trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Atlanta, Buffalo, Cambridge MA, Durham, Los Angeles, Munich, New York, Pittsburgh, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-05-11T01:15:43.086Z

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

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Munich Meetup: 04 May 2013 03:00PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 61-63: 04 May 2013 12:30PM
(Pittsburgh) Big Gaming Fun 6: A New Beginning!: 05 May 2013 01:00PM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 05 May 2013 03:00PM
Buffalo LW Sunday Meetup: 05 May 2013 04:00PM
(Los Angeles) Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics): 08 May 2013 07:00PM
Atlanta Lesswrong: Cryonics FAQ & Signing up Party!: 10 May 2013 07:00PM
Moscow, Rationality and Media: 12 May 2013 04:00PM
Atlanta Lesswrong's May Meetup: The Rationality of Social Relationships, Friendship, Love, and Family.: 17 May 2013 07:00PM
Brussels meetup: 18 May 2013 01:00PM
Bratislava lesswrong meetup III: 20 May 2013 06:30PM
Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 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:

Austin, TX: 04 May 2019 01:30PM
[New York] Effective Altruism (Outdoor!) Dinner Discussion: 04 May 2013 05:00PM
[Cambridge MA] How To Do Everything: 05 May 2013 02:00PM
Vienna meetup #3: 18 May 2013 04:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, 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.

Plea...
Meetup : Seattle-Vancouver Kilomeetup
by  — 2013-05-10T18:55:09.335Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle-Vancouver Kilomeetup

WHEN:
18 May 2013 11:54:51AM (-0700)

WHERE:
1600, ne 68 st, Seattle

For May long weekend, I will be going to Seattle to visit jsalvatier.

It's a kilomeetup because it's more than a meetup but not really a megameetup.

I can bring three Vancouver folks (driving).

Topic is still up in the air, but it looks like it will be at jsalvatier's house on saturday.

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle-Vancouver Kilomeetup
Meetup : Vancouver Microeconomics: Fungibility
by  — 2013-05-10T18:44:17.349Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Microeconomics: Fungibility

WHEN:
11 May 2013 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2505 west broadway, vancouver, bc

This week, we will meet and study the CFAR microeconomics I material. I think it's using fungibility to reorganize how you achieve your goals.

We will meet at 15:30 at Benny's Bagels on Saturday.

As usual, join us on our mailing list

Sorry for the short notice, hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Microeconomics: Fungibility
Wikifying the blog list
by Scott Alexander — 2013-05-10T08:18:23.823Z

Konkvistador's excellent List of Blogs by LWers led me to some of my favorite blogs, but is pretty well hidden and gradually becoming obsolete. In order to create an easily-update-able replacement, I have created the wiki page List of Blogs and added most of the blogs from Konkvistador's list. If you have a blog, or you read blogs, please help in the following ways:

-- Add your blog if it's not on there, and if it has updated in the past few months (no dead blogs this time, exceptions for very complete archives of excellent material like Common Sense Atheism in the last section)

-- Add any other blogs you like that are written by LWers or frequently engage with LW ideas

-- Remove your blog if you don't want it on there (I added some prominent critics of LW ideas who might not want to be linked to us)

-- Move your blog to a different category if you don't like the one it's in right now

-- Add a description of your blog, or change the one that already exists

-- Change the name you're listed by (I defaulted to people's LW handles)

-- Bold the name of your blog if it updates near-daily, has a large readership/commentership, and/or gets linked to on LW a lot

-- Improve formatting

Somebody more familiar with the Less Wrong twittersphere might want to do something similar to Grognor's Less Wrong on Twitter
[SEQ RERUN] Go Forth and Create the Art
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-10T05:04:04.503Z

Today's post, Go Forth and Create the Art! was originally published on 23 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

I've developed primarily the art of epistemic rationality, in particular, the arts required for advanced cognitive reductionism... arts like distinguishing fake explanations from real ones and avoiding affective death spirals. There is much else that needs developing to create a craft of rationality - fighting akrasia; coordinating groups; teaching, training, verification, and becoming a proper experimental science; developing better introductory literature... And yet it seems to me that there is a beginning barrier to surpass before you can start creating high-quality craft of rationality, having to do with virtually everyone who tries to think lofty thoughts going instantly astray, or indeed even realizing that a craft of rationality exists and that you ought to be studying cognitive science literature to create it. It's my hope that my writings, as partial as they are, will serve to surpass this initial barrier. The rest I leave to you.

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 Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism, 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.
Meetup : LessWrong Ottawa
by Cyan — 2013-05-09T18:18:34.466Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Ottawa

WHEN:
13 May 2013 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1015 Wellington St W

If you're in Ottawa, read LessWrong, and want to meet others like you, come on out to AlphaSoul Café!

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Ottawa
[SEQ RERUN] Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-09T05:46:24.707Z

Today's post, Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism was originally published on 21 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves, and so it has been since the days of Eternal September. Anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter. A community with internal politics will treat any attempt to impose moderation as a coup attempt (since internal politics seem of far greater import than invading barbarians). In rationalist communities this is probably an instance of underconfidence - mildly competent moderators are probably quite trustworthy to wield the banhammer. On Less Wrong, the community is the moderator (via karma) and you will need to trust yourselves enough to wield the power and keep the garden clear.

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 Sin of Underconfidence, 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.
Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-05-08T20:37:32.096Z

In an erratum to my previous post on Pascalian wagers, it has been plausibly argued to me that all the roads to nuclear weapons, including plutonium production from U-238, may have bottlenecked through the presence of significant amounts of Earthly U235 (apparently even the giant heap of unrefined uranium bricks in Chicago Pile 1 was, functionally, empty space with a scattering of U235 dust). If this is the case then Fermi's estimate of a "ten percent" probability of nuclear weapons may have actually been justifiable because nuclear weapons were almost impossible (at least without particle accelerators) - though it's not totally clear to me why "10%" instead of "2%" or "50%" but then I'm not Fermi.

We're all familiar with examples of correct scientific skepticism, such as about Uri Geller and hydrino theory. We also know many famous examples of scientists just completely making up their pessimism, for example about the impossibility of human heavier-than-air flight. Before this occasion I could only think offhand of one other famous example of erroneous scientific pessimism that was not in defiance of the default extrapolation of existing models, namely Lord Kelvin's careful estimate from multiple sources that the Sun was around sixty million years of age. This was wrong, but because of new physics - though you could make a case that new physics might well be expected in this case - and there was some degree of contrary evidence from geology, as I understand it - and that's not exactly the same as technological skepticism - but still. Where there are sort of two, there may be more. Can anyone name a third example of erroneous scientific pessimism whose error was, to the same degree, not something a smarter scientist could've seen coming?

I ask this with some degree of trepidation, since by most standards of reasoning essentially anything is "justifiable" if you try hard enough to find excuses and then not question them further, so I'll phrase it more carefully this way: I am looking for a case of erroneous scientific pessimism, preferably about technological impossibility or extreme difficulty, where it seems clear that the inverse case for possibility would've been weaker if carried out strictly with contemporary knowledge, after exploring points and counterpoints. (So that relaxed standards ...
[SEQ RERUN] The Sin of Underconfidence
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-08T04:51:43.947Z

Today's post, The Sin of Underconfidence was originally published on 20 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When subjects know about a bias or are warned about a bias, overcorrection is not unheard of as an experimental result. That's what makes a lot of cognitive subtasks so troublesome - you know you're biased but you're not sure how much, and if you keep tweaking you may overcorrect. The danger of underconfidence (overcorrecting for overconfidence) is that you pass up opportunities on which you could have been successful; not challenging difficult enough problems; losing forward momentum and adopting defensive postures; refusing to put the hypothesis of your inability to the test; losing enough hope of triumph to try hard enough to win. You should ask yourself "Does this way of thinking make me stronger, or weaker?"

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 My Way, 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.
Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-05-08T00:43:17.403Z

Followup to: Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities, The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy, Being Half-Rational About Pascal's Wager Is Even Worse

Short form: Pascal's Muggle

tl;dr: If you assign superexponentially infinitesimal probability to claims of large impacts, then apparently you should ignore the possibility of a large impact even after seeing huge amounts of evidence. If a poorly-dressed street person offers to save 10(10^100) lives (googolplex lives) for $5 using their Matrix Lord powers, and you claim to assign this scenario less than 10-(10^100) probability, then apparently you should continue to believe absolutely that their offer is bogus even after they snap their fingers and cause a giant silhouette of themselves to appear in the sky. For the same reason, any evidence you encounter showing that the human species could create a sufficiently large number of descendants - no matter how normal the corresponding laws of physics appear to be, or how well-designed the experiments which told you about them - must be rejected out of hand. There is a possible reply to this objection using Robin Hanson's anthropic adjustment against the probability of large impacts, and in this case you will treat a Pascal's Mugger as having decision-theoretic importance exactly proportional to the Bayesian strength of evidence they present you, without quantitative dependence on the number of lives they claim to save. This however corresponds to an odd mental state which some, such as myself, would find unsatisfactory. In the end, however, I cannot see any better candidate for a prior than having a leverage penalty plus a complexity penalty on the prior probability of scenarios.

In late 2007 I coined the term "Pascal's Mugging" to describe a problem which seemed to me to arise when combining conventional decision theory and conventional epistemology in the obvious way. On conventional epistemology, the prior probability of hypotheses diminishes exponentially with their complexity; if it would take 20 bits to specify a hypothesis, then its prior probability receives a 2-20 penalty factor and it will require evidence with a likelihood ratio of 1,048,576:1 - evidence which we are 1048576 times more likely to see if the theory is true, than if it is false - to make us assign it around 50-50 credibil...
Testing lords over foolish lords: gaming Pascal's mugging
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-05-07T18:47:07.412Z

There are two separate reasons to reject Pascal's mugger's demands. The first one is if you have a system of priors or a method of updating that precluded you from going along with the deal. The second reason is that if it becomes known that you accept Pascal's mugger situations, people are going to seek you out and take advantage of you.

I think it's useful to keep the two reasons very separate. If Pascal's mugger was a force of nature - a new theory of physics, maybe - then the case for keeping to expected utility maximisation may be quite strong. But when there are opponents, everything gets much more complicated - which is why game theory has thousands of published research papers, while expected utility maximisation is taught in passing in other subjects.

But does this really affect the argument? It means that someone approaching you with a Pascal's mugging today is much less likely to be honest (and much more likely to have simply read about it on Less Wrong). But that's a relatively small shift in probability, in an area where the number are already so huge/tiny.

Nevertheless, it seems that "reject Pascal's muggings (and other easily exploitable gambles)" may be a reasonable position to take, even if you agreed with the expected utility calculation. First, of course, you would gain that you reject all the human attempts to exploit you. But there's another dynamic: the "Lords of the Matrix" are players too. They propose certain deals to you for certain reasons, and fail to propose them to you for other reasons. We can model three kinds of lords:

The foolish lords, who will offer a Pascal's mugging no matter what they predict your reaction will be.

The sadistic lords, who will offer a deal you won't accept.

The testing lords, who will offer a deal you will accept, but push you to the edge of your logic and value system.

Precommitting to rejecting the mugging burns you only with the foolish lords. The sadistic lords won't offer an acceptable deal anyway, and the testing lords will offer you a better deal if you've made such a precommitment. So the gain is the loss with (some of) the foolish lords versus a gain with the testing lords. Depending on your probability distribution over the lord types, this can be a reasonable thing to do, even if you would accept the impersonal version of the mugging.
Open Thread: how do you look for information?
by Emile — 2013-05-07T17:22:52.299Z

There have been a couple discussion posts on this, but let's make it general and collect our tips in one place. It's also a good way to encourage each other at getting better at this - looking for info more often and more efficiently.

So, if you want to find something out, where do you look, and how? Who do you ask?
Meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 3
by therufs — 2013-05-07T14:30:37.725Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 3

WHEN:
09 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 E Geer St, Durham NC 27701

We'll be wrapping up our Living Luminously discussion with:

Highlights and Shadows: http://lesswrong.com/lw/209/highlights_and_shadows/

As you uncover and understand new things about yourself, it's useful to endorse and repudiate your sub-components, and then encourage or interrupt them, respectively.

City of Lights: http://lesswrong.com/lw/20r/city_of_lights/

It's a handy trick to represent yourself as multiple agents when dealing with tensions in yourself.

Lampshading: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21l/lampshading/

When you have models, test them - but rig your experiments!

We'll have informal discussion and beverage procurement starting at 7 and official discussion from 7:30-9:00 or so. Afterward, we often adjourn to an adjacent establishment (probably Fullsteam) for further beverages and social activity.

RSVP on the listserv [http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw]. If you'd like transportation assistance, let us know there or here.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 3
[LINK] Antibiotic seemingly improves decision-making in the presence of attractive women.
by iconreforged — 2013-05-07T14:26:04.604Z

This study seems to show that minocycline helps to resist placing too much trust in attractive women.

Recently, minocycline, a tetracycline antibiotic, has been reported to improve symptoms of psychiatric disorders and to facilitate sober decision-making in healthy human subjects. Here we show that minocycline also reduces the risk of the 'honey trap' during an economic exchange. Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without careful evaluation of their trustworthiness, resulting in betrayal by the female. In this experiment, healthy male participants made risky choices (whether or not to trust female partners, identified only by photograph, who had decided in advance to exploit the male participants). The results show that trusting behaviour in male participants significantly increased in relation to the perceived attractiveness of the female partner, but that attractiveness did not impact trusting behaviour in the minocycline group. Animal studies have shown that minocycline inhibits microglial activities. Therefore, this minocycline effect may shed new light on the unknown roles microglia play in human mental activities.
Googling is the first step. Consider adding scholarly searches to your arsenal.
by Tenoke — 2013-05-07T13:30:38.019Z

Related to: Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently

There has been a slightly increased focus on the use of search engines lately. I agree that using Google is an important skill - in fact I believe that for years I have came across as significantly more knowledgeable than I actually am just by quickly looking for information when I am asked something.

However, There are obviously some types of information which are more accessible by Google and some which are less accessible. For example distinct characteristics, specific dates of events etc. are easily googleable1 and you can expect to quickly find accurate information on the topic. On the other hand, if you want to find out more ambiguous things such as the effects of having more friends on weight or even something like the negative and positive effects of a substance - then googling might leave you with some contradicting results, inaccurate information or at the very least it will likely take you longer to get to the truth.

I have observed that in the latter case (when the topic is less 'googleable') most people, even those knowledgeable of search engines and 'science' will just stop searching for information after not finding anything on Google or even before2 unless they are actually willing to devote a lot of time to find it. This is where my recommendation comes - consider doing a scholarly search like the one provided by Google Scholar.

And, no, I am not suggesting that people should read a bunch of papers on every topic that they discuss. By using some simple heuristics we can easily gain a pretty good picture of the relevant information on a large variety of topics in a few minutes (or less in some cases). The heuristics are as follows:

1. Read only or mainly the abstracts. This is what saves you time but gives you a lot of information in return and this is the key to the most cost-effective way to quickly find information from a scholary search. Often you wouldn't have immediate access to the paper anyway, however you can almost always read the abstract. And if you follow the other heuristics you will still be looking at relatively 'accurate' information most of the time. On the other hand, if you are looking for more information and have access to the full paper then the discussion+conclusion section are usually the second best thing to look at; a...