trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Introduction to the Sequence Reruns
by Unnamed — 2011-04-19T19:39:41.706Z

BACKGROUND
The sequences - hundreds of posts written by Eliezer Yudkowsky from 2006 through 2009 - contain the core material behind Less Wrong, including many ideas that are often treated as background knowledge in new posts. New LW members are encouraged to read the sequences and many LW regulars have expressed interest in rereading them, but even though the posts are sitting in the archives for anyone to read it takes another step to actually read them. The sheer number of words can be overwhelming, and many people find that they never quite get around to delving in. To many people, reading new blog posts is fun but going through the sequences is work. And it can be hard to have lively discussions on years-old posts.
As announced here, we are introducing the Rerunning the Sequences series to the discussion section as an attempt to make the sequences more accessible by making them more like new blog posts. We will be going through the sequence posts in order, one post per day, making posts that contain a link to the sequence post and a summary of it. If you're interested, follow along (the posts will all have [SEQ RERUN] in the title and will be easy to spot), take part in the discussion, and get involved in other ways described below. If you're not interested, you can ignore these discussion section posts (they all have [SEQ RERUN] in the title and will be easy to spot).
DETAILS
For our purposes, we're currently considering the sequences to consist of Eliezer's 702 posts (listed in order here) beginning with The Martial Art of Rationality, ending with Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories, and excluding quotes threads. The list of posts has not been finalized yet - there are still some other posts to exclude (like purely administrative posts) and some more posts to add, perhaps including some posts not by Eliezer (like Robin Hanson's side of the AI Foom Debate). Each day, there will be a post in the discussion section which links to one of these posts and follows the standard template included below. We'll go through the posts in chronological order, one per day, beginning today (April 19, 2011) with The Martial Art of Rationality. These posts will be clearly identified by the [SEQ RERUN] tag in the title, easy to find under the sequence_reruns tag, and easy to follow with a feed reader by subscribing to the rss feed for the se...
Insufficiently Awesome
by Cayenne — 2011-04-19T19:28:08.226Z

Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post. Please disregard it.

I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time. I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do. I want to correct this horrible deficiency.

We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others. I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant. I want more than this!

We already talk, we need an action-based meetup. I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup. It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.

I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day. Nonetheless, we should have something happening every day that we're not spending talking. The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become totally awesome.

Is there anyone else that feels the same? If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?
Meetup meta: please think carefully when posting -- add desired time/title the first time
by jwhendy — 2011-04-19T15:32:32.251Z

There seem to here have been a fair amount of meetups posted with no times, and then re-posted with added times or slightly adjusted wording. Perhaps Google Reader is the problem (how I follow the top-level), but not only are there a lot of meetups (which has been talked about quite a bit lately), but these changed post titles show up as two separate entities. (Example)

For planners, please think carefully when announcing your meetup and post the time and the title you want on the first try, if possible. Thanks.

Perhaps a standard title format could be proposed that handled such things?

Meetup: [City/State/Country] [Time] [AM/PM] @ [Venue]

Or something like that? This would have the benefit of helping planners not forget anything important, but might have the added benefit that if a future implementation of some sort makes a meetup page or auto-scraped list of happenings, a standard format will make this easier.
Planning a series: discounting utility
by Psychohistorian — 2011-04-19T15:27:28.702Z

I'm planning a top-level post (probably two or three or more) on when agent utility should not be part of utilitarian calculations - which seems to be an interesting and controversial topic given some recent posts. I'm looking for additional ideas, and particularly counterarguments. Also hunting for article titles. The series would look something like the following - noting that obviously this summary does not have much room for nuance or background argument. I'm assuming moral antirealism, with the selection of utilitarianism as an implemented moral system.

Intro - Utilitarianism has serious, fundamental measurement problems, and sometimes substantially contradicts our intuitions. One solution is to say our intuitions are wrong - this isn't quite right (i.e. a morality can't be "wrong") unless our intuitions are internally inconsistent, which I do not think is the problem. This is particularly problematic because agents (especially with high self modification capacities) may face socially undesirable incentives. I argue that a better solution is to ignore or discount the utility of certain agents in certain circumstances. This better fits general moral intuitions. (There remains a debate as to whether Morality A might be better than Morality B when Morality B better matches our general intuitions - I don't want to get into this, as I'm not sure there's a non-circular meaning of "better" as applied to morality that does not relate to moral intuitions.)

1 -First, expressly anti-utilitarian utility can be disregarded. Most of the cases of this are fairly simple and bright-line. No matter how much Bob enjoys raping people, the utility he derives from doing so is irrelevant unless he drinks the utilitarian Koolaid and only, for example, engages in rape fantasies (in which case his utility is counted - the issue is not that his desire is bad, it's that his actions are). This gets into some slight line-drawing problems with, for example, utility derived from competition (as one may delight in defeating people - this probably survives, however, particularly since it is all consensual).

1.5 - The above point is also related to the issue of discounting the future utility of such persons; I'm trying to figure out if it belongs in this sequence. The example I plan to use (which makes pretty much the entire point) is as follows. You have some chocolate ice cream you have t...
Cambridge Less Wrong Meetups April 21, May 1, May 15, ...
by jimrandomh — 2011-04-19T12:24:43.249Z

The Cambridge, Massachusetts Less Wrong group has 2:00pm afternoon meetups on the first and third Sunday of every month. Additionally, we're having an extra meetup on Thursday evening (April 21) at 7:30pm. The full schedule is kept on meetup.com, and you can join/subscribe to the group there to get e-mail reminders. Meetups take place at Cosi, near Kendall Square on the red line. Follow the right-hand rule to reach our usual table, which is in the back room where it's reasonably quiet (except for us). All are welcome to attend and no RSVP is necessary.
Introduction to the Sequence Reruns
by Unnamed — 2011-04-19T04:48:43.407Z

BACKGROUND

The sequences - hundreds of posts written by Eliezer Yudkowsky from 2006 through 2009 - contain the core material behind Less Wrong, including many ideas that are often treated as background knowledge in new posts. New LW members are encouraged to read the sequences and many LW regulars have expressed interest in rereading them, but even though the posts are sitting in the archives for anyone to read it takes another step to actually read them. The sheer number of words can be overwhelming, and many people find that they never quite get around to delving in. To many people, reading new blog posts is fun but going through the sequences is work. And it can be hard to have lively discussions on years-old posts.

As announced here, we are introducing the Rerunning the Sequences series to the discussion section as an attempt to make the sequences more accessible by making them more like new blog posts. We will be going through the sequence posts in order, one post per day, making posts that contain a link to the sequence post and a summary of it. If you're interested, follow along (the posts will all have [SEQ RERUN] in the title and will be easy to spot), take part in the discussion, and get involved in other ways described below. If you're not interested, you can ignore these posts (they all have [SEQ RERUN] in the title and will be easy to spot).

DETAILS

For our purposes, we're considering the sequences to consist of Eliezer's 702 posts (listed in order here) beginning with The Martial Art of Rationality, ending with Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories, and excluding only open threads, quotes threads, and administrivia. We may also include some posts not by Eliezer, like Robin Hanson's side of the AI Foom Debate. Each day, there will be a post in the discussion section which links to one of these posts and follows the standard template included below. We'll go through the posts in chronological order, one per day, beginning today (April 18, 2011) with The Martial Art of Rationality. These posts will be clearly identified by the [SEQ RERUN] tag in the title, and easy to find under the sequence_reruns tag. Hopefully, this will capture the feel of reading a blog, with a new post to read each day.

Each post also serves as a focal point for discussion. Discussion should take place in the comments to the new post i...
Advice to aspiring undergraduates
by KatjaGrace — 2011-04-19T04:45:31.000Z

Katla ungratefully believes her undergraduate studies could have been better, and that those of many of her acquaintances could too. Even without them being something other than undergraduate studies. She demands I let her warn future students. Here is her advice.

***

Consider far away universities. The task of choosing may be significantly more difficult if you open up the competition to places not in your home state, but it will probably be worth it.

There is no particular reason the best university will be in your city or nation, but it seems many people use such borders as the bound for what to consider.

Don’t worry much about where your friends are going. If you are normal enough to have friends by the time you are leaving for college they are probably easily replaceable. Your brain probably says they are not, but it is lying. That’s how friendship works. It is harder to replace your family, but families don’t seem to be that easy to lose track of even when people devote a lot of attention to it.

If you are moving away from everyone you know, this is a good time to review your personality.

Don’t use the apparent altruism of a course or degree as a strong sign of its usefulness for the world. Apparently altruistic courses are the ones concerned with climate change or poverty or species extinctions or social stigma or genocide or so on. Many people are apparently altruistic as an excuse for not doing difficult courses, and the coursework will be designed accordingly. Part of designing coursework for people who aren’t up to difficult courses is understanding that they do not need tools for solving important problems in the world, but rather for getting a job at all.

Also, courses about problems such as climate change or third world development naturally will not include much material on how to solve these problems, as they have not been solved. Instead you and your ‘altruistic’ acquaintances will probably have to discuss how to solve them yourselves, or if your teacher recognises that you are not up to this, to learn to describe how difficult and complex they are. On the upside, solving the problems will be easy because you are probably too ignorant to constrain them much. On the downside, your solutions will not improve the world.

If you have some particular ambition, for instance to be a lawyer, find a lawyer or s...
Vanilla and chocolate and preference judgements
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-04-18T22:14:25.795Z

Related to: 2-Place and 1-Place Worlds, Offence versus harm minimization.

Note: edited to replace 'value' with 'preference' as suggested by orthonormal.

Imagine you overheard two children having an argument over whether vanilla ice cream was better than chocolate ice cream. To you as an observer, it would be obvious that this kind of argument has no content. The children aren’t disputing anything measurable in the exterior world; they would agree with each other than chocolate ice cream contains elements from cocoa beans, and vanilla contains the extract from vanilla beans. Most adults wouldn’t have this argument at all, because it’s self-evident that if Mary says, truthfully, that she likes vanilla better than chocolate ice cream, and her husband Albert confesses that he prefers chocolate, then both of them are right. There is no contradiction; vanilla and chocolate are both neutral items until they come into contact with human tastebuds and human brains, at which point their positive or negative weighting is a fact about those brains, not about the substances themselves.

I think that this concept generalizes. Imagine that Mary and Albert are having an argument. Mary hates how Albert leaves papers spread across the kitchen table with empty coffee mugs on top. She wishes he would remember to put his clothes in the laundry basket instead of leaving them on the floor. She nags about it. Albert is helplessly baffled at why she thinks it’s such a big deal. He accuses her of being a nitpicker and a perfectionist.1

It’s hard to say that both of them are right, if each is hurting the other’s feelings. Again, though, their argument isn’t about anything factual. They both agree that there are papers on the desk and clothes on the floor, and that Albert is the one responsible. Where they diverge is the preference they place on this world-state.

Mary is a bit of a neat freak. She likes shiny floors and spotless counters, and she finds cleaning pleasant and relaxing. Seeing a cluttered countertop causes her a small amount of psychological pain. It doesn’t matter where she acquired this attitude; it’s so deeply entrenched in her mind that clean is good that she doesn’t even realize it’s a preference, instead of a fact.

Albert, in turn, has no particular opinion about a clean living space. It doesn’t bother...
Nonsuperintelligent AI threat
by PlaidX — 2011-04-18T21:21:10.200Z

Something that I don't think I've seen discussed here is the threat posed by an AI which is smarter than we are when it comes to computer security without being generally intelligent.

Suppose there were a computer virus that could read code, to the extent of looking at the programs on a computer, seeing how they process input from the internet, and how they could be exploited to run arbitrary code. Historically, viruses have been annoyances. How much smarter would a virus have to be in order to be a threat on the scale of say, a planetary EMP burst?
Learned Blankness
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-04-18T18:55:32.552Z

Related to: Semantic stopsigns, Truly part of you.

One day, the dishwasher broke. I asked Steve Rayhawk to look at it because he’s “good with mechanical things”.

“The drain is clogged,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

He pointed at a pool of backed up water. “Because the water is backed up.”

We cleared the clog and the dishwasher started working.

I felt silly, because I, too, could have reasoned that out. The water wasn’t draining -- therefore, perhaps the drain was clogged. Basic rationality in action.[1]

But before giving it even ten seconds’ thought, I’d classified the problem as a “mechanical thing”. And I’d remembered I “didn’t know how mechanical things worked” (a cached thought). And then -- prompted by my cached belief that there was a magical “way mechanical things work” that some knew and I didn’t -- I stopped trying to think at all.

“Mechanical things” was for me a mental stopsign -- a blank domain that stayed blank, because I never asked the obvious next questions (questions like “does the dishwasher look unusual in any way? Why is there water at the bottom?”).

When I tutored math, new students acted as though the laws of exponents (or whatever we were learning) had fallen from the sky on stone tablets. They clung rigidly to the handed-down procedures. It didn’t occur to them to try to understand, or to improvise. The students treated math the way I treated broken dishwashers.

Martin Seligman coined the term "learned helplessness" to describe a condition in which someone has learned to behave as though they were helpless. I think we need a term for learned helplessness about thinking (in a particular domain). I’ll call this “learned blankness”[2]. Folks who fall prey to learned blankness may still take actions -- sometimes my students practiced the procedures again and again, hired a tutor, etc. But they do so as though carrying out rituals to an unknown god -- parts of them may be trying, but their “understand X” center has given up.

To avoid misunderstanding: calling a plumber, and realizing he knows more than you do, can be good. The thing to avoid is mentally walling off your own imp...
Less Wrongers from Austin
by MinibearRex — 2011-04-18T14:07:08.659Z

As far as I know, there is not a group of Less Wrongers from Austin that has formed yet. I haven't ever seen posts about meet-ups, etc. I would really like to get a group started, but I honestly do not know if there is even a single other member on this site who lives nearby, and I don't particularly want to go to all the trouble of finding a meeting place and getting a meet-up set up only to have no one come. So, not committing at all to any future dates for meetings, is there anyone else on this site from Austin? How many people do you know? How many people would be interested in meeting?
Austin Less Wrong Meetup, Saturday April 23rd, 12:00 Noon
by NMJablonski — 2011-04-18T03:18:26.511Z

This is the second meeting of the group that met in Waco last weekend. Meeting will be at the Starbucks on the corner of 15th and San Antonio, at 12:00 Noon on Saturday. This Starbucks has its own parking, and there are additional public parking options in the surrounding area. The address is:

501 West 15th Street

Austin, TX 78701

We would love to see new people, and feel free to bring friends. Here is a photo of the participants from last time.

See you all on Saturday

EDIT: Apologies for the late edit all. Skylar sent me the photos from the group yesterday and I wanted to share one. We're getting bigger!
Build Small Skills in the Right Order
by lukeprog — 2011-04-17T23:01:26.545Z

I took some Scientology classes in Hollywood so I could get into their Toastmasters club, which is the best Toastmasters club in L.A. county.1 My first Scientology class, 'Success Through Communication', taught skills that were mostly non-specific to Scientology. At first, the class exercises seemed to teach skills too basic to be worth practicing. Later, I came to respect the class as surprisingly useful. (But please, don't take Scientology classes. They are highly Dark Arts, and extremely manipulative.)

For the first exercise, I had to sit upright, still, and silent with my eyes closed for about an hour. I was to remain alert and aware but utterly calm. When my head drooped or my hand twitched, I was forced to start over. It took me five hours of silent sitting to complete the exercise successfully. At first I thought the exercise was stupid, but later I found I was now more in control of my awareness and attention, and less disturbed by things in the environment.

For the second exercise, I had to stare directly into someone's eyes without looking away - even for a split second - for 20 minutes in a row. If you've never tried this, you should. It's very difficult. Unfortunately, they first paired me with a 12-year-old girl. I was sure I would freak her out if I stared into her eyes for 20 minutes (it's an intense experience), so I made faces when the instructors weren't looking and waited for them to pair me with an adult. After half a dozen failures, I finally managed to maintain eye contact for 20 minutes in a row, without a single glance away or a long blink.

Again, this seemed absurd at the time, but later I discovered that I no longer had any trouble maintaining eye contact with people. This skill is a small one, but it is highly valuable in almost every social endeavor.

Later exercises seemed childish. An instructor would ask me simple questions from a book like, "What's that over there?" and I would have to answer correctly: "That's a table." I had to do this for hundreds of questions. But I couldn't just say "That's a table" any old way. I had to say it without a stutter, I had to enunciate, and I had to speak loudly. Answering questions like this 100 times in a row will reveal how often most of us speak softly, fail to enunciate, and use filler words like "um." Every time I did one of those things, I had to start over.

In another exercise, th...
Sequence Exercise: "Extensions and Intensions" from "A Human's Guide to Words"
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-04-17T20:22:43.498Z

Exercise for “Extensions and Intensions”

Give an intensional definition for each of the following words:

Shoe

Hope

Wire

Green

Politician

Apple

Now rank them from easiest to define to hardest.

Describe how you would give an extensional definition of the same words:

Shoe

Hope

Wire

Green

Politician

Apple

Again, rank them from easiest to hardest.

Are the two lists the same? If not, what tends to make something easier to define intensionally than extensionally and vice versa?

You can share your answers in the comments. I'm interested in seeing how similarly people think of these things. Please make suggestions as to how this could be improved or augmented and what to do the same/differently in future exercises. My current plan is to do more from the sequence "A Human's Guide to Words." This post will be edited in response to suggestions.