trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Durham, NC: Do you even predict?
by curiousepic — 2015-04-10T20:15:54.220Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham, NC: Do you even predict?

WHEN:
16 April 2015 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 W Geer St., Durham NC 27701

So we can work on calibration, but what is it good for if we don't make predictions in everyday life? This recent post from Julia Galef gives us some ideas of what might be useful to make predictions for.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/m0m/16_types_of_useful_predictions/

Let's talk about these and think about others.

See you next Thursday at Cocoa Cinnamon, 7pm!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham, NC: Do you even predict?
New LW Meetup: Chicago
by FrankAdamek — 2015-04-10T15:14:55.417Z

This summary was posted to LW main on April 3rd. The following week's summary is here.

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

Chicago Rationality Training Group - Meeting 1: "Why Rationality?" and Using the Inner Simulator : 05 April 2015 01:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
[Edinburgh] LessWrong Scotland: 12 April 2015 02:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Munich April Meetup: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small actions, big impact (part 2): 12 April 2015 02:19PM

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 - Caffe Medici: 04 April 2015 01:30PM
Boston: Unconference: 05 April 2015 03:30AM
[Melbourne] April Rationality Discussion: Life planning vs. the coming technology explosion. : 05 April 2015 04:30PM
[Seattle] MIRI paper reading party: 05 April 2015 12:00PM
Seattle Sequences Group: Mysterious Answers 5: 06 April 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Skill Training Part 2: 12 April 2015 05:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 09 May 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 05 April 2015 03:00PM
West LA—R:AZ Part C, Noticing Confusion: 08 April 2015 07:00PM

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 happenin...
What level of compassion do you consider normal, expected, mandatory etc. ?
by  — 2015-04-10T12:57:38.813Z

My hidden secret goal is to understand the sentiments behind social justice better, however I will refrain from asking questions that directly relate to it, as they can be mind-killers, instead, I have constructed an entirely apolitical, and probably safe thought experiment involving a common everyday problem that shouldn't be incisive.

Alice is living in an apartment, she is listening to music. The volume of her music is well within what is allowed by the regulations or social norms. Yet the neighbor is still complaining and wants her to turn it down, claiming that she (the neighbor) is unusually sensitive to noise due to some kind of ear or mental condition.

Bob, Alice's friend is also present, and he makes a case that while she can turn it down basically out of niceness or neighborliness, this level of kindness is going far beyond the requirements of duty, and should be considered a favor, because she has no ethical duty to turn it down, for the following reasons.

1) Her volume level of music is usual, it is the sensitivity level of the neighbor that is unusual, and we are under no duty to cater to every special need of others.

2) In other words, it is okay to cause suffering to others as long as it is a usual, common, accepted thing to do that would not cause suffering to a typical person.

The reasons for this are

A) It would be too hard to do otherwise, to cater to every special need, in this case it is easy, but not in all cases, so this is no general principle.

B/1) It would not help the other person much, if the other person is unusually sensitive, the problem would not be fixed by one person catering to them. A hundred people should cater to it, after all there are many sources of noise in the neighborhood.

B/2) In other words, if you are unusually rude, reducing it to usual levels of rudeness is efficient, because by that one move you made a lot of people content. But if you are already on the usual levels of rudeness and an unusually sensitive person is still suffering, further reduction is less efficient because you are only one of the many sources of their suffering. And these people are few anyway.

C) Special needs are easy to fake.

D) People should really work on toughening up and growing a thicker skin, it is actually possible.

Polls in comments below

Please explain your view in the comments.
Meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.
by efim — 2015-04-10T08:27:01.867Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.

WHEN:
18 April 2015 06:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Санкт-Петербург, Невский просп., 54

Place updated
Saturday, 18.04.15.

From 18:00 and for about four hours.

It would be in 'Subway' cafe please call me if you don't know me personally and can't find small piece of paper with 'LessWrong' written on it somewhere on the table.

Main theme - habits:
- small presentations of articles on this topic and personal stories on things that help with establishing good habits and getting rid of bad ones.
- brainstorm for good habit ideas and chosing of the priorities in which everyone would like to implement them.

On desert - bragging thread, where we share our accomplishments.
If you are thinking of coming please vote for your expected attendance here: https://vk.com/lwspb

I will be there even if i'll be there alone.
For any questions I can be reached by phone +7(911)843-56-44 or social network vk.com/timetravel.
Efim.

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.
Ephemeral correspondence
by So8res — 2015-04-10T03:46:20.479Z

This is the third of four short essays that say explicitly some things that I would tell an intrigued proto-rationalist before pointing them towards Rationality: AI to Zombies (and, by extension, most of LessWrong). For most people here, these essays will be very old news, as they talk about the insights that come even before the sequences. However, I've noticed recently that a number of fledgling rationalists haven't actually been exposed to all of these ideas, and there is power in saying the obvious.

This essay is cross-posted on MindingOurWay.

Your brain is a machine that builds up mutual information between its insides and its outsides. It is not only an information machine. It is not intentionally an information machine. But it is bumping into photons and air waves, and it is producing an internal map that correlates with the outer world.

However, there's something very strange going on in this information machine.

Consider: part of what your brain is doing is building a map of the world around you. This is done automatically, without much input on your part into how the internal model should look. When you look at the sky, you don't get a query which says

Readings from the retina indicate that the sky is blue. Represent sky as blue in world-model? [Y/n]

No. The sky just appears blue. That sort of information, gleaned from the environment, is baked into the map.

You can choose to claim that the sky is green, but you can't choose to see a green sky.

Most people don't identify with the part of their mind that builds the map. That part fades into the background. It's easy to forget that it exists, and pretend that the things we see are the things themselves. If you didn't think too carefully about how the brain works, you might think that brains implement people in two discrete steps: (1) build a map of the world; (2) implement a planner that uses this map to figure out how to act.

This is, of course, not at all what happens.

Because, while you can't choose to see the sky as green, you do get to choose how some parts of the world-model look. When your co-worker says "nice job, pal," you do get to decide whether or not to perceive it as a complement or an insult.

Well, kinda-sorta. It depends upon the tone and the person. Some people will automatically take it as a complement, others will automatically take it as an insult. Others will conscious...
16 types of useful predictions
by Julia_Galef — 2015-04-10T03:31:39.018Z

How often do you make predictions (either about future events, or about information that you don't yet have)? If you're a regular Less Wrong reader you're probably familiar with the idea that you should make your beliefs pay rent by saying, "Here's what I expect to see if my belief is correct, and here's how confident I am," and that you should then update your beliefs accordingly, depending on how your predictions turn out.

And yet… my impression is that few of us actually make predictions on a regular basis. Certainly, for me, there has always been a gap between how useful I think predictions are, in theory, and how often I make them.

I don't think this is just laziness. I think it's simply not a trivial task to find predictions to make that will help you improve your models of a domain you care about.

At this point I should clarify that there are two main goals predictions can help with:

Improved Calibration (e.g., realizing that I'm only correct about Domain X 70% of the time, not 90% of the time as I had mistakenly thought).

Improved Accuracy (e.g., going from being correct in Domain X 70% of the time to being correct 90% of the time)

If your goal is just to become better calibrated in general, it doesn't much matter what kinds of predictions you make. So calibration exercises typically grab questions with easily obtainable answers, like "How tall is Mount Everest?" or "Will Don Draper die before the end of Mad Men?" See, for example, the Credence Game, Prediction Book, and this recent post. And calibration training really does work.

But even though making predictions about trivia will improve my general calibration skill, it won't help me improve my models of the world. That is, it won't help me become more accurate, at least not in any domains I care about. If I answer a lot of questions about the heights of mountains, I might become more accurate about that topic, but that's not very helpful to me.

So I think the difficulty in prediction-making is this: The set {questions whose answers you can easily look up, or otherwise obtain} is a small subset of all possible questions. And the set {questions whose answers I care about} is also a small subset of all possible questions. And the intersection between those two subsets is much smaller still, and not easily identifiable. As a result, prediction-making tend...
Why are track records unpopular?
by KatjaGrace — 2015-04-10T03:26:38.000Z

Robin points out that people dislike track records across a range of contexts, and poses a puzzle: why?

Naively, track records seem pretty helpful for deciding who to trust and hire. Yet Robin points to a lack of track records or interest in track records for doctors, lawyers, pundits, teachers and academics.

He has also answered his puzzle in a later post, but I’m not going to read his answer until I’ve tried to guess myself (though I did glance at it enough to learn it is about elites and status).

Here are some theories I can think of:

The tracked don’t like it. Most of the effort to avoid track records is from the people who would be tracked. They don’t like it because they are risk averse, and influence is not particularly well correlated with skill. When a large class of people spread throughout society dislikes something and most other people don’t automatically have strong views, most people’s views will end up being negative.

Track records show mixed allegiance. People habitually try to publicize information which supports their own allies. Publishing track records in general is agreeing to publicize a giant pile of information, randomly supporting friends and foes alike. For instance if all records of doctor success become public, this would somewhat endanger any doctors you care about: doctors in your political party and friendship circles and minority doctors and nice doctors so on. That is, unless you had been careful to only side with competent doctors, which you probably haven’t, since you haven’t seen their track records. Similarly, if you read about the track records of pundits, half of them will be pundits you like looking bad or pundits you don’t like looking good, so you will have to surmise that the thing is bunk.

People aren’t quantitative. Customers are not interested in track records because they are not interested in anything quantitative.

Track records conflict with perceived quality. People perceive traits like charisma directly as goodness, and so when explicit indicators don’t align with it, they doubt the explicit indicators.

Track records are hard to integrate. Customers have an overall sense of the worth of particular people, and the explicit measure only tells them one thing. They don’t want to trust the explicit measure on its own because they know it misse

...
On immortality
by Algon — 2015-04-09T18:42:35.626Z

Edit: Hello again. After a fair bit of discussion with some of you, I can say with great relief my belief in an infinite universe with infinite minds in it has gone down. Now, that is not to say that I think that it won't rear its ugly head once more, but it seems to have been beaten back for a while. If you're wondering why I sound relieved, well, that because an infinite, mind hospitable universe is a terrible place. Though some have presented me with some arguments against the whole immortality thing to do with consciousness, well that's a little harder to discuss.I don't think the path I'm taking on the philosophy of mind thing is wrong, but there's a ways to go yet. But I've seen the groundwork, and it looks good to me. Anywho, I've got about 40 -50% belief that its right in the argument I presented below, whereas before it was a little under 70%. Now, I think I'll make another one of these in a few years, because this is an important topic. This whole thing, or something like it may well be right, and utilitarian ethics is going down in that case. And that's bad news for a lot of people, including me. So I'll see you a few years down the line, when I've learnt some more physics, and have brushed up on my arguments.

Hello there,

This is my first time writing a LessWrong post (welcome thread aside), and I thought I'd start with something that has occupied most people's minds at one point or another: death. Essentially, I am reasonably sure that immortality already exists from a reductionist point of view, albeit with one assumption that some may not agree with. And depending on whether or not the universe will last forever, then immortality is guaranteed for everyone, throughout all time. it is I think I'd be correct in saying that many people on this site are familiar with the whole Boltzmann brain idea, but I'll go through it anyway, to set the stage.

So, let's get started with the basic idea. In this universe, things seem to run on probabilistic laws known as quantum mechanics. These allow for very strange consequences, which were previously thought eradicated. The idea was originally conceived Boltzmann for a deterministic, infinite world, but it works just as well for a probabilistic one. According to the laws of probability, it is possible that any structure could spontaneously form at random points in the universe. The expected...
Hedonium's semantic problem
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-04-09T11:50:59.836Z

If this argument is a re-tread of something already existing in the philosophical literature, please let me know.

I don't like Searle's Chinese Room Argument. Not really because it's wrong. But mainly because it takes an interesting and valid philosophical insight/intuition and then twists it in the wrong direction.

The valid insight I see is:

One cannot get a semantic process (ie one with meaning and understanding) purely from a syntactic process (one involving purely syntactic/algorithmic processes).

I'll illustrate both the insight and the problem with Searle's formulation via an example. And then look at what this means for hedonium and mind crimes.

Napoleonic exemplar

Consider the following four processes:

Napoleon, at Waterloo, thinking and directing his troops.

A robot, having taken the place of Napoleon at Waterloo, thinking in the same way and directing his troops in the same way.

A virtual Napoleon in a simulation of Waterloo, similarly thinking and directing his virtual troops.

A random Boltzmann brain springing into existence from the thermal radiation of a black hole. This Boltzmann brain is long-lasting (24 hours), and, by sheer coincidence, happens to mimic exactly the thought processes of Napoleon at Waterloo.

All four mental processes have the same syntactic properties. Searle would draw the semantic line between the first and the second process: the organic mind is somehow special. I would draw the semantic line between the third and the fourth process. The difference is that in all three of the first processes, the symbols in the brain correspond to objects in reality (or virtual reality). They can make reasonably accurate predictions about what might happen if they do something, and get feedback validating or infirming those predictions. Semantic understanding emerges from a correspondence with reality.

In contrast the fourth process is literally insane. It's mental process correspond to nothing in reality (or at least, nothing in its reality). It emerges by coincidence, its predictions are wrong or meaningless, and it will almost certainly be immediately destroyed by processes it has completely failed to model. The symbols exist only within its own head.

There are some interesting edge cases to consider here (I chose Napoleon because there are famously many people deluded into thinking they are Napoleon), but that's enough backg...
If you could push a button to eliminate one cognitive bias, which would you choose?
by MalcolmOcean — 2015-04-09T07:05:47.084Z

I realize this question is contrived, but I figure it might provoke some fun discussion, so here goes:

If you could push a button and have your brain modified to precisely remove a cognitive bias (and have no other unnecessary effects—most convenient possible world), which would you choose? Why?

What if you were choosing for the whole human race?
Dance dance evaluation
by KatjaGrace — 2015-04-08T21:57:39.000Z

One of the best things I came across in 2014 was Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), or specifically Stepmania, a free version you can play on your computer. It is a dance game that looks basically like this (skip the first minute) or this if you are very good and play in arcades.

I’m never sure whether to draw attention to seemingly large improvements to my life: mileages vary, and improvements are often imaginary (especially if excessive imagination makes it onto the list of things to be improved). However DDR solves what I think is a very basic and common problem: the problem of exercise being less addictive than computer games.

For instance, I sometimes exercise by running. A good fraction of my thoughts while running are about whether I can stop running yet, and the other ones are mostly appeals to not do that. Incidentally, ‘can I stop yet?’ is not a thought I have ever had while playing Civ IV, though I have played much more Civ IV than I have run. Conversely, ‘just one more turn?‘ is a rare thought while running.

Some other sources of exercise are more fun for me, but still mostly require an active effort to do instead of not doing. Based on gym membership’s most famous feature being its liability to be forgotten about, and the connection between exercise and willpower in the popular mind, I think I am in the majority when I say exercise does not usually remind me of playing Civ IV. Except in the sense that exercise reminds me to play Civ IV instead.

For me at least, DDR is enough like Civ IV for the analogy to be salient. I frequently get to the end of a song, and just want to play one more. Often even when I am in a state of exhaustion beyond what I could dream of achieving by running. The addictive quality is not nearly as extreme as for some actual computer games: I’m mostly capable of deciding to stop, and usually actively want to at some point. Sometimes I don’t even want to play at all. But often, the strongest temptation is to keep going.

I might just guess that some people find some exercises randomly fun, and this one happens to be fun for me. But DDR is much more like a computer game than most forms of exercise (it even involves a computer!) And computer games are known to be unusually addictive among pastimes. So I doubt that it is by chance that DDR seems so compelling to me. So, if you are looking fo...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Cherry Blossoms
by RobinZ — 2015-04-08T21:45:30.200Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Cherry Blossoms

WHEN:
12 April 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Enid A. Haupt Garden

Note: The meetup location has changed for this week.

We will be gathering at the Enid A. Haupt Garden (outside the south entrance to the Smithsonian Castle, on Independence Ave. between 9th and 12th St. SW, east of the Smithsonian Metro stop) to enjoy the annual cherry blossoms and/or associated festival. We will be congregating between 3:00 and 3:40 toward the southwest corner of the garden, and set out from there toward the Tidal Basin. If you can't find the group, my number is 301-503-6543 - I generally prefer telephone calls to text messages.

The official National Cherry Blossom Festival website has a map of the blossoms that may be useful for planning purposes. Because we are meeting on a Sunday, food options may be fairly limited; there may be food trucks in the Smithsonian area and there may be food tents scattered throughout the festival area (the official map has a fork-and-knife symbol indicating food sources), but the safest option is probably to bring your own.

There is no WMATA major track work scheduled; minor track work is on hold for the end of the Cherry Blossom festival.

Upcoming meetups:

Apr. 19: "The Sword of Good" (talk about a LessWrongian short story)

Apr. 26: (Outdoors) Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Cherry Blossoms