This was posted to the London LessWrong mailing list, but I am crossposting here, as per David Gerard's suggestion, in case anyone else finds this interesting.

So here's my notes:

Bitcoin - Mostly how it's quite interesting, but annoying that we can't transfer money in from the UK. Myself and ciphergoth were the interested parties. If anyone has any ideas, let us know.

Euthyphro Dilemma and Moral Realism - The first religion-themed conversation, mostly on the sorts of answers that come up to the dilemma and what constitutes moral realism anyway.

Evolutionarily Stable Strategies - The discussion of moral realism naturally led to what the nature of morality is and how evolution gave rise to it.

Learning Decision Theory & Project Euler - Not sure how we got here, but I mentioned my desire that the people working on decision theory would make a Project Euler-type introduction to the material, so the rest of us can eventually join the conversation. I should probably write this up as a separate discussion post.

Rationality as Landgrab, and Definitions of Rationality - Apparently some high-ranking figures in the general futurist cluster dislike LessWrong for 'appropriating the term rationality'. There may or may not be a point there, but we started discussing how the term can be defined, preferably in a LW-independent manner.

Libertarianism & LessWrong - There seems to be a high concentration of libertarians on LW, and it seems that the ban on talking politics has kept this from being discussed much. Which brings us to...

Talking Politics on LessWrong - There seems to be this norm against talking politics, which was inherited by other online communities. However, LessWrong is very much not like other communities. We can discuss religion and philosophy without flamewars breaking out, so why not try politics too? People on LW have been known to change their minds, so there is a good chance we will generate more light than heat.

Describing LW & Changing our minds - Leonhart described the site as 'an Internet forum where people occasionally apologise and change their minds'. Everyone else felt this was a great formulation that should be noted down. Discussion on what we have changed our minds on on LW followed

Historicity of Jesus - Back on the religious track, we discussed how atheists are often former Christians who looked into the Historicity of Jesus. Cases in point - taryneast's relatives and Lukeprog.

Making pepole admit cached thoughts - More or less what it says on the tin. What it is and if anyone's done it (not really).

Is the term 'Dark Arts' meaningful? - Perhaps one of the few discussions where there was active debate. A couple of good definitions for 'dark arts' came up, including 'techniques that if the other person knew you were applying them, they would be pissed off'. My personal definition was 'convincing techniques independent of the payload'. Which is to say, tricks anyone can use to convince the untrained about almost anything.

Methods of Rationality meetup - By this point we'd moved on to the next pub. The discussion was whether to do a MoR meetup (yes) and how we would go about setting it up (coordinating with Eliezer to have a date set before he posts the next chapter). What remains is actually doing any of this.

Plausibility vs. Possibility - David Gerard's idea. The ideas that seem plausible should raise a red flag since that may be due to the conjunction fallacy, reducing the possibility of them actually being true.

Biweekly Meetup Dates - It has been decided by the council of elders (aka, those who bothered to turn up) that the biweekly meetups will be on the 1st and 3rd Sunday of each month, with every 4th one being a 'big' bimonthly meetup.

Psychology & Science - Is psychology a proper science? (some of it yes, some of it no).

Race & Intelligence - Another debated topic. On the one hand, it's unlikely that intelligence would remain stable while so many other attributes vary among races. On the other David Gerard mentioned recent research raises questions about the studies that showed such differences. On the third hand, anyone seriously researching the topic without a view to disproving it will have their career destroyed, so, yeah...

Prevalence of Basic Knowledge - An anecdote by me about some fairly educated acquaintances that had basic misconceptions about evolution (oddly, not with religious motive, I think), and a warning not to consider the general public's education levels too high due to the Typical Mind Fallacy.

Comedy as Anti-Compartmentalization - Another pet theory of mine. I was puzzled by the amount of atheist comedians out there, who people pay to see tell them that their religion is absurd. (Yes, Christian comedians exist too. Search YouTube. I dare you.) So my theory is that humour serves as a space where patterns and data from different fields are allowed to be superimposed on one another. Think of it as an anti-compartmentalization habit. Due to our brain design, compartmentalization is the default, so humour may be a hack to counter that. And we reward those who do it well with high status because it's valuable. Maybe we should have transhumanist/rationalist stand-up comedians? We sure have a lot of inconsistencies to point out.

Spread of Atheism - The above developed into this. Has atheism saturated it's audience, and will it stabilise? No clear outcome, I guess we'll have to wait and see. I certainly hope not.

Wikipedia's Epistemology - How Wikipedia determines truth. I'll let David Gerard tell us what that was about

The Larrikin-Wowser Dynamic - Kristoff mentioned this theory on how societies work through this fundamental tension. He can probably say more on this than I can.

The Myers-Kurzweil argument - It turns out, the winner differs by how you frame the claims made. As far as I am concerned, of these two, whoever wins, we lose.

The Black Box experiment - The discussion turned to raising children, and I mentioned this experiment on how the children of other primates seem to do some things better than human children do, and what that tells us about our learning process. YouTube vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAoJsS9Ix8

Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Does it do anything? - DG says no, but it works by the power of telling people what to do.

End of notes.

That was a lot of text, if you made it down to here, you have my sincere congratulations.

I had posted a while back on my proposed dissolution of the Fine Tuning argument. My main argument was as follows:

So the question posed to defenders of the FTA is 'why life'? Why focus on this particular fact? What is it that sets life apart from all the other propositions true about our universe but not other the other possible universes? The usual answer is that life stands out, being valuable in ways that galaxies, iPads, and all the other true propositions are not. It seems that this is an unstated premise of the FTA. But where does that premise come from? Physics gives us no instrument to measure value, so how did this concept get in what was supposed to be a cosmology-based argument?

I present the FTA here as an argument that while seemingly complex, simply evaporates in light of the Mind Projection Fallacy. Knowing that humans tend to confuse 'I see X as valuable' with 'x is valuable', the provenance of the hidden premise 'life is valuable' is laid bare, as is the identity of the agent who is doing the valuing, and it is us. With the mystery solved, explaining why humans find life valuable does not require us to go to the extreme lengths of introducing a non-naturalistic cause for the universe.

The conditions necessary for life are also necessary for iPads: the argument hinges on things like the ability of subatomic particles to come together to form atoms, or the ability of stars to burn. It's not a question of one interesting type of complexity versus another,  but of a vast selection space of universes in which there is nothing complex or interesting, versus a tiny space of universes in which there are many interesting things  like iPads and life.

I admit this explanation lacks a rigorous definition of "interesting", but I think the least that can be said is that our universe is interesting in being a wild outlier in various physical and mathematical characteristics, and not just "interesting to beings with the same value system as ourselves".

I've been pondering how to process that response, and if the argument is salvageable, ever since. Do we really have to explain anthropics and the multiverse to diffuse the FTA?

Today I came across a great article with an elegant description of Ramsey's Theorem:

Expressed roughly, it tells us that complete disorder (in certain situations) is impossible. No matter how jumbled and chaotic you try to arrange certain objects, you will find yourself creating a very highly organized and structured object within it.

As I understand it, positing few 'interesting' vs. the vast majority of 'uninteresting' universes is in direct contradiction with Ramsey's theorem. I put this to the more mathematically educated among this community for feedback. Beyond pushing forward this particular internal dialog of mine, it should have more general application in the fine tuning debate, should someone choose to use it there.

Today's post, Why truth? And... was originally published on 27 November 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Why should we seek truth? Pure curiosity is an emotion, but not therefore irrational. Instrumental value is another reason, with the advantage of giving an outside verification criterion. A third reason is conceiving of truth as a moral duty, but this might invite moralizing about "proper" modes of thinking that don't work. Still, we need to figure out how to think properly. That means avoiding biases, for which see the next post.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Martial Art of Rationality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Sharing interesting links via the discussion section seems to have too much overhead. I suspect we all find things that are quite interesting but don't bother to share them on LW. This is an experiment to see if a dedicated thread can work better.

I've been scraping data from the sequences recently, where by sequences I mean all of Eliezer's posts up to and including Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories. I've been doing this mostly to get some fun data out and maybe some more useful things like the Bring Back the Sequences project, but one of the things I found is that there is breakage from the move from OB (and OB's subsequent reorganization) that remains unfixed.

In particular, 96 links either give 404s (not found), used to link to a comment but now only link to the main article, or link under the summary fold for no apparent reason. To avoid overloading this article, I have posted the list on piratepad here:

http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/ro.eyxCVZYMZeO/latest

Note that I have only checked links that went to overcomingbias.com. This is not necessarily a complete list.

Some of these can be fixed by anyone with editing rights, but the ones pointing to comments can be fixed only by Eliezer or someone who knows what comment was meant to be linked. Alternatively, someone can go through the archive.org WayBack machine, figure out which comments were linked to, then find them in the equivalent LessWrong page, and finally provide the corrected link. I may modify the scraper to do this if someone is willing to make the substitution.

Also, a bunch of links (not in the above list) direct the user to OvercomingBias.com only to be redirected back to LessWrong. While this doesn't actually cause any breakage, it's a pity to be burdening OB's server for no real reason. I can produce a list of these if needed.

If I have managed to attract the attention of anyone with editorial rights, I would really appreciate it if you could help me out by removing certain formatting inconsistencies that greatly slow down and complicate my scraper. I can offer more details on demand, but these links to OB are near the top of the list.

I should be back with more interesting data soon. If you have any particular data-mineable queries about the sequences, let me know.

[Edit: The 4 links that point to a #comments fragment are actually processed correctly. That leaves 92 to be fixed.]

So, the London community is arranging a Hackday where some of us will get together and code. In order to ensure we work on the awesomest idea(s) possible, we decided to ask LessWrong to add to our list of candidates. So here is the question:

What could a few developers do in a day or less worth of coding that will be awesome? Also, as a way of checking calibration, you can give your estimate for how long such a thing would take to build.

Note: While we will take ideas and voting here into account, there is no guarantee that we will actually end up choosing one or more of them.

During the latest London Meetup, I asked: "If you could spread one meme about rationality to the mainstream, what would that be?"

I realize that certain parts of rationality, like cognitive biases, should be taught as a unit, but I hypothesize that there exist rationality-enhancing lessons that can fit in 140 characters and stand on their own. Given that we want to spread rationality to those close to us and everyone else as well, it may be useful to work on developing compact versions of our most potent insights, and work on phrasing them in a way that is accessible to the mainstream.

So this thread is a challenge to do just that: pick a rationality-related insight, and try to find 140 characters (or less) that express it well for the purpose of spreading it further. It may be a quote that has appeared in our quotes thread, it may be in the form of a joke, or maybe just a compact insight that can resonate. A non-obvious challenge is to avoid getting evaluated as 'obviously true' and discarded. I guess a better target reaction is ("this sounds intriguing"->"huh, I hadn't thought about this that way!")

Don't worry too much about getting it perfect the first time; we can use the threaded comments system to collaborate. If you see a way to improve a sentence, propose the improvement as a response to it. forming a tree of alternative versions, with votes to sort them.

If you see a version of a meme developed somewhere in the thread that reaches your required awesomeness threshold, you can also post it to your (facebook/twitter/whatever else) followers. I certainly will.

Edit: As per Luke's suggestion, I went and made a twitter account that we can use to tweet good sentences that come out of this thread. Feel free to follow.

Given that 

1. Deciding to read and actually reading the sequences is 'work'

2. Reading the latest frontpaged article on LessWrong is 'fun'

3. We frequently have gaps in the posting rate of articles that make it to the front page

4. There are many people who joined this community after the sequences were written and haven't gone through all of them

...would it make sense to start bringing articles from the sequences to the front page, either at a set pace or whenever there is a gap in posting?

I have actually read most of the sequences, but wouldn't mind going through them once again. However, taking it up as a project seems like too much work. By bringing an article to the front page, either with the old comment thread or with a fresh one (plus a reference to the old one), it becomes something that the community is doing. Following things that a group you belong to is doing is fun. But for that to happen, we need to share a common pointer to which article is 'the one we are reading now'. Hence, the front page.

In short, I think if people in this community reading (and re-reading) more of the sequences is something we want, then recycling them through the front page is also a good idea.

If the barrier is implementation modifications needed, I may be able to assist.