trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Chicago, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Sydney
by FrankAdamek — 2012-06-01T15:18:05.845Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Second Copenhagen meetup: 26 May 2012 05:00PM
Less Wrong Sydney -Social: 31 May 2012 06:00PM
Pittsburgh: Making Beliefs Pay Rent: 01 June 2012 06:00PM
First Berlin meetup: 05 June 2012 07:30PM
Phoenix, Arizona: 15 June 2012 07:00PM

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:

Weekly Chicago Meetups Resume 5/26: 26 May 2012 01:00PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 01 June 2012 07:00PM
Less Wrong Cambridge (MA) first-Sundays meetup: 03 June 2012 02:00PM
Less Wrong Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup: 17 June 2012 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, 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!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted 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: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as reg...
Questions on SI Research
by MichaelAnissimov — 2012-06-01T15:00:29.005Z

Hello LessWrong,

As one of my assignments at the Singularity Institute (SI), I am writing a research FAQ answering the most frequently asked questions regarding the Singularity Institute's research program.

For a short summary of what SI is about, see our concise summary.

Here are some examples of questions I'm currently planning to include:

1) who conducts research at SI?

2) what are the specific research topics being investigated?

3) what is the history of SI's research program?

4) where does SI see its research program in 5, 10, and 20 years?

5) what other organizations conduct research similar to SI?

Please submit other questions that come to mind below. Unfortunately, due to limited time, we cannot answer every question posed to us. However, I hope to answer some of the questions that receive the most upvotes. Thank you for your participation!
Low Hanging Fruit in Computer Hardware
by  — 2012-06-01T14:44:27.007Z

Introduction:

Since my fellow LWers have been making posts about shaving, dental hygiene and bedroom decorating, I thought I might as well make a post pointing out low hanging fruit in computer hardware. In this post however, I will not make value calculations. Instead, I am going to provide low-cost sampling methods and let you experiment and decide for yourself whether the gains are worthwhile. It bears pointing out we nowadays use our computers more often than we like to admit, so any small improvements in our computing experience can have tremendous value.

Notebooks

When comparison-shopping for notebooks, most consumers overlook two important aspects, namely the screen quality and the hard drive performance. In return, most manufacturers try to save costs by fitting their notebooks with the cheapest screens and hard drives they can find.

Notebook Monitors:

Low-cost sampling method: Compare the screen quality of your notebook with that of your smartphone.

Most notebook monitors are abysmal. You cannot tilt the screen a little without it shifting in colours, and the contrast ratios are so low the colours become very washed out and the blacks start looking like greys, and don't get me started on the colour accuracy. Watching a beautiful painting or high definition video on such horrible screens is like watching natural scenery through a dirty window.

There aren't many notebooks in the market with good screens. This is not necessarily bad because it is a good idea to artificially limit your choices while shopping. Some well-known notebooks with good screens at the time of writing: all Apple Macbooks, some ASUS notebooks, upgraded Dell XPS 15 and upgraded Lenovo X220. For further reading, check out Digital Versus' Notebooks: The Best 10'' to 14'' Screens and Notebooks: The Best 15’’ to 17’’ Screens. Also read the latest reviews from Anandtech and notebookreview.com

Notebook hard Drives:

Low-cost sampling method: Watch youtube videos of SSDs in action.

A slow hard drive will not necessarily slow down CPU intensive tasks like gaming or encoding, but few consumers do these tasks on their notebooks. What most consumers actually do is log in their chat client, browse the Internet and maybe listen to music or watch a movie. Their only gauge while performing these tasks is how quickly the OS and ap...
How can I argue without people online and not come out feeling bad?
by wantstojoinin — 2012-06-01T14:24:59.902Z

I wont be the only one here who "wastes time" arguing about things they care about online (note: I am referring to web forums and things like subreddits, I am not including Less Wrong whose dynamic is completely different). It seems like something that is worth optimising in some direction.

The theory behind it is that one should expose themselves to counter-arguments allowing their claims to be attacked so they that have a chance to substantiate them or reject them upon realising they are mistaken.

In practice they generally follow a pattern that starts with people pointing out what they believe are mistakes then ignoring or intentionally misunderstanding the other party when he refutes or backs up claims.. and ends up with insults, patronising sarcastic remarks and nobody changing their mind about anything.

I don't particularly care about changing other peoples minds to make them agree with me (well, it would be great but I think it's practically impossible) so one thing I would like is for both people to at least end up feeling good.

So I'm interested in three things: Do other LWers recognize this pattern now that I have mentioned it? What decision did those that were already aware of it make, in order to optimise this activity?
Son of Shit Rationalists Say
by Eneasz — 2012-06-01T13:47:47.451Z

A long time ago, in the colder seasons, I asked for suggestions for a Shit Rationalists Say video. Due to other concerns it took me this long to put it together, and the meme has long since passed. However, here it is.

Shit Rationalists Say

It is my first time in front of a camera, so I'm shakey. But I learned, and there it is.
June 2012 Media Thread
by RobertLumley — 2012-06-01T13:39:34.131Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Which cognitive biases should we trust in? 
by Andy_McKenzie — 2012-06-01T06:37:44.383Z

There have been (at least) a couple of attempts on LW to make Anki flashcards from Wikipedia's famous List of Cognitive Biases, here and here. However, stylistically they are not my type of flashcard, with too much info in the "answer" section.

Further, and more troublingly, I'm not sure whether all of the biases in the flashcards are real, generalizable effects; or, if they are real, whether they have effect sizes large enough to be worth the effort to learn & disseminate. Psychology is an academic discipline with all of the baggage that entails. Psychology is also one of the least tangible sciences, which is not helpful.

There are studies showing that Wikipedia is no less reliable than more conventional sources, but this is in aggregate, and it seems plausible (though difficult to detect without diligently checking sources) that the set of cognitive bias articles on Wikipedia has high variance in quality.

We do have some knowledge of how many of them were made, in that LW user nerfhammer wrote a bunch. But, as far as I can tell, s/he didn't discuss how s/he selected biases to include. (Though, s/he is obviously quite knowledgable on the subject, see e.g. here.)

As the articles stand today, many (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) only cite research from one study/lab. I do not want to come across as whining: the authors who wrote these on Wikipedia are awesome. But, as a consumer the lack of independent replication makes me nervous. I don't want to contribute to information cascades.

Nevertheless, I do still want to make flashcards for at least some of these biases, because I am relatively sure that there are some strong, important, widespread biases out there.

So, I am asking LW whether you all have any ideas about, on the meta level,

1) how we should go about deciding/indexing which articles/biases capture legit effects worth knowing,

and, on the object level,

2) which of the biases/heuristics/fallacies are actually legit (like, a list).

Here are some of my ideas. First, for how to decide:

- Only include biases that are mentioned by prestigious sources like Kahneman in his new book. Upside: authoritative. Downside: potentially throwing out some good info and putting too much faith in one source.

- Only include biases whose Wikipedia articles cite at least two primary articles that share none...
[SEQ RERUN] Causality and Moral Responsibility
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-01T05:29:23.750Z

Today's post, Causality and Moral Responsibility was originally published on 13 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Knowing that you are a deterministic system does not make you any less responsible for the consequences of your actions. You still make your decisions; you do have psychological traits, and experiences, and goals. Determinism doesn't change any of that.

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 Against Devil's Advocacy, 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 to Purchase AI Risk Reduction
by lukeprog — 2012-06-01T03:13:04.149Z

I'm writing a series of discussion posts on how to purchase AI risk reduction (through donations to the Singularity Institute, anyway; other x-risk organizations will have to speak for themselves about their plans).

Each post outlines a concrete proposal, with cost estimates:

A scholarly AI risk wiki

Funding good research

Short primers on crucial topics

"Open Problems in Friendly AI"

Building the AI risk research community

Reaching young math/compsci talent

Raising safety-consciousness among AGI researchers

Strategic research on AI risk

Building toward a Friendly AI team

Also see John Maxwell's Brainstorming additional AI risk reduction ideas.

(For a quick primer on AI risk, see Facing the Singularity.)
Building the AI Risk Research Community
by lukeprog — 2012-06-01T02:13:47.486Z

Series: How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction

Yet another way to purchase reductions in AI risk may be to grow the AI risk research community.

The AI risk research community is pretty small. It currently consists of:

4-ish AI risk researchers at the Singularity Institute. (Eliezer is helping to launch CFAR before he goes back to AI risk research. The AI risk research done at SI right now is: about 40% of Carl, 25% of me, plus large and small fractions of various remote researchers, most significantly about 90% of Kaj Sotala.)

4-ish AI risk researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute: Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, Vincent Mueller. (This number might be wrong. It seems that Nick and Stuart are working basically full-time on AI risk right now, but I'm not sure about Anders and Vincent. Also, FHI should be hiring someone shortly with the Tamas Research Fellowship money. Finally, note that FHI has a broader mission than AI risk, so while they are focusing on AI risk while Nick works on his Superintelligence book, they will probably return to other subjects sometime thereafter.)

0.6-ish AI risk researchers at Leverage Research, maybe?

0.2-ish AI risk researchers at GCRi, maybe?

Nobody yet at CSER, but maybe 1-2 people in the relatively near future?

Occasionally, something useful might come from mainstream machine ethics, but they mostly aren't focused on problems of machine superintelligence (yet).

Small fractions of some people in the broader AI risk community, e.g. Ben Goertzel, David Chalmers, and Wei Dai.

Obviously, a larger AI risk research community could be more productive. (It could also grow to include more people but fail to do actually useful work, like so many academic disciplines. But there are ways to push such a small field in useful directions as it grows.)

So, how would one grow the AI risk research community? Here are some methods:

Make it easier for AI risk researchers to do their work, by providing a well-organized platform of work from which they can build. Nick's Superintelligence book will help with that. So would a scholarly AI risk wiki. So do sites like Existential-Risk.org, IntelligenceExplosion.com, Friendly-AI.com, Friendly AI Research, and SI's Singularity FAQ. So does my AI Risk Bibliography 2012, and so do "basics" or "survey" articles like Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Ne

...
Proposal for "Open Problems in Friendly AI"
by lukeprog — 2012-06-01T02:06:52.851Z

Series: How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction

One more project SI is considering...

When I was hired as an intern for SI in April 2011, one of my first proposals was that SI create a technical document called Open Problems in Friendly Artificial Intelligence. (Here is a preview of what the document would be like.)

When someone becomes persuaded that Friendly AI is important, their first question is often: "Okay, so what's the technical research agenda?"

So You Want to Save the World maps out some broad categories of research questions, but it doesn't explain what the technical research agenda is. In fact, SI hasn't yet explained much of the technical research agenda yet.

Much of the technical research agenda should be kept secret for the same reasons you might want to keep secret the DNA for a synthesized supervirus. But some of the Friendly AI technical research agenda is safe to explain so that a broad research community can contribute to it.

This research agenda includes:

Second-order logical version of Solomonoff induction.

Non-Cartesian version of Solomonoff induction.

Construing utility functions from psychologically realistic models of human decision processes.

Formalizations of value extrapolation. (Like Christiano's attempt.)

Microeconomic models of self-improving systems (e.g. takeoff speeds).

...and several others open problems.

The goal would be to define the open problems as formally and precisely as possible. Some will be more formalizable than others, at this stage. (As a model for this kind of document, see Marcus Hutter's Open Problems in Universal Induction and Intelligence.)

Nobody knows the open problems in Friendly AI research better than Eliezer, so it would probably be best to approach the project this way:

Eliezer spends a month writing an "Open Problems in Friendly AI" sequence for Less Wrong.

Luke organizes a (fairly large) research team for presenting these open problems with greater clarity and thoroughness, in the mainstream academic form.

These researchers collaborate for several months to put together the document, involving Eliezer when necessary.

SI publishes the final document, possibly in a journal.

Estimated cost:

2 months of Eliezer's time.

150 hours of Luke's time.

$40,000 for contributed hours from staff researchers, remote researchers, and perhaps domain experts (as consultants) from mainstream academia.

&nbs...
Is this rule of thumb useful for gauging low probabilities?
by DataPacRat — 2012-06-01T01:57:55.742Z

Does something like this seem to you to be a reasonable rule of thumb, for helping handle scope insensitivity to low probabilities?

There's a roughly 30 to 35 out of a million chance that you will die on any given day; and so if I'm dealing with a probability of one in a million, then I 'should' spend 30 times as much time preparing for my imminent death within the next 24 hours as I do playing with the one-in-a-million shot. If it's not worth spending 30 seconds preparing for dying within the next day, then I should spend less than one second dealing with that one-in-a-million shot.

Relatedly, can you think of a way to improve it, such as to make it more memorable? Are there any pre-existing references - not just to micromorts, but to comparing them to other probabilities - which I've missed?
Loebian cooperation, version 2
by cousin_it — 2012-05-31T18:41:52.131Z

I'm writing up some math results developed on LW as a paper with the tentative title "Self-referential decision algorithms". Something interesting came up while I was cleaning up the Loebian cooperation result. Namely, how do we say precisely that Loebian cooperation is stable under minor syntactic changes? After all, if we define a "minor change" to program A as a change that preserves A's behavior against any program B, then quining cooperation is just as stable under such "minor changes" by definition. Digging down this rabbit hole, I seem to have found a nice new reformulation of the whole thing.

I will post some sections of my current draft in the comments to this post. Eventually this material is meant to become an academic paper (hopefully), so any comments on math mistakes, notation or tone would be much appreciated! And yeah, I have no clue about academic writing, so you're welcome to tell me that too.
central planning is intractable (polynomial, but n is large)
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2012-05-31T18:41:09.552Z

Three Toed Sloth has a nice exposition on the difficulties of optimizing an economy, including the best explanation of convex optimization ever:

If plan A calls for 10,000 diapers and 2,000 towels, and plan B calls for 2,000 diapers and 10,000 towels, we could do half of plan A and half of plan B, make 6,000 diapers and 6,000 towels, and not run up against the constraints.
Low Hanging Fruit- Basic bedroom decorating
by daenerys — 2012-05-31T17:26:55.597Z

This is a weird topic for a discussion post. Why are you writing it?

In a recent post-mini-camp skills exchange thread, I jokingly mentioned that I could "help make your room look Awesome!" To my surprise, a couple people were actually interested. Note: I'm not an interior decorator, and what follows will be the extremely basic 101-level breakdown. Follow these instructions, and your room will look significantly nicer than the average 20-something male's (I'm assuming gender, based on the 92% male readership of this site), but not look like it was done by a professional or anything.

Why should I care about Making my Room Awesome?
(aka "Why would you be able to put the word "Rational" in this post, should there not be edicts against it?")

1) It's Low-Hanging Fruit- If you haven't spent much time or effort on room decoration, then it will take very little money or effort to make significant improvements. $200 and a weekend will have your room looking super-awesome for the remainder of your stay at your current location.

2) You probably spend more time there, than any other location- Your environment effects your mood, and your bedroom is likely to be the environment you spend the most time in. It is what you wake up in, setting the mood for the rest of the day. It also sets the mood (or lack thereof) for....

3) Romantic Considerations- 'nuff said

Psh! It doesn't count if you don't Use Math.

How much does it cost?-- I recently Awesome-ized a room, and it cost about $250. Assuming you re-decorate every two years (either because you move, or you just want a change, or your stuff is getting old), then that ends up being about $10/month.

What about time?-- Assuming it takes you about 2 weekends of part-time work, then that is about 30 hours of work. If you value your time at about $15/hour, then that's about $450 total. So it actually costs more in time than it does in money, but that's still only about $19/mo.

Note: Ways to make the relative cost of time less-

Enjoy it: decorating is fun, if you let it be!

Use it as an excuse to ask for accompaniment from the romantic interest of choice: "Gee! I'm about to go comforter shopping and have no clue what to look for! I sure could use help...Wanna come?"

So, if you add up monetary and time cost, you get $29/mo to have an awesome room. Considering the small return you get on apartment rental (a $450/month rental is not that...
Interest in a Coventry/Birmingham meetup?
by philh — 2012-05-31T16:41:35.630Z

I'm in Coventry myself (at Warwick uni), and now that I've finished exams I'd like to see if there's sufficient interest for a meetup in the area.

(I'm actually only around for another six weeks or so, but even if we only manage to meet once or twice, that seems worth doing.)

If there's interest, I'm happy to organise; I'd default to a saturday afternoon thing, but can probably work with any time. (And I don't know Birmingham, so if we go there, suggestions for where to meet would be useful.)

(There was an attempt a while back which didn't take off, but it can't hurt to try again. I'll message those two posters in case they don't see this.)