trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The wandering rationalist
by Despard — 2012-08-28T02:59:35.324Z

Hello all. I'm still fairly new to the site and I've only posted comments up until now, but this definitely warrants its own topic. Currently I work at Queen's University in Canada as a postdoc studying motor control, but my funding runs out at the end of November. I don't have another job immediately lined up, but I've been in discussions with CFAR about working for them either directly or through UC Berkeley on doing some research into rationality techniques. I attended the June minicamp and had an absolute blast with the people there.

Why am I telling you all this? Well... I've applied for some funding to go work at Berkeley but it won't come through until July 2013 at the earliest, assuming I'm awarded it. In the meantime, I've decided to go travelling through the US, buy a round-the-world ticket from San Francisco and wander for the next few months - and it would be awesome to meet up with some rationalists along the way!

I've got some money saved and will have more by the time I leave. To support myself further I intend to take on academic editing work (like this company does), where I can basically work from anywhere and have a little bit of money coming in regularly. Maybe I'll try for some freelance programming work too. Regardless, it'll be a lot easier if I don't have to pay for accommodation, so if anyone could put me up for a night or two along the way I'd be massively appreciative; I intend to couchsurf anyway but it would be great to meet some LWers and have enjoyably rational conversations on my trip.

Here is my (vague) route through the US. This will be December 1st-31st. It has a few random detours as I have friends in Oklahoma and Colorado (though I don't know anyone in New Mexico, it just seemed like a logical place to visit and I couldn't resist being able to go through Amarillo), as well as in northern Idaho and Vancouver.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll buy a bus ticket or simply try to hitch rides from the internet; that's still up in the air. Regardless of what I choose, anyone who wants to drive me some of my route will not be turned down...

After I leave San Francisco I want to head to Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia for a couple of months before I go to SE Asia. I intend to be back in Europe (I'm British although I live in Canada) by May 2013 and I'll hit the North American continent again in June, but this time I'll be flying acr...
Anyone know of empirically driven lobbying efforts?
by palladias — 2012-08-27T22:02:03.457Z

I was recently in an argument with a friend about the efficacy of WhiteHouse.gov petitions. He was disappointed that atheists hadn't pushed the Free Alexander Aan petition up to 25,000 signatures and thought this was a bad sign for future projects. I thought it wasn't a very good 'ask' so it was reasonable for otherwise committed activist to ignore it. He ended up pulling Pascal's Mugging by arguing "nothing tangible may ever happen as a result, but we don’t know that, and it does send a palpable signal either way."

I was annoyed, but I also noticed I couldn't think of any GiveWell equivalent for advocacy efforts. I was pretty confident that this WhiteHouse.gov petition was a waste of time, but I wasn't sure whether I'd prefer for a cause I supported to focus on petitions, voter education, wacky stunts to up coverage, etc etc. I've seen plenty of studies on how to get people to sign petitions, but none on whether they work.

The Human Rights Campaign used to run into a lot of criticism for just wining and dining legislators instead of getting pushier or focusing on electing new allies, but, when DADT was killed, the pundits seemed to think the strategy had paid off. It looks like no one is very good at predicting which lobbying techniques will work, just popping in at various timepoints, seeing whether the policy changed, and passing or failing the outreach effort on that basis.

I'm actually a researcher for a consumer protection group that does a fair amount of lobbying, and it can feel a little like a cargo cult over here. It feels a bit like we just try to keep an issue in view (through visits, press coverage, etc) so that when Congress or a regulatory body lumbers into action, they might think of our pet issue.

Government gridlock is out of our hands, so the metrics we track (number of signatures on a petition, press citations of our work, social shares of data infographics) are meant to be proxies for our influence, but I'm not aware of any heuristic we use to check which align best with the regulatory results we're actually seeking.

Has anyone seen interesting data on this or have heuristics they use when deciding which advocacy efforts to support and promote?
[SEQ RERUN] Optimization
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-27T07:02:14.247Z

Today's post, Optimization was originally published on 13 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A discussion of the concept of optimization.

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 Psychic Powers, 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.
UPDATE: Society of Venturism is spearheading Kim Suozzi's cryopreservation charity
by dblch — 2012-08-27T06:51:57.813Z

Hey everyone,

I'm Kim Suozzi, a 23-year old brain cancer patient trying to secure cryopreservation before my death.

I know I haven't updated in awhile so I just wanted to check in and say how thankful I am for everyone that has been donating and supporting me so far. I've gotten way more of a response than I could have ever expected, and it's hard to find words regarding this whole thing, but I want you know that I am endlessly grateful for the hope you've already offered to me.

I have two days of radiation treatment left, then I'm off to hopefully pursue a clinical trial. Things are going well considering the circumstances; I have no big side effects other than being tired.

I updated the other day with a video, if anyone is interested:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lISC8I_IiCg

I also wanted to clarify that though The Society of Venturism is fundraising on my behalf, I also have a direct link to my paypal (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4WR8KS68RC6YY) for independent donations. However, I would like to move funds to the Venturists since they are third-party and a non-profit, that way people can be sure the funds go to cryo and nothing else. It looks like setting it up through the Society for Venturism is a better bet than going though CI or Alcor as it can be difficult to move funds in the case that you choose one company over the other or need to change things around with financing.

Anyway the Society for Venturim Charity is located here: http://venturist.info/kim-suozzi-charity.html, Sorry to repost since I know it's elsewhere already. I just wanted to try to put it all in one message since some others were asking.

I can't say this enough: thank you for all of you consideration and support through all of this,and to all those who have already donated. Maybe if I achieve reanimation, I can throw a party and show you guys what I'm really like, (not just your run-of-the-mill-dying-patient.)

Hope to meet you/ talk to you soon, whether in this time or much later.

Kim
Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2012-08-27T05:52:31.628Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN:
07 September 2012 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
55 walsh st west melbourne 3003 australia

Practical rationality.

This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month and is distinct from our social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Consciousness
by  — 2012-08-27T05:02:10.135Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Consciousness

WHEN:
29 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, August 29th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: This week, we will discuss some of those classic questions regarding consciousness: Can machines be conscious? Are there different sorts of consciousness? Does consciousness matter? And what the hell are we talking about?

There is so much literature on this topic, and some of it is actually worth reading. See (and add to) the comments section for some recommendations.

There will be general discussion too, and there are lots of interesting recent posts. But don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Consciousness
The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?
by Scott Alexander — 2012-08-27T03:36:08.152Z

Related to: Leaky Generalizations, Replace the Symbol With The Substance, Sneaking In Connotations

David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
It sounds dumb only because we are talking soberly of categories and features. As soon as the argument gets framed in terms of words, it becomes so powerful that somewhere between many and most of the bad arguments in politics, philosophy and culture take some form of the noncentral fallacy. Before we get to those, let's look at a simpler example.
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.
The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.

This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take ...
Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4
by lukeprog — 2012-08-27T00:04:37.740Z

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!
Decision Theories, Part 3.5: Halt, Melt and Catch Fire
by orthonormal — 2012-08-26T22:40:20.388Z

Followup to: Decision Theories: A Semi-Formal Analysis, Part III

UPDATE: As it turns out, rumors of Masquerade's demise seem to have been greatly exaggerated. See this post for details and proofs!

I had the chance, over the summer, to discuss the decision theory outlined in my April post with a bunch of relevantly awesome people. The sad part is, there turned out to be a fatal flaw once we tried to formalize it properly. I'm laying it out here, not with much hope that there's a fix, but because sometimes false starts can be productive for others.

Since it's not appropriate to call this decision theory TDT, I'm going to use a name suggested in one of these sessions and call it "Masquerade", which might be an intuition pump for how it operates. So let's first define some simple agents called "masks", and then define the "Masquerade" agent.

Say that our agent has actions a1, ... , an, and the agent it's facing in this round has actions b1, ... , bm. Then for any triple (bi, aj, ak), we can define a simple agent Maskijk which takes in its opponent's source code and outputs an action:

def Mask_ijk(opp_src):
look for proof that Opp(Mask_ijk) = bi
if one is found, then output aj
otherwise, output ak

(This is slightly less general than what I outlined in my post, but it'll do for our purposes. Note that there's no need for aj and ak to be distinct, so constant strategies fall under this umbrella as well.)

A key example of such an agent is what we might call FairBot: on a Prisoner's Dilemma, FairBot tries to prove that the other agent cooperates against FairBot, and if it finds such a proof, then it immediately cooperates. If FairBot fails to find such a proof, then it defects. (An important point is that if FairBot plays against itself and both have sufficiently strong deductive capacities, then a short proof of one's cooperation gives a slightly longer proof of the other's cooperation, and thus in the right circumstances we have mutual cooperation via Löb's Theorem.)

The agent Masquerade tries to do better than any individual mask (note that FairBot foolishly cooperates against CooperateBot when it could trivially do better by defecting). My original formulation can be qualitatively described as trying on different masks, seeing which one fares the best, and then running a "sanity check" to see if the other agent treats Masquerade the same way it treats that mask. T...
[Draft] Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases
by wattsd — 2012-08-26T18:08:15.564Z

The main point
If we are naturally biased and limited in how rational our decision making can be, it might be more effective to improve intuition and manage biases rather than trying to completely eliminate them and focus on unbiased thinking. I’m not advocating irrationality, instead I’m interested in how to deal with bounded rationality. How can we improve our ability to satisfice? How can we productively use and develop our intuition?
Caveats
While I intend for this post to be informative, it may not be, and I suspect I’ll learn more from writing it and feedback than others will get from reading it. There is much on LessWrong I haven’t read, so I apologize if this is something that was discussed extensively before. If that is the case, I’d appreciate links to those discussions in the comments. One other note, I realize intuition can be interpreted as a dirty word, with good reason. Here, please interpret intuition as a rational heuristic guided by experience. Heuristics are tools, they can be effective when used properly.
Background
This post was prompted by some casual research on expertise and decisionmaking I've been doing for a couple months now. Along the way I came across the work of Herbert Simon and Gary Klein. Simon’s ideas of bounded rationality and satisficing have come up in discussion here before, but I haven’t seen any discussion of Klein, who is an active researcher in the area of intuitive decisionmaking. Simon proposes that rationality in decisionmaking is limited by the constraints of time, available information, and brain/computational capabilities (bounded rationality). Rather than make perfectly rational decisions, we make the best decisions we can given those constraints (satisficing). Klein’s work is primarily focused on how experts actually make decisions in the real world. Put another way, his work is focused on how experts satisfice.
One of Klein’s early research projects was to help the military improve decision making. His proposal was to study firefighters, figuring their experience would be a useful analog to military experience (high pressure, life/death, time...). The major finding was that they did not follow the standard model of good decision making, they did not evaluate multiple options. Instead, they believed they operated by feel. G...
[SEQ RERUN] Psychic Powers
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-26T04:06:33.833Z

Today's post, Psychic Powers was originally published on 12 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Some of the previous post was incorrect. Psychic powers, if indeed they were ever discovered, would actually be strong evidence in favor of non-reductionism.

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 Excluding the Supernatural, 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 : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm
by EvelynM — 2012-08-25T23:58:21.201Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm

WHEN:
30 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1129 W. Elizabeth St. Fort Collins 80521

Back to school, back to our regular Thursday in Fort Collins meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm
PSA: People can see what you've "liked" and "disliked" if you checked "Make my votes public"
by lukeprog — 2012-08-25T22:53:59.415Z

I think this feature might have been broken a while ago, but it works now. So if you don't want your likes and dislikes to be public, go to your preferences page and uncheck "Make my votes public." At the moment, the upvotes and downvotes of many prominent users are visible by clicking their username and then clicking "Liked" or "Disliked".

That is all.
What are useful skills to learn at university?
by Metus — 2012-08-25T22:43:32.431Z

To further elaborate the question: What are the most universally and most useful skills one could learn at a university? Currently, I am studying physics as an undergraduate and I am thinking about my career options. I have gotten opinions in other forums as well but I would really like to hear your thoughts and I also think that other LessWrongers would find such a list useful. To give you a rough idea of what I mean I have two examples:

Programming/Coding: Almost universally applicable seeing as if you can describe your process, you can automate it. It is a skill you can use in applied research, fundamental research or in a field not related to physics at all.

Statistics, the mathematics and the use of R or SAS: Again, in all fields of science and many applications statistical knowledge is required. Having a firm grasp of the mathematical concepts involved and being able to use a statistics software can only be advantageous.

What are some other skills along this line that are universally useful?
Neil Armstrong died before we could defeat death
by kilobug — 2012-08-25T19:49:02.906Z

The sad news broke tonight : Neil Armstrong, the first human to ever walk another world, died today. We lost him forever. He died before we could defeat death.

Once again the horror of death strikes. This time, in addition from wiping from us forever a hero of humanity, he wiped from us forever a memory that will never exist again. Never again will a human being be able to experience being the first to walk another world. That beautiful experience is lost forever too, along with all the memories, dreams, desires and wishes that made Neil Armstrong.

But thanks to him, humanity made a giant leap. We'll fill the stars and conquer death. The spark of intelligence and sentience will not extinguish. That's the best we can do to honour him.

Source : http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/25/us-usa-neilarmstrong-idUSBRE87O0B020120825