I think there's widespread assent on LW that the sequences were pretty awesome. Not only do they elucidate upon a lot of useful concepts, but they provide useful shorthand terms for those concepts which help in thinking and talking about them. When I see a word or phrase in a sentence which, rather than doing any semantic work, simply evokes a positive association to the reader, I have the useful handle of "applause light" for it. I don't have to think "oh, there's one of those...you know...things where a word isn't doing any semantic work but just evokes a positive association the reader". This is a common enough pattern that having the term "applause light" is tremendously convenient.

I would like this thread to be a location where people propose such patterns in comments, and respondents determine (a) whether this pattern actually exists and / or is useful; (b) whether there is already a term or sufficiently-related concept that adequately describes it; and (c) what a useful / pragmatic / catchy term might be for it, if none exists already.

I would like to propose some rules suggested formatting to make this go more smoothly.

(ETA: feel free to ignore this and post however you like, though)

When proposing a pattern, include a description of the general case as well as at least one motivating example. This is useful for establishing what you think the general pattern is, and why you think it matters. For instance:

General Case:

When someone uses a term without any thought to what that term means in context, but to elicit a positive association in their audience.

Motivating Example:

I was at a conference where someone said AI development should be "more democratic". I didn't understand what they meant in context, and upon quizzing them, it turned out that they didn't either. It seems to me that they just used the word "democratic" as decoration to make the audience attach positive feelings to what they were saying.

When I think about it, this seems like quite a common rhetorical device.

When responding to a pattern, please specify whether your response is:

(a) wrangling with the definition, usefulness or existence of the pattern

(b) making a claim that a term or sufficiently-related concept exists that adequately describes it

(c) suggesting a completely fresh, hitherto-uncoined name for it

(d) other

(ETA: or don't, of you don't want to)

Obviously, upvote suggestions that you think are worthy. If this post takes off, I may do a follow-up with the most upvoted suggestions.

Following the interest in this proposal a couple of weeks ago, I've set up a Google Group for the purpose of giving people a venue to discuss R, talk about their projects, seek advice, share resources, and provide a social motivator to hone their skills. Having done this, I'd now like to bullet-point a few reasons for learning applied statistical skills in general, and R in particular:

The General Case:

- Statistics seems to be a subject where it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you know a lot about it. This is visibly apparent on Less Wrong. Although there are many subject experts on here, there are also a lot of people making bold pronouncements about Bayesian inference who wouldn't recognise a beta distribution if it sat on them. Don't be that person! It's hard to fool yourself into thinking you know something when you have to practically apply it.

- Whenever you think "I wonder what kind of relationship exists between [x] and [y]", it's within your power to investigate this.

- Statistics has a rich conceptual vocabulary for reasoning about how observations generalise, and how useful those generalisations might be when making inferences about future observations. These are the sorts of skills we want to be practising as aspiring rationalists.

- Scientific literature becomes a lot more readable when you appreciate the methods behind them. You'll have a much greater understanding of scientific findings if you appreciate what the finding means in the context of statistical inference, rather than going off whatever paraphrased upshot is given in the abstract.

- Statistical techniques make use of fundamental mathematical methods in an applicable way. If you're learning linear algebra, for example, and you want an intuitive understanding of eigenvectors, you could do a lot worse than learning about principal component analysis.

R in particular:

- It's non-proprietary, (read "free"). Many competitive products are ridiculously expensive to license.

- Since it's common in academia, newer or more exotic statistical tools and procedures are more likely to have been implemented and made available in R than proprietary statistical packages or other software libraries.

- R skills are a strong signal of technical competence that will distinguish you from SPSS mouse-jockeys.

- There are many out-of-the-box packages for carrying out statistical procedures that you'd probably have to cobble together yourself if you were working in Python or Java.

- Having said that, popular languages such as Python and Java have libraries for interfacing with R.

- There's a discussion / support group for R with Less Wrong users in it. :-)

Discussion article for the meetup : London - The Schelling Point Strategy Game (plus socials)

Discussion article for the meetup : London - The Schelling Point Strategy Game (plus socials)

Discussion article for the meetup : London 2014 Protospective

Discussion article for the meetup : London 2014 Protospective

Last October there was a discussion post on Ada Lovelace Day, and it met with something of a lukewarm reception. Fair enough. There are legitimate criticisms of this particular blogosphere event, and people are welcome to subscribe to those criticisms, or not, as they see fit. Personally, I'm quite fond of Ada Lovelace Day, in no small part because I get a chance to write about one of my nerdy interests in a public place with a reasonable expectation that a lay audience will attempt to engage with it. This year, the occasion falls on October 15th, and as a result I'm currently drafting a short piece on Esther Duflo, a development economist responsible for pioneering randomised controlled trials of policy interventions in developing countries. She's rather prolific, has a shelf full of academic awards, and is a hot tip for a Nobel Memorial Prize over the next few years or so.

So I was thinking about this: I get to talk about the importance of randomised controlled trials in policy-making; I get to talk about evidence-based philanthropy; I get to wrap it up with a don't-put-mustard-on-the-cat closing message of how it's not enough to just care about an issue, you have to be informed on it as well, (and by the way, there's this thing called "effective altruism" you might want to look up); and I can expect a reasonable number of readers to actually engage with it, because it's ostensibly written about the work of an interesting woman on Ada Lovelace Day.

You can probably see where I'm going with this by now.

Whether or not you think it's valuable to publicise the work of women in STEM, it is an excellent opportunity to sneak assorted pro-rationality memes under the radar to an audience that wouldn't necessarily engage with them otherwise. Less Wrong has a lot of eloquent people with knowledge across a wide assortment of different domains. I'm curious as to what we could come up with if we made a concerted effort to do this.

For that matter (and Harry Potter fanfic aside), it's an interesting question as to what other popular internet phenomena can be co-opted for this purpose.

There's a category of game-theoretic scenario called Battle of the Sexes, which is commonly used to demonstrate coordination problems. Two cinema-goers, traditionally a husband and wife, have agreed to go to the cinema, but haven't decided on what to see beforehand. Of the two films that are showing, she would rather see King Kong Lives, while he would rather see Big Momma's House 2. Each would rather see their non-preferred film with their spouse than see their preferred film on their own. The payoff matrix is as follows:

The two have not conferred beforehand, beyond sharing knowledge of their preferences. They are turning up to the cinema and picking an auditorium in the hope that their spouse is in there.  Which should they pick?  This is a classic coordination problem. The symmetry of their preferences means there is no stand-out option for them to converge on. There is no Schelling Point.¹

Except I'm going to argue that there is.

Shoehorning an example of a Schelling Point into the above scenario, we might imagine that one of the above films being screened is being billed as "an ideal romantic treat to share with your spouse", (which one that would be, I'm not entirely sure), though in the absence of a "natural" Schelling Point, there's no reason we can't make one. All we need is to identify procedures that would reliably elevate one of these options to our attention.  Then it becomes a question of selecting which of these procedures is most likely to be selected by the other agent in the scenario.

I am now going to instigate a multidimensional instance of Battle of the Sexes with all the readers of this post.  Below are sixteen randomly-ordered films.  I am going to select one, and invite you to do the same.  The object of the exercise is for all of us to pick the same one.  I will identify my selection, and the logic behind it, in rot13 after the list.

Breakfast at Tiffany's
William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Children of the Corn
An American Werewolf in London
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harold and Maude
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Duck Soup
Highlander
Fantasia
Heathers
Forbidden Planet
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Grosse Pointe Blank
Mrs. Doubtfire

Urer vf na vapbafrdhragvny fragrapr gb guebj bss crbcyr jub pna vagrecerg guvf plcure ba fvtug ol abj. Zl fryrpgvba jnf na nzrevpna jrerjbys va Ybaqba. Gur cebprqher V fryrpgrq jnf gur svefg svyz nycunorgvpnyyl. Guvf frrzf yvxr gur zbfg "boivbhf" cebprqher sbe eryvnoyl fryrpgvat n fvatyr vgrz sebz gur frg. Cbffvoyl n zber "boivbhf" bar jbhyq fvzcyl or gb fryrpg gur svefg bar ba gur yvfg (Oernxsnfg ng Gvssnal'f va guvf pnfr), ohg V jnf bcrengvat ba gur nffhzcgvba gung gur yvfg jnf abg arprffnevyl eryvnoyl-beqrerq (juvpu V gevrq gb pbairl ol qrfpevovat gur yvfg nf "enaqbzyl-beqrerq", ohg pbhyqa'g ernyyl rkcyvpvgyl fgngr jvgubhg cbffvoyl tvivat n ovt uvag nf gb gur cebprqher V pubfr. Guvf jbhyq unir fcbvyrq guvatf n yvggyr.

I have no idea if that worked.  Whether or not it did, it seems to me that the general skill of identifying popular procedures for designating Schelling Points is possibly a worthwhile skill to develop. It also seems to me that once a handful of common strategies for identifying Schelling Points are known to a group, some effort has to be put into constructing scenarios in which that group can't coordinate. This forms the outline of an adversarial game, (provisionally named Schelling Point Strategy Training), whereby two teams take it in turns to construct and present a set of options which the other team has to coordinate on. I am idly toying with running a session of this at a future London Less Wrong meetup. 

¹ There is actually an unrelated meta-strategy here, whereby on all disputes one designated partner acquiesces to the wishes of the other.  This behaviour is also far from unheard of in romantic partnerships.  While this doesn't seem very egalitarian, I am wondering if it actually becomes a reasonable trade-off for partnerships which face coordination problems on a regular basis.

After considering how many of us have arrived here within recent memory, the London Less Wrong community is explicitly offering itself as a resource for those moving to the city. We all know how awkward and daunting it can be to get settled somewhere new, and we'd like to help newcomers hit the ground running. It seems that our most effective recruitment strategy at the moment is "wait for existing Less Wrong readers to move here", so it's a worthwhile offer to make.

If any LessWrongers are moving to the Greater London area, let us know. Either message me via the site or join our Google Group. Tell us where/when you're moving, what your circumstances are, and what sort of things you like to do. We will try to proactively invite you to events and activities we think you'll enjoy, as well as providing you with useful local knowledge if you want it.

We will also try and make some time available for you if there's anything you need another person's help with. If assembling your Ikea bookshelf is a two-person job, we'll see if we can scrape together a couple of people for a couple of hours to help you put it together.  If you need help setting up your wireless router, we'll see if someone with the relevant skills is available to give you a hand.  We can't promise any specific type of help, but we're always happy to be asked.

Big cities can often feel quite impersonal, so if you're planning on moving here, or even just thinking about it, let us know, and we'll see what we can do to make it a little more welcoming.

ETA: ModusPonies has set up a Google Group for everyone doing this.  It looks like it's officially a Thing.

I originally asked this on the London Less Wrong mailing list, but then realised the internet doesn't just have a ten mile radius.

There's been some interest in public speaking on LW lately, and it cropped up a couple of times at the London practical meetup as an area people would like to work on.  I volunteered to collate some exercises and resources on the subject.

Since then, I've noticed a Coursera course on public speaking which is starting in a little under two weeks.  I've signed up for it, and would like to encourage other LessWrongers to sign up for it alongside me.  My reasons for this are as follows:

- The course involves the option of recording your progress and sharing it with other participants.  As several of us have discovered on the Less Wrong Study Hall, seeing the faces of people you chat to on the internet is fun, sociable and motivational.

- We can read posts and articles on the subject all day long, but having an externally-imposed syllabus will provide the structure and motivation to actually act on it.

- There is an aspect of rhetoric and persuasion to the course, (cf. 'dark arts'), and having epistemically hygienic fellows will help keep participants on the straight-and-narrow.

- Turning a large number of aspiring rationalists into erudite and persuasive speakers can't be a bad thing.

So who else is in?

(Also, before anyone mentions it, yes, I am very, very aware of the existence of Toastmasters.  They seem to be the default suggestion whenever public speaking comes up.  For anyone who isn't aware of them, they are an international organisation of clubs practising communication and public speaking.  Google them if you're interested.  I'm not, for social- and time-commitment reasons.)

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - Exposure to Direct Sunlight - June 23rd

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - Exposure to Direct Sunlight - June 23rd

Discussion article for the meetup : London - Inaugural Practical Session - June 9th

Discussion article for the meetup : London - Inaugural Practical Session - June 9th