trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New LW Meetup: Houston
by FrankAdamek — 2014-05-09T16:07:29.845Z

This summary was posted to LW main on May 2nd. The following week's summary is here.

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

Houston, TX: 03 May 2014 02:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australia Mega-Meetup: 09 May 2014 05:00PM
(Buffalo NY) Sunday Meetup: 04 May 2014 04:00PM
Helsinki Meetup - Effective Altruism: 10 May 2014 04:00PM
Munich Meetup: 11 May 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: 03 May 2014 05:00PM

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:

Canberra: Rationalist Fun and Games!: 24 May 2014 06:00PM
London social meetup: 04 May 2014 02:00PM
Washington DC Games meetup: 06 May 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Cambridge UK, Canberra, 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 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 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, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.

Whether or not ther...
Meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
by philh — 2014-05-09T13:37:19.129Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park

WHEN:
11 May 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Holborn, WC2B 6BG

Your regularly scheduled meetup. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

If the weather is nice, we'll head to Lincoln's Inn Fields, probably somewhere in the northwest quadrant. If not, we'll be in the usual Shakespeare's Head. If the weather is variable, we might move from one to the other - give me a call or text if you're not sure. My number is 07792009646.

Edit: It seems a little cold and windy right now. Let's start out in the pub.

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
Paradigm shifts in forecasting
by VipulNaik — 2014-05-08T19:38:11.822Z

This post has been written in relation with work I'm doing for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), but hasn't been formally vetted by MIRI. I'm posting this to LessWrong because of its potential interest to a segment of the LessWrong readership. As always, all thoughts are appreciated.

In this post, I'll try to apply some of the scientific theory of paradigm shifts to the domain of forecasting. In a sense, all of science is about making (conditional) predictions about the behavior of systems. Forecasting simply refers to the act of making predictions about the real-world future rather than about a specific controlled experimental setup. So while the domain of forecasting is far more restricted than the domain of science, we can still apply the conceptual framework of paradigm shifts in science to forecasting.

Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts

Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Amazon, Wikipedia) provides a detailed descriptive theory of the nature of paradigm shifts in science. Quoting from the Wikipedia page on paradigm shifts:

An epistemological paradigm shift was called a "scientific revolution" by epistemologist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies that cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. This is based on features of landscape of knowledge that scientists can identify around them.

There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with (a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change). Rather, according to Kuhn, anomalies have various levels of significance to the practitioners of science at the time. To put it in the context of early 20th century physics, some scientists found the problems with calculating Mercury's perihelion more troubling than the Michelson-Morley experiment results, and some the other way around. Kuhn's model of scientific change differs here, and in many places, fro

...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Recreation
by Manfred — 2014-05-08T13:52:35.938Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Recreation

WHEN:
11 May 2014 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
40.1112,-88.2274

Since the weather is nice, let's meet outside, on the benches south of the engineering quad. I'll bring kites - coincidentally, the engineering quad is a great place to fly kites.

We may talk about mechanism design (reading).

Bonus topic: what do debates like this recent one tell us about what's going on in peoples' heads?

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Recreation
[Link] Quantum theory as the most robust description of reproducible experiments
by gRR — 2014-05-08T11:18:52.888Z

The paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000349161400102X

Authors: Hans De Raedt, Mikhail I. Katsnelson, Kristel Michielsen

Abstract

It is shown that the basic equations of quantum theory can be obtained from a straightforward application of logical inference to experiments for which there is uncertainty about individual events and for which the frequencies of the observed events are robust with respect to small changes in the conditions under which the experiments are carried out.
[LINK] No Boltzmann Brains in an Empty Expanding Universe
by Shmi — 2014-05-08T00:37:38.525Z

Another link to Sean Carroll's blog: Squelching Boltzmann Brains (And Maybe Eternal Inflation). The discussion of Boltzmann brains has come up many times on LW, starting from this Eliezer's post. Now Sean and his collaborators argue that in an empty expanding universe:

Quantum fluctuations are not dynamical processes inherent to a system, but instead reflect the statistical nature of measurement outcomes. Making a de nite measurement requires an out-of-equilibrium, low-entropy detection apparatus that interacts with an environment to induce decoherence. Quantum variables are not equivalent to classical stochastic variables. They may behave similarly when measured repeatedly over time, in which case it is sensible to identify the nonzero variance of a quantum-mechanical observable with the physical fluctuations of a classical variable. In a truly stationary state, however, there are no fluctuations that decohere. We conclude that systems in such a state|including, in particular, the Hartle-Hawking vacuum never fluctuate into lower-entropy states, including false vacua or con gurations with Boltzmann brains.

Although our universe, today or during inflation, is of course not in the vacuum, the cosmic no-hair theorem implies that any patch in an expanding universe with a positive cosmological constant will asymptote to the vacuum. Within QFT in curved spacetime, the Boltzmann brain problem is thus eliminated: a patch in eternal de Sitter can form only a finite (and small) number of brains on its way to the vacuum.

In other words, in an empty universe no macroscopic areas of low entropy can form. And a non-vacuum expanding universe like ours becomes vacuum after a time too short to form more than a few Boltzmann brains.
Meetup : Montreal - How to be charismatic
by bartimaeus — 2014-05-08T00:26:33.998Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal - How to be charismatic

WHEN:
26 May 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
3459 McTavish, montreal

Charisma isn't just "something you're born with"; it's a specific set of behaviors that can be learned by anyone. You can practice these skills, and work on the three main areas of charisma: presence, power and warmth.

I'll present some of the exercises found in The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism (by Olivia Fox Cabane), and we'll see if we can find some fun ways of practicing!

If anyone has any good ideas for locations, please let me know; ideally, we would want a location where we can talk loudly without fear of bothering anyone. If the weather permits, we could do it outside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal - How to be charismatic
[LINK] Sean Carroll Against Afterlife
by Shmi — 2014-05-07T21:47:37.752Z

Well, not quite, but close. The debate starts 1 hour after this post is up. From Sean's blog post:

Is There Life After Death? A Debate

No, there’s not. In order to believe otherwise, you would have to be willing to radically alter our fundamental understanding of physics on the basis of almost no evidence. Which I’m not willing to do. But others feel differently! So we’re going to have a debate about it tonight — to be live-streamed.

Note that Sean did extremely well against W.L. Craig (LW discussion), so this should be interesting. His co-debater Steven Novella runs The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast, well worth listening to.
Proposal: Community Curated Anki Decks For MIRI Recommended Courses
by iconreforged — 2014-05-07T18:48:32.833Z

Spaced repetition is optimal for recalling factual information. It won't necessarily teach you anything that you haven't already learned. It helps you retain knowledge, and won't necessarily help you develop skills. But, within the domain of factual information that you can already comprehend, spaced repetition systems are pretty optimal. So, if you want to train your brain on a bunch of Spanish-to-English sentence translations, or stock market tickers, or definitions, or sample questions, you should use something like Anki.

Once you start using spaced repetition, you learn that one of the biggest limits is the card-making process. Making your own cards is time-consuming, although experience will make you much faster. Experience will also teach you what makes a better card. The 20 Rules of Formatting Knowledge pretty much spells it out for you, but I still had to make my own cards, find the sticking points, and edit them until I got a good sense for proper context and suitably short, distinct answers.

You can find other people's shared decks and skip the card making process yourself, but not without some new problems. First, you are going to learn more making the cards yourself than studying someone else's. If it's subtle material, you can make cards that fill in the gaps in your particular understanding. But if someone else studies something and makes cards to fill in their own gaps, that means that what you're studying may not cover material that you don't know you don't know. It would be nice if everyone's shared decks were a completely thorough treatment of the material, but, alas, it is not so. And the only way that you can tell is by comparing the deck and the material during your own studying.

Shared decks also just aren't all that good sometimes. Someone, I can't recall who, wrote a script to scrape the entire LW wiki and then cloze-delete the title from the article. I appreciate the idea of SRSing the LW wiki, and scripting the whole thing was undoubtedly really efficient. However, the result was usually question and answer text hundreds of words long, with tables of content in the middle, and probably too many cards of insufficient value.

Despite their problems, I think that shared decks have way more potential than their current use suggests. A well-crafted deck that gives its subject matter a thorough treatment could be more va...
MIRI Donation Collaboration Station Redux: The Final Push (IMPORTANT)
by Skeptityke — 2014-05-07T06:12:52.690Z

As you likely already know, there is a one-day only fundraiser for MIRI going on tonight. 1 hour left, or less on the clock.

Donation page is HERE

And, "$250K in Microsoft in-kind giving is available for the organization which gets the most unique donors, which won't literally be worth $250K to us but includes hardware, software and consulting services; plus the publicity of winning this major competition among charities. This is one of the most leveraged chances to give $10 that you'll probably ever encounter ever." -Yudkowsky

So, a 250k opportunity is on the line, under an hour is left, we are in second place, and it only takes a 10 dollar donation to be registered as a unique donor (if you haven't donated already).

So let's do this. In the last 10 minutes before midnight, donate once. And if possible, persuade people around you to donate once.
Some historical evaluations of forecasting
by VipulNaik — 2014-05-07T02:42:56.582Z

This post has been written in relation with work I'm doing for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), but hasn't been formally vetted by MIRI. I'm posting this to LessWrong because of its potential interest to a segment of the LessWrong readership.

In order to assess the quality of current and future forecasts, it's important to consider the historical record of forecasting. Doing such a historical evaluation typically requires a systematic record of past forecasts. The set of forecasts may be:

collected explicitly for the purpose of an experiment to test the quality of forecasts,

collected implicitly in the form of a market-clearing price or other indicator, or

collected for the purpose of directly creating useful forecasts. In this case, the evaluation that happens later is incidental and is not the main goal of generating the forecasts.

Forecasts may be evaluated for any of these (for a longer discussion, see here):

Accuracy of forecasts: How close are the forecasts to what actually transpires?

Rationality or efficiency of forecasts: Are the forecasters ignoring obvious ways to improve the quality of their forecasts? Forecasts can rarely be proved to be efficient or rational, but we can test for the presence of some specific forms of irrationality or inefficiency (an example is where the forecasts have systematic bias, so that applying a Theil's correction for the bias would yield a better forecast).

Utility of forecasts: How much more valuable is it to have correct forecasts than incorrect forecasts?

The forecasts could also take at least two different perspectives:

They could put the focus on the individuals or institutions making the forecasts, and consider the quality of the forecasts along various dimensions in relation with the incentives and conditions facing these individuals and institutions. This is a black box approach with respect to the forecasting method used. The focus is on explaining why some people or institutions have better incentives or informational advantages that allow them to come up with better forecasts, rather than on what methods work better.

They could put the focus on the methods used for the forecasts. This is best seen in cases where we compare the performance of programs or softwares that use different forecasting algorithms to guess unknown points in a time series from known points.

A quick list of fo...
Meetup : Rescheduled: Chicago Calibration Game
by Nic_Smith — 2014-05-06T18:11:44.980Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rescheduled: Chicago Calibration Game

WHEN:
31 May 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Corner Bakery, 360 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL

This Saturday, we'll be playing a personal calibration game. From the LW wiki: "One person reads the question aloud, and everyone writes down their 50% and 90% confidence intervals. For example, if you’re 50% sure that 20% - 40% of the world’s countries are landlocked, write that down as your 50% confidence interval." After everyone has written down confidence intervals, the correct answer is revealed. If we run out of questions, we can spend the rest of the time discussing PredictionBook, idea futures, and similar.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rescheduled: Chicago Calibration Game
Sortition - Hacking Government To Avoid Cognitive Biases And Corruption
by Aussiekas — 2014-05-06T06:10:04.713Z

I've elaborated on this form of government I have proposed in great detail on my blog here

http://ecophilosophylife.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/a-thoughtful-constitution-by-sortition.html

The purpose of this post is to be a persuasive argument for my proposed system of democracy. I am arguing along the lines that my legislature by sortition, random selection, is superior to electoral systems. It also mirrors the advances in overcoming bias which are currently being pioneered in the Sciences.
I. The Problem
It is insane that we allow the same people who are elected to cast their eye on society to identify problems, write up the solutions to those problems, and then also vote to approve those solutions. This triple function of government by elected officials isn't simply corruptible, but is inherently flawed in its decision making process.
II. The Central Committee, overcoming bias, electoral shenanigans, and demographics bias
In my system of sortition election there is a mini-referendum done by a huge sampling of 1,000-5,000 representatives at the highest level. They vote everything up or down and cannot change anything about a bill themselves. They are not congregated into one place and there is no politics between them. They don't even need to know, nor could they know each other. Perhaps they could be part of political parties, but there is no need or money behind this as the members of what I'm calling the Central Committee (C2) are never candidates and can individually never serve more than once per lifetime or perhaps per decade in 3 year terms.
Contentious issues can be moved to a general referendum. In the 1,000 member C2, any law in the margins of 550-450 can have a special second vote proposed by the disagreeing side such that if more than 600 agree then the item is added to the general monthly or quarterly referendum conducted electronically with the entire population. In this way the average person participates and feels heard by their government on a regular basis.
The major advantage of this C2 is that it is representative. It will have people from all areas, be 50% male and 50% female and will include all minorities. There can be no great misrepresentation or capture of the legislature by a powerful group. This overcome many of the inherent biases of an electoral system which in almo...
Meetup : Washington DC: Museums
by rocurley — 2014-05-06T05:47:40.852Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Museums

WHEN:
11 May 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

We'll be meeting to go look at museums. We'll rendezvous in the usual place then head out.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Museums
Find a study partner - May 2014 Thread
by Mati_Roy — 2014-05-06T05:37:07.030Z

For reasons mentioned in So8res article as well as for other reasons: studying with a partner can be very good.

So if you're looking for a study partner for an online course, reading a manual or else (whether it's in the MIRI course list or not) tell others in the comment section.

The past threads about finding a study partner can be found under the tag study_thread. However, you have higher probability of finding a study partner in the most recent thread. If you haven't found a study partner last month, you are welcome to post the same comment again here.
Arguments and relevance claims
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-05-05T16:49:46.192Z

The following once happened: I posted a link to some article on an IRC channel. A friend of mine read the article in question and brought up several criticisms. I felt that her criticisms were mostly correct though not very serious, so I indicated agreement with them.

Later on the same link was posted again. My friend commented something along the lines of "that was already posted before, we discussed this with Kaj and we found that the article was complete rubbish". I was surprised - I had thought that I had only agreed to some minor criticisms that didn't affect the main point of the article. But my friend had clearly thought that the criticisms were decisive and had made the article impossible to salvage.

--

Every argument actually has two parts, even if people often only state the first part. There's the argument itself, and an implied claim of why the argument would matter if it were true. Call this implied part the relevance claim.

Suppose that I say "Martians are green". Someone else says, "I have seen a blue Martian", and means "I have seen a blue Martian (argument), therefore your claim of all Martians being green is false (relevance claim)". But I might interpret this as them saying, "I have seen a blue Martian (argument), therefore your claim of most Martians being green is less likely (relevance claim)". I then indicate agreement. Now I will be left with the impression that the other person made a true-but-not-very-powerful claim that left my argument mostly intact, whereas the other person is left with the impression that they made a very powerful claim that I agreed with, and therefore I admitted that I was wrong.

We could also say that the relevance claim is a claim of how much the probability of the original statement would be affected if the argument in question were true. So, for example "I have seen a blue martian (argument), therefore the probability of 'Martians are green' is less than .01 (relevance claim)", or equivalently, "I have seen a blue martian" & "P(martians are green|I have seen a blue martian) < .01".

If someone says something that I feel is entirely irrelevant to the whole topic, inferential silence may follow.

Therefore, if someone makes an argument that I agree with, but I suspect that we might disagree about its relevance, I now try to explicitly comment on what my view of the relevance is. Example.

Notice

...
Ottawa meetup: Applied Rationality Series, Value of Information
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2014-05-05T15:48:31.307Z

The sixth talk in the Ottawa Applied Rationality series will take place on Tuesday, May 20th at 7:00 pm, at the Canal Royal Oak in Ottawa, Canada. These events are run through the Ottawa Skeptics meetup group. See link here: http://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Skeptics/events/181263842/

The usual format consists of an approximately 15 minute talk on the topic of the day, followed by semi-structured exercises, followed by beers and unstructured discussion. Previous topics have included "Rational Debating", "Bayes", "Calibration", "Rationality Dojo" (a review session), and "Goal Factoring."

If you are not from Ottawa, but are interested in running meetups in your area, send me a PM and I can give you the PowerPoints that I use for these talks.