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A collection of Stubs.
In light of SDR's comment yesterday, instead of writing a new post today I compiled my list of ideas I wanted to write about, partly to lay them out there and see if any stood out as better than the rest, and partly so that maybe they would be a little more out in the wild than if I hold them until I get around to them. I realise there is not a thesis in this post, but I figured it would be better to write one of these than to write each in it's own post with the potential to be good or bad.
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/many-draft-concepts/
I create ideas at about the rate of 3 a day, without trying to. I write at about a rate of 1.5 a day. Which leaves me always behind. Even if I write about the best ideas I can think of, some good ones might never be covered. This is an effort to draft out a good stack of them so that maybe it can help me not have to write them all out, by better defining which ones are the good ones and which ones are a bit more useless.
With that in mind, in no particular order - a list of unwritten posts:
From my old table of contents
Goals of your lesswrong group – As a guided/workthrough exercise in deciding why the group exists and what it should do. Help people work out what they want out of it (do people know)? setting goals, doing something particularly interesting or routine, having fun, changing your mind, being activists in the world around you. Whatever the reasons you care about, work them out and move towards them. Nothing particularly groundbreaking in the process here. Sit down with the group with pens and paper, maybe run a resolve cycle, maybe talk about ideas and settle on a few, then decide how to carry them out. Relevant links: Sydney meetup, group resources (estimate 2hrs to write)
Goals interrogation + Goal levels – Goal interrogation is about asking <is this thing I want to do actually a goal of mine> and <is my current plan the best way to achieve that>, goal levels are something out of Sydney Lesswrong that help you have mutual long term goals and supporting short term goal. There are 3 main levels, Dream, Year, Daily (or approximate) you want dream goals like going to the moon, you want yearly goals like getting another year further in your degree and you want daily goals like studying today that contribute to the upper level goals. Any time you are feeling lost you can look at the guide you set out for yourself and use it to direct you. (3hrs)
How to human – A zero to human guide. A guide for basic functionality of a humanoid system. Something of a conglomeration of maslow, mental health, so you feel like shit and system thinking. Am I conscious?Am I breathing? Am I bleeding or injured (major or minor)? Am I falling or otherwise in danger and about to cause the earlier questions to return false? Do I know where I am? Am I safe? Do I need to relieve myself (or other bodily functions, i.e. itchy)? Have I had enough water? sleep? food? Is my mind altered (alcohol or other drugs)? Am I stuck with sensory input I can't control (noise, smells, things touching me)? Am I too hot or too cold? Is my environment too hot or too cold? Or unstable? Am I with people or alone? Is this okay? Am I clean (showered, teeth, other personal cleaning rituals)? Have I had some sunlight and fresh air in the past few days? Have I had too much sunlight or wind in the past few days? Do I feel stressed? Okay? Happy? Worried? Suspicious? Scared? Was I doing something? What am I doing? do I want to be doing something else? Am I being watched (is that okay?)? Have I interacted with humans in the past 24 hours? Have I had alone time in the past 24 hours? Do I have any existing conditions I can run a check on - i.e. depression? Are my valuables secure? Are the people I care about safe? (4hrs)
List of common strategies for getting shit done – things like scheduling/allocating time, pomodoros, committing to things externally, complice, beeminder, other trackers. (4hrs)
List of superpowers and kryptonites – when asking the question “what are my superpowers?” and “what are my kryptonites?”. Knowledge is power; working with your powers and working out how to avoid your kryptonites is a method to improve yourself. What are you really good at, and what do you absolutely suck at and would be better delegating to other people. The more you know about yourself, the more you can do the right thing by your powers or weaknesses and save yourself troubles.
List of effective behaviours – small life-improving habits that add together to make awesomeness from nothing. And how to pick them up. Short list: toothbrush in the shower, scales in front of the fridge, healthy food in the most accessible position in the fridge, make the unhealthy stuff a little more inacessible, keep some clocks fast - i.e. the clock in your car (so you get there early), prepare for expected barriers ahead of time (i.e. packing the gym bag and leaving it at the door), and more.
Stress prevention checklist – feeling off? You want to have already outsourced the hard work for “things I should check on about myself” to your past self. Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. Generate a list of things that you want to check are working correctly. i.e. did I drink today? Did I do my regular exercise? Did I take my medication? Have I run late today? Do I have my work under control?
Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. – as its own post in curtailing bad habits that you can expect to happen when you are compromised. inspired by candy-bar moments and turning them into carrot-moments or other more productive things. This applies beyond diet, and might involve turning TV-hour into book-hour (for other tasks you want to do instead of tasks you automatically do)
A p=np approach to learning – Sometimes you have to learn things the long way; but sometimes there is a short cut. Where you could say, “I wish someone had just taken me on the easy path early on”. It’s not a perfect idea; but start looking for the shortcuts where you might be saying “I wish someone had told me sooner”. Of course the answer is, “but I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway” which is something that can be worked on as well. (2hrs)
Rationalists guide to dating – Attraction. Relationships. Doing things with a known preference. Don’t like unintelligent people? Don’t try to date them. Think first; then act - and iteratively experiment; an exercise in thinking hard about things before trying trial-and-error on the world. Think about places where you might meet the kinds of people you want to meet, then use strategies that go there instead of strategies that flop in the general direction of progress. (half written)
Training inherent powers (weights, temperatures, smells, estimation powers) – practice makes perfect right? Imagine if you knew the temperature always, the weight of things by lifting them, the composition of foods by tasting them, the distance between things without measuring. How can we train these, how can we improve. Probably not inherently useful to life, but fun to train your system 1! (2hrs)
Strike to the heart of the question. The strongest one; not the one you want to defeat – Steelman not Strawman. Don’t ask “how do I win at the question”; ask, “am I giving the best answer to the best question I can give”. More poetic than anything else - this post would enumerate the feelings of victory and what not to feel victorious about, as well as trying to feel what it's like to be on the other side of the discussion to yourself, frustratingly trying to get a point across while a point is being flung at yourself. (2hrs)
How to approach a new problem – similar to the “How to solve X” post. But considerations for working backwards from a wicked problem, as well as trying “The least bad solution I know of”, Murphy-jitsu, and known solutions to similar problems. Step 0. I notice I am approaching a problem.
Turning Stimming into a flourish – For autists, to make a presentability out of a flaw.
How to manage time – estimating the length of future tasks (and more), covered in notch system, and do tasks in a different order. But presented on it's own.
Spices – Adventures in sensory experience land. I ran an event of spice-smelling/guessing for a group of 30 people. I wrote several documents in the process about spices and how to run the event. I want to publish these. As an exercise - it's a fun game of guess-the-spice.
Wing it VS Plan – All of the what, why, who, and what you should do of the two. Some people seem to be the kind of person who is always just winging it. In contrast, some people make ridiculously complicated plans that work. Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle. I suggest that the more of a planner you can be the better because you can always fall back on winging it, and you probably will. But if you don't have a plan and are already winging it - you can't fall back on the other option. This concept came to me while playing ingress, which encourages you to plan your actions before you make them.
On-stage bias – The changes we make when we go onto a stage include extra makeup to adjust for the bright lights, and speaking louder to adjust for the audience which is far away. When we consider the rest of our lives, maybe we want to appear specifically X (i.e, confident, friendly) so we should change ourselves to suit the natural skews in how we present based on the "stage" we are appearing on. appear as the person you want to appear as, not the person you naturally appear as.
Creating a workspace – considerations when thinking about a “place” of work, including desk, screen, surrounding distractions, and basically any factors that come into it. Similar to how the very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions covers environmental factors in your sleep environment but for a workspace.
Posts added to the list since then
Doing a cost|benefit analysis - This is something we rely on when enumerating the options and choices ahead of us, but something I have never explicitly looked into. Some costs that can get overlooked include: Time, Money, Energy, Emotions, Space, Clutter, Distraction/Attention, Memory, Side effects, and probably more. I'd like to see a How to X guide for CBA. (wikipedia)
Extinction learning at home - A cross between intermittent reward (the worst kind of addiction), and what we know about extinguishing it. Then applying that to "convincing" yourself to extinguish bad habits by experiential learning. Uses the CFAR internal Double Crux technique, precommit yourself to a challenge, for example - "If I scroll through 20 facebook posts in a row and they are all not worth my time, I will be convinced that I should spend less time on facebook because it's not worth my time" Adjust 20 to whatever position your double crux believes to be true, then run a test and iterate. You have to genuinely agree with the premise before running the test. This can work for a number of committed habits which you want to extinguish. (new idea as at the writing of this post)
How to write a dating ad - A suggestion to include information that is easy to ask questions about (this is hard). For example; don't write, "I like camping", write "I like hiking overnight with my dog", giving away details in a way that makes them worth inquiring about. The same reason applies to why writing "I'm a great guy" is really not going to get people to believe you, as opposed to demonstrating the claim. (show, don't tell)
How to give yourself aversions - an investigation into aversive actions and potentially how to avoid collecting them when you have a better understanding of how they happen. (I have not done the research and will need to do that before publishing the post)
How to give someone else an aversion - similar to above, we know we can work differently to other people, and at the intersection of that is a misunderstanding that can leave people uncomfortable.
Lists - Creating lists is a great thing, currently in draft - some considerations about what lists are, what they do, what they are used for, what they can be used for, where they come in handy, and the suggestion that you should use lists more. (also some digital list-keeping solutions)
Choice to remember the details - this stems from choosing to remember names, a point in the conversation where people sometimes tune out. As a mindfulness concept you can choose to remember the details. (short article, not exactly sure why I wanted to write about this)
What is a problem - On the path of problem solving, understanding what a problem is will help you to understand how to attack it. Nothing more complicated than this picture to explain it. The barrier is a problem. This doesn't seem important on it's own but as a foundation for thinking about problems it's good to have sitting around somewhere.
How to/not attend a meetup - for anyone who has never been to a meetup, and anyone who wants the good tips on etiquette for being the new guy in a room of friends. First meetup: shut up and listen, try not to be too much of an impact on the existing meetup group or you might misunderstand the culture.
Noticing the world, Repercussions and taking advantage of them - There are regularly world events that I notice. Things like the olympics, Pokemon go coming out, the (recent) spaceX rocket failure. I try to notice when big events happen and try to think about how to take advantage of the event or the repercussions caused by that event. Motivated to think not only about all the olympians (and the fuss leading up to the olympics), but all the people at home who signed up to a gym because of the publicity of the competitive sport. If only I could get in on the profit of gym signups...
leastgood but only solution I know of - So you know of a solution, but it's rubbish. Or probably is. Also you have no better solutions. Treat this solution as the best solution you have (because it is) and start implementing it, as you do that - keep looking for other solutions. But at least you have a solution to work with!
Self-management thoughts - When you ask yourself, "am I making progress?", "do I want to be in this conversation?" and other self management thoughts. And an investigation into them - it's a CFAR technique but their writing on the topic is brief. (needs research)
instrumental supply-hoarding behaviour - A discussion about the benefits of hoarding supplies for future use. Covering also - what supplies are not a good idea to store, and what supplies are. Maybe this will be useful for people who store things for later days, and hopefully help to consolidate and add some purposefulness to their process.
list of sub groups that I have tried - Before running my local lesswrong group I partook in a great deal of other groups. This was meant as a list with comments on each group.
If you have nothing to do – make better tools for use when real work comes along - This was probably going to be a poetic style motivation post about exactly what the title suggests. Be Prepared.
what other people are good at (as support) - When reaching out for support, some people will be good at things that other people are not. For example - emotional support, time to spend on each other, ideas for solving your problems. Different people might be better or worse than others. Thinking about this can make your strategies towards solving your problems a bit easier to manage. Knowing what works and what does not work, or what you can reliably expect when you reach out for support from some people - is going to supercharge your fulfilment of those needs.
Focusing - An already written guide to Eugine Gendlin's focusing technique. That needs polishing before publishing. The short form: treat your system 1 as a very powerful machine that understands your problems and their solutions more than you do; use your system 2 to ask it questions and see what it returns.
Rewrite: how to become a 1000 year old vampire - I got as far as breaking down this post and got stuck at draft form before rewriting. Might take another stab at it soon.
Should you tell people your goals? - This thread in a post. In summary: It depends on the environment, the wrong environment is actually demotivational, the right environment is extra motivational.
Meta: this took around 4 hours to write up. Which is ridiculously longer than usual. I noticed a substantial number of breaks being taken - not sure if that relates to the difficulty of creating so many summaries or just me today. Still. This experiment might help my future writing focus/direction so I figured I would try it out. If you see an idea of particularly high value I will be happy to try to cover it in more detail.
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LessWrong Hamburg Meetup July 2015 Summary
After a hiatus of about a year the LessWrong Hamburg Meetup had a very strong revival! Infused by motivation from the Berlin Weekend I tried a reachout to collegues and via meetup.com and an amazing 24 people gathered on July, 17th in a location kindly provided by my employer.
Because the number of participants quickly exceeded my expectations I had to scramble to put something together for a larger group. For this I had tactical aid from blob and practical support from colleagues putting everything together from name tags to getting food and drinks and chairs.
We had an easy start with getting to know each other with Fela's Ice-Breaking Game.
The main topics covered were:
- An introduction into the topics, goals and methods or LessWrong illustrated with The Parable of the Dagger by pinkgothic. This was followed up by many smaller talks about how to apply rationality.
- A presentation and moderated discussion about effective altruism by ImmaSix.
- Moderated discussion about methods of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- I answered many questions regarding biases and fallacies and we used the game cards I had prepared early multiple times. These attracted some interest and can be found here (Dropbox).
Beside the main topics there was a good athmosphere with many people having smaller discussions.
The event ended with a short wrap-up based on Irinas Sustainable Change talk from the Berlin event which did prompt some people to take action based on what they heard.
What I learned from the event:
- I still tend to do overplanning. Maybe having a plan for eventualities isn't bad but the agenda doesn't need to be as highly structured as I did. It could cause expectations that can't be met.
- Apparently I appeared stressed but I didn't feel that way myself. Probably from hurrying around. I wonder wheather that has a negative effect on other people and how I can avoid that. Esp. as I'm not feeling stressed myself.
- A standard-issue meeting room for 12 people can comfortably host 24 people if tables and furniture are rearranged and comfy beanbags etc. are added.
- Whe number of people showing up can vary unpredictably. This may depend on weather or how the event is communicated and unknown factors.
- Visualize the concrete effects of your charity. This can give you a specific intuition you can use to decide whether it's worth it. Imma's example was thinking about how your donated AMF bednets hang over children and protect from mosquitoes.
There will definitely be a follow-up meeting of a comparable size in a few month (no date yet). And maybe smaller get-together will be organized inbetween.
European Community Weekend 2015 Impressions Thread
The European Community Weekend in Berlin is over and was plain awesome.
This is no complete report of the event but a place where you can e.g. comment on the event, link to photos or what else you want to share.
I'm not the organizer of the Meetup but I have been there and for me it was the most grand experience since last years European Community Weekend. Meeting so many energetic, compassionate and in general awesome people - some from last year or many new. Great presentations and workshops. And such a positive and open athmosphere.
Cheers to all participants!
See also the Facebook Group for the Community Event.
Calling all Nigerian rationalists and effective altruists
I'm in Lagos, Nigeria till the end of May and I'd like to hold a LessWrong/EA meetup while I'm here. If you'll ever be in the country in the future (or in the subcontinent), please get in touch so we can coordinate a meetup. I'd also appreciate being put in contact with any Nigerians who may not regularly read this list.
My e-mail address is oge@nnadi.org. I hope to hear from you.
Australia wide - LessWrong meetup camp weekend of awesome!
Posting here as a boost; not sure how "nearest meetup" listings work, and I want to pass this on to everyone in Australia/New Zeland.
http://lesswrong.com/meetups/1bt
Camp is super interesting; very much achieves the goal of meeting and hanging out with other brilliant lesswrong people. Last year I made such good friends that I still consider them some of the closest I have ever made; even without talking to them for weeks at a time. Although I also do tend to talk to them every other day usually.
There is also an opportunity to learn skills, this year's camp is themed around topics such as:
- productivity
- effectiveness
- functioning successfully at life
- Food, exercise, health, technology skills
- How to win at life
- Turbocharging training
- High impact culture
- Effective communication
- CoZE
Its gonna be great, Please come along if you are in Australia! Part of what makes camp so great is that so many LessWrong people come along and also enjoy the company of each other.
If you know someone who is not regularly on www.lesswrong.com and likely to miss this post - please make sure to direct them to here.
Any questions - send me a message. :)
Effective Sustainability - results from a meetup discussion
Related-to Focus Areas of Effective Altruism
These are some small tidbits from our LW-like Meetup in Hamburg. The focus was on sustainability not on altruism as that was more in the spirit of our group. EA was mentioned but no comparison was made. Well-informed effective altruists will probably find little new in this writeup.
So we discussed effective sustainability. To this end we were primed to think rationally by my 11-year old who moderated a session on mind-mapping 'reason' (with contributions from the children). Then we set out to objectively compare concrete everyday things by their sustainability. And how to do this.
Is it better to drink fruit juice or wine? Or wine or water? Or wine vs. nothing (i.e.to forego sth.)? Or wine vs. paper towels? (the latter intentionally different)
The idea was to arrive at simple rules of thumb to evaluate the sustainability of something. But we discovered that even simple comparisons are not that simple and intuition can run afoul (surpise!). One example was that apparently tote bags are not clearly better than plastic bags in terms of sustainability. But even the simple comparison of tap water vs. wine which seems like a trivial subset case is non-trivial when you consider where the water comes from and how it is extracted from the ground (we still think that water is better but we not as sure as before).
We discussed some ways to measure sustainability (in brackets to which we reduced it):
- fresh water use -> energy
- packaging material used -> energy, permanent ressources
- transport -> energy
- energy -> CO_2, permanent ressources
- CO_2 production
- permanent consumption of ressources
Life-Cycle-Assessment (German: Ökobilanz) was mentioned in this context but it was unclear what that meant precisely. Only afterwards was it discovered that it's a blanket term for exactly this question (with lots of estabilished measurements for which it is unclear how to simplify them for everyday use).
We didn't try to break this down - a practical everyday approch doesn't allow for that and the time spent on analysing and comparing options is also equivalent to ressources possibly not spent efficiently.
One unanswered question was how much time to invest in comparing alternatives. Too little comparison means to take the nextbest option which is what most people apparently do and which also apparently doesn't lead to overall sustainable behavior. But too much analysis of simple decisions is also no option.
The idea was still to arrive at actionable criteria. One first approximation be settled on was
1) Forego consumption.
A nobrainer really, but maybe even that has to be stated. Instead of comparing options that are hard to compare try to avoid consumption where you can. Water instead of wine or fruit juice or lemonde. This saves lots of cognitive ressources.
Shortly after we agreed on the second approximation:
2) Spend more time on optimizing ressources you consume large amounts of.
The example at hand was wine (which we consume only a few times a year) versus toilet paper... No need to feel remorse over a one-time present packaging.
Note that we mostly excluded personal well-being, happiness and hedons from our consideration. We were aware that our goals affect our choices and hedons have to factored into any real strategy, but we left this additional complication out of our analysis - at least for this time.
We did discuss signalling effects. Mostly in the context of how effective ressources can be saved by convincing others to act sustainably. One important aspect for the parents was to pass on the idea and to act as a role model (with the caveat that children need a simplified model to grasp the concept). It was also mentioned humorously that one approach to minimize personal ressource consumption is suicide and transitively to convice others of same. The ultimate solution having no humans on the planet (a solution my 8-year old son - a friend of nature - arrived at too). This apparently being the problem when utilons/hedons are expluded.
A short time we considered whether outreach comes for free (can be done in addition to abstinence) and should be the no-brainer number 3. But it was then realized that at least right now and for us most abstinence comes at a price. It was quoted that buying sustainable products is about 20% more expensive than normal products. Forgoing e.g. a car comes at reduced job options. Some jobs involve supporting less sustainable large-scale action. Having less money means less options to act sustaibale. Time being convertible to money and so on.
At this point the key insight mentioned was that it could be much more efficient from a sustainability point of view to e.g. buy CO_2 certificates than to buy organic products. Except that the CO_2 certificate market is oversupplied currently. But there seem to be organisations which promise to achieve effective CO_2 reduction in developing countries (e.g. solar cooking) at a much higher rate than be achieved here. Thus the thrid rule was
3) Spend money on sustainable organisations instead of on everyday products that only give you a good feeling.
Czech's first Meetup in Prague report
Hello,
I'm happy to inform Less Wrong community about new meet up in Czech Republic, Prague. Despite the fact that nobody came at meet up I'd organized 2 months ago (mainly because it was organized only two weeks ahead), yesterday we met in 5 people. Plus, some other people (about next 3) just couldn't make it yesterday, but are interested in future meet ups.
All of us are young men in 21-25, studying or working in mathematics (mainly data science), informatics or AI and one of us is studying international affairs.
Just 2 of us have some stronger background with Less Wrong (we have read HPMOR and at least core sequences), the rest is interested in these and are willing to catch up (more or less) and came based on our recommendation or by getting at the LW by luck.
We agreed we'd like to meet regularly to share our opinions, lifehacking experiences, commenting our lives etc. and we are going to meet in next 14 days. In addition, we agreed to plan longer-term meet up for those who don't visit LW too often and hence have a chance to notice it.
Currently, the most challenging task I see so far is to find an optimal shape, form, of the group and formulate it's motives and goals. It ranges from just being friends and chat from time to time to highly organized group with fixed time schedule, active work and close relationships. Of course, I do realize how hard it is to hold the group together and how we should not rely only on initial enthusiasm.
Yesterday, we discussed for about 3 hours about various topics like lifehacking, our studies, tips, most-actual-questions, our lifes... The most surprising thing I've found was how diverse we are in different techniques which help to our productivity - one of us needs stress, I need exact time schedule, other one is more effective when taking things easy, one testing nootropics, other one meditation, I eat my frog at the morning, other one after some other pleasant things et etcetera. Another interesting thing was how our lives have been entangled together - we know same people or friends, we have visited same courses... Not so surprising when living in city just with million or so people, but still interesting.
Less Wrong website (community) was what brings as together and I feel obligated to inform the community about it's impact and happiness it nourishes. Also, any recommendations and help is welcome (I try to use http://wiki.lesswrong.com/mediawiki/images/c/ca/How_to_Run_a_Successful_Less_Wrong_Meetup_Group.pdf as a reference guide).
Thank you for that and I'm happy to see you on our future meet-ups (which will be held, I hope).
Paris LW Meetup - LHC Exhibit - 17/01/2015
We'll be organizing a meetup of LW Paris at "Palais de la Découverte" in order to view the exhibit on LHC (link in French, sorry) and speak about it (and any related - or even unrelated - subject) between LWer.
The meeting is scheduled at 14h00 on Saturday 17th afternoon.
Map and location information available.
Hoping to see many Paris LWers !
Possible interest in Louisiana Meetup?
Is there any interest in an (ideally northern) LA meetup? I live in Natchitoches, which would probably not be an ideal location (unless there are people coming from both Shreveport and Alexandria). I know of at least one reader in Baton Rouge; is there anyone else out there?
Four things every community should do
Yesterday I attended church service in Romania where I had visited my sister and the sermon was about the four things a (christian) community has to follow to persevere and grow.
I first considered just posting the quote from the Acts of the Apostles (reproduced below) in the Rationality Quotes Thread but I fear without explanation the inferential gap of the quote is too large.
The LessWrong Meetups, the EA community and other rationalist communities probably can learn from the experience of long established orders (I once asked for lessons from free masonry).
So I drew the following connections:
According to the the sermon and the below verse the four pillars of a christian community are:
- Some canon of scripture which for LW might be compared to the sequences. I'm not clear what the pendant for EA is.
- Taking part in a closely knit community. Coming together regularly (weekly I guess is optimal).
- Eat together and have rites/customs together (this is also emphasized in the LW Meetup flyer).
- Praying together. I think praying could be generalized to talking and thinking about the scripture by oneself and together. Prayer also has a component of daily reflection of achievements, problems, wishes.
Other analogies that I drew from the quote:
- Verse 44 describes behaviour also found in communes.
- Verse 45 sounds a lot like EA teachings if you generalize it.
- Verse 47 the last sentence could be interpreted to indicate exponential growth as a result of these teachings.
- The verses also seem to imply some reachout by positive example.
And what I just right now notice is that embedding the rules in the scripture is essentially self-reference. As the scripture is canon this structure perpetuates itself. Clearly a meme that ensures its reproduction.
Does this sound convincing and plausible or did I fell trap to some bias in (over)interpreting the sermon?
I hope this is upvoted for the lessons we might draw from this - despite the quote clearly being theistic in origin.
LessWrong in Brisbane, Australia
At present, the LessWrong presence in Brisbane is essentially non-existent. We have Brisbane Skeptics in the Pub, and that's the closest you can get. During the most recent Australia-wide LessWrong hangout, Nick Wolf of Melbourne and Eliot Redelman of Sydney persuaded me to create a Facebook group for LessWrong in Brisbane. This post is solely to announce that.
The group can be found here.
Ideally a meetup will occur once more than the small handful currently on the group have joined.
LessWrong Hamburg Meetup Notes - Diet
Review of our LessWrong Hamburg Meetup - Diet
After I was approched a few times about another meetup I scheduled it on short notice and six of us met yesterday evening at my place.
Summary
It was an mostly unstructured talk where we discussed diet from different angles and a few other tangential topics. I also reported from my participation in the LW Berlin Meetup a few weeks ago (which led to a side-track about polyphasic sleep).
We discussed the benefits and risks of misc. dietary recommendations and seemed to agree on most points, most of which coincide with those discussed on LW before:
Links about polyphasic sleep:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
- http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/overviews/segmented-sleep/
- http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip6/polyphasic_sleep_seed_study_reprise/
- http://www.wired.com/2010/12/kids-study-bees/
- http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/18/rsbl.2010.1056
- http://littlebits.cc/
- http://code.org/learn
Other LW Hamburg Meetup reviews
Gauging interest for a Tokyo area meetup group
I'd like to gauge interest in an (english-language) Tokyo area meetup - given Tokyo's size, if a couple people are interested, it would be good to pick a location/day that's convenient for everybody. Otherwise I will announce a date and time and wait in a cafe with a book hoping that somebody will turn up.
I have been to several LW gatherings and have met consistently awesome and nice people, so if any Tokyo lurkers are reading this, I can assure you it's totally worth it to come! Please make yourself heard in the comments if you are interested.
Meetup Zürich last minute
Meetup tomorrow(Wednesday) at 19:30, lets go!
Ottawa meetup: Applied Rationality Series, Value of Information
The sixth talk in the Ottawa Applied Rationality series will take place on Tuesday, May 20th at 7:00 pm, at the Canal Royal Oak in Ottawa, Canada. These events are run through the Ottawa Skeptics meetup group. See link here: http://www.meetup.com/Ottawa-Skeptics/events/181263842/
The usual format consists of an approximately 15 minute talk on the topic of the day, followed by semi-structured exercises, followed by beers and unstructured discussion. Previous topics have included "Rational Debating", "Bayes", "Calibration", "Rationality Dojo" (a review session), and "Goal Factoring."
If you are not from Ottawa, but are interested in running meetups in your area, send me a PM and I can give you the PowerPoints that I use for these talks.
Meetup Notes: Community Building
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 insufficient understanding of the contraceptives usage. These are what some fear leads to collective stultification.
- Conscious mental factors. Factors leading to explicit family planning e.g. children/family as terminal goals. The lead to a conscious use of contraception. The effect is less pronounced but likely leads to healthy and better educated children.
- Group selection factors. These are factors favoring groups which collectively have more children. The genetic effects are likely weak here but the memetic effects are strong. A culture with social norms against contraception or for large families are likely to out-birth other groups.
Other LW Hamburg Meetup reviews
- Fourth Meetup (no notes)
- Third Meetup Notes: Small Steps Forward
- Second Meetup Notes: In need of Structure
- First Meetup Notes: Starting small
European Community Weekend in Berlin Impressions Thread
The European Community Weekend in Berlin is over and was a full sucess.
This is no report of the event but a place where you can e.g. comment on the event, link to photos or what else you want to share.
I'm not the organizer of the Meetup but I have been there and for me it was a great event. Meeting many energetic, compassionate and in general awesome, people. Great presentations and workshops. And a very awesome positive athmosphere.
Cheers to all participants!
Gunnar
PS. I get it that there will be an upload of the presentations by the organizers and maybe some report of the results some time later. Those may or may not be linked from this post.
LessWrong Hamburg Third Meetup Notes: Small Steps Forward
Review of our third Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - Structure
Summary
To make it short: We didn't follow the nice agenda we planned. We did the procrastination topic but diverged a lot.
Course of events
In the long open beginning (expected) we talked a lot, played some MindTrap and had lunch together.
Then to get started I began the presentation of the main topic of this meetup: procrastination. This was basically a summary of
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination
- http://lesswrong.com/lw/9wr/my_algorithm_for_beating_procrastination/
- http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.de/2010/05/cure-for-procrastination-forgive.html
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html
This led to lots of satellite discussions which partly diverged but mostly were centered on examples of procrastination (though afterwards some felt that this got out of hand with too many personal details; this was controversial). This part was all in all very long but also led to quite some understanding of the problems of and strategries against procrastination.
In the previous meetups there was an interest in the topics of and the objectives behind lesswrong. To get an authentic handle on the former I posted a topic poll in the Polling Thread. This I presented shortly (see appendix).
Interesting points we arrived at:
The image of lukeprogs procastination algorithm led to a discussion of what we called the mathematical fallacy/bias: Just giving a mathematical formula naming properties of interest leads to the false impression of scientificity and presents a false image of correctness and precision that just isn't there. This is a method sometimes seen in pseudo-science publications to give the impression of science. It is also used in economic sciences to approximate tendencies numerically. The general pattern of the mathematical fallacy is that modelling complex human behavior (like procrastination) in a simple formula is a special case of over-simplification riding piggy-back on the habit to take formulas at face value. The disclaimer on such formular (lukeprog actually gave one) just cannot be large enough. In this special case it would have been better to just name the four (nonlinear, crossrelated) effects on motivation instead of using the formula (at least until the five quantities in the formula are actually shown or defined in a precise way).
We planned the next meetup for Mar 30th, but the location (near Hamburg central station) is not yet fixed.
We did have more structure than the last time but a review discussion at the end clearly showed that just having one main topic with unmoderated side tracks wasn't enough and that all preferred a more formal structure - at least for topic presentations. Which on the next meetup will be theme-centered interaction.
Having keen observers of behavior allowed to pinpoint differences and misunderstandings in the group (actually involving me) to address these in a friendly helpful way.
Sidetrack
Following the advice from Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity I had bought an e-cig for the smoker in our round who wants to quit. He received it positively. He enjoyed the near-identical handling and the fact that he could smoke in the room (I didn't notice bad taste) and that there was no effort to 'light' and 'unlight' it. We discussed it afterwards whether it increased or decreased the amount of smoking (I had noticed that he had used the e-cig more often, but this may be balanced by a much smaller number of pulls. We promised to measure this.
Appendix
I presented the following list of LessWrong topics in order of decreasing typicality (most typical for LW first):
-
methods for being less wrong, knowing about biases, fallacies and heuristics
-
methods of self-improvement (if scientifically backed), e.g. living luminiously, winning at life, longevity
-
organization and discussion of meetups
-
dealing with procrastination and akrasia
-
statistics, probability theory, decision theory and related mathematical fields
-
topics of associated or related organizations CFAR, MIRI, GiveWell, CEA
-
advancing specific virtues: altruism, mindfulness, empathy, truthfulness, openness
-
artificial intelligence topics esp. if related to AGI, (U)FAI, AI going FOOM (or not)
-
the singularity and transhumanism (includes cryonics as method to get there)
-
rationality applied to social situations in relationships, parenting and small groups
-
(moral) philosophical theories, ethics
-
platform to hangout with like-minded smart people
Other LW Hamburg Meetup reviews
Interest in a Christchurch (New Zealand) Meetup
I'm considering starting a Christchurch LessWrong Meetup and would like to get a measure of interest in the area. Including me, there are already three people interested, so you're sure to meet someone new! Please comment if you'd be at all interested.
I'd also like to find out if Sunday afternoon/evening is a good time for you. Considering Chch is pretty small, I'd like to find a time everyone can make it.
Location would likely be James Hight Library at Canterbury University (there are bookable private discussion rooms, nearby food places, and anyone can access it).
Topics up for grabs too, leave a suggestion if you'd like.
LessWrong Hamburg Second Meetup Notes: In need of Structure
Review of our second Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - about Procrastination
When I arrived late there already was a discussion about the benefits and content of LessWrong. I didn't take a clear organizers role and instead let the meetup mostly run itself. This worked OK but also led to the planned topic procrastication falling off the table until very late when it was discovered that there was actually more interest in it than everybody seemed to have assumed.
There were phases where the discussion was dominated by everyday topics and not focussed. This was partly because some participants knew each other well and played topics back and forth. This kept the others out. I could have moderated this but wasn't clearly aware of it until it was explicitly and friendly made a topic.
Despite the unstructured format we got the following positive results:
- I had brought Emotions Revealed by Ekman (and other books) and left it lying on the table. Page turning led to the faces test and we took the test and discovered which emotions we could read or differentiate best and least. See also Emotion in the LW Wiki.
- A diabetes glucose test was demonstrated (curiosity overcame fear of being needled) and one actually had an unexpectedly elevated reading.
- When discussing how to stop smoking we turned up one option that convinced one participant: When relocating next month he will try to find a non-smoker flat-sharing community.
- We noticed that our communication cultures differed and talked about guess and ask cultures and how we could improve (I saw that this was a topic at the recent Berkeley Meetup).
- We noticed that that we had difficulty finding structure and made an explicit agenda for the next meetup.
We planned the next meetup and chose a moderator to keep us more focussed.
Lessons:
- Suitable books laying about can direct discussion to productive topics.
- Lively discussions about off-topics eat time and can keep participants out - but also provide casual athmosphere.
- Missing meetup structure can cause dissatisfaction with content uncertainness about direction.
(none of these surprising)
We also played a game (Set), had some fun, took photos and planned a next meetup.
LessWrong Hamburg First Meetup Notes: Starting small
Review of our LessWrong Hamburg First Meetup:
I arrived early and the location was somewhat crowded and the reserved table in the back had been replaced by a center table - but I managed to switch for a better one.
Then I put up some books and a sign and was quickly greated by the first LWer.
We started with smalltalk, finding common background quickly.
I had brought some books from the LW reading list I had in my collection and surprise: Half of them were recognized and the remaining quickly started a discussion (the Kahneman I later lent to C.F.).
Some friends trickled in and after some introduction we played Wits and Wagers and then Pandemic (without biasing because the game was new to most).
Summary: The Meetup was a success for me. We introduced some friends to LW ideas and we enjoyed a lively discussion not without controversy. I adapted to the Meetup format easily.
One idea I had was a Meetup Diary which I used to plan the Meetup and take notes in. I think it still beats digital for things like quick notes and diagrams. I had it handy to check our schedule, draw Bayes diagrams and write down a telephone number. I plan to have it around and maybe lend it to later Meetup organizers.
Outlook for the next Meetup: We planned it for Friday 21th in company offices somewhere in Hamburg, Altona (thanks to F.R. who will confirm the location later with a separate Post).
Topics will be then
- Procrastination (I committed to read up and present some techniques in exchange for C.F. committing to use beeminder).
- More discussion of LW topics, most likely: effective altruism
- I will bring books and games again.
More Meetups will likely follow roughly every fourtnight and alternating Friday and weekends.
Expression of Interest: Brisbane LessWrong Meetup
The new Canberra meetup has spurred me on to think about creating a Brisbane, Australia meetup for LessWrong. I would have posted this in the open thread, but this is significantly more likely to be seen by any potential attendees.
This post is obviously to see who, if anyone, would be wanting to attend a LessWrong meetup if one was to be started in Brisbane. I'm also curious to see how many LessWrongers also attend things like Brisbane Skeptics in the Pub (at the Plough Inn) or are members of UQ Skeptics etc (and if those people would be interested in a dedicated LW meetup nonetheless).
Comment away, Brisbane-ites!
EDIT: People of now, I'm not making any assumptions about upvotes so please comment if you're interested. Those of you who are upvoting anyway, thanks.
EDIT 2: People of the distant future, feel free to comment however old this post is when you stumble upon it.
Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
My girlfriend and I have just moved to Princeton, and would like to meet any LessWrong readers who go to the university or live in the area. I used to co-run the Oxford meetups a long time ago, and it'd be good to do something similar again. All welcome! We don't have any particular topics in mind, but we're A) willing to discuss anything LW-ey, as well as just socialise, and B) capable of coming up with conversation topics, so don't feel you have to have anything clever to say to be welcome! As such, we hereby precommit to being at Small World Coffe* from 1pm to 3pm. By the sign of the paperclip so shall ye know us. If you prefer a different time/place, please let me know, either by PM or in the comments. *unless people recommend a better option before October 31st. At that point the time and date are fixed.
Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
Cambridge Meetup: Talk by Eliezer Yudkowsky: Recursion in rational agents
Discussion article for the meetup : Talk by Eliezer Yudkowsky: Recursion in rational agents: Foundations for self-modifying AI
On October 17th from 4:00-5:30pm, Scott Aaronson will host a talk by MIRI research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky’s talk will take place in MIT’s Ray and Maria Stata Center (see image on right), in room 32-123 (aka Kirsch Auditorium, with 318 seats). There will be light refreshments 15 minutes before the talk. Yudkowsky’s title and abstract are:
Recursion in rational agents: Foundations for self-modifying AI
Reflective reasoning is a familiar but formally elusive aspect of human cognition. This issue comes to the forefront when we consider building AIs which model other sophisticated reasoners, or who might design other AIs which are as sophisticated as themselves. Mathematical logic, the best-developed contender for a formal language capable of reflecting on itself, is beset by impossibility results. Similarly, standard decision theories begin to produce counterintuitive or incoherent results when applied to agents with detailed self-knowledge. In this talk I will present some early results from workshops held by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to confront these challenges.
The first is a formalization and significant refinement of Hofstadter’s “superrationality,” the (informal) idea that ideal rational agents can achieve mutual cooperation on games like the prisoner’s dilemma by exploiting the logical connection between their actions and their opponent’s actions. We show how to implement an agent which reliably outperforms classical game theory given mutual knowledge of source code, and which achieves mutual cooperation in the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma using a general procedure. Using a fast algorithm for finding fixed points, we are able to write implementations of agents that perform the logical interactions necessary for our formalization, and we describe empirical results.
Second, it has been claimed that Godel’s second incompleteness theorem presents a serious obstruction to any AI understanding why its own reasoning works or even trusting that it does work. We exhibit a simple model for this situation and show that straightforward solutions to this problem are indeed unsatisfactory, resulting in agents who are willing to trust weaker peers but not their own reasoning. We show how to circumvent this difficulty without compromising logical expressiveness.
Time permitting, we also describe a more general agenda for averting self-referential difficulties by replacing logical deduction with a suitable form of probabilistic inference. The goal of this program is to convert logical unprovability or undefinability into very small probabilistic errors which can be safely ignored (and may even be philosophically justified).
Discussion article for the meetup : Talk by Eliezer Yudkowsky: Recursion in rational agents: Foundations for self-modifying AI
Megameetup on December 13-15th, NYC
This winter, we'll be hosting a megameetup on December 13th-15th. This is the weekend of the Winter Solstice, a big event we're putting together the rationality, humanist and transhumanist communities of the area. (The Solstice celebration is on Saturday evening - if you'd like to attend, you should check out the kickstarter and back it. Seating is limited and tickets are sold in advance are $25).
Eight members of the New York Rationality community recently moved into a gorgeous house in Brooklyn. It's got 5500 square feet. The first floor, approximately 1800 square feet, has four areas that with sliding doors that can either be treated as a single, huge meetup space, or broken into smaller areas.
Also it has secret doors.
We have named it "Highgarden."
We're really looking forward to turning this into a genuine rationality community center. We have self improvement meetups every other Sunday (the next one is on the October 13th), and have other one-off events in the works.
Friday night and Saturday afternoon will primarily casual hangouts, before most of us head over to the Solstice event. On Sunday there will be a presentation on the current state of Effective Altruism. We're aiming to have other presentations as well but details are not finalized yet.
We have a large (but not unlimited) array of crash space, so if you'd like to spend Friday and/or Saturday night at Highgarden, you should let us know in advance.
Looking forward to seeing many of you there!
When + Where
Highgarden House -851 Park Place Brooklyn NY, 11261
Friday, December 13th, 7:00 PM - Saturday, December 15th, 7:00 PM
Meetup : Washington DC meetup: Robin Hanson visits again
Discussion article for the meetup : Robin Hanson visits to talk about prediction markets
(This meetup is being posted a few weeks before it will occur.)
Since we mostly talked about ems and AI last time he was here, Robin Hanson is visiting again, this time with more of a focus on economics and prediction markets. (Though as always, the discusssion will also be shaped by the interests of the participants.)
The meetup will be in the courtyard adjacent to the National Portrait Gallery, as usual.
Discussion article for the meetup : Robin Hanson visits to talk about prediction markets
Gauging interest for a Zurich, Switzerland meetup group
Who would be interested in meeting? Please reply to this thread or msg me in private.
Thanks!
Edit: There doesnt seem to be enough people willing to meet so Im not planning anything at the moment. But if you happen to be in Zurich and want to meet a fellow LWer just msg me in private and we can go for a talk/drink.
On-line conference for LW readers and meet up members
I would like to consolidate LW members in a new way. I believe we can organize an on-line gathering in some form, for example as a set of chat rooms to discuss different topics in the real time. This event can be announced in advance to help everyone to arrange plans. I hope the discussion can be more intense and productive than in chats that open for prolonged periods of time. And comparing to the lesswrong.com this event should give some feeling of a real conversation, which I can not get while posting articles and comments here.
If you have any additions, ideas and proposals please let me know.
Meetup : São Paulo, Transhumanist Manifestation, Lesswrongers invited
The Transhumanist community in Brazil nearly coincides with the "read a few posts on Lesswrong" community.
So anyone nearby São Paulo is invited to join us in this event, to harness the let's take the streets climate around the country to talk about Transhumanism and have a picnic... It will be by far the biggest event with Lesswrong readers to take place in Brazil, if, say, 8 people show up out of 28 confirmed and 18 maybes...
https://www.facebook.com/events/583621724994218/?ref=notif¬if_t=plan_user_joined
Here is the description in portuguese for those who'd like to attend and have no facebook. Saturday, July 6. If anyone needs a translation to decide send me a private message or use google tradutor.
Cansado das manifestações Contra tudo aquilo que você é contra? Venha se manifestar A FAVOR de alguma coisa que você é a favor, mas não sabia que tem nome!!
Venha defender a importância de modificar a condição humana usando tecnologia, o Transhumanismo.
Vamos nos aglomerar, com mentes abertas, instrumentos musicais e comes e bebes, na Praça Alexandre Gusmão, ao lado do Parque Trianon, fazer um grande Piquenique das 15:00 até as 16:30 e subir em direção a Paulista, no vão do MASP. A favor de...
- A FAVOR do uso de tecnologia para tornar o ser humano mais cooperativo, altruísta, moral, utiltarista, gentil do que já é!
- A FAVOR de um programa de incentivo a pesquisa contra o envelhecimento (anti-ageing)
- A FAVOR de aprimoramentos cognitivos que permitam às pessoas ser mais inteligentes, como o chocolate, o café, o Stavigile, e o Piracetam!
- A FAVOR de um interesse maior em Ética no longo prazo, em particular a FAVOR de pesquisa e ação política que vise evitar Riscos Existenciais, como guerra Nuclear, Inteligência Artificial Não-amigável, Colapso Ambiental Global.
- A FAVOR de pensar questões políticas quantitativamente, visando beneficiar o maior número da maneira que gere mais benefícios!
- A FAVOR da liberdade de escolher seu modelo familiar e de relacionamento, de abortar, de garantir aos indivíduos o direito de intervir em seus corpos, mentes e vontades, independente de sua origem, orientação sexual, carga genética, predisposição instintiva, afinidade política e classe social.
- A FAVOR de modular a si mesmo para sentir mais amor e felicidade, seja através de prolongar a Oxitocina de seu relacionamento de longo prazo, seja induzindo a produção direta de Serotonina!
Venha nos encontrar na Praça Alexandre Gusmão, e vamos lutar A FAVOR daquilo que queremos juntos! Porque se você não começar a mudar e convidar à mudança agora, quando acha que vai começar?!!
Meetup : LW Meetup in Lyon
Discussion article for the meetup : LW Meetup in Lyon
It is time for a first LW Meetup in Lyon!
Some of the topics we could talk about are: effective altruism, munchkinism and other sorts of life hacking, belief updates or any other topic that you would like to discuss.
We will meet at Café de la Cloche, a "café-philo".
Please feel free to bring along non LW readers and non Anglophones who might be interested in such conversations.
I look forward to meeting you!
Discussion article for the meetup : LW Meetup in Lyon
Meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.
Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.
The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, May 26, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum. We have several guests of honor! Cat should be around, and loup-vaillant is coming up from the south!
Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.
Meet up in St. Petersburg, Russia
Andrey who participate in Moscow meet-up organization will visit St. Petersburg on 8th-12th of May. He can tell you about Moscow gatherings and applied rationality, show some exercises and useful methods.
We only need someone from St. Petersburg, who can find suitable venue and meet Andrey and other people there. Please write at lw@lesswrong.ru to coordinate efforts.
You can also write to me after 12th of May, and we will help you to organize a meet up.
LW Women Entries- LW Meetups
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women replied, totaling about 18 pages.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
Notes from Daenerys:
1. I'm not on this site very much anymore, so I'm going to try to remember to post these about once a week to get them off my to-do list. So the next couple weeks might have a lot of gender discussion, but I only have 2 left, so it will be done soon.
2. This post ended up being less anonymous. Please do NOT link to any identifying information.
3. There were some questions recently about the purpose of this series, which makes sense because the purpose was discussed 8 months ago, which is a pretty long time, by LW standard. Shortly, by virtue of the gender ratio here (90% male), the men's voices tend to drown out the women's voices, and many women may just not post on certain issues due to the feeling of swimming upstream, so this was a way to compile a bunch of LW women's opinions and thoughts. Note that, going by the latest LW survey there are less than 100 women on here, so each submitter is over 1% of the total female readership of LW. Here is the original call for responses, and the original discussion of the LW Women series idea.
Submitter C
I wasn't going to write, but something happened at today's meetup that really irked me.
A man turned to a young woman near him and asked, "So, do you actually read Less Wrong, or did someone drag you here?" I asked, "Are you saying that because she's wearing heels and lipstick?" "No, no," he answered, flustered. "It's not because of how she's dressed. It's just that most of the women who come here are dragged by someone else." I asked, "Do you think that any woman, no matter why she came here, would feel welcomed by being asked that question?" At that point he began apologizing, and the other woman assured him she wasn't offended.
It really bothered me, though. It seemed like a basic failure to think about the consequences of his words. Apparently his hypothesis was "Most female meetup attenders do not read Less Wrong." It's fine to have that hypothesis (although I think it's incorrect), but it's different to test it in a way that's likely to offend. If you really want to find out if she reads the site, ask how long she's been reading Less wrong or what her favorite posts are. Don't start by saying, essentially, "I assume you are an outsider." (For the record, he was wrong - she's an avid LW reader.)
If someone doesn't fit the usual Less Wrong demographic, they're probably far more aware of that than you are. If you notice someone doesn't fit your mental model of a Less Wronger, please don't demand that they explain their presence. There are probably other ways to satisfy your curiosity, and if not, your curiosity does not justify making someone else feel they don't belong.
UPDATE from Submitter C
This happened last year, and since that time we've talked about it more. I think it was a genuine mistake/misunderstanding and not a deliberate attempt to alienate anyone. I don't know how the other woman took the whole situation. I know it pushed my you-don't-belong-here button, and I responded based on that. The whole thing would have gone better if I had responded more charitably.
Meetup Interest Probe: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
I'm going to be starting graduate school in Urbana-Champaign this fall, and want to know if there are LessWrongers there (or like me, going to be there) who want to hold some meetups. Google shows me that someone else tried asking the same thing last year and met with some success, but after three meetups, they went extinct.
We Don't Drink Vodka (LW Moscow report)
And we don't have bears playing balalaikas. Well, I would like to tell you about Moscow rationality community after all, not about some B movie featuring crazy Russians.
Moscow community have grown from 5 people on my first meetup to 17 on the last one. And I believe we have possibility to grow even more. Moscow is a big city and it must have many smart people who can start to study rationality.
Our story began in May 2012, when I gathered the people for the first time. Spring meetup announcements hadn't attracted many new members, so we gathered, discussed our site with Russian translations of LessWrong Sequences and made some plans. Our first venue was one of the Subway restaurants in Moscow.
The next milestone in our development was September meetup, when I started to use on-line form to collect information from potential members of our group. Or maybe for some other reason we had got new faces, and even recurring ones. I also told everyone than we should practice rationality skills doing some exercises. Of course we had a lot of theories and ideas to duscuss, but we had to be closer to the real world. That's why we started to practice our rationality skills. We have approximately 8-10 people on each meetup during this fall.
Soon enough this practice yielded good results, new members became heroes and started to improve our ways of training and create new exercises. In January, 2013 one member of our group proposed big and comfortable office room, and we moved there. Our meetups suddenly became more organized and more new members appeared — this year we have 13 people on average.
We have also started to design game that can teach group members some rationality skills. You can find some examples of interesting and fun games in the same guidelines I mentioned, but we want to develop games specially for the skills improvement. Of course even educational games have to produce fun, not only teach you something. We play Liar's dice for relaxation after exercises now.
And you can find some photos from our meetup here.
Appendix: Exercises
Organizer presents two block of questions, each block has 10 questions for the sake of easy results calculation.
In the first one I read questions which require 90% confidence intervals. For example, what is the wingspan of the last model Boeing 737? It is similar to the one from “How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup” guidelines. After this block everyone can calculate their real confidence, for example, if the correct answers are inside your interval in 7 out of 10, your confidence interval is closer to 70% than to 90%. So calibration level still can be improved in this case.
The second block is similar to The Credence Game, it consists of true or false questions. Everyone needs to write down credence for each answer. The average expected credence is calculated, then the real average is calculated. For example, if someone has the following credence: 0.5, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 0.7, 0.6, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9, 0.8 the average expected credence will be 0.73. And if there are 6 correct, 3 incorrect and one answer with credence 50%, then it will be 6.5 real average: 0.5 for one answer with 0.5 credence and 6 for the correct answers. The two numbers are close and the person with that answers seems to be well calibrated.
And for the some reason everyone showed better result in the second block. I can conclude that a person has more difficulties with hitting into specified confidence interval than assigning confidence for own answers.
During the calibration session I present the following strategies to improve calibration, once a time:
1. Repetition and feedback. Take several tests in succession, assessing how well you did after each one and attempting to improve your performance in the next one.
2. Equivalent bets. For each estimate, set up the equivalent bet to test if that range or probability really reflects your uncertainty. It means that you should choose between two games. In game A you will receive a money prize if your statement is true, in other words if the correct number is between your upper and lower bounds. In game B you generate random number between 0 and 1, and you win if the random is between zero and your credence (0.9, for example). I can say that you win with probability equals to your credence. If you prefer game A, you may be underconfident; if you prefer game B, you may be overconfident.
3. Consider two pros and two cons. Think of at least two reasons why you should be confident in your assessment and two reasons you could be wrong.
4. Avoid anchoring. Think of range questions as two separate binary questions of the form “Are you 95% certain that the true value is over/under (pick one) the lower/upper (pick one) bound?”
5. Reverse the anchoring effect. Start with extremely wide ranges and narrow them with the “absurdity test” as you eliminate highly unlikely values.
I recommend to make at least one calibration session before any Fermi calculation sessions.
2. Tabooing, version 2
There is standard rationalists' taboo exercise, you just remove some word from your speech and try to talk about something. But I would like to propose another version.
You need to create some texts, or use existing texts from a book or a news article. You also need to find some words in each text that should obscure the meaning therefore tabooing will make it clearer. It may be some texts about politics or other controversial topic. Each text should be short, one or two paragraphs. You need to highlight words to taboo somehow, with italic font, separate colour or highlighter.
At the meetup ask the people to read the text tabooing the words you have selected.
If you are going to try this exercise, please let me know about the results, because I am still trying to improve it.
3. Reframing
First, define or find a statement you want to work with. The statement can be associated with some choice you want to make or it can be your interlocutor's phrase you want to make clear.
Second, do the reframing itself:
Check for you desire to maintain status quo. Do you see changes as bad things? Try to reverse changes direction.
Imagine, that you make a decision for every similar situation in the future.
Change unit of measurement, for example, convert time into money or vice versa.
Change time frame, into the past or the future.
Change the arena. Transfer your conditions into another country, even into imaginary place described in some book.
Imagine, that another person is faced with you issue. What will he or she decide or do?
Imagine yourself as an outside observer. What will you think about your own thoughts and deeds?
4. Value of information
Information can have an influence upon the utility and yield of your choices. If it can help you to make the choice with higher utility, then the difference is the value of the information for you. Take several daily situations when you need to make simple choices and estimate the impact of new information on these choices. For example, you need to buy some things and you may make random choice or look for detailed descriptions and specifications of this things. How much money, time and other resources you can save or earn in the future if you make informative choice instead of choice without the information?
Meet up interest: Vienna, March
Please post here if you'd be interested in a meetup in Vienna in March.
Location, date and time to be agreed upon by the participants.
Meetup : First Buffalo Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : First Buffalo Meetup
Its the first ever Buffalo LW Meetup! It will be at Spot Coffee on Elmwood. Lets meet at 6:30pm, I'll get there earlier and have some seating by the couches with a LW sign.
Since this is the first meeting, we will be getting to know each other and talking about what we want to get out of the group meetups. We can discuss the locations, times, and frequency of future meetups. Also, I thought some games and group activities might be a fun way to get know each each other.
Discussion article for the meetup : First Buffalo Meetup
Meetup :St.Louis MO: Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games
Discussion article for the meetup : Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games
I'm planing to do a presentation with optional exercises on the psychology of memorization with an emphasis on learning names. I plan on focusing on techniques that haven't already received much attention on Less Wrong, but will have materiel on things like SRS prepared in case anyone isn't already familiar with them.
Also, if you'd like to talk to Thiel Fellow and Singularity summit speaker James Koppel now's your chance. He's told me that will be attending, and since he no longer lives in the St.Louis area you might not get another chance.
I'll also be bringing some games for anyone who wants to stick around after the presentation. Feel free to bring some of your own.
cross-posted from Less Wrong
-edited for writing style and updated location
cross-posted from http://www.meetup.com/lesswrong/
Discussion article for the meetup : Psycology of memorization, Thiel Fellow James Koppel, and games
Gauging interest for a Rio de Janeiro meetup group.
Who would be interested? Please reply to this thread or msg in private.
Thanks!
Edit: It's Rio de Janeiro, RJ, in Brazil.
It seems it is going to happen, discussion also on fb now:
http://www.facebook.com/Ierfh/posts/108940625936257?comment_id=28607&ref=notif¬if_t=comment_mention
Ok, the meetup will happen, here is the link: http://lesswrong.com/meetups/fp
Possible meetup: Singapore
Are there any Singaporean LW-ers out there? I'll be visiting Singapore for a few days with my husband, Carl Shulman, and we'd be keen to either have a short meet-up in a coffee shop somewhere, or to see Singaporean sites while talking to a LWer or two. Please comment or pm me if you're interested. We get in noon this Thursday (tomorrow), and leave the morning of Sunday, the 26th.
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