trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup Formats
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-04-29T15:43:51.051Z

[ This post is todo with Cambridge_UK meetups, and is probably of no interest to others. ]

At the meetup on 29th April, 2012, it was suggested that members of the meetup post a variety of meetup formats, so we can try them out systematically, and compare format to outcome. Because outcome depends upon not only format, but also the specific participants and the topic under discussion, it may take using a format more than once (or possibly having it used by a different group) to get a reasonable idea of how reliably a format contributes towards producing positive or negative outcomes.

I volunteered to kick the thread off with a couple of suggestions. I hope people will add other proposals in the comments. Deciding which formats to try when, and matching them to suitable topics, is probably best left to the cambridge mailing list.

Numbers seem to vary between 4 and 12 participants, but feel free to propose formats that don't handle that entire range. If too few people turn up, we can postpone a format to another time (or take it as a vote upon the popularity of the format, if the format for that meeting was announced in advance).

The timeslot is 11am to 12:30, but people should also feel free to propose formats for shorter periods of time.

Proposed Format : small group discussions

Required equipment : A4 paper, pens, countdown timer
Required time : 90 minutes

11:00 start a 10 minutes countdown timer

People arrive, chat, say what is on their mind and, most importantly, write down on paper (one topic per sheet) things they would be interested in discussing. Once the timer goes off, topic sheets may not be altered or created.

11:10 timer goes off

Spread the sheets around the room with a proposer by each sheet (any sheets for which no proposer volunteers get discarded at this stage). Read each topic out aloud, with no discussion/clarification/objections, clockwise from the position of the timer.

Set a one minute countdown. People stand behind the proposer of the topic they most want to discuss, in a queue. If a topic gets 5 or more people, the front 5 take a table and start talking. Set the timer for one minute again, and re-form behind the remaining available topics. Any turn no topic reaches 5 people, junk the smallest topic that has fewer than 3 people. Repeat until the room is divided into groups of...
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Wedneday 7pm
by EvelynM — 2012-04-29T15:38:32.494Z

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

WHEN:
02 May 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

Upgrading your life. Sunk costs. Dungeons and Dragons-style character builds as a learning environment for life strategy.
Supper to follow.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Wedneday 7pm
Pre-commitment and meta at the Cambridge UK meetup
by rebellionkid — 2012-04-29T15:17:57.656Z

At today's Cambridge UK meetup I made an observation: It seems that LW meetups are very good at having meta-discussions. But they are not so good at acting effectively on them.

The point of meta discussion is to make object level discussion better. The meta questions aren't themselves interesting and dont automatically produce win. Object level discussions are themselves interesting and do produce win (if not then stop talking about boring things). So if one has a meta discussion it should be such that the improvements made to the object level discussions outweigh the cost of the meta discussion.

I notice we have meta discussions which (like a lot of discussions in LW groups) dont resolve themselves into actions. This means that improvements to the meetups aren't in fact implemented. This is a double fail: first because the object level discussion isn't improved, and second because the unresolved meta took resources away from the body of the meeting.

We could cheaply improve this with the internet. Doodle polls solve the problem of when to schedule a meeting far more efficiently than verbal discussion. Likewise the time-consuming question of "what shall we talk about" can be thought about outside the meeting where there are far fewer constraints on time. Both these problems should be outsourced to the google group and not mentioned in the meeting itself.

A point that was raised is that it is very easy for the group to decide that such and such a thing must be done, that does not automatically translate into the actions of specific people. Someone mentioned the parable of the rabbi raising funds, and we started the following pre-commitment game.

The Napkin

We got out a napkin and Douglas drew a table of "who, what, by when" on it. He was the first to write down a commitment so as to overcome everyone's reluctance to be the first to act. We then went round and asked for commitments that would be made public in front of the group. I'm now posting those commitments online.

Douglas: "Post a meeting format to discussion" Wednesday midnight

Paul: "Kahneman AD/BC* example on LW wiki" Thursday midnight

Paul: "David Styles" Monday midnight

Adam: "Post this list, post on meta/object interaction" Wednesday midnight

Jonathan: "Directions to JCR" Tuesday midnight

Ben: "Keep diary for 1 week, ident

...
[LINK] Get paid to train your rationality (update)
by gwern — 2012-04-29T15:01:49.963Z

Previous: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ya/link_get_paid_to_train_your_rationality/

The IARPA-run forecasting contest remains ongoing. Season 1 has largely finished up, and groups are preparing for season 2. Season 1 participants like myself get first dibs, but http://goodjudgmentproject.com/ has announced in emails they have spots open for first-time participants! I assume the other groups may have openings as well.

I personally found the tournament a source of predictions to stick on PB.com and I even did pretty well in GJP. (When I checked a few weeks ago, I was ranked 28 of 203 in my experimental group.) I haven't been paid my honorarium yet, though.
Losing Your Religion: Analytic Thinking Can Undermine Belief
by  — 2012-04-29T13:07:52.330Z

It appears that Scientific American have found out about raising the sanity waterline. Plus one successful prediction by Mr. Yudkowsky, I presume. Since I couldn't bring myself to quote any particular bit of the article, deeming all of them to be of substance and interest, I urge the reader to actually follow the link and read for themselves.

To summarize: the conclusion many experiments, performed in many different ways, reach, is that, whenever you get people to actually stop and think of what they are saying, rather than go on intuition or what they think the socially "normal" thing is, their declared levels of religious belief seem to always drop dramatically, on average. This isn't achieved by anything complicated like teaching them about biases, but by tricks as simple and cheap as making the font of the answer sheet hard to read, or showing them a picture of Rodin's The Thinker.

I shall also link you to the TVTropes discussion on that topic, since they're a little more mainstream than us, and we shouldn't lose sight of the world around us and fall to parochialsim. Links to other communities discussing the article (it's bound to make quite a splash) are very welcome.
Stanovich on CEV
by lukeprog — 2012-04-29T09:37:46.315Z

Keith Stanovich is a leading expert on the cogsci of rationality, but he also also written on a problem related to CEV, that of the "rational integration" of our preferences. Here he is on pages 81-86 of Rationality and the Reflective Mind (currently my single favorite book on rationality, out of the dozens I've read):

All multiple-process models of mind capture a phenomenal aspect of human decision making that is of profound importance — that humans often feel alienated from their choices. We display what folk psychology and philosophers term weakness of will. For example, we continue to smoke when we know that it is a harmful habit. We order a sweet after a large meal, merely an hour after pledging to ourselves that we would not. In fact, we display alienation from our responses even in situations that do not involve weakness of will — we find ourselves recoiling from the sight of a disfigured person even after a lifetime of dedication to diversity and inclusion.

This feeling of alienation — although emotionally discomfiting when it occurs — is actually a reflection of a unique aspect of human cognition: the use of Type 2 metarepresentational abilities to enable a cognitive critique of our beliefs and our desires. Beliefs about how well we are forming beliefs become possible because of such metarepresentation, as does the ability to evaluate one's desires — to desire to desire differently...

...There is a philosophical literature on the notion of higher-order evaluation of desires... For example, in a classic paper on second-order desires, Frankfurt (1971) speculated that only humans have such metarepresentational states. He evocatively termed creatures without second-order desires (other animals, human babies) wantons... A wanton simply does not reflect on his/her goals. Wantons want — but they do not care what they want.

Nonwantons, however, can represent a model of an idealized preference structure — perhaps, for example, a model based on a superordinate judgment of long-term lifespan considerations... So a human can say: I would prefer to prefer not to smoke. This second-order preference can then become a motivational competitor to the first-order preference. At the level of second-order preferences, I prefer to prefer to not smoke; nevertheless, as a first-order preference, I prefer to smoke. The resul

...
Value realism
by KatjaGrace — 2012-04-29T02:55:44.000Z

People have different ideas about how valuable things are. Before I was about fifteen the meaning of this was ambiguous. I think I assumed that a tree for instance has some inherent value, and that when one person wants to cut it down and another wants to protect it, they both have messy estimates of what it’s true value is. At least one of them had to be wrong. This was understandable because value was vague or hard to get at or something.

In my year 11 Environmental Science class it finally clicked that there wasn’t anything more to value than those ‘estimates’. That a tree has some value to an environmentalist, and a different value to a clearfelling proponent. That it doesn’t have a real objective value somewhere inside it. Not even a vague or hard to know value that is estimated by different people’s ‘opinions’. That there is just nothing there. That even if there is something there, there is no way for me to know about it, so the values I deal with every day can’t be that sort. Value had to be a function of things: the item being valued and the person doing the valuing.

I was somewhat embarrassed to have ever assumed otherwise, and didn’t really think about it again until recently. It occurred to me recently that a long list of strange things I notice people believing can be explained by the assumption that they disagree with me on whether things have objective values. So I hypothesize that many people believe that value is inherent in a thing, and doesn’t intrinsically depend on the agent doing the valuing.

Here’s my list of strange things people seem to believe. For each I give two explanations: why it is false, and why it is true if you believe in objective values. Note that these are generally beliefs that cause substantial harm:

When two people trade, one of them is almost certainly losing

People don’t necessarily say this explicitly, but often seem to implicitly believe it.

Why it’s false: In most cases where two people are willing to trade, this is because the values they assign to the items in question are such that both will gain by having the other person’s item instead of their own.

Why it’s believed: There’s a total amount of value shared somehow between the people’s posessions. Changing the distribution is very likely to harm one party or...
[SEQ RERUN] Quantum Non-Realism
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-29T02:40:54.459Z

Today's post, Quantum Non-Realism was originally published on 08 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

"Shut up and calculate" is the best approach you can take when none of your theories are very good. But that is not the same as claiming that "Shut up!" actually is a theory of physics. Saying "I don't know what these equations mean, but they seem to work" is a very different matter from saying: "These equations definitely don't mean anything, they just work!"

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 Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable, 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.
Quotes about death from the conventional viewpoint [edited for clarity]
by  — 2012-04-29T00:38:26.451Z

This may not be the right place for this, but I need quotes about death coming from the orthodox (normative, non-LW) position on death. I'm working on a project that will eventually be at least tangentially LW relevant, and I want to have some good 'pro-death' quotes that I can adapt for usage in the final project. I don't think I really need any quotes from the LW perspective; I plan to paraphrase Yudkowsky and the Sequences as well as Dylan Thomas's poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" for the opposing viewpoint.

I don't want to go into too much detail as to what it is exactly I am working on (if I fail or lose motivation fewer people will be disappointed), but I think that the project will take a maximum of 2 months to complete. This means that it will in all likelihood be complete in 3. More details as progress is made. Thank you in advance.
What's wrong with psychology, anyway?
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2012-04-28T23:36:53.833Z

Came across this article, published in 1991 but hardly dated:

David T. Lykken, What's Wrong With Psychology, Anyway? (PDF, 39 pages)

Anyone who's interested in psychology as a science might, I think, find it fascinating. Lots of stuff there about rationality-related failures of academic psychology. Several wonderful anecdotes, of which I'll quote one in full that had me laughing out loud --

In the 1940s and ’50s. there was a torrent of interest and research surrounding the debate between the S-R [Stimulus-Response] reinforcement theorists at Yale and Iowa City and the S-S [Stimulus-Stimulus] expectancy theorists headquartered at Berkeley. As is usual in these affairs, the two sides produced not only differing theoretical interpretations but also different empirical findings from their rat laboratories, differences that ultimately led Marshall Jones to wonder if the researchers in Iowa and California might not be working with genetically different animals. Jones obtained samples of rats from the two colonies: and tested them in the simple runway situation. Sure enough, when running time was plotted against trial number, the two strains showed little overlap in performance. The Iowa rats put their heads down and streaked for the goal box, while the Berkeley animals dawdled, retraced, investigated, appeared to be making “cognitive maps” just as Tolman always said. But by 1965 the torrent of interest in latent-learning had become a backwater and Jones's paper was published obscurely (Jones & Fennel, 1965).

(I came across the reference to the article in the HN discussion about a project, of independent interest, to try and replicate a sample of articles from three reputable journals in psychology in a given year)
[SEQ RERUN] Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-28T22:11:57.676Z

Today's post, Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable was originally published on 07 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

(Note: Designed to be standalone readable.) An epistle to the physicists. To probability theorists, words like "simple", "falsifiable", and "testable" have exact mathematical meanings, which are there for very strong reasons. The (minority?) faction of physicists who say that many-worlds is "not falsifiable" or that it "violates Occam's Razor" or that it is "untestable", are committing the same kind of mathematical crime as non-physicists who invent their own theories of gravity that go as inverse-cube. This is one of the reasons why I, a non-physicist, dared to talk about physics - because I saw (some!) physicists using probability theory in a way that was simply wrong. Not just criticizable, but outright mathematically wrong: 2 + 2 = 3.

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 Decoherence is Simple, 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 : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2012-04-28T21:59:41.777Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
19 May 2012 12:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Museum of Natural Sciences Rue Vautier 29 B-1000 Brussels

During this meetup we will use puzzles and games to improve creative thinking, our models of other people and rationality in general.
We'll meet in the lobby as usual, should you arrive late we will have moved to the cafeteria (just go straight once you're past the entrance, you can't miss it) If the weather is particularly nice we might even move to the nearby Leopold Park later. If you are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. (getting there: http://www.naturalsciences.be/information/visitor/access)

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
Timeless Physics Question
by DanielLC — 2012-04-28T20:33:19.923Z

Timeless physics is what you end up with if you take MWI, assume the universe is a standing wave, and remove the extraneous variables. From what I understand, for the most part you can take a standing wave and add a time-reversed version, you end up with a standing wave that only uses real numbers. The problem with this is that the universe isn't quite time symmetric.

If I ignore that complex numbers ever were used in quantum physics, it seems unlikely that complex numbers is the correct solution. Is there another one? Should I be reversing charge and parity as well as time when I make the standing real-only wave?
Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial?
by lukeprog — 2012-04-28T04:18:12.916Z

I've spent so much time in the cogsci literature that I know the LW approach to rationality is basically the mainstream cogsci approach to rationality (plus some extra stuff about, e.g., language), but... do other people not know this? Do people one step removed from LessWrong — say, in the 'atheist' and 'skeptic' communities — not know this? If this is causing credibility problems in our broader community, it'd be relatively easy to show people that Less Wrong is not, in fact, a "fringe" approach to rationality.

For example, here's Oaksford & Chater in the second chapter to the (excellent) new Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, the one on normative systems of rationality:

Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality at all? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a clash between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.

From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… Logic can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over beliefs. Probability… studies consistency over degrees of belief. Rational choice theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with choices.

They go on to clarify that by probability they mean Bayesian probability theory, and by rational choice theory they mean Bayesian decision theory. You'll get the same account in the textbooks on the cogsci of rationality, e.g. Thinking and Deciding or Rational Choice in

...
Quotes on Existential Risk
by lukeprog — 2012-04-28T02:01:33.295Z

Similar to the AGI Quotes thread and the monthly Rationality Quotes threads, this is a thread for memorable quotes about existential risk.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

But please feel free to quote posts and comments from Less Wrong or Overcoming Bias.
LINK: Human Bio-engineering and Coherent Extrapolated Volition
by Mass_Driver — 2012-04-28T01:40:02.931Z

This article has some interesting commentary on how humans might modify themselves to combat global warming, including the use of drugs that would increase empathy, increase willpower, or increase aversion to meat. The interviewer points out that such techniques could involve implanting non-native beliefs in people's minds, and the researcher responds that any such beliefs would be essentially built up out of the person's existing desires and wishes -- the analysis is remarkably similar to the analysis Eliezer gives in explaining Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

No hate mail about how meat does or doesn't cause global warming, please -- the interesting bit is the analysis of CEV, not the analysis of climate change.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/how-engineering-the-human-body-could-combat-climate-change/253981/