= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Weekly LW Meetups
This summary was posted to LW Main on September 30th. The following week's summary is here.
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
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:
- Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
- Melbourne: A Bayesian Guide on How to Read a Scientific Paper: 08 October 2016 03:30PM
- Sydney Rationality Dojo - October 2016: 02 October 2016 04:00PM
Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.
Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
Meetup : Meetup #5 - Amsterdam edition!
Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #5 - Amsterdam edition!
As promised, this meetup will be in Amsterdam. We'll meet at the Coffee Company nearby Amsterdam Amstel Station.
As our activity, we'll practice some techniques taught at the Center for Applied Rationality. Don't worry if you don't know any: Toon and Tim will prepare to teach some.
Join us for some coffee/tea (or not), and let's have a great afternoon!
P.S. Suggestions are welcome as usual!
Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #5 - Amsterdam edition!
Philosophical theory with an empirical prediction
I have a philosophical theory which implies some things empirically about quantum physics, and I was wondering if anyone knowledgeable on the subject could give me some insight.
It goes something like this:
As an anathema to reductionists, quarks (and by "quarks" I just mean, whatever are the fundamental particles of the universe) are not governed by simple rules a la conway's game of life, but rather, like all of metaphysics goes into their behavior.
The reductionist basically reduces metaphysics to the simple rules that govern quarks. Fundamentally there is no other identity or causality, everything else is just emergent from that, anything we want to call "real" that we deal with in ordinary experience, does not have any metaphysical identity or causal efficacy of its own, it's just an illusion produced by tons of atoms bouncing around. If the universe is akin to conway's game of life, then I don't think the things we see around us are actually what we think they are. They don't have any real identity on a metaphysical level, but rather they are just patterns of particles in motion, governed by mathematically simple rules.
But suppose there actually is metaphysical identity and causal power in the things around us, well the place I can see for that, is that the unknown rules governing quarks, are not mathematically simple rules, but literally that's where all of metaphysics is contained, quarks entangle together according to high level concepts corresponding to the things we see around us, including a person's identity, and have not the mathematically simple causal powers like conway's game of life, but the causal powers of the identity of the high-level agent.
The empirical question is this: do we observe the fundamental particles of the universe behaving according mathematically simple rules, or do they seem to behave in complex/unpredictable ways depending on how they are entangled / what they are interacting with?
Adding an example to clarify:
The behavior of the quarks corresponds to the identity of the things we see around us. The things we see around us are constituted by quarks - but the question is, are these quarks behaving mindlessly as billiard balls, or is their behavior the result of complex rules corresponding to the identity of the thing they form?
In other words, suppose we're talking about a living ant, are the quarks which constitute that ant behaving according to simple mathematical rules like billiard balls, and the whole concept of there being an "ant" is just an illusion produced by these particles bouncing around, or are these quarks constituting the ant actually behaving "ant-like"?
Is the causal behavior of the ant determined by the billiard-ball interactions of quarks bouncing around, or does the causal behavior actually originate in the identity of the ant, with the quark interactions being decided according to its nature?
What I'm saying is that there metaphysically is such a thing as an ant, when quarks "get together as an ant", they behave differently, they behave ant-like. Given there is a lot of unknown on exactly why quarks behave the way they do, why is this ruled out: that when they "get together as an ant", they behave ant-like?
Basically the idea is, when it comes to the interactions of the quarks constituting the ant with the quarks constituting the things the ant interacts with, the behavior of those interactions is determined not by simple, universal rules of quark behavior, but by the rules of quark behavior that are in effect "when the quarks are an ant".
To further clarify this example:
This is framed in general terms, because I don't actually know any quantum physics, but I'm talking about the fundamental physical particles ("quarks", for lack of a better term), and their behavior at the quantum level - behavior which we don't fully understand. So one could say in general terms, sometimes the quarks "swerve left" and other times they "swerve right", and we don't exactly know why they do that in any given case.
So the question is, suppose the behavior of quarks in general is not determined by simple, universal laws of quark behavior, e.g. "always swerve left 50% of the time", but rather, there are metaphysically real and physically meaningful "quark groups", like if a bunch of quarks are entangled together in a group constituting what we'd observe to be an ant, then quarks in that quark group behave differently. So for example, the quarks in that "ant quark group" might always swerve left when they interact with another quark group of a different kind.
Weekly LW Meetups
New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:
Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:
- Munich Meetup in October: 29 October 2016 04:00PM
- Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources: 11 November 2016 05:15PM
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:
- Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
- Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness: 30 October 2016 02:00PM
- NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
- San Francisco Meetup: Board Games: 31 October 2016 06:15PM
- Washington, D.C.: Halloween Party: 30 October 2016 03:00PM
Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.
Your Truth Is Not My Truth
Can someone help me dissolve this, and give insight into how to proceed with someone who says this?
What are they saying, exactly? That the set of beliefs in their head that they use to make decisions is not the same set of beliefs that you use to make decisions?
Could I say something like "Yes, that's so, but how do you know that your truth matches what is in the real world? Is there some way to know that your truth isn't only true for you, and not actually true for everybody?"
I'm trying to get a feel for what they mean by "true" in this case, since it's obviously not "matching reality."
Meetup : Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources
Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources
"Value of time" is often employed by utilitarians. It can be hard to determine one's value of time for a variety of reasons. This talk will be about different currencies of personal life like time, money, and pleasure; and how choices are implicit trades between them.
The talk will focus on when it's appropriate to treat these resources as liquid currencies and when it's not. After discussing the theory, and some examples, we'll practice. We'll individually come up with our own exchange rates for personal currencies, then fix one another's estimates in small groups.
I hope everyone walks away from this talk with a concrete number for their value of time.
The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up. If you want to influence future meetup times, fill out this poll
Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm: Bottlenecks to trading personal resources
Meetup : Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness
Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: rational review, status quo bias, interpersonal closeness
Note: most our members join meetups via other channels. Still, the correlation between "found out about Moscow meetups via lesswrong.com" and "is a great fit for our community" is very high. So we're posting just a short link to the hackpad document with the schedule here instead of the full translation of the announcement into English.
Pad with the details about 30.10.2016 meetup.
We're meeting at the "Kocherga" anticafe, as usual.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}