Meetup : Austin, TX - Schelling Day
Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Schelling Day
We're celebrating Schelling Day, the day for getting to know people in your community. It'll be a potluck followed by a bunch of sharing (starting at 7-7:30); last year's was awesome, and I hope you can make it to this one!
Standard advice: 1. Feel free to bring food if you want to, but also to not bring food if you don't want to. We typically have more than enough. 2. If you need a ride, get in contact with me and I'll see if I can arrange one. 3. If you've never been to a LW meetup in Austin before, feel free to come. This is probably the best event for meeting people. 4. If you're not sure about whether or not you should come, lean towards coming.
Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Schelling Day
Sapiens

This is a section-by-section summary and review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It's come up on Less Wrong before in the context of Death is Optional, a conversation the author had with Daniel Kahneman about the book, and seems like an accessible introduction to many of the concepts underlying the LW perspective on history and the future. Anyone who's thought about Moloch will find many of the same issues discussed here, and so I'll scatter links to Yvain throughout. I'll discuss several of the points that I thought were interesting and novel, or at least had a novel perspective and good presentation.
A history as expansive as this one necessarily involves operating on higher levels of abstraction. The first section expresses this concisely enough to quote in full:
About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.
About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.
About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.
About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.
Thinking well
Many people want to know how to live well. Part of living well is thinking well, because if one thinks the wrong thoughts it is hard to do the right things to get the best ends.
We think a lot about how to think well, and one of the first things we thought about was how to not think well. Bad ways of thinking repeat in ways we can see coming, because we have looked at how people think and know more now about that than we used to.
But even if we know how other people think bad thoughts, that is not enough. We need to both accept that we can have bad ways of thinking and figure out how to have good ways of thinking instead.
The first is very hard on the heart, but is why we call this place "Less Wrong." If we had called it something like more right, it could have been about how we're more right than other people instead of more right than our past selves.
The second is very hard on the head. It is not just enough to study the bad ways of thinking and turn them around. There are many ways to be wrong, but only a few ways to be right. If you turn left all the way around, it will point right, but we want it to point up.
The heart of our approach has a few parts:
- We are okay with not knowing. Only once we know we don't know can we look.
- We are okay with having been wrong. If we have wrong thoughts, the only way to have right thoughts is to let the wrong ones go.
- We are quick to change our minds. We look at what is when we get the chance.
- We are okay with the truth. Instead of trying to force it to be what we thought it was, we let it be what it is.
- We talk with each other about the truth of everything. If one of us is wrong, we want the others to help them become less wrong.
- We look at the world. We look at both the time before now and the time after now, because many ideas are only true if they agree with the time after now, and we can make changes to check those ideas.
- We like when ideas are as simple as possible.
- We make plans around being wrong. We look into the dark and ask what the world would look like if we were wrong, instead of just what the world would look like if we were right.
- We understand that as we become less wrong, we see more things wrong. We try to fix all the wrong things, because as soon as we accept that something will always be wrong we can not move past that thing.
- We try to be as close to the truth as possible.
- We study as many things as we can. There is only one world, and to look at a part tells you a little about all the other parts.
- We have a reason to do what we do. We do these things only because they help us, not because they are their own reason.
Rationality Quotes Thread April 2015
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's
Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's
The next meetup is July 9th, 2016 at 1:30PM at Quack's 43rd Street Bakery (don't worry, they've also got coffee). We'll likely be inside, to the right. I might have a sign with the LW blog header printed on it. I hope to see you there!
If you have any questions or want to get my phone number to make sure you find us, please send me a private message. I'll notice and respond to those much more quickly than I'll notice comments on this meetup announcement.
We have a Google Group here that we use for announcements (like our weekly group dinner in a private residence), as well as a Facebook Group.
Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - Quack's
Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Control Theory Commentary
This is the third and final post in a sequence on control theory. In the first post I introduced the subject of control theory and stepped through some basics. In the second post I outlined Powers's model, as presented in Behavior: The Control of Perception. This post is a collection of comments on the subject that are only somewhat related, and so I'll use section headings to separate them. I'll also explicitly note the absence of a section on the design of control systems, which is where most of the effort used in talking about them in industrial settings goes, and is probably relevant to philosophical discussions surrounding them.
Behavior: The Control of Perception

This is the second of three posts dealing with control theory and Behavior: The Control of Perception by William Powers. The previous post gave an introduction to control theory, in the hopes that a shared language will help communicate the models the book is discussing. This post discusses the model introduced in the book. The next post will provide commentary on the model and what I see as its implications, for both LW and AI.
An Introduction to Control Theory
Behavior: The Control of Perception by William Powers applies control theory to psychology to develop a model of human intelligence that seems relevant to two of LW's primary interests: effective living for humans and value-preserving designs for artificial intelligence. It's been discussed on LW previously here, here, and here, as well as mentioned in Yvain's roundup of 5 years (and a week) of LW. I've found previous discussions unpersuasive for two reasons: first, they typically only have a short introduction to control theory and the mechanics of control systems, making it not quite obvious what specific modeling techniques they have in mind, and second, they often fail to communicate the differences between this model and competing models of intelligence. Even if you're not interested in its application to psychology, control theory is a widely applicable mathematical toolkit whose basics are simple and well worth knowing.
Because of the length of the material, I'll split it into three posts. In this post, I'll first give an introduction to that subject that's hopefully broadly accessible. The next post will explain the model Powers introduces in his book. In the last post, I'll provide commentary on the model and what I see as its implications, for both LW and AI.
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