What's guilt good for? How can we use it, or get rid of it if we don't find it useful? Nate Soares, blogging at Minding Our Way, is writing a series of blog posts on this issue. In this meetup, we will discuss the articles starting at Working yourself ragged is not a virtue, until the end of the series, or the last post in the series to be published before the meetup, whichever happens first. We will be discussing these posts over vegan snacks. General meetup info: * If you use Facebook, please join our group. * Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late.

Note the new location! Also, date and time for this might be off since I am posting from San Francisco: it should be at 6:00 pm on Friday the 24th of July.

What is the Efficient Market Hypothesis, is it supported by market data, and what are its implications for ordinary people looking to invest their spare cash? Rémy Hamilton-smith will tell us as we eat vegan snacks at his place.

For more detail on the talk: "Since the 80s the growing consensus among academics (though still hotly debated among practitioners) is that the major stock and security markets in developed countries are relatively efficient. This is because huge multinational investment banks can detect and take advantage of the slightest mispricings extremely quickly, making them disappear. They achieve this speed using automated trading programs and have been known to physically move their office next door to the stock exchange in order to get the lowest possible ping.

Thus from the point of view of everyone else this leads to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which states that it is not possible to predictably ‘beat the market’. In this talk I'll discuss the EMH more formally as well as where it might suggest we should be investing our spare cash."

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late.

I really enjoyed Zendo last time we played it, so we're doing it again, but this time with things other than playing cards. The rules will be explained at the event, but in summary, one person is the 'Master', who has a secret rule in mind, and their 'Students' must guess the Master's rule in order to win. Further explanation is at the Wikipedia page (although note that we will be using simpler rules). As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

Note that after this, I will be in the USA until late July, and therefore unable to run meetups. However, other people are more than welcome to do so in my absence.

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Deep learning has been making waves: many domains of machine learning have their best results from deep learning approaches. The cynical view is that deep learning is just a new term for neural networks, and the truth is probably somewhere in between, deep learning makes use of new tricks, better hardware and more data to better train neural networks. What is certain is that neural networks have made a comeback. During the talk, I [Mayank Daswani] hope to make you aware of some basic deep learning techniques, and then show you some very cool applications. My knowledge comes primarily from the course on deep learning taught at Stanford this semester (CS224d) that I'm following along (videos, notes, assignments available online). I highly recommend checking it out.

As always, vegan snacks are provided.

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

At our last meetup, we talked about a mathematical theory of how to do induction well. At this meetup, we will get some practice at actually doing it by playing (a facsimile of) Zendo! In small groups, one player will be the 'Master', and the rest will be their 'Students'. Students will have playing cards, and the Master will have some criterion to pick out 'good' arrangements of playing cards. The 'Students' have to try to guess the Master's criterion by putting out arrangements of playing cards, and asking the Master if they are 'good'. If a Student guesses the Master's criterion, they win! As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Assume we are walking through the world and see a bunch of objects. Some of these objects are ravens, and all of the ravens turn out to be black. So we start entertaining the hypothesis that 'all ravens are black'. But how can we believe in this hypothesis? It talks about an infinite number of ravens, almost all of which we haven't seen!

What we need is a method of induction, generalizing a finite number of examples into a universal rule. It has been claimed that Solomonoff induction is the best method out there. Is that true? Does that mean all scientists should use Solomonoff induction? How does it work? And what can it do for me?

Jan will explain these and related questions giving a brief tour from probability theory to the universally intelligent agent AIXI. No prior knowledge about math is required. As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

In February we had a meet up based around us discussing our favorite sequence post. As a counterbalance to that, this time we will be discussing a sequence post that we disagreed with. Each person will summarize the article that they chose and why they disagree with it and that will lead into group discussion.

Please post the article you are bringing on this FB event page so everyone has a chance to read all of them before hand. The disagreement can be major issues or minor nit picks, buy if you can't think of any that you disagree with that might be a bad sign :P

As usual, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is finally coming to a conclusion! To celebrate, we invite all Canberran Less Wrongers to our wrap-up party. (: Snacks will be provided.

Make sure you read all the new chapters so that we can have some interesting discussions.

Note that this is on Sunday instead of Saturday (π day), and there will be no LW meeting on Saturday.

Often we come across various pieces of technology - such as a neat app or website - that help us accomplish goals that we are trying to achieve. In this meetup, we will discuss any such tools that we have come across (so if you can, please come prepared with a few in mind), and see if others have ideas that we might find useful. As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

For this meet up, we want to talk about our favorite LW posts. Please pick one (or more) posts from the 'How to Actually Change Your Mind' sequence that you found interesting. Tell us why you liked it and possibly lead into a group discussion.

Feel free to pick a post from another sequence if you want and it its totally fine if you haven't read any of the sequences, you can still come and discuss other peoples favourite posts. It would also be awesome if you could post your favourite post on the Facebook event page so everyone has the chance to read them before hand.

As usual Vegan snacks will be provided. Hope to see you there!

General meetup info:

• If you use Facebook, please join our group.
• Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.