How To Find Us: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking: Free for three hours.

Discussion: This week we will attempt to tackle Robin Hanson's proposal for solving coordination problems on a massive scale, Futarchy. This will be a freestyle discussion, so it's probably best to at least read a little of the recommended reading to know what's going on. However, this is not required.

Recommended Reading:

• Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs by Robin Hanson.
• Questions about Futarchy by Andrew Gelman.
• Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs? by Robon Hanson.
• Where do I disagree with Robin Hanson? by Tyler Cowen.

How to Find Us: We are meeting at the old location again this week, in the upstairs wine bar at Westside Pavillion.

Discussion: The phrase "bias bias" could mean many things. Perhaps one might employ the term to point to the tendency to accuse others of bias before oneself. Perhaps, as in this paper, it could refer to the tendency of statisticians to be overly concerned with eliminating statistical bias and under-concerned about variance. What I want to discuss is the risk that, if we are observing other decision-makers from the outside with less knowledge about the situation than them, we will almost always find predictable irregularities in their decision-making which we cannot explain via our understanding of the situation. This will, I think, tend to be true whether they're "biased" in a significant sense or not. In other words: we're very likely to have less knowledge about the situation than the people making the decisions, and this is very likely to mislead us into thinking they're making biased decisions which are harming them, if we approach the question without sufficient awareness. This doesn't mean we can't assess bias, but it does sound a note of caution in doing so. Even in cases where the reasoning from our perspective seems very clear, the decision-maker may have other considerations to take into account.

Recommended Reading: I don't know of anything written specifically on this, but the recent breaking Chesterton’s fence in the presence of bull seems relevant here.

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; all are welcome.

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Checking assumptions is important. Sometimes that can be a matter of thinking things through yourself, but often we are better off looking for what other people have found. The first hurdle is to notice that we can check an assumption in this way -- often we do not even get that far. Once we've thought of actually checking, a simple search or wikipedia check may be sufficient. Sometimes, however, we need to dive deeper.

Where do you look for information? What do you do if a search brings up contradictory information? If an issue is not "settled science", do you give up? How do you decide whether an article is BS? How do you account for the relative weight of evidence from anecdotal answers to a question vs scientific research? How do you weight arguments against empirical evidence?

Recommended Reading:

This will be a bring-your-own-recommended-reading meetup! This forces you to practice the skill of investigating, differentiating useful references, and so on. Please make the assumption that no one else will do this and you'll have to be the only person bringing any useful information.

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. It absorbs time and energy which could be spent on fact. Although we make a conscious distinction between fictional worlds and reality, we will often use fictional examples when evaluating real-life situations. It has been argued that we should learn to take joy in the world we actually live in. Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?

Perhaps fiction offers a fun, relaxing break. I can understand this claim in two different ways. The first version is that reading fiction gives us a rest from serious thinking, restoring us in some way. So, is this really true? Often when we feel tired of thinking, we're really tired of thinking about some particular thing. We gain new mental energy when we switch to something else. We think this means we're unable to do productive work, and need to take a break; but often, we could continue to be productive on a sufficiently different task, which gave us the same variety as a "break" would. (This is anecdotal. I recall seeing a discussion of this in a lesswrong post, but didn't figure out which one.) Alternatively, if we really are exhausted, reading fiction might not be restoring our energy as much as taking a nap or perhaps meditating. In either case, the pro-fiction argument seems murky. Answering this question is difficult, because it's far from obvious why certain types of thinking seem to take "mental effort" and leave us feeling drained. (It seems it might be a mechanism for sensing high opportunity cost, or it might be due to depleting a physical resource in the brain.)

A second way to interpret this is that consuming fiction is closer to being an end, rather than a means. The joy which fiction creates, or the rich inner experience, may be a good in and of itself. Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes life worthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one. I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism. I'm not sure this view can be defended, however. If you've got something like a computational theory of mind, and believe that uploading yourself into a virtual world is OK, how do you draw a firm line between "reality" and "fiction" to say which kinds of experiences are really valuable and in which you're just fooling yourself? Is it a matter of a sufficiently detailed simulation, which includes other conscious beings rather than puppets, and so on?

Maybe...

Robin Hanson discusses the social value of stories: those who read fiction are more empathetic toward others, seemingly fooled by story logic into acting as if good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior punished. Although clearly valuable, this gives me the uneasy sense that stories are manipulative control directives. I may enjoy the story, but does that make me comfortable accepting control directives from this particular author? Or should we examine the moral character of the author, before reading?

To make our arguments stick, we've got to compare fiction to relevant alternatives. It seems to me that we can have almost as much fun reading biographies, memoirs, and (entertainingly written) history as we can reading fiction... and all with the advantage of being real facts about the real world, which seems at least a little useful.

Recommended Reading:

• The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
• Stories Are Like Religion
• Serious Stories
• All the links I threw in this write-up

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Our group has been doing something we call "rationality moments", sharing success or failure in skills of rationality since we last saw each other. Naturally, this leads to some discussion of how to solve problems which we may be having. It occurs to me that group problem-solving is a skill which can go wrong, and that there is knowledge out there about how to avoid pitfalls and how to get good results.

Recommended Reading:

It's encouraged that you think about the problem and look for good resources yourself, but here is what I found:

The wikipedia article on groupthink (which as I understand it says that we don't know very much at all about what causes groupthink or what may prevent it, in the empirical findings section)

Wikipedia on problem solving has interesting points.

Here is a short document about effective problem-solving for groups.

Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

Don't get caught up solving the wrong problem.

Polya on problem solving

A short article on avoiding bias in decision making, which has the same format of many such articles (IE, not chosen because it especially sticks out).

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: If we wish to make a concerted effort to learn pragmatic rationality, as opposed to the most intellectually shiny concepts in rationality, what should we be reading? We will discuss what's out there and brainstorm other things to look for. In addition to LessWrong, we'd like to draw from other communities that give practical advice; Mister Money Mustache appears to be one of these.

Recommended Reading:

• Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge
• Mister Money Mustache: Is it Convenient?
• Mister Money Mustache: Hedonic Adaptation

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.