trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup
by Alexander230 — 2015-05-25T14:35:37.856Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup

WHEN:
07 June 2015 03:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, ul.Svobody, 37

Welcome to the next lecture centre meetup!

Our plan:

A talk about cognitive biases.

"Investigation of a belief" excercise ( https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/--cmNMJhG0OIx ).

Fallacymania game ( https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH ).

Meetup schedule is in hackpad: https://lw-msk-lect.hackpad.com/-7--vTxKJm79lbZ

Come to DK Salyut, ul.Svobody, 37. Nearest metro station is Skhodnenskaya. Map and directions are here: http://www.dksalut.ru/index.php?id=10 . If you are lost, call Sasha at 8-905-527-30-82. Meetup begins at 15:00, the length is 2-3 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow LW lecture centre meetup
"Should" considered harmful
by So8res — 2015-05-25T03:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/should-considered-harmful/

My last few posts have been aimed at addressing what I call the "listless guilt," the vague sense of guilt that stems from not doing anything in particular. I said:

The listless guilt is a guilt about not doing anything. To remove it, we must first turn it into a guilt about not doing something in particular.

If you didn't have a listless guilt, or if you did and the last few posts worked for you, then you may now find yourself wrestling with a very pointed sort of guilt that stems from not doing particular things. These next few posts will address the pointed guilts.

One of the most common sources of pointed guilt that I encounter stems from neglected obligations. Imagine someone who thinks they should stop watching Netflix (because they care about something important, and watching Netflix isn't helping), but who can't seem to stop. Or imagine someone who thinks they should be spending more time working on their thesis, but can't make themselves do it. Or imagine someone who thinks they should be smarter, and that their homework shouldn't be taking them this long, and who feels worse and worse as they work. In each case, the pattern is the same: the subject thinks there's something they should be doing (or some way they should be), and they're not doing it (or aren't being it), and so they feel really guilty.

I claim that the word "should" is causing damage here.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the way that most people use the word "should," most of the time, is harmful. People seem to use it to put themselves in direct and unnecessary conflict with themselves.

For example, imagine the person who wakes up feeling a bit sick. They may well say to themselves, "ugh, I should go to the pharmacy and pick up medication before work." Now picking up meds feels like an obligation: if they don't get meds, then that's a little bit of evidence that they're incompetent, or akrasiatic, or bad. Now they must go get meds, if they want to be a competent person. In the lingo of CFAR, this "should" is the exact opposite of an urge-propagation: it disconnects the reason from the task, it abolishes the "why". The person feeling sick now feels like they have an obligation to pick up medication, and so if they do it, they do it grudgingly, resenting the situation. (And if they don't, then they've failed, and they're at risk of failing with abandon.)

Now imagine they say this, instead: "u...
Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-05-25T00:00:29.799Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
How do we learn from errors?
by ChristianKl — 2015-05-24T21:56:21.991Z

Mark Friedenbach's post Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life makes a few criticisms of the way LW approaches rationality. It's not focused enough on empiricism. While he grants that there's lip service payed to empiricism Mark argues that LW isn't empiric enough.

Part of empiricism is learning from errors. How do you deal with learning from your own errors? What was the last substantial errors you made that made you learn and think differently about the issue in question?

Do you have a framework for thinking about the issue of learning through errors? Do you have additional questions regarding the issue of learning through errors that are worth exploring?
Meetup : Boston: Trigger action planning
by Anders_H — 2015-05-24T20:00:31.195Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Trigger action planning

WHEN:
21 June 2015 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
98 Elm Street, Somerville

Mick Porter will be presenting on trigger action planning, which is a strategy taught by CFAR to systematize solutions to everyday problems.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm on the first and third Sunday of every month.

The default location is at the Citadel Rationalist House in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville (Occasionally, meetups take place at other locations, such as MIT or Harvard. This will be specified as needed)

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: Trigger action planning
Meetup : Boston: Making space in Interpersonal Interactions
by Anders_H — 2015-05-24T19:58:56.123Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston: Making space in Interpersonal Interactions

WHEN:
07 June 2015 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
98 Elm Street, Somerville

Kate (from the blog Gruntled and Hinged) is going to be talking about a concept called holding space. Specifically she's going to focus on talking with people who are having emotions when you disagree with their reasoning for having those emotions.

Here's a cool intro: http://heatherplett.com/2015/03/hold-space/

As always, the talk will be followed by discussion, both about the feature presentation and general

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups start at 3:30pm on the first and third Sunday of every month.

The default location is at the Citadel Rationalist House in Porter Sq, at 98 Elm St, apt 1, Somerville (Occasionally, meetups take place at other locations, such as MIT or Harvard. This will be specified as needed)

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: Making space in Interpersonal Interactions
A resolution to the Doomsday Argument.
by Fivehundred — 2015-05-24T17:58:11.857Z

A self-modifying AI is built to serve humanity. The builders know, of course, that this is much riskier than it seems, because its success would render their own observations extremely rare. To solve the problem, they direct the AI to create billions of simulated humanities in the hope that this will serve as a Schelling point to them, and make their own universe almost certainly simulated.

Plausible?
Full Service
by Zvi — 2015-05-24T12:42:02.000Z

New Jersey has a law that says that you are not allowed to pump your own gas. They have had this law for 70 years. This is, of course, absurd. But if it is so absurd, why do 63 percent of residents actively want to keep the law, preventing Captain Obvious (full official name: State Assemblyman Declan J. O’Scanlon Jr.) from leading a charge to repeal the law? What does this anomaly have to teach us?

The arguments for self-service gas are clear. Pumping your own gas is faster. Pumping your own gas is cheaper. Pumping your own gas avoids someone trying to use other ‘services’ to extract tips from you, which can be stressful. The market has spoken: The ban was originally put into place because people were voting with their feet and wallets for self-serve gas, and self-serve gas has completely won the market battle wherever it hasn’t been banned. People have a revealed preference for self-serve gas. That is a rather strong case, even without the libertarian argument and/or the argument from complexity, that banning an obviously sensible activity damages our freedom, encourages further regulation and other not-so-neat stuff like that. Captain Obvious has so failed to find a good explanation that he has claimed that “The only way to win the argument is if you can make a legitimate argument that New Jersyans are more flammable than other people.” What is the motivation here?

The article draws attention to several interesting potential explanations. Interestingly, it skips over what I would consider the most obvious explanation behind the law, so let’s look at that first.

The easy and most obvious explanation is that the law is about make-work. Gas stations are forced to hire attendants, which are jobs that would not otherwise exist. People who are otherwise zero marginal product laborers (ZMPs), with no skills to contribute, get gainful employment and stay off the public dole in an era where machines are taking their jobs. Ideally they develop good work habits, get experience and eventually make something of themselves. Unemployment is very bad, and pumping other people’s gas maintains the illusion of productivity without doing harm. Back in the 1940s when the law was originally passed the economic logic behind this did not hold water, since there were plenty of manual labor jobs, but today there are not enough such jobs, so there is a case to be made here, but it is n...
Prior probabilities and statistical significance
by  — 2015-05-24T10:00:47.652Z

How does using priors affect the concept of statistical significance? The scientific convention is to use a 5% threshold for significance, no matter whether the hypothesis has been given a low or a high prior probability.

If we momentarily disregard the fact that there might be general methodological issues with using statistical significance, how does the use of priors specifically affect the appropriateness of using statistical significance?
[Link] Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans worms
by Rangi — 2015-05-24T03:43:18.684Z

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/rej.2014.1636

This is a paper published in 2014 by Natasha Vita-More and Daniel Barranco, both associated with the Alcor Research Center (ARC).

The abstract:

Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study’s goal was to test C. elegans’ memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans we establish that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal’s behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C₆H₅CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing.
[Link] Mainstream media writing about rationality-informed approaches
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-05-24T01:18:46.485Z

Wanted to share two articles published in mainstream media, namely Ohio newspapers, about how rationality-informed strategies help people improve their lives.

This one is about improving one's thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns overall, and especially one's highest-order goals, presented as "meaning and purpose."

This one is about using rationality to deal with mental illness, and specifically highlights the strategy of "in what world do I want to live?"

I know about these two articles because I was personally involved in their publication as part of my broader project of spreading rationality widely. What other articles are there that others know about?
Meetup : West LA: Lightning Talks
by abramdemski — 2015-05-23T23:36:55.118Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Lightning Talks

WHEN:
27 May 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Minica blvd, LA, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Lightning talks. Everyone is encouraged to make a 5-10 minute talk!

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Lightning Talks
[Link] Throwback Thursday: Are asteroids dangerous?
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-05-23T08:00:24.415Z

Throwback Thursday: Are asteroids dangerous? by StartsWithABang:

When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes, when we're far more likely to die from something mundane, like getting hit by a truck. One of the examples where science and this type of fear-based fallacy intersect is the science of asteroid strikes. With all we know about asteroids today, here's the actual risk to humanity, and it's much lower than anyone cares to admit. -- summary from slashdot.
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Clicker Training/Improv Games
by rocurley — 2015-05-23T06:40:41.799Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Clicker Training/Improv Games

WHEN:
25 May 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to play clicker training/other improv games. As usual, call 301-458-0764 to be let in.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Clicker Training/Improv Games
NFL is a perfect example of complexity creep
by Zvi — 2015-05-22T17:39:23.000Z

The NFL has voted to adopt a new rule that extra point attempts are snapped from the fifteen yard line, whereas two point conversions will continue to be run from the two yard line, but with the additional rule that if the defending team can run it back, they can score two points.

This rules change should be taught in game design class as a perfect example of how not to pick rules. Having an offensive play with an option to do a kick instead is part of the core rules, and an extra point follows those rules. You can fake or botch a kick and run the ball in, you can line up (as Oregon often does in college) to go for it and then kick instead if the other team defends properly. With different places to snap the ball, they are effectively now two distinct plays, both of them seem more arbitrary, and the whole thing is inelegant as hell.

Football is not an emergent property of a simple idea like basketball or soccer, instead being the result of a century of tinkering. I would guess that all alternate timelines have soccer, and most of them have basketball, hockey and tennis, but many of them never got anywhere near football. If everyone forgot about football, the game would be impossible to recreate because the intermediate steps are not good games. The rules for football need to be complicated in order to properly balance offense, defense, fairness, strategy, player safety and spectacle. Games that are never quite over are not a naturally occurring phenomenon; the endgame in particular is engineered to make sure comebacks are possible.

Partially as a result of this, football is a complicated sport, sufficiently complex that many of my friends have no idea how the game works or what is going on. A large part of why the game hasn’t caught on in other countries is that you need someone to tutor you in how the game works or you will not understand it. The rules and strategy of the game are so complex that every coach in the NFL regularly botches basic strategy, because no one person has the time to learn how to play all aspects of the game properly.

What the NFL does not appreciate is that complexity and elegance are also key values that need to be considered when choosing how they want to play their game. The right response to a problem is not to add a new hack to the rules set! The right response is to figure out how to get what you want in a simple and elegant fashi...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-05-22T15:18:39.848Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 15th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Oslo LessWrong Meetup: 22 May 2015 05:15PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13: 13 June 2015 01:30PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Munich] May Meetup: 16 May 2015 03:00PM
[Utrecht] 'The Most Good Good You Can Do' (Effective Altruism meetup): 31 May 2015 02:00PM
Warsaw: Newcomb's Problem & Decision Theories: 30 May 2015 06:30PM

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:

Boston: How to Beat Perfectionism: 17 May 2015 03:30PM
London meetup: 24 May 2015 02:00PM
Los Angeles: Growth Mindset: 20 May 2015 07:00PM
Moscow: game theory, test for solving mind-body problem, brainstorm on rationality exercises: 17 May 2015 02:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Intuitive Bayes: 07 June 2015 04:00PM
Vienna: 20 June 2015 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, Tel Aviv, 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 ...
AI Researchers On AI Risk
by Scott Alexander — 2015-05-22T11:16:18.000Z

I first became interested in AI risk back around 2007. At the time, most people’s response to the topic was “Haha, come back when anyone believes this besides random Internet crackpots.”

Over the next few years, a series of extremely bright and influential figures including Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk publically announced they were concerned about AI risk, along with hundreds of other intellectuals, from Oxford philosophers to MIT cosmologists to Silicon Valley tech investors. So we came back.

Then the response changed to “Sure, a couple of random academics and businesspeople might believe this stuff, but never real experts in the field who know what’s going on.”

Thus pieces like Popular Science’s Bill Gates Fears AI, But AI Researchers Know Better:

When you talk to A.I. researchers—again, genuine A.I. researchers, people who grapple with making systems that work at all, much less work too well—they are not worried about superintelligence sneaking up on them, now or in the future. Contrary to the spooky stories that Musk seems intent on telling, A.I. researchers aren’t frantically installed firewalled summoning chambers and self-destruct countdowns.

And Fusion.net’s The Case Against Killer Robots From A Guy Actually Building AI:

Andrew Ng builds artificial intelligence systems for a living. He taught AI at Stanford, built AI at Google, and then moved to the Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, to continue his work at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to real-world problems. So when he hears people like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking—people who are not intimately familiar with today’s technologies—talking about the wild potential for artificial intelligence to, say, wipe out the human race, you can practically hear him facepalming.

And now Ramez Naam of Marginal Revolution is trying the same thing with What Do AI Researchers Think Of The Risk Of AI?:

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have recently expressed concern that development of AI could lead to a ‘killer AI’ scenario, and potentially to the extinction of humanity. None of them are AI researchers or have worked substantially with AI that I know of. What do actual AI researchers think of the risks of AI?

It quotes the same couple of cherry-picked AI researchers as all the other stories – Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun,...
Reminder: Oslo Lesswrong meetup...
by FourFire — 2015-05-22T06:54:49.344Z

... is happening 17:00 local time today at the UiO Science library.

There will be cookies and popcorn, and those other reasons for attending a meetup.
If enough of the people who turn up are interested, this may become an annual, monthly, or even weekly event.

Current topics we will be discussing (subject to change of course):

* Introduction

* Raising the sanity waterline

* Effective Altruism

* Transhumanism / Futurism

(and sub-topics thereof)

There will be a sign with explicit directions to where in the building the meetup is located at the entrance.

Further planned meetups will be fleshed out then.

I look forward to seeing you there ;)