trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : [Boston] Using Causal Graphs to Understand Bias in the Medical Literature
by Ben_LandauTaylor — 2013-08-07T04:32:42.499Z

WHEN: 11 August 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA

Meetup event page

This talk is a very gentle introduction to modern causality theory, as developed by Jamie Robins and Judea Pearl. We will use as little mathematics as possible to introduce some of the central ideas in the field, with examples from medicine and epidemiology. In the one hour talk, we will cover:

(1) Causal Directed Acyclic Graphs and the rules of D-Separation

(2) Definitions of confounding and selection bias

(3) Methods to adjust for confounding

(4) Examples of situations where standard methods are always biased.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are every Sunday at 2pm in MIT's building 66 at 25 Ames St, room 156. Room number subject to change based on availability; signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 2:30, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner. It's about a ten minute walk to the usual restaurant.
How to Measure Anything
by lukeprog — 2013-08-07T04:05:58.366Z

Douglas Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything is one of my favorite how-to books. I hope this summary inspires you to buy the book; it’s worth it.

The book opens:

Anything can be measured. If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matter how “fuzzy” the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before. And those very things most likely to be seen as immeasurable are, virtually always, solved by relatively simple measurement methods.

The sciences have many established measurement methods, so Hubbard’s book focuses on the measurement of “business intangibles” that are important for decision-making but tricky to measure: things like management effectiveness, the “flexibility” to create new products, the risk of bankruptcy, and public image.

Basic Ideas

A measurement is an observation that quantitatively reduces uncertainty. Measurements might not yield precise, certain judgments, but they do reduce your uncertainty.

To be measured, the object of measurement must be described clearly, in terms of observables. A good way to clarify a vague object of measurement like “IT security” is to ask “What is IT security, and why do you care?” Such probing can reveal that “IT security” means things like a reduction in unauthorized intrusions and malware attacks, which the IT department cares about because these things result in lost productivity, fraud losses, and legal liabilities.

Uncertainty is the lack of certainty: the true outcome/state/value is not known.

Risk is a state of uncertainty in which some of the possibilities involve a loss.

Much pessimism about measurement comes from a lack of experience making measurements. Hubbard, who is far more experienced with measurement than his readers, says:

Your problem is not as unique as you think.

You have more data than you think.

You need less data than you think.

An adequate amount of new data is more accessible than you think.

Applied Information Economics

Hubbard calls his method “Applied Information Economics” (AIE). It consists of 5 steps:

Define a decision problem and the relevant variables. (Start with the decision you need to make, then figure out which variables would make your decision easier if you had better es

...
Meetup : LessWrong Israel September meetup
by DanArmak — 2013-08-06T12:11:12.797Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Israel September meetup

WHEN:
12 September 2013 08:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Adventure Park, Park hayarqon tel aviv

* NOTE: THE LOCATION HAS CHANGED TO PARK HAYARQON!! *

Call 0545330678 (Gal) for details.

We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, September 12 at VisionMap's offices, Gibor Sport House, 15th floor, 7 Menachem Begin st., Ramat-Gan.
Our program is:
* 20:00-20:15: Assembly
* 20:15-21:00: Main Talk
* 21:00-22:00: Dinner & Discussion
* 22:00-23:00: Rump Session (minitalks)
* 23:00-: End of official programming
Main Talk: Mirrors and Sunlight: Dealing with Emotional Vampires / Guy Banay
We will learn how to recognize the Dramatic Personality Disorders (antisocial, borderline, narcissistic and histrionic) and some strategies to minimize the damage they can do.
Backup Talk: Solomonoff Induction / Benjamin Fox
Solomonoff Induction is basically the most generalized form of intelligence, intelligence treated on the most basic mathematical level.If we wish to find facts given provided information, Solomonoff Induction is the most fundamental algorithm to do so.
Rump Session: each participant will give a 4-minute talk (+3 minute encore if we applaud hard enough). Giving a talk isn't mandatory, but it's highly recommended. Not confident that what you have to say is relevant to our interests? Unsure about your public speaking skills? Doesn't matter - in the rump session, anything goes.
(Posted for Guy Banay, the organizer, who doesn't have enough LW karma yet.)

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Israel September meetup
Meetup : LW Munich Meetup in August
by Valeriy — 2013-08-06T11:58:52.256Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Munich Meetup in August

WHEN:
10 August 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Hirschgarten, 80639 Munich, Germany

The next Munich meetup will take place on August 10th. You are highly welcome to come and say hi, no matter how long you’ve been reading LessWrong. If you plan to attend, please (optionally) post a comment saying what topics you’d like to discuss. Also if you on Facebook, think about joining the group (see comments to the previous meetup).

Location: Since the weather is supposed to become bettter on Saturday, I'd suggest we meet in Hirschgarten Biergarten. GPS: 48.149063, 11.512099 near the tables (I'll bring a blanket). Also we would probably go to the tables later so leave a comment if you are going to join later.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Munich Meetup in August
Meetup : LW Munich Meetup in August
by Valeriy — 2013-08-06T11:58:51.153Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Munich Meetup in August

WHEN:
10 August 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Hirschgarten, 80639 Munich, Germany

The next Munich meetup will take place on August 10th. You are highly welcome to come and say hi, no matter how long you’ve been reading LessWrong. If you plan to attend, please (optionally) post a comment saying what topics you’d like to discuss. Also if you on Facebook, think about joining the group (see comments to the previous meetup).

Location: Since the weather is supposed to become bettter on Saturday, I'd suggest we meet in Hirschgarten Biergarten. GPS: 48.149063, 11.512099 near the tables (I'll bring a blanket). Also we would probably go to the tables later so leave a comment if you are going to join later.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Munich Meetup in August
Meetup : Saskatoon's First Meetup!
by Nicholas_Rutherford — 2013-08-05T05:33:23.425Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon's First Meetup!

WHEN:
17 August 2013 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2318 8th St E, Saskatoon, SK

It's time for central Canada's first meetup!

It will be at the Broadway Roaster on 8th street (not on broadway!) at the pleasant time of 1:00 in the afternoon.

Feel free to bring along anyone who you think might be interested, even if they are not LW people.

I look forward to meeting you all! :D

Discussion article for the meetup : Saskatoon's First Meetup!
Meetup : Washington DC books meetup
by rocurley — 2013-08-05T02:20:42.382Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC books meetup

WHEN:
11 August 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

We'll be meeting to talk about and exchange books.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC books meetup
Crossing the experiments: a baby
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-08-05T00:31:56.319Z

I've always been more of a theoretician, but it's important to try one's hand at practical problems from time to time. In that vein, I've decided to try three simultaneous experiments on major Less Wrong themes. I will aim to acquire something to protect, I will practice training a seed intelligence, and I will become more familiar with many consequences of evolutionary psychology.

In the spirit of efficiency I'll combine all these experiments into one:

She's never seen Star Wars or Doctor Who.

She's never seen David Attenborough or read J. L. Borges.

She's never had a philosophical debate.

She's never been skiing.

Never had sex, never been hugged or even been licked by a dog!

She has so much to look forwards to...

(Though she'll be very boring for several months yet!)
Seeking a reader for LessWrong sequences
by Rick_from_Castify — 2013-08-04T10:58:12.742Z

As some of you are aware we make audio versions of LessWrong sequences. We are looking to hire someone from the LessWrong community who has a good voice and is keen to record the remaining sequences. There is quite a bit of material as I'm sure you are all aware.

Anybody who is interested please record yourself reading Politics is the Mind-Killer and send it to support@castify.co. Please say what sort of recording device you used and keep the recording size rational.

Thanks to all of you who have been listening.
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2013-08-04T03:20:18.859Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
04 August 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains
by lukeprog — 2013-08-03T02:29:21.928Z

Today MIRI released a new technical report by visiting researcher Katja Grace called "Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains." The report summarizes data on algorithmic progress – that is, better performance per fixed amount of computing hardware – in six domains:

SAT solvers,

Chess and Go programs,

Physics simulations,

Factoring,

Mixed integer programming, and

Some forms of machine learning.

MIRI's purpose for collecting these data was to shed light on the question of intelligence explosion microeconomics, though we suspect the report will be of broad interest within the software industry and computer science academia.

One finding from the report was previously discussed by Robin Hanson here. (Robin saw an early draft on the intelligence explosion microeconomics mailing list.)

This is the preferred page for discussing the report in general.

Summary:

In recent boolean satisfiability (SAT) competitions, SAT solver performance has increased 5–15% per year, depending on the type of problem. However, these gains have been driven by widely varying improvements on particular problems. Retrospective surveys of SAT performance (on problems chosen after the fact) display significantly faster progress.

Chess programs have improved by around 50 Elo points per year over the last four decades. Estimates for the significance of hardware improvements are very noisy, but are consistent with hardware improvements being responsible for approximately half of progress. Progress has been smooth on the scale of years since the 1960s, except for the past five. Go programs have improved about one stone per year for the last three decades. Hardware doublings produce diminishing Elo gains, on a scale consistent with accounting for around half of progress.

Improvements in a variety of physics simulations (selected after the fact to exhibit performance increases due to software) appear to be roughly half due to hardware progress.

The largest number factored to date has grown by about 5.5 digits per year for the last two decades; computing power increased 10,000-fold over this period, and it is unclear how much of the increase is due to hardware progress.

Some mixed integer programming (MIP) algorithms, run on modern MIP instances with modern hardware, have roughly doubled in speed each year. MIP is an important optimization problem, but one which has been called to

...
August 2013 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2013-08-02T21:49:13.274Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. 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.
Rationality Quotes August 2013
by Vaniver — 2013-08-02T20:59:04.223Z

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
[Link] AI advances: computers can be almost as funny as people
by Shmi — 2013-08-02T18:41:08.410Z

"Our model significantly outperforms a competitive baseline and generates funny jokes 16% of the time, compared to 33% for human-generated jokes."

From this paper:

Unsupervised joke generation from big data

Sasa Petrovic and David Matthews

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Short Papers (ACL Short Papers 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

Abstract

Humor generation is a very hard problem. It is difficult to say exactly what makes a joke funny, and solving this problem algorithmically is assumed to require deep semantic understanding, as well as cultural and other contextual cues. We depart from previous work that tries to model this knowledge using ad-hoc manually created databases and labeled training examples. Instead we present a model that uses large amounts of unannotated data to generate I like my X like I like my Y, Z jokes, where X, Y, and Z are variables to be filled in. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully unsupervised humor generation system. Our model significantly outperforms a competitive baseline and generates funny jokes 16% of the time, compared to 33% for human-generated jokes.

From The Register:

It uses 2,000,000 noun-adjective pairs of words to draw up jokes "with an element of surprise", something the creators claim is key to good comedy.

...

jokes calculated by the software include:

I like my relationships like I like my source code... open
Meetup : Vienna Meetup
by Ratcourse — 2013-08-02T17:47:53.909Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna Meetup

WHEN:
17 August 2013 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien

The Meetup will be held at the NIG, room 2G on the second floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien.

This time, the discussion will be led by Andreas, focusing on the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", from Kahneman.

facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/438894002884502/?ref=3

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-08-02T15:23:06.901Z

This summary was posted to LW main on July 26th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong: August Meetup : 04 August 2013 06:00PM
Brussels meetup: 17 August 2013 01:00PM
Chicago: Discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow: 03 August 2013 09:58PM
Cincinnati: Financial optimisation: 28 July 2013 04:00PM
Cleveland Ohio Meetup: 28 July 2013 02:00PM
Moscow: Miscellaneous Rationality: 04 August 2013 04:00PM
Philadelphia informal meetup: 28 July 2013 03:00PM
Zagreb meetup - July 27th: 27 July 2013 07:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 27 July 2019 01:30PM
[Boston] Becoming Stronger: 28 July 2013 02:00PM
Durham NC/Triangle Area: Meetup!: 01 August 2013 07:00PM
London Meetup - Achieving Better Goals: 04 August 2013 02:00PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 02 August 2013 07:00PM
West LA Meetup—Introduction to Anthropics: 31 July 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, Research Triangle NC, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more c...
Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15
by therufs — 2013-08-01T20:38:28.460Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for August 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Immediate past diary: July 16-31

Next diary: August 16-31

Rationality Diaries archive
The Fermi paradox as evidence against the likelyhood of unfriendly AI
by chaosmage — 2013-08-01T18:46:53.630Z

Edit after two weeks: Thanks to everyone involved in this very interesting discussion! I now accept that any possible differences in how UFAI and FAI might spread over the universe pale before the Fermi paradox's evidence against the pre-existence of any of them. I enjoyed thinking about this a lot, so thanks again for considering my original argument, which follows below...

The assumptions that intelligence is substrate-independent, as well as that intelligent systems will always attempt to become more intelligent lead to the conclusion that, in the words of Paul Davies, "if we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological".

At Less Wrong, we have this notion of unfriendly artificial intelligence - AIs that use their superior intelligence to grow themselves and maximize their own utility at the expense of humans much like we maximize our own utility at the expense of mosquitoes. Friendly AI, on the other hand, should have a positive effect on humanity. Details are beyond my comprehension or indeed rather vague, but presumably such an AI would prioritize particular elements of its home biosphere over its own interests as an agent that - aware of its own intelligence and the fact that is what helps it maximize its utility - should want to grow smarter. The distinction should make as much sense on any alien planet as it does on our own.

We know that self-replicating probes, travelling at, say, 1% of the speed of light, could colonize the entire galaxy in millions, not billions, of years. Obviously, an intelligence looking only to grow itself (and maximize paperclips or whatever) can do this much more easily than one restrained by its biological-or-similar parents. Between two alien superintelligences, one strictly self-maximizing should out-compete one that cares about things like the habitability of planets (especially its home planet) by the standards of its parents. It follows that if we ever encounter post-biological extraterrestrial intelligence, it should be expected (at least by the Less Wrong community) to be hostile.

But we havent. What does that tell us?

Our astronomical observations increasingly allow us to rule out some possible pictures of life in the rest of the galaxy. This means we can also rule out some possible explanations for the Fermi paradox. For example, until a few years ago, we didn't know h...
Meetup : Picnic au Parc de la Tête d'Or
by Oriane — 2013-08-01T12:18:29.663Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Picnic au Parc de la Tête d'Or

WHEN:
17 August 2013 12:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Parc de la Tête d'Or, Lyon

We will be having our second meetup in Lyon.

If the weather is nice enough, we will be having a picnic in the park.
Please check this page again if it is not the case to find out where our meetup will be located.

We will meet at 12:30 at La Porte des Enfants du Rhône. In case you arrive late, please send me a text and I will let you know where to find us. My number is 06 02 35 34 42.

Feel free to bring all sorts of food and beverages but please remember that some of our members are vegetarians.

We will be focusing our discussions on different methods and games of self-improvement and better decision-making techniques. I will be sharing my experience of the CFAR workshop and present some of their material.

I look forward to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Picnic au Parc de la Tête d'Or
How does MIRI Know it Has a Medium Probability of Success?
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-01T11:42:24.140Z

In the past, people like Eliezer Yudkowsky (see 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) have argued that MIRI has a medium probability of success. What is this probability estimate based on and how is success defined?

I've read standard MIRI literature (like "Evidence and Import" and "Five Theses"), but I may have missed something.

-

(Meta: I don't think this deserves a discussion thread, but I posted this on the open thread and no-one responded, and I think it's important enough to merit a response.)