trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: "Should" Considered Harmful
by rocurley — 2015-06-22T07:53:32.340Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: "Should" Considered Harmful

WHEN:
22 June 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to discuss Nate Soares's recent blog posts:

"Should considered harmful"

Not because you "should"

Your "shoulds" are not a duty

Reading these beforehand is optional but encouraged!

As usual, call 301-458-0764 to be let in, and feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: "Should" Considered Harmful
Open Thread, Jun. 22 - Jun. 28, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-06-22T00:01:54.872Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
High energy ethics and general moral relativity
by maxikov — 2015-06-21T20:34:02.400Z

Utilitarianism sometimes supports weird things: killing lone backpackers for their organs, sacrificing all world's happiness to one utility monster, creating zillions of humans living on near-subsistence level to maximize total utility, or killing all but a bunch of them to maximize average utility. Also, it supports gay rights, and has been supporting them since 1785, when saying that there's nothing wrong in having gay sex was pretty much in the same category as saying that there's nothing wrong in killing backpackers. This makes one wonder: if despite all the disgust towards them few centuries ago, gay rights have been inside the humanity's coherent extrapolated volition all along, then perhaps our descendants will eventually come to the conclusion that killing the backpacker has been the right choice all along, and only those bullet-biting extremists of our time were getting it right. As a matter of fact, as a friend of mine pointed out, you don't even need to fast forward few centuries - there are or were already ethical systems actually in use in some cultures (e.g. bushido in pre-Meiji restoration Japan) that are obsessed with honor and survivor's guilt. They would approve of killing the backpacker or letting them kill themselves - this being an honorable death, and living while letting five other people to die being dishonorable - on non-utilitarian grounds, and actually alieve that this is the right choice. Perhaps they were right all along, and the Western civilization bulldozed through them effectively destroying such culture not because of superior (non-utilitarian) ethics but for any other reason things happened in history. In this case there's no need in trying to fix utilitarianism, lest it suggest killing backpackers, because it's not broken - we are - and out descendants will figure that out. In physics we've seen this, when an elegant low-Kolmogorov-complexity model predicted that weird things happens on a subatomic level, and we've built huge particle accelerators just to confirm - yep, that's exactly what happens, in spite of all your intuitions. Perhaps smashing utilitarianism with high energy problems only breaks our intuitions, while utilitarianism is just fine.

But let's talk about relativity. In 1916 Karl Schwarzschild solved the newly discovered Einstein field equations and thus predicted the black holes. It was thought as a mere cur...
Human factors research seems very relevant to rationality
by casebash — 2015-06-21T12:55:35.479Z

"The science of “human factors” now permeates the aviation industry. It includes a sophisticated understanding of the kinds of mistakes that even experts make under stress. So when Martin Bromiley read the Harmer report, an incomprehensible event suddenly made sense to him. “I thought, this is classic human factors stuff. Fixation error, time perception, hierarchy.”

It’s a miracle that only ten people were killed after Flight 173 crashed into an area of woodland in suburban Portland; but the crash needn’t have happened at all. Had the captain attempted to land, the plane would have touched down safely: the subsequent investigation found that the landing gear had been down the whole time. But the captain and officers of Flight 173 became so engrossed in one puzzle that they became blind to the more urgent problem: fuel shortage. This is called “fixation error”. In a crisis, the brain’s perceptual field narrows and shortens. We become seized by a tremendous compulsion to fix on the problem we think we can solve, and quickly lose awareness of almost everything else. It’s an affliction to which even the most skilled and
experienced professionals are prone..."

I don't believe that I've heard fixation error or time perception mentioned on Less Wrong. The field of human factors may be something worth looking into more.
Meetup : LW London regular meetup
by Leonhart — 2015-06-21T08:40:43.941Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW London regular meetup

WHEN:
28 June 2015 09:39:43AM (+0100)

WHERE:
Lincoln's Inn Fields, London

Edit: weather is a bit meh; will start off in the SH.

The next LW London meetup will be on June 28th. Join us from 2pm to talk about vote trading, Boltzmann chickens, and ethical Bitcoin fanfiction. Or something.
If the weather is nice, we'll be in Lincoln's Inn Fields. If not, we'll be in our usual Shakespeare's Head, just around the corner. My number is 07860 466862, call it if you have difficulty finding us, and ideally not otherwise.
About London LessWrong:
We run this meetup approximately every other week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....
Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.
Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW London regular meetup
Working yourself ragged is not a virtue
by So8res — 2015-06-21T03:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/stop-before-you-drop/

Let's get back to the "replacing guilt" series. Here's a quick recap of what we've covered so far:

Part 1 was about replacing the listless guilt: if someone feels vaguely guilty for not really doing anything with their life, then the best advice I can give is to start doing something. Find something to fight for. Find a way that the world is not right, and decide to change it. Once the guilt is about failing at a specific task, then we can start addressing it.

Part 2 was about refusing to treat your moral impulses as obligations. Be wary of the word should, which tries to force an obligation upon you. I recommend refusing to do anything just because you "should": Insofar as that sets you free, the obligations were false ones. Insofar as that sparks fear that something important won't get completed, seek out the cause of the worry, and complete the task because you want to see it done, rather than because you "should."

However, having something to change in the world and being free of false obligations is not anywhere near enough to replace guilt motivation. In fact, I think that most guilt in most people comes from a different source: it comes from people honestly deciding that X is what they want to do and then finding themselves not doing X anyway.

Maybe they know that watching another episode of a TV show will cause them to stay up too late and be tired at class tomorrow, and they know that their classes are very expensive and that their parents would be very disappointed, and they decide that the best thing to do would be to stop binge-watching the TV show and get some sleep — and then they find themselves watching the next episode anyway.

This sort of guilt is one of the most demoralizing, and therefore it's perhaps one of the most damaging types of guilt. Addressing it is going to require quite a few different tools. Today, I'll describe one of them.

(If you haven't read half-assing it with everything you've got, recommend doing so now: I wrote it as a direct predecessor to this idea, before realizing that I actually needed the previous seven or so posts first.)

Here's a failure mode that I used to see all the time, back when I was a professional programmer: A co-worker of mine would be working on a project that was almost under control. It would be a Friday afternoon, with an important deadline coming up in a few weeks, and everything would be almost passabl...
Happiness interventions
by  — 2015-06-20T11:39:09.375Z

I found a website called Happier Human. It's about how to become and stay happier. I've trawled through it. Here are the best posts in my opinion:

[Meditate]. Don't [worry/overthink/fantasise/compare]. [Disregard desire]. [Motivate]. [Exercise gratitude]. [Don’t have kids].

[Buy many small gifts]. [Trade some happiness for productivity]. [Set] [happiness goals]

If you've found any other happiness interventions on any website, please share them.
Compendium of methods for going from undesirable to desirable
by  — 2015-06-20T11:33:50.804Z

[Plans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_planned_behavior) predict behaviour. When you notice something on the Not preferable list, [talk to yourself]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_response_model) or [learn]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_education) to [consciously](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_and_Controlled_Processes_%28ACP%29) attend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions) to items on the Preferable [function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_contextualism) list to [distract]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_inhibition) yourself.

Where is my lists?

I'll put it in another post and link to it here if there's enough interest.
Meetup : Frankfurt Meetup Revival
by Aharon — 2015-06-20T11:00:52.793Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt Meetup Revival

WHEN:
29 June 2015 06:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Frankfurt Praunheim, exact address available

Hi!

I'm posting on behalf of Janko (see below)

Contact: Tel:0176 3066 164 (Janko)

less-wrong-frankfurt@googlegroups.com

The meetup takes place in the apartment of the Frankfurt lesswrong core group. The exact adress can be found in our google group or by calling me.

After a long period without meetups and some discussions later we decided to start again and do it more regularly (maybe every two weeks).

We decided to focus more on the core ideas of lesswrong by going through Eliezer's book Rationality: From AI to Zombies

Kai will give a talk about the first chapters:

What do I mean by rationality

Feeling rational

Why truth

What's a bias again

and maybe

Availability

Burdensome Details

Planning Fallacy

Other topics are:

short summaries of interesting books any of us have read

The game Zendo)

hope to see you

Janko

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt Meetup Revival
Meetup : Warsaw June Meetup: TDT, UDT, WTF
by mkf — 2015-06-19T14:50:58.845Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw June Meetup: TDT, UDT, WTF

WHEN:
25 June 2015 06:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Warsaw

We'll try to understand WTF is going on with TDT and UDT and possibly talk about other stuff, as usual (how beautiful are those images generated by Google neural networks and how depiction of math in popculture sucks).

See you in Cafe Lorentz backyard (Muzeum Narodowe, Aleje Jerozolimskie 3).

Event page on FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/941447572573094/
Less Wrong Warsaw group on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwwarsaw/

Discussion article for the meetup : Warsaw June Meetup: TDT, UDT, WTF
New LW Meetup: São Paulo
by FrankAdamek — 2015-06-19T14:48:07.313Z

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

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

São Paulo, Brazil - Meetup at Base Sociedade Colaborativa: 27 June 2015 01:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13: 13 June 2015 01:30PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Cologne Meetup: 13 June 2015 05:00PM
Dallas, TX: 14 June 2015 01:00PM
[Edinburgh] LessWrong Scotland: 28 June 2015 02:00PM
Munich June Meetup: 20 June 2015 03:00PM
[Prague] Rationality meetup in Prague #3: 30 June 2015 06:30PM
San Francisco Meetup: Stories: 14 June 2015 06:15PM

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:

Boston: Trigger action planning: 21 June 2015 03:30PM
Canberra: More Zendo!: 13 June 2015 06:00PM
London regular meetup: 14 June 2015 02:00PM
Moscow: existential risks, case-method, epistemic logic: 14 June 2015 02:00PM
Sydney Meetup - June: 24 June 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - July: 22 July 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - August: 26 August 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 20 June 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Visit Museums: 14 June 2015 03:00PM

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 happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup fe...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Create and Complete
by RobinZ — 2015-06-19T02:57:19.237Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Create and Complete

WHEN:
21 June 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will congregate as usual in the courtyard between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m., to be ready to start at 3:30 p.m.

This week's meeting is a Schelling point for people to work on things. Please bring projects you'd like to work on, help people with theirs, or just come hang out.

Upcoming meetups:

Jun 28: Fun & Games

Jul 5: American History

Jul 12: Fermi Estimates

Jul 19: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Create and Complete
[Link] Self-Representation in Girard’s System U
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2015-06-18T23:22:21.142Z

Self-Representation in Girard’s System U, by Matt Brown and Jens Palsberg:

In 1991, Pfenning and Lee studied whether System F could support a typed self-interpreter. They concluded that typed self-representation for System F “seems to be impossible”, but were able to represent System F in Fω. Further, they found that the representation of Fω requires kind polymorphism, which is outside Fω. In 2009, Rendel, Ostermann and Hofer conjectured that the representation of kind-polymorphic terms would require another, higher form of polymorphism. Is this a case of infinite regress?

We show that it is not and present a typed self-representation for Girard’s System U, the first for a λ-calculus with decidable type checking. System U extends System Fω with kind polymorphic terms and types. We show that kind polymorphic types (i.e. types that depend on kinds) are sufficient to “tie the knot” – they enable representations of kind polymorphic terms without introducing another form of polymorphism. Our self-representation supports operations that iterate over a term, each of which can be applied to a representation of itself. We present three typed self-applicable operations: a self-interpreter that recovers a term from its representation, a predicate that tests the intensional structure of a term, and a typed continuation-passing-style (CPS) transformation – the first typed self-applicable CPS transformation. Our techniques could have applications from verifiably type-preserving metaprograms, to growable typed languages, to more efficient self-interpreters.

Emphasis mine. That seems to be a powerful calculus for writing self-optimizing AI programs in...

See also the lambda-the-ultimate comment thread about it.
In praise of gullibility?
by ahbwramc — 2015-06-18T04:52:09.043Z

I was recently re-reading a piece by Yvain/Scott Alexander called Epistemic Learned Helplessness. It's a very insightful post, as is typical for Scott, and I recommend giving it a read if you haven't already. In it he writes:

When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.
And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn't believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.
And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.
And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable.

He goes on to conclude that the skill of taking ideas seriously - often considered one of the most important traits a rationalist can have - is a dangerous one. After all, it's very easy for arguments to sound convincing even when they're not, and if you're too easily swayed by argument you can end up with some very absurd beliefs (like that Venus is a comet, say).

This post really resonated with me. I've had several experiences similar to what Scott describes, of being trapped between two debaters who both had a convincingness that exceeded my ability to discern truth. And my reaction in those situations was similar to his: eventually, after going through the endless chain of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, changing my mind at each turn, I was forced to throw up my hands and admit that I probably wasn't going to be able to determine the truth of the matter - at least, not without spending a lot more time investigating the different claims than I was willing to. And so in many cases I ended up adopting a sort of semi-principled stance of agnosticism: unless it was a really really important question (in which case I was sort of obligated to do the hard work of investigating the matter to actually figure out the truth), I would just say I don't know when asked for my opinion.

[Non-exhaustive list of areas in which I am currently epistemically helpless: geopolitics (in particular the Israel/Palestine situation), anthropics, nutrition science, population ethics]

All of which is to say: ...
Michigan Meetup Feedback and Planning
by Zubon — 2015-06-18T02:06:12.609Z

Our meetup last weekend was at the downtown Ann Arbor Public Library. There were several comments, requests, and discussion items. This discussion topic goes out to attendees, people who might have wanted to attend but didn't, and members of other meetup groups who have suggestions.

1. Several people mentioned having trouble commenting here on the Less Wrong forums. Some functions are restricted by karma, and if you cannot comment, you cannot accummulate karma.

Have you verified your e-mail address? This is a common stumbling point.

Please try to comment on this post. Restrictions on comments are (moderate certainty) looser than comments on starting posts.

If that does not work, please try to comment on a comment on this post. I will add one specifically for this purpose. Restrictions on comments on comments may be (low certainty) looser than starting new comment threads.

If someone has already troubleshot new users' problems with commenting, please link.

2. Some people felt intimidated about attending. Prominent community members include programmers, physicists, psychiatrists, philosophy professors, Ph.D.s, and other impressive folks who do not start with P like fanfiction writers. Will I be laughed out of the room if I have not read all the Sequences?

No. Not only is there no minimum requirement to attend, as a group, we are *very excited* about explaining things to people. Our writing can be informationally dense, but our habit of linking to long essays is (often) meant to provide context, not to say, "You must read all the dependencies before you are allowed to talk."

And frankly, we are not that intimidating. Being really impressive makes it easy to become prominent, which via availability bias makes us all look impressive, but our average is way lower than that. And the really impressive people will welcome you to the discussion.

So how can we express this in meetup announcements? I promised to draft a phrasing. Please critique and edit in comments.

Everyone is welcome. There is no minimum in terms of age, education, or reading history. There is no minimum contribution to the community nor requirement to speak. You need not be this tall to ride. If you can read this and are interested in the meetup, we want you to come to the meetup.

3. As part of signalling "be comfortable, you are welcome here," I bought some stim toys from Stimtastic and put them ou...
Rationality Reading Group: Part C: Noticing Confusion
by Gram_Stone — 2015-06-18T01:01:27.351Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This week we discuss Part C: Noticing Confusion (pp. 81-114). This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong post where available.

C. Noticing Confusion

20. Focus Your Uncertainty - If you are paid for post-hoc analysis, you might like theories that "explain" all possible outcomes equally well, without focusing uncertainty. But what if you don't know the outcome yet, and you need to have an explanation ready in 100 minutes? Then you want to spend most of your time on excuses for the outcomes that you anticipate most, so you still need a theory that focuses your uncertainty.

21. What Is Evidence? - Evidence is an event connected by a chain of causes and effects to whatever it is you want to learn about. It also has to be an event that is more likely if reality is one way, than if reality is another. If a belief is not formed this way, it cannot be trusted.

22. Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence - For good social reasons, we require legal and scientific evidence to be more than just rational evidence. Hearsay is rational evidence, but as legal evidence it would invite abuse. Scientific evidence must be public and reproducible by everyone, because we want a pool of especially reliable beliefs. Thus, Science is about reproducible conditions, not the history of any one experiment.

23. How Much Evidence Does It Take? - If you are considering one hypothesis out of many, or that hypothesis is more implausible than others, or you wish to know with greater confidence, you will need more evidence. Ignoring this rule will cause you to jump to a belief without enough evidence, and thus be wrong.

24. Einstein's Arrogance - Albert Einstein, when asked what he would do if an experiment disproved his theory of general relativity, responded with "I would feel sorry for [the experimenter]. The theory is correct." While this may sound like arrogance, Einstein doesn't look nearly as bad from a Bayesian perspective. In order to even consider the hypothesis of general relativity in the first place, ...