trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A place for casual, non-karmic discussion for lesswrongers?
by  — 2012-11-04T18:50:39.325Z

I have never been on a Lesswrong meetup because they tend to take place too far away from my range in terms of distance and budget. Because of that, I don't know if those perform this function to everyone's satisfaction in such a way that what I'm suggesting here doesn't seem worth the effort. I hear that they're a lot of fun, and involve quite a bit of silliness, though; I find those cruelly lacking on Lesswrong proper, whether it be in main posts or discussion posts, and their relevant threads.

That's why I think it would be nice to have a forum, a place to have normal discussions, where you don't have to watch that you don't say anything stupid or out-of-line lest you unexpectedly lose karma. A place to exchange jokes, frivolities, and entertainment. A place to talk about stuff that isn't rationality or singularity-related. A place to relax and enjoy the company of like-minded folks. A place to take a more personal approach to communication, with sequential rather than branching conversations. A place to make and be friends.

Don't you think having that would be nice?

EDIT: Also, if this place does already exist and I'm not aware of it, I humbly request that you provide me a link, for which I would be most grateful.
[LINK] Q&A with John E. Laird and Kristinn R. Thorisson on risks from AI
by David_Gerard — 2012-11-04T15:09:30.066Z

(Not added to the previous post so as not to foul up your RSS feeds.)

The previous interview in XiXiDu's series, not posted here but on his site. They're all indexed on the wiki.

Professor John E. Laird is the founder of Soar Technology, an Ann Arbor company specializing in creating autonomous AI entities. His major research interest is in creating human-level artificial intelligent entities, with an emphasis on the underlying cognitive architecture.

Dr. Kristinn R. Thorisson has been developing A.I. systems and technologies for over two decades. He is the Coordinator / Principal Investigator of the HUMANOBS FP7 project and co-author of the AERA architecture, with Eric Nivel, which targets artificial general intelligence. A key driving force behind the project is Thorisson’s new Constructivist Methodology which lays out principles for why and how AI architectures must be given introspective and self-programming capabilities.
In Defense of Moral Investigation
by MTGandP — 2012-11-04T04:26:17.343Z

Cross-posted from my blog.

Some argue that certain claims about the nature of reality could cause people to become more immoral. Examples of such suppositions include:

1. People should follow Christianity because we will be more moral if we have to avoid eternal damnation.
2. The theory of evolution says that since people evolved from bacteria and have no immortal souls, human lives are worthless. Therefore, we can rape and kill each other and there’s nothing wrong with that.
3. The theory of evolution says that people should act selfishly all the time.
4. If free will doesn’t exist, people will be free to hurt and kill each other and won’t be held responsible.

Such arguments are bogus. Any new information about reality, if properly understood (that part is important), can only cause people to become more ethical. Morality is contingent upon the nature of the universe; the better we understand the universe, the better we understand morality.

Some people fear that if we investigate reality, we will discover truths that cause us to behave unethically. In some cases, people even wish to discount discoveries that already have been made—such as natural selection or the nonexistence of free will [1]—on the basis that these discoveries may lead to immoral behavior.

Someone may take the theory of evolution and use that as evidence that it is morally justified to behave selfishly at the expense of others. However, such a person would be misinterpreting evolution. Nowhere does the theory of evolution say that we should attempt to propagate our genes at the expense of every other living being; it merely explains that beings that do do that tend to survive and reproduce. Evolution tells us nothing about what we ought to value.

On the other hand, evolution (and, in fact, all branches of science) does tell us something about how to achieve what we do value. Once we understand how the world works, we can take it into account and more effectively work towards our goals. (This is Sam Harris’ thesis in The Moral Landscape.) For example, positive psychology provides insights into how best to make ourselves happy; and biology tells us which animals can feel pain and therefore deserve moral consideration.

It is possible to make a discovery that changes our conceptions about what is or is not moral. If such a discovery is made, what was previously tho...
Analyzing FF.net reviews of 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'
by gwern — 2012-11-03T23:47:36.580Z

The unprecedented gap in Methods of Rationality updates prompts musing about whether readership is increasing enough & what statistics one would use; I write code to download FF.net reviews, clean it, parse it, load into R, summarize the data & depict it graphically, run linear regression on a subset & all reviews, note the poor fit, develop a quadratic fit instead, and use it to predict future review quantities.

Then, I run a similar analysis on a competing fanfiction to find out when they will have equal total review-counts. A try at logarithmic fits fails; fitting a linear model to the previous 100 days of _MoR_ and the competitor works much better, and they predict a convergence in <5 years.

Master version: http://www.gwern.net/hpmor#analysis
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
by Scott Alexander — 2012-11-03T23:00:19.891Z

11/26: The survey is now closed. Please do not take the survey. Your results will not be counted.

It's that time of year again.

If you are reading this post, and have not been sent here by some sort of conspiracy trying to throw off the survey results, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.

This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
The survey will probably remain open for a month or so, but once again do not delay taking the survey just for the sake of the extra credit questions.

Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".

Okay! Enough nitpicky rules! Time to take the...

2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey

Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because some of them were contradictory, others were vague, and others would have required me to provide two dozen answers and a thesis paper worth of explanatory text for every question anyone might conceivably misunderstand. But I did make about twenty changes based on the feedback, and *most* of the suggested questions have found their way into the text.

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.
Sign up to be notified about new LW meetups in your area
by Louie — 2012-11-03T22:38:38.971Z

LessWrong has rolled out a new feature on the user preference pages under "Location":

This is UNCHECKED by default. Also, we don't know by default where you live.

If you think you might want to meet up with other LWers, please input your location and check this box. Once enough people have signed up in a new area, it will make starting a LW meetup there that much more straightforward for the future organizer. (You'll just get that email; they won't see your email address.) In general, it seems like being able to know something about where LWers live would be helpful, so please consider entering your approximate location even if you don't check the box.

Thanks to Wesley Moore for deploying this upgrade to the LW backend.
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
by toner — 2012-11-03T07:31:36.972Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup

WHEN:
16 November 2012 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
see mailing list, Carlton VIC 3053 Australia

Melbourne's next social meetup is on Friday 16 November, 6:30 for 7pm, at my house. If you have any trouble working out the location or getting in, you can call me on 0412 996 288.

We'll get some snacks and organise some form of take-away for dinner. BYO drinks and games.

We always look forward to meeting new people!

This meetup is usually on the third Friday of the month. We also have a regular meetup about practical rationality on the first Friday of each month.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Less Wrong Parents
by saliency — 2012-11-03T04:59:25.612Z

Less Wrong Parents
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!forum/less-wrong-parents

Recently the NYC LW/OB community had two babies and is expecting a third.
I created a google group as a way of sharing information, primarily thinking of the NYC community.

I posted my pre-baby purchase list and William Eden posted an extensive list of books on early parenting.

William suggested opening up the group so as to get insight from the larger LW community on parenting.
I think this is *probably* a good idea. Google groups are simple to set up but have limits.
For this reason I request that if you are going to have an extensive debate on a subject you create a new thread (aka: get a room)

The primary objective is to lower the cost of obtaining information on parenting.
I believe this overall goal to be more important then any particular "truth".

My hope is that this will primarily serve as a place for people to ask parenting question and post guides.
Perhaps if enough guides are posted they can eventually be consolidated into a wiki.
Conformity
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-11-02T19:02:40.723Z

A rather good 10 minute YouTube video presenting the results of several papers relevant to how conformity affects our thinking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrNIuFrso8I

The papers mentioned are:

Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology, 27(187), pp.17-22.
Asch, S.E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.
Asch, S.E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193(5), pp.31-35.
Berns, G.S., Chappelow, J., Zink, C.F., Pagnoni, G., Martin-Skurski, M.E., and Richards, J. (2005) 'Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation' Biological Psychiatry, 58(3), pp.245-253.
Weaver, K., Garcia, S.M., Schwarz, N., & Miller, D.T. (2007) Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 821-833.

What techniques do other posters, here on LessWrong, use to monitor and counter these effects in their lives?

The video also lists some of the advantages to a society of having a certain amount of this effect in place. Does anyone here conform too little?
Meetup : Cambridge, MA Sunday meetup
by jimrandomh — 2012-11-02T17:08:17.011Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA Sunday meetup

WHEN:
04 November 2012 02:07:17PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames St Cambridge, MA 02139

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups recur on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bldg 66].

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge, MA Sunday meetup
Logical Pinpointing
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-11-02T15:33:19.634Z

Followup to: Causal Reference, Proofs, Implications and Models

The fact that one apple added to one apple invariably gives two apples helps in the teaching of arithmetic, but has no bearing on the truth of the proposition that 1 + 1 = 2.

-- James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics

Previous meditation 1: If we can only meaningfully talk about parts of the universe that can be pinned down by chains of cause and effect, where do we find the fact that 2 + 2 = 4? Or did I just make a meaningless noise, there? Or if you claim that "2 + 2 = 4"isn't meaningful or true, then what alternate property does the sentence "2 + 2 = 4" have which makes it so much more useful than the sentence "2 + 2 = 3"?

Previous meditation 2: It has been claimed that logic and mathematics is the study of which conclusions follow from which premises. But when we say that 2 + 2 = 4, are we really just assuming that? It seems like 2 + 2 = 4 was true well before anyone was around to assume it, that two apples equalled two apples before there was anyone to count them, and that we couldn't make it 5 just by assuming differently.

Speaking conventional English, we'd say the sentence 2 + 2 = 4 is "true", and anyone who put down "false" instead on a math-test would be marked wrong by the schoolteacher (and not without justice).

But what can make such a belief true, what is the belief about, what is the truth-condition of the belief which can make it true or alternatively false? The sentence '2 + 2 = 4' is true if and only if... what?

In the previous post I asserted that the study of logic is the study of which conclusions follow from which premises; and that although this sort of inevitable implication is sometimes called "true", it could more specifically be called "valid", since checking for inevitability seems quite different from comparing a belief to our own universe. And you could claim, accordingly, that "2 + 2 = 4" is 'valid' because it is an inevitable implication of the axioms of Peano Arithmetic.

And yet thinking about 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't really feel that way. Figuring out facts about the natural numbers doesn't feel like the operation of making up assumptions and then deducing conclusions from them. It feels like the numbers are just out there, and the only point of making up the axioms of Peano Arithmetic was ...
Weekly LW Meetups: Cambridge UK, Melbourne, Moscow, Munich, Pittsburgh, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-11-02T15:08:03.789Z

This summary was posted to LW main on October 26th. The following summary is here.

For LW readers under 20: Note that the Thiel Fellowships (20 under 20) are now open for their next round of applications, and as they put it, "you have a huge readership of folk who would make great applicants". More info here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Moscow: Biases, Applied Rationality, Visual Thinking: 27 October 2012 04:00PM
Munich Meetup, EDIT: October 28th: 28 October 2012 03:00PM
Washington DC Ethics meetup: 28 October 2012 03:00PM
Pittsburgh: Belief as attire: 30 October 2012 06:00PM
Berlin Meetup: 03 November 2012 08:30PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM

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:

Cambridge UK Weekly Meeting: 28 October 2012 11:00AM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 02 November 2012 07:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

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, Hels...
Teaching English in Shanghai
by ShanghaiTEFLer — 2012-11-02T11:13:24.131Z

If your English is good enough to follow discussions on this site you can get a job teaching English in Shanghai. If you can participate meaningfully you are frankly overqualified. I am currently saving about 2,000 dollars a month working approximately 9-5 every day.

The minimum legal requirements to teach are that you be over 23 years of age, have a (relevant) degree and two years of relevant work experience as well as a TEFL qualification that took 120 hours to complete. In theory you should also be from a country where English is a native language to teach but this requirement is often honoured in the breach. In practice you must be over 23 and know someone who can fake up a degree certificate in Photoshop, and be willing to write yourself a fitting resume and sign a form stating that all the documents you are submitting are true. Some companies will do all of the faking and lying for you, some will at least want you to give them the appropriate fake documents so there’s some farcical plausible deniability.

If you are not on a work visa doing work of any kind for pay is illegal. This rule is ignored all the time, including by large Western multinational companies with legal departments because the rules change depending on who’s interpreting them and which website you’re looking at. But people get Business visas to come over here and do internships regularly and if you are from a First World country the worst that will happen to you for getting caught working on a tourist or student visa is a large fine (5500 yuan). If you overstay your visa by more than about three days you will be deported. This is one of the few things the government care about when it comes to foreigners. Drugs, gambling, prostitution, as long as there are no nationals involved it needs to get quite big for them to care. But you can get unlucky. It's rare but it happens.

Demand for English teachers in Shanghai is insatiable. If you are being paid by the hour the minimum acceptable rate for someone with no experience, who can’t spell, and can’t teach is 150 RMB per hour. Never accept less than this for any job. The local public primary schools are legally barred from hiring foreigners so they go through companies who hire them instead. You will not really be teaching at most of these companies, more providing a prop; you, the foreign teacher. There isn&...
November 2012 Media Thread
by RobertLumley — 2012-11-02T06:13:46.750Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
[SEQ RERUN] The First World Takeover
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-02T05:47:56.017Z

Today's post, The First World Takeover was originally published on 19 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The first replicator was the original black swan. A couple of molecules that, despite not having a particularly good optimization process, could explore new regions of pattern-space. This is an event that would have implications that would have seemed absurd to predict.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Weak Inside View, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.