trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Thwarting a Catholic conversion?
by Jay_Schweikert — 2012-06-18T16:26:42.666Z

I recently learned that a friend of mine, and a long-time atheist (and atheist blogger), is planning to convert to Catholicism. It seems the impetus for her conversion was increasing frustration that she had no good naturalistic account for objective morality in the form of virtue ethics; that upon reflection, she decided she felt like morality "loved" her; that this feeling implied God; and that she had sufficient "if God, then Catholicism" priors to point toward Catholicism, even though she's bisexual (!) and purports to still feel uncertain about the Church's views on sexuality. (Side note: all of this information is material she's blogged about herself, so it's not as if I'm sharing personal details she would prefer to be kept private.)

First, I want to state the rationality lesson I learned from this episode: atheists who spend a great deal of their time analyzing and even critiquing the views of a particular religion are at-risk atheists. Eliezer's spoken about this sort of issue before ("Someone who spends all day thinking about whether the Trinity does or does not exist, rather than Allah or Thor or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is more than halfway to Christianity."), but I guess it took a personal experience to really drive the point home. When I first read my friend's post, I had a major "I notice that I am confused" moment, because it just seemed so implausible that someone who understood actual atheist arguments (as opposed to dead little sister Hollywood Atheism) could convert to religion, and Catholicism of all things. I seriously considered (and investigated) the possibility that her post was some kind of prank or experiment or otherwise not sincere, or that her account had been hijacked by a very good impersonator (both of these seem quite unlikely at this point).

But then I remembered how I had been frustrated in the past by her tolerance for what seemed like rank religious bigotry and how often I thought she was taking seriously theological positions that seemed about as likely as the 9/11 attacks being genuinely inspired and ordained by Allah. I remembered how I thought she had a confused conception of meta-ethics and that she often seemed skeptical of reductionism, which in retrospect should have been a major red flag for purported atheists. So yeah, spending all your time arguing about Catholic doctrine really is a warning sign, no matter...
[Link] You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes
by Vladimir_Golovin — 2012-06-18T07:57:17.887Z

http://thobbs.github.com/blog/2012/06/17/you-should-downvote-anecdotes/

Anecdotal evidence has been shown to have a greater influence on opinion than it logically deserves, most visibly when the anecdote conflicts with the reader’s opinion and when the reader is not highly analytical, even if the anecdotes are accompanying statistical evidence. Though the anecdotes may not totally sway you, they can easily leave you with the sense that the research findings aren’t as conclusive as they claim to be.
Meetup : Montreal First Meetup 
by Paul_G — 2012-06-18T06:18:10.622Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal First Meetup

WHEN:
23 June 2012 01:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
100 Rue Saint Antoine Ouest Montreal, QC H2Z 1X8

First meetup for Montreal LessWrongers! I recently visited an Ottawa meetup, and it was a great time. I'd like to meet like minded rationalists and discuss what to do next.

I'd prefer if this were the "self improvement" type of meetup, but I also plan on in the future discussion games and the like. Hope to see you there! I'll have a sign that says "LessWrong Meetup Group", and will be reading some sort of book.

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal First Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] The Opposite Sex
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-18T04:12:53.652Z

Today's post, The Opposite Sex was originally published on 28 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A few thoughts from Eliezer Yudkowsky about a discussion of sexism on Overcoming Bias.

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 2-Place and 1-Place Words, 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.
Local Ordinances of Fun
by Alicorn — 2012-06-18T03:07:47.979Z

Prerequisite reading which you will probably want open in another tab for reference: 31 Laws of Fun

Unprefaced, this post might sound a lot like I'm just picking on Eliezer, or Eliezer's particular set of "laws". I'm sort of doing that, but only as a template for ways to pick on Laws of Fun in general. The correct response to this post is not "Here is my new, different list of N things that will satisfy everyone".

(Well, it would be if you could do that. I'm skeptical.)

If I purported to come up with general laws of fun, I might or might not do a better job. Probably I'd do a better job coming up with a framework for myself; I might also be more cautious about assuming human homogeneity, but I doubt I'd do an unassailable job. And an unassailable job is probably necessary, if everyone will abide by Laws of Fun forever. An unassailable job of Legislating Fun is needed make sure that some people aren't caught between unwanted mental tampering and, probably not Hell, but a world that is subtly (or glaringly) wrong, wrong, wrong.

Please do not assume that I outright endorse unmentioned laws; these are just the ones I can pick at most obviously.

I fully expect to be told that I have misunderstood at least half of these items.

6 sits uncomfortably. The savannah is where we were designed to survive, but evolution is miserly; it is not where we were designed to thrive gloriously. (Any species designed to thrive gloriously there which was actually put there would find its descendants getting away with more and more corner-cutting until they found a more efficient frontier. Creatures that can fly don't keep flight just because flying is awesome; they must also need it.) I want a home designed for me to thrive gloriously in, not one that takes its cues from the environment my ancestors eked out a living in. I suspect this is more like a temperate-clime park than a baking savannah, and it might be more like an architecturally excellent house than either. "Windowless office" is not the fair comparison. That is not how we design places to put people we like.
8 sounds just wrong, or like a misstatement. Why should we get better and better? Objecting to flat awesomeness sounds like a matter of denying that it is flat. Perhaps it just sounds tedious for things to be the same level of awe...
Altruistic Kidney Donation
by jefftk — 2012-06-17T20:02:25.254Z

People are dying because their kidneys have failed, and you probably have an extra one: should you donate it? A dialysis machine can do most of the work of a kidney, but it's not as good. A donated kidney gives someone an average of 10 additional years. [1] (Some of them reject it right away, others live for years before having problems.) This is pretty good: if you volunteer to be a kidney donor and are selected as a match, you give someone an average of another 10 years of life. [2]

A kidney donation is a surgery, however, and does have some risk for you. It's hard to calculate the risk because people who are selected for kidney donation are a weird group: they're heavily screened (so they tend to be healthier) but they're likely to be related to the person they're donating to (so they tend to be at risk for kidney problems themself). An ideal study on the dangers of kidney donation would compare donors with people who were going to donate and then didn't for some nearly-random reason. I can't find such a study, but I've heard people give odds of around 1:3000 for dying due to donating. You also spend several days in the hospital, miss some weeks of work, and take several months to fully recover. [3] This sounds like a lot, but giving someone 10 years of life is a lot too.

The question isn't so much "does this do good," however, but "does this maximize the good I can do for the amount of sacrifice I'm willing to accept?" GiveWell estimates that each $1600 given to the AMF for antimalarial net distribution prevents the death of someone with an average life expectancy of maybe 40 years [4]. So another way to give a stranger 10 more years of life is to give $400 to the AMF. Kidney donation is in the same ballpark as this, in terms of the ratio of benefit (to others) to cost (to you) [5], but even ignoring the risk of death [6] I would pay that $400 just to avoid the hospital and recovery time.

Update 2012-06-22: BDan and Alexander Berger have convinced me I was wrong to write off chains. At least right now there are more possible chains than kidneys to start them, and they can be quite long. My updated estimate is that this gets you a 3x multiplier on the value of a donated kidney, bringing the $400 charity equivalent to $1200. Which is still less than the $10-$100K at which I think I would sell a kidney, but substantially higher.

(I also posted this ...
[Link] Nick Bostrom on the Status Quo Bias
by Jayson_Virissimo — 2012-06-17T10:51:56.817Z

Here (in MP3 format) is the Philosophy Bites podcast from 05/14/2012. In it, Nick Bostrom discusses the status quo bias with Nigel Warburton. Here (in PDF format) is Bostrom's paper outlining a technique (the reversal test) for debiasing within the context of applied ethics.
[video] Kelly McGonigal on willpower
by Bobertron — 2012-06-17T10:39:22.817Z

the video

Author and Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, PhD, talks about strategies from her new book "The WillPower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It" as part of the Authors@Google series. Topics include dieting/weight loss, health, addiction, quitting smoking, temptation, procrastination, mindfulness, stress, sleep, cravings, exercise, self-control, self-compassion, guilt, and shame.

I'm posting this because akrasia, procrastination and willpower are often discussed on LW. I haven't read the book, but for those that are interested "The Willpower Instinct" and "Maximum Willpower" are, from what I can tell, exactly the same books.
What is the best way to read the sequences?
by NoSignalNoNoise — 2012-06-17T03:50:05.672Z

I am a relative new-comer to LW, and I have read ~half the articles in the core sequences, but I think I have not been optimizing for comprehension/retention while reading them. Could some more experienced members of the community give some recommendations on how best to read them \(both in terms of in which posts in which order and in terms of the actual reading process\)?

I will periodically edit this post to include some of the suggestions in order to provide the most benefit to future newcomers.

EDIT: Here are the most popular suggestions:

Order:

Chronological order (5 or 6 comments)

Whatever method you will actually do or already doing (1.5 comments)

How to read them:

e-reader or smartphone (3 comments)

Text-to-speech (1 comment)

Read How to Read a Book and implement its suggestions (1 comment) (note: the link is a 9-page PDF, so it shouldn't be too hard to read and see what's useful)

Mind-mapping (1 comment)

Try to guess what the links go to (1 comment)
Arrison, Vassar and de Grey speaking at Peter Thiel's startup class [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2012-06-16T13:58:35.578Z

http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/25149261055/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-19-notes-essay

as someone mentioned the rest of Thiel's notes are also an interesting read

http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup
[SEQ RERUN] 2-Place and 1-Place Words
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-16T03:26:45.321Z

Today's post, 2-Place and 1-Place Words was originally published on 27 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is possible to talk about "sexiness" as a property of an observer and a subject. It is also equally possible to talk about "sexiness" as a property of a subject, as long as each observer can have a different process to determine how sexy someone is. Failing to do either of these will cause you trouble.

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 No Universally Compelling Arguments, 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.
Cards Against Rationality
by fubarobfusco — 2012-06-16T02:23:42.941Z

(This post won't make much sense if you don't know about the game Cards Against Humanity. Fortunately it has a web site. If you know the game Apples to Apples, well, CAH's gameplay is almost identical to Apples to Apples ... but the cards range from snarky to perverted to shockingly un-PC.)

After the LW meetup in Mountain View yesterday, the idea came up of a Less Wrong expansion set for Cards Against Humanity ... with a roughly Shit Rationalists Say theme, with a little help from Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts. Regardless of whether this ever happens, we felt the need to share the pain with the rest of the community.

These are meant to be mixed with the standard deck. Hence, the completed phrase "That which can be destroyed by being a motherfucking sorceror should be" is a clearly winning combination, as is "Why am I sticky? Grass-fed butter."

Black cards:

That which can be destroyed by _____ should be.

_____ is the mind-killer.

The thirteenth virtue of rationality is _____.

_____ is truly part of you.

"Let me not become attached to _____ I may not want."

_____ is vulnerable to counterfactual mugging.

What is true is already so. _____ doesn't make it worse.

_____ is not the territory.

_____ will kill you because you are made of _____ that it could use for something else.

"I'm an aspiring _____."

In the new version of Newcomb's problem, you have to choose between a box containing _____ and a box containing _____.

Instrumental rationality is the art of winning at _____.

Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't include _____.

In an Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma, _____ beats _____.

The latest hot fanfic: _____ and the Methods of _____.

_____ is highly correlated with _____.

Absence of _____ is evidence of _____.

The coherent extrapolated volition of humanity includes a term for _____.

We have encountered aliens who communicate through _____.

In the future, Eliezer Yudkowsky will be remembered for _____.

I'm signed up with Alcor, so _____ will be frozen when I die.

"I am running on corrupted _____."

An improperly-programmed AI might tile the universe with _____.

You know what they say: one person's _____ is another person's _____.

"I want to want _____."

_____ is what _____ feels like from the inside.

_____ is the unit of caring.

If you're not getting _____, you're spending too many resources on _____.

Every _____ wants to be

...
Brief response to kalla724 on preserving personal identity with vitrification
by Synaptic — 2012-06-16T01:28:09.752Z

About a month ago kalla724 posted a number of comments on this post, many of which were highly upvoted.

Synopsis: I) I think that kalla724 is too pessimistic about the practice of cryopreservation to preserve personal identity, because we don't know what level of synapse/active zone/protein structure is preserved in human brains, and we also don't know what level is required for personal identity. II) I think kalla724 is wrong about the required detail necessary to simulate a C. elegans. This is testable in the relatively near-term, and the results of that test might yield insight into whose argument in point I is stronger.

I

kalla724's main argument: it is not possible (p = 10^-22) that cryonics will preserve personal identity, because replacing water with cryoprotectant will cause too much damage to proteins and lipids in the brain.

My view is that kalla724 is too pessimistic. To find a specific example to expand upon this intuition, I searched for "c elegans memory". I chose one of the first reviews in the results: http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/17/4/191.full, published in 2010 by Ardiel and Rankin. Here's their first example:

Rankin et al. (1990) were the first to characterize learning and memory in C. elegans. They studied plasticity of the “tap-withdrawal response” (TWR), a behavior whereby worms swim backward in response to a nonlocalized mechanical stimulus generated by tapping the Petri plate containing the worm. The magnitude of this reversal response is around 1 mm (roughly the length of the worm), but this can change with experience. Repeated administration of the tap results in a decrement of both the amplitude and the frequency of the response

The specific neurons mediating this are known:

Using the circuits described by Chalfie et al. (1985) in conjunction with the neural wiring diagram (White et al. 1986), Wicks and Rankin (1995) identified the mechanosensory cells (ALM, AVM, PLM, and PVD) and interneurons (AVD, AVA, AVB, PVC, and DVA) mediating the TWR.

Through more science, they found that:

the locus of mechanosensory habituation is in a part of the circuit unique to the TWR, i.e., the touch cells and/or the synapses between the touch cells and the interneurons. Now the hunt for the underlying molecular mechanism could begin.

There is some evidence for how the short-term comp...
Moving blogs
by KatjaGrace — 2012-06-15T16:00:47.000Z

Today Overcoming Bias becomes a group blog again, and I become one of the group. Robin will keep blogging, joined by Robert Wiblin and me. The other two are my good friends, and among my most respected intellectual influences, so it should be fun! We also hope that between us we can better produce regular enough output to make it worth your while visiting, without taking too much time away from other projects that we all have.

I might cross post my posts back here, for the sake of completeness. However it probably won’t be timely, and I might turn off the comments to keep the conversation in one place. So update your bookmarks/RSS/etc!
Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Phoenix, Sydney
by FrankAdamek — 2012-06-15T14:21:46.036Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Less Wrong Sydney: 11 June 2012 06:00PM
Phoenix, Arizona: 15 June 2012 07:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 June 2012 12:00PM
Tucson, Arizona: 20 June 2012 07:00PM
First Cali, Colombia meetup: 02 July 2012 07:00PM

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:

Melbourne social/games meetup: 15 June 2012 07:00PM
Less Wrong Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup: 17 June 2012 02:00PM
Summer Festival Megameetup at NYC: 23 June 2012 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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, 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.

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, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let me know so we can present more accurate information to newcomers.
Coursera Behavioural Neurology Course
by Patrick — 2012-06-15T07:53:37.615Z

Coursera is running a course on behavioural neurology here: https://www.coursera.org/course/neurobehavior

Any LWers that to want the associated study group should visit ##patrickclass on irc.freenode.net or email patrick.robotham2@gmail.com .
Beer with Charlie Stross in Munich
by mapnoterritory — 2012-06-15T06:42:23.289Z

From Charlie Stross' blog:

I'm in Munich this week, and I plan to be drinking in the Paulaner Brauhaus(Kapuzinerplatz 5, 80337 München; click here for map) from 7pm on Monday 18th. All welcome! (Yes, I will sign books if you bring them.) If in doubt, look for the plush Cthulhu!
[SEQ RERUN] No Universally Compelling Arguments
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-15T05:15:14.210Z

Today's post, No Universally Compelling Arguments was originally published on 26 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Because minds are physical processes, it is theoretically possible to specify a mind which draws any conclusion in response to any argument. There is no argument that will convince every possible mind.

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 Design Space of Minds in General, 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.