trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why Productivity? Why Gratitude?
by feanor1600 — 2013-08-30T02:28:15.171Z

I recently did a series of online seminars where productivity guru Jason Womack tried to apply his advice for academics.

The productivity advice was good but not especially new after having read a lot of anti-akrasia posts on LW; EverydayUtilitarian recently wrote a great summary of these kind of ideas here. I suppose the fact that the advice wasn't new to me means LW has been doing a good job of bringing in good instrumental rationality advice from elsewhere.

But the most interesting parts of the seminars weren't actually ways to be more productive.

One is a question: why do you want to be more productive?

After asking themselves this, some people might realize that they don't actually need to be more productive. Why get more things done? If you work as a certain kind of corporate drone, becoming more productive might not make you or anyone else much better off. Perhaps you are rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, becoming better at a job or project when you should be doing something else entirely. If your goal in work is to make you and your family better off, then it might be counterproductive to employ strategies that make you less happy or take you away from your family.

Alternatively, if you realize you have all kinds of really great reasons to be more productive, this should encourage you.

The other big non-exactly-productivity idea I learned about was gratitude.

The most obvious reason to send people thank-you notes is that it will make them happy, and is just the right thing to do. Another good reason you have probably heard of is that it will make you happier, like keeping a gratitude journal.

What I didn't realize before are the tangible benefits of sending thank-you notes. Jason Womack says he tries you send one a day, and has had many people respond by offering to do some project with him. I recently started sending out more thank-you emails to people who have helped improve my work, and have already had someone respond by offering a large and totally unexpected benefit (a letter of recommendation). It seems like sending out more thank you notes is just an all around win.
Techniques to consciously activate a rationalist self-image
by chaosmage — 2013-08-30T00:01:14.770Z

When I do mindless or routine tasks for a while, activities I don't need much conscious thought for, I go back to older and simpler cognitions. It takes me a little effort to, for example, notice I'm confused, and then remember the methods of rationality. That takes me a second or so, during which some attention goes inward, to flash images associated with rationality. So to me, rational, purposeful thought distinctly feels like a faculty that needs to be (re)activated to be used.

That's my own experience. Does anyone experience this similarly?

So I played with this activation. First I started noticing it and feeling it in detail. I don't know how much my (non-trivial) mindfulness meditation training helped with this. I related to the activation impulse as another part of my body, as if I had an extra finger and was learning how to twitch it. I found a short trigger phrase for me to associate with this activation and taught my brain the connection by simply doing the activation at the same time as I was saying the trigger phrase.

Do any of you guys do something like that? Some image, phrase or visualization that helps you remember to be rational?
A basis for pattern-matching in logical uncertainty
by Manfred — 2013-08-29T08:53:55.914Z

Previous logical uncertainty robot designs (e.g. here, here, here) have relied on proving theorems that relate to the statement (e.g. "the trillionth digit of pi is 5") under inspection (where a useful theorem would be e.g. "there are 10 possible mutually exclusive digits [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0] the trillionth digit of pi could be."). This is nice. But it doesn't do pattern-matching - if you tell a theorem-proving robot that a statement is true for the first thousand integers, it doesn't even suspect that the statement might be true for the 1001st too. The statements are just independent black boxes.

In order to go further, our robot needs to peek inside the black box. But how, and why should it see patterns?

We tell our robot these facts: "3 is 'odd'. 5 is 'odd'. 7 is 'odd'. 11 is 'odd'."

The robot asks "Could you just tell me what this concept 'odd' means explicitly? I don't know English very well."

"No," we say. "You'll have to guess."

For robots that don't make up information out of thin air, guesses about 'odd'-ness will obey the maximum-entropy principle, which roughly means "give everything equal probability until you learn more."

"Well, robot, what do you think is the probability that 9 is 'odd', given what we've told you?"

"50 percent. Beep boop."

"But all those other things were odd, weren't they?"

"Those other things were not the number 9. Imagine going number by number and labeling each number as 'odd' or 'not odd'. There are equal numbers of possible labelings with 9 odd and 9 not odd, regardless of what those other numbers are. Since by the principle of maximum entropy I start out with all labelings equally likely, 9 has a 50% chance of being 'odd'."

"But isn't it just sensible to think that the next number we give you will be 'odd' if all the others were? What of the appeal of simplicity?"

"What's so great about simplicity? I'm trying not to make up information out of thin air here."

What do we tell our robot to make it guess that 9 is probably odd? Well, we want it to think that patterns of odd-ness that are simpler are more likely. So how about we let the robot peek at our definition of 'odd', just long enough to see that for every integer we can test if it's odd, and how complicated the test is.

Even if our robot has no clue what the constituent symbols were (or, more to the point, not enough processing power...
Meetup : Moscow: The Sunday Meetup
by Yuu — 2013-08-29T07:32:55.202Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: The Sunday Meetup

WHEN:
01 September 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. We will meet you at 16:00 with “LW” sign inside the hall or just look for group of geek-looking people.

Main topics:

Discussion about motivation.

Discussion about cognitive biases.

Game session.

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.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: The Sunday Meetup
Meetup : Fall Equinox: Festival of Heroes
by hamnox — 2013-08-29T01:59:51.042Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fall Equinox: Festival of Heroes

WHEN:
21 September 2013 03:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Sugar Lily Pavillion, Sugar House Park 1400 East 2100 South, Salt Lake City, Utah

This event is about becoming agenty.
Any LW concepts and exercises will be heavily simplified as it is meant to include friends and family, as well as to be a celebration of values to reinforce rather than be a study in hard-core instrumental rationality.

3:00 pm Tournaments and Games

4:00 pm A Toast to Heroes, and The Three Prescripts: (initiative, priorities, effectiveness)

6:00 pm Dinner and Talk

7:00 pm Hero’s Challenge

10:00 pm After Party, if there is critical mass.

Please RSVP to mheisey.nox@gmail.com if you can as I'm aiming to have a personalized element. Not a big deal if you don't, but it would up the coolness factor.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fall Equinox: Festival of Heroes
Outside View(s) and MIRI's FAI Endgame
by Wei Dai — 2013-08-28T23:27:23.372Z

On the subject of how an FAI team can avoid accidentally creating a UFAI, Carl Shulman wrote:

If we condition on having all other variables optimized, I'd expect a team to adopt very high standards of proof, and recognize limits to its own capabilities, biases, etc. One of the primary purposes of organizing a small FAI team is to create a team that can actually stop and abandon a line of research/design (Eliezer calls this "halt, melt, and catch fire") that cannot be shown to be safe (given limited human ability, incentives and bias).

In the history of philosophy, there have been many steps in the right direction, but virtually no significant problems have been fully solved, such that philosophers can agree that some proposed idea can be the last words on a given subject. An FAI design involves making many explicit or implicit philosophical assumptions, many of which may then become fixed forever as governing principles for a new reality. They'll end up being last words on their subjects, whether we like it or not. Given the history of philosophy and applying the outside view, how can an FAI team possibly reach "very high standards of proof" regarding the safety of a design? But if we can foresee that they can't, then what is the point of aiming for that predictable outcome now?

Until recently I haven't paid a lot of attention to the discussions here about inside view vs outside view, because the discussions have tended to focus on the applicability of these views to the problem of predicting intelligence explosion. It seemed obvious to me that outside views can't possibly rule out intelligence explosion scenarios, and even a small probability of a future intelligence explosion would justify a much higher than current level of investment in preparing for that possibility. But given that the inside vs outside view debate may also be relevant to the "FAI Endgame", I read up on Eliezer and Luke's most recent writings on the subject... and found them to be unobjectionable. Here's Eliezer:

On problems that are drawn from a barrel of causally similar problems, where human optimism runs rampant and unforeseen troubles are common, the Outside View beats the Inside View.

Does anyone want to argue that Eliezer's criteria for using the outside view are wrong, or don't apply here?

And Luke:

One obvious solution is to use multiple reference classes, and weight t

...
[LINK] - Aaron Sell (Psychology Today) on the Politicisation of Science
by Salemicus — 2013-08-28T20:25:29.857Z

Dr. Aaron Sell recently wrote an interesting piece about political incentives and shoddy statistical work in science. In particular, he was highly critical of the much-publicized Conley article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which attempted to demonstrate that "large gender differences... [in willingness to engage in] casual sex [have] more to do with perceived personality characteristics of the female versus male proposers than with gender differences."

[[The full article can be found here. Please note - I have deliberately chosen to omit quoting any material which Less Wrongers may find mindkilling. It would be nice if we could keep it that way.]]

He points out that Conley's results were obtained by hypothetical pseudo-experiments, and spurious controls. For example, when Conley found that men were more willing to sleep with their friends than women, she made this difference "evaporate" by:

control[ling] for “sexual capabilities.” The sexual capabilities covariate contained two items: “the proposer would be a great lover” and “would provide you with a positive sexual experience.” Keep in mind, these items were rated by the subjects just after deciding how likely they would be to have a sexual encounter with the person! If you control for two tightly correlated variables any effect disappears. The gap in male and female pay completely disappears when you control for testicle number... So how tightly correlated is “likelihood of agreeing to sex” with “would provide a positive sexual experience”? We don’t know; it’s not reported. JPSP. Seriously.

Yet for bottom line reasons, we now find Eagly and Woods reading Conley uncritically, and even claiming that she has overturned Clark and Hatfield's classic (and truly experimentally based) article demonstrating that women are radically less willing than men to have casual sex.

Sell concludes:

This sort of nonsense is an indictment of our science... As long as the most prestigious journals of our discipline publish this kind of political masturbation , we have no right to demand that the public take us seriously. When politics and good science collide there is no reason the public should bet on science. They are better off trusting their uninforme

...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98 
by Vaniver — 2013-08-28T19:29:17.855Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 98. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.

Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Open Thread: How much strategic thinking have you done recently?
by Emile — 2013-08-28T11:48:25.571Z

diegocaleiro wrote:

I'm tired of people never, ever, ever, EVER stopping 2 hours to 1) Think of what their goals are 2)Checking if their current path leads to desired goals 3)Correcting course and 4)Creating a system to verify, in the future, whether goals are being achieved. I'm really tired of that. Really.

... so we may want to remind and encourage each other to do so, and exchange tips!

Have you thought about your life goals recently?

Do you know what your long-term and medium-term goals are?

If you're facing big problems or annoyances, have you thought of ways of solving them?

Do you have a system you use regularly that pushes you in the right direction?

See also: Humans are not automatically strategic, levels of action.
Meetup : Melbourne Practical Rationality: Group Prediction Calibration and Aumann's Agreement Theorem
by BraydenM — 2013-08-28T07:17:24.166Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Practical Rationality: Group Prediction Calibration and Aumann's Agreement Theorem

WHEN:
06 September 2013 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
491 Kings St, West Melbourne

This event will give us a chance to improve out prediction and updating skills, and we have prepared 90 minutes of group exercises as formal activities for the night, which kick off at 7:30pm.
This event is open to interested members who are less familiar with the LW material, and you are invited to bring a friend who might be interested.
All attendees are kindly requested to RSVP via the group meetup page, where you will find more information about the event: http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-Less-Wrong/events/137079922/

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Practical Rationality: Group Prediction Calibration and Aumann's Agreement Theorem
What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism?
by D_Malik — 2013-08-27T19:06:55.348Z

I'd like to solicit advice since I'm starting at Stanford this Fall and I'm interested in optimal philanthropy.

First off, what should I major in? I have experience in programming and math, so I'm thinking of majoring in CS, possibly with a second major or a minor in applied math. But switching costs are still extremely low at the moment, so I should consider other fields.

Some majors that could have higher lifetime earnings than straight CS:

Petroleum engineering. Would non-oil energy sources cause pay to drop over the next 40 years?

Actuarial math. If I understand correctly, actuaries had high pay because they were basically a cartel, artificially limiting the supply of certifications to a certain number each year. And I've heard that people that used to hire actuaries now hire cheaper equivalents, so pay could be less over the next 40 years.

Chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, electrical and electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering.

Pre-med.

Quantitative finance.

Thoughts?

Stanford actually has salary data for 2011-2012 graduates by major. CS has highest earnings, by quite far. The data is incomplete because few people responded and some groups were omitted for privacy, so we don't know what e.g. petroleum engineers or double majors earned.

Should I double-major? There are some earnings statistics here; to summarize, two majors in the same field doesn't help; a science major plus a humanities major has lower earnings than the science major alone; greatest returns are achieved by pairing a math/science major with an engineering major, which increases earnings "up to 30%" above the math/science major alone. I'd guess these effects are largely not causation, but correlation caused by conscientiousness/ambition causing both double majors and higher earnings.

I could also get minors. I'm planning to very carefully look over the requirements for each major and minor, since there do seem to be some cheap gains. A math minor can be done in one quarter, for instance; a math major takes only a bit more than two quarters.

I have a table with the unit requirements of each combination of majors and minors. Most students take 15 units a quarter. Here are some major/minor combinations I could do:

If I take 18.8 units a quarter, I could double-major in CS and econ.

If I take 15.8 units a quarter, I could major in CS and minor in ma

...
Meetup : Arizona State Lunch Group
by Danny_Hintze — 2013-08-27T17:37:44.943Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Arizona State Lunch Group

WHEN:
03 September 2013 12:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
301 E. Orange Mall Tempe, AZ 85281

We will be meeting up at Engrained in the ASU memorial union (There are many other food options available in the same place). The goal of the meeting is to get a regular weekly lunch group going at ASU and more generally in the Phoenix metro area.

Feel free to text me at 602-501-9420 (I am in the process of porting my number to google voice, so phone calls don't work right now)

Discussion article for the meetup : Arizona State Lunch Group
Meetup : New Meetup: Boulder CO
by yakurbe0112 — 2013-08-27T16:15:44.287Z

Discussion article for the meetup : New Meetup: Boulder CO

WHEN:
03 September 2013 07:03:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Munzinger building of CU Boulder

Alright, so I've heard that the way these things get started is that someone wants to make a meetup and says I'm going to be sitting at this cafe or whatever at so and so time and anyone who wants to talk rationality can come there.

So, I'll be waiting on the padio inside the Munzinger Building next Tuesday from 7:00 to 8:00 PM and if anyone is intrested we can talk about rationality.

Discussion article for the meetup : New Meetup: Boulder CO
How I Am Productive
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-27T13:04:42.568Z

I like to think that I get a lot of stuff done. Other people have noticed this and asked me how I'm so productive. This essay is where I try and "share my secrets", so to speak.

The real secret is that, in the past, I wasn't nearly as productive. I struggled with procrastination, had issues completing assignments on time, and always felt like I never had enough time to do things. But, starting in January and continuing for the past eight months, I have slowly implemented several systems and habits in my life that, taken together, have made me productive. Productivity is not a talent I have -- I've learned to be productive over the past several months and I have habits in place where I basically cannot fail to be productive.

Hopefully these systems will work for you. I've seen some people adopt them to some success, but I've never seen anyone do it exactly the way I do. And perhaps it would even be bad to do it exactly the way I do, because everyone is just a little bit different. I'm being aware of other-optimizing and letting you just know what's worked for me. I make no claims that these systems will work for you. Your mileage may vary.

So what are the systems? To get you to be productive, we'll need to get you to organize, to prioritize, then to do and review. Have those four things down and you'll have everything you need to be productive.

Organize

The first step to being productive is to be organized and remember things without memorizing them. If we get these systems down, you won't forget your ideas, when and where events are, what tasks you need to complete, what papers you have, and what emails you have.

The Most Important Rule: Write Things Down

If you only take away one system from one category, I want it to be this one. Whole essays can be written about these systems and this one is no different -- write things down. Whenever you have a cool idea, an event invitation, a task, etc., write it down. Always. Constantly. No excuses.

I've found in my life that stress has come in surprising part from trying to keep everything in my head. When I write down everything I think is worth remembering, whether it be a concrete thing I need to do or just a cool yet unimportant idea I want to follow up on sometime later, I writ...
Meetup : Saskatoon Meetup: Value of Information
by Nicholas_Rutherford — 2013-08-27T08:59:46.986Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon Meetup: Value of Information

WHEN:
31 August 2013 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2318 8th St E, Saskatoon, SK

Hello again everyone!

Saskatoon's 2nd meetup, at the same place and time as the last one: Broadway Roaster on 8th street (not on broadway!) at 1:00 in the afternoon.

For this week we'll be going over Value of Information calculations, what they are, and why they are super useful! More info here: http://www.meetup.com/Saskatoon-Rationalists/

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon Meetup: Value of Information
Two angles on Repetitive Strain Injury
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-08-26T15:40:52.755Z

Discussion of buckling-spring keyboards, which give accurate tactile feedback. You can get them for about $70, and a lot of people swear by them.

Here's my RSI story: Some years ago, I was getting a lot of pain in my right elbow, presumably as + result of excessive Blockout (3D tetris), counted crosstitch, and being polite for no good reason to someone I was very angry at when I was under stress. Rest was not helping. I remember needing to sign a bunch of checks, and using my right hand for the signatures and my left for the account numbers, and it was still hard on my elbow.

The Way of Energy is an excellent introduction to Taoist standing meditation. I worked up to being able to do twenty minutes of just plain standing and twenty minutes of holding a balloon (arms circled at a little below shoulder level) a day. After mere weeks, my elbow problem went away and never came back. Subjectively, I hit a point in meditation where it became obvious to me that I was using more effort to stand than I needed to, and I could just let go of the excess tension.