trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-05-31T15:19:03.100Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 24th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 05:00PM
Bristol meetup: 25 May 2013 03:00PM
[Chicago] Fermi Estimates in Chicago: 25 May 2013 03:00PM
London Meetup: 26th May: 26 May 2013 02:00PM
[Moscow] Belief cleaning: 26 May 2013 04:00PM
Munich Meetup: 01 June 2013 03:00PM
Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.: 26 May 2013 02:00PM

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, TX: 25 May 2019 01:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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).

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, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in notifications you can still enter your approximate location, which will let meetup-starting heroes know that ther...
Optimizing for attractiveness
by MrMind — 2013-05-31T09:14:18.737Z

I want to spend a substantial fraction of my time optimizing myself in the direction of being more attractive to females, and I'd really appreciate your suggestions on how to do so.

Why

It should be pretty self-explanatory, but in case you're wondering: relationships are a big part of personal happiness, and where I am now, I feel more inclined toward increasing the number and variability of short- or middle-term sexual relationships rather than just picking a girl who wants to be my wife and run with it. But at the moment women aren't exactly chasing me down the streets, so I want to offer them a more pleasant experience of my company than what it already is.

Mind-killing

I sincerely think this post should provoke none of the above. I'm not asking for ways to trick women into liking me, nor about gender differences about what males prefer over females, etc. Please try really hard to avoid mind-killing subjects into your comments. I'm 'just' asking for ways to change myself into being a more sexually attractive human being.

Caveat(s)

I'm aware of the dichotomy lying around: attraction can be created vs attraction can only be amplified. In both cases there should be at least something that can be done.
I'm also aware that some people strongly dislike posts full of personal details, so I will try to keep them at minimum, while at the same time trying to provide the necessary description of my situation.

I would like

Try to aim for advice on stable improvements, about aspects that are proven to be sexually attractive to straight females, in the age range of 20 to 40.
For example, I know that height or facial symmetry are proven to result universally attractive, but I cannot really change that, and sole-lifts or make-up are so short-term solutions to border on 'tricking women' (yes, I know that women use those tricks too, I simply would like to invest my time better).

My situation

This is the shortest possible description: I'm a straight male in my thirties, heavily overweight, living in Italy in a 20k people town, with a job paying me about $20k a year.
If you think you need more details ask for them in the comments or PM me.

What I'm already doing/planning to do

The first obvious choice is getting fit, although it's about two years I'm trying different diets with no results, so I'd really need pointers in that direction. I've also heard about training programs that...
Meetup : [Moscow] Rational choice
by Yuu — 2013-05-31T06:08:00.097Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Rational choice

WHEN:
09 June 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

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

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Strategies how to make a rational choice.

Prediction markets. We will have another round of predictions, you can find the discussion and bets table on the Russian forum.

Game session: the Liar's dice.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.
Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Rational choice
Curriculum suggestions for someone looking to teach themselves contemporary philosophy
by quanticle — 2013-05-31T04:20:58.811Z

Hello LessWrong,

I just (finally) finished Good and Real, by Gary Drescher. It was a very stimulating read, and I'd like to continue learning philosophy on my own. However, I'm running into a bootstrapping problem. I don't know what I don't know, and therefore, I don't know where I should get started. I've tried searching the LessWrong archive to see if anyone has made a post outlining a curriculum for someone looking to teach themselves the fundamentals of modern philosophy and logic, but either my Google-fu is weak or no such post exists. So, what should someone who is looking to reduce the inferential distance between themselves and modern philosophical thought read, and in what order?

Or, do you all think this is a quixotic quest that I should give up on?
The Paucity of Elites Online
by JonahS — 2013-05-31T01:35:46.626Z

Something that's caught my attention over the past few months is that out of the strongest thinkers who I'm familiar with, a very low proportion record their informal ideas online, and discuss their thoughts in the public domain.

The domain that I'm most familiar with is pure math, so I'll focus on that, but I imagine that my remarks apply more broadly.

A very large fraction of pure mathematicians (including a large fraction of elite mathematicians) post their papers to ArXiv, a database which stores preprints of mathematical papers. The invention and widespread use of ArXiv has been very valuable, in that researchers can easily notice and access the new papers in their fields as soon as they become available.

That not withstanding, the fraction of mathematical thinking that's in the public domain is vastly smaller. Math papers generally don't include explanations of why the researchers are interested in the questions that they're writing about or how they came up with the proofs of the theorems. Even when an author does attempt to explain his or her thinking, a reader will often find parts of it opaque, and want clarification. The need to write to the author for clarification poses a trivial inconvenience which, in practice, discourages a large fraction of questions that people ask.

Informal mathematical thoughts are extremely important for doing mathematical research, and it's generally difficult to learn it without in-person contact with authors of papers.

A natural solution to these issues is for researchers to spend more time blogging about their informal thoughts, and for a commenting system to be enabled for readers to offer suggestions or request clarification.

The mathematicians who have the most to offer in the way of ideas and insight are the elite mathematicians. The fraction of them who blog is tiny. Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers do a considerable amount of blogging, but they're nearly alone in this.

Of the 42 living Fields Medalists, Tao and Gowers are the only active bloggers who I know of, and Borcherds and Connes are the only others who I know of who have ever blogged.

I don't know of any bloggers amongst the winners of the Cole Prize in algebra or in number theory.

I don't know any bloggers amongst the Steele Prize winners.

Ian Agol is the only blogger amongst winners of the&nb

...
"disfluency" research
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2013-05-30T21:33:12.398Z

Adam Alter lists some evidence from people who study the effects of "disfluency" (unfamiliarity, or lack of clarity), which somewhat surprisingly leads to greater depth of thought (while you're expending the energy to understand something, you can't help but think about it), and also a willingness to depart further from immediate concrete reality (as in Robin Hanson's Near-Far). Think of the effort given to studying vague, poetic, or just incomprehensible religious materials (sometimes in their original scripts) and the investment this can generate.

Below are some of the linked claims of evidence:

When you give the prompt ... "Think about what it would be like to be fit and to have done a lot of exercise," if you give that prompt in a font that's very difficult to read, in a disfluent font, people tend to think longer about the task, they think more deeply about it, they depart more from reality, and then later on they actually say that they're going to be more willing to do this sort of exercise, and so they become more committed.

When you give them the bill that's been slightly altered [George Washington's portrait faces left], they think they can't purchase quite as much with it. If you say to them, "How many M&Ms can you purchase with this dollar bill," they'll give you a higher number when it's the real bill, and they'll also do that when it's a dollar bill versus a more obscure form of currency, like a dollar coin, or if you give them two $1bills, they think they can buy more with those two $1 bills than they can with a single $2 bill, the Jefferson $2 bill, which is much rarer. It's legal tender, but it's just more rare, and you find that people think they can purchase more with the two $1 bills than with the single $2 bill. That effect is also stronger to the extent that they are unfamiliar with the Jefferson bill. It goes away completely when they're very familiar with the Jefferson bill, but when they haven't seen it as many times, you get this very strong effect that they think that the Jefferson bill is less valuable, can purchase less than two $1 bills.

[about some anonymous confessions website] In the middle of 2008 he decided to change the format, and now the background, instead of being this gray shade that was very similar to the black text, he changed the background to white, and all of a sudden it was much easier to read the info

...
Meetup : Brussels meetup with Cat
by Axel — 2013-05-30T20:25:03.167Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup with Cat

WHEN:
03 June 2013 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

we are lucky enough to be meeting Cat from the CfAR in "la fleur en papier dorrée" on Monday the 3rd of June.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup with Cat
Meetup : LW Vienna Meetup #3
by Ratcourse — 2013-05-30T18:02:36.127Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Vienna Meetup #3

WHEN:
15 June 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien

Rationality goes University!! - meetup at the NIG, room 2G on the second floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien
Viliam Bur will be talking on "being specific" and Gunther Greindl on what constitutes evidence.
Newcomers welcome.
FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/483142041754571/

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Vienna Meetup #3
Finding interesting communities
by Error — 2013-05-30T15:31:15.773Z

diegocaleiro said this in Research is Polygamous:

Being in an area where the most awesome people are is not asking to "lose the game" it is being in an environment that cultivates greatness.

It made me think of the recent post in Main on How to Build a Community. And reflect a bit on how, while I've lived pretty much exclusively online for the last ten years, the lack of meatspace social contact is finally beginning to annoy me. So here's a question for the group: Not how does one build a community, but where and how does one find existing communities that are worth joining? And what are some examples? Not counting LW itself and its tributaries.

A few things I've tried or will try, in no particular order:

Mensa. Didn't work out terribly well, largely because I seemed to have very little in common with anyone else there. Apparently intelligence alone is an insufficient filter.

Geek conventions. (e.g. Dragoncon) I'm a giant flaming unrepentant geek, so I get the feeling of being among my own kind, and selecting for passion seems to work better than selecting for intelligence insofar as finding interesting people goes. The sheer size of the crowd makes getting at the people who are actually doing awesome things difficult, though.

Makerspaces. For those that haven't heard the term, these are a sort of shared lab for private individuals. I actually became aware of these through item 2. Seems promising and it's the next thing I intend to look into, within the next few weeks. Unfortunately the nearest established one, like the nearest LW meetup, is downtown through murdertraffic; a 2-3 hour round trip.

I suspect, but have no significant evidence, that universities containing graduate schools would also be a good bet. But I'm long out of college (I dropped out, for irrelevant reasons) and have no wish (or money, or time) to go back. I occasionally apply for jobs at the closest such place to me, but haven't had a hit yet and I'm unsure I would want to move downtown anyway. I do get the impression that many here are undergrads or graduate students, so opinions on whether that route may be worth pursuing are welcome.

Beyond that? I don't know. There don't seem to be many communities that both select for being awesome and are accessible to anyone who cares to be awesome. I've found that social reinforcement for doing cool stuff helps a lot. I don't like that fact ve...
Meetup : Helsinki meetup with CatM (CFAR instructor) as special guest star
by Kaj_Sotala — 2013-05-30T07:21:37.467Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki meetup with CatM (CFAR instructor) as special guest star

WHEN:
08 June 2013 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Café Vanha, Mannerheimintie 3, Helsinki, Finland

Cat, who has volunteered extensively at CFAR (and taught at CFAR), will be visiting many cities in Europe. She will now also be visiting Helsinki, and has said that she would happily teach a CFAR class or lead a discussion on some rationality material.

Apologies for the short notice.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki meetup with CatM (CFAR instructor) as special guest star
The Rational Investor, Part I
by wubbles — 2013-05-30T00:32:05.691Z

First off, note that I am not in possession of any of the licenses that entitle me to call myself a financial advisor. However, the approach to investing I will present in this article is endorsed by many economists, Warren Buffet, and Vanguard. I personally follow it, and you can too.

What is the goal of investing? To turn money today into money tomorrow. There are several ways to do this, and people on Wall Street are constantly inventing new ones. What is more, you have professional competition in this activity: people who want to make money today into more money tomorrow then is otherwise possible. You are producing a commodity, and the better you understand this, the better investing decisions you will make.

What are the ways to make money today into money tomorrow? There are many ways. But we want to make money today into money tomorrow in the most efficient way that involves the least amount of worry. After all, we have specialised in some other area of human activity, and are not good at this area. So we should pick an investment that requires no upkeep, no worry, and good returns. This rules out real estate entirely, and the last criterion rules out letting money sit there.

So how does money today turn into money tomorrow? First you pay taxes on the money today, then give the money today as a loan (called "buying a bond") to someone who needs it to do something that will be profitable. Or you can purchase a bit of an enterprise that makes money (called "buying stock") and let it make money, and pay you in the form of dividends or appreciation of shares, as the company grows. Then you sell what you have or get payed back and get taxed again.

But what if they don't pay me back or the company fails? Then you are screwed.

So what if I put a little bit of money in each loan and each share? Then the failure of each one won't hurt you that much.

Okay, I'll do that! Got a few million lying around?

Nope. So I can't do that? Nope, you can't. Bonds come in units of $1000 face value, and stocks in lots of 100.

Wait, what if I got a bunch of my friends together, and we pooled our money? That's called a mutual fund, and you can buy them. But the person who manages the fund charges you money, and that comes right out of the money tomorrow, and sometimes out of the money you put in.

So I should try to minimize these charges? Exactly!

Someone promises me...
To become more rational, rinse your left ear with cold water
by dvasya — 2013-05-29T23:32:47.545Z

A recent paper in Cortex describes how caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS), i.e., rinsing of the ear canal with cold water, reduces unrealistic optimism. Here are some bits from the paper:

Participants were 31 healthy right-handed adults (15 men, 20–40 years)...

Participants were oriented in a supine position with the head inclined 30° from the horizontal and cold water (24 °C) was irrigated into the external auditory canal on one side (Fitzgerald and Hallpike, 1942). After both vestibular-evoked eye movements and vertigo had stopped, the procedure was repeated on the other side...

Participants were asked to estimate their own risk, relative to that of their peers (same age, sex and education), of contracting a series of illnesses. The risk rating scale ranged from −6 (lower risk) to +6 (higher risk). ... Each participant was tested in three conditions, with 5 min rest between each: baseline with no CI (always first), left-ear CI and right-ear CI (order counterbalanced). In the latter conditions risk-estimation was initiated after 30 sec of CI, when nystagmic response had built up. Ten illnesses were rated in each condition and the average risk estimate per condition (mean of 10 ratings) was calculated for each participant. The 30 illnesses used in this study (see Table 1) were selected from a larger pool of illnesses pre-rated by a separate group of 30 healthy participants.Overall, our participants were unrealistically optimistic about their chances of contracting illnesses at baseline ... and during right-ear CI. ...Post-hoc tests using the Bonferroni correction revealed that, compared to baseline, average risk estimates were significantly higher during left-ear CI (p = .016), whereas they remained unchanged during right-ear CI (p = .476). Unrealistic optimism was thus reduced selectively during left-ear stimulation.

(CI stands for caloric irrigation which is how CVS was performed.)

It is not clear how close the participants came to being realistic in their estimates after CVS, but they definitely became more pessimistic, which is the right direction to go in the context of numerous biases such as the planning fallacy.

The paper:

Vestibular stimulation attenuates unrealistic optimism

Ryan McKay,

Corinne Tamagni,

Antonella Palla,

Peter Krummenacher,

Stefa

...
Stats Advice on a New N-back Game
by Antisuji — 2013-05-29T21:44:51.627Z

Cross-posted to my blog. I expect this will be of some interest to the LessWrong community both because of previous interest in N-back and because of the opportunity to apply Bayesian statistics to a real-world problem. The main reason I'm writing this article is to get feedback on my approach and to ask for help in the areas where I'm stuck. For some background, I'm a software developer who's been working in games for 7+ years and recently left my corporate job to work on this project full-time.

As I mentioned here and here, since early February I've been working on an N-back-like mobile game. I plan to release for iOS this summer and for Android a few months later if all goes well. I have fully implemented the core gameplay and most of the visual styling and UI, and am currently working with a composer on the sound and music.

I am just now starting on the final component of the game: an adaptive mode that assesses the player's skill and presents challenges that are tuned to induce a state of flow.

The Problem

The game is broken down into waves, each of which presents an N-back-like task with certain parameters, such as the number of attributes, the number of variants in each attribute, the tempo, and so on. I would like to find a way to collapse these parameters into a single difficulty parameter that I can compare against a player's skill level to predict their performance on a given wave.

But I realize that some players will be better at some challenges than others (e.g. memory, matching multiple attributes, handling fast tempos, dealing with visual distractions like rotation, or recognizing letters). Skill and difficulty are multidimensional quantities, and this makes performance hard to predict. The question is, is there a single-parameter approximation that delivers an adequate experience? Additionally, the task is not pure N-back — I've made it more game-like — and as a result the relationship between the game parameters and the overall difficulty is not as straightforward as it would be in a cleaner environment (e.g. difficulty might be nearly linear in tempo for some set-ups but highly non-linear for others).

I have the luxury of having access to fairly rich behavioral data. The game is partly a rhythm game, so not only do I know whether a match has been made correctly (or a non-match correctly skipped) bu...
Meetup : [Boston] The Science Of Happiness
by ModusPonies — 2013-05-29T20:04:07.923Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Boston] The Science Of Happiness

WHEN: 02 June 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA

We'll review the current research on what makes humans happy and discuss how to apply these lessons to our own lives.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are on the first and third Sunday of every month at 2pm in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : [Boston] The Science Of Happiness