trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup Notes: Community Building
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-04-27T07:59:20.146Z

Review of our fifth LessWrong Meetup - Report from Berlin

Summary

We had visitors fank1 and just_existing from the Bielefeld/Paderborn Meetup. The meetup was great. It was a continuously lively discussion with everybody contributing personal and/or insightful and/or relevant pieces.

After ashort introduction of each other (because of the guests) we plunged immediately into interesting discussions mostly revolving around LeeWrong topics.

In between I retold my very positive experience from the Berlin LW community event. After a short summary about the effects of meditation we had a Mnemonics session inspired by the Berlin workshop.

One on-going topic was "Extrovert in Training" - techniques for and experience with getting in touch with people. How to start a conversation. What I still don't get is how to steer a conversation from small-talk phase to more personal topics - esp. in a group setting. Though this was not a problem during the meetup.

We also discussed selection pressure on humans. We agreed that there is almost none on mutations affecting health in general due to medicine. But we agreed that there is tremendous pressure on contraception. We identified four ways evolution works around contraception (see appendix for a short summary). We discussed what effects this could on the future of society. The movie Idiocracy was mentioned. This could be a long term (a few generations) existential risk.

There were other topcis which I recollect less clearly. Maybe the participants can comment on them below.

There will definitely be more LW Hamburg meetups. The next step is a joint Skype meetup with the Bielefeld group. I also relayed the Jonas Vollmers advice to get in contact with the Giordano-Bruno-Stiftung.

The meetup ended with a photo and positive impression feedback round (peak-end rule). Afterwards out guests from Bielefeld stayed overnight in my (Gunnars) place.

Appendix

Four ways evolution works around contraception:

Biological factors. Examples are hormones compensating the contraception effects of the pill or allergies against condoms. These are easily recognized, measured and countered by the much faster operating pharma industry. There are also little ethical issues with this.

Subconscious mental factors. Factors mostly leading to non- or mis-use of contraception. Examples are carelessness, impulsiveness, fear, and i

...
Tapestries of Gold
by  — 2014-04-27T07:23:40.029Z

(Nothing here is actually new, but a short explanation with pictures would have been helpful to me a while ago, so I thought I'd make an attempt.)
Let me start with a patch of territory: a set of things that exist. The number of rows is far from clear, but I'll use six candidates as a sample; and of course the diagram ought to be a tree, with many elements on each row converging to fewer on the row above, but you'll have to imagine that part.
The blue line that runs through the column is not causation, but identity. It took me a long time (and many knocks about the head from smarter people) to realize that this line is directionless. If someone labels the top Meaningful and the bottom Meaningless, or the top Important and the bottom Unimportant, we see this at once for an error; but the same labels are still errors, if applied in the opposite order. If someone labels the top Contingent and the bottom Necessary, this is another error; if the top Subjective and the bottom Objective, another; or if the top Less Real and the bottom More Real, another still. (Some errors of this type have been called "reductionism," but they aren't the thing people mean when they say "reductionism" around here.) Whatever is, is real—and equally so, wherever it appears along the blue line.
At one time I would have labelled the top Emergent and the bottom Fundamental, but David Deutsch convinced me that even this was a mistake. Suppose we grant that a mind of arbitrary power, given only the bottom row, could deduce all the others—a popular hypothesis for which we have some good evidence (though not too much). Even then: could not this same mind, given only the complete row for Physiology, deduce the contents of Chemistry no less readily? The blue line has no direction; if I forget this I forget what identity means, and cast myself into confusion—the same type of confusion afflicting one who says, "Science believes that morality's not real!" Better, then, to unlabel the blue line entirely, and when someone wants to know what ontological difference exists between the higher rows and the lower, say "Mu." (Until I realized this I did not understand the metaethics sequence—but that isn't the topic of this post.)
Where does that leave reductionism? Right where it was, untouched. As finite entities, we never perceive the blue line as a whole—not a single azure ba...
Meetup : Berkeley: Alpha-testing at CFAR 
by PeerInfinity — 2014-04-27T04:24:04.055Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Alpha-testing at CFAR

WHEN: 30 April 2014 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 2030 Addison, 3rd floor, Berkeley

Hello, all! CFAR is holding a free rationality training session Wednesday night in order to alpha-test a new unit titled "negative visualization". Since this overlaps our usual Less Wrong meetup, it's going to be the main activity of the evening: You're encouraged to attend the alpha-testing sessions in the couch room; but if you don't want to or if there's too many of us, you can hang out with other Less Wrongers in the CFAR/MIRI common area.

The test session (and the meetup) run from 7pm-9pm at the CFAR office which is at 2030 Addison, 3rd floor, Berkeley, near the Downtown Berkeley BART. If you find yourself locked out, text me at:

http://i.imgur.com/9iDsvo8.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Alpha-testing at CFAR
Meetup : Helsinki Meetup - Effective Altruism
by mikko — 2014-04-26T10:50:30.168Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup - Effective Altruism

WHEN:
10 May 2014 04:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Kaivokatu 10 A, Helsinki

We're having a casual get-together to discuss topics related to Effective Altruism. There will also be some light vegan food available, and bringing more food for everyone to try is encouraged! You're welcome regardless of how familiar you are with Effective Altruism; the topics of discussion will be along the lines of researching charities, charity in Finland, and career choice.

The meeting is in Rydman, which is in the 9th floor of Kaivokatu 10 A. To reach the room, take the lift up to the 8th floor and then continue up the stairs and ring the doorbell to be let in. If the downstairs door is locked, ring the Ullakkosauna doorbell.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup - Effective Altruism
Skills and Antiskills
by katydee — 2014-04-26T06:54:28.182Z

One useful little concept that a friend and I have is that of the antiskill. Like a normal skill, an antiskill gives you both the ability and the affordance to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. The difference between a skill and an antiskill is that a skill gives you the ability and affordance to do things that are positive on net, while an antiskill gives you the ability and affordance to do things that are negative on net.

For instance, my friend believes that dancing is often an antiskill, because it gives you an affordance to dance rather than have interesting conversations while at parties, and he considers having interesting conversations to be much more valuable than dancing-- therefore, knowing how to dance serves primarily to enable choices that are bad on net.

I disagree with the specific point in this case, but I nevertheless think it's a good example because it illustrates another key principle of skills and antiskills-- whether something is a skill or an antiskill is context-dependent. If dancing will largely prevent you from having interesting conversations, it may well be an antiskill-- but if you go to a lot of nightclubs where loud music makes conversation difficult, knowing how to dance seems very useful indeed!

Another example is the skill of knowing how to fix computers. In many respects this is very useful, and can indeed lead to a profitable career in IT. But-- as I'm sure many of you may have experienced-- having your friends and family know that you know how to fix computers can be very negative on net!

Overall, I find the skill/antiskill framework quite useful when it comes to navigating what sorts of skills, abilities, and knowledge I should acquire. Before choosing my next priority, I often pause to think:

What affordances will learning this give me?

In what contexts will those affordances be most relevant?

Will this be positive or negative on net?

Using this framework has enabled me to discern strengths and weaknesses that I had previously not considered, and in some cases those strengths and weaknesses have proven decisive to my planning.
Questions to ask theist philosophers? I will soon be speaking with several
by kokotajlod — 2014-04-26T00:46:37.806Z

I am about to graduate from one of the only universities in the world that has a high concentration of high-caliber analytic philosophers who are theists. (Specifically, the University of Notre Dame, IN) So as not to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I have sent out emails asking many of them if they would like to meet and discuss their theism with me. Several of them have responded already in the affirmative; fingers crossed for the rest. I'm really looking forward to this because these people are really smart, and have spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I expect them to have interesting and insightful things to say.

Do you have suggestions for questions I could ask them? My main question will of course be "Why do you believe in God?" and variants thereof, but it would be nice if I could say e.g. "How do you avoid the problem of X which is a major argument against theism?"
Questions I've already thought of:

1-Why do you believe in God?

2-What are the main arguments in favor of theism, in your opinion?

3-What about the problem of evil? What about objective morality: how do you make sense of it, and if you don't, then how do you justify God?

4-What about divine hiddenness? Why doesn't God make himself more easily known to us? For example, he could regularly send angels to deliver philosophical proofs on stone tablets to doubters.

5-How do you explain God's necessary existence? What about the "problem of many Gods," i.e. why can't people say the same thing about a slightly different version of God?

6-In what sense is God the fundamental entity, the uncaused cause, etc.? How do you square this with God's seeming complexity? (he is intelligent, after all) If minds are in fact simple, then how is that supposed to work?

I welcome more articulate reformulations of the above, as well as completely new ideas.
Parametric polymorphism in updateless intelligence metrics
by Squark — 2014-04-25T19:46:12.382Z

Followup to: Agents with Cartesian childhood and Physicalist adulthood

In previous posts I have defined a formalism for quantifying the general intelligence of an abstract agent (program). This formalism relies on counting proofs in a given formal system F (like in regular UDT), which makes it susceptible to the Loebian obstacle. That is, if we imagine the agent itself making decisions by looking for proofs in the same formal system F then it would be impossible to present a general proof of its trustworthiness, since no formal system can assert is own soundness. Thus the agent might fail to qualify for high intelligence ranking according to the formalism. We can assume the agent uses a weaker formal system the soundness of which is provable in F but then we still run into difficulties if we want the agent to be self-modifying (as we expect it to be). Such an agent would have to trust its descendants which means that subsequent agents use weaker and weaker formal systems until self-modification becomes impossible.

One known solution to this is Benja's parametric polymorphism. In this post I adapt parametric polymorphism to the updateless intelligence metric framework. The formal form of this union looks harmonious but it raises questions which I currently don't fully understand.

"Ineffable mystery" using oracles instead of timeouts

In the original parametric polymorphism, a constant κ is introduced (informally known as "the number of ineffable mystery") s.t. the agent has to prove its actions are "safe" for time period κ (i.e. have no "bad" consequences during this period). Since it's impossible to the agent to prove any upper bound on κ, effectively its actions have to be safe indefinitely. I found that for our purposes it's better to cast the formalism otherwise. Instead of κ playing the role of a "timeout", the agent is provided with an oracle that answers questions of the form "κ > n?" for any n. Contrary to what the agent thinks, the oracle provides an affirmative answer for all n.

Let's do some math. The formalism I introduce at this point is very close to Yudkowsky and Herreshoff, with some adjustments.

Consider an infinite chain of agents A0, A1, A2... where A{i+1} is created by Ai. Formally, each Ai is a program for a universal oracle machine which computes a_i = (a_i, A{i+1}). Here a_i is a "motor action"...
New LW Meetup: Christchurch NZ
by FrankAdamek — 2014-04-25T16:01:32.394Z

This meetup summary was posted to LW Main on April 18th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Christchurch, NZ Inaugural Meetup: 27 April 2014 04:30PM
Las Vegas/Henderson, NV: 01 May 2014 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australia Mega-Meetup: 09 May 2014 05:00PM
Bratislava Meetup XII.: 28 April 2014 06:00PM
Hamburg - Report from Berlin: 26 April 2014 05:00PM
Moscow meet up: 20 April 2014 04:00AM
Sydney Meetup - April: 23 April 2014 07:30PM
Urbana-Champaign: Planning and Re-planning: 20 April 2014 12:00PM
Utrecht: Behavioural economics, game theory...: 19 April 2014 05:00PM

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: 19 April 2025 01:30PM
Boston - Two Parables on Language and Philosophy: 20 April 2014 03:30PM
Brussels - all fun and games: 19 April 2014 12:00PM
Canberra: Life Hacks Part 2: 25 April 2014 06:00PM
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!...
Russian native speakers wanted as editors (translating "Smarter Than Us")
by listic — 2014-04-24T22:40:50.175Z

Thanks to the efforts of volunteer translators, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence was translated into Russian.

Many thanks to the volunteers who translated it, and to Stuart Armstrong who wrote it in the first place!

But now, we need fresh volunteers who can help as editors, to proofread and edit the translated text before it will be compiled into beautiful pdf. If you were not working as a volunteer translator of this text and are willing to help, please contact me by email: . Please translate the synopsis as a 'test task'. If I have already asked you to translate it, but you haven't been working on the translation, please point it out to me or re-send your translation (sorry, it might got buried in the emails).

Thank you!
Meetup : West LA—Honor and Glory
by OpenThreadGuy — 2014-04-24T22:24:24.263Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Honor and Glory

WHEN:
30 April 2014 06:59:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. I will bring a Rubik's Cube. The presence of a Rubik's Cube will be strong Bayesian evidence of the presence of a Less Wrong meetup.

Parking is completely free. There is a sign that claims there is a 45-minute time limit, but it is not enforced.

Discussion: Honor, next to courage, is the manliest virtue, but manliness and chivalry are dead, and so one wonders (when one is not me) whether honor matters anymore, whether it brings goodness to the world or whether it is merely another status signal. I claim that it is still a virtue even in these depraved and decadent times, that the function of honor is a commitment device: it is the ability to make promises, to fail gracefully if one should fail, to be punished with harm rather than death when one makes a reasonable mistake, and to grow in reputation and in stature. But while it can be true and beautiful, it can be exploited, by mountebanks and scavengers alike. For honor is inextricably tied to reputation, and no commitment device can give a man enough control over what others think of him to reliably prevent atrocities.

Recommended Reading:

Duel

Homo Hypocritus

Parfit's Hitchhiker

revenge as charitable act by Yvain

Honor killing

NB: No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. However, I will tolerate no slights nor aspersions on my ancestry.

You must thoroughly research this.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Honor and Glory
How Tim O'Brien gets around the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence
by mszegedy — 2014-04-24T21:41:22.443Z

It took me until I read The Things They Carried for the third time until I realized that it contained something very valuable to rationalists. In "The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence," EY explains how using fiction as evidence is bad not only because it's deliberately wrong in particular ways to make it more interesting, but more importantly because it does not provide a probabilistic model of what happened, and gives at best a bit or two of evidence that looks like a hundred or more bits of evidence.

Some background: The Things They Carried is a book by Tim O'Brien that reads as an autobiography where he recollects various stories from being a story in the Vietnam War. However, O'Brien often repeats himself, writing the same story over again, but with details or entire events that change. It is actually a fictional autobiography; O'Brien was in the Vietnam War, but all the stories are fictional.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien not only explains how generalization from fictional evidence is bad, but also has his own solution to the problem that actually works, i.e. gives the reader a useful probabilistic model of what happened in such a way that actually interests the reader. He does this by telling his stories many times, changing significant things about them. Literally; he contradicts himself, writing out the same story but with things changed. The best illustration of the principle in the book is the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story," found here (PDF warning, and bad typesetting warning).

A reader is not inclined to read a list of probabilities, but they are inclined to read a bunch of short stories. He talks about this practice a lot in the book itself, writing, "All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. … You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it." He always says war story, but the principle generalizes. At one point, he has a character represent the forces that act on conventional writing, telling a storyteller that he cannot say that he doesn't know what happened, and that he cannot insert any analysis.

O'Brien also writes about a lot of other things I don't want to mention more than briefly here, such as the specific ways in which the model that conventional war stories give of war is wrong, a...
Meetup : Washington DC Singing Meetup
by rocurley — 2014-04-24T17:27:27.871Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Singing Meetup

WHEN:
27 April 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Same as before, but this time for real!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Singing Meetup
The Cryonics Strategy Space
by Froolow — 2014-04-24T16:11:03.773Z

In four paragraphs I’m going to claim, “It is highly likely reading this article will increase your chance of living forever”. I’m pretty sure you won’t disagree with me. First, however, I’d like to talk about how much I don’t like Monopoly.

I play a lot of Monopoly, because I am forced into it – against my will – by friends, family, work-related-bonding etc. I understand this is a controversial opinion, but I really, really don’t like Monopoly – there is very little scope for creative play. In fact there is so little scope for create play I spotted that I could win at Monopoly, in a probabilistic sense, by going online and looking up the optimal allocation of houses to properties and valuation of houses in the ‘bargaining’ mid-game. For a while, the fact that nobody but me played ‘perfect’ Monopoly meant I won nearly every game, and I felt much better about playing because games tended to conclude more quickly when one player was a soulless, utility-hungry robot – it left me more time to concentrate on the stuff I actually enjoyed, which was socialising.

But Monopoly, despite being an almost completely deterministic dice-rolling game, hides unexpected complexity; a salutary lesson for an aspiring rationalist. Winning the game was completely secondary to my actual aim, which was forcing the game to take as little time as possible. I realised a few months ago that it didn’t matter who won, as long as somebody won quickly, and it was very unlikely the strategy optimised for one player was the same as the strategy optimised for all of them. As a consequence, I reran the computer simulations I built and developed an optimal ‘turn reducing’ strategy (it won’t surprise you to know that the basic rule is ‘play with as much variance as you possibly can’; having one maverick player lowers the average number of turns to the first bankruptcy, and bankruptcy is gamebreaking in Monopoly).

I agree that I could lower the number of turns even more by simply flipping over the board and storming out when someone suggests I play, but let’s assume I am also trying to balance a nebulously-defined but nonetheless real value of ‘not losing all my friends’, which is satisfied when I play a risky-but-exciting strategy and not satisf...
Less Wrong Business Networking Google Group
by moridinamael — 2014-04-24T14:45:21.253Z

Following on JoshuaFox's thread polling for interest in business networking between Less Wrong community members, a Less Wrong Networking Google group has been created. If you're interested in the potential of discovering potential business opportunities with other Less Wrong users, with whom you may have reason to assume you share some philosophical and ideological alignment, please consider joining the group.

As Gunnar_Zarncke proposed, please consider modifying your user page to indicate your participation.

Please tell me if there's a best practice I should be doing with regards to this Google group that I'm not doing.