trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Cryonics Presentation [help request]
by Mati_Roy — 2013-11-09T20:51:34.599Z

This Monday (November 11th 2013 EDIT: it has been postponed to November 18th 2013) I will participate in a 'scientific communication' competition Laval University. If I win, I will go to the Quebec Engineering Competition (http://cqi-qec.qc.ca/). If I win again, I will go to the Canadian Engineering Competition (http://cec.cfes.ca/).

I need to do a presentation of 15 to 20 minutes. Then the judges can ask me questions during 10 minutes. I will do my presentation on cryonics. I want to invest approximately 12 to 15 hours for preparing it. I will not have time to read everything there is on Internet about cryonics in that time period, so if some of you are familiar with the subject, I would appreciate if you could link me to the best resources on the scientific and ethic aspects of cryonics.

I will do my presentation with Google Drive Presentation. It will be in French. I will put the link here later on if someone wants to review the presentation (EDIT: the presentation is done; you can see it and comment it on Google Drive). Moreover, I would like to practice my presentation tomorrow in a Google+ hangout if some people want to watch and comment it.

Thank you.

P.S.: If there are any Canadian engineering students reading this, check out the competition: there's 7 categories and it's a really interesting competition in my opinion.
Non-standard cryo ideas
by DataPacRat — 2013-11-09T17:42:27.313Z

What plans could a prospective cryonicist try out, beyond simply signing up, that could increase the odds of eventually having a pleasant re-animation experience?
To show what I mean, here are the main ideas I've managed to come up with so far. None of these particular ideas are a standard part of a cryonics preservation package. Some are easier to implement than others, some are more likely to have an effect than others, some have potentially greater effect than others.
* Arranging for as much information about oneself (photo albums, emails, grade school report cards, etc) as possible to be placed on archival media and stored along with one's body. Reasoning: If the cryo-preservation procedure causes brain damage, and technology advances sufficiently before re-animation, then this information potentially allows for that damage to be at least partially reconstructed.
* Requesting additional data about the cryo-preservation procedure used on oneself be archived. Eg, requesting that, to whatever degree doesn't interfere with the procedure, it be videoed.
* Making arrangements for an animal body to be cryo-preserved with the same procedure one's own body was preserved with. A lab chimp would be ideal, but difficult to arrange for a number of reasons; more likely, a more common animal of around human mass would be feasible, such as a dog or goat. Even a few lab-rats might help. Reasoning: It gives future re-animators an additional opportunity to experiment with re-animation techniques, before attempting to re-animate a person.
* Noting down one's preferences and requests for future re-animators. Eg, from "I'd appreciate having a cat nearby to pet and calm down as I wake up" to "If you have to rebuild my body from scratch anyway, and it's within cultural norms, I would appreciate being gender _____" to "If you create a digital/electronic/computer/data copy of my mind, I would like a copy of that to be placed in offline, air-gapped storage, so that if every active copy of my mind is destroyed, there will always be that original backup available to re-instantiate myself." Or just more general ideas, such as, "My goal is to live forever, and I would prefer whatever means most likely lead to that happening to be tried."
I'm not nearly as creative as I wish I could be; so I'm hoping that the local group-mind here might be able to offer further ideas, or improvements or refi...
Good movies for rationalists?
by roland — 2013-11-09T08:00:42.977Z

Hi,

what good movies can you suggest that give ideas or inspirations on how to be more rational?

I just watched [Memento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_%28film%29) last night and I was very impressed.

(No spoilers in this post)

The main character is a guy who suffers from amnesia, he forgets everything after a couple minutes so he has developed a system to cope with it. He takes pictures and writes notes. E.g. when staying at a hotel he takes a picture of it and put it in his pocket. So later when he doesnt know where he is staying he searches his pockets, finds the picture of the hotel and then he knows.

What I learned

I identified with the character in the movie because in spite of not having amnesia my memory as everyone elses isn't perfect either and I have all the quirks(biases) of a normal human brain. I cant exactly remember what I did last Thursday at 3 PM. Do I actually know why I am doing what Im doing or why I believe what I believe? I may have good rationalizations for both, of course, but that doesnt mean they are the real reasons.

I like to read LW but I havent developed much of a system to actually be more rational. If anyone has, I would be eager to read about it.

Practical Advice

What system could I develop to be more rational? One thing that a lot of management experts(e.g. Peter Drucker) have already pointed out is to write down how we actually spend our time because often how we spend it is not how we think we spend it and we end up spending much more time on unproductive activities than we are aware of. How much time went into random internet browsing last week?

I will start an activity log during work: how much time Im spending on what. This will be a first step.
Meetup : Washington DC: Goals, Political Advocacy as Effective Altruism, and Stories
by rocurley — 2013-11-09T06:50:10.579Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Goals, Political Advocacy as Effective Altruism, and Stories

WHEN:
10 November 2013 03:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

So, we came up with three ideas, none of which will necessarily take a long time. So we're doing them together. We will be:
Talking about goals and trying to revive the goals spreadsheet
Discussing several posts on Givewell's blog about political advocacy as effective altruism
And (if people have them) telling Haloween stories, as per this thread (a bit late, I know, but why not?)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Goals, Political Advocacy as Effective Altruism, and Stories
[Link] Bet Your Friends to Be More Right
by katydee — 2013-11-08T21:12:44.652Z

This article does a good job of explaining how betting can be a useful rationality practice. An excerpt:

The interesting thing about this practice was that it made us both think very carefully about the accuracy of all of our statements. The most embarrassing thing ever was to say, "I bet you anything that I'll be on time..." and then be unwilling to back up the assertion with a bet. Failing to bet was an admission that you'd just said something that you had no real confidence in.
[Prize] Essay Contest: Cryonics and Effective Altruism
by lsparrish — 2013-11-08T19:55:27.747Z

I'm starting a contest for the best essay describing why a rational person of a not particularly selfish nature might consider cryonics an exceptionally worthwhile place to allocate resources. There are three distinct questions relating to this, and you can pick any one of them to focus on, or answer all three.

Contest Summary:

Essay Topic: Cryonics and Effective Altruism

Answers at least one of the following questions:

Why might a utilitarian seeking to do the most good consider contributing time and/or money towards cryonics (as opposed to other causes)?

What is the most optimal way (or at least, some highly optimal, perhaps counterintuitive way) to contribute to cryonics?

What reasons might a utilitarian have for actually signing up for cryonics services, as opposed to just making a charitable donation towards cryonics (or vice versa)?

Length: 800-1200 words

Target audience: Utilitarians, Consequentialists, Effective Altruists, etc.

Prize: 1 BTC (around $350, at the moment)

Deadline: Sunday 11/17/2013, at 8:00PM PST

To enter, post your essay as a comment in this thread. Feel free to edit your submission up until the deadline. If it is a repost of something old, a link to the original would be appreciated. I will judge the essays partly based on upvotes/downvotes, but also based on how well it meets the criteria and makes its points. Essays that do not directly answer any of the three questions will not be considered for the prize. If there are multiple entries that are too close to call, I will flip a coin to determine the winner.

Terminology clarification: I realise that for some individuals there is confusion about the term 'utilitarian' because historically it has been represented using very simple, humanly unrealistic utility functions such as pure hedonism. For the purposes of this contest, I mean to include anyone whose utility function is well defined and self-consistent -- it is not meant to imply a particular utility function. You may wish to clarify in your essay the kind of utilitarian you are describing.

Regarding the prize: If you win the contest and prefer to receive cash equivalent via paypal, this wll be an option, although I consider bitcoin to be more convenient (and there is no guarantee how many dollars it will come out to due to the volatility of bitcoin).

Contest results
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-11-08T16:54:22.325Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 1st. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta: November Meetup (First of Two): 03 November 2013 07:00PM
Cologne (Köln): 10 November 2013 04:00PM
Princeton NJ Meetup: 16 November 2013 02:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion: 03 November 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: 02 November 2019 01:30PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, chapters 94-96: 02 November 2013 12:00PM
Washington DC/VA Games meetup: 03 November 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be not...
Academic Cliques
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-11-08T04:27:43.075Z

In my article on trusting expert consensus, I talked about the value of having hard data on the opinions of experts in a given field. The unspoken subtext was that you should be careful of claims of expert consensus that don't have hard data to back them up. I've joked that when a philosopher says there's a philosophical consensus, what he really means is "I talked to a few of my friends about this and they agreed with me."

What's often really happening, though (at least in philosophy) is that the "consensus" really reflects the opinions of a particular academic clique. A sub-group of experts in the field spend a disproportionate amount of time talking to each other, and end up convincing themselves they represent the consensus of the entire profession. A rather conspicuous example of this is what I've called the Plantinga clique on my own blog—theistic philosophers who've convinced themselves that the opinions of Alvin Plantinga represent the consensus of philosophy.

But it isn't just theistic philosophers who do this. When I was in school, it was still possible to hear fans of Quine claim that everyone knew Quine had refuted the analytic synthetic distinction. Post PhilPapers survey, hopefully people have stopped claiming this. And one time, I heard a philosophy blogger berating scientists for being ignorant of the findings in philosophy that all philosophers agree on. I asked him for examples of claims that all philosophers agree on, I responded with examples of philosophers who rejected some of those claims, "Ah," he said, "but they don't count. Let me tell you who's opinions matter..." (I'm paraphrasing, but that was what it amounted to.)

I strongly suspect this happens in other disciplines: supposed "consensuses of experts" are really just the opinions of one clique within a discipline. Thus, I tend to approach claims of consensus in any discipline with skepticism when they're not backed up by hard data. But I don't actually know of verifiable examples of this problem outside of philosophy. Has other people with backgrounds in other disciplines noticed things like this?
Meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-11-08T04:20:52.149Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity

WHEN:
13 November 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you know the eight secrets of the coven.

Discussion:

Can you give a specific example of abstract argument being more useful than a specific example? How about an abstract argument that specific examples are more useful than abstract arguments? The ladder of abstraction, from abstract to concrete, superficially seems unrelated to but is quite entangled with the other well-known dichotomy, that between the general and the specific. This mess is our focus. It is obvious that both "sides" have their place, but what modes are best for what purposes?

Recommended Reading:

Up and Down The Ladder of Abstraction

Skill of the Week: Be Specific

The Virtue of Narrowness

Hug the Query

Leaky Generalizations

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity
The future of values
by KatjaGrace — 2013-11-08T00:56:45.000Z

Humans of today control everything. They can decide who gets born and what gets built. So you might think that they would basically get to decide the future. Nevertheless, there are some reasons to doubt this. In one way or another, resources threaten to escape our hands and land in the laps of others, fueling projects we don’t condone, in aid of values we don’t care for.

A big source of such concern is robots. The problem of getting unsupervised strangers to to carry out one’s will, rather than carrying out something almost but quite like one’s will, has eternally plagued everyone with a cent to tempt such a stranger with. There are reasons to suppose the advent of increasingly autonomous robots with potentially arbitrary goals and psychological tendencies will not improve this problem.

If we avoid being immediately trodden on by a suddenly super-superhuman AI with accidentally alien values, you might still expect a vast new labor class of diligent geniuses with exotic priorities would snatch a bit of influence here and there, and eventually do something you didn’t want with the future we employed them to help out with.

The best scenario for human values surviving far into an era artificial intelligences may be the brain emulation scenario. Here the robot minds start out as close replicas of human minds, naturally with the same values. But this seems bound to be short-lived. It would likely be a competitive world, with strong selection pressures. There would be the motivation and technology to muck around with the minds of existing emulations to produce more useful minds. Many changes that would make a person more useful for another person might involve altering that person’s values.

Regardless of robots, it seems humans will have more scope to change humans’ values in the future. Genetic technologies, drugs, and even simple behavioral hacks could alter values. In general, we understand ourselves better over time, and better understanding yields better control. At first it may seem that more control over the values of humans should cause values to stay more fixed. Designer babies could fall much closer to the tree than children traditionally have, so we might hope to pass our wealth and influence along to a more agreeable next generation.

However even if parents could choose their children to perfectly match their own va...
Meetup: Somewhere you do not live even close to
by Metus — 2013-11-07T11:17:21.889Z

Six out of the last 10 posts are about single meetups. And I care about none of them.

I will look into whipping together some kind of bot that periodically posts threads like the open thread or a meetup thread. Voice your opinion in the comments if you do not want me to do that.

That is all.
Yes, Virginia, You Can Be 99.99% (Or More!) Certain That 53 Is Prime
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-11-07T07:45:07.565Z

TLDR; though you can't be 100% certain of anything, a lot of the people who go around talking about how you can't be 100% certain of anything would be surprised at how often you can be 99.99% certain. Indeed, we're often justified in assigning odds ratios well in excess of a million to one to certain claims. Realizing this is important for avoiding certain rookie Bayesian's mistakes, as well as for thinking about existential risk.

53 is prime. I'm very confident of this. 99.99% confident, at the very least. How can I be so confident? Because of the following argument:

If a number is composite, it must have a prime factor no greater than its square root. Because 53 is less than 64, sqrt(53) is less than 8. So, to find out if 53 is prime or not, we only need to check if it can be divided by primes less than 8 (i.e. 2, 3, 5, and 7). 53's last digit is odd, so it's not divisible by 2. 53's last digit is neither 0 nor 5, so it's not divisible by 5. The nearest multiples of 3 are 51 (=17x3) and 54, so 53 is not divisible by 3. The nearest multiples of 7 are 49 (=7^2) and 56, so 53 is not divisible by 7. Therefore, 53 is prime.

(My confidence in this argument is helped by the fact that I was good at math in high school. Your confidence in your math abilities may vary.)

I mention this because in his post Infinite Certainty, Eliezer writes:

Suppose you say that you're 99.99% confident that 2 + 2 = 4. Then you have just asserted that you could make 10,000 independent statements, in which you repose equal confidence, and be wrong, on average, around once. Maybe for 2 + 2 = 4 this extraordinary degree of confidence would be possible: "2 + 2 = 4" extremely simple, and mathematical as well as empirical, and widely believed socially (not with passionate affirmation but just quietly taken for granted). So maybe you really could get up to 99.99% confidence on this one.

I don't think you could get up to 99.99% confidence for assertions like "53 is a prime number". Yes, it seems likely, but by the time you tried to set up protocols that would let you assert 10,000 independent statements of this sort—that is, not just a set of statements about prime numbers, but a new protocol each time—you would fail more than once. Peter de Blanc has an amusing anecdote on this point, which he is welcome to retell in the comments.

I think this argument...
Meetup : Comfort Zone Expansion at Citadel, Boston
by Vika — 2013-11-06T21:02:10.395Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Comfort Zone Expansion at Citadel, Boston

WHEN:
10 November 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Citadel, 98 Elm St Apt 1, Somerville, MA

Comfort Zone Expansion (CoZE) is the practice of exposing yourself to uncomfortable or unusual situations with strangers in order to develop social skills, persuasion, and confidence. (as taught at CFAR)

A wide variety of activities fall under the umbrella of CoZE - here are some examples:

starting conversations and asking personal questions

asking people for favors

singing or dancing in public

going to stores and asking for free samples

trading objects with people

After a brief intro to CoZE, we will warm up by playing improv games, and then take a trip to a mall in downtown Boston for the CoZE practice (the location is chosen to minimize the chances of encountering someone you know). We will disperse around the mall, and then reconvene for dinner and an exchange of stories!

Our schedule for this meetup is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: Intro to CoZE - 3:30-4pm.

—Phase 3: Improv games (warmup) - 4-5pm.

—Phase 4: CoZE outing in downtown Boston - 5-7pm.

—Phase 5: Dinner and exchanging CoZE stories - 7pm.

Discussion article for the meetup : Comfort Zone Expansion at Citadel, Boston
Meetup : Frankfurt
by Kendra — 2013-11-05T21:16:12.717Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt

WHEN:
24 November 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Frankfurt, Ginnheimer Landstraße

Our next meetup will take place on the 24th of November, 2pm. The usual location, contact me if you don't know where it is and want to attend. If you face any difficulties that might make it hard for you attend (social anxiety, etc.) please tell me in advance, I'll try to accomodate your needs as best as I can.
Last topic of our meetup was Effective Altruism, we want to focus on many different things in the future. (You are welcome to bring your ideas!)

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt