trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Parsimony as a side dish - a game to play on meetups?
by  — 2015-01-03T09:29:40.755Z

Tl;dr: we seem to (naively?) compound parsimony with other heuristics.

There was a quote from R. Burton, provided by JQuinton, offering an amusing exercise. The reader had to guess if an excerpt of text was nonsense or merely a rambling presentation of something, and what that could be. Upon learning a single word of explanation, it became difficult to read it as anything than the object's description, even if the reader was told there were other possible answers (beyond 'ridiculous.')

Here's an example:

> Reconstruction probably won't even account for all that escaped the initial search. Of course it doesn't have as much lead as the stained variety. Please don't follow 'old traditions' again, it's a cultural thing anyway. The little ones are easily lost in water. The dog won't know how to find them, but the problem is rather that it won't know how to avoid them. The high singing note I will miss. Be careful not to step on it. It was to harmony what it is to ruin. A different brand is used in electron microscopy, to make 'em smooth and even. There's plenty under the bench in the park. I had cherished it since my wedding.

(I'm not a writer, so that was rather clumsy. Please post better examples in comments.)

But what if we are offered to brainstorm before answering, and to try viewing the excerpt as a collection of true facts, just not necessarily a coherent story? Here are some of our possible approaches (heuristics):

- it's a picture;

- it's an instruction;

-it's paraphyletic (e.g., it is about a single thing which has more than one cause);

- it's alive!

- it's dangerous!

- it's an advertisement;

- it's a single thing better described by more than one word, though still recognizable from the best match;

- it's a compilation of distant phenomena related to whatsitname, the everyday thing;

- it's all true, BUT there are qualifiers (which could make it more plausible-sounding);

- it's just not a physical body;

- it's an extreme case etc.

...and then we try to guess again.

The number of hypotheses now should be more than one, but why? What changed?

I think we start out with expectations nearest to 'picture' and most removed from 'qualifiers', and maybe it was useful in ancestral environment, but I would not expect them to be most fruitful. Maybe if enough people played such scenarios out, we would experimentally obtain a set of more useful ones?

Is there a way to prove th...
The Superstar Effect
by Adam Zerner — 2015-01-03T06:11:19.710Z

Modern microconomist Alfred Marshall explains that technology has greatly extended the power and reach of the planet's most gifted performers....He referenced a classical of the British opera singer Elizabeth Billington. She was a well-acclaimed soprano with a strong voice, that, naturally did not have access to a microphone or amplifier in 1798, let alone to MTV, CDs, iTunes, and Pandora. She could only reach a small audience. This limited her ability to dominate the market in the way that artists to do today. Marshall wrote, “so long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs. Billington at the beginning of the last century, nearly as great [an increase] as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on those of the last.”

- Wikipedia

Technology has made it easy for us to reach large audiences. And to do so at no marginal cost. If a musician writes a song and puts it on iTunes, it doesn't cost him any money for one more person to download it.

The fact that technology has made it easy for us to reach large audiences has implications on the consumer side of things as well. As a consumer, I can go on iTunes and choose the best music to buy. To understand my point, consider a different world. In this world iTunes doesn't exist. In this world the best music is 200 miles away, but mediocre music is only 5 miles away. Because traveling 200 miles is inconvenient, I choose the mediocre music.

In today's world of iTunes, this doesn't happen. Technology exists that allows us to reach large audiences and to do so at little/no marginal cost. And so, the consumer can (and will) choose the best the market has to offer.

Now for the implications on the supply side. We've already seen that consumers can and will choose the best the market has to offer. "The best the market has to offer" is usually provided by a small number of talented people. Think about it: the best artists, performers, writers, athletes etc. These talented people end up serving a large proportion of the market, and are paid accordingly. This... is The Superstar Effect.

Because of these joint consumption economies, there is a unique opportunity to create and capture value. If you are the best, you capt...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Argument from Silence
by RobinZ — 2015-01-03T05:13:57.990Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Argument from Silence

WHEN:
04 January 2015 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

Because of the late posting of the announcement, we are postponing the Meta Meetup to next week to give people more prep time.

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to discuss the argument from silence. As usual, we will congregate between 3:00 and 3:30 and begin at 3:30.

The term "argument from silence" here refers to a special case of absence of evidence being used as evidence of absence: specifically, when something is missing from a particular corpus of writings that a given historian would have expected to be present. We hope in this discussion to improve people's ability to evaluate the strength of negative evidence with these examples. As always, initiating and participating in side discussions when desired is both allowed and encouraged.

There are no announced disruptions on the Metro for this weekend; however, trains will be only six cars long due to anticipated light ridership.

Upcoming meetups:

Jan. 11: Meta Meetup (what you like, what you want, what you'd change)

Jan. 18: Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Argument from Silence
Non-obvious skills with highly measurable progress?
by robot-dreams — 2015-01-03T00:23:22.997Z

A lot of my significant personal improvement happened as a result of highly measurable progress and tight feedback loops. For example:

Project Euler

Go (the game has a very accurate ranking system)

Strength training

However, these are somewhat obvious examples, and I feel like it would be a waste not to push such a useful improvement mechanism as far as possible.

What are some non-obvious examples of skills with highly measurable progress and tight feedback loops?
Meetup : Moscow: bayes, language and psychology, now with homework
by BT_Uytya — 2015-01-02T23:46:21.454Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: bayes, language and psychology, now with homework

WHEN:
04 January 2015 03:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Hello there.

If you don't have plans for the Sunday but aware of Bayes' theorem in odds form, you certainly will be welcome here.

Our plan for 4th is:

Victor will try to explain the device of imaginary results by I J Good, himself gaining a deeper understanding of it in the process (yup, it's the same guy who posted this. I'm still a bit confused about Caesar, but I think I understand the big picture now. Let's tackle this together, it should be interesting and educating);

Varman will give a short talk on exosemantics. Surprisingly, the usual lack of political correctness isn't included (but counter-signalling and in-group bashing are still here, of course)

Natalia will tell you why do you need to know the very basics of behaviorism to properly analyze things like social interactions, and how exactly the use of more complex models could led you to a trouble.

Please do your homework and make sure you are familiar with the odds form of Bayes' theorem and know something about biofeedback.

PS: No, we aren't implying that behaviorism is enough to understand things. But it is necessary.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: bayes, language and psychology, now with homework
Meetup : Montreal Less Wrong/Effective Altruism - 8, 760 hours: Setting goals for 2015
by bartimaeus — 2015-01-02T22:20:04.561Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Less Wrong/Effective Altruism - 8, 760 hours: Setting goals for 2015

WHEN:
08 January 2015 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1720 st denis montreal

The end of a year is the perfect time to review one’s life, goals, plans, and projects, as well as plan for the upcoming year. Alex Vemeer has been fine-tuning his own review process for several years, and it's a great model to start with. We'll take some time to brainstorm how 2014 went for us, what went great, what needs improvement, and we'll set some milestones for 2015.

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Less Wrong/Effective Altruism - 8, 760 hours: Setting goals for 2015
[Link]How to Achieve Impossible Career Goals (My manifesto on instrumental rationality)
by  — 2015-01-02T20:46:03.143Z

Hey guys,

Don't normally post from my blog to here, but the latest massive post on goal achievement in 2015 has a ton that would be relevant to people here.

Some things that I think would be of particular interest to LWers:

The section called "Map the Path to Your Goal" has some really great stuff on planning that haven't seen many other places. I know planning gets a bad wrap here, but when combined with the "Contigency Plans" method near the bottom of the post, I've found this stuff to be killer for getting results for students.

At the bottom, there's a section called "Choosing More Habits" that breaks down habits into the only five categories you should ever focus on. If you're planning to systematically take on new habits in 2015, this will help.

The section called "a proactive mindset" has some fun mental reframes to play around with.

Anyways, would love feedback and thoughts. Feel free to comment here or on the bottom of that post.

Thanks!

Matt
Meetup : Boston: Antifragile
by Anders_H — 2015-01-02T20:04:48.211Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Antifragile

WHEN:
04 January 2015 03:30:33PM (-0500)

WHERE:
98 Elm Street, Somerville

This Sunday, Jesse Galef will be reviewing the book Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. Topics will include effective decision making, catastrophic risk, and pop culture references.

Reviews of Antifragile:

"The glossary alone offered more thought-provoking ideas than any other nonfiction book I read this year. That said, Antifragile is far from flawless."

"As always, an imperfect, infuriating but intriguing book"

"A big mixed bag of insights and misconceptions"

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm, and have an alternating location:

1st Sunday meetups are at Citadel in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville.

3rd Sunday meetups are in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number.

(We also have last Wednesday meetups at Citadel at 7pm.)

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 4pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Antifragile
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-01-02T16:34:47.923Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 26th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta December Meetup - Game Night!: 27 December 2014 07:00AM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Utrecht: a critique of effective altruism: 04 January 2015 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici: 03 January 2026 01:30PM

Washington, D.C.: Mini Talks + Socializing: 28 December 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

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

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, 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, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Tel Aviv, Vancouver, Warsaw, Waterloo.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're no...
[Link] Neural networks trained on expert Go games have just made a major leap
by ESRogs — 2015-01-02T15:48:16.283Z

From the arXiv:

Move Evaluation in Go Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Chris J. Maddison, Aja Huang, Ilya Sutskever, David Silver

The game of Go is more challenging than other board games, due to the difficulty of constructing a position or move evaluation function. In this paper we investigate whether deep convolutional networks can be used to directly represent and learn this knowledge. We train a large 12-layer convolutional neural network by supervised learning from a database of human professional games. The network correctly predicts the expert move in 55% of positions, equalling the accuracy of a 6 dan human player. When the trained convolutional network was used directly to play games of Go, without any search, it beat the traditional search program GnuGo in 97% of games, and matched the performance of a state-of-the-art Monte-Carlo tree search that simulates a million positions per move.

This approach looks like it could be combined with MCTS. Here's their conclusion:

In this work, we showed that large deep convolutional neural networks can predict the next move made by Go experts with an accuracy that exceeds previous methods by a large margin, approximately matching human performance. Furthermore, this predictive accuracy translates into much stronger move evaluation and playing strength than has previously been possible. Without any search, the network is able to outperform traditional search based programs such as GnuGo, and compete with state-of-the-art MCTS programs such as Pachi and Fuego.

In Figure 2 we present a sample game played by the 12-layer CNN (with no search) versus Fuego (searching 100K rollouts per move) which was won by the neural network player. It is clear that the neural network has implicitly understood many sophisticated aspects of Go, including good shape (patterns that maximise long term effectiveness of stones), Fuseki (opening sequences), Joseki (corner patterns), Tesuji (tactical patterns), Ko fights (intricate tactical battles involving repeated recapture of the same stones), territory (ownership of points), and influence (long-term potential for territory). It is remarkable that a single, unified, straightforward architecture can master these elements of the game to such a degree, and without any explicit lookahead.

On the other hand, we note that the network still has weaknesses: notably it sometimes fails to

...
Brain-centredness and mind uploading
by gedymin — 2015-01-02T12:23:35.474Z

The naïve way of understanding mind uploading is "we take the connectome of a brain, including synaptic connection weights and characters, and emulate it in a computer". However, people want their personalities to be uploaded, not just brains. That is more than just replicating the functionality of their brains in silico.

This nuance has lead to some misunderstandings, for example, to experts wondering [1] why on Earth would anyone think that brain-centredness [2] (the idea that brains are "sufficient" in some vague sense) is a necessary prerequisite for successful whole brain emulation. Of course, brain-centredness is not required for brain uploading to be technically successful; the problem is whether it is sufficient for mind uploading in the sense that people actually care about?

The first obvious extension that may be required is the chemical environment of the brain. Here are some examples:

Are you familiar with someone whose personality is radically (and often predictability) altered under influence of alcohol or drugs? This is not an exception, but a rule: most are impacted by this, only to a smaller extent. Only the transiency of the effects allow us to label them as simple mood changes.

I have observed that my personal levels of neuroticism vary depending on the pharmaceutical drugs I'm using. Nootropics make me more nervous, while anti-hypertensions drugs have the reverse effect.

The levels of hormones in the blood function as long-term personality changes. There are neurotransmitters that themselves are slow-acting, for example, nitric oxide [3].

Artificially enchanted levels of serotonin in the brain causes it to "adapt" to this environment - in this way some of antidepressants work (namely, SSRI) [4].

Whole Brain Emulation - A Roadmap includes a short section about the "Body chemical environment" and concludes that for "WBE, the body chemistry model, while involved, would be relatively simple", unless protein interactions have to be modelled.

The technical aspect notwithstanding, what are the practical and moral implications? I think that here's not only a problem, but also an opportunity. Why keep the accidental chemistry we have developed in our lifetimes, one that presumably has little relation to what we would really like to be - if we could? Imagine that it is possible to create carefully improved and tailored versions of the neu...
Understanding Who You Really Are
by ozziegooen — 2015-01-02T08:44:50.374Z

Here are 14 ways in which you reveal who you really are. If you’re brave enough, or if you dare, aim to share who you really are, little by little, everyday, with those you trust.

- A typical 'Who You Really Are' article on Lifehack

Take a minute to consider the following questions.

Who are you?
Who are you, really?
Who do you really think you are inside?

It took me a full year to find the answer to these. The answer was that these questions, when posed as philosophical dilemmas, were bullshit. This post is not about ‘understanding who you really are’. It's about understanding, 'who you really are'.

“Who are you” is a question that sounds grandiose. It’s hard to come up with a philosophically solid answer, and this makes it seem interesting. It is not interesting. It just lacks context.

What would you say if you were asked “who are you?” by the police? By a doctor? By a relative? By a potential boss? By a space alien?

You should say different things, because these people would be using the same words to mean different things.

What they really want is information about you that is of decision relevance to them. A police cares where you are from. The doctor cares how old you are. A relative cares about who you are related to. A boss cares what skills you have. A space alien cares about your number of eyes and hands. “Who are you?” really means, “given your understanding of my position, what simple information about yourself do you think is useful to me?”

So when a young philosopher follows up your response with, “no really, who are you?”, you should respond with asking, “what in particular would you like to know?”

Some may respond to this saying that there does exist a true self. A real self. This is what the phrase should really mean, and this is what I personally spent a year pondering.

But first, the very idea of there being a true self is specific to a set of religions and philosophies that you may not believe in. If you’re a empirical atheist, you shouldn’t. David Hume fought the notion of an inner self 250 years ago. [1] Derek Parfit fought it more concretely in the last 30 years. [2]

Second, even if you do ascribe to a belief system where there is some sort of tru...
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup
by rocurley — 2015-01-02T00:46:24.061Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup

WHEN:
12 January 2015 06:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1390 Market St., San Francisco, CA

There doesn't appear to exist a San Francisco meetup group, so I'm starting one!

The first meetup will start at 6:00 pm on Monday, Jan 12th, at Maia's and my apartment (1390 Market St., San Francisco, very near Civic Center BART/ Van Ness Muni). If you call me when you get to the lobby (301-458-0764) I can come let you in. Feel free to show up late: I'm sure some people will be commuting back from the South Bay or something and won't be able to make it by 6, for example.

Things to talk about include:

*Getting to know people!
*Determining what people want out of the group.
*Probably figuring out a better place than my apartment for future meetups.
*Whatever you want to talk about.

There are many restaurants nearby, so we can grab food later.

Looking forward to seeing you then!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
by AnnaLeptikon — 2015-01-01T21:09:30.269Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna

WHEN:
24 January 2015 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Kaisermühlenstraße 24/2, 1220 Wien

Welcome to the first meetup in 2015 everyone :)

location: When arriving by U2 or Schnellbahn train: get out at station Stadlau take the exit towards Kaisermühlenstraße and simply cross the street the meetup is in the modern looking, greenish building right in front of your nose :) (you need to go through it, it's on the other side of the building)
Important: Google maps doesn't recognise the address and hence shows the wrong location...

agenda:
- as far as I remember we have Axel﻿'s talk about chaos theory and transactional analysis by Andreas﻿ :)
- if there is more time or they are not prepared, we can have another open mic session

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna