trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup: How Modern Math Is Different
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2015-04-26T12:37:30.251Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup: How Modern Math Is Different

WHEN:
28 April 2015 07:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv, Israel

On Tuesday, April 28, Anatoly Vorobey will be speaking on How Modern Math Is Different, and we'll have the usual chance to chat with other interesting people.

Mathematics has been rapidly growing and changing over the last 250 years. This continued progress, however, has not been level or uniform. In this talk I will describe a quiet revolution that happened in math on and around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Just a few decades saw a decisive change in how mathematics "works", in several different aspects:

How mathematicians see math and its goals;

How mathematics sees its relationship with other sciences;

How mathematicians approach the goals of rigor and precision;

And most of all, what kind of entities math is "build out of", what are its basic building blocks.

None of these changes ever made it into the typical curriculum for high school or below. Some of these changes are felt by science and engineering students as they begin their undergraduate studies, but most of them are only apparent to professional mathematicians. I will attempt to describe as simply as I can what is it that makes modern math different from the 19th century math or from other sciences. No particular math material beyond the high school curriculum will be assumed.

Where: Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv. Meet at the 29th floor. We'll then move to a room.

When: Tuesday, April 28 at 19:00

Contact: If you can't find us, call Anatoly at 054-245-1060; or Joshua at 054-569-1165.

Facebook: Join the LessWrong Israel group. If you have FB, please RSVP at the FB event which will appear there, to help us get a sense of what to expect.

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup: How Modern Math Is Different
Meetup : May Meetup
by jasticE — 2015-04-26T09:30:33.005Z

Discussion article for the meetup : May Meetup

WHEN:
16 May 2015 03:00:15PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

The Meetup on the month of May! As usual, all newcomers are welcome.

Please RSVP on Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/LessWrongMunich/events/222075124/

For this meetup, let's start out with reviewing our predictions from last time and further discuss our little prediction game.

Further topics: Up to you! Suggestions encouraged!

Good weather location: Lawn between Pinakothek der Moderne and Museum Reich der Kristalle (aka Mathebau). I'll be there with a picnic blanket and a Less Wrong logo.

Bad weather (wet/chilly): Café Puck, Türkenstraße 33

If you have any trouble finding us, call me: +49 151 65156 404

Discussion article for the meetup : May Meetup
How to sign up for Alcor cryo
by oge — 2015-04-26T02:51:48.377Z

I wrote an article about the process of signing up for cryo since I couldn't find any such accounts online. If you have questions about the sign-up process, just ask.

A few months ago, I signed up for Alcor's brain-only cryopreservation. The entire process took me 11 weeks from the day I started till the day I received my medical bracelet (the thing that’ll let paramedics know that your dead body should be handled by Alcor). I paid them $90 for the application fee. From now on, every year I’ll pay $530 for Alcor membership fees, and also pay $275 for my separately purchased life insurance.

http://specterdefied.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-sign-up-for-alcor-cryo.html
Rational discussion of politics
by cleonid — 2015-04-25T21:58:32.247Z

In a recent poll, many LW members expressed interest in a separate website for rational discussion of political topics. The website has been created, but we need a group of volunteers to help us test it and calibrate its recommendation system (see below).

If you would like to help (by participating in one or two discussions and giving us your feedback) please sign up here.

About individual recommendation system

All internet forums face a choice between freedom of speech and quality of debate. In absence of censorship, constructive discussions can be easily disrupted by the inflow of the mind-killed which causes the more intelligent participants to leave or descend to the same level.

Preserving quality thus usually requires at least one of the following methods:

Appointing censors (a.k.a. moderators).

Limiting membership.

Declaring certain topics (e.g., politics) off limits.

On the new website, we are going to experiment with a different method. In brief, the idea is to use an automated recommendation system which sorts content, raising the best comments to the top and (optionally) hiding the worst. The sorting is done based on the individual preferences, allowing each user to avoid what he or she (rather than moderators or anyone else) defines as low quality content. In this way we should be able to enhance quality without imposing limits on free speech.

UPDATE. The discussions are scheduled to start on May 1.
Meetup: Oslo LessWrong meetup planning thread.
by FourFire — 2015-04-25T21:09:23.827Z

After some deliberation, I realized that an Oslo meetup wasn't going to happen by itself, and after my somewhat abortive (and way too late) attempt to organize a PI day HP:MoR wrapup meeting, I decided to just do it, and announce that it's happening, four weeks in advance.
Please add yourself to the coordination timetable.
Here are the possible locations:
UiO Science library (only open on the friday).

Hackerspace-Makerspace.

I'd prefer to meet up at the Library, because it seems like the perfect place for a LessWrong meetup, and it's open to the public until 10PM.
However if it doesn't suit enough people, timewise, then I do have 24/7 access to the hackerspace as a backup plan, and there is food nearby.

Please respond with any suggestions as this really is my first time organizing anything, I am aware of the guide.

Edit: Unfortunately That Social Media Site has locked both of my accounts, so contact me either via freenode (FourFire), PM here, or email me.
Meetup : MIRI paper reading group
by agilecaveman — 2015-04-25T00:08:20.515Z

Discussion article for the meetup : MIRI paper reading group

WHEN:
03 April 2015 11:00:00AM (-0800)

WHERE:
109 15th Ave, Seattle Wa, 98122

https://www.facebook.com/events/654466484698076/
We will be following: https://intelligence.org/2014/12/23/new-technical-research-agenda-overview/
The papers can be tricky to get through, so it's ok to come by even if you have not understood or even read the paper before hand. We will alternate reading and discussion at the event.
This time we'll get to: 3. https://intelligence.org/files/QuestionsLogicalUncertainty.pdf

Discussion article for the meetup : MIRI paper reading group
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-04-24T16:27:39.067Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on April 17th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Munich April Meetup: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.: 18 April 2015 06:00PM
Warsaw April Meetup: 22 April 2015 08:30PM

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 - Caffe Medici - Fun and Games: 18 April 2015 01:30PM
Austin, TX - Schelling Day: 18 April 2015 06:00PM
Sydney Meetup - April - build your community: 22 April 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Planning and Debugging: 03 May 2015 04:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Sword of Good: 19 April 2015 03:00PM
West LA—R:AZ Part D, Mysterious Answers: 22 April 2015 07:00PM
West LA: Improv & Rationality: 22 April 2015 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, yo...
Limited agents need approximate induction
by Manfred — 2015-04-24T07:42:15.901Z

[This post borders on some well-trodden ground in information theory and machine learning, so ideas in this post have an above-average chance of having already been stated elsewhere, by professionals, better. EDIT: As it turns out, this is largely the case, under the subjects of the justifications for MML prediction and Kolmogorov-simple PAC-learning.]

I: Introduction

I am fascinated by methods of thinking that work for well-understood reasons - that follow the steps of a mathematically elegant dance. If one has infinite computing power the method of choice is something like Solomonoff induction, which is provably ideal in a certain way at predicting the world. But if you have limited computing power, the choreography is harder to find.

To do Solomonoff induction, you search through all Turing machine hypotheses to find the ones that exactly output your data so far, then use the weighted average of those perfect retrodictors to predict the next time step. So the naivest way to build an ideal limited agent is to merely search through lots of hypotheses (chosen from some simple set) rather than all of them, and only run each Turing machine for time less than some limit. At least it's guaranteed to work in the limit of large computing power, which ain't nothing.

Suppose then that we take this nice elegant algorithm for a general predictor, and we implement it on today's largest supercomputer, and we show it the stock market prices from the last 50 years to try to predict stocks and get very rich. What happens?

Bupkis happens, that's what. Our Solomonoff predictor tries a whole lot of Turing machines and then runs out of time before finding any useful hypotheses that can perfectly replicate 50 years of stock prices. This is because such useful hypotheses are very, very, very rare.

We might then turn to the burgeoning field of logical uncertainty, which has a major goal of handling intractable math problems in an elegant and timely manner. We are logically uncertain about what distribution Solomonoff induction will output, so can we just average over that logical uncertainty to get some expected stock prices?

The trouble with this is that current logical uncertainty methods rely on proofs that certain outputs are impossible or contradictory. For simple questions this can narrow down the answers, but for complicated problems it becomes intractable, replacing the har...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fermi Estimates
by rocurley — 2015-04-24T06:44:44.538Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fermi Estimates

WHEN:
27 April 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to practice Fermi estimates, a technique for quick order of magnitude estimates.

If you need help getting in, you can call (301)-458-0764

As usual, feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Fermi Estimates
Meetup : Washington, DC: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2015-04-24T04:43:09.799Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC: Fun & Games

WHEN:
26 April 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Reynolds Center

Due to uncertain weather, the Outdoor part of the Outdoor Fun & Games will be postponed.

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Note: Feel free to send an email to the Google Group - lesswrong-dc - if you have a game you wish to recruit people to play in advance. This is especially useful for games that take 3+ hours, as you would want to start playing by 3:30 to be sure of finishing by 7:00.

The WMATA major track work schedule has buses replacing trains between College Park and Greenbelt for April 26; weekend service adjustments also include single-tracking on both ends of the Red Line and on the New Carrolton end of the Orange Line, with attendant delays. The Verizon Center calendar for April 26 has a playoffs game between the Washington Wizards and Toronto Raptors starting at 6:30 p.m. - doors 5:30.

Upcoming meetups:

May 3: Sharing Book Excerpts (bring books to share and discuss favorite passages)

May 10: xkcd Discussion (conversation about the comic and individual pages thereof)

May 17: (Outdoor) Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC: Fun & Games
Moral Anti-Epistemology
by Lukas_Gloor — 2015-04-24T03:30:27.972Z

This post is a half-baked idea that I'm posting here in order to get feedback and further brainstorming. There seem to be some interesting parallels between epistemology and ethics.
Part 1: Moral Anti-Epistemology

"Anti-Epistemology" refers to bad rules of reasoning that exist not because they are useful/truth-tracking, but because they are good at preserving people's cherished beliefs about the world. But cherished beliefs don't just concern factual questions, they also very much concern moral issues. Therefore, we should expect there to be a lot of moral anti-epistemology.

Tradition as a moral argument, tu quoque, opposition to the use of thought experiments, the noncentral fallacy, slogans like "morality is from humans for humans" – all these are instances of the same general phenomenon. This is trivial and doesn't add much to the already well-known fact that humans often rationalize, but it does add the memetic perspective: Moral rationalizations sometimes concern more than a singular instance, they can affect the entire way people reason about morality. And like with religion or pseudoscience in epistemology about factual claims, there could be entire memeplexes centered around moral anti-epistemology.

A complication is that metaethics is complicated; it is unclear what exactly moral reasoning is, and whether everyone is trying to do the same thing when they engage in what they think of as moral reasoning. Labelling something "moral anti-epistemology" would suggest that there is a correct way to think about morality. Is there? As long as we always make sure to clarify what it is that we're trying to accomplish, it would seem possible to differentiate between valid and invalid arguments in regard to the specified goal. And this is where moral anti-epistemology might cause troubles.

Are there reasons to assume that certain popular ethical beliefs are a result of moral anti-epistemology? Deontology comes to mind (mostly because it's my usual suspect when it comes to odd reasoning in ethics), but what is it about deontology that relies on "faulty moral reasoning", if indeed there is something about it that does? How much of it relies on the noncentral fallacy, for instance? Is Yvain's personal opinion that "much of deontology is just an attempt to formalize and justify this fallacy" correct? The perspective of moral anti-ep...
LessWrong Experience of Flavours
by Elo — 2015-04-24T01:02:12.312Z

Following on from:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/m2r/lesswrong_experience_on_alcohol/ and

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/m3j/tally_of_lesswrong_experience_on_alcohol/

I would like to ask for other people's experience of flavours. I am dividing food into significant categories that I can think of. I don't really like the 5 tastes categories for this task, but I am aware of them. This post is meant to be about taste preference although it might end up about dietary preferences.

My experience:

I dislike spicy things. Chilli, Curry, too much pepper, horseraddish; are all not nice things. I do eat wasabi but I like that the flavour goes away unlike chilli which continues to burn. I do eat like sweet chilli.

I am completely and uselessly over-addicted to sugar. Nearly every food I eat is sugar-based. I have no problem with savoury food; but I would completely prefer to eat sweet things to savoury. I like chocolate. (I tend to cook a lot and end up with sugar in a lot of the foods I cook - and they taste delicious)

Drinks: 95% of what I drink is water; I drink soy milk as a drink (about once a week), I don't mind milk but don't drink it much. I drink apple juice (and previously accidentally conditioned my brain to treat it like coffee-wakeup so am trying to maintain my conditioning and not drink it too often). I dislike processed orange juice for its bitterness, however enjoy fresh orange juice (I realise that some people cannot taste the difference so you might have to trust me). I rarely drink cordial and rarely drink soft drink.

Hot drinks: I don't drink coffee, I rarely drink tea (less than once a month, and coincidentally only with other people, not for myself as I might drink or eat other foods), and when I do; drink it with several sugars (upwards of 2-3). I do drink hot chocolate but rarer than tea.

I dislike the taste of alcohol, anything from beer; wine; spirits. The only alcohols I can happily drink is an uncommon lychee liqueur and the alcohol Bitters (I am not sure if its actually meant to be bitter but) I don't find bitter and will drink it happily, Bitters is usually a ^40% and meant to be used as a dash (as in "lemon lime and bitters"), I can happily drink 4x or more in a drink. Tequila will make me throw up most of the time.

I dislike bitter foods; Oli...
The Effective Altruism Handbook
by RyanCarey — 2015-04-24T00:30:08.040Z

Lots of people want to help others but lack information about how to do so effectively. Thanks to the growing effective altruism movement, lots of essays have been written around the topic of charity effectiveness over the last five years. And many of the key insights are gathered together in the Effective Altruism Handbook, which has become available today.

The Effective Altruism Handbook includes an introduction by William MacAskill and Peter Singer followed by five sections. The first section motivates the rest of the book, giving an overview of why people care about effectiveness. The second through fourth sections address tricky decisions involved in helping others: evaluating charities, choosing a career and prioritizing causes. In the final section, the leaders of seven organizations describe why they're doing what they're doing, and describe the kinds of activities they consider especially helpful.

A lot of conversations have gone into picking out the materials for this compilation, so I hope you enjoy reading it! Or, for those who are already familiar with its concepts, sharing it with friends.

The Effective Altruism Handbook can be freely downloaded here.

There are also epub and mobi versions for readers using ebook devices, although their formatting has not been edited as carefully.

Thanks to all of the authors in this compilation for writing their essays in the first place, as well as for making them available for the Handbook. Thanks to Alex Vermeer from MIRI, whose experience and assistance in producing a LaTeX book was invaluable. Thanks also to Bastian Stern, the Centre for Effective Altruism, Peter Orr (for proofreading), and Lauryn Vaughan for cover design. Also, thanks kindly to Agata Sagan who is helping by making a Polish translation! It is always good to see useful ideas spread to a more linguistically diverse audience.

Lastly, here’s the full table of contents:

Introduction, Peter Singer and William MacAskill

I. WHAT IS EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM?

The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle, Peter Singer

What is Effective Altruism, William MacAskill

Scope Neglect, Eliezer Yudkowsky

Tradeoffs, Julia Wise

II. CHARITY EVALUATION

Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others, Scott Alexander

“Efficiency” Measures Miss the Point, Dan Pallotta

How Not to Be a “White in Shining Armor”, Holden Kar

...
Meetup : Moscow: meta-model, epistemology, tabooing, etc.
by Slava Matyukhin — 2015-04-23T12:08:36.043Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: meta-model, epistemology, tabooing, etc.

WHEN:
26 April 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, L'va Tolstogo 16

Two important announcements:

1) We're moving to the Extropolis conference hall. It's in the same Yandex building (well, almost), but it has a different entrance. Look below for the details.
2) I got asked by Yandex people to implement a registration process. So, please enter your name into this form if you're going to join us. (I'll think about how to make this process less annoying for the regular visitors. In the meantime, the good news is that you don't need a Yandex badge to enter Extropolis.)

Our planned activities for this meetup:

Alex will give a talk about meta-model.

Pavel will give a talk about epistemology.

Pion will talk about Taboo technique, and we'll have our usual belief investigation exercise.
We also have a lot planned for the afterparty:

Prisoner's dilemma tournament, again

Brainstorm about how to improve Fallacymania (hey, if you're not from Moscow, but wondering what is Fallacymania, here are the rules translated in English: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/lesswrong-tel-aviv/9OT5yXHX1lo/RDmlIXz1bF4J)

general lets-solve-each-other-problems session

Location details and some Info for the newcomers:

We meet outside of the Yandex office, near the archway and bike parking place. Here is a guide how to get to Yandex: http://company.yandex.ru/contacts/redrose/.

Here is the street view of the entrance you need. (upd: link fixed). You can enter it yourself, but please fill the registration form to avoid any issues with the security. If you can't find the entrance, call me (Slava) at +7(926)313-96-42.

Expected duration of the meetup is 4-6 hours, depending on whether you'd like to stand for the afterparty activities. If you're not the member of our Moscow community yet, you might want to check out https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/ , there's a lot of content about what's been going on for the last two years.

Also, please subscribe to our mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rationality-in-moscow

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: meta-model, epistemology, tabooing, etc.
Dancing room for you and applied problems in foreign fields
by  — 2015-04-23T08:29:08.633Z

This is a place for matchmaking researchers with research ideas in applied sciences that have a sizeable impact on human condition.

Edit: let there be janitors.

What are the so-called adult problems in your field and who, in your opinion, is needed most to solve them?

Add reasons why you are not working on them yourself. (I, for example, am in a PhD program very remote from practical applications and might have a chance to do some research on useful stuff if I survive that long.)