's post, The Super Happy People (3/8) was originally published on 01 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Humanity encounters new aliens that see the existence of pain amongst humans as morally unacceptable.

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 War and/or Peace (2/8), 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.