trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
OpenWorm and differential technological development
by John_Maxwell — 2014-05-19T04:47:00.042Z

According to Robin Hanson's arguments in this blog post, we want to promote research in to cell modeling technology (ideally at the expense of research in to faster computer hardware). That would mean funding this kickstarter, which is ending in 11 hours (it may still succeed; there are a few tricks for pushing borderline kickstarters through). I already pledged $250; I'm not sure if I should pledge significantly more on the strength of one Hanson blog post. Thoughts from anyone? (I also encourage other folks to pledge! Maybe we can name neurons after characters in HPMOR or something. EDIT: Or maybe funding OpenWorm is a bad idea; see this link.)

I'm also curious on what people think about the efficiency of trying to pursue differential technological development directly this way vs funding MIRI/FHI. I haven't read the entire conversation referenced here, but this bit from the blog post sounds correct-ish to me:

People doing philosophical work to try to reduce existential risk are largely wasting their time. Tyler doesn’t think it’s a serious effort, though it may be good publicity for something that will pay off later. A serious effort looks more like the parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons. There was also a serious effort by the people who set up hotlines between leaders to be used to quickly communicate about nuclear attacks (e.g., to help quickly convince a leader in country A that a fishy object on their radar isn’t an incoming nuclear attack).

Edit: For some reason I forgot about this previous discussion on this topic, which makes the case for funding OpenWorm look less clear-cut.
Strawman Yourself
by katydee — 2014-05-18T05:28:05.423Z

One good way to ensure that your plans are robust is to strawman yourself. Look at your plan in the most critical, contemptuous light possible and come up with the obvious uncharitable insulting argument for why you will fail.

In many cases, the obvious uncharitable insulting argument will still be fundamentally correct.

If it is, your plan probably needs work. This technique seems to work not because it taps into some secret vault of wisdom (after all, making fun of things is easy), but because it is an elegant way to shift yourself into a critical mindset.

For instance, I recently came up with a complex plan to achieve one of my goals. Then I strawmanned myself; the strawman version of why this plan would fail was simply "large and complicated plans don't work." I thought about that for a moment, concluded "yep, large and complicated plans don't work," and came up with a simple, elegant plan to achieve the same ends.

You may ask "why didn't you just come up with a simple, elegant plan in the first place?" The answer is that elegance is hard. It's easier to add on special case after special case, not realizing how much complexity debt you've added. Strawmanning yourself is one way to safeguard against this risk, as well as many others.
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIII. (international)
by Viliam_Bur — 2014-05-17T20:11:32.699Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIII. (international)

WHEN:
24 May 2014 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Mickiewiczova 2, Bratislava

This is an international meetup (which means that we will meet during a weekend and speak English), so if you wanted to visit Bratislava, this is the right moment to do. More info in comments.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup XIII. (international)
Moving on from Cognito Mentoring
by VipulNaik — 2014-05-16T22:42:56.907Z

Back in December 2013, Jonah Sinick and I launched Cognito Mentoring, an advising service for intellectually curious students. Our goal was to improve the quality of learning, productivity, and life choices of the student population at large, and we chose to focus on intellectually curious students because of their greater potential as well as our greater ability to relate with that population. We began by offering free personalized advising. Jonah announced the launch in a LessWrong post, hoping to attract the attention of LessWrong's intellectually curious readership.

Since then, we feel we've done a fair amount, with a lot of help from LessWrong. We've published a few dozen blog posts and have an information wiki. Slightly under a hundred people contacted us asking us for advice (many from LessWrong), and we had substantive interactions with over 50 of them. As our reviews from students and parents suggest, we've made a good impression and have had a positive impact on many of the people we've advised. We're proud of what we've accomplished and grateful for the support and constructive criticism we've received on LessWrong.

However, what we've learned in the last few months has led us to the conclusion that Cognito Mentoring is not ripe for being a full-time work opportunity for the two of us.

For the last few months, we've eschewed regular jobs and instead done contract work that provides us the flexibility to work on Cognito Mentoring, eating into our savings somewhat to cover the cost of living differences. This is a temporary arrangement and is not sustainable. We therefore intend to scale back our work on Cognito Mentoring to "maintenance mode" so that people can continue to benefit from the resources we've already collected, with minimal additional effort on our part, freeing us up to take regular jobs with more demanding time requirements.

We might revive Cognito Mentoring as a part-time or full-time endeavor in the future if there are significant changes to our beliefs about the traction, impact, and long-run financial viability of Cognito Mentoring. Part of the purpose of "maintenance mode" will be to leave open the possibility of such a revival if the idea does indeed have potential.

In this post, I discuss some of the factors that led us to change our view, the conditions under which we might revive Cognito Mentoring, and more details about how "mai...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-05-16T16:16:14.577Z

This summary was posted to LW main on May 9th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Houston, TX: 17 May 2014 11:31AM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Chicago Calibration Game: 10 May 2014 03:00PM
Frankfurt: Presentation about Operant Conditioning: 11 May 2014 02:00PM
Helsinki Meetup - Effective Altruism: 10 May 2014 04:00PM
Montreal - How to be charismatic: 26 May 2014 07:00PM
Munich Meetup: 11 May 2014 02:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Recreation: 11 May 2014 01:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 10 May 2025 01:30PM
Canberra: Rationalist Fun and Games!: 24 May 2014 06:00PM
London social meetup - possibly in a park: 11 May 2014 02:00PM
Washington DC: Museums: 11 May 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 irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, F...
Group Rationality Diary, May 16-31
by therufs — 2014-05-16T15:09:20.944Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 16-31.

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

Established a useful new habit

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

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

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

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

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

Tried doing any of the above and failed

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

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

Previous diary: May 1-15

Next diary: June 1-15

Rationality diaries archive
Meetup : Sydney Social Meetup - June (Games night)
by taryneast — 2014-05-16T06:56:49.635Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Social Meetup - June (Games night)

WHEN:
12 June 2014 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale, NSW

Everybody bring your favourite game, and we'll decide what we want to play on the night!

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Social Meetup - June (Games night)
Strategyproof Mechanisms: Impossibilities
by badger — 2014-05-16T00:52:30.626Z

In which the limits of dominant-strategy implementation are explored. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite dictatorship theorem for unrestricted preference domains is stated, showing no universal strategyproof mechanisms exist, along with a proof for a special case.

Due to the Revelation Principle, most design questions can be answered by studying incentive compatible mechanisms, as discussed in the last post. Incentive compatibility comes in many different flavors corresponding to different solution concepts—dominant-strategy IC and Bayes-Nash IC being the two most common. In this post, I’ll delve into what’s possible under dominant strategy incentive compatibility.

Recall that a strategy is dominant if playing it always leads to (weakly) higher payoffs for an agent than other strategy would, no matter what strategies other agents play. A social choice function is dominant-strategy incentive compatible if honest revelation is a dominant strategy in the direct mechanism for that SCF1. The appeal of implementation in dominant strategies is that an agent doesn't need to think about what other agents will do. Even in the worst case, a dominant-strategy IC social choice function leaves an agent better off for being honest. Since the need for strategic thinking is eliminated, dominant-strategy IC is also referred to as strategyproofness.

Gibbard-Satterthwaite: universal strategyproof mechanisms are out of reach

Arrow’s theorem is well-known for showing dictatorships are the only aggregators of ordinal rankings that satisfy a set of particular criteria. The result is commonly interpreted as saying there is no perfect voting system for more than two candidates. However, since Arrow deals with social welfare functions which take a profile of preferences as input and outputs a full preference ranking, it really says something about aggregating a set of preferences into a single group preference. Most of the time though, a full ranking of candidates will be superfluous—all we really need to know is who wins the election. Although Arrow doesn’t give social welfare functions much room to maneuver, maybe there are still some nice social choice functions out there.

Alas, it’s not to be. Alan Gibbard and Mark Satterthwaite have shown that, in general, the only strategyproof choice from three or more alternatives that is even slightly ...
Common sense quantum mechanics
by dvasya — 2014-05-15T20:10:11.534Z

Related to: Quantum physics sequence.

TLDR: Quantum mechanics can be derived from the rules of probabilistic reasoning. The wavefunction is a mathematical vehicle to transform a nonlinear problem into a linear one. The Born rule that is so puzzling for MWI results from the particular mathematical form of this functional substitution.

This is a brief overview a recent paper in Annals of Physics (recently mentioned in Discussion):

Quantum theory as the most robust description of reproducible experiments (arXiv)

by Hans De Raedt, Mikhail I. Katsnelson, and Kristel Michielsen. Abstract:

It is shown that the basic equations of quantum theory can be obtained from a straightforward application of logical inference to experiments for which there is uncertainty about individual events and for which the frequencies of the observed events are robust with respect to small changes in the conditions under which the experiments are carried out.

In a nutshell, the authors use the "plausible reasoning" rules (as in, e.g., Jaynes' Probability Theory) to recover the quantum-physical results for the EPR and Stern–Gerlach experiments by adding a notion of experimental reproducibility in a mathematically well-formulated way and without any "quantum" assumptions. Then they show how the Schrodinger equation (SE) can be obtained from the nonlinear variational problem on the probability P for the particle-in-a-potential problem when the classical Hamilton-Jacobi equation holds "on average". The SE allows to transform the nonlinear variational problem into a linear one, and in the course of said transformation, the (real-valued) probability P and the action S are combined in a single complex-valued function ~P1/2exp(iS) which becomes the argument of SE (the wavefunction).

This casts the "serious mystery" of Born probabilities in a new light. Instead of the observed frequency being the square(d amplitude) of the "physically fundamental" wavefunction, the wavefunction is seen as a mathematical vehicle to convert a difficult nonlinear variational problem for inferential probability into a manageable linear PDE, where it so happens that the probability enters the wavefunction under a square root.

Below I will excerpt some math from the paper, mainly to show that the approach actually works, but outlining just the key steps. This will be followed by so

...
Meetup : Melbourne June Rationality Dojo: Memory
by Ruby — 2014-05-15T12:53:45.469Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne June Rationality Dojo: Memory

WHEN:
01 June 2014 03:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
491 King Street, West Melbourne, VIC

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and exercises.

Continuing the succession of immensely successful dojos, Megan will present in June on memory.

As always, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo ('I will have done X by the next Dojo'). Scott Fowler recorded the commitments, if you didn't make it but would like to add your own goal to the records, send him a message (shokwave.sf@gmail.com).

The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, call me on 0425-855-124.
If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster: http://is.gd/dojoroster

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne June Rationality Dojo: Memory
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
by Maelin — 2014-05-15T10:31:12.910Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup

WHEN:
16 May 2014 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
7/24 Green St, Windsor 3181 VIC

Our social meetup is on as regularly scheduled! This month we're meeting in Windsor.

Come along for a friendly chat and maybe a game or two. We'll organise something for dinner if people are interested.

You can buzz in when you get there, or call Ryan on 0438869257 or me on 0421231789.

Ryan notes: parking can get pretty full out the front but you might be able to find spots in nearby streets.

(Apologies for the late notice)

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
Meetup : Moscow meet up
by Yuu — 2014-05-15T09:11:15.791Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meet up

WHEN:
18 May 2014 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

We will have:

Probe phenomenon and limits of corporeality, report.

Small reports about cognitive biases.

What is pragmatics and semantic solutions of some of its issues, report.

Unicorns: false but useful beliefs, report.

Belief investigation, exercise.

We gather in the Yandex office, you need the first revolving door under the archway. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.
You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 16:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow meet up
Meetup : Frankfurt
by Kendra — 2014-05-15T05:55:29.536Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt

WHEN:
25 May 2014 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Frankfurt

Another meetup! Location still unclear, contact our mailing list for more information. You can find our mailing list on the list of LW meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt
Meetup : Sydney Meetup - May
by taryneast — 2014-05-15T01:41:06.197Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - May

WHEN:
21 May 2014 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Sydney City RSL, 565 George St, Sydney, Australia 2000

6:30 PM for early discussion 7PM general dinner-discussion after dinner we'll have our rationality exercise and a more specific discussion-topic.

I'll book another table under the name "less wrong". Last meetup we were in the restaurant on level 2. When I arrive I'll facebook about where exactly the table is located.

We'll have general discussion over dinner, followed by a rationality exercise and more specific discussion-topic.

The theme this month is: "errors of social human interactions and our solutions"

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - May
Meetup : Washington DC Short Talks Meetup
by rocurley — 2014-05-15T00:05:41.059Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Short Talks Meetup

WHEN:
18 May 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

We'll be meeting to listen to/give short talks (again)!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Short Talks Meetup
Meetup : Christchurch, New Zealand Meetup
by free_rip — 2014-05-14T21:15:16.524Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Christchurch, New Zealand Meetup

WHEN:
18 May 2014 04:30:00PM (+1200)

WHERE:
Room 901, James Hight, University of Canterbury, Christchurch

The second Chch meetup is about to begin! 4.30pm this Sunday. We already have three confirmed attendees so if you live in Chch and would like to connect with the Less Wrong community here it's well worth the effort.

It will be held in James Hight library, discussion room 901, at the University of Canterbury. You do not need to be a student or in any way affiliated with UC to come along, the discussion rooms are open to everyone.

The way to get there is to go through the front (and only) doors of the library, walk forwards until you see elevators to your right, and take one of those elevators to floor 9. Then walk around the edges of the floor until you see room 901. Don't take the stairs, they only lead up one floor! If you need clearer directions or anticipate getting lost, PM or post below and I can clear it up and give you a contact cell number.

Last time was a lot of fun, spanning topics from self-enhancing drugs, what the bayesian/frequentist debate is all about, cool blogs to follow and the ways in which a Giant might attempt to dismember a Sky Whale.

Discussion article for the meetup : Christchurch, New Zealand Meetup
[LINK] Sentient Robots Not Possible According To Math Proof
by Darklight — 2014-05-14T18:19:59.555Z

Based on Tononi's earlier work on Integrated Information Theory, apparently, Maguire et al. have come up with a formulation of consciousness as a lossless integration of information that requires noncomputable functions, which implies that consciousness cannot be modeled computationally.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25560-sentient-robots-not-possible-if-you-do-the-maths.html

I'm personally skeptical of this, but their paper (seen here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0126v1) has some impressive looking formal mathematical proofs that I will admit I lack the mathematical competence to judge the veracity of. Anyone with greater mathematical acumen want to take a look?
Meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
by philh — 2014-05-14T13:27:30.586Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park

WHEN:
18 May 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Holborn, WC2B 6BG

Your regularly scheduled meetup. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

If the weather is nice, we'll head to Lincoln's Inn Fields, probably somewhere in the northwest quadrant. If not, we'll be in the usual Shakespeare's Head. If the weather is variable, we might move from one to the other - give me a call or text if you're not sure. My number is 07792009646.

Update: Weather's nice, the park it is!

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
[LINK] Utilitarian self-driving cars?
by V_V — 2014-05-14T13:00:02.670Z

When a collision is unavoidable, should a self-driving car try to maximize the survival chances of its occupants, or of all people involved?

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-robot-car-of-tomorrow-might-just-be-programmed-to-hit-you/