trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
First Triangle LW Meetup 5/4 7pm (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) [Repost]
by curiousepic — 2011-04-28T03:30:17.047Z

Note: This announcement was previously posted here but was not promoted at the time. I assume this was either because the date was too far out or there was no summary break. Please let me know if I should delete that post or ask for people to downvote it to balance karma or if there is some other reason it or this post was not promoted.

When: Wednesday, May 4th at 7:00 pm

Where: Morrisville Outlet Mall Food Court; I'll be wearing a Lego evolution shirt and may or may not have a LW sign.

This Google doc contains some preliminary notes as well as my phone number. I imagine this meeting will consist of introductions and some meta stuff about future meetups. We have seven people that can attend, including the number three LW poster, Alicorn. Hopefully there are even more LWers in the area, or at least rationalists that we can reach out to; it certainly seems like there should be, being the "Research Triangle" and all. And feel free to join us if you're not officially inside the Triangle, of course. If there are a bunch of people in Greensboro or Charlotte, we can probably move the venue further West.

Hope to see you there!
Melbourne Meetup: Friday 6th May, 6pm
by matt — 2011-04-27T23:59:54.062Z

When: Friday 6th May, 18:00
Where: TrikeApps office, lvl 2, 55 Walsh St, West Melbourne 3003 (http://trikeapps.com/contact)

Directions:
Enter the somewhat unfriendly building, climb the stairs to the top (2 floors), and turn left.
No wheelchair access (sorry - if you need help there and dignity and safety are not important to you I'm sure we can help you get to the top; if they are important then please speak up - we can at least move the next one to a more accessible venue).

Discussion:

http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong (join to see this list)

http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=6a317
What would you do with a solution to 3-SAT?
by Alex Flint — 2011-04-27T18:19:51.186Z

Many experts suspect that there is no polynomial-time solution to the so-called NP-complete problems, though no-one has yet been able to rigorously prove this and there remains the possibility that a polynomial-time algorithm will one day emerge. However unlikely this is, today I would like to invite LW to play a game I played with with some colleagues called what-would-you-do-with-a-polynomial-time-solution-to-3SAT? 3SAT is, of course, one of the most famous of the NP-complete problems and a solution to 3SAT would also constitute a solution to *all* the problems in NP. This includes lots of fun planning problems (e.g. travelling salesman) as well as the problem of performing exact inference in (general) Bayesian networks. What's the most fun you could have?
Avoiding Factual Muggings
by KenChen — 2011-04-27T16:41:02.296Z

When people talk about self-defense, they tend to concentrate on how to physically defend yourself. But the best way to avoid getting hurt is to avoid being attacked in the first place. Here are some suggestions:

Appear to be alert -- don't listen to music, don't use your phone, and keep moving. If you go so far as to run or jog to your destination, you will be a very unappealing target.

Stay in well-lit areas at night. In a place with low traffic, it may be better to walk in the middle of the road.

Appear to be armed. Concealed weapons don't help -- they are only useful once you have already been selected as a target. Visible and obvious weapons such as guns and knives are usually too much trouble to be worth it. Ordinary objects that can be used as weapons, such as baseball bats and hammers may be best, as they act a deterrent without the hassle that traditional weapons bring.

What are some other easy measures that people can take to make themselves less of a likely target?
Entropy and social groups
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-04-27T13:59:32.012Z

I suggest that there are default patterns for social groups, and they could be viewed as high entropy-- what you'd expect without knowing more than that there was a social group of a certain size, possibly with some modifications for tech level and status.

For example, I think that authoritarianism is the default for government-- "we're in charge because we're in charge, and it would be dangerous for anyone who tries to change that". Totalitarianism is lower entropy-- it's surprising for the people in charge to have an ideology which requires them to make drastic changes.

The recent Elitist Jerks: A Well-kept Garden describes an effort to fight one sort of entropy (the repetition of the same questions and answers) which resulted in another sort of entropy (an excessively stable and eventually fragile core group).

Maintaining fun is another challenge in the keeping things alive category. Pleasant is relatively easy. Fun (which I'd say requires novelty) is harder, and I'm interested in comments on what it takes to keep the fun going.

There's a theory that life exists as chaos on the border between order and randomness-- I find this plausible, and it's a different angle for looking at the Friendliness problem. How can a system be built which continues to permit (or even encourage) interesting sorts of change, without permitting change so drastic that we as we are now wouldn't recognize the outcome as still related to us?
Is there an optimal function for belief calibration over time?
by InquilineKea — 2011-04-27T08:46:16.731Z

You can, say, measure a belief on a scale from -1 to 1, where 0 is correct belief.

Then you could try calibrating the belief. Thing is, that sometimes you can calibrate it by monotonically decreasing it. Or you could monotonically decrease the absolute value of it. Or you could even make the calibration function oscillate between -1 and 1. Sometimes, more incorrect beliefs might even be desirable, since they may give you additional information about the landscape (this is where you can have a case where D1(t) > D2(t) and D1(t+1) < D2(t+1) ).
Explanation found for the Pioneer anomaly 
by arundelo — 2011-04-27T04:25:05.478Z

Paper here. Lay summary here. Some bits from the latter:

The problem is this. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched towards Jupiter and Saturn in the early 1970s. After their respective flybys, they continued on escape trajectories out of the Solar System, both decelerating under the force of the Sun's gravity. But careful measuremenrs show that the spacecraft are slowing faster than they ought to, as if being pulled by an extra unseen force towards the Sun.

Spacecraft engineers' first thought was that heat emitted by the spacecraft could cause exactly this kind of deceleration. But when they examined the way heat was produced on the craft, by on board plutonium, and how this must have been emitted, they were unable to make the numbers add up.

Now Frederico Francisco at the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusao Nuclear in Lisbon Portugal, and a few pals, say they've worked out where the thermal calculations went wrong.
[SEQ RERUN] Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary
by jake987722 — 2011-04-27T03:06:13.819Z

Today's post, Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary was originally published on 20 January 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals are more worthy of trust than what you detect with your own ears and eyes.

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 A Fable of Science and Politics, 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.
Mapping our maps: types of knowledge
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-04-27T02:16:11.000Z

Related to: Map and Territory.

This post is based on ideas that came to be during my second-year nursing Research Methods class. The fact that I did terribly in this class maybe indicates that I shouldn’t be trying to explain it to anyone, but it also has a lot to do with the way I zoned out for most of every class, mulling over the material that would later become this post.

Types of map: the level of abstraction, or ‘how many steps away from reality’?

Probably in the third or fourth Research Methods class, we learned that any given research proposal could be divided into one of the following four categories:

Descriptive

Exploratory

Explanatory

Predictive

I started wondering to what degree knowledge in general could be divided into these categories; whether a map can be, in different people’s minds, descriptive or exploratory or explanatory or predictive depending on how well they understand the territory. Following this analogy, descriptive knowledge is a map one step, one level of abstraction, away from the territory. Every observation made is simply echoed in the model. From the Wikipedia page on descriptive research:

Descriptive research, also known as statistical research, describes data and characteristics about the population or phenomenon being studied. Descriptive research answers the questions who, what, where, when and how... Although the data description is factual, accurate and systematic, the research cannot describe what caused a situation. Thus, descriptive research cannot be used to create a causal relationship, where one variable affects another. In other words, descriptive research can be said to have a low requirement for internal validity.

A descriptive map draws no sweeping conclusions; it just copies data about the world. When I close my eyes and picture my kitchen, the model in my head is descriptive. It says nothing about why my kitchen looks a particular way, or what effects its particulars have in my daily life, or what the kitchens in other people’s houses look like. Thinking about my kitchen, I might classify the information I know into chunks; I know that spoons, forks, and knives are all in my cutlery drawer, whereas the kettle, toaster, and microwave are all next to each other in a row on the counter. The system of binomial nomenclature created by Carl Linnaeus is a descriptive map; it...
IA first steps (Berkeley, CA) (dead)
by Cayenne — 2011-04-27T01:25:43.879Z

Apologies for wasting your time with this post. Please disregard it.

My temporary plan is to meet together daily at one of the BART stops (Ashby or Berkeley, probably Ashby at first), choose a random set of directions, walk for 30-45 minutes, and then find a place to sit and chat for a while about other activities. Then walk back and split up. Total time may be 2-2.5 hours, 1-1.5 of it spent walking. I'm planning on doing this in the evening to avoid the midday heat, and to be done before it gets dark.

Anyone that wishes can come along. If you would like to bring ideas for future format or training ideas, please do! Together we can come up with things that enhance us all.

Edit - forgot to add location! Thanks for reminding me, Randaly.
DC Meetup: Sunday May 1st, 1 PM
by atucker — 2011-04-27T01:24:59.946Z

Sunday May 1st, 1 PM - 5 PM
Chipotle Mexican Grill
7600 Old Georgetown Road
Bethesda, MD 20814

Hey DC LWers, its about time we started meeting up! (Lurkers welcome)

Goals:
Basically, get to know each other and establish a regularly meeting (and thoroughly awesome) meetup group. I have a few discussion topics in mind (basic logistics, what we'd like to improve/what our goals are, introductions, etc), but feel free to come with your own.

Directions:
The Chipotle is near the Bethesda Metro station, just follow these directions. Go out of the station and walk down Old Georgetown Road. The Chipotle is next to the waterfall fountain, and outdoor seating area.
We will be sitting towards the back of the restaurant (basically, keep going in the direction you've been walking to get to the Chipotle), hopefully in the corner with a wraparound bench. Look for the person with curly red hair, or the LW sign.
Advice needed for Less Wrong Discussion Topic: Learning Mastery
by Goobahman — 2011-04-26T23:52:46.667Z

Hi everyone,

I currently head up a Sydney Less Wrong Meetup, which is actually just me and a group of my friends trying to improve our own rationality.

Several are uni students, so I was thinking of doing powerpoint and initiating some discussion on learning optimization, and exploring what helps us learn and absorb information, and see what devices we can find to help us maximize our learning capability.

Anyone know any particuarly good articles/websites/concepts that would be good for the meetup?

All advice is always appreciated.
What data generated that thought?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-04-26T12:54:31.971Z

In Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight W. Swain gives advice on receiving advice:

George Abercroft is an action writer. "Start with a fight!" is his motto. And for him, it works.

But Fred Friggenheimer's witch-cult yarn, as he conceives it, puts heavy emphasis on atmosphere. The fight he tries to stick in like a clove in a ham at the beginning, following George's rule, destroys the mood - and the story.

Even with your own rules, indeed, you must be careful. Because somehow, subtly, they may not apply to this explicit situation. [...]

How do you tell whether a rule is good or not, in terms of a specific problem?

Answer: Find out the reason the rule came into being. What idea or principle stands behind it? [...]

Take George's rule about starting every story with a fight. It's born of George's markets - men's magazines in which the emphasis is on fast, violent action, with blood on page one an absolute must.

If Fred only realized that fact, he'd ignore George's rule when he himself writes a mood-geared story.

One way to reduce damage done by cached thoughts is to cultivate a habit of asking questions about the origin of the thought. Do you remember where you heard the thought? Did it come from someone practicing good epistemic hygiene, or do they just unthinkingly pass on anything they hear? If somebody offered advice based on their own experiences, how representative is their experience? What kinds of experiences have they had that prompted that advice? Are there alternative ways of interpreting those experiences? Or if you're the one offering advice, which you came up with yourself, what situation led you to come up with it? How generalizable is it?

So far I have mostly been framing this as a way to notice flaws in seemingly good advice. But there's also an opposite angle: finding gems in seemingly worthless information.

All outcomes are correlated with causes; most statements are evidence of something. Michael Vassar once gave the example of a tribe of people who thought that faeries existed, lived in a nearby forest, and you could see them once you became old enough. It later turned out that the tribe had a hereditary eye disease which caused them to see things from the corners of their eyes once they got old. The tribe's theory of what was going on was wrong, but it was still based on some true data about the real world. A scientifically minded person could...
Nonmagical Powers
by sixes_and_sevens — 2011-04-26T10:53:19.858Z

A couple of years ago my workplace was running one of those guess-the-number-of-jellybeans-in-the-jar competitions. I don't even like jellybeans all that much, but nonetheless, I held aloft my nonmagic calculator and said "by the power of Galton!" Taking the mean of all the previous guesses, I put that down as my answer. I was out by one bean, and won the jar. I don't think my colleagues have ever been so interested in statistics as they were that afternoon, and I doubt they ever will be again.

I'm going to admit something a bit silly and embarrassing now: that made me feel like a wizard. Not because of the scope of what I'd done, since it was an utterly trivial piece of arithmetic, but because of the reaction it got. I had drawn on arcane lore unknown to my colleagues, and used it to exercise power over the world.

Personally, I think something like solid state semiconductor technology is about as impressive a real-world miracle as one could ever want by way of demonstrating the whole Science Works/Rationality Is Systematised Winning/Maths Has Manifold Real-World Applications thing, but for most people it will never have the impact of intentionally winning a jar full of jellybeans.

So I ask you, LW-readership: what other impressive nonmagical powers do we have, that we can casually demonstrate to everyday people in everyday circumstances?
SIAI Fundraising
by BrandonReinhart — 2011-04-26T08:35:22.242Z

Please refer to the updated documented here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5il/siai_an_examination/

This version is an old draft.

NOTE: Analysis here will be updated as people point out errors! I've tried to be accurate, but this is my first time looking at these (somewhat hairy) non-profit tax documents. Errors will be corrected as soon as I know of them! Please double check and criticize this work that it might improve.

Document History:

4/25/2011 - Initial post.

4/25/2011 - Corrected Yudkowsky compensation data.

4/26/2011 - Added expanded data from 2002 - 2009 in Overview, Revenue, and Expenses

4/27/2011 - Added expanded data to Officer Compensation & Big Donors

Todo:

Create a detailed program services analysis that examines the SIAI's allocation of funds to the Summit, etc.

Create an index of organizational milestones.

Disclaimer:

I am not affiliated with the SIAI.

I have not donated to the SIAI prior to writing this.

Acting on gwern's suggestion in his Girl Scout Cookie analysis, here is a first pass at looking at SIAI funding, suggestions for a funding task-force, etc.

The SIAI's Form 990's are available at GuideStar and Foundation Center. You must register in order to access the files at GuideStar.

2002 (Form 990-EZ)

2003 (Form 990-EZ)

2004 (Form 990-EZ)

2005 (Form 990)

2006 (Form 990)

2007 (Form 990)

2008 (Form 990-EZ)

2009 (Form 990)

Work is being done in this Google Spreadsheet.

Overview

Notes:

Sometimes the listed end of year balances didn't match what the spreadsheet calculated:

Filing Error 1? - There appears to be a minor typo to the effect of $4.86 in the end of year balance for the 2004 document. This money is accounted for, the results just aren't entered correctly. * Someone else please verify.

Filing Error 2? - The 2005 document appears to have accounted for expenses incorrectly, resulting in an excess $70,179.00 reported in the end of the year asset balance. This money is accounted for under 2005 Part III. It is merely not correctly deducted from the year end asset balance. * Someone else please verify.

Theft? - The organization reported $118,803.00 in theft in 2009 resulting in a year end asset balance lower than expected. The SIAI is currently pursuing legal restitution.

Analysis:

The SIAI asset sheet grew until 2008 when expenditures outpaced revenue.

Assets would have resumed growth into 2009, except for theft (see above.)

Curr

...
[SEQ RERUN] A Fable of Science and Politics
by jake987722 — 2011-04-26T03:42:25.538Z

Today's post, A Fable of Science and Politics was originally published on 23 December 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People respond in different ways to clear evidence they're wrong, not always by updating and moving on.

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 "I don't know.", 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.
Consequentialism FAQ
by Scott Alexander — 2011-04-26T01:45:09.234Z

There are a lot of explanations of consequentialism and utilitarianism out there, but not a lot of persuasive essays trying to convert people. I would like to fill that gap with a pro-consequentialist FAQ. The target audience is people who are intelligent but may not have a strong philosophy background or have thought about this matter too much before (ie it's not intended to solve every single problem or be up to the usual standards of discussion on LW).

I have a draft up at http://www.raikoth.net/consequentialism.html (yes, I have since realized the background is horrible, and changing it is on my list of things to do). Feedback would be appreciated, especially from non-consequentialists and non-philosophers since they're the target audience.
Toronto Meetup, April 28
by Spencer_Sleep — 2011-04-25T21:05:37.065Z

When: Thursday, April 28th, 20:00

Where: The Bedford Academy, 36 Prince Arthur Avenue

Hi everyone,

The Toronto meetup group is having one of our bi-weekly meetings this Thursday at the Bedford Academy. The reservation is under the name Spencer Sleep. I have requested a table upstairs, as it tends to be much quieter up there.

Newcomers are, as always, extremely welcome.

If you want to hear about upcoming LessWrong events in Toronto, or have ideas about how or when those events should be run, join the Toronto LessWrong Google Group!
Elitist Jerks: A Well-Kept Garden 
by malthrin — 2011-04-25T18:56:27.094Z

In response to: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

I'm a moderator at Elitist Jerks (http://www.elitistjerks.com), a World of Warcraft discussion forum. Within the WoW community, EJ has always been known for its strict moderation standards. We're exactly the sort of 'well-kept garden' that EY's post is about. You can see the fruit of the mod team's labor here: http://elitistjerks.com/f34/ I'll give some of the site's backstory for non-WoW players, describe the crossroads that we're currently at, and then give some caveats before you generalize too much from our example.

EJ's initial community came together to discuss WoW's most challenging content, known as "raids". In order to optimally outfit our characters for maximum performance in raids, both empirical and theoretical work was necessary: the game's combat mechanics were reverse engineered and detailed models for each character class were created. Within a couple of years, this "theorycrafting" work became the forum's primary purpose - refining and updating models as new game patches were released. Throughout the forum's life, high moderation standards have been maintained in order to protect our high signal/noise discussion. Primarily, asking for help is forbidden when the resources to answer your question already exist.

However, we're starting to wonder if we've performed our task too well.

Discussion about any aspect of the game that can't be quantified has almost completely died out. Despite having threads explicitly designated for more subjective topics, the overall forum atmosphere is sufficiently hostile/intimidating to non-analytic personalities that those threads don't see much traffic.

Further refinements in class modeling are so small as to be empirically unverifiable - their impact emerges in lengthy runs of simulated combat, but is washed out by random factors (critical hits, etc) in the 5-10 minutes of a typical raid encounter.

The community is heavily dependant on a few dozen key contributors who maintain the accepted spreadsheet/simulation models. By encouraging all our visitors to use their tools, we've made these people into single points of failure. When one of them quits the game, it's difficult to find another to take up maintenance on their model, because any programmer would rather write new code than work on old code (http://www.joelonsoftware.co

...