trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : First LW Meetup in Warsaw
by David Althaus — 2014-03-22T16:41:08.015Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First LW Meetup in Warsaw

WHEN: 30 March 2014 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE: Cafe Kulturalna, Plac Defilad 1, 00-901 Warszawa

As far as I can tell, there never has been a Lesswrong meetup in Warsaw, although Warsaw has almost 2 million inhabitants.

I'm currently visiting my girlfriend in Warsaw and we would like to meet folks who are also interested in Lesswrong and related topics.

Regarding the content and structure of the meetup: I would suggest that at first everyone proposes some discussion topics he or she is interested in (e.g. epistemic rationality, effective altruism, far future/FAI, practical life tips, etc.) and then we choose the most popular ones. Simple socializing and getting to know each other is of course also great!

Please leave a comment if you're thinking about attending or are interested in a LW meetup in Warsaw, even if you can't attend this one.

And remember, (almost) everyone is welcome, especially newbies!

(In case you can't find the place or something, here's our number: 0048 693 603 770)

ETA: The meetup will take place at 15:00 PM, local time.

Link to Facebook-Event

Discussion article for the meetup : First LW Meetup in Warsaw
Meetup : Munich Meetup
by cadac — 2014-03-22T14:33:44.827Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup

WHEN:
06 April 2014 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Theresienstraße 41, 80333 München

Since our last meetup's format seemed to work pretty well, April's meetup is going to be not too different. We have one or two short talks planned, one of them will be about Near/Far effects. Afterwards we'll move on to free discussion and maybe Zendo. We're planning to meet outside the mathematics building at the LMU. Depending on the weather, we'll stay outside or occupy a free room inside the math department. Whoever brings food for the group is awesome. :) It goes without saying that newcomers are very welcome.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup
Meetup : London Social Meetups - 23/03 and 30/03
by Tenoke — 2014-03-22T12:21:42.893Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetups - 23/03 and 30/03

WHEN:
23 March 2014 02:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Africa House, 64 Shakespeare's Head, Africa House, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG, UK

LessWrong London is having another Social Meetup this Sunday (23/03) and one on the Sunday after that (30/03) at 2:00 PM. We are meeting at our usual venue - The Shakespeare's Head by Holborn tube station.

Note: If the Weather forecast for the 30th is good, the location for the Meetup on that day might be changed to a park so make sure to check for comments here or on our mailing list prior to coming.

There is no fixed topic of discussion nor is there anything planned so be prepared for anything. There will be a sign identifying us (hopefully one with a paperclip) and if you have any problems feel free to contact me by e-mail - Tenoke[at]Tenoke.com or by phone - 07425168803.

If you want more information about the meetup or anything else come by our mailing list or alternatively to the facebook group

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social Meetups - 23/03 and 30/03
Effective Altruism Summit 2014
by Ben_LandauTaylor — 2014-03-21T20:30:14.760Z

In 2013, the Effective Altruism movement came together for a week-long Summit in the San Francisco Bay Area. Attendees included leaders and members from all the major effective altruist organizations, as well as effective altruists not affiliated with any organization. People shared strategies, techniques, and projects, and left more inspired and more effective than when they arrived.

More than ever, rationality and existential risk reduction are part of the Effective Altruism movement, and so I'm glad to announce to LessWrong the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit.

Following last year’s success, this year’s Effective Altruism Summit will comprise two events. The Summit will be a conference-style event held on the weekend of August 2-3, preceded by a smaller Effective Altruism Retreat from July 27-August 1. To accommodate our expanding movement and its many new projects, this year’s Summit will be bigger than the last. The Retreat will be similar to last year’s EA Summit, providing a more intimate setting for attendees to discuss, to learn, and to form lasting connections with each other and with the community.

We’re now accepting applications for the 2014 events. Whether you’re a veteran organizer trying to keep up with Effective Altruism’s most exciting developments, or you're looking to get involved with a community of people who use rationality to improve the world, we’d love for you to join us.
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-03-21T16:07:24.268Z

This summary was posted to LW main on March 14th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Frankfurt: 23 March 2014 02:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 23 March 2014 04:00PM
Israel Less Wrong Meetup - Productivity Hacks: 20 March 2014 07:00PM
Sydney Meetup - March: 26 March 2014 06:30PM
Urbana-Champaign: Discussion: 16 March 2014 02:00PM

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:

[Berlin] Community Weekend in Berlin: 11 April 2014 04:00PM
Brussels - all fun and games: 19 April 2014 12:00PM
Canberra: Meta-meetup + meditation: 28 March 2014 06:00PM
Melbourne Social Meetup: 21 March 2014 06:30PM
NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6: 05 April 2014 11:00AM
Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day: 20 April 2014 02:45PM
Vienna Meetup : 15 March 2014 03:00PM
Washington DC Short Talks Meetup: 16 March 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, 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 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 feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

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

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-03-21T16:06:58.541Z

This summary was posted to LW main on March 21st. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Detroit/Ann Arbor - Memory Workshop: 23 March 2014 01:00PM
Frankfurt: 23 March 2014 02:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 23 March 2014 04:00PM
Moscow, Chaotic Meet up: 23 March 2014 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - March: 26 March 2014 06:30PM
Urbana-Champaign: Lose Arguments to Win Fabulous Prizes: 23 March 2014 02:00PM
Utrecht: Famine, Affluence and Morality: 22 March 2014 07:21PM

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: 22 March 2025 01:30PM
[Berlin] Community Weekend in Berlin: 11 April 2014 04:00PM
Brussels - all fun and games: 19 April 2014 12:00PM
Canberra: Meta-meetup + meditation: 28 March 2014 06:00PM
NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6: 05 April 2014 11:00AM
Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day: 20 April 2014 02:45PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, 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 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 feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

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

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to...
A capabilities approach to personal development
by Stabilizer — 2014-03-21T11:03:18.683Z

Warning: Rather obvious things will be said below. (EDIT: May not be so obvious after all. Sorry.)

The capabilities approach is an important theoretical framework in political and moral philosophy, often used in the context of development and welfare economics, pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The principal insight I want to import from the capabilities approach is that the main goal of any development exercise should be to increase the capabilities of individuals. In other words, I may not be able to tell what goals you would like to achieve, but I can make a reasonable guess that capabilities like health, access to jobs, access to food-supply etc. would help you achieve what you want to achieve. The capabilities approach doesn't necessarily privilege a life-script.

There are three main categories of capabilities: personal, social and environmental. Let me illustrate with an example from the Stanford Encyclopedia article. Suppose you own a bike. This in itself isn't very useful. You value the bike because you can use it to move around. But in order to be able to use it fruitfully, you need a degree of all three categories of capabilities: (1) Personal capabilities: You must know how to ride a bike. The quality of your health determines how far you go. Your bike must be in good condition. (2) Social capabilities: It should be socially acceptable to ride a bike; for example you may live in a country where women aren't allowed to ride bikes. (3) Environmental capabilities: You need to have decent roads to ride the bike. You must have access to bike repair shops. It must be safe to ride a bike.

Another major insight of the capabilities approach is that capabilities can combine and are inter-dependent. Thus, there can be a combinatorial explosion in actual opportunities for each extra capability acquired. Sticking with the bike example, suppose you also know how to drive a car and own a car; suppose your car can carry your bike; suppose you have good fitness; and suppose you have access to wilderness. Now, you can take your bike to the wilderness and bike around and enjoy the nature. This capability in turn allows a great new mode of socialization. Further, you have a capability to further improve your fitness.

My goal here is to apply this approach to personal development. First let me make a tentative list of what capabilities seem worth a...
Procrastinating because of uncertainty
by JonahS — 2014-03-21T00:14:59.916Z

Procrastination accompanied by guilt comes from an internal conflict about whether one should do the activity. Sometimes the conflict comes from partly wanting to cater to one's present self (by engaging in more gratifying short-term activities) and partly wanting to cater to one's future self, or to others (by doing something that's less rewarding in the short term but that will pay for others, or pay off in the long run).

But this is often not the only element present when one procrastinates and is guilty. Often another element present is uncertainty as to whether the activity is what one should be doing, even when considering the indirect consequences. This can be subconscious: one might consciously think "I know I should be doing X, but I just can't motivate myself to do it" while simultaneously believing on some level that one shouldn't be doing X (even when considering indirect consequences). The conscious self isn't always right in these situations – sometimes rather than trying to overcome procrastination, one should instead abandon the activity that one is procrastinating, for example, when the activity is neither interesting nor important. The subconscious self isn't always right either: sometimes it's operating based in false information or insufficient reflection.

If one can recognize and resolve the uncertainty, this can increase one's motivation to do the work if it's the right thing to be doing, and help one decide not to do the work if it's not the right thing to be doing. So determining whether there's uncertainty and trying to resolve it can have high value.

It's not always possible to resolve the uncertainty. When this is the case, recognizing that there is uncertainty may not be helpful. Unfortunately, uncertainty can be demotivating even when completing the task is expected value maximizing. The question of how to stay motivated in the face of uncertainty is an important one that I don't know the answer to in general.

Below, I give some examples of beliefs that can coexist with "I know that I should do the work" that give rise to uncertainty, together with commentary. Some of the beliefs described overlap in character, or can be present simultaneously.

A belief that it's more effective to do the work later on

Sometimes there are higher priority things to do (even if one should do the work later on). Sometimes one is in an unusually poo...
[Link] IBM to set Watson loose on cancer genome data
by TylerJay — 2014-03-20T16:48:31.187Z

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/ibm-to-set-watson-loose-on-cancer-genome-data/

Can anyone more informed about Watson or Machine Learning in general comment on this application? Specifically, I'm interested in an explanation of this part:

[...] the National Institutes of Health has compiled lists of biochemical pathways—signaling networks and protein interactions—and placed them in machine-readable formats. Once those were imported, Watson's text analysis abilities were set loose on the NIH's PubMed database, which contains abstracts of nearly every paper published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals.

Over time, Watson will develop its own sense of what sources it looks at are consistently reliable. Royyuru told Ars that, if the team decides to, it can start adding the full text of articles and branch out to other information sources. Between the known pathways and the scientific literature, however, IBM seems to think that Watson has a good grip on what typically goes on inside cells.

It sounds like Watson will be trained through some standard formatted input data and then it's going to read plaintext articles and draw conclusions about them? It sounds like they're anticipating that Watson will be able to tell which studies are "good" studies as well, which sounds incredible (in both senses of the word).
Engineering archaeology 
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-03-20T16:38:36.544Z

Here's an account by a retired engineer of what happened when his old company wanted to streamline a process in the factory where he used to work.

People only knew how to keep the factory going from one day to the next, but all the documentation was lost-- the factory had been sold a couple of times, and efforts at digitization caused more to get lost. Even the name of the factory had been lost.

Fortunately, engineers keep more documentation than their bosses allow them to. (Trade secrets!) And they don't throw the documentation away just because they've retired.

I've been concerned about infrastructure neglect for a while, and this makes me more concerned. On the other hand, instead of just viewing with alarm, I'd like to view with quantified alarm, and I don't have the foggiest on how to quantify the risks.
Also, some of the information loss is a result of a search for efficiency. How can you tell when you're leaving something important out?
Thoughts on How Consciousness Can Affect the World
by DavidPlumpton — 2014-03-20T08:32:09.473Z

Overview

In "The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle" Eliezer mentioned that one aspect of consciousness is that it can affect the world, e.g. by making us say out loud "I feel conscious", or deciding to read (or write) this article. However my current working hypothesis is that consciousness is a feature of information and computation. So how can pure information affect the world? It is this aspect of consciousness that I intend to explore.

Assumptions

A1: Let's go all in on Reductionism. Nothing else is involved other than the laws of physics (even if we haven't discovered them all yet).

A2: Consciousness exists (or at least some illusion of experiencing it exists).

Tentative Lemmas

TL1: A simulation of the brain (if necessary down to quantum fields) would seem to itself to experience consciousness in whatever way it is that we seem to ourselves to experience consciousness

TL2: If an electronic (or even pen and paper) simulation of a brain is conscious, then consciousness is "substrate independent", i.e. not requiring a squishy brain at least in principle.

TL3: If consciousness is substrate independent, then the best candidate for the underlying mechanism of consciousness is computation and information.

TL4: "You" and "I" are information and algorithms, implemented by our brain tissue. By this I mean that somehow information and computation can be made to seem to experience consciousness. So somehow the information can be computed into a state where it contains information relating to the experience of consciousness.

Likely Complications

LC1: State transitions may involve some random component.

LC2: It seems likely that a static state is insufficient to experience consciousness, requiring change of state (i.e. processing). Could a single unchanging state experience consciousness forever? Hmmmm....

Main Argument

What does is mean for matter such as neurons to "implement" consciousness? For information to be stored the neurons need to be in some state that can be discriminated from other states. The act of computation is changing the state of information to a new state, based on the current state. Let's say we start in state S0 and then neurons fire in some way that we label state S1, ignoring LC1 for now. So we have "computed" state S1 from a previous state S0, so let's just write that as:

S0 -> S1

From our previous set of assumptions we can con

...
To what extent does improved rationality lead to effective altruism?
by JonahS — 2014-03-20T07:08:38.997Z

It's been claimed that increasing rationality increases effective altruism. I think that this is true, but the effect size is unclear to me, so it seems worth exploring how strong the evidence for it is. I've offered some general considerations below, followed by a description of my own experience. I'd very much welcome thoughts on the effect that rationality has had on your own altruistic activities (and any other relevant thoughts).

The 2013 LW Survey found that 28.6% of respondents identified as effective altruists. This rate is much higher than the rate in the general population (even after controlling for intelligence), and because LW is distinguished by virtue of being a community focused on rationality, one might be led to the conclusion that increasing rationality increases effective altruism. But there are a number of possible confounding factors:

It's ambiguous what the respondents meant when they said that they're "effective altruists." (They could have used the term the way Wikipedia does, or they could have meant it in a more colloquial sense.)

Interest in rationality and interest in effective altruism might both stem from an underlying dispositional variable.

Effective altruists may be disproportionately likely to seek to improve their epistemic rationality than are members of the general population.

The rationalist community and the effective altruist community may have become intertwined by historical accident, out of virtue of having some early members in common.

So it's helpful to look beyond the observed correlation and think about the hypothetical causal pathways between increased rationality and increased effective altruism.

The above claim can be broken into several subclaims (any or all of which may be intended):

Claim 1: When people are more rational, they're more likely to pick their altruistic endeavors that they engage in with a view toward maximizing utilitarian expected value.

Claim 2: When people are more rational, they're more likely to succeed in their altruistic endeavors.

Claim 3: Being more rational strengthens people's altruistic motivation.

Claim 1: "When people are more rational, they're more likely to pick their altruistic endeavors that they engage in with a view toward maximizing utilitarian expected value."

Some elements of effective altruism ...
Meetup: Philadelphia, 1 PM, March 23-- treating mistakes as though they're bugs
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-03-19T15:55:42.348Z

1 PM

Nam Phuong at 11th and Broad St. This is a Vietnamese restaurant which is good, cheap, quiet, and on mass transit.

The discussion prompt is "Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity"

Secondary prompt: The Discipline of DE (Do Easy)

The second prompt is back by popular request-- the people who wanted to discuss it couldn't make it to the meeting when it was scheduled.

Discussion group/mailing list.