trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Washington DC, Munich, Vancouver, Houston, Shanghai, Ottawa, Fort Collins CO, Seattle
by FrankAdamek — 2011-09-16T12:45:16.269Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Melbourne, Ben's house: 09 September 2011 06:00PM
Washington, DC: 09 September 2011 06:00PM. NOTE: New Location
Munich Meetup, Saturday September 10th, 2PM: 10 September 2011 02:00PM
Vancouver Rationalists: LAN Party + Board Games + Discussion at Waves Cafe: September 10th 3:00 to 5:00PM: 10 September 2011 03:00PM
Houston Meetup 9/11: 11 September 2011 02:00PM
Shanghai Less Wrong Meetup: 12 September 2011 07:00PM
Ottawa Weekly Meetup: 12 September 2011 07:30PM
Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup: 14 September 2011 07:00PM
Seattle Biweekly Meetup: Occam's Razor, Repetition and Time's Up: 19 September 2011 04:00PM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: New York, Berkeley, Mountain View, Cambridge, MA, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine, Austin, Washington, DC, London, Oxford, 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, Ottawa, Helsinki, Melbourne, Vancouver, Madison, WI.
Your inner Google
by PhilGoetz — 2011-09-16T06:56:32.287Z

I just heard a comment by Braddock of Lovesystems that was brilliant: All that your brain does when you ask it a question is hit "search" and return the first hit it finds. So be careful how you phrase your question.

Say you just arrived at work, and realized you once again left your security pass at home. You ask yourself, "Why do I keep forgetting my security pass?"

If you believe you are a rational agent, you might think that you pass that question to your brain, and it parses it into its constituent parts and builds a query like

X such that cause(X, forget(me, securityPass))

and queries its knowledge base using logical inference for causal explanations specifically relevant to you and your security pass.

But you are not rational, and your brain is lazy; and as soon as you phrase your question and pass it on to your subconscious, your brain just Googles itself with a query like

why people forget things

looks at the first few hits it comes across, maybe finds their most-general unifier, checks that it's a syntactically valid answer to the question, and responds with,

"Because you are a moron."

Your inner Google has provided a plausible answer to the question, and it sits back, satisfied that it's done its job.

If you instead ask your brain something more specific, such as, "What can I do to help me remember my security pass tomorrow?", thus requiring its answer to refer to you and actions to remember things and tomorrow, your brain may come up with something useful, such as, "Set up a reminder now that will notify you tomorrow morning by cell phone to bring your security pass."

So, try to be at least as careful when asking questions of your brain, as when asking them of Google.
Rationality Minicamp Photos Online
by MichaelAnissimov — 2011-09-16T05:42:00.992Z

Some photos from Rationality Minicamp, which was run by Luke Muehlhauser, Anna Salamon, and Divia Melwani are now online:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66605555@N00/sets/72157627675418194/
[SEQ RERUN] We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-16T03:39:04.252Z

Today's post, We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think was originally published on 03 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

We all change our minds occasionally, but we don't constantly, honestly reevaluate every decision and course of action. Once you think you believe something, the chances are good that you already do, for better or worse.

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 A Rational Argument, 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.
The Ramblings of an Old Man Succumbing to Dementia
by  — 2011-09-16T03:33:26.982Z

My grandfather died several years ago, before I began to seriously consider cryonics. He deteriorated markedly as he approached death. Nevertheless, he was smart enough to want to be part of the new technologies "the kids were putting out these days." At age 90, with some help, he created a blog and posted this entry:

As my memory weakens, I no longer perform much, but I deeply enjoy life. My wife, Genie, and my three daughters help me a lot, with food, walks, talks, and gifts. I usually feel good. Many other people say and do nice things for me.
...
Life began as cells 3 ½ billion years ago and gradually spread out from one species to another. There is no evidence of any species living after death. Therefore, each human should enjoy life, itself. Long before our Earth formed, our Universe spread out 14 billion years ago, long after material existed, which may have been forever. On that basis, I think human lives are a result of amazing development. We can enjoy life deeply into old age and on almost to death. No human should weaken true enjoyment by physically attacking another human. A human may argue with another human with the purpose of keeping both lives enjoyable.

When approaching death, a person should overcome huge pain by mental concentration or medicine and enjoy the remainder of life. This can be done by listening to music, relatives, friends, reading, and other actions. Life can be pleasant to the end, or about to the end. Enjoy yourself. Be nice to others.

The unedited entry (still up, along with other postings to his blog) concerns the mental topics that were occupying him at the end of life: mainly birdwatching and overpopulation. I post it here as evidence that even a very old person, suffering the mental and physical burdens of advanced old age, can still enjoy themselves and value life.

From one perspective, it is the ramblings of an old man succumbing to dementia. From another, it is proof that life is never a thing to be easily surrendered.

Enjoy yourself. Be nice to others.
The Optimizer's Curse and How to Beat It
by lukeprog — 2011-09-16T02:46:22.705Z

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

- Robert Burns (translated)

Consider the following question:

A team of decision analysts has just presented the results of a complex analysis to the executive responsible for making the decision. The analysts recommend making an innovative investment and claim that, although the investment is not without risks, it has a large positive expected net present value... While the analysis seems fair and unbiased, she can’t help but feel a bit skeptical. Is her skepticism justified?1

Or, suppose Holden Karnofsky of charity-evaluator GiveWell has been presented with a complex analysis of why an intervention that reduces existential risks from artificial intelligence has astronomical expected value and is therefore the type of intervention that should receive marginal philanthropic dollars. Holden feels skeptical about this 'explicit estimated expected value' approach; is his skepticism justified?

Suppose you're a business executive considering n alternatives whose 'true' expected values are μ1, ..., μn. By 'true' expected value I mean the expected value you would calculate if you could devote unlimited time, money, and computational resources to making the expected value calculation.2 But you only have three months and $50,000 with which to produce the estimate, and this limited study produces estimated expected values for the alternatives V1, ..., Vn.

Of course, you choose the alternative i* that has the highest estimated expected value Vi*. You implement the chosen alternative, and get the realized value xi*.

Let's call the difference xi* - Vi* the 'postdecision surprise'.3 A positive surprise means your option brought about more value than your analysis predicted; a negative surprise means you were disappointed.

Assume, too kindly, that your estimates are unbiased. And suppose you use this decision procedure many times, for many different decisions, and your estimates are unbiased. It seems reasonable to expect that on average you will receive the estimated expected value of each decision you make in this way. Sometimes you'll be positively surprised, sometimes negatively surprised, but on average you should get the estimated expected value for each decision.

Alas, this is not so; your...
Watts, son
by  — 2011-09-15T23:43:11.078Z

Some interesting numbers to contextualize IBM’s Watson:

90 Power 750 Express servers, each with 4 CPUs, each of those having 8 cores

Total of 15TB RAM (yep, all of Watson’s data was stored in RAM for rapid search. The human brain’s memory capacity is estimated at between 3 and 6 TB, and not all of that functions like RAM, and it’s implemented in meat.)

Each of the Power 750 Express servers seems to consume a maximum of 1,949 watts, making a total of 175kw for the whole computer

There also appears to be a sophisticated system connected to the Jeopardy buzzer but I can’t find power specs for that part.

IBM estimates that Watson can compute at about 80 teraflops (10^12). This paper mentions in passing that the human brain operates in the petaflop range (10^15), but at the same time, a brain is not a digital system and so the flop comparison is less meaningful.

To put this in perspective, a conservative upper bound for a human being standing still is at most about 150w — less than 1/10 of 1% of Watson — and the person just holds the buzzer and operates it with a muscular control system.

Each of the servers generates a maximum of 6,649 BTU/hour. Watson overall would generate about 600,000 BTU/hour and require massive amounts of air conditioning. I don’t know a good estimate on heat removal, but it would up Watson’s energy cost significantly.

I don’t mean to criticize Watson unduly; it certainly is an impressive engineering achievement and has generated a lot of good publicity and public interest in computing. The engineering feat is impressive if for no other reason than that it is the first accomplishment of this scale, and pioneering is always hard… future Watsons will be cheaper, faster, and more effective because of IBM’s great work on this.

But at the same time, the amazing power and storage costs for Watson really kind of water it down for me. I’m not surprised that if you throw power and hardware and memory at a problem, you can use rather straightforward machine learning methods to solve it. I feel similarly about Deep Blue and chess.

A Turing test that would be more impressive to me would be building something like Watson or Deep Blue that is not allowed to consume more power than an average human, and has comparable memory and speed. The reason this would be impressive is that ...
Meetup : Houston
by Cog — 2011-09-15T20:34:45.829Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston

WHEN:
17 September 2011 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2010 Commerce St, Houston, TX 77002, USA

Hi everyone. Sorry for the short notice - some space opened up in my weekend, and I figured I would go ahead and put out an announcement. If any LWers in Houston want to hang out for a while, I'll be at the hackerspace Saturday afternoon working on a project. Feel free to drop by - we can get a game of some sort going if several people show up.

Usual comers, take note of the change in date and time.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston
Case study: Folding@home
by gwern — 2011-09-15T18:55:08.003Z

Latest in an irregular series, some of whose previous entries were Edge.org and the Girl Scouts...

I examine the Folding@home distributed computing project with reference to the costs (electricity resulting in air pollution causing deaths) and benefits (some papers): http://www.gwern.net/Charity is not about helping. Additional data on either side of the cost-benefit is welcome.

(I also recently split out my essay describing things I have changed my mind on.)
Questions about doing literature searches
by jsalvatier — 2011-09-15T17:27:17.133Z

I'd like to get better at doing literature searches. Luke has written a bit about this, but I still have lots of questions.

I've mostly been using Google Scholar; it seems OK, but not stellar. What other tools are useful and for what? Added: is there a good way to find papers that cite a many of a set of papers (the idea being that if I find a number of relevant papers, I want to see if there's a review which covers them)?

How do you look specifically for review papers and/or books? For example, I'm interested in cognitive skill acquisition and I've found a review paper from 1996 but I'd like to find recent review papers on the same or closely related topics and haven't had any luck. Are there specific keywords or phrase permutations that often help? Is searching just the papers that cite an older paper useful? Is searching the same journal useful?

How do you search for criticism? Lets say I've found a paper that uses a particular method or theory but I want to know whether there are significant criticisms. Are there phrases that are often associated criticism papers?

Are there any activities that are especially good for practicing literature searches?
Meetup : Edinburgh Weekday LW Meetup
by sark — 2011-09-15T15:53:30.094Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Edinburgh Weekday LW Meetup

WHEN:
21 September 2011 01:00:00PM (+0100)

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

The Edinburgh LW meetups resume. The topic shall be: Value Complexity & Instrumental Rationality. See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Edinburgh Weekday LW Meetup
Which Fields Are Underserved?
by  — 2011-09-15T13:16:18.417Z

I'm currently about 2/3rds through Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". This is one of the defining works of modern urban planning, and Jane Jacobs is considered one of our most important urban planning thinkers.

It's a fine book, but I found myself surprised at just how unimpressive it is for a work of such supposed importance. Her hypothesis is simple enough that I can summarize it here:

-Cities succeed by having many people using the city streets throughout the day. Large numbers of people keep the streets safe, and provide enough traffic for businesses to thrive.

-To achieve this constant stream of people, streets should have a large variety of different businesses which are utilized at different times, and should eliminate barriers that prevent the flow of people.

Jacobs' reaches this hypothesis through her own observations of various cities, along with a few bits of data concerning densities, crime rates, etc. But there's no systematic examination of data, no meticulously constructed arguments, and no addressing of criticisms or alternate explanations. Evidently, all that it takes to be a great work in urban planning is the barest rudiments of basic science. (This isn't the first time I've been critical of supposed great works in this field.)

It strikes me that, for whatever reason, Urban Planning is an underserved field* - the scholarship behind it doesn't compare to, say, the quality of work done in evolution, or cognitive psychology.

I have my theories for why this might be**, but it got me thinking - which other fields show a distinct lack of quality work done in them? What other fields are underserved?

-

*There is of course the possibility that I'm unfamiliar with more recent, higher quality urban planning literature.

**Namely, that urban planning is an offshoot of architecture, which has tended to value on aesthetic judgement and intuition over empiricism and rigorously constructed arguments.
Interview with Singularity Institute Research Fellow Luke Muehlhauser
by MichaelAnissimov — 2011-09-15T10:23:43.584Z

Yesterday I sat down with Lukeprog for a few hours and we produced this ten-page interview for the Singularity Institute blog. This interview contains information about the Singularity Institute's technical research program and recent staff changes that hasn't been announced anywhere else! We hope you find it informative.

http://singinst.org/blog/2011/09/15/interview-with-new-singularity-institute-research-fellow-luke-muehlhuaser-september-2011/
[SEQ RERUN] A Rational Argument
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-15T02:35:15.313Z

Today's post, A Rational Argument was originally published on 02 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You can't produce a rational argument for something that isn't rational. First select the rational choice. Then the rational argument is just a list of the same evidence that convinced you.

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 Recommended Rationalist Reading, 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.
How can humans make precommitments?
by Incorrect — 2011-09-15T01:19:36.748Z

How can you precommit to something where the commitment is carried out only after you know your commitment strategy has failed?
It would seem to make it impossible to commit to blackmail when the action of blackmail has negative utility. How can you possibly convince your rational future self to carry out a commitment they know will not work?
You could attempt to adopt a strategy of always following your commitments. From your current perspective this is useful but once you have learned your strategy has failed, what's to prevent you from just disregarding the strategy?
If a commitment strategy will fail you don't want to make the commitment but if you will not follow the commitment even when the strategy fails then you never made the commitment in the first place.
For example, in nuclear war why would you ever retaliate? Once you know your strategy of nuclear deterrence has failed, shooting back will only cause more civilian casualties.
I'm not saying commitments aren't useful, I'm just not sure how you can make them. How do you prevent your future self from reasoning their way out of them?

I apologize if reading this makes it harder for any of you to make precommitments. I'm hoping someone has a better solution than simply tricking your future self.
Game theory question -- iterated truel with private information
by Prismattic — 2011-09-15T01:15:07.986Z

I was reading the discussion here of how truels with unlimited shots and symmetric complete information favor the weakest truelist. This set me to wondering about somewhat more complicated situations. Suppose you are in a world where there are daily truels for some substantial period of time, say 30 days. As with the linked problem, all hits are fatal and truelists are accurate 50%, 80%, or 100% of the time. Unlike the linked problem, however, rather than possessing complete information about the accuracy of other truelists, you only know your own true accuracy and the %hit of other truelists in earlier iterations, and there is no guarantee that there will be one truelist of each skill level in any given truel.

Now suppose you know that you are a perfect marksman. On which of the iterations would you intentionally miss your first shot? I definitely lack the math strength to offer a good strategy, but I'm sure many others here could do better.

Edit #2 -- I give up on the formatting.
Software tools for efficient scholarship
by lukeprog — 2011-09-15T00:17:02.255Z

I've figured out a few things about efficient scholarship, but my process isn't optimal. In particular, I'm probably not using the best software tools. I and probably many Less Wrongers could benefit from using the best scholarship software around.

Please post your scholarship software recommendations below!

In particular, the thing I'm looking for is a good citation manager (for Mac): one that will scan all the PDFs on my NAS (network attached storage), query web databases to fill out their metadata in a searchable database, and allow me to export bibliographic records in a variety of formats. Here are the failure modes of the ones I've tried so far:

Zotero: When I try to import any of the 80,000 pdfs on my NAS so that it can check internet databases for their metadata, it makes a local copy of each PDF even though I have "automatically attach PDFs..." unchecked in the preferences window. Also, the program crashes when I try to import more than about 10 PDFs at a time, even though my new Macbook Air is lightning fast doing everything else.

Mendeley: As far as I can tell, Mendeley cannot use a NAS drive as a 'watched folder'. Maybe there's a hack for this?

Sente: Cannot batch-import without prompting for interaction for almost every PDF imported.

BibDesk: Does not import PDFs.

Bookends: Cannot batch-import dozens of PDFs quickly.

RefDB: No Mac binary, not sure if it can import PDFs.

Garr.
Leveling IRL - followup
by cousin_it — 2011-09-14T22:45:01.362Z

I have finally achieved level 1, so I can talk about these things again!

It seems that our concept of leveling conflated two different ideas of self-improvement that should've been kept separate. The first idea is about trying out new things, like making pancakes, solving a trivial programming problem or playing the intro to "Smoke on the Water". Trying out new things is a lot of fun, but as many commenters have noted, it doesn't necessarily give you a long-term upgrade. (NB to everyone who considers me a strong rationalist: you'd change your opinion if you saw my pancakes!)

The second idea is about establishing habits of practice. Some goals force you to set up a daily routine before you can achieve them. In retrospect, that daily routine always turns out to have been the main thing of value, and the actual result is almost an afterthought. For example, my routine over the last several months has looked like this: cold shower every day, jump-rope workout and drum practice every weekday, strength training twice a week, travel every weekend. Once you get into the groove, you don't wanna get out.

So maybe instead of designing level 2 we could somehow incentivize each other to pick up (and keep) rigorous habits, e.g. write N words every day without exception? Any ideas?