trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Southeast Michigan
by Scott Alexander — 2013-07-16T02:50:20.478Z

WHEN: 21 July 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: [information removed]

I now live in Michigan and would like to get to know the locals. By a happy coincidence, this weekend out-of-staters ozymandias_42 and lucidian are also visiting. So I am inviting the Metro Detroit/Ann Arbor LW community to my house for snacks and informal discussion.

Sorry for the non-neutral location, but arundelo says last time everyone tried to meet up at a restaurant and it was loud and inconvenient and turned everyone off from further meetups. There are various people on here who can vouch for me being safe to visit. RSVPs appreciated but not required.
Akrasia Tactics Review 2: The Akrasia Strikes Back
by polutropon — 2013-07-16T02:17:21.127Z

About three and a half years ago, orthonormal ran an akrasia tactics review: an open-ended survey asking Less Wrong posters to give numerical scores to productivity techniques that they'd tried, with the goal of getting a more objective picture of how well different techniques work (for the sort of people who post here). Since it's been years since the original and Less Wrong has grown significantly while retaining akrasia as a major topic, I thought it'd be useful to have a new one!

A modified version of the instructions from the previous post:

Note what technique you've tried. Techniques can be anything from productivity systems (Getting Things Done) to social incentives (precommitting in front of friends) to websites or computer programs (Beeminder, Leechblock) to chemical aids (Modafinil). If it's something that you can easily link to information about, please provide a link and I'll add it when I list the technique; if you don't have a link, describe it in your comment and I'll link that.

Give your experience with it a score from -10 to +10 (0 if it didn't change the status quo, 10 if it ended your akrasia problems forever with no side effects, negative scores if it actually made your life worse, -10 if it nearly killed you). For simplicity's sake, I'll only include reviews that give numerical scores.

Describe your experience with it, including any significant side effects. Please also say approximately how long you've been using it, or if you don't use it anymore how long you used it before giving up.

Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing every technique that's been reviewed at least twice with the number of reviews, average score, standard deviation and common effects, as well as links to the relevant reviews <edit: mostly canceling the last two parts part because I think it'd be too much work for me for too little benefit for the reader>. I'll do my best to combine similar techniques appropriately, but it'd be appreciated if you could try to organize it a bit by replying to people doing similar things and/or saying if you feel your technique is (dis)similar to another.

I'm not going to provide an initial list due to the massive number of possible techniques and fear of prejudicing answers, but you can look back on the list in the last post if you want. If you have any suggestions for how to organize this (th...
For Happiness, Keep a Gratitude Journal
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-07-15T21:11:52.203Z

Want to be happier than you already are? Many people look to self-help books as a way to become happy. Sometimes they give good advice and sometimes they dont. However, one of the most robust, enduring findings from psychological studies of increasing people's happiness has been that happiness can be found from journaling, especially when you keep a regular journal of what you're grateful for.

Gratitude

Gratitude is defined as the reliable emotional response that one has to receiving benefits<sup>1</sup>. Gratitude is also known to correlate with subjective levels of happiness1,2,3,4,5, as well as pro-social behavior, self-efficacy, and self-worth6,7. Moreover, this connection with happiness is found in both student and non-student populations, and persists even when controlling for extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness8,9. Gratitude also fights stress, materialism, and negative self-comparisons7.

But what if you're not already grateful? Well, there is a solution. Regular practice of gratitude has theological origins -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all consider it a virtue and prescribe approaches for practicing10.

And it appears that religion is right on this one -- gratitude can be trained, and one way to do so is the gratitude journal. And by training in gratitude, one can become lastingly happier.

Writing as a Cure

Studies have found that while talking about one's problems doesn't help one to feel better about them, even if it seems like the talk helped at the time11, writing about the problem does help. In one study, participants who had been recently laid off from work were asked to spend a few minutes each day writing a diary about their feelings regarding the lay off. Doing so produced boosts in happiness, self-esteem, health, and psychological and physical well-being12. Other similar studies found similar results13.

But one doesn't need trauma in order to get these beneficial results. Another study had people assigned to write for 20 minutes a day for four days about one of four topics at random -- either a traumatic life event, their best possible future self, both, or a nonemotional control. A follow up five months later found that writing about either trauma or a positive future lead to reduced illness and increased subje...
Personally mitigating existential risk
by Metus — 2013-07-15T17:56:41.176Z

Instrumental rationalilty is important. Existential risk is important. The average person will do most good in this world by helping himself. While only few people or all people at once can avoid a war, everyone can increase his and his loved ones likelihood to survive. In this spirit I would like to create a repository of advice to help people mitigate catastrophic risk, that is any danger with irreversible consequences to personal well-being regardless of the scale of the catastrophe. This can be either a personal accident, a local earthquake, continent-wide war or a global pandemic.

I ask you, the reader, to provide your bit of knowledge and expertise in this matter, be in financial, health, personal or public, insurance, politics, law, building safety ... Here is an example of how I imagine advice:

Mitigate natural desaster (low cost, low time): Natural catastrophes destroy infrastructure and supply lines and in the worst case shelter, too. To mitigate food shortages and allowing helpers to divert ressources from providing food and water to rebuilding infrastructure to return to normal levels again, build a basic disaster supply kit. In general, it is helpful to stay in contact with your government's agency tasked with managing catastrophes. In the case of the USA that is FEMA with their site ready.gov.

I did not post this in the PSA repository as this advice should be more prominent and longer.
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
by Maelin — 2013-07-15T14:10:44.459Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup

WHEN:
19 July 2013 06:30:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
5 / 52 Leicester St, Carlton 3053

Melbourne's regular monthly Social Meetup will be running as normal on Friday evening this week. All welcome from 6:30pm, feel free to arrive later if that is easier for you.

Our social meetups are friendly, informal events where we chat about topics of interest and often play board games. Sometimes we will also play parlour games like Mafia (a.k.a. Werewolf) or Resistance. We usually order some sort of take-away dinner for any that wish to partake.

This week we will also be discussing the Comfort Zone Expansion activity planned for Saturday, which will be especially helpful for any members that are unsure if they want to attend.

Please ring the number 5 button when you arrive in the foyer and we'll buzz you up. If you get lost or have any problems, feel free to call me (Richard) on 0421231789.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
Group Rationality Diary, July 16-31
by therufs — 2013-07-15T13:39:39.682Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for July 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!

Immediate past diary: July 1-15

Next diary: August 1-15

Rationality Diaries archive
Duller blackmail definitions
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-15T10:08:11.279Z

For a more parable-ic version of this, see here.

Suppose I make a precommitment P to take action X unless you take action Y. Action X is not in my interest: I wouldn't do it if I knew you'd never take action Y. You would want me to not precommit to P.

Is this blackmail? Suppose we've been having a steamy affair together, and I have the letters to prove it. It would be bad for both of these if they were published. Then X={Publish the letters} and Y={You pay me money} is textbook blackmail.

But suppose I own a MacGuffin that you want (I value it at £9). If X={Reject any offer} and Y={You offer more than £10}, is this still blackmail? Formally, it looks the same.

What about if I bought the MacGuffin for £500 and you value it at £1000? This makes no difference to the formal structure of the scenario. Then my behaviour feels utterly reasonable, rather than vicious and blackmail-ly.

What is the meaningful difference between the two scenarios? I can't really formalise it.
Countess and Baron attempt to define blackmail, fail
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-15T10:07:54.211Z

For a more concise version of this argument, see here.

We meet our heroes, the Countess of Rectitude and Baron Chastity, as they continue to investigate the mysteries of blackmail by sleeping together and betraying each other.

The Baron had a pile of steamy letters between him and the Countess: it would be embarrassing to both of them if these letters got out. Yet the Baron confided the letters to a trusted Acolyte, with strict instructions. The Acolyte was to publish these letters, unless the Countess agreed to give the Baron her priceless Ping Vase.

This seems a perfect example of blackmail:

The Baron is taking a course of action that is intrinsically negative for him. This behaviour only makes sense if it forces the Countess to take a specific action which benefits him. The Countess would very much like it if the Baron couldn't do such things.

As it turns out, a servant broke the Ping Vase while chasing the Countess's griffon. The servant was swiftly executed, but the Acolyte had to publish the letters as instructed, to great embarrassment all around (sometimes precommitments aren't what they're cracked up to be). After six days of exile in the Countess's doghouse (a luxurious, twenty-room affair) and eleven days of make-up sex, the Baron was back to planning against his lover.

The Countess acquired the left winged sandal from the god Hermes, who was seeking to retire from the god-race. A precious acquisition indeed! But nearly worthless without the rightmost one. The Baron suddenly remembered that he'd seen the right sandal in a small mysterious shop he'd attempted to buy out earlier (he'd wanted the land to design a course for the recently fashionable sport of hunting kangaroos while mounted on sea-horses). But he'd visited that shop hand in hand with the Countess, so she'd remember it! Quickly, he rushed down to town to buy the sandal and sell it back to the Countess at an inflated price.

Is this blackmail? It fits the definition. The Baron is prepared to shell out money to buy the sandal, which he has no interest in. He wants to force the Countess into a specific action (giving him more money). She would like him not to do this, as she would buy the sandal herself otherwise.

He was consternated to discover that the small shop was no longer there: it had vanished as mysteriously as it came, leaving nothing but an empty lot. Suddenly, he remembere...
Notes/blog posts on two recent MIRI papers
by Quinn — 2013-07-14T23:11:09.455Z

I've been learning math lately; specifically I've been reading MIRI's recent research preprints and the prerequisite material. In order to actually learn math, I typically have to write it down again, usually with more details and context. I started a blog to make my notes on these papers public, and I think they're of high enough quality that I ought to share them here.

Note: my use of the pronoun "we" is instilled habit; I am not claiming to have helped develop the core ideas herein.

Löb's Theorem and the Prisoner's Dilemma is an account of the LaVictoire et al paper Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Details in Provability Logic is a technical followup to the above, which goes into the details of modal logic needed for the LaVictoire et al paper; namely the normal form theorem, the fixed point theorem, and the decidability of GL via Kripke semantics.

Definability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic goes through the Christiano et al paper of the same name. It's a little rougher around the edges on account of being the first blog post I ever wrote (and being produced more hastily than the other two). I note that the construction doesn't truly require the Axiom of Choice.
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup V.
by Viliam_Bur — 2013-07-14T09:03:16.881Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup V.

WHEN:
22 July 2013 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Lanai, Dunajská 25, Bratislava

This time we try a new place: Cafe Lanai. We will have a lecture (in Slovak language) about rationality in human relations and education of children.

Stretneme sa o šiestej v Lanai, pri križovatke Dunajskej a Lazaretskej. Na stretnutí nám redaktorka stránky "nanicmama.sme.sk" porozpráva o racionalite v medziľudských vzťahoch a výchove detí.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup V.
Writing Style and the Typical Mind Fallacy
by lukeprog — 2013-07-14T04:47:48.167Z

For a long time, Eliezer has been telling me I should write more like he does. I've mostly resisted, preferring instead to write like this:

Explain the lesson of the post immediately, and outline the ideas clearly with lots of headings, subheadings, lists, etc.

State the abstract points first, then give concrete examples.

Provide lots of links and references to related work so that readers have the opportunity to read more detail about what I'm trying to say (in case it wasn't clear in a single sentence or paragraph), or read the same thing from a different angle (in case the metaphors and language I used weren't clear to that reader).

Eliezer talks as though his style is simply better writing, while I've complained that I often can't even tell what his posts are saying.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that it wasn't until sometime last month that I realized that, obviously, different people prefer each style, and Eliezer and I were both falling prey to the typical mind fallacy.

At the recent Effective Altruism Summit I tried to figure out which personal features predicted writing style preference.

One hypothesis was that people who read lots of fiction (like Eliezer) will tend to prefer Eliezer's story-like style, while those who read almost exclusively non-fiction (like me) will tend to prefer my "just gimme the facts" style. This hypothesis didn't hold up well on my non-scientific survey of ~10 LW-reading effective altruists.

Another hypothesis was that most people would prefer Eliezer's more exciting posts, while people trained in the sciences or analytic philosophy (which insist on clear organization, definitions, references to related work, etc.) would prefer my posts. This hypothesis fared a bit better, but not by much.

Another hypothesis was that people who had acquired an epiphany addiction would prefer Eliezer's style, whereas those who just want to learn everything efficiently would prefer my style. But I didn't test this.

Another hypothesis that occurs to me is that people with short attention spans could prefer my more skimmable style. But I haven't tested this.

Perhaps the community would like to propose some hypotheses, and test them with LW polling?
To reduce astronomical waste: take your time, then go very fast
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-13T16:41:05.623Z

While we dither on the planet, are we losing resources in space? Nick Bostrom has an article on astronomical waste, talking about the vast amounts of potentially useful energy that we're simply not using for anything:

As I write these words, suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives.

The rate of this loss boggles the mind. One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~1046 per century of delayed colonization.

On top of that, galaxies are slipping away from us because of the exponentially accelerating expansion of the universe (x axis in years since Big Bang, cosmic scale function arbitrarily set to 1 at the current day):

At the rate things are going, we seem to be losing slightly more than one galaxy a year. One entire galaxy, with its hundreds of billions of stars, is slipping away from us each year, never to be interacted with again. This is many solar systems a second; poof! Before you've even had time to grasp that concept, we've lost millions of times more resources than humanity has even used.

So it would seem that the answer to this desperate state of affairs is to rush thing: start expanding as soon as possible, greedily grab every hint of energy and negentropy before they vanish forever.

Not so fast! Nick Bostrom's point was not that we should rush things, but that we should be very very careful:

However, the lesson for utilitarians is not that we ought to maximize the pace of technological development, but rather that we ought to maximize its safety, i.e. the probability that colonization will eventually occur.

If we rush things and lose the whole universe, then we certainly don't come out ahead in this game.

But let's ignore that; let's pretend that we've solved all risks, that we can expand safely, without fear of messing things up. Right. Full steam ahead to the starships, no?

No. Firstly, though the losses are large in absolute terms, they are small in relative terms. Most of the energy ...
Some highlights from Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise"
by JonahS — 2013-07-13T15:21:14.903Z

As a part of my work for MIRI on the "Can we know what to do about AI?" project, I read Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't. I compiled a list of the takeaway points that I found most relevant to the project. I think that they might be of independent interest to the Less Wrong community, and so am posting them here.

Because I've paraphrased Silver rather than quoting him, and because the summary is long, there may be places where I've inadvertently misrepresented Silver. A reader who's especially interested in a point should check the original text.

Main Points

The deluge of data available in the modern world has exacerbated the problem of people perceiving patterns where none exist, and overfitting predictive models to past data.

Because of the risk of overfitting a model to past data, using a simple model can give more accurate results than using a refined model does.

A major reason that predictions fail is that predictors often don't take model uncertainty into account. Looking at a situation from multiple different angles can be a guard against failure to give adequate weight to model uncertainty.

Average different perspectives often yields better predictive results than using a single perspective.

Humans have a very strong tendency toward being overconfident when making predictions.

People make better predictions in domains where they have tight feedback loops to use to test their hypotheses.

Sometimes people's failure to make good predictions is the result of perverse incentives.

Chapter Summaries

Introduction

Increased access to information can do more harm than good. This is because the more information is available, the easier it is for people to cherry-pick information that supports their pre-existing positions, or to perceive patterns where there are none.
The invention of the printing press may have given rise to religious wars on account of facilitating the development of ideological agendas.

Chapter 1: The failure to predict the 2008 housing bubble and recession

There was an issue of people failing to take into account model uncertainty. In particular, people shouldn't have taken the forecasted 0.12% default rate of mortgage securities at face value. This rate corresponded to the rating agencies giving mortgage securities AAA

...
Meetup : London Social - Direct Sunlight 2, Vitamin Boogaloo - July 21st 
by Leonhart — 2013-07-13T11:09:16.790Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - Direct Sunlight 2, Vitamin Boogaloo - July 21st

WHEN:
21 July 2013 11:54:28AM (+0100)

WHERE:
St James Park, London, SW1H

The next London Social meetup will be taking place in St. James Park on Sunday July 21st from 2pm. Please join us all. Bring friends if you have made adequate backups.

For further details - including where to meet if the weather doesn't get my memo - please see the last social meetup entry here. I can be contacted on 07860 466862 that morning in case of confusion.

There is no agenda or topic; although the whereabouts of Hermione's brain will probably be discussed.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - Direct Sunlight 2, Vitamin Boogaloo - July 21st
"Stupid" questions thread
by gothgirl420666 — 2013-07-13T02:42:56.635Z

r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.