trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Eliezer's Meta-Level Determinism
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-10T06:01:49.592Z

Today's post, Eliezer’s Meta-Level Determinism was originally published on June 23, 2008. A summary:

Eliezer has suggested that the most dramatic changes in the history of life are the result of events that changed the optimization process at work. This is experimentally testable, and the predictions it offers seem to be false.

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 AI Go Foom, 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.
[SEQ RERUN] Optimization and the Singularity
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-10T05:50:28.467Z

Today's post, Optimization and the Singularity was originally published on 23 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An introduction to optimization processes and why Yudkowsky thinks that a singularity would be far more powerful than calculations based on human progress would suggest.

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 AI Go Foom, 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.
How many of you doing Khan Academy?
by  — 2012-11-10T05:39:14.662Z

Hello, I was wondering: how many of you are doing khanacademy?

Right now, I am about 2 weeks away from completing khanacademy altogether. 334 out of 380 concepts are completed, assuming that the KA team don't add any new content during the time period.

Are you guys brushing up your math on KA, and if so what's your progress?
If MWI is correct, should we expect to experience Quantum Torment?
by Furcas — 2012-11-10T04:32:02.524Z

If the many worlds of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics are real, there's at least a good chance that Quantum Immortality is real as well: All conscious beings should expect to experience the next moment in at least one Everett branch even if they stop existing in all other branches, and the moment after that in at least one other branch, and so on forever.

However, the transition from life to death isn't usually a binary change. For most people it happens slowly as your brain and the rest of your body deteriorates, often painfully.

Doesn't it follow that each of us should expect to keep living in this state of constant degradation and suffering for a very, very long time, perhaps forever?

I don't know much about quantum mechanics, so I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion. I'm just terrified, and I'd like, not to be reassured by well-meaning lies, but to know the truth. How likely is it that Quantum Torment is real?
Meetup : Toronto THINK
by Giles — 2012-11-10T00:24:57.882Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto THINK

WHEN:
14 November 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto

In the Hart House Reading Room (the room across from the reception desk with the purple walls)

Sustainability and the environment are hot topics - global warming, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, overpopulation, water resources, pollution, deforestation. But as individuals, what should we be doing about it? Should we be trying to minimize our own environmental impact, or encouraging our friends to do so? Or should we be lobbying for change at the political level? Just how much do things need to change? Is it already too late? And, importantly, which issues should be getting most of our attention and which do we think are distractions?

This will be the focus of next week's discussion.

In addition to this, we're starting a project to save a life! One of the best ways we know to go about this comes to our attention via the charity evaluator GiveWell. If their research is to be believed, the Against Malaria Foundation can save a life for around $2000. But we need to get the money somehow, and we need to decide whether we trust GiveWell's methodology and whether there are better options available. All things to discuss at the next meetup!

Note: THINK is not directly LW-affiliated but I've been told to post our meetups here anyhow :-)

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto THINK
Meetup : (Seattle) Conscientiousness
by jsalvatier — 2012-11-09T22:10:45.473Z

Discussion article for the meetup : (Seattle) Conscientiousness

WHEN:
11 November 2012 04:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1900 NE 68th St. Seattle, WA 98115

Three short conscientiousness related presentations.

Andrew will give a short presentation on what psychologists know about conscientiousness (one of the big-5 personality traits),

Ben will talk a bit about the book "Getting Things Done".

I will briefly talk about Vitamin D supplementation research.

We'll have some discussion and socializing and order dinner. I'm interested in talking about how to work on conscientiousness related skills (organization of various sorts, motivation etc.).

See you there!

If you need help: 360 602 1069

Discussion article for the meetup : (Seattle) Conscientiousness
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Cambridge UK, Champaign IL, Durham NC (2), Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-11-09T16:12:27.399Z

This summary was posted to LW main on Nov 2nd, and has been moved to discussion. The following week's summary is here.

For LW readers under 20: Note that the Thiel Fellowships (20 under 20) are now open for their next round of applications, and as they put it, "you have a huge readership of folk who would make great applicants". More info here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Durham HPMoR discussion, ch 12-14: 03 November 2012 11:00AM
Berlin Meetup: 03 November 2012 08:30PM
Washington DC Social Meetup: 04 November 2012 04:23PM
Champaign, IL meetup: 06 November 2012 09:00PM
Durham LW: Technical explanation, meta: 08 November 2012 08:00PM
Skepticon 5: 10 November 2012 01:06PM
First Meetup- Cleveland and Akron, Ohio: 17 November 2012 08:03PM
18/11 London Meetup: 18 November 2012 02:00PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 03 November 2018 01:30PM
Cambridge UK Weekly Meetup: 03 November 2012 07:47PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, 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, build community, 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...
[SEQ RERUN] AI Go Foom
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-09T05:37:00.426Z

Today's post, AI Go Foom was originally published on November 19, 2008. A summary:

Robin Hanson's attempt to summarize Eliezer Yudkowsky's position.

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 Whence Your Abstractions?, 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.
XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians
by brilee — 2012-11-09T05:25:49.367Z

http://xkcd.com/1132/

Is this a fair representation of frequentists versus bayesians? I feel like every time the topic comes up, 'Bayesian statistics' is an applause light for me, and I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be applauding.
Meetup : Berlin Meetup
by blob — 2012-11-09T04:59:58.349Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup

WHEN:
14 November 2012 07:30:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Ming Dynastie, Brückenstraße 6, 10179 Berlin

WARNING: We might meet at c-base instead which is also at S Jannowitzbruecke. If it works out, the change of location will be announced on the mailing list and here at least a day in advance.

Our plans for this time are:

Discuss plans and make public commitments

Discuss answers to LW census survey

Self-improvement open space

As usual, I'll be there slightly early and bring a sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup
On counting and addition
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2012-11-09T03:26:17.544Z

When mathematical truths and their applicability to the physical world are discussed, there's a certain kind of flawed (in my opinion) thinking that is often employed, and it comes out in sentences like "rocks behave isomorphically to integers, while clouds don't", or "two apples plus two apples is four apples, unless someone stole one from the bowl", and so on. I'll try to explain why I consider such reasoning flawed, and what are the more suitable descriptions of what's going on with the apples and the rocks and the clouds and the drops of water and such.

Two mistakes combine together and create a shared state of confusion; the mistakes themselves are almost independent and I think they stand or fall separately.

1. The first mistake is conflating counting things and bringing things together spatially. One usually goes with the other because that's how we learn to count, by looking at groups of things located closely together - but it doesn't have to be this way. When we say "take 2 apples and add 2 more apples, now count - you have 4 apples", we automatically imagine the two additional apples being brought in and placed next to the two original ones, but that's just a mental crutch you can easily do without. Let me show you: suppose I ask you to consider two sheep in England and two more sheep in Australia - how many sheep are there together? You see the English sheep in your mind's eye, there they are standing, and you count one, two. Now please resist the temptation to teleport the two Australian sheep and place them next in sequence. Instead, just fly with your mind's eye all the way to Australia in a split second and home on that field - there they are - and continue counting: three, four. There, you just counted 2+2 sheep without bringing them together in space, in real life or your imagination. There's nothing to it and you do it all the time - if someone asks you to count the number of chairs in a large and busy-looking living room, you don't bring them together in your mind, you just gaze-travel over the room and count them off one by one.

Now consider the implication of that to clouds or other such objects. Suppose someone tells you "well, apples obey the law of arithmetics, but one drop of water plus another drop of water equals one larger drop of water, not two" - it should be clear that they are naively conflating spatial movement and adding/count...
Meetup : Rio de Janeiro Meetup
by roland — 2012-11-09T00:24:27.758Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rio de Janeiro Meetup

WHEN:
09 November 2012 08:00:00PM (-0200)

WHERE:
Rio de Janeiro

It will be at Pizzaria Parmê in Largo do Machado(Rua do Catete, 311 - Ljs. 112 / 1)
link

I will place a paper written with "LessWrong.com Meet-up" on the table so you can find us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Rio de Janeiro Meetup
Nov 16-18: Rationality for Entrepreneurs
by AnnaSalamon — 2012-11-08T18:15:15.281Z

CFAR is taking LW-style rationality into the world, this month, with a new kind of rationality camp: Rationality for Entrepreneurs. It is aimed at ambitious, relatively successful folk (regardless of whether they are familiar with LW), who like analytic thinking and care about making practical real-world projects work. Some will be paying for themselves; others will be covered by their companies.

If you'd like to learn rationality in a more practical context, consider applying. Also, if you were hoping to introduce rationality and related ideas to a friend/acquaintance who fits the bill, please talk to them about the workshop, both for their sake and to strengthen the rationality community.

The price will be out of reach for some: the workshop costs $3.9k. But there is a money-back guarantee. Some partial scholarships may be available. This fee buys participants:

Four nights and three days at a retreat center, with small classes, interactive exercises, and much opportunity for unstructured conversation that applies the material at meals and during the evenings (room and board is included);

One instructor for every three participants;

Six weeks of Skype/phone and email follow-up, to help participants make the material into regular habits, and navigate real-life business and personal situations with these tools.

CFAR is planning future camps which are more directly targeted at a Less Wrong audience (like our previous camps), so don’t worry if this camp doesn’t seem like the right fit for you (because of cost, interests, etc.). There will be others. But if you or someone you know does have an entrepreneurial bent[1], then we strongly recommend applying to this camp rather than waiting. Attendees will be surrounded by other ambitious, successful, practically-minded folks, learn from materials that have been tailored to entrepreneurial issues, and receive extensive follow-up to help apply what they’ve learned to their businesses and personal lives.

Our schedule is below.

(See also the thread about the camp on Hacker News.)

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE: NOVEMBER 16-18, 2012

Friday, November 16: Know the World

8:00 am
Breakfast

8:45 am
Opening Session. Rationality doesn't mean Spock - the common themes that will bind the workshop together - building accurate models of

...
FAI, FIA, and singularity politics
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-11-08T17:11:10.674Z

In discussing scenarios of the future, I speak of "slow futures" and "fast futures". A fast future is exemplified by what is now called a hard takeoff singularity: something bootstraps its way to superhuman intelligence in a short time. A slow future is a continuation of history as we know it: decades pass and the world changes, with new politics, culture, and technology. To some extent the Hanson vs Yudkowsky debate was about slow vs fast; Robin's future is fast-moving, but on the way there, there's never an event in which some single "agent" becomes all-powerful by getting ahead of all others.
The Singularity Institute does many things, but I take its core agenda to be about a fast scenario. The theoretical objective is to design an AI which would still be friendly if it became all-powerful. There is also the practical objective of ensuring that the first AI across the self-enhancement threshold is friendly. One way to do that is to be the one who makes it, but that's asking a lot. Another way is to have enough FAI design and FAI theory out there, that the people who do win the mind race will have known about it and will have taken it into consideration. Then there are mixed strategies, such as working on FAI theory while liaising with known AI projects that are contenders in the race and whose principals are receptive to the idea of friendliness.
I recently criticised a lot of the ideas that circulate in conjunction with the concept of friendly AI. The "sober" ideas and the "extreme" ideas have a certain correlation with slow-future and fast-future scenarios, respectively. The sober future is a slow one where AIs exist and posthumanity expands into space, but history, politics, and finitude aren't transcended. The extreme future is a fast one where one day the ingredients for a hard takeoff are brought together in one place, an artificial god is born, and, depending on its inclinations and on the nature of reality, something transcendental happens: everyone uploads to the Planck scale, our local overmind reaches out to other realities, we "live forever and remember it afterwards".
Although I have criticised such transcendentalism, saying that it should not be the default expectation of the future, I do think that the "hard takeoff" and the "all-powerful agent" would be among the strategic considerations in an ideal plan for the future, though in a rather ...
SI is coming to Oxford, looking for hosts, trying to keep costs down 
by Malo — 2012-11-08T15:40:52.935Z

The Singularity Institute is coming to Oxford, England for AGI-2012!

AGI-2012 runs December 8th–11th, but many of us will be arriving as early as the 6th or 7th, and some will be leaving as late as the 16th. We are looking for generous members of the Less Wrong community who would be willing to host us during our visit.

Who's coming?

Luke Muehlhauser

Louie Helm

Carl Shulman

Alex Altair

Malo Bourgon

Anja Heinisch

Why you might want to host us?

You want to help SI save some money.

You want to see Luke Meuhlhauser fact #8 for yourself.

You want to hangout with us, which is great, because we also want to hangout with you.

You want to marvel at Louie's boyish good looks in person.

If you live close to Oxford and have a spare bed, a futon, a comfortable couch, a not so comfortable couch, an inflatable mattress etc.—and would be willing to put one or more of us up for one or more nights—please email malo@intelligence.org with the following information:

your location,

what dates you can host one or more of us, and

how many of us you're able/willing to put up with :)
[SEQ RERUN] Whence Your Abstractions?
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-08T15:28:13.860Z

Today's post, Whence Your Abstractions? was originally published on 20 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Figuring out how to place concepts in categories is an important part of the problem. Before we classify AI into the same group as human intelligence, farming, and industry, we need to think about why we want to put them into that same category.

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 old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Abstraction, Not Analogy, 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.
[LINK] Was Intrade being manipulated?
by DanielVarga — 2012-11-08T08:30:59.538Z

Overcoming Bias: Was Intrade being manipulated in the last month?

The link is good apropos, but the question that interests me is a bit more general. It seems to me that the apparent failure of Intrade to function as a predictor/knowledge aggregator before the US presidential elections was an important natural experiment. What do you think about the explanations and implications? I don't think it's too hard to discuss the knowledge aggregation issues without being bogged down in the specificities of US politics.
PROPOSAL: LessWrong for Teenagers
by  — 2012-11-08T06:09:14.223Z

What about an online group for high schoolers devoted to refining the art of human rationality?

Discovering LessWrong had a profound effect on me, shedding light on the way I study thought processes and helping me with a more rational approach. As a teenager in high school, I wish I could share LessWrong's teachings and philosophies with others at my level.

It would be awesome if we could create a list for the interests of LessWrong readers who are in their teens/in high school. I think this would allow a rational online community such as LessWrong to help develop more rationalists whether by outlining some plans to start rationality clubs in high school or discussing ways teenagers an approach rationality. I also think it would help more timid readers to express themselves and talk with other teenagers about common interests (adults could be allowed in to, if they are deemed appropriate for the community). Correct me if I'm wrong, but rationality training should start as soon as possible in the development process and what better age group to target than teenagers? Adolescence is a crucial transitional phase psychologically, biologically and culturally. I would love to see more collected articles on the evolution of rationality in the amazing, flexible mind of an adolescent. If the goal of this blog is to train humans to be rational-minded, more importance should be allocated to training teenagers. I do not think it hasn't happened yet for want of need among teenagers and if we concentrate some resources, gather a list of interested individuals and garner some interest we can make this work. This article is a good example of something that could be distributed in the proposed group:

For LW readers under 20: Note that the Thiel Fellowships (20 under 20) are now open for their next round of applications, and as they put it, "you have a huge readership of folk who would make great applicants". More info here. (from http://lesswrong.com/lw/f9r/weekly_lw_meetups_austin_berlin_cambridge_uk/)

There is also this LessWrong Highschoolers Facebook group created by Curtis SerVaas:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/201577993258819/

I recently Skyped (not officially a verb yet?) Anna Salamon who is the Executive Director of CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality). We had begun to develop this proposal. She is on the e-mail list and will be invo...