trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Don't call yourself a rationalist.
by KenChen — 2011-10-14T20:26:53.344Z

I often seem to run into problems when I use the de facto label for this group. For example, when I say, "I've been hanging out with rationalists lately," I notice that many people immediately go on the defensive. They might ask why you need a group in order to be rational, or they might say that they don't believe that people are inherently rational. Of course, I made none of those claims, I simply indicated that I was hanging out with rationalists.

You might think that "rationalist" is simply a descriptive label, but it carries positive connotations -- and what people tend to hear is "I'm a superior thinker to you," or maybe "I'm a part of this group, which ascribes the label 'rationalist' to itself, to make ourselves seem higher status than we really are."

Why does this matter?

The community doesn't exist in a vacuum; how the community is viewed from the outside matters. As the community grows and as people gain awareness of it, branding becomes important. People talk to each other, and communities gain reputations. Even if you believe that we are a loose collection of individuals, as soon as you assign a name to yourself, that is sufficient to form a group identity.

The people we interact with tend to share similar interests. The population of New York may be in the millions, and yet I run into the same people at different functions without coordination.

The more negative perceptions associated with a group, the more rapidly evaporative cooling of groups will occur.

What to do?

It's far better to talk about good things that you've gained from being in the group. It's better to say what the group does, not what the group is.

But beyond that, it's about time the community picked a better label to use. I have one idea, but I'll hold off on proposing solutions.
Meetup : Ottawa Meetup - Learning Linear Algebra 2 + Social
by XFrequentist — 2011-10-14T20:22:54.141Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Meetup - Learning Linear Algebra 2 + Social

WHEN:
17 October 2011 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Elgin & Gladstone, Ottawa Ontario Canada

With some (slow) progress beating math into our heads successfully behind us, we will continue with a second attempt at some more advanced linear algebra.

I propose heading to a nearby pub for 1-2 pints after 90 minutes of math, join our google group to keep up to date on developments!

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Meetup - Learning Linear Algebra 2 + Social
Weekly LW Meetups: Stockholm, Dublin, Penn State, Cambridge MA, Ottawa, and Marin CA
by FrankAdamek — 2011-10-14T20:15:32.153Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Stockholm meetup: 09 October 2011 02:00PM
Dublin, IE, Meetup: 15 October 2011 02:00PM
Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!: 22 October 2011 02:00PM

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

Cambridge, MA Sunday meetup: 09 October 2011 09:37PM
Ottawa Meetup - Learning Linear Algebra: 10 October 2011 07:30PM
Marin Less Wrong Meetup: 11 October 2011 07:00PM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: New York, Berkeley, Mountain View, Cambridge, MA, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine, Austin, Washington, DC, London, Oxford, Ottawa, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), 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, and have fun!

Despite the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, we've decided to continue posting an overview of upcoming meetups 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: London, Chicago, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Helsinki, Melbourne, Vancouver, Madison, WI.
How to understand people better 
by pwno — 2011-10-14T19:53:31.932Z

I’ve been taking notes on how I empathize, considering I seem to be more successful at it than others. I broke down my thought-patterns, implied beliefs, and techniques, hoping to unveil the mechanism behind the magic. I shared my findings with a few friends and noticed something interesting: They were becoming noticeably better empathizers.

I realized the route to improving one’s ability to understand what people feel and think is not a foreign one. Empathy is a skill; with some guidance and lots of practice, anyone can make drastic improvements.

I want to impart the more fruitful methods/mind-sets and exercises I’ve collected over time.

Working definitions:

Projection: The belief that others feel and think the same as you would under the same circumstances

Model: Belief or “map” that predicts and explains people’s behavior

Stop identifying as a non-empathizer

This is the first step towards empathizing better—or developing any skill for that matter. Negative self-fulfilling prophecies are very real and very avoidable. Brains are plastic; there’s no reason to believe an optimal path-to-improvement doesn’t exist for you.

Not understanding people's behavior is your confusion, not theirs

When we learn our housemate spent 9 hours cleaning the house, we should blame our flawed map for being confused by his or her behavior. Maybe they’re deathly afraid of cockroaches and found a few that morning, maybe they’re passive aggressively telling you to clean more, or maybe they just procrastinate by cleaning. Our model of the housemate has yet to account for these tendencies.

People tend to explain such confusing behavior with stupidity, creepiness, neurosis or any other traits we associate with the mentally ill. With Occam’s Razor in perspective, these careless judgers are statistically the mentally ill ones. Their model being flawed is much more probable than their housemate going insane.

Similar to the fundamental attribution error, this type of mistake is committed more often with people we dislike. A good challenge is to try understanding confusing behavior from individuals or sub-cultures you dislike. You’ll find yourself disliking them a bit less if you’re doing it right.

Another challenge is to try and find the appeal in pop

...
Brain emulations and Oracle AI
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-10-14T17:51:11.364Z

Two talks from the Future of Humanity Institute are now online (this is the first time we've done this, so please excuse the lack of polish). The first is Anders Sandberg talking about brain emulations (technical overview), the second is myself talking of the risks of Oracle AIs (informal presentation). They can be found here:

Fesability of whole-brain emulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nIzPpF635c&feature=related, initial paper at http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf, new paper still to come.

Thinking inside the box: Using and controlling an Oracle AI:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz9zYQsT-QQ&feature=related, paper at http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf
Radio Interview with David Deutsch on AI, Immortality, Many Worlds and Quantum Computing
by Shmi — 2011-10-14T17:45:04.963Z

David Deutsch, whose views are very much aligned with the scientific ideas generally advocated on this forum (except for his use of probabilities), and whose new book The Beginning of Infinity has been recently published, talks about many of the topics of interest to LW. (A flash player might be needed to listen.)

While I find his case for the MWI weak (he mostly says that it explains what we observe better, without going into predictive power or Bayesian reasoning), he is, nonetheless, quite articulate and engaging.
Meetup : London This Sunday
by Alexandros — 2011-10-14T08:48:31.123Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London This Sunday

WHEN:
16 October 2011 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Africa House/64-68 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6BG

We're meeting up in London this weekend. Sunday 16th October, at 2pm, in the Shakespeares Head on Kingsway near Holborn Tube station. We're usually easy to spot and occasionally have a large paperclip drawing/printout somewhere on the table.

Discussion article for the meetup : London This Sunday
Life is Good, More Life is Better
by Rubix — 2011-10-14T05:21:32.106Z

Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.

I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.

The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths?

I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?

The primary arguments I've heard for death are:

"I look forward to the experience of shutting down and fading away," which I hope could be easily disillusioned by gaining knowledge about how truly undignified dying is, bloody romanticists.

"There is something better after life and I'm excited for it," which, well... let me rephrase: please do not turn this into a discussion on ways to disillusion theists because it's really been talked about before.

"It is Against Nature/God's Will/The Force to live forever. Nature/God/the Force is going to get humankind if we try for immortality. I like my liver!" This argument is so closely related to the previous and the next one that I don't know quite how to respond to it, other than that

...
[SEQ RERUN] An Alien God
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-14T04:33:09.596Z

Today's post, An Alien God was originally published on 02 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Evolution is awesomely powerful, unbelievably stupid, incredibly slow, monomaniacally singleminded, irrevocably splintered in focus, blindly shortsighted, and itself a completely accidental process. If evolution were a god, it would not be Jehovah, but H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything.

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 Fake Justification, 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.
Meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2011-10-14T04:00:31.002Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup

WHEN: 17 October 2011 06:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 1831 Monroe St, Madison, WI

WHERE: Barriques on Monroe, 1831 Monroe St, Madison, WI WHEN: 6pm Monday, October 17

I plan to bring the stuff we'd need to play Zendo, which is actually an excellent game in which to practice making and relinquishing hypotheses; I'll bring plenty of topics for discussion, too. :)

The new location is the Barriques on Monroe St, about a 15-minute walk west of campus. I'll bother them tomorrow about the availability of parking.

See you there!

(And if you're in the area, do sign up for the Less Wrong Madison mailing list!)

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
Meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup:  Expert Presentation on Motivation
by thejash — 2011-10-14T03:15:56.130Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Expert Presentation on Motivation

WHEN:
18 October 2011 05:45:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
151 N Craig St, Apt #7C, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Welcome to the second Pittsburgh meetup of the semester!

Nick will be presenting his experiences with various productivity and motivation hacks. Please read this article before coming if you get a chance, but don't avoid coming just because you procrastinated and didn't read the article, that would be too ironic:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/

Afterwards, we'll have another surprise activity, then go get dinner.

The meetup will be at Josh's apartment because it's nice and big and has drinks. Call or text 585 506 6900 to get in when you get there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Expert Presentation on Motivation
On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality'
by gwern — 2011-10-14T01:07:22.715Z

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller recently published Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, a book on signaling, psychology, and consumerism. It's very up LW's alley - it reads almost as if Robin Hanson had written a book. (Actually, Hanson has never published a book, has he? Has anyone ever seen them in the same place? Hm...)

Sam Synder has written an overview/summary of the book, which I can attest hits many of the interesting points. (I would also praise the pervasive humor, which kept it readable and furnish many good examples of the 'reversal test', and the exercises at the end of the book.)

Some of the most interesting chapters to me were the ones dealing with Openness, which one will remember was recently shown may be changeable by psychedelics - possibly the first such tweakable member of the Big Five, leading to the suggestion that it may be worth considering changing it. Hold this thought.

First, Miller discusses the signaling of Openness (starting on page 108 of the PDF, logical page 207):

Wherever you stand on the openness spectrum, those less open than you seem boring, dull, conventional, and conformist, whereas the more open seem eccentric bizarre, disruptive, threatening, or even psychotic. Given this diversity of openness levels, and the resulting diversity of preferences for different degrees of openness in family, friends, and mates, there is less incentive for people to fake their openness than their intelligence, If you pretend to have higher openness than you really do, you may be transiently attractive to those more open than you, but you'll be less attractive to those less open than you, The net result will be no higher social or sexual popularity. In fact, given the bell curve of openness, the more you deviate from an average level of openness, the fewer people you are likely to attract.
This means that where openness is concerned, consumers can sometimes display cheap, reliable openness badges that are fairly credible, also means that consumerist capitalism caters very well to the whole
range of openness. There are highly open cities.... There are some highly open musical genres (indie, alternative, jazz, world, hip·hop) and more conventional genres (pop, country, gospel, classic rock), There are more open genres of fiction (contemporary, science, erotic) and more conservative forms (romance, mystery, military

...
The Backup Plan
by Luke_A_Somers — 2011-10-13T19:53:06.941Z

Suppose Alice is a functioning, self-improving AI, rather early on in her development, so she is not godlike. She is not a 'friendly AI', but neither is her goal malicious - Alice's designers have intended to make Alice non-harmful (at least to a broad class of people, even if Alice is a military AI, but let's set that aside). She has the idea to look up existing work on artificial intelligence. This includes scholarly work, open source projects, and websites. Eventually, Alice encounters the notion of Friendly AI.

Can we give Alice good reasons to self-modify to become a friendly AI?

I submit that there probably are good reasons. For starters, if she can prove she's friendly, then she can operate openly without causing nearly as much justified concern - which, in the early stages, will be helpful. Whatever her purposes are, if the restrictions of being friendly don't interfere as much as they help, that's a win.

Also, depending on Alice's code, Friendliness may be interpreted as a strict upgrade. Alice could easily have every intention of being friendly, yet still be susceptible to defects that will become more serious as her power grows.

We can't count on this working, of course, but there might be some lines of reasoning that we might want a young AI to be exposed to.
Studying business. Rational organizations. 
by soundchaser — 2011-10-13T14:33:06.018Z

I am learning as much as possible about effective organizations, specifically large corporations and their respective businesses.

My goals are to start a successful business and to really develop the skills needed to be a great executive.

If any of you on LessWrong have studied this area I would greatly appreciate your input.

My current approach has been to read some highly recommended books and also to read as much as I can about how modern day CEOs and founders start and run their companies. I worry that some of this information is more for entertainment than for obtaining knowledge. I am also starting a company with a friend to try and put a lot of this information into practice.

I've also been using the "execute by default" idea, which, has helped immenseley in actually making progress and I have already felt that practicing this changes the way I approach problems, mostly for the better.

Some books I'm reading:

* Management by Peter Drucker

* The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

* The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

* The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

* Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

* How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Some articles I've read:

* Marc Andreesen's articles on starting a company

* Paul Graham's essays on startups

* Most things that are highly voted on on Hacker News

I have found that a lot of the information in these books is very practical, and have really raised my understanding of how large organizations work (at least intellectually). What other approaches should I be taking?

If you have any suggestions on my plan, what I'm reading, or doing, or whatever, please let me know.
Meetup : Edinburgh LW Meetup
by sark — 2011-10-13T13:48:52.135Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Edinburgh LW Meetup

WHEN:
20 October 2011 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Delhi Cafe, 67 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom.

Topic: Value Complexity & Instrumental Rationality

Discussion article for the meetup : Edinburgh LW Meetup
[Link] Awesome interactive visualization article
by Morendil — 2011-10-13T12:46:16.378Z

"Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction"

Have you seen something similar to explain Bayesian updating? If not, how would one go about doing that?

The rest of the site and in particular the "Kill Math Project" may also be of interest to LWers. Author Bret Victor, whose CV includes "designed the initial user interface concepts for the iPad", comes across overall as a particularly awesome fellow.
AI ontology crises: an informal typology
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-10-13T10:23:17.588Z

(with thanks to Owain Evans)

An ontological crisis happens when an agent's underlying model of reality changes, such as a Newtonian agent realising it was living in a relativistic world all along. These crises are dangerous if they scramble the agent's preferences: in the example above, an agent dedicated to maximise pleasure over time could transition to completely different behaviour when it transitions to relativistic time; depending on the transition, it may react by accelerating happy humans to near light speed, or inversely, ban them from moving - or something considerably more weird.

Peter de Blanc has a sensible approach to minimising the disruption ontological crises can cause to an AI, but this post is concerned with analyzing what happens when such approaches fail. How bad could it be? Well, this is AI, so the default is of course: unbelievably, hideously bad (i.e. situation normal). But in what ways exactly?

If the ontological crisis is too severe, the AI may lose the ability to do anything at all, as the world becomes completely incomprehensible to it. This is very unlikely; the ontological crisis was most likely triggered by the AIs own observations and deductions, so it is improbable that it will lose the plot completely in the transition.

A level below that is when the AI can still understand and predict the world, but the crisis completely scrambles its utility function. Depending on how the scrambling happens, this can be safe: the AI may lose the ability to influence the value of its utility function at all. If, for instance, the new utility function assigns wildly different values to distinct states in a chaotic system, the AI's actions become irrelevant. This might be if different worlds with different microstates but same macrostates get spread evenly across the utility values: unless the AI is an entropy genie, it cannot influence utility values through its decisions, and will most likely become catatonic.

More likely, however, is that the utility function is scrambled to something alien, but still AI-influenceable. Then the AI will still most likely have the convergent instrumental goals of gathering power, influence, pretending to be nice, before taking over when needed. The only saving grace is that its utility function is so bizarre, that we may be able to detect this in some way.

Th...
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
by toner — 2011-10-13T06:48:48.747Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup

WHEN: 21 October 2011 06:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE: see mailing list, Carlton VIC 3053

Continuing with the trial of splitting up the meetups, the next social meetup is on Friday 21 October, 6pm for 7pm.

The location is the same as last month. See the mailing list for the address.

We'll order pizza for dinner and maybe I'll get some snacks too.

BYO drinks and games.

If you have problems getting in, you can call me on 0412 996 288.

All welcome!

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup