trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Local truth
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-12-20T17:04:09.426Z

New Salt Compounds Challenge the Foundation of Chemistry

The title is overblown (it depends on what you think the foundation is), but get a load of this:

"I think this work is the beginning of a revolution in chemistry," Oganov says. "We found, at low pressures achievable in the lab, perfectly stable compounds that contradict the classical rules of chemistry. If you apply the rather modest pressure of 200,000 atmospheres -- for comparison purposes, the pressure at the center of the Earth is 3.6 million atmospheres -- everything we know from chemistry textbooks falls apart."

Standard chemistry textbooks say that sodium and chlorine have very different electronegativities, and thus must form an ionic compound with a well-defined composition. Sodium's charge is +1, chlorine's charge is -1; sodium will give away an electron, chlorine wants to take an electron. According to chemistry texts and common sense, the only possible combination of these atoms in a compound is 1:1 -- rock salt, or NaCl. "We found crazy compounds that violate textbook rules -- NaCl3, NaCl7, Na3Cl2, Na2Cl, and Na3Cl," says Weiwei Zhang, the lead author and visiting scholar at the Oganov lab and Stony Brook's Center for Materials by Design, directed by Oganov.

"These compounds are thermodynamically stable and, once made, remain indefinitely; nothing will make them fall apart. Classical chemistry forbids their very existence. Classical chemistry also says atoms try to fulfill the octet rule -- elements gain or lose electrons to attain an electron configuration of the nearest noble gas, with complete outer electron shells that make them very stable. Well, here that rule is not satisfied."

And here's the philosophical bit:

"For a long time, this idea was haunting me -- when a chemistry textbook says that a certain compound is impossible, what does it really mean, impossible? Because I can, on the computer, place atoms in certain positions and in certain proportions. Then I can compute the energy. 'Impossible' really means that the energy is going to be high. So how high is it going to be? And is there any way to bring that energy down, and make these compounds stable?"

To Oganov, impossible didn't mean something absolute. "The rules of chemistry are not like mathematical theorems, which cannot be broken," he says. "The rules of chemistry can be broken, because impossible only means 'softly' impo

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-12-20T17:02:58.839Z

This summary was posted to LW main on December 13th. The following week's summary is here.

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

[Leipzig] Secular Solstice Celebration! (And the Inauguration of the LW Leipzig Community): 21 December 2013 05:05PM
Mumbai Meetup: 15 December 2013 03:00PM
Utrecht: 14 December 2013 02:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Atlanta] December Meetup : 14 December 2013 07:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 15 December 2013 03:00PM
[Jacksonville FL] Book Mini-Review: Doug Hubbard's How to Measure Anything: 15 December 2013 04:00PM
[Vienna] The Return of the Rationalists!: 14 December 2013 03:00PM

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: 14 December 2019 01:30PM
Berlin: 01 January 2019 01:30PM
Brussels monthly meetup: time!: 14 December 2013 01:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: At...
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Rituals
by Mestroyer — 2013-12-20T15:28:26.843Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Rituals

WHEN: 21 December 2013 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE: 300 S Goodwin Ave Apt 102, Urbana Illinois

What are rituals good for? What makes a good ritual? What are the dangers of rituals? Are they worth it?

This being the solstice, conditioning on a "yes" to the last question, we may end up doing some of these ones: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2000477/SolsticeEve_2012.pdf

The location is 300 S Goodwin Ave Apt 102, Urbana Illinois. The main entrance to the building requires card access, but there is a door directly to my apartment from the outside at the Northwest corner of the building. If you have any trouble getting in, call my phone, REDACTED

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Rituals
Meetup : Moscow: Art Therapy for Emotions
by Yuu — 2013-12-19T06:22:40.082Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Art Therapy for Emotions

WHEN:
24 December 2013 06:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, Losinoostrovskaya ulitsa 24с1

We will gather at a new location this time to participate in an art therapy workshop. You can learn how to work with your emotions with this method, there will be practical demonstration and discussion about it.

We will start at 18:00 and finish about 20.

How to get there

Please read a detailed description in Russian here.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: Art Therapy for Emotions
Meetup : Durham: New Years' Resolutions etc.
by evand — 2013-12-18T03:02:17.243Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: New Years' Resolutions etc.

WHEN:
19 December 2013 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2411 N Roxboro St, Durham NC 27704

As your intrepid meetup organizers are still a bit worn out from their Solstice adventuring, this will be a somewhat low-key meetup. Our proposed discussion topic is New Years' resolutions, what makes for good ones, and whether or not you should make them.

We'll be at the Roxboro St house with the red door at 7 for general introductions, planning to start actual meetup discussions around 7:30. Meetup will run until 9:30 officially, but we're unlikely to kick people out / go to bed for a while after that.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: New Years' Resolutions etc.
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
by Ratcourse — 2013-12-18T01:28:30.265Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna

WHEN:
18 January 2014 03:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Vienna, Reichsratstraße 17 Cafe Votiv

Quantum Physics and its implications for a rational world view

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
Rationality Quotes December 2013
by Cyan — 2013-12-17T20:43:49.506Z

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
MIRI's Winter 2013 Matching Challenge
by lukeprog — 2013-12-17T20:41:28.303Z

Update: The fundraiser has been completed! Details here. The original post follows...

(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog. MIRI maintains Less Wrong, with generous help from Trike Apps, and much of the core content is written by salaried MIRI staff members.)

Thanks to Peter Thiel, every donation made to MIRI between now and January 15th, 2014 will be matched dollar-for-dollar!

Also, gifts from "new large donors" will be matched 3x! That is, if you've given less than $5k to SIAI/MIRI ever, and you now give or pledge $5k or more, Thiel will donate $3 for every dollar you give or pledge.

We don't know whether we'll be able to offer the 3:1 matching ever again, so if you're capable of giving $5k or more, we encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity while you can. Remember that:

If you prefer to give monthly, no problem! If you pledge 6 months of monthly donations, your full 6-month pledge will be the donation amount to be matched. So if you give monthly, you can get 3:1 matching for only $834/mo (or $417/mo if you get matching from your employer).

We accept Bitcoin (BTC) and Ripple (XRP), both of which have recently jumped in value. If the market value of your Bitcoin or Ripple is $5k or more on the day you make the donation, this will count for matching.

If your employer matches your donations at 1:1 (check here), then you can take advantage of Thiel's 3:1 matching by giving as little as $2,500 (because it's $5k after corporate matching).

Please email malo@intelligence.org if you intend on leveraging corporate matching or would like to pledge 6 months of monthly donations, so that we can properly account for your contributions towards the fundraiser.

Thiel's total match is capped at $250,000. The total amount raised will depend on how many people take advantage of 3:1 matching. We don't anticipate being able to hit the $250k cap without substantial use of 3:1 matching — so if you haven't given $5k thus far, please consider giving/pledging $5k or more during this drive. (If you'd like to know the total amount of your past donations to MIRI, just ask malo@intelligence.org.)

Now is your chance to double or quadruple your impact in funding our research program.

Donate Today

Accomplishments Since Our July 2013 Fundraiser Launched:

Held three research workshops, including our first European workshop.

Talks at MIT and Harvard, by E

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Meetup : Montreal - How to Actually Change your Mind
by bartimaeus — 2013-12-17T17:49:43.346Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal - How to Actually Change your Mind

WHEN:
07 January 2014 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
459 rue McTavish Montreal Quebec Canada

Montreal Less Wrong won't be meeting officially over the holidays due to several of us having busy schedules. However, send me a message on Less Wrong if you want to meet some fellow Less Wrongers over the holidays!
In January, we'll be having a meetup intended for newcomers to rationality. We'll look at some concrete 5-second level mental skills that can help us overcome mental obstacles to actually updating on evidence. Here's the description from the meetup.com page:
People aren't very good at changing their minds when their ideas are challenged. Have you ever been in an argument with someone, and no matter how much evidence you showed them that they were wrong, they would just become more and more convinced that YOU are the one who's wrong? That is a common human trait called reactance, where trying to get people to change their minds polarizes them in the other direction.
That's one example out of several cognitive biases that can prevent us from realizing we're wrong, and this can sometimes have disastrous consequences. We'll take a look at some classic biases that might prevent us from updating our opinions, and try to pin down specific mental skills you can use to fix your thinking and actually update on evidence.
Let me know if the date is good with everyone; the venue is subject to change once we have a better idea of how many people we'll be. Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal - How to Actually Change your Mind
Meetup : Melbourne Social Southern Summer Solstice Celebration
by BraydenM — 2013-12-17T15:08:57.063Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social Southern Summer Solstice Celebration

WHEN:
20 December 2013 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
54 Scenic Cres, Eltham North

Welcome to the end of 2013, a time of feasts and of plenty, and a time to celebrate the successes of the previous year and prepare for the next one.

Our traditional social meetup this month falls on the weekend of the 2013 Southern Summer Solstice. Lets take this opportunity to review our recent progress and bring a touch of ceremony into our lives.

Instead of our usual establishment in Carlton, you are invited to join me at the special location of my family home, in Eltham.

The focus for the evening will be on reflection and refocusing - What have we done in the past year that has lead to our successes? What could we have done differently? How can we improve our next year?

We will have an opportunity to look at these from both an individual and societal level. There will be reflections on the progress of humanity, and participatory exercises on self improvement.

In keeping with the tradition of feasting, we will have a pot-luck and BBQ dinner. All guests are encouraged to bring food to cook on the grill, a dish to share, or a contribution towards supplies. If you want to opt in, post what you are able to bring - be it meals, drinks, or deserts - to the Facebook event invitation (https://www.facebook.com/events/436330916489443). Please RSVP by Friday morning so I can make final arrangements.

Following the feast we can play some social party games, including a thematically appropriate Werewolf game, modified to include additional characters to make it even more interesting. If the clouds are clear I will bring out the telescope and we should have views of Venus, Jupiter's moons, our moon, and the milky way. We hope to end the evening with a mindfulness session.

Come to 54 Scenic Crescent, Eltham North. Parking is available up the driveway, and we will offer lifts from Eltham train station. Arrive from 7pm if you want to help with the set up, and we will kick off formal proceedings and dinner at 8pm. Sunset will be 8:41PM, and the day length will be 14 hours 47 minutes.

Let this be a ceremony to saviour, while the days remain long. I look forward to your attendance.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Social

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[LINK] David Deutsch on why we don't have AGI yet "Creative Blocks"
by harshhpareek — 2013-12-17T07:03:56.976Z

Folks here should be familiar with most of these arguments. Putting some interesting quotes below:

http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/

"Creative blocks: The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What's holding us up?"

Remember the significance attributed to Skynet’s becoming ‘self-aware’? [...] The fact is that present-day software developers could straightforwardly program a computer to have ‘self-awareness’ in the behavioural sense — for example, to pass the ‘mirror test’ of being able to use a mirror to infer facts about itself — if they wanted to. [...] AGIs will indeed be capable of self-awareness — but that is because they will be General

Some hope to learn how we can rig their programming to make [AGIs] constitutionally unable to harm humans (as in Isaac Asimov’s ‘laws of robotics’), or to prevent them from acquiring the theory that the universe should be converted into paper clips (as imagined by Nick Bostrom). None of these are the real problem. It has always been the case that a single exceptionally creative person can be thousands of times as productive — economically, intellectually or whatever — as most people; and that such a person could do enormous harm were he to turn his powers to evil instead of good.[...] The battle between good and evil ideas is as old as our species and will go on regardless of the hardware on which it is running

He also says confusing things about induction being inadequate for creativity which I'm guessing he couldn't support well in this short essay (perhaps he explains better in his books). Not quoting here. His attack on Bayesianism as an explanation for intelligence is valid and interesting, but could be wrong. Given what we know about neural networks, something like this does happen in the brain, and possibly even at a concept level.

The doctrine assumes that minds work by assigning probabilities to their ideas and modifying those probabilities in the light of experience as a way of choosing how to act. This is especially perverse when it comes to an AGI’s values — the moral and aesthetic ideas that inform its choices and intentions — for it allows only a behaviouristic model of them, in which values that are ‘rewarded

...
Meetup : Boston Winter Solstice
by Vika — 2013-12-17T06:56:27.729Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston Winter Solstice (Ritual Report)

WHEN: 21 December 2013 06:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: Citadel, 98 Elm St Apt 1, Somerville, MA

The winter solstice is a secular holiday. Last Saturday was New York's large-scale celebration, designed by Ray Arnold, and this Saturday we're having a smaller and cozier local one, and putting our own spin on it. This involves sing-alongs, speeches, and contemplating our place in an uncaring universe. It has a fairly intense emotional arc, including some rather dark parts, and is quite inspirational overall.

Dinner (potluck) will start at 6 pm. The ceremony will start at 7:30 pm and last about two hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston Winter Solstice
Group Rationality Diary, December 16-31
by therufs — 2013-12-16T22:44:28.024Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for December 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: December 1-15

Rationality diaries archive
Meetup : West Los Angeles - Resolutions
by Scott Garrabrant — 2013-12-16T20:34:00.260Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West Los Angeles - Resolutions

WHEN:
18 December 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Suite 312, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, December 18.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion:

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to everyone who values thinking for themselves. There will be open general conversation until 7:30, and that's always a lot of good, fun, intelligent discussion!

We will talk about new years resolutions and other hacks to get your future self to listen to your present self. I will provide an abstract game theoretic model to explain why it is hard to get yourselves to get along, and propose a solution to this problem that hopefully all your future selves can agree on. Then I will explain the way new years resolutions work for most people and explain how you can use a different strategy to make them work for you much more effectively. Hopefully this will lead to a discussion about how my proposal can be made even more effective, and how it can be extended to everyday life. (As opposed to every year)

Discussion article for the meetup : West Los Angeles - Resolutions
Meetup : Moscow, How Can Visual Image Be Rational
by Yuu — 2013-12-16T17:18:56.648Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, How Can Visual Image Be Rational

WHEN:
22 December 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

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

We will gather at the same second entrance, but we will go to the new room at 16:00. So please do not be late.

This Sunday we will have visual image and created expression workshop. You can ask to analyse you own image, you can also bring some photos. Or you can send these photos for us in advance at lw@lesswrong.ru.

In the second section we will have something from the following list:

Belief investigation

Training game

Dutch booking

Moderated discussion

Useful ideas sharing

Tabletop games

You can read a bit more in Russian notice.

If you are going for the first time:
We gather in the Yandex office, you need the second revolving door with the sign “Яндекс”, here is the photo of the entrance you need. You need to pass the first entrance and the bicycle parking on you way. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.
You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.
We start at 16:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the second entrance and then move to the new room.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, How Can Visual Image Be Rational