The Berlin meetup group is organizing the LessWrong Community Weekend 2015. From June 12th to 14th awesome people from all across Europe are coming to Berlin to meet, exchange ideas and start projects. The focus is on forming new and strengthening existing ties between our local communities. In addition to being a vibrant social event, it’s also about sharing your world-improvement projects as well as about teaching and learning valuable skills.

If you are already attending a local meetup, you might find this to be similar in the way it mixes a social event with workshops and talks. And if you don’t have a meetup nearby, this is a great opportunity to get in touch with the community.

Our 2014 event had an unexpectedly huge turnout. This time we have planned for a larger number of participants yet might still be underestimating the size of the community and its growth since last year. So sign up quickly if you want to be sure to get in.

Building on our experience and the feedback from the last event we are making this event even more awesome: The new location offers several seminar rooms for parallel workshops, activities and discussions in smaller groups. Combined with shorter and more efficient talks this leaves more space for structured social time and activities.

Participants are encouraged to share their knowledge in workshops, tutorials and talks as well as exchange experiences in informal settings. Featured topics include practical rationality, self improvement, world improvement and other rationality related areas.

Giving a workshop or talk is a great way to introduce yourself to other attendants and start a discussion about a topic you care about. If you're unsure if the topic is valuable or a good fit, please err on the side of including it! The more content offers we get, the easier it will be to create a balanced, yet diverse program.

Next to the talks, there is plenty of opportunity to get to know your fellow participants better in structured and less structured social settings. The chosen location provides many opportunities to spend off-time outside, whether you'd rather take a few companions on a morning hike in the nearby forest while discussing AI, receive a tutorial in proper stone-skipping technique at lake Wannsee or if you'd prefer a game of ultimate frisbee on the premises. Which specific activities will be offered during the weekend depends on the participants themselves, so make sure to tell us on the signup form if there's a skill you can share or an activity you'd like to offer.

The event begins on Friday June 12th, 12:00 with our shared lunch. Then we will move to our main location, Jugendherberge Berlin-Am Wannsee that provides us with seminar rooms and on-site accommodation (shared rooms, 4 beds) as well as access to the nearby lake and forest. The next days will be filled with workshops, talks, discussions and many other activities. We’ll say goodbye on Sunday June 14th at 15:00.

Costs are €150 including accommodation for two nights, the welcome reception and lunch on Friday and all the other meals till lunch on Sunday.

The European LW community is pretty scattered at the moment. This event is our chance to reach out and build lasting bonds and friendships across cities and borders. Are you looking for allies for your world-optimization plans, or for new methods to improve yourself and your model of the world? Do you want to teach others what you have learned? Or are you looking forward to a relaxing weekend around like-minded people?
The community weekend can offer all those things and more, and you can help make it the event that you want it to be!

Looking forward to seeing you
Alexander, Anne, Christian, John, Marcel, Matthias and Tristan

P.S.: If you have any questions about the event you can reach us at lwcw2015@gmail.com.

Edit: 80 attendants have signed up, which means we have reached capacity! The signup has been closed.

I learned a game at Burning Man this year that was about connecting to people and reading their nonverbal signals, called the "open-closed" game (h/t Minda Myers). There are two people in the game, and one is trying to approach the other and place a hand on their shoulder. No words can be exchanged, except that person who is being approached can announce their emotional state as "open" or "closed". When they say "closed", the approacher may not get any closer until they say "open" again. The approachee monitors themselves for any internal discomfort associated with the other person, and says "closed" if that is the case. The approacher tries to keep the other person comfortable through their body language and eye contact, to get them to remain "open".

I have recently started playing this game with myself, with "open" representing openness to experience or being in the moment, and "closed" representing tunnel vision or discomfort with the way things are going. In a way, I imagine being "approached" by whatever situation I'm in, or whatever sequence of experiences is happening, instead of a person. I ask myself whether I am in the open or closed state, and try to shift to the open state whenever I notice being in the closed state.

There are a couple of reasons to try to do this. In the open state, I tend to be happier, more curious and observant and have more new thoughts. From a week of tracking my mental states and thought status using TagTime, I can make a preliminary conclusion that while old thoughts do occur in the open state, new thoughts never occur in the closed state. While the closed state makes me more efficient at doing straightforward tasks (e.g. by making me less distractable), it makes me less efficient at doing less straightforward tasks (e.g. by increasing my tendency to optimize locally rather than globally).

This is related to the concept of "againstness" taught by Valentine Smith at CFAR, which is a sense of resisting something about the situation at hand. Learning to notice this sense more quickly is a valuable thing I learned at CFAR and through my meditation practice. Redirecting attention to body sensations is supposed to be helpful for dissipating againstness, but I have found it difficult to get myself to do this in the moment, and not particularly reliable. Following the driving principle of "focusing on the road and not the curb", I find it easier to shift to a mental state with a simple salient label like "open" instead of a clunky label like "non-againsty". It also feels less judgmental to ask myself "what am I closed to right now, what experience am I not letting in?" than "what am I against right now?".

The againstness approach seems to be about relaxing the mind by relaxing the body first, while for some people relaxing the mind first comes more naturally - I actually find myself automatically breathing deeper when shifting into the open state. For both approaches, the goal is the same - to let go of mental and physical tension before proceeding with what you are doing. The rule of thumb, like in the game, is to first get into the open state and then approach the situation at hand.

(Cross-posted from my blog).

Here are 14 ways in which you reveal who you really are. If you’re brave enough, or if you dare, aim to share who you really are, little by little, everyday, with those you trust.

- A typical 'Who You Really Are' article on Lifehack

Take a minute to consider the following questions.

Who are you?
Who are you, really?
Who do you really think you are inside?

It took me a full year to find the answer to these.  The answer was that these questions, when posed as philosophical dilemmas, were bullshit.  This post is not about ‘understanding who you really are’. It's about understanding, 'who you really are'.

“Who are you” is a question that sounds grandiose.  It’s hard to come up with a philosophically solid answer, and this makes it seem interesting.  It is not interesting.  It just lacks context.

What would you say if you were asked “who are you?” by the police?  By a doctor? By a relative? By a potential boss? By a space alien?

You should say different things, because these people would be using the same words to mean different things. 

What they really want is information about you that is of decision relevance to them.   A police cares where you are from. The doctor cares how old you are. A relative cares about who you are related to. A boss cares what skills you have. A space alien cares about your number of eyes and hands.  “Who are you?” really means, “given your understanding of my position, what simple information about yourself do you think is useful to me?”

So when a young philosopher follows up your response with, “no really, who are you?”, you should respond with asking, “what in particular would you like to know?”

Some may respond to this saying that there does exist a true self. A real self.  This is what the phrase should really mean, and this is what I personally spent a year pondering.

But first, the very idea of there being a true self is specific to a set of religions and philosophies that you may not believe in.  If you’re a empirical atheist, you shouldn’t.  David Hume fought the notion of an inner self 250 years ago. [1] Derek Parfit fought it more concretely in the last 30 years. [2]

Second, even if you do ascribe to a belief system where there is some sort of true self, this would not give you a clear way to describe it.  Should you say that you are a Capricorn inside?  Or that a small fraction of your brain believes in Libertarianism?  Or that you possess soul #988334?

Of course not.  The question of “who are you?” is wrongly worded, and the one of “who are you, really?” should be placed on hold until the questioner can figure out what they are actually trying to ask.  

[1] David Hume's view on Personal Identity, Skinner (2013)

[2] Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1986)

Modern microconomist Alfred Marshall explains that technology has greatly extended the power and reach of the planet's most gifted performers....He referenced a classical of the British opera singer Elizabeth Billington. She was a well-acclaimed soprano with a strong voice, that, naturally did not have access to a microphone or amplifier in 1798, let alone to MTV, CDs, iTunes, and Pandora. She could only reach a small audience. This limited her ability to dominate the market in the way that artists to do today. Marshall wrote, “so long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs. Billington at the beginning of the last century, nearly as great [an increase] as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on those of the last.” 

- Wikipedia

Technology has made it easy for us to reach large audiences. And to do so at no marginal cost. If a musician writes a song and puts it on iTunes, it doesn't cost him any money for one more person to download it.

The fact that technology has made it easy for us to reach large audiences has implications on the consumer side of things as well. As a consumer, I can go on iTunes and choose the best music to buy. To understand my point, consider a different world. In this world iTunes doesn't exist. In this world the best music is 200 miles away, but mediocre music is only 5 miles away. Because traveling 200 miles is inconvenient, I choose the mediocre music.

In today's world of iTunes, this doesn't happen. Technology exists that allows us to reach large audiences and to do so at little/no marginal cost. And so, the consumer can (and will) choose the best the market has to offer.

Now for the implications on the supply side. We've already seen that consumers can and will choose the best the market has to offer. "The best the market has to offer" is usually provided by a small number of talented people. Think about it: the best artists, performers, writers, athletes etc. These talented people end up serving a large proportion of the market, and are paid accordingly. This... is The Superstar Effect.

Because of these joint consumption economies, there is a unique opportunity to create and capture value. If you are the best, you capture insane amounts of value. Thus, there is a huge incentive to be the best.

So, should you invest in an attempt to outdo The Superstar and capture this value? Well, investment decisions are all about expected value. Balancing risk with reward. In this case, the potential reward is huge. Astronomical. These joint consumption economies allow you to reach tremendous markets. However, the question is "how big is the risk?".

Outdoing The Superstar is a large and complex task, and I won't pretend to have all the answers. However, I've had this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind for years. My suspicion is that people drastically overestimate this risk, and that with a good plan and enough resources, you could have an excellent chance at "outdoing The Superstar".

Before moving on, let me go through the logic one more time:

• Today's joint consumption economies allow for firms to reach large amounts of people with little/no marginal costs.
• Thus, consumers have tons of options to choose from.
• Consumers often have similar enough tastes such that a large percentage of them end up choosing The Superstar.
• In serving all of these people, The Superstar has created and captured a ton of value.
• If another firm came along and outdid The Superstar, this new firm would replace The Superstar. It would now be the one to serve the large market, and would be compensated accordingly. There is a large reward for outdoing The Superstar.
• Investment is all about balancing risk and reward. Investing in an attempt to outdo The Superstar has a very large potential reward. The question is, "what's the risk?".

Outdoing The Superstar

People seem to view large ventures like starting startups as a roll of the dice. They say things like, "9 out of 10 startups fail". I don't see things that way. I don't see it as "a roll of the dice". I see it as a deterministic puzzle that can be solved.

I should qualify that previous statement. I'm not trying to make a philosophical point, just a practical one. People seem to be afraid of what I'll call, Large Puzzles. Because of their size and complexity, people seem to be put off by them, and they fall back on outside view arguments like "9 in 10 startups fail".

I'll admit that Large Puzzles are complex, but I maintain that with enough resources and with a good plan, a lot of them are very solvable. I sense that a lot of these large joint consumption winner-take-all industries are ripe for the taking, and that with enough resources and a good plan, they can be taken.

My confidence isn't that high though. I don't understand these Large Puzzles well enough to really say. What I'm referring to are "relatively strong suspicions", not "beliefs" (my thoughts are cloudy enough such that I'm having trouble being more precise than this, sorry).

Investing

This is a bit of an aside and a rant, but here we go. Investors currently seem to be heavily biased towards investing in businesses that can be built incrementally. They want to...

• See some sort of promise/traction before investing at all (usually).
• Invest 10s/100s of thousands of dollars in a seed round.
• See some more traction before they invest a couple/10s of millions in a series A.
• See some more traction before they invest 10s/100s in the next round.
• etc. etc.

Education

The Large Puzzle that I understand best is Education (which causes my System I to care disproportionately about it). I'll indulge myself and say it: the education system today is shit.

I think that Elon Musk said it well. He said (paraphrasing):

Consider The Dark Knight. It's awesome! It has all the best actors, directors, special effects etc. Now imagine if you took the same script and asked the local middle school to reproduce it. It'd suck. That's education.

I think that this division of resources is really the core of the problem. Things you could do once you pool resources:

• Put a lot of effort towards making each lesson great (in dath ilan, "One hour of instruction on a widely-used subject got the same kind of attention that an hour of prime-time TV gets on Earth"). Figure out how to word things properly. What examples to use. What analogies to give. Make lessons visual, animated, interactive. Gamify them and make them fun (when appropriate). Make them beautiful. Apply design thinking. Make them skimmable so students can refer back to them when they're studying. Include convenient references to things the student might have a question on.
• Break lessons into chunks and organize them according to their dependencies (this is an important and difficult task). I'm a big believer that knowledge is hierarchical. That concepts have dependencies (to know A, you have to know B). I think it makes a lot of sense to have students learn things that they have the proper foundation for. I think this makes more sense in the negative: you shouldn't have students learn things that they don't have the proper foundation for. (This is a bit of an aside, but I think that mastery should be fixed, and time should be variable. Currently it's the opposite.)
• Open up time for teachers to spend personal attention on their students. In today's system, they're usually too busy to do this. (Note: even with these great lessons, I still think that teachers will be useful. The lessons could be pretty good, so I'm not sure if they'd be necessary, but I suspect that they'd still be useful. I think using a human will still be the best way to diagnose and address the holes in a student's understanding.)
• Come up with great practice problems, exercises, projects etc. 
• Make tests way more accurate and effective. Make them smaller. And for gods sake, have them created by a separate financial entity than the entity that does the teaching!
• This applies to a lot of what I said above, but iterate, iterate, iterate!! See what works and what doesn't work and change. Given the amount of "experimental subjects (students)" and "technicians (teachers)", there's a tremendous opportunity to do this. Effective collaboration and coordination might be tough, but I sense that it's doable.

This is the third post in a series discussing my recent bout of productivity. Within, I discuss two techniques I use to avoid akrasia and one technique I use to be especially productive.

Deregulating Distraction

I like to pretend that I have higher-than-normal willpower, because my ability to Get Things Done seems to be somewhat above average. In fact, this is not the case. I'm not good at fighting akrasia. I merely have a knack for avoiding it.

When I was young, my parents were very good at convincing me to manage my money. They gave me an allowance, perhaps a dollar a week. When we would go to the store, I'd get excited about some trite toy and ask my parents whether I could buy it.

Their answers were similar. My mother would crouch down, put a hand on my shoulder, and say "Of course you can. But before you do, think carefully about how much you will enjoy this after you've bought it, and what other things you would be able to buy if instead you saved up."

My father was a bit more direct. He'd just shrug and say "It's your money", with the barest hint of derision.

I rarely spent my allowance.

I now use a similar technique when dealing with distractions.

(It's worth noting that it's always been very easy to put me into far mode, perhaps in part because I decided at a very young age that I wasn't going to die.)

As Kaj Sotala and a few others noted, assigning guilt to non-productive tasks is not especially healthy. Nor is it, in my experience, sustainable. In a few different cases, I experienced scenarios where I wanted to do something but couldn't will myself to do it. I suffered ego depletion and hit a vicious cycle of unproductivity and depression. I never fell completely into the self-hate death spiral, but I flirted around at the edges. It became clear that I needed a new strategy.

To break the cycle, I decided to stop fighting myself.