betterthanwell

In June 2012, the Association for Computing Machinery—a professional society of computer scientists, best known for hosting the prestigious ACM Turing Award, commonly referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science"—celebrated the 100th birthday of Alan Turing. The event was attended by luminaries like, oh, in no particular order:...

As of an hour ago, I had not yet heard of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Luke announced it to Less Wrong, as The University of Cambridge announced it to the world, back in April: > CSER at Cambridge University joins the others. > > Good people...

Edit: Dangerously misleading on one crucial point. This started out as a short reply to the Less Wrong post Minimum Viable Workout Routine. Unfortunately I was unable to summarise my points sufficiently, so this reply grew into a post of it's own. I realize that the following is a bit...

Less Wrong used to like Bitcoin before it was cool. Monthly threads popped up around the same time a pricing bubble brought mainstream attention last year. When the bubble popped, and price continued to deflate, discussion on this site stopped entirely. Was there a change of sign in the social...

Transhumanist philosopher David Pearce co-founded Humanity+ with Nick Bostrom. He is currently answering questions in an AMA on reddit/r/transhumanism.

A mundane cause for a surprising result. Consider this unconfirmed for now, however unsurprising it sounds. > According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the...

Journalist David McRaney has very recently published a popular book on human rationality. The book, You Are Not So Smart, is currently the 3rd best selling book in Nonfiction/Philosophy on Amazon.com after less than a week on the market. (Eighth best selling book in Nonfiction/Education) The tag-line of the project...