See here for location and RSVP.

We haven't had an effective altruism meetup in Toronto for a while, so time for a relaunch! No particular fixed topic, just a chance to meet each other, hang out and discuss what's new.

See [http://www.meetup.com/Less-Wrong-Toronto/] for the exact location.

Sometimes we are faced with a decision which is important and non-trivial. What hard decisions have you made in the past? Do you have any coming up? Do you have any techniques and strategies for making hard, real-world decisions?

For me right now a hard decision is which direction to take my career, with grad school being an option. I'd like to talk about that a bit, but other examples too, with the emphasis being on general-purpose techniques that can be applied to a wide range of decision-making problems.

Things to consider:

• How do you get yourself in the right decision-making mindframe?
• How do you get a handle on what your options actually are, and make sure you're considering all of them?
• How do you translate your goals and values into utility, in order to compare options? Or do you not do it that way?
• How do you make sure your model of the decision and its consequences squares with reality?

I don't usually do this, but since this meetup is a special occasion, I'm buying everyone dinner! (Up to 10 people, first come first served. Beyond that you're more than welcome to come, but no free grub). RSVP on the meetup.com page

I'm assuming you know who MIRI are.

Malo Bourgon is a project manager and volunteer coordinator at MIRI. He will be visiting Toronto just for this meetup, so read up on AGI and prepare to give him a good grilling on what MIRI is up to.

Location: Fernando's Hideaway, 591 Yonge St.

Sorry, new location again! We're at the World's Biggest Bookstore in the Second Floor Meeting Room (at the back of the bookstore, up the stairs. Look for the paperclip sign).

This is our first guest event so let's all be friendly and welcoming to Cat, who's in Toronto just for the day! Cat volunteers for the Center for Applied Rationality, which you've no doubt heard a lot about already.

I don't want to set a fixed agenda for the discussion (since we're trying out a new format here with the invited guest) but let's just say I have a hunch this meeting's going to go well. :D

Tim Hortons on Victoria Street near Dundas station. We'll be at the back by the paperclip sign.

The "fight or flight" response evolved to help us cope with life-threatening situations, which called for quick judgement and maybe aggression or bursts of energy. But it comes at a price - when in this mode, blood is diverted away from the parts of the brain that deal with empathy, social relationships and long term planning.

This doesn't sound so good for rationality! In the modern environment, we can go into fight or flight response when it really isn't necessary (or a mild version of it, if we suffer from chronic stress). In this meetup we'll be sharing stories about the fight/flight/freeze response, how well we handled it and what the consequences were!

Place: Upstairs at The Imperial Public Library 54 Dundas St. E, near Dundas Station. Enter at the door on the right marked "library", go upstairs and look for the paperclip sign.

How do we avoid competitive debates where everyone loses, and achieve productive discussions where everyone wins? How do we do this when our brains seem set up to embrace "the brawl"?

Place: Upstairs at The Imperial Public Library 54 Dundas St. E, near Dundas Station. Enter at the door on the right marked "library", go upstairs and look for the paperclip sign.

A lot of us enjoy reading the Less Wrong Sequences:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

...but there's a lot there that might seem confusing. Do we really try to live our lives according to a mathematical formula? Do we really hate frequentist statistics? Who are these mysterious organizations with their logos at the top of the page? What's the deal with the Harry Potter and My Little Pony stuff? How much of that math and science and philosophy is relevant to our daily lives?

This meetup is a chance to try and clear up some of these confusions.

It's also a chance for each of us to explain: what does rationality mean to you? What do you imagine a rational person as being like?

Place: Upstairs at The Imperial Public Library 54 Dundas St. E, near Dundas Station. Enter at the door on the right marked "library", go upstairs and look for the paperclip sign.

We'll kick the meeting off with ASK LESS WRONG. Think of something in your everyday life that's bothering you and we'll help you smooth it out. Purpose: increase the fun in each others' lives through the magic of friendship. Secondary purpose: train ourselves to notice things that are suboptimal and view them as problems that can be solved.

The main part of the meeting will be a RATIONAL DEBATE. We'll start with "will rationality make you rich", then move on to "is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe" and "should you vote". That's probably all we'll have time for before the beer kicks in, but we do have backup topics.

If you want to read up on any of these topics, that's great - but not strictly necessary.

Rational debating is far from a solved problem, so we'll be learning how to do it as we go along. I'll be chairing, so don't worry about keeping track of this vast list of meta stuff - that's my job. It'll go something like this:

• In a conventional debate, you win by sounding more plausible than the other person. In a rational debate, you win if and only if you end up believing the truth. This makes it a cooperative game - it's possible for everyone to win or for everyone to lose. (Incidentally it also means you don't actually know whether you've won or not).

• Initially, each person answers the question separately, choosing how they wish to frame their answer. If people come up with very different ways of framing the question, we will take each one in turn and try to approach the question from that direction. (The point of this is to avoid fighting over the framing of the discussion and instead address the issues directly).

• I'll keep track of structural stuff - different ways of framing the question, agreed subtopics of discussion, and binary chopping to find points of disagreement (which involves lists of statements and verbally how plausible we each think they are).

• When arguing against something, construct a steel man first - rephrase the opposing argument in your own words, making it as strong and plausible as you can, before you try and defeat it.

• Be bold and specific - make sure you're saying something substantial, even if you're not completely sure it's true.

• The social aspect: make sure we're providing status and rewards for the right things.

• Leave a line of retreat. What would I do if I was wrong about this?

• Try to notice when you're replying to somebody's cached thought with a cached thought of your own. I'll try and do the same.

• Try to find something to change your mind about, even if it's something small.

• Separate out disagreement about facts from disagreement about values (and disagreement about strategy, which combines both). Separate out semantic confusion. I think we're already reasonably good at these.

• If possible, identify which of these techniques you're trying to put into practice. I'll do the same. (By drawing attention to this we'll help keep things purposeful, and also hopefully learn which techniques seem particularly useful).

Resources on rational debate:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gm9/philosophical_landmines/

Hope to see you all at the Imperial Pub on Tuesday! Let me know if you can come.

In the Hart House Reading Room (the room across from the reception desk with the purple walls)

We're trying to save a life, and we want to get you involved! Three of us are already promising to give money to the Against Malaria Foundation, but if you don't have spare cash - or if you're not convinced this is a good idea - you can also help by contributing to the discussion.

Charity evaluator GiveWell estimates that the cost of saving the life of a child by giving to AMF is $2300. But there is a lot of uncertainty in this estimate, and the focus of this meetup will be on how to deal with that uncertainty. In particular, if we discover that AMF is less cost effective than we thought, how should we proceed?

We should also look at some specific sources of uncertainty, try and establish whether GiveWell has already taken account of them and estimate how much uncertainty is introduced by each factor. I plan on researching this a little and hope to bring along some relevant information for each one.

• Will AMF make good use of additional funds?
• Might AMF change in the future, e.g. starting to fund other kinds of programme which may be less effective?
• Possible widespread distribution of anti-malarial vaccines in the future (currently still under development); will this affect value of bed nets today? (HT Steven Bukal)
• If someone like the Gates Foundation were to dump a huge amount of money into AMF and/or other bednetting programmes, what would the effect be on the marginal value of our own donations?
• Insecticide resistance or "behavioural" resistance of mosquitoes
• Decrease in child mortality between mid-1990's (when the studies were done) and now. Expecting continued decrease in the future?
• Out of the people getting nets, how many actually already have one?
• Are nets going where they should and are they being used correctly for as many years as they're good for?
• Do AMF's activities discourage local governments from distributing nets? (Or for that matter, other nonprofits?)
• Are people discouraged from buying nets if they expect them to be given out for free at some point? (Even if they can afford them)
• Uncertainties and biases associated with the original studies (published statistical uncertainty, representativeness, publication bias)
• Over-optimism causes higher estimates of expected value. If we focus on the best (according to GiveWell), does that mean they're more likely to have been over-optimistic and should we correct for this? (This point is somewhat technical but I'll try and explain in the meeting)
• How do we account for "leveraging"? (AMF requires its distribution partners to acquire the funds to cover distribution costs themselves; should we consider non-AMF funding to be "free" or should we include all costs in our estimate, or somewhere in between?)

But there's also some uncertainty in the upward direction (i.e. we know it's not included in the $2300 figure):

• Additional non-life-saving benefits
• Helping GiveWell by tagging donations as GiveWell-inspired

So if you want to have a think about some of these before the meetup, you're more than welcome. I realise everyone's busy though! In any case, we'll have plenty of in-depth stuff to talk about. Note: THINK is not directly LW-affiliated but I've been told to post our meetups here anyhow :-)