trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Megameetup Announcement: Boston, July 13-14
by ModusPonies — 2013-05-14T17:42:29.910Z

On the weekend of July 13-14, the Boston community will be hosting a megameetup. Everyone who can make the trip is strongly encouraged to come. Details are being worked out, but I expect to have presentations, pairwise discussion, a prediction market game, and (weather permitting) running around outside.

If you think you might come, please leave a comment and a confidence estimate. For example, if you would bring two guests and are 75% certain you will come, your comment might contain "me +2, 75%." If you need a space to crash at night, send me a PM.
The Power of Pomodoros
by elharo — 2013-05-14T10:36:25.710Z

Until recently, I hadn't paid much attention to Pomodoro, though I've heard of it for a few years now. "Uncle Bob" Martin seemed to like it, and he's usually worth paying attention to in such matters. However, it mostly seemed to me like a way of organizing a variety of tasks and avoiding procrastination, and I've never had much trouble with that.

However after the January CFAR workshop suggested it in passing, I decided to give it a try; and I realized I had it all wrong. Pomodoros aren't (for me) a means of avoiding procrastination or dividing time among projects. They're a way of blasting through Ugh fields.

The Pomodoro technique is really simple compared to more involved systems like Getting Things Done (GTD). Here it is:

Set a timer for 25 minutes

Work on one thing for that 25 minutes, nothing else. No email, no phone calls, no snack breaks, no Twitter, no IM, etc.

Take a five minute break

Pick a new project, or the same project, if you prefer.

Repeat

That's pretty much it. You can buy a book or a special timer for this; but there's really nothing else to it. It takes longer to explain the name than the technique. (When Francesco Cirillo invented this technique in the 1980s, he was using an Italian kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato.)

I got interested in Pomodoro when I realized I could use it to clean my office/desk/apartment. David Allen's GTD system appealed to me, but I could never maintain it, and the 2+ days it needed to get all the way to a clean desk was always a big hurdle to vault. However, spending 25 minutes at a time, followed by a break and another project seemed a lot more manageable.

I tried it, and it worked. My desk stack quickly shrunk, not to empty, but at least to a place where an accidental elbow swing no longer launched avalanches of paper onto the floor as I typed.

So I decided to try Pomodoro on my upcoming book. The publisher was using a new authoring system and template that I was unfamiliar with. There were a dozen little details to figure out about the new system--how to check out files in git, how to create a section break, whether to use hard or soft wrapping, etc.--and I just worked through them one by one. 25 minutes later I'd knocked them all out, and was familiar enough with the new system to begin writing in earnest. I didn't know everything about the software, but I knew enough that it w...
Meetup : Berkeley: Munchkinism
by Nisan — 2013-05-14T04:25:21.643Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Munchkinism

WHEN:
15 May 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

This week's meetup is about Munchkinism:

"A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells."

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Come and bring your strange and zany ideas for exploiting the structure of reality at the expense of the Protestant work ethic. I suggest you look at this recent Less Wrong thread on Munchkinism beforehand, although it is not required:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/

The meetup will begin on Wednesday at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Munchkinism
[LINK] Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
by  — 2013-05-13T18:27:34.226Z

A new popular science book on existential risks and mass extinctions from Annalee Newitz, the founding editor of io9.com

It probably won't display the same rigour as Global Catastrophic Risks (Bostrom, Cirkovic et al.), but that was published five years ago and is a bit academic. A new book written in a popular, journalistic way seems pretty appealing - it might even be a good introduction for family/friends. Anyway I'm looking forward to reading it, and I expect enough other LWers will be interested in this news to warrant the post.

If anyone has any other existential risk book recommendations, please comment.

Tumblr

Amazon

Some reviews on goodreads
The autopilot problem: driving without experience
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-05-13T12:42:57.106Z

Consider a mixed system, in which an automated system is paired with a human overseer. The automated system handles most of the routine tasks, while the overseer is tasked with looking out for errors and taking over in extreme or unpredictable circumstances. Examples of this could be autopilots, cruise control, GPS direction finding, high-frequency trading – in fact nearly every automated system has this feature, because they nearly all rely on humans "keeping an eye on things".

But often the human component doesn't perform as well as it should do – doesn't perform as well as it did before part of the system was automated. Cruise control can impair driver performance, leading to more accidents. GPS errors can take people far more off course than following maps did. When the autopilot fails, pilots can crash their planes in rather conventional conditions. Traders don't understand why their algorithms misbehave, or how to stop this.

There seems to be three factors at work here:

Firstly, if the automation performs flawlessly, the overseers will become complacent, blindly trusting the instruments and failing to perform basic sanity checks. They will have far less procedural understanding of what's actually going on, since they have no opportunity to exercise their knowledge.

This goes along with a general deskilling of the overseer. When the autopilot controls the plane for most of its trip, pilots get far less hands-on experience of actually flying the plane. Paradoxically, less efficient automation can help with both these problems: if the system fails 10% of the time, the overseer will watch and understand it closely.

And when the automation does fail, the overseer will typically lack situational awareness of what's going on. All they know is that something extraordinary has happened, and they may have the (possibly flawed) readings of various instruments to guide them – but they won't have a good feel for what happened to put them in that situation.

So, when the automation fails, the overseer is generally dumped into an emergency situation, whose nature they are going to have to deduce, and, using skills that have atrophied, they are going to have to take on the task of the automated system that has never failed before and that they have never had to truly understand.

And they'll typically get blamed for getting it wrong....
[SEQ RERUN] Final Words
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-13T03:49:52.368Z

Today's post, Final Words was originally published on 27 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The conclusion of the Beisutsukai series.

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 Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories, 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.
Unlimited Pomodoro Works: My Scheduling System
by Intrism — 2013-05-13T00:36:14.487Z

Related: The Power of Pomodoros, Working Hurts Less Than Procrastinating, Cached Procrastination

Follow-up To: Reinforcement and Short-Term Rewards as Anti-Akratic

I'm still working on cleaning up my scheduling system for release, like I mentioned in the comments to my last post. However, I managed to forget the end of my college semester, which is taking up a distressing amount of my time. So, although progress is being made, I'm not done quite yet and probably won't be until sometime after my final exams end on the 16th. In the meantime, I'm going to explain my scheduling system and some of the modifications I've made to it.

My system is derived from the Pomodoro Technique. In it, work is separated into individual 25-minute blocks also called "Pomodoros." To ensure that blocks last for the full 25 minutes, they're timed; once the timer has started, the block should not be uninterrupted until the timer runs out. There's a short break between each Pomodoro; after several Pomodoros, there's a longer break.

The biggest benefit I've noticed from using my system is in fixing my problems with task switching. When I was doing something I didn't much like, I used to think about doing something else almost constantly; it usually wasn't long before I stopped working to do something else. The original Pomodoro Method solved this problem by forcing me to wait until the timer had expired to stop working. However, I had another problem with task switching that the original Pomodoro System didn't touch. When I was slacking off, I could sit contented for hours without doing anything else; I found it hard to start working or stop slacking off. That's where my changes came in. These problems are both very similar; in this one, I change tasks too infrequently, where in the other, I changed tasks too often. It stands to reason, then, that they could both be solved the same way: by timing them. So, in my system, everything I do is treated like work is under the Pomodoro System, even slacking off.

That's the biggest change my system makes: everything is a block (or a Pomodoro), and I'm in a block all the time. However, my system is more than just a few rule tweaks. My system is computerized; I use a web application for my block timer, as well as for managing my task list and the various other add-ons my system has. I've also made a number of more subtle decis...
How to calibrate your political beliefs
by Michael Wiebe — 2013-05-12T20:09:21.466Z

So you're playing the credence game, and you’re getting a pretty good sense of which level of confidence to assign to your beliefs. Later, when you’re discussing politics, you wonder how you can calibrate your political beliefs as well (beliefs of the form "policy X will result in outcome Y"). Here there's no easy way to assess whether a belief is true or false, in contrast to the trivia questions in the credence game. Moreover, it’s very easy to become mindkilled by politics. What do you do?

In the credence game, you get direct feedback that allows you to learn about your internal proxies for credence, i.e., emotional and heuristic cues about how much to trust yourself. With political beliefs, however, there is no such feedback. One workaround would be to assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you have read n academic papers on the subject. For example, only assign 90% confidence if you've read ten academic papers.

To account for mindkilling, use a second criterion: assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you are ideologically Turing-capable (i.e., able to pass an ideological Turing test). As a proxy for an actual ideological Turing test, you should be able to accurately restate your opponent’s position, or be able to state the strongest counterargument to your position.

In sum, to calibrate your political beliefs, only assign high confidence to beliefs which satisfy extremely demanding epistemic standards.
Computer Science and Software Engineering
by JMiller — 2013-05-12T17:01:02.724Z

Hello,

I'm not sure if this should be posted here. If it should go in the open thread please let me know. I figured this could be an interesting conversation, since many people on lesswrong seem to be programmers.

I am currently researching the difference/ pros-cons of pursuing a computer science degree versus a software engineering degree. By "software engineering" I mean an accredited 4 year engineering program that allows a student to become a p.eng. My understanding is that computer science is more theoretical and mathematical and studies things like algorithms, data strictures, complexity and computability, while engineering is concerned with the practical design,development, testing, and production of software.

I'm wondering what kind of jobs each degree can lead to, and if one is more optimal than the other in terms of:

1) short term salary

2) long term salary

3) promotability (job ladder climbing)

I'm sure there are more useful and relevent questions which I do not even know to ask. If there is anything you think might be a good question that others (or you) can answer, please let me know and I'll add it into the OP.

Thanks!
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
by Maelin — 2013-05-12T13:17:40.561Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup

WHEN:
17 May 2013 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
5 / 52 Leicester St, Carlton 3053

Melbourne's next regular social meetup will occur on Friday 17th May 2013 at our usual location. All welcome from 6:30pm for a 7:00pm official start, but feel free to arrive later as circumstances require.

Our social meetups are relaxed, informal events where we play card and board games, chat about topics of interest, and occasionally play parlour games like Mafia or Resistance if there's interest. The social meetup is a great first meetup to attend if you haven't come to one before - we're always happy to welcome newcomers.

We generally organise some kind of take-away food for dinner for those that would like some. Snacks will also be provided, BYO drinks.

Press the number 5 button at the front door, or call me (Richard) on 0421231789, and we'll buzz you in. For any questions, feel free to post on our Google Group or send me an SMS during the week.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
LW Study Hall - 2 Month Update
by Lachouette — 2013-05-12T10:03:12.547Z

Comment reposted from (link) for exposure

Two months have passed and I’m glad to say the LW Study Hall on tinychat is still active and alive. Since judging from the comments it kind of looks like we’ve moved on from tinychat, a review like this might be useful for anyone who hasn’t been there yet.

My first sessions on the chat were driven more by curiosity than anything else since I didn’t believe it would be really effective for me – I’ve felt that I procrastinate too much, but it never occurred to me that working together with other people might make me more effective. I was proven wrong.

Since those first sessions I’ve been online almost every day and got to see different people come and go, and some people stay. It didn’t take long for me to feel like a part of the “chat community”, and to feel motivated to work to see the regulars more often, some of which I might even consider friends now. The atmosphere is friendly, people make an active effort to integrate newcomers in the “community” and I have yet to see an argument that isn’t constructive. Though the breaks are a bit flexible, people usually don’t overstretch it and it’s generally good practice not to chat during a working phase. More introverted people can participate without taking part in the chat much and without broadcasting video.

So, what makes this chat so effective in combating procrastination? Pomodoros are the “flow” of the chat. Since you’re working with other people, you are much more likely to stick to the pomodoro cycle than if you set those constraints for yourself. That doesn’t just mean you keep the breaks relatively short, but you also don’t work too long. I find that if I work alone, I tend to keep at it for longer than I can keep concentrated. When I do take a break I don’t really have anything else to do, so I might start to procrastinate, leading to a work cycle where the “breaks” can be as long as the working phases. This has been my main issue with structuring my working day, and I was more surprised than I probably should have been to see that problem solved by working in a group. Judging from my own experiences and those of others I believe everyone struggling with akrasia should at least try if it works for him/her. For those who

...
Meetup : Washington DC Munchinkry meetup
by rocurley — 2013-05-12T00:17:43.442Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Munchinkry meetup

WHEN:
12 May 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

Meet to talk about interesting lifehacky things!

(Credit to Maia for the idea for this one).

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Munchinkry meetup
Keeping Choices Donation Neutral
by jefftk — 2013-05-11T12:58:07.286Z

Every dollar I spend on myself is a dollar that could go much farther if spent on other people. I can give someone else a year of healthy life for about $50 [1] and there's no way $50 can do anywhere near that much to help me. I could go through my life constantly weighing every purchase against the good it could do, but this would make me miserable. So how do I accept that other people need my money more without giving up on being happy myself?

For me the key is to make most choices donation neutral. As money comes in I divide it into "money to give to the most effective charity" and "money to spend as I wish". How to divide it is a hard and distressing choice, but it's one I only have to make once a year. Then when deciding to buy something (socks, rent, phone, instruments, food) I know it's money that isn't getting given away regardless, so I don't have to feel constantly guilty about making tradeoffs with people's lives.

Julia and I have been using this system since 2009. [2] It's mostly worked well, but it's needed some additions. The main issue is that declining to spend money on yourself isn't the only way to trade off benefits to other people against costs to yourself. For example you could decide to be vegan, donate a kidney, or cash out your vacation days and give away the money. For ones that generate money directly (cashing out vacation) the solution is simple: that money goes into the pool that can't be given away. For ones that don't generate money you would convert them into money via the good you think they do. Take the most effective charity you know about, figure out how much you would need to give to them in order to have the same positive effect, and then move that amount of money from donations to self-spending. For example, I might estimate that giving $100 to the AMF does about as much good as being vegan for a year, so if I decided to go ahead with being vegan I would decrease my annual donations by $100 and allocate another $100 to spend on myself.

I may or may not decide that having another $X to spend on myself is better than sacrifice Y, but whichever way I decide I'm working to make myself as happy as possible for a given amount of doing good. It's not a choice that has additional lives saved weighing on either side of it.

(This doesn't deal with a potentially important category: things that only make you somewhat unhappy. ...
[SEQ RERUN] Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-11T03:38:46.104Z

Today's post, Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories was originally published on 25 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Practical advice is genuinely much, much more useful when it's backed up by concrete experimental results, causal models that are actually true, or valid math that is validly interpreted. (Listed in increasing order of difficulty.) Stripping out the theories and giving the mere advice alone wouldn't have nearly the same impact or even the same message; and oddly enough, translating experiments and math into practical advice seems to be a rare niche activity relative to academia. If there's a distinctive LW style, this is it.

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 Go Forth and Create the Art, 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.
new meetup policy: promote posts only with first-time meetups
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-05-11T02:46:05.869Z

I propose for comment the following alteration of the LW meetup promotion policy:

* The weekly meetup roundup will contain, in its title, only the names of cities which have not previously had an LW meetup, or which have not had an LW meetup in the last year.

* On occasions where no such name appears in the title, the meetup roundup post will still appear in Main but will not be Promoted.

* Cities having a first-time meetup, or where a new meetup is being started by a new organizer after a hiatus, should have additional info about that meetup and its organizer appearing in a prominent, top-of-post position in the roundup post.

This is intended to make it easier for new meetups to gain attention, by requiring hopeful LWers awaiting a new meetup in their area to pay attention to a smaller number of promoted posts and a smaller number of cities appearing in the titles of Main posts.