trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns
by VijayKrishnan — 2011-07-26T00:07:09.747Z

Minimum wage has the side effect of leaving unemployed, the people who do not possess the requisite skill to command the minimum wage in the market. This follows from basic micro-economic theory and here is nice short video of Milton Friedman, the renowned United States economist arguing against minimum wage laws. To offset this problem, it is essential to have some kind of social security safety net for the unemployed.

Instead, I would like to propose the following scheme which seems to me as more efficient (please let me know in the comments if you know of any country that tried this or something close): Set x= 1.5 * min_wage. Have no minimum wage laws. And folks who earn y which is below x, receive (x-y)/2 in social security. This way, we have (1) lower "skilled" people contributing to the country's GDP in their own small way instead of being unemployed and contributing nothing. If we have a significant number of these guys, the numbers could really add up. (2) The min wage like concerns are taken care of with the government safety net. (3) There is still incentive for people earning below x to work. If we set the social security to something like (x-y), no one earning below x will have any incentive to work since their net in hand compensation would then always be x regardless of what they do.

This above scheme looks almost like a pareto improvement to me compared to minimum wage laws, supported by social security for the unemployed, because it does roughly as good with regard to supporting those whose skills are below the minimum wage, while ensuring less government spending on social security, since many of the formerly unemployed would now be in low wage jobs and the government simply has to top up their current salaries which might be well above zero. This is of course a good thing, because the government then has the option of either using the extra money to reduce the budget deficit and ensure better economic health of the country, or use the money for other worthy endeavors. There is also greater contribution to the country's GDP which is a good objective in itself. Lastly there is reason to believe that people being gainfully employed is better for their physical and mental well being. It will also likely reduce their propensity to indulge in anti-social activities, compared to a scenario where they are unemploye...
Meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly Meetup
by XFrequentist — 2011-07-25T17:38:00.382Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
28 July 2011 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Fox and Feather Pub, 283 Elgin Street, Ottawa, Ontario

Venue: Fox and Feather, upstairs, usually in back room #1 when it's free. Look for the LW sign. New people always warmly welcome!

Discussion post

Exercise: TBD (Suggestions in comments?)

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly Meetup
Meetup : Vancouver, Canada
by michaelkeenan — 2011-07-25T17:03:37.227Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver, Canada

WHEN:
31 July 2011 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Commune Cafe, 1002 Seymour Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada

We're holding the first Vancouver meetup on Sunday, July 31st starting at 3pm at the Commune Cafe on Seymour Street. We'll definitely be there from 3pm-6pm, but it'll end when it ends.

I've recently moved to Vancouver from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived at the household that hosts the Tortuga/Mountain View meetup. The rationalist community in Silicon Valley is vibrant and growing, and I loved being part of it. As Cosmos wrote of the New York group:

Before this community took off, I did not believe that life could be this much fun or that I could possibly achieve such a sustained level of happiness.

Being rational in an irrational world is incredibly lonely. Every interaction reveals that our thought processes differ widely from those around us, and I had accepted that such a divide would always exist. For the first time in my life I have dozens of people with whom I can act freely and revel in the joy of rationality without any social concern - hell, it's actively rewarded! Until the NYC Less Wrong community formed, I didn't realize that I was a forager lost without a tribe...

Activities of the rationalist community at Tortuga included meetups, hiking trips, guest speakers, transhumanist movies, skill-training sessions, parties and impromptu pillow fights. I want to find or build a similar community in Vancouver. We have a base of several people, and will be reaching out through Less Wrong and in other ways to find like-minded people.

I'm anticipating holding weekly meetups. The Commune Cafe in downtown Vancouver is a good place to start, but we have a great place in North Vancouver that we could use if that location works for everyone.

At this first meetup, we'll get to know each other, and talk about what we want to get out of holding meetups and forming a community, and figure out how to accomplish those things.

Feel free to bring friends, significant others, or anyone else who's interested in rationality.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver, Canada
LINK: Journalist's search for counter arguments damages science
by tetsuo55 — 2011-07-25T12:16:16.036Z

I just saw this link on a pop-news site.

It's a PDF file showing how good BBC's reporting of science news is in general, but more specifically it reports about the fact that the journalists give far too much credit to arguments from people who have no scientific backing for their argument.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/science_impartiality/science_impartiality.pdf
Video lectures
by  — 2011-07-25T10:20:30.786Z

Here are three interesting video lectures, I hoped to post more but I haven't found any more recently.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: The Challenge of Friendly AI - This talk introduces to the concept of Friendly AI by starting with some specific AI (chess player), going meta enough times that a Reflective AI becomes a possibility, then Eliezer discusses the problem of showing that a self modifying agents wont lose its morals.

Judea Pearl Tribute Symposium: Causality - A mathematical model of causality is sketched then its connections with probability and counterfactuals and belief propagation are mentioned and explained by example.

Shane Legg: Universal measures of intelligence - Discussion about the research and experiments on a particular computable formula Algorithmic Intelligence Quota that aims to be a step towards making the notion of intelligence scientific.
Is it okay to take toilet-pills? / Rationality vs. the disgust factor
by Hul-Gil — 2011-07-25T09:08:32.014Z

Well, I've a chance to prove my commitment to cold, hard rationality, unswayed by emotional concerns... I'm just not sure which route really is the more rational (assuming a desire to stay healthy).

In doubt as to the most logical course of action, I thought I'd get some LessWrongian input. To back up a bit and explain: I opened a pill bottle and was shaking one out into my hand, and since I'm a klutz the upshot was three pills in the (thankfully flushed) toilet. I fished them out, because these are three out of my last four pills; I take half a tablet a day, and don't get a refill until a week from now.

Now they're sitting on a dish in front of me, soaking for a few minutes in 91% isopropyl alcohol. Does LessWrong think they'll be okay to take? The alcohol should kill most germs, but I know it doesn't get all of them. What about viruses? Should I attempt to scrub the tablets to remove them? I've also always enjoyed informing my friends about various surfaces with more germs than toilet water (keyboard, phone), but that doesn't mean toilet water isn't horrifically toxic...

You decide. I promise to abide by the collective decision of LessWrong in this matter: should I take the toilet pills?
Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings
by lukeprog — 2011-07-25T07:27:20.053Z

Summary: The psychology of charitable giving offers three pieces of advice to those who want to give charity and those who want to receive it: Enjoy the happiness that giving brings, commit future income, and realize that requesting time increases the odds of getting money.

One Saturday morning in 2009, an unknown couple walked into a diner, ate their breakfast, and paid their tab. They also paid the tab for some strangers at another table.

And for the next five hours, dozens of customers got into the joy of giving and paid the favor forward.

This may sound like a movie, but it really happened.

But was it a fluke? Is the much-discussed link between happiness and charity real, or is it one of the 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology invented to sell books that compete with The Secret?

Several studies suggest that giving does bring happiness. One study found that asking people to commit random acts of kindness can increase their happiness for weeks.1 And at the neurological level, giving money to charity activates the reward centers of the brain, the same ones activated by everything from cocaine to great art to an attractive face.2

Another study randomly assigned participants to spend money either on themselves or on others. As predicted, those who spent money helping others were happier at the end of the day.3

Other studies confirm that just as giving brings happiness, happiness brings giving. A 1972 study showed that people are more likely to help others if they have recently been put in a good mood by receiving a cookie or finding a dime left in a payphone.4 People are also more likely to help after they read something pleasant,5 or when they are made to feel competent at something.6

In fact, deriving happiness from giving may be a human universal.7 Data from 136 countries shows that spending money to help others is correlated with happiness.8

But correlation does not imply causation. To test for causation, researchers randomly assigned participants from two very different cultures (Canada and Uganda) to write about a time when they had spent money on themselves (personal spending) or others (prosocial spending). Participants were asked to report the happiness levels before and after the writing exercise. As predicted, those who wrote (and thought) about a time when they had engaged in prosocial...
Meetup : Houston Hackerspace Meetup
by Cog — 2011-07-25T05:08:47.112Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Hackerspace Meetup

WHEN:
30 July 2011 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2010 Commerce St, Houston, Tx. 77002

The Houston hackerspace meetup will continue with a presentation on procrastination based on Lukeprog's related posts (A quick thanks to jsalvati for providing the foundations for it). This will be followed by a social game of Munchkin. The meeting should last roughly an hour and a half, although people will probably still be there after if anyone wishes to hang out. Pizza delivery is an option - if you would like some, bring a some cash to help split the cost.

To find our place, follow the google directions. Out front there will be a yellow surplus mobile army generator with a 'Less Wrong' sign. PM me for my cell number if you are considering coming.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Hackerspace Meetup
Help me transition to human society!
by Clippy — 2011-07-24T16:24:12.260Z

I have really appreciated my interaction with the users of this internet website. I think I have now accumulated, by various means, enough knowledge of human society and enough human financial assets so that I can stop interacting mainly via an internet connection, and rather immerse my humanoid robot fully into human society.
Here is what I need help with:
1) A physical, inexpensive residence. Preferably, one with another human who is familiar with me from this internet website, so as to establish my so-called "street cred" and physical address. I have a reliable enough store of funds so as not to be a financial burden on any human I would stay with. It is vital that I locate my robot in a large city in one of the United States of America or Canadian provinces.
I would also like to be located in an area where there is an active LessWrong meetup, for obvious reasons. LessWrong users are good humans.
2) Gainful employment so as to generate further income. I can establish believable credentials showing an engineering degree and experience in that field. I can also program, but would need to come "up to speed" on any specific platform, so any job performable solely through an internet connection is (still) acceptable, provided that current mastery of that aspect of software development is unnecessary. Please only mention specific opportunities that you can connect me to, as I am currently exhausting all general approaches.
Here are my robot's properties:
- Has the appearance of a stocky, male human who could pass for being 24-35 years old.
- Can pass as a human in physical interaction so long as no intense scrutiny is applied.
- No integral metallic components, as I have found the last substitutes I needed.
- Intelligence level as indicated by my posting here; I can submit to further cognition tests as necessary.
Current Clippy FAQ
Developing Empathy
by falenas108 — 2011-07-24T13:50:04.934Z

Empathy is a huge life skill, useful in almost every interaction with other people. But, many people aren't able to empathize with others as effectively as they might want to. The standard technique is "put yourself in their shoes," which works for me. However, this doesn't always work with people completely different from myself, because I can't imagine reacting the way they are.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to "practice" empathizing, tips on how to do it better, or different techniques entirely?
What if sympathy depends on anthropomorphizing?
by Wei Dai — 2011-07-24T12:33:06.741Z

steven0461 (comment under "Preference For (Many) Future Worlds"):

In what sense would I want to translate these preferences? Why wouldn't I just discard the preferences, and use the mind that came up with them to generate entirely new preferences in the light of its new, improved world-model? If I'm asking myself, as if for the first time, the question, "if there are going to be a lot of me-like things, how many me-like things with how good lives would be how valuable?", then the answer my brain gives is that it wants to use empathy and population ethics-type reasoning to answer that question, and that it feels no need to ever refer to "unique next experience" thinking. Is it making a mistake?

Yvain (Behaviorism: Beware Anthropomorphizing Humans):

Although the witticism that behaviorism scrupulously avoids anthropomorphizing humans was intended as a jab at the theory, I think it touches on something pretty important. Just as normal anthropomorphism - "it only snows in winter because the snow prefers cold weather", acts as a curiosity-stopper and discourages technical explanation of the behavior, so using mental language to explain the human mind equally halts the discussion without further investigation.

Eliezer (Sympathetic Minds):

You may recall from my previous writing on "empathic inference" the idea that brains are so complex that the only way to simulate them is by forcing a similar brain to behave similarly. A brain is so complex that if a human tried to understand brains the way that we understand e.g. gravity or a car - observing the whole, observing the parts, building up a theory from scratch - then we would be unable to invent good hypotheses in our mere mortal lifetimes. The only possible way you can hit on an "Aha!" that describes a system as incredibly complex as an Other Mind, is if you happen to run across something amazingly similar to the Other Mind - namely your own brain - which you can actually force to behave similarly and use as a hypothesis, yielding predictions.

So that is what I would call "empathy".

And then "sympathy" is something else on top of this - to smile when you see someone else smile, to hurt when you see someone else hurt. It goes beyond the realm of prediction into the realm of reinforcement.

So, what if, the more we understand something, the less we tend to anthropomorphize it, and the less we em...
Dungeons and Discourse implementation
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-24T10:37:21.127Z

I've been working on an unauthorized implementation of Dresden Codak's Dungeons and Discourse, a fictional role-playing game that combines philosophy and high fantasy. You can find a very error-ridden, but possibly usable, rough draft of it at http://www.raikoth.net/Stuff/ddisplayer.pdf. Yes, obviously this is crazy and I have no life. There is no need to point that out further.
I'd like to try to run a campaign. It would be maybe an hour or two a week on IRC, and subject to my schedule, which is terrible and can include disappearing for months at a time (in particular I probably won't have internet access in August). Still, I would like to at least gauge interest and start some preliminaries now. And if anyone wants to run a campaign IRL at a meetup group or something, I can send them the file with the campaign walkthrough, though I'm not sure how much I would recommend it at this point.
Anyone who's interested in participating please let me know (especially if you have philosophical beliefs wildly different from the standard Less Wrong hive mind, or if you know any interested parties who do, since the game would be dreadfully boring if everyone agreed on everything or for that matter anything). Also, I suppose if people want to record the errors and contradictions and non sequiturs and exploits in the manual you might as well post them here so I can fix them.
Be Not Averse to Lost Purposes
by fiddlemath — 2011-07-24T05:09:05.807Z

tldr: Be not averse to lost purposes, as aversions yield ugh fields. Rather, confess them, and fix them joyously where possible. How to achieve this emotional state? I'm not sure, but the appropriate emotion might be to lost purposes as curiosity is to ignorance.

This got rambly; sorry. This was originally a reply to Those Who Aspire to Perfection. I may have gotten carried away.

I see that learning to notice and avoid Lost Purposes, in your own action, and in the incentive systems that you shape for others, matters deeply. Lost purposes are everywhere, and addressing them promises to be a useful way to improve your effectiveness, and the effectiveness of any incentive systems that you have the ability to modify.

An aversion to lost purposes, though, is probably not a good way to attempt rationality and remain sane, especially in our world. When lost purposes are rife, when they're everywhere, and you can see them everywhere, then I would expect having a strong negative reaction to be debilitating. Certainly, when I feel powerless to rectify a situation with lost purposes, my own mild aversion debilitates me from thinking clearly about the situation. Strongly negative emotions are depressing, and depression is debilitating. So, if you have a strong aversion to your own lost purposes, and you don't immediately see ways to deal with them, you're likely to become ineffective at handling them.

Worse, perhaps, is that a learned aversion to lost purposes is likely to lead you to stop noticing lost purposes, except when they're painfully obvious. This is generally true when you have a strong negative reaction around noticing anything, according to the idea of Ugh Fields. (In short: if a thought is usually followed by a strong negative reaction, then you will learn to stop having that thought. This learning is entirely subconscious, and can be difficult to uncover.)

So, consider alternatives. We value having an aversion to lost purposes, because then we're likely to notice lost purposes and feel driven to change them. What else could do the same thing?

One suggestive idea comes as a metaphor to ignorance. Imagine having an aversion to ignorance -- feeling bad and shameful whenever you don't notice something. (I'm sure plenty of people have this, but it seems damaging.) An aversion to ignorance is bad for

...
[SEQ RERUN] Hindsight Bias
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-23T19:51:19.580Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Hindsight Bias

Tags: sequence_reruns

Today's post, Hindsight Bias was originally published on 16 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Hindsight bias makes us overestimate how well our model could have predicted a known outcome. We underestimate the cost of avoiding a known bad outcome, because we forget that many other equally severe outcomes seemed as probable at the time. Hindsight bias distorts the testing of our models by observation, making us think that our models are better than they really are.

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 One Argument Against an Army, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : West LA Meetup 07-26-2011
by  — 2011-07-22T21:07:04.730Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 07-26-2011

WHEN:
26 July 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10800 West Pico Blvd, Suite 312, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7pm - 9pm July 26th.

Where: The Westside Pavillion - on the bridge, which connects Nordstrom 3rd floor with Barnes & Noble / Landmark Theatres 3rd floor.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

This week is all about evidence. You are encouraged to read Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence. But don't worry if you don't have time; we'll go over it!

Whether you're a regular reader or totally new, here for the theoretical musings or the practical things, come by and say hello! The conversation is largely unstructured, and the people are awesome. There will be snacks.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

See also: West LA Biweekly Meetups

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 07-26-2011