trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-07-12T15:37:17.572Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on July 5th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta: Intro to Meditation: 13 July 2013 06:00PM
Brussels meetup with HEALES: 13 July 2013 01:00PM
[Moscow] The Goals We Set: 07 July 2013 04:00PM
[Munich] LW Munich Meetup in July: 06 July 2013 03:00PM
[Vienna] LW Vienna Meetup #4: 13 July 2013 03:00PM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 07 July 2013 03:00PM

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: 06 July 2019 01:30PM
London Practical - Sunday 7th July: 07 July 2013 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, 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 will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

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'...
Cosmic expansion vs uploads economics?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-12T07:37:07.297Z

In a previous post (and the attendant paper and talks) I mentioned how easy it is to build a Dyson sphere around the sun (and start universal colonisation), given decent automation.

Decent automation includes, of course, the copyable uploads that form the basis of Robin Hanson's upload economics model. If uploads can gather vast new resources by Dysoning the sun using current or near future technology, this calls into question Robin's model that standard current economic assumptions can be extended to an uploads world.

And Dysoning the sun is just one way uploads could be completely transformative. There are certainly other ways, that we cannot yet begin to imagine, that uploads could radically transform human society in short order, making all our continuity assumptions and our current models moot. It would be worth investigating these ways, keeping in mind that we will likely miss some important ones.

Against this, though, is the general unforeseen friction argument. Uploads may be radically transformative, but probably on longer timescales than we'd expect.
[LINK] If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?
by Strilanc — 2013-07-12T05:39:02.814Z

A post about how, for some causal models, causal relationships can be inferred without doing experiments that control one of the random variables.

If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?

To help address problems like the two example problems just discussed, Pearl introduced a causal calculus. In the remainder of this post, I will explain the rules of the causal calculus, and use them to analyse the smoking-cancer connection. We’ll see that even without doing a randomized controlled experiment it’s possible (with the aid of some reasonable assumptions) to infer what the outcome of a randomized controlled experiment would have been, using only relatively easily accessible experimental data, data that doesn’t require experimental intervention to force people to smoke or not, but which can be obtained from purely observational studies.
Meetup : [Columbus] Upcoming Workshop Topics
by daenerys — 2013-07-12T04:12:33.453Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Upcoming Workshop Topics

WHEN: 15 July 2013, 7:30 pm

WHERE: Columbus, OH

Columbus, OH has a thriving rationality scene. If you live nearby, you should come check us out. PM me here, join the facebook page, or RSVP to the meetup.com site for more info!

Logistics: We run workshops on the first, third, and fifth Mondays of the month at the HCCO conference room off Henderson. Workshops start at 7:30pm, and go until about 9:30.

Demographics: Most workshops draw about 25 people. We have a wide range of ages, centering around 30 years old. Decent gender balance (1:2). Very casual atmosphere.

Links: Our Facebook page- https://www.facebook.com/groups/563449250347654/

Meetup page for the next meetup- http://www.meetup.com/HumanistOhio/events/128040042/

UPCOMING TOPICS

July 15- Community Engagement- Gleb Tsipursky

-Rationality is about the science of reasoning, and acting effectively to meet your goals. This week's workshop is on Community Engagement, and will be taught by Gleb Tsipursky, a professor of history at OSU.

Most of our activities in Rationality focus on improving our own thinking. This workshop broadens our lens to consider how the ideas of rationality can be applied fruitfully to analyze and improve our communities. We will look at three levels of our community: our local, everyday communities; our economic system; and our political system. Our goal will be to come away with a broadened understanding of some of the irrationalities in our communities and some ideas for what we can do to help improve the situation.

July 29- Social Activity TBA

August 5- Popular Psych Studies, and Where They Go Wrong- Don Sutterfield

August 19- Intro to Bayes- Eric Huff

Sept 2- Labor Day- Possible Social Gathering TBA

Sept 16- Budgeting/Finances- Jeff Dubin

Sept 30- tentative- Effective Altruism- Elissa Caffery Fleming

Oct 7- TBA- Mike Riggs

OCTOBER 11-13 MEGA MEETUP: TOPICS

Down the Rabbit Hole: Magic as Psychic Entertainment -Jack Strauss

-Magician/Mentalist Jack Strauss will present a stage act as a psychic entertainer. Afterwards, there will be a sit-down talkback with the audience. Topics will be determined by audience questions and may include: ethics of performing on stage with a psychic persona, psychology of deception, techniques of cold reading, etc. The only topic off the t

...
The WASH-1400 Reactor Safety Study
by JonahS — 2013-07-11T23:16:50.358Z

In Intelligence Explosion analysis draft: introduction, Luke Muehlhauser and Anna Salamon wrote

Norman Rasmussen's (1975) analysis of the safety of nuclear power plants, written before any nuclear accidents had occurred, correctly predicted several details of the Three Mile Island incident that previous experts had not (McGrayne 2011, 180).

I investigated this further a part of the project "Can we know what to do about AI?". The analysis that Muehlhauser and Salamon reference is WASH-1400, 'The Reactor Safety Study', which was produced for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Upon investigating, I formed the impression that this case study little relevance to the question of whether we can know what to do about AI:

The issue was one that a lot of people were already concerned about.

The issue was highly domain specific.

Rather than there being a few salient predictions, there were a huge number of small predictions.

One way in which the situation is relevant is that risk of nuclear power plant accidents was not adequately addressed, but that's only one of many examples people not adequately addressing risks.

A few details below.

The report predicted one core damage accident per 20,000 years of nuclear power plant operation.
As a point of comparison, at the time of the Three Mile Island incident, only 500 years of nuclear power plant operation had occurred. This could be a fluke. The Chernobyl accident occurred only 6 years later. If the cause was the same, that strongly suggests that the Three Mile Island incident was not a fluke.
However, the report was based on reactor designs that didn't include the Three Mile Island type.

The report did discuss tidal waves as a potential cause for nuclear disaster, anticipating the recent disaster in Japan. But the report is 21 volumes long, and so this (weak) prediction could have been cherry picked retrospectively.

The report is considered to be obsolete, and its main lasting value seems to have been pioneering use of probabilistic risk assessment.

A summary of the situation seems to be: "People were concerned about nuclear power plants being dangerous. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioned a report analyzing the risks. The report was really long, and didn't address key relevant factors. Other scientists thought that the report understated the risks. The report was quick

...
[META] Open threads (and repository threads) are underutilized.
by Adele_L — 2013-07-11T17:48:27.030Z

Recently, issues with the way open threads currently work were brought up. Open threads aren't very visible and get crowded with comments quickly. This causes people to post things that belong in open threads in r/discussion, to not post in open threads more than a few days old, or to ignore/be unaware of new comments in open threads. I think we can do better.

Some possible solutions that were pointed out, or that I thought of are:

Put the most recent open thread at the top of the 'Recent Comments' sidebar.

Having open threads more often.

Put a link to it on the main page.

Make a new subreddit for open threads.

Create a new medium for open threads.

Note that not all of these are orthogonal.

Having them more often has the advantage of being especially easy to implement. Adding new links seems to be relatively easy to implement as well. As far as I know, making a new subreddit isn't too difficult, but making a new medium would probably be a waste of development resources.

Personally, I like the idea of having a new subreddit for open threads. It would increase visibility, not get overcrowded, and have the right atmosphere for a casual open thread. My evidence for believing this comes from being familiar the way Reddit works. It seems like there is some resistance to creating new subreddits here, so I don't expect this to be implemented. I would like to see the reasoning for this attitude, if it indeed exists.

There are similar issues for the repository threads. For repositories, having them more often defeats the purpose of having one place for a certain type of idea, and a different subreddit doesn't seem right either. Giving them their own wiki pages might be a better medium, with new threads to encourage new ideas every once in a while. The main problem for this is the trivial inconvenience of going to the wiki, and logging in. It would be nice if there was a unified log-in for this part of the site and the wiki, but I realize this may be technically difficult. I might organize a wiki page for some of the repositories myself if people think this is a good idea but no one else feels like doing it (depends on if I feel like doing it too :p ).

Thoughts?
Less Wrong London New Arrival Integration Task Force
by sixes_and_sevens — 2013-07-11T16:53:53.270Z

After considering how many of us have arrived here within recent memory, the London Less Wrong community is explicitly offering itself as a resource for those moving to the city. We all know how awkward and daunting it can be to get settled somewhere new, and we'd like to help newcomers hit the ground running. It seems that our most effective recruitment strategy at the moment is "wait for existing Less Wrong readers to move here", so it's a worthwhile offer to make.

If any LessWrongers are moving to the Greater London area, let us know. Either message me via the site or join our Google Group. Tell us where/when you're moving, what your circumstances are, and what sort of things you like to do. We will try to proactively invite you to events and activities we think you'll enjoy, as well as providing you with useful local knowledge if you want it.

We will also try and make some time available for you if there's anything you need another person's help with. If assembling your Ikea bookshelf is a two-person job, we'll see if we can scrape together a couple of people for a couple of hours to help you put it together. If you need help setting up your wireless router, we'll see if someone with the relevant skills is available to give you a hand. We can't promise any specific type of help, but we're always happy to be asked.

Big cities can often feel quite impersonal, so if you're planning on moving here, or even just thinking about it, let us know, and we'll see what we can do to make it a little more welcoming.
Meetup : [Moscow] The Meet up
by Yuu — 2013-07-11T12:57:55.405Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] The Meet up

WHEN:
21 July 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 16:00 with “LW” sign inside the hall. And we will also check the entrance at 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Applied rationality exercises.

Prediction market.

Game session: the Liar's dice or the Resistance.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with more photos!

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] The Meet up
Seed Study: Polyphasic Sleep in Ten Steps
by LoganStrohl — 2013-07-11T07:17:20.355Z

(Update on this project now available here.)

A handful of Bay Area folks will be going polyphasic over the next month. By that, I mean we'll be adopting a sleep schedule that gets us 4 extra hours of productive work or play time per day, or two whole months per year. (Or a decade over 60 years.)

If you want to tell me about why it's a bad idea, feel free to post comments. I don't plan to use this space to sell you on polyphasic sleep. That might be another post, depending on how this goes.

I'm going to be collecting some very simple data through this here form. I invite you to join us!

This will be hard. It will hurt. You'll probably need a buddy to follow you around and keep you awake. If you don't have a lot of self-discipline, I don't recommend even trying.

Still with me? If you want in by the time you're done reading this, message me (or comment below) with your name so I know who you are. Here's the plan.

1. Stop using caffeine right now. If you try to maintain a caffeine addition during this process, you will fail. I promise.

2. Data collection began on July 10th. Start submitting daily reports at any point as soon as you want to participate, especially if you can begin in the next couple of days and then stick to our schedule. Fill out the above form once every 24hrs (whenever it's convenient) until August 10th.

3. Pick a time to take a 20min nap each day from Monday, July 15th through Sunday, July 21st. You probably won't actually sleep during this time, but you can use it for mindfulness meditation if you stay awake. The goal is to practice napping. This is important.

4. On Monday, July 22nd, begin fasting immediately after lunch.

5. On the night of Monday, July 22nd, skip sleep. No naps, then an all-nighter. This is the official adaptation start date. The idea is to make you sleep deprived so your naps the next day are more likely to take.

6. Eat breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd. This should be the first time you've eaten anything since Monday lunch.

7. Starting on the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd, take a 20min nap every 2hrs (for a total of 12 naps per day). Do not oversleep. Use an obnoxious alarm or whatever other means necessary. "Nap" counts as lying down trying to sleep; take your naps on a strict schedule regardless of how long you successfully sleep.

8. Start to cut your...
Meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78
by therufs — 2013-07-10T23:20:03.920Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78

WHEN:
13 July 2013 12:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham NC 27701

This Saturday: food truck food, coffee from Cocoa Cinnamon, beer from Fullsteam, and discussion from HPMoR!

If you have the time & inclination to do the reading in advance, please notice and note any discussion-worthy points of interest. If not, please come hang out anyway!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 77-78
Svante Arrhenius's Prediction of Climate Change
by JonahS — 2013-07-10T23:00:38.541Z

In Intelligence Explosion analysis draft: introduction, Luke Muehlhauser and Anna Salamon wrote

Svante Arrhenius' (1896) models of climate change lacked modern climate theory and data but, by making reasonable extrapolations from what was known of physics, still managed to predict (within 2°C) how much warming would result from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere (Crawford 1997).

As a part of the project "Can we know what to do about AI?", I've summarized my initial impressions of Arrhenius's predictions and the impact that they might have had. The object level material is all draw from Wikipedia, and I have not vetted it.

Arrhenius's chemistry was sound: the equation for how the Earth's temperature varies as a function of concentration of carbon dioxide is the same equation used today.

For the most part, Arrhenius didn't model how increased carbon concentrations would impact other factors that influence the Earth's temperature. I don't know if this is because he wasn't aware of these, because he thought that they were sufficiently small to ignore, or because he didn't try to.

Knut Ångström criticized Arrhenius's claim on scientific grounds, giving a different model which predicted no climate change from increased carbon concentrations. My surface impression is that Arrhenius was a much more accomplished scientist than Knut Ångström was. To the extent that this is true, I think that Ångström's view should be heavily discounted, but I haven't investigated further.

While Arrhenius recognized that the use of fossil fuels could increase atmospheric concentrations, he underestimated how fast carbon emissions would increase (by a huge margin) because he didn't recognize how widespread fossil fuel use would become.

People later thought that Arrhenius's prediction that atmospheric carbon would increase was wrong, because they thought that oceans would serve as great carbon sinks. It would be interesting to look into whether they had good reasons for thinking this at the time.

Arrhenius predicted that global warming would have positive humanitarian impacts on balance, global warming now appears to have negative humanitarian impacts on balance.

Taking this all together, based on my surface impressions, I think that this case study gives evidence against attempting to predict the far future being usefu

...
[LINK] Hypothesis about the mechanism for storing long-term memory
by Andy_McKenzie — 2013-07-10T14:33:14.244Z

As proposed by Roger Tsien, open access here. The first paragraph offers a potentially biased but still useful overview of the state of the field:

A major problem in understanding memory is how it can be very long-lasting and stable from early childhood until death, despite massive interruptions in brain state as extreme as prolonged comas. Current prominent candidates for molecular substrates for long-term memory storage have focused on macromolecules such as calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) coupled with the NMDA receptor and protein phosphatase 2A (2), protein kinase M zeta (PKMζ) (3), and cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding protein (CPEB) (4), all of which are inside postsynaptic spines. To retain information despite metabolic turnover, all such candidates need to have some sort of bistable switch (e.g., state of phosphorylation or prion conformation) and a mechanism by which older copies of the molecule pass on their status to newer copies to preserve the information. A major problem is that individual intracellular molecules typically last at most a few days before being turned over. Therefore, the information would have to survive being copied tens of thousands of times in a long-lived human, despite metabolic interruptions. Such robust ﬁdelity would be extremely difﬁcult to engineer. Even dynamic computer memory with sophisticated refresh and error correction circuits cannot cope with even a momentary hiccup in its power supply. Instead, long-term information storage in both computers and human civilizations requires writing the information onto physically stable storage media (e.g., magnetic disks, clay tablets, or acid-free paper), which do not require frequent energy-dependent recopying. Aside from some nuclear pore constituents, all of the known really long-lived proteins are insoluble [extracellular matrix] components such as crystallin, elastin, collagen, and proteoglycans (5), which gain stability by extensive cross-linkage and remoteness from intracellular degradative machinery, such as proteasomes, lysosomes, and autophagy.