In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a small (~50m) presentation about LW community on "social sciences sunday" in Saint Petersburg.

Target audience - students, teachers and young recearcher mostly from social sciences and humanities.

I'm planning to at least mention in passing:

1) rationality: epistemological and practical division

2) virtues of rationality

3) big part of learning is by osmosis

4) about sequences => some ideas I found engaging (but those that are at the same time would be easier to explain in 10 minutes)- definetely about inferential distances and looking wise

maybe mention Milgrams experiments or anecdote about Pain and Gain motivation

5) study hall (I tried it just for a bit), meetups, related projects - CFAR (anything else?), International Insights, slatestarcodex?

There is also this: 

I'm not sure LW is a good entry point for people who are turned away by a few technical terms. Responding to unfamiliar scientific concepts with an immediate surge of curiosity is probably a trait I share with the majority of LW'ers.

I am going to spend some more time prepairing and would probably have some good ideas, but I would be really great to have opinions from others. Am I missing something? Or if anyone had relevant experience?

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup. Habits and spring.

I have been using (alongside other learning tools) Duolingo for more than a year now and with considerable success in learning Spanish language.

I used immersion for learning purposes, but just recently it dawned on me that I could use it to translate HPMOR into different languages while simultaneously promoting it in wide audience.

My first attempt was uploading first untranslated chapter (on hpmor.com listed Spanish translation up to 24th chapter). 

Half of it got translated before the upload drowned in new more recent uploads from other people.

First idea was to get 'commercial' license to keep uploaded chapter on top, but right now i'll try to break chapters into smaller chunks, since uploads up to 500 - 700 sentences get fully translated.

Because Doulingo for free lets you upload only web-pages I will gather english chunks in a vk.com group (google docs can't be uploaded to Duolingo).

I am posting this to make public commitment to continue to post chunks of untranslated chapters of HPMOR to Duolingo and get roughly translated texts out of it.

Even though Doulingo translations usually are quite good I suspect that there got to be some kind of checking.

What could be the solution? Could we organize e-mail broadcast for native Spanish speakers in LW to read and check translated chunks? They could be stored on google docs and be available for correction.

And also if\when I succeed in translation of a full chapter of HPMOR into spanish, how could it be added to hpmor site? 

[edit to add links]

vk group with english and spanish chunks:https://vk.com/hpmor_en_to_sp_by_duolingo

latest duolingo chunk (ch.25 part 2): https://www.duolingo.com/translation/b665ba41aa75970134b14adb81de9fcf

first duolingo chunk (ch.25 full): https://www.duolingo.com/translation/7921153db4ef97a13e5c308151d0f8ae

P.S this project might not work, if Duo users won't find content interesting enough.

Hi!
For a while now I've been having troubles with my life.

Today it got worse, likely I will feel better in a week, but problems related to a person I love and searching for the purpose of my life will not be solved, just ignored as I did for a couple of years now.

First thing to do would be to talk it out with friends or therapist (and I am now willing to spend money on it).

But the biggest problem is that they will probably not understand it, I tried to discuss it with a friend and got sympathetic and emotionally helpful advices that nonetheless don't contribute to solution at all.

I know that I will never let me kill myself (at least for anything less that amount of money that I can make in a lifetime), so I am lingering on with my life. Still I need help.

Conversations like this should not be held in comments, and I don't really know what kind of help am I expecting to get.

Sometime ago I saw an ad of therapist from lw that can council via Skype - please give me a link if you know anyone like that.

[edited: 1.12.14; 6:42] I thank everyone who send me link to Shannon at http://anxietygoaway.com/; i signed up for a free consultation, hope that something goog will come out of it.

-----

[Edited on 26-11-2014]

In discussion opened by XiXiDu on what to call Pascal Mugging one of the top comments seem to successfully clarify to me that this particular situation should not be regarded as Pascal's Mugging. (Considering lack of entanglement between improbability and size of impact). 

Though question of what to do (technically, not common-sensically) with 'high impact low probability' claims is still not quite clear to me.

----- 

As I became a little less anonymous on a social network (by posting in rationality-related public page) I received a message from a person, who introduced himself as a 'self-taught AI researcher'.

From his words - he don't know english and isn't acquainted with any works from sequences (or other not-translated into russian sources - i.e textbooks), but that he has 'a firm understanding' of what he has to do in order to build a general AI from 'genetic algorithms'. 

Mostly he wrote that complexity of values is a bullshit article and that he 'knows the answer' to that question, and also 'all questions' of contemporary AI field. 

Chances of his words being true is infinitesimal.

I probably had a vague feeling that I am being 'pascal mugged' (threat of creating uFAI) in the start (but flinched from it), and definitely had this idea somewhere along the line, but didn't quite thought about it and didn't consciously choose any particular mode of communication. Just tried to understand his position with guiding questions and explain why uFAI is not a good thing.

As I write this I am aware that it is probably not the best quality material, but hopefully it will be good enough for 'discussion'. I probably seek advice on how to handle this stuff emotionally and practically (ignore / engage).

And maybe some encouragement\critique because I feel really bad for engaging in conversations with him since it brought about only insults from him (he is most likely a troll) and more close mindedness (in a rare chance that he is sincere). Also because if I think about it my motivations to talk to him were mostly comprised from thrill of engaging in a conversation with a hateful person (hello nineteen neighty-four) and then worries about chance that he is sincerely crazy.

[edit: added on 20.11.2014] Overnight he wrote that he is not 'interested' in creating friendly AI. As he understands it - as 'not harming people', because he wants to rule the world, and because ai would be 'more important' than people, since it so smart.

In really FAI would be one that can understand his commands and values as he understands them, and probably one that understands notion of life at all.

He is ignoring notion of evidence, since he posted screenshot of 'ai interface' with nothing but 10 lines of php code, that are barely functional as I understand them to support his claims.

Again chances that he really doing what he's claiming - diminishing with every his word, and chances that he is trolling or mentally ill - grow. But now he requests material help with creating full blown uFAI for a chance to get safety when it arrives.

I feel like I should ignore him now and block him on a social network, and that I should have done it before it spiraled out of control. Such small probabilities should not be allowed to reside in my mind - looks like I have unwillingly favored the hypothesis since despite it all - I am a little unhinged by his writing. Really, I feel that I should ignore the urge to mess with him and just block all communications whatsoever.

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg, Russia meetup: "Low hanging fruit"

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg, Russia meetup: "Low hanging fruit"

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup - "with probable lectures"

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup - "with probable lectures"

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup - "the lonely one"

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg meetup - "the lonely one"

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg sunday meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg sunday meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg sunday meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg sunday meetup