Meetup : Sunday Brunch Club - Sunday 20th October
Discussion article for the meetup : Sunday Brunch Club - Sunday 20th October
Dear Friends,
As we await the coming of summer, October in Melbourne is wet yet deceivingly warm. Thank heavens for food though! New friends and old are joining together for the much awaited Sunday Brunch Club. This time held our home, Isengard, in the Docklands with a lovely view of the city and harbour.
Come out for a good time on Sunday Oct 20 for a brunch (lunch?) we have cooked up just for you. Let this be one of the myriad of joyous occasions we choose to celebrate knowing and loving each other. Let us welcome summer, as we embark on our paths, wherever they may lead.
On to the details! Where: 2105 / 5 Caravel Lane, Docklands Getting Here: 12 minute walk from Southern Cross station, or catch a free tram straight to our front door. When: 11am-4pm You will be provided a seating time by Thursday based on your survey responses. Please be punctual so we can make sure it all works to plan! Suggested Contribution: $11-$15 per person to cover food costs, all excess proceeds to support GiveWell top rated charities. Guests: Please limit yourself to inviting one additional guest.
We need to receive all RSVPs via this form by 7pm on Thurs 16th October.
Wish you well and look forward to seeing you soon!
Your friends and hosts,
Adrienne, Allison, Brayden, Helen, and Thomas
Tentative À La Carte Menu Below STARTER
Homemade Pumpkin Bread Served with nutmeg and rosemary butter
MAINS
Patatas Bravas Latkes Apple creme drizzled sweet and savoury potato pancakes served with Gruyère cheese and rocket
Omelette du Fromage Fluffy omelettes with capsicum, ham, mushrooms, tomato, parsley, and, of course, cheese.
DESSERT Matcha Green Tea Crepes Roulade A Japanese-French fusion dusted with sugar and served with banana slices
Orange-Blossom Mead du la Glace Honey-fermented wine liqueur served with vanilla ice cream
DRINKS Sangria Blanco Spanish wine punch with chopped fruit
Discussion article for the meetup : Sunday Brunch Club - Sunday 20th October
We Don't Drink Vodka (LW Moscow report)
And we don't have bears playing balalaikas. Well, I would like to tell you about Moscow rationality community after all, not about some B movie featuring crazy Russians.
Moscow community have grown from 5 people on my first meetup to 17 on the last one. And I believe we have possibility to grow even more. Moscow is a big city and it must have many smart people who can start to study rationality.
Our story began in May 2012, when I gathered the people for the first time. Spring meetup announcements hadn't attracted many new members, so we gathered, discussed our site with Russian translations of LessWrong Sequences and made some plans. Our first venue was one of the Subway restaurants in Moscow.
The next milestone in our development was September meetup, when I started to use on-line form to collect information from potential members of our group. Or maybe for some other reason we had got new faces, and even recurring ones. I also told everyone than we should practice rationality skills doing some exercises. Of course we had a lot of theories and ideas to duscuss, but we had to be closer to the real world. That's why we started to practice our rationality skills. We have approximately 8-10 people on each meetup during this fall.
Soon enough this practice yielded good results, new members became heroes and started to improve our ways of training and create new exercises. In January, 2013 one member of our group proposed big and comfortable office room, and we moved there. Our meetups suddenly became more organized and more new members appeared — this year we have 13 people on average.
We have also started to design game that can teach group members some rationality skills. You can find some examples of interesting and fun games in the same guidelines I mentioned, but we want to develop games specially for the skills improvement. Of course even educational games have to produce fun, not only teach you something. We play Liar's dice for relaxation after exercises now.
And you can find some photos from our meetup here.
Appendix: Exercises
Organizer presents two block of questions, each block has 10 questions for the sake of easy results calculation.
In the first one I read questions which require 90% confidence intervals. For example, what is the wingspan of the last model Boeing 737? It is similar to the one from “How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup” guidelines. After this block everyone can calculate their real confidence, for example, if the correct answers are inside your interval in 7 out of 10, your confidence interval is closer to 70% than to 90%. So calibration level still can be improved in this case.
The second block is similar to The Credence Game, it consists of true or false questions. Everyone needs to write down credence for each answer. The average expected credence is calculated, then the real average is calculated. For example, if someone has the following credence: 0.5, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 0.7, 0.6, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9, 0.8 the average expected credence will be 0.73. And if there are 6 correct, 3 incorrect and one answer with credence 50%, then it will be 6.5 real average: 0.5 for one answer with 0.5 credence and 6 for the correct answers. The two numbers are close and the person with that answers seems to be well calibrated.
And for the some reason everyone showed better result in the second block. I can conclude that a person has more difficulties with hitting into specified confidence interval than assigning confidence for own answers.
During the calibration session I present the following strategies to improve calibration, once a time:
1. Repetition and feedback. Take several tests in succession, assessing how well you did after each one and attempting to improve your performance in the next one.
2. Equivalent bets. For each estimate, set up the equivalent bet to test if that range or probability really reflects your uncertainty. It means that you should choose between two games. In game A you will receive a money prize if your statement is true, in other words if the correct number is between your upper and lower bounds. In game B you generate random number between 0 and 1, and you win if the random is between zero and your credence (0.9, for example). I can say that you win with probability equals to your credence. If you prefer game A, you may be underconfident; if you prefer game B, you may be overconfident.
3. Consider two pros and two cons. Think of at least two reasons why you should be confident in your assessment and two reasons you could be wrong.
4. Avoid anchoring. Think of range questions as two separate binary questions of the form “Are you 95% certain that the true value is over/under (pick one) the lower/upper (pick one) bound?”
5. Reverse the anchoring effect. Start with extremely wide ranges and narrow them with the “absurdity test” as you eliminate highly unlikely values.
I recommend to make at least one calibration session before any Fermi calculation sessions.
2. Tabooing, version 2
There is standard rationalists' taboo exercise, you just remove some word from your speech and try to talk about something. But I would like to propose another version.
You need to create some texts, or use existing texts from a book or a news article. You also need to find some words in each text that should obscure the meaning therefore tabooing will make it clearer. It may be some texts about politics or other controversial topic. Each text should be short, one or two paragraphs. You need to highlight words to taboo somehow, with italic font, separate colour or highlighter.
At the meetup ask the people to read the text tabooing the words you have selected.
If you are going to try this exercise, please let me know about the results, because I am still trying to improve it.
3. Reframing
First, define or find a statement you want to work with. The statement can be associated with some choice you want to make or it can be your interlocutor's phrase you want to make clear.
Second, do the reframing itself:
Check for you desire to maintain status quo. Do you see changes as bad things? Try to reverse changes direction.
Imagine, that you make a decision for every similar situation in the future.
Change unit of measurement, for example, convert time into money or vice versa.
Change time frame, into the past or the future.
Change the arena. Transfer your conditions into another country, even into imaginary place described in some book.
Imagine, that another person is faced with you issue. What will he or she decide or do?
Imagine yourself as an outside observer. What will you think about your own thoughts and deeds?
4. Value of information
Information can have an influence upon the utility and yield of your choices. If it can help you to make the choice with higher utility, then the difference is the value of the information for you. Take several daily situations when you need to make simple choices and estimate the impact of new information on these choices. For example, you need to buy some things and you may make random choice or look for detailed descriptions and specifications of this things. How much money, time and other resources you can save or earn in the future if you make informative choice instead of choice without the information?
MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare
In a world where 85% of doctors can't solve simple Bayesian word problems...
In a world where only 20.9% of reported results that a pharmaceutical company tries to investigate for development purposes, fully replicate...
In a world where "p-values" are anything the author wants them to be...
...and where there are all sorts of amazing technologies and techniques which nobody at your hospital has ever heard of...
...there's also MetaMed. Instead of just having “evidence-based medicine” in journals that doctors don't actually read, MetaMed will provide you with actual evidence-based healthcare. Their Chairman and CTO is Jaan Tallinn (cofounder of Skype, major funder of xrisk-related endeavors), one of their major VCs is Peter Thiel (major funder of MIRI), their management includes some names LWers will find familiar, and their researchers know math and stats and in many cases have also read LessWrong. If you have a sufficiently serious problem and can afford their service, MetaMed will (a) put someone on reading the relevant research literature who understands real statistics and can tell whether the paper is trustworthy; and (b) refer you to a cooperative doctor in their network who can carry out the therapies they find.
MetaMed was partially inspired by the case of a woman who had her fingertip chopped off, was told by the hospital that she was screwed, and then read through an awful lot of literature on her own until she found someone working on an advanced regenerative therapy that let her actually grow the fingertip back. The idea behind MetaMed isn't just that they will scour the literature to find how the best experimentally supported treatment differs from the average wisdom - people who regularly read LW will be aware that this is often a pretty large divergence - but that they will also look for this sort of very recent technology that most hospitals won't have heard about.
This is a new service and it has to interact with the existing medical system, so they are currently expensive, starting at $5,000 for a research report. (Keeping in mind that a basic report involves a lot of work by people who must be good at math.) If you have a sick friend who can afford it - especially if the regular system is failing them, and they want (or you want) their next step to be more science instead of "alternative medicine" or whatever - please do refer them to MetaMed immediately. We can’t all have nice things like this someday unless somebody pays for it while it’s still new and expensive. And the regular healthcare system really is bad enough at science (especially in the US, but science is difficult everywhere) that there's no point in condemning anyone to it when they can afford better.
I also got my hands on a copy of MetaMed's standard list of citations that they use to support points to reporters. What follows isn't nearly everything on MetaMed's list, just the items I found most interesting.
LW Women: LW Online
Standard Intro
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
(Note from me: I've been procrastinating on posting these. Sorry to everyone who submitted! But I've got them organized decently enough to post now, and will be putting one up once a week or so, until we're through)
Submitter A
I think this is all true. Note that that commenter hasn't commented since 2009.
Objectifying remarks about attractive women and sneery remarks about unattractive women are not nice. I worry that guys at less wrong would ignore unattractive women if they came to meetings. Unattractive women can still be smart! I also worry that they would only pay attention to attractive women insofar as they think they might get to sleep with them.
I find the "women are aliens" attitude that various commenters (and even Eliezer in the post I link to) seem to have difficult to deal with: http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/. I wish these posters would make it clear that they are talking about women on average: presumably they don't think that all men and all women find each other to be like aliens.
I find I tend to shy away from saying feminist things in response to PUA/gender posts, since there seems to be a fair amount of knee-jerk down-voting of anything feminist sounding. There also seems to be quite a lot of knee-jerk up-voting of poorly researched armchair ev-psych.
Linked to 3, if people want to make claims about men and women having different innate abilities, that is fine. However, I wish they'd make it clear when they are talking on average, i.e. "women on average are worse at engineering than men" not "women are worse at engineering than men."
A bit of me wishes that the "no mindkiller topics" rule was enforced more strictly, and that we didn't discuss sex/gender issues. I do think it is off-putting to smart women - you don't convert people to rationality by talking about such emotive topics. Even if some of the claims like "women on average are less good at engineering than men" are true* they are likely to put smart women off visiting less wrong. Not sure to what extent we should sacrifice looking for truth to attract people. I suspect many LWers would say not at all. I don't know. We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?
I agree with Luke here
*and I do think some of them are true
***
Submitter B
My experience of LessWrong is that it feels unfriendly. It took me a long time to develop skin thick enough to tolerate an environment where warmth is scarce. I feel pretty certain that I've got a thicker skin than most women and that the environment is putting off other women. You wouldn't find those women writing an LW narrative, though - the type of women I'm speaking of would not have joined. It's good to open a line of communication between the genders, but by asking the women who stayed, you're not finding out much about the women who did not stay. This is why I mention my thinner-skinned self.
What do I mean by unfriendly? It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there's next to no emotional relating to one another. People show appreciation silently in votes, and give verbal criticism, and there are occasionally compliments, but there seems to be a dearth of friendliness. I don't need instant bonding, but the coldness is thick. If I try to tell by the way people are acting, I'm half convinced that most of the people here think I'm a moron. I'm thick skinned enough that it doesn't get to me, but I don't envision this type of environment working to draw women.
Ive had similar unfriendly experiences in other male-dominated environments like in a class of mostly boys. They were aggressive - in a selfish way, as opposed to a constructive one. For instance, if the teacher was demonstrating something, they'd crowd around aggressively trying to get the best spots. I was much shorter, which makes it harder to see. This forced me to compete for a front spot if I wanted to see at all, and I never did because I just wasn't like that. So that felt pretty insensitive. Another male dominated environment was similarly heavy on the criticism and light on niceness.
These seem to be a theme in male-dominated environments which have always had somewhat of a deterring effect on me: selfish competitive behavior (Constructive competition for an award or to produce something of quality is one thing, but to compete for a privilege in a way that hurts someone at a disadvantage is off-putting), focus on negative reinforcement (acting like tough guys by not giving out compliments and being abrasive), lack of friendliness (There can be no warm fuzzies when you're acting manly) and hostility toward sensitivity.
One exception to this is Vladimir_Nesov. He has behaved in a supportive and yet honest way that feels friendly to me. ShannonFriedman does "honest yet friendly" well, too.
A lot of guys I've dated in the last year have made the same creepy mistake. I think this is likely to be relevant because they're so much like LW members (most of them are programmers, their personalities are very similar and one of them had even signed up for cryo), and because I've seen some hints of this behavior on the discussions. I don't talk enough about myself here to actually bring out this "creepy" behavior (anticipation of that behavior is inhibiting me as well as not wanting to get too personal in public) so this could give you an insight that might not be possible if I spoke strictly of my experiences on LessWrong.
The mistake goes like this:
I'd say something about myself.
They'd disagree with me.
For a specific example, I was asked whether I was more of a thinker or feeler and I said I was pretty balanced. He retorted that I was more of a thinker. When I persist in these situations, they actually argue with me. I am the one who has spent millions of minutes in this mind, able to directly experience what's going on inside of it. They have spent, at this point, maybe a few hundred minutes observing it from the outside, yet they act like they're experts. If they said they didn't understand, or even that they didn't believe me, that would be workable. But they try to convince me I'm wrong about myself. I find this deeply disturbing and it's completely dysfunctional. There's no way a person will ever get to know me if he won't even listen to what I say about myself. Having to argue with a person over who I am is intolerable.
I've thought about this a lot trying to figure out what they're trying to do. It's never going to be a sexy "negative hit" to argue with me about who I am. Disagreeing with me about myself can't possibly count as showing off their incredible ability to see into me because they're doing the exact opposite: being willfully ignorant. Maybe they have such a need to box me into a category that they insist on doing so immediately. Personalities don't fit nicely in categories, so this is an auto-fail. It comes across as if they're either deluded into believing they're some kind of mind-reading genius or that they don't realize I'm a whole, grown-up human being complete with the ability to know myself. This has happened on the LessWrong forum also.
I have had a similar problem that only started to make sense after considering that they may have been making a conscious effort to develop skepticism: I had a lot of experiences where it felt like everything I said about myself was being scrutinized. It makes perfect sense to be skeptical about other conversation topics, but when they're skeptical about things I say about myself, this is ingratiating. This is because it's not likely that either of us will be able to prove or disprove anything about my personality or subjective experiences in a short period of time, and possibly never. Yet saying nothing about ourselves is not an option if we want to get to know each other better. I have to start somewhere.
It's almost like they're in such a rush to have definitive answers about me that they're sabotaging their potential to develop a real understanding of me. Getting to know people is complicated - that's why it takes a long time. Tearing apart her self-expressions can't save you from the ambiguity.
I need "getting to know me" / "sharing myself" type conversations to be an exploration. I do understand the need to construct one's own perspective on each new person. I don't need all my statements to be accepted at face value. I just want to feel that the person is happily exploring. They should seem like they're having fun checking out something interesting, not interrogating me and expecting to find a pile of errors. Maybe this happens because of having a habit of skeptical thinking - they make people feel scrutinized without knowing it.
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Cambridge UK, London
This summary was posted to LW main on February 8th. The following week's summary is here.
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
- Berlin Meetup: 08 February 2013 07:30PM
- London Meetup, 10th Feb: 11 February 2013 02:00PM
- Brussels meetup: 16 February 2013 01:00PM
- Moscow: Rationality in our daily life: 17 February 2013 04:00PM
- Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th: 20 February 2013 07:00PM
- First meetup in Frankfurt (Main) : 22 February 2013 06:30PM
- Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
- Austin, TX: 09 February 2019 01:30PM
- Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-01]: 10 February 2013 11:00AM
- Love and Sex in Salt Lake City: 16 February 2014 01:00PM
Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.
A brief history of ethically concerned scientists
For the first time in history, it has become possible for a limited group of a few thousand people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions.
-- Norbert Wiener (1956), Moral Reflections of a Mathematician.
Today, the general attitude towards scientific discovery is that scientists are not themselves responsible for how their work is used. For someone who is interested in science for its own sake, or even for someone who mostly considers research to be a way to pay the bills, this is a tempting attitude. It would be easy to only focus on one’s work, and leave it up to others to decide what to do with it.
But this is not necessarily the attitude that we should encourage. As technology becomes more powerful, it also becomes more dangerous. Throughout history, many scientists and inventors have recognized this, and taken different kinds of action to help ensure that their work will have beneficial consequences. Here are some of them.
This post is not arguing that any specific approach for taking responsibility for one's actions is the correct one. Some researchers hid their work, others refocused on other fields, still others began active campaigns to change the way their work was being used. It is up to the reader to decide which of these approaches were successful and worth emulating, and which ones were not.
Pre-industrial inventors
… I do not publish nor divulge [methods of building submarines] by reason of the evil nature of men who would use them as means of destruction at the bottom of the sea, by sending ships to the bottom, and sinking them together with the men in them.
People did not always think that the benefits of freely disseminating knowledge outweighed the harms. O.T. Benfey, writing in a 1956 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, cites F.S. Taylor’s book on early alchemists:
Alchemy was certainly intended to be useful .... But [the alchemist] never proposes the public use of such things, the disclosing of his knowledge for the benefit of man. …. Any disclosure of the alchemical secret was felt to be profoundly wrong, and likely to bring immediate punishment from on high. The reason generally given for such secrecy was the probable abuse by wicked men of the power that the alchemical would give …. The alchemists, indeed, felt a strong moral responsibility that is not always acknowledged by the scientists of today.
With the Renaissance, science began to be viewed as public property, but many scientists remained cautious about the way in which their work might be used. Although he held the office of military engineer, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) drew a distinction between offensive and defensive warfare, and emphasized the role of good defenses in protecting people’s liberty from tyrants. He described war as ‘bestialissima pazzia’ (most bestial madness), and wrote that ‘it is an infinitely atrocious thing to take away the life of a man’. One of the clearest examples of his reluctance to unleash dangerous inventions was his refusal to publish the details of his plans for submarines.
Later Renaissance thinkers continued to be concerned with the potential uses of their discoveries. John Napier (1550-1617), the inventor of logarithms, also experimented with a new form of artillery. Upon seeing its destructive power, he decided to keep its details a secret, and even spoke from his deathbed against the creation of new kinds of weapons.
But only concealing one discovery pales in comparison to the likes of Robert Boyle (1627-1691). A pioneer of physics and chemistry and possibly the most famous for describing and publishing Boyle’s law, he sought to make humanity better off, taking an interest in things such as improved agricultural methods as well as better medicine. In his studies, he also discovered knowledge and made inventions related to a variety of potentially harmful subjects, including poisons, invisible ink, counterfeit money, explosives, and kinetic weaponry. These ‘my love of Mankind has oblig’d me to conceal, even from my nearest Friends’.
You can't signal to rubes
The word 'signalling' is often used in Less Wrong, and often used wrongly. This post is intended to call out our community on its wrongful use, as well as serve as an introduction to the correct concept of signalling as contrast.
My experience as an Australian work-holiday maker
I read Optimal Employment and decided to try a work-holiday in Australia. Several people have asked me how it's going, so here's my first take. I haven’t finished my work-holiday yet, but I want to provide this information now so that potential travelers can make a decision before the hiring season peaks next summer.
Alice Springs
I came to Alice Springs in late April, and secured a job at a fast-food immediately. They offered me $26/hr after super and penalties. I didn’t get many hours, but it was enough to cover expenses. I took the job so that I wouldn’t lose money while I was looking for a better job.
Finding better job proved tough. I quickly applied to all of the sit-down restaurants and bars in town, and they all said they preferred locals. I signed up for a couple of employment agencies, but they were concerned that I had didn’t have any experience serving alcohol. I borrowed a phonebook and called random business on the Plenty Highway and that didn’t work.
This continued for five weeks. I found this period stressful because I get anxious asking businesses if they’re hiring, and then I feel humiliated when they say they’re not. There were fun times: I toured Uluru and met cool people in the hostel. But in the back of my mind I was always stressed about finding a better job. After five weeks I was about to head south in search of fruit picking work. But then I saw a flyer.
Remote Australia
A gas-station/convenience store was looking for staff. It was a full-time job, with meals and accommodation costing $40/week. This was exactly what I was looking for! I called immediately and got the job because I was American and nobody else had called before me.
This job was pretty much everything Louie described in Optimal Employment. I had practically no expenses, no responsibilities, and free entertainment after hours. At any given time there were three backpackers (including myself) working there, and one would be switched out about every month. We played a lot of video games and ate a lot of barbeques. We also attended a concert and a rodeo. I saved a lot of money and had a lot of fun, but I was anxious to leave after six months.
Adelaide
Australia prohibits backpackers from working the same job for more than six months, so I had to leave. Around this time I discovered that I had distant relatives living in Victoria, and they wanted me over for Christmas. This left me only three weeks to work. I decided to look for fruit picking work, since I heard they’re more willing to employ backpackers for short periods.
I flew to Adelaide, but I cannot find any fruit picking work. And I hear there's very little in Victoria. I could go to West Australia, but even if I found a job over there, it hardly seems worth it to fly there, work for two weeks, and fly back to Victoria on Christmas Eve. So now I’ve got to fill up two weeks in South Australia or Victoria.
What’s next?
I had originally planned to work 88 days of fruit picking work, so that I could get a second working holiday visa next year. (Most Americans are NOT eligible to do this. I can because I’m half British.) But I’ve heard a lot of bad things about fruit picking, that it’s miserable work and that you make little money (or even negative money). And I’m 70% sure I don’t want to come back to Australia next year anyway. (I want to teach English in Shanghai). So the new plan is to spend Christmas in Victoria while applying to TEFL jobs, and then tour the east coast for a month. Then I’ll fly back to the states and hopefully start teaching English in March. In the meantime I will have to entertain myself Adelaide/Melbourne.
Is Optimal Employment accurate?
Pretty much. You’ll probably earn more money on the job than Louie estimates, because of penalty rates and an increasing minimum wage. And there’s a chance to hit jackpot: I met a LW lurker in Alice Springs who said she was banking $1000/wk after expenses working at Lasseters. Mining and fishing jobs are also lucrative if you can get them.
But there’s also a risk of not finding a job. It took me five weeks to find my remote area job, and I’ve met some backpackers who ran out of money and while looking for work. Immigration requires you to save up $5000 before you start your work-holiday; skirt that law at your peril.
Overall I’m pleased with my visit to Australia. Even if I though I’ll be bleeding money the next couple of months, I’ll still come back with a nice profit and wicked memories. If you’re young with a sense of adventure, you should definitely consider it. A lot of people want to visit Australia “someday”, but it gets more difficult when you’re older and have more commitments.
I’m planning to write another post with tips for working in Australia. Requests welcome!
Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
Followup to: Logical Pinpointing, Causal Reference
Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.
- Death, in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
Meditation: So far we've talked about two kinds of meaningfulness and two ways that sentences can refer; a way of comparing to physical things found by following pinned-down causal links, and logical validity by comparison to models pinned-down by axioms. Is there anything else that can be meaningfully talked about? Where would you find justice, or mercy?
LessWrong podcasts
Today we're announcing a partnership with Castify to bring you Less Wrong content in audio form. Castify gets blog content read by professional readers and delivers it to their subscribers as a podcast so that you can listen to Less Wrong on the go. The founders of Castify are big fans of Less Wrong so they're rolling out their beta with some of our content.

To see how many people will use this, we're having the entire Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions core sequence read and recorded. We thought listening to it would be a great way for new readers to get caught up and for others to check out the quality of Castify's work. We will be adding more Less Wrong content based on community feedback, so let us know which content you'd like to see more of in the comments.
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