trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
LW Women Entries- LW Meetups
by daenerys — 2013-04-20T16:52:54.397Z

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women replied, totaling about 18 pages.

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Notes from Daenerys:

1. I'm not on this site very much anymore, so I'm going to try to remember to post these about once a week to get them off my to-do list. So the next couple weeks might have a lot of gender discussion, but I only have 2 left, so it will be done soon.

2. This post ended up being less anonymous. Please do NOT link to any identifying information.

3. There were some questions recently about the purpose of this series, which makes sense because the purpose was discussed 8 months ago, which is a pretty long time, by LW standard. Shortly, by virtue of the gender ratio here (90% male), the men's voices tend to drown out the women's voices, and many women may just not post on certain issues due to the feeling of swimming upstream, so this was a way to compile a bunch of LW women's opinions and thoughts. Note that, going by the latest LW survey there are less than 100 women on here, so each submitter is over 1% of the total female readership of LW. Here is the original call for responses, and the original discussion of the LW Women series idea.

Submitter C

I wasn't going to write, but something happened at today's meetup that really irked me.

A man turned to a young woman near him and asked, "So, do you actually re...
Want to have a CFAR instructor visit your LW group?
by AnnaSalamon — 2013-04-20T07:04:08.521Z

Cat, who has volunteered extensively at CFAR (and taught at CFAR), will be visiting many cities in Europe over the coming months.

She is awesome.

Also, the list of cities that she is visiting will probably be determined in the next few days.

If you'd like to have her visit your LW meetup group, share some of our classes with your meetup, and generally bring connections back and forth... comment below, or PM her (or me)! I suspect this can be a lot of fun, and useful as well. Offers of couch space and similar are also appreciated.

For now this is just for Europe, probably, but no harm in touching base from other cities as well; it's possible she'll visit elsewhere later.
Metatickle Intelligence Metrics and Friendly Utility Functions
by Squark — 2013-04-19T20:43:52.172Z

Related to: Intelligence Metrics and Decision Theories

Previously I presented a formalism for dealing with the Duality and Ontology problems associated with attempts to define a formal metric of general intelligence. It also solves the environment distribution problem. This formalism ran into problems closely related to the problems of decision theory. I tried to solve these problems using a formalization of UDT suitable for this context.

Here I'm going to pursue a different approach, which I believe to be analogous to the "metatickle" version of EDT. I will argue that, as opposed to decision theory, metatickling is a good approach to intelligence metrics. I will also present an analogous formalism for multi-agent systems. Finally, I will suggest an approach for constructing friendly utility functions using this formalism.

Review of Quasi-Solomonoff Distributions

In this section I will remind the idea behind quasi-Solomonoff distributions, glossing over mathematical details. For more details consult the previous article.

Most attempts at constructing a formal general intelligence metric are based on Legg and Hutter and involve considering an agent A interacting with an environment V through actions that A applies to V and observations A makes on V (the latter being information flowing from V to A). The problem with this is that such an agent is indestructible since no process in V can force a change in the inner workings of A. Thus an AI programmed in accord with this formalism will consider it an a priori truth that its mind cannot be tampered with in any way, an obviously false assumption.

In order to deal with this we can make A a part of V, as suggested by Orseau and Ring. This creates another problem, namely it's unclear what prior for V should we use. Legg and Hutter suggest using the Solomonoff distribution which makes sense since a perfectly rational agent is supposed to use the Solomonoff distribution as a prior. However, if A is a part of V, the Solomonoff distribution is clearly too general. For example if our A is implemented on a computing machine M, the rules according to which M works have to be part of our assumptions about V, since without making such assumptions it is impossible to program M in any sensible way.

Enters the quasi-Solomonoff distribution. Suppose you are a programmer building an AI A. Then it makes sense for you to impart to A th...
Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks
by lsparrish — 2013-04-19T18:13:45.279Z

Should you probably donate a bitcoin to your future self?

Bitcoin has been in the news a bit lately. In case anyone hasn't been following recent events, its price hit $266 per coin, toppled to $50, and then climbed back to a rate which has been between $80 and $140.

This goes to show its high volatility at the present time, which means that any individual trade you make will be something of a gamble with a noisy, hard-to-predict outcome. You could be buying in right before a boom or a bust. Buying and then selling at random intervals will probably cost you more money than you make, due to transaction fees. Trying to outsmart the market in the short term with nothing but your own human instincts and powers of induction will probably cost you even more money because Markets are anti-inductive. The most realistic way of making much money with bitcoin -- sans owning your own exchange, having skill and resources for serious technical analysis, a faster-than-usual trading bot, or fantastic luck -- is if you can determine that the current price is very poorly calibrated relative to its future value, and if you buy and hold very long-term.

Market swings constitute a psychological attack, assuming you know and care about them, so employing the buy-and-hold strategy can be more difficult than it looks. However, as it happens, you can render bitcoins almost purely unspendable (i.e. impossible to transfer via the network) for a finite period of time as a technical matter. You could for example create a brainwallet based on a lengthy memorized passphrase with a random value appended to it. The larger that appended value, the (exponentially) greater the amount of processing time needs to be spent to find out what it contains. Having access to the memorized passphrase gives you the overwhelming advantage over a brute force attacker, whereas the appended random value immunizes it against dictionary attacks. (Todo: Find or write a program for this. Prove it works, and move some of my bitcoin holdings to a wallet requiring a day or more to unlock.)

Early adopters with moderate crypto skills could thus have a distinct advantage compared to the average investor and realistically hope to beat the market on that basis if mere human psychology and resistance against short term panic-selling is the fundamental constraint. So that's one consideration that could play to our advantage. A...
Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, London, Moscow, Vienna
by FrankAdamek — 2013-04-19T15:14:15.635Z

This summary was posted to LW main on April 12th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Vienna Meetup #2: 13 April 2013 04:00PM
London Meetup, 14th April: Hedonic hacks: 14 April 2013 02:00PM
Moscow, Applied Rationality, take two: 14 April 2013 04:00PM
April Atlanta Meetup! Friday, April 19th: 19 April 2013 07:00PM
Cincinnati near-Schelling day: 21 April 2013 04:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

None this week!

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, 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're not interested in notifications you can still enter your approximate location, which will let meetup-starting heroes know that there's an interested LW populatio...
Meetup : London Meetup, 28th April
by philh — 2013-04-18T23:48:03.973Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 28th April

WHEN:
28 April 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

A fortnightly meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. We meet every other Sunday at 2pm.

Everyone is welcome to attend: we're a friendly group and we don't bite. If you're on the fence about coming, err on the side of showing up. It's probably safe to assume that we'd like to meet you.

We also have a Google group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 28th April
Meetup : Cambridge: The Meaning Of Life For Beginners
by ModusPonies — 2013-04-18T23:26:30.330Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge: The Meaning Of Life For Beginners

WHEN:
21 April 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
21 Ames St, Cambridge, MA, 02139

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are at 2 PM on the first and third Sunday of every month at the MIT Whitaker Building [21 Ames St, Bldg 56], room 180. Room number subject to change based on availability. Signs will be posted with the actual room number.

This meetup's theme is figuring out which things are most important to you and how to weigh them against one another. RSVPs at the meetup site are nice but not required.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge: The Meaning Of Life For Beginners
Meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 56-60
by therufs — 2013-04-18T22:36:36.295Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 56-60

WHEN:
20 April 2013 12:30:30PM (-0400)

WHERE:
726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham NC 27701

Meet at Fullsteam about 12:30 for discussion of HPMoR chapters 56-60!

Feel free to bring food and or coffee from surrounding establishments.

Probably sometime midafternoon we'll adjourn from Fullsteam for a hike along the Eno. Join the RTLW Google group (http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw) for contact info/details/etc.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 56-60
Meetup : Vienna meetup #3
by Ratcourse — 2013-04-18T20:06:06.144Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna meetup #3

WHEN:
18 May 2013 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rathausstraße 6, 1010 Wien {Vienna, Austria}

Our own Villiam Bur will give a short lecture on which discussion will be focused.
It is happening in the metalab.
https://metalab.at/wiki/Lage

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna meetup #3
Meetup : Moscow, Measurements
by Yuu — 2013-04-18T13:20:23.564Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Measurements

WHEN:
28 April 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 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Short presentations. Two or three people will tell us about something interesting.

Practical rationality. We will train useful skills.

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 photos.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Measurements
[Link] Should Psychological Neuroscience Research Be Funded?
by David Althaus — 2013-04-18T12:13:12.902Z

In this post, Jesse Marczyk argues that psychological neuroscience research often doesn't add much value per dollar spent and therefore is not worth the cost.

In my last post, when discussing some research by Singer et al (2006), I mentioned as an aside that their use of fMRI data didn’t seem to add a whole lot to their experiment. Yes, they found that brain regions associated with empathy appear to be less active in men watching a confederate who behaved unfairly towards them receive pain; they also found that areas associated with reward seemed slightly more active. Neat; but what did that add beyond what a pencil and paper or behavioral measure might? That is, let’s say the authors (all six of them) had subjects interact with a confederate who behaved unfairly towards them. This confederate then received a healthy dose of pain. Afterwards, the subjects were asked two questions: (1) how bad do you feel for the confederate and (2) how happy are you about what happened to them? This sounds fairly simple, likely because, well, it is fairly simple. It’s also incredibly cheap, and pretty much a replication of what the authors did. The only difference is the lack of a brain scan. The question becomes, without the fMRI, how much worse is this study?

There are two crucial questions in mind, when it comes to the above question. The first is a matter of new information: how much new and useful information has the neuroscience data given us? The second is a matter of bang-for-your-buck: how much did that neuroscience information cost? Putting the two questions together,we have the following: how much additional information (in whatever unit information comes in) did we get from this study per dollar spent?

...I’ll begin my answer to it with a thought experiment: let’s say you ran the initial same study as Singer et al did, and in addition to your short questionnaire you put people into an fMRI machine and got brain scans. In the first imaginary world, we obtained results identical to what Singer et al reported: areas thought to be related to empathy decrease in activation, areas thought to be related to pleasure increase in activation. The interpretation of these results seems fairly straightforward – that is, until one considers the second imaginary world. In this second world, we see the results of

...
Being Half-Rational About Pascal's Wager is Even Worse
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-04-18T05:20:25.235Z

For so long as I can remember, I have rejected Pascal's Wager in all its forms on sheerly practical grounds: anyone who tries to plan out their life by chasing a 1 in 10,000 chance of a huge payoff is almost certainly doomed in practice. This kind of clever reasoning never pays off in real life...

...unless you have also underestimated the allegedly tiny chance of the large impact.

For example. At one critical junction in history, Leo Szilard, the first physicist to see the possibility of fission chain reactions and hence practical nuclear weapons, was trying to persuade Enrico Fermi to take the issue seriously, in the company of a more prestigious friend, Isidor Rabi:

I said to him: "Did you talk to Fermi?" Rabi said, "Yes, I did." I said, "What did Fermi say?" Rabi said, "Fermi said 'Nuts!'" So I said, "Why did he say 'Nuts!'?" and Rabi said, "Well, I don't know, but he is in and we can ask him." So we went over to Fermi's office, and Rabi said to Fermi, "Look, Fermi, I told you what Szilard thought and you said ‘Nuts!' and Szilard wants to know why you said ‘Nuts!'" So Fermi said, "Well… there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course perhaps a chain reaction can be made." Rabi said, "What do you mean by ‘remote possibility'?" and Fermi said, "Well, ten per cent." Rabi said, "Ten per cent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that I might die, and it's ten percent, I get excited about it." (Quoted in 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' by Richard Rhodes.)

This might look at first like a successful application of "multiplying a low probability by a high impact", but I would reject that this was really going on. Where the heck did Fermi get that 10% figure for his 'remote possibility', especially considering that fission chain reactions did in fact turn out to be possible? If some sort of reasoning had told us that a fission chain reaction was improbable, then after it turned out to be reality, good procedure would have us go back and check our reasoning to see what went wrong, and figure out how to adjust our way of thinking so as to not make the same mistake again. So far as I know, there was&...
Meetup : Washington DC Kennedy Center Meetup with Michael Vassar
by komponisto — 2013-04-18T05:07:13.227Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Kennedy Center Meetup with Michael Vassar

WHEN:
18 April 2013 12:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street, NW, Washington, DC 20566.

(This is very short notice -- 11 hours from posting -- so apologies!)

This meetup will have two "sessions"; people are welcome to attend either or both:

12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

and

3:30 pm - 7:30 pm

(Michael is attending an event with press at 2, hence the break.)

We'll plan to meet in the area with tables and chairs outside the KC café, which is on the upper ("Terrace") level of the Kennedy Center. I'll try to bring a Less Wrong sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Kennedy Center Meetup with Michael Vassar
Litany of a Bright Dilettante
by Shmi — 2013-04-18T05:06:05.490Z

So, one more litany, hopefully someone else finds it as useful.

It's an understatement that humility is not a common virtue in online discussions, even, or especially when it's most needed.

I'll start with my own recent example. I thought up a clear and obvious objection to one of the assertions in Eliezer's critique of the FAI effort compared with the Pascal's Wager and started writing a witty reply. ...And then I stopped. In large part because I had just gone through the same situation, but on the other side, dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity by those who know next to nothing about General Relativity. It was irritating, yet here I was, falling into the same trap. And not for the first time, far from it. The following is the resulting thought process, distilled to one paragraph.

I have not spent 10,000+ hours thinking about this topic in a professional, all-out, do-the-impossible way. I probably have not spent even one hour seriously thinking about it. I probably do not have the prerequisites required to do so. I probably don't even know what prerequisites are required to think about this topic productively. In short, there are almost guaranteed to exist unknown unknowns which are bound to trip up a novice like me. The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule. So if I think up such an argument, the odds of it being both new and correct are heavily stacked against me. It is true that they are non-zero, and there are popular examples of non-experts finding flaws in an established theory where there is a consensus among the experts. Some of them might even be true stories. No, Einstein was not one of these non-experts, and even if he were, I am not Einstein.

And so on. So I came up with the following, rather unpolished mantra:

If I think up what seems like an obvious objection, I will resist assuming that I have found a Weaksauce Weakness in the experts' logic. Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.

If you think it useful, feel free to improve the wording.