All of luminosity's Comments + Replies

Note that the address has been updated due to an unfortunate double booking.

I'd definitely be interested to read it!

Venues are definitely a problem -- we're lucky enough to have a relatively central humanist group who let us hire out their meeting space once a month, but occasionally it has been difficult to scramble to find an alternative.

I wonder if there'd be some value in having a list of suggested ways to find a venue for people organising meetup groups.

Did you get people that did crossover from these meetups to the others? It seems like a more lightweight / fun topic like this might be good for letting people get involved more easily?

How did you go about finding people to come to your meetups? Pre-existing friends? LW site postings? Something else?

When you say most of the original people moved away, do you mean the group stopped meeting, or its meetings acquired new members and a different focus?

Do you track where new people come from? I'm wondering about what channels it makes sense to focus on maintaining a presence in. (Hadn't thought of doing it on r/ssc)

Social meetups

Shortly after we started back up, we ran intermittent social meetups, such as a night out at laser tag, or a walk over the Sydney harbour bridge, followed by a picnic. These were pretty enjoyable, but organisation fell through and these lapsed. We're currently thinking about how we want to start these back up.

Dinner meetups

We have a monthly meetup at an RSL in Sydney -- we've found this is a good venue, as people who want to can get food and drinks, but not everyone needs to. At a cafe there is more pressure to have to make purchases over time if you're taking up their floor space.

This was the first meetup we ran when the Less Wrong Sydney group resumed meeting -- at first we ran them with a focus on group discussions, and talking about a particular topic, but we found that often a topic was more of a reason for people to stay away, than for people to come. Wit... (read more)

Rationality Dojos

We started these off using material taken from CFAR workshops -- gradually over time related topics such as Kegan's Immunity to Change have been introduced.

We started off running these as one two hour session, all given by the same person, but after a year we switched to a new format, where we break off into two - three segments run by different people. This keeps people's attention better, reduces the amount of work individual presenters do, and allows us to experiment with new material without having to worry that if it doesn't work out ... (read more)

Less Wrong Sydney

We've run three different types of meetups over the last several years, each of which will get a sub-comment below.

The date was originally incorrectly set to 1 May instead of 5 June. This is now fixed.

Disregard the time, the meetup starts at 4, and the post won't correct.

For those who wish to come along we will also have our usual group dinner after the dojo ends, around 6pm.

Fair call on my intellectual laziness in not performing the brainstorming myself. Point taken. However, if you are noticing a pattern of many people doing this over time, it seems like this is something article authors could take into account to get more impact out of their articles. Unless the point is to make the person reading do the brainstorming to build that habit, then the time of many readers can be saved by the person who wrote the article, and presumably has already passed this point and thus put in the time sharing tips or a call to action on ho... (read more)

One extra note I'd add. We've had a few events where another group, or a fraction thereof, and our group combined for the event. I'd recommend strongly against these unless you think there is significant demographic overlap, as I felt it strongly diluted the event, both in terms of group feel and also in terms of group focus.

I love the list of predictions, but I also feel fairly confident in predicting that this post won't prompt me to actually make more (or more useful) predictions. Do you have any tips on building the habit of making predictions?

Location has been updated.

Note: 4pm not 5pm, time widget is misbehaving.

The reason I really love Spotify style services is that they massively reduce the friction of trying new things out. I've found a lot more music I enjoy of various different types over the last two years of using rdio / spotify than in any time period previous to that, because the cost of trying something new is as simple as typing in a search query.

We ran a summer solstice event in Sydney also. 8 people attended for a potluck picnic in Centennial park, general social interaction, then we watched the sun go down while reflecting on the year that had been. This was followed by an attempt to get candles working -- even with cups to shield them, they kept being extinguished. Fortunately, this was about the worst thing to go wrong.

After the sundown, different people ran various short sessions. We had one on the hedonic treadmill, one on what's known about planning new year's resolutions, a session where w... (read more)

Thank you, that fixed the problem! Maybe the link should be larger or placed in a different location. My guess is I didn't parse it because of its proximity to the map where you usually get map-related links.

Shorty before bed:

• 1mg melatonin
• 150mg magnesium citrate

After morning coffee:

• 1 large fish oil pill
• 3000 IU D3
• 1 CDP Choline (leftover from see below)

Discontinued due to lack of noticeable effect:

• Rhodiola rosea
• Vitamin K
• Pramiracetam
• Aniracetam
• Oxiracetam
• Noopept
• Zinc
• Caffeine pills
• L- Theanine

Taken the survey (would have loved to do digit ratio, but too difficult to get access to the equipment needed).

Note: Date keeps changing to say 3PM. This is at 4PM!

Some other alternatives:

• Human-Friendly AGI
• Constrained AGI
• Humanist AGI
• Human-Valuing AGI
• Secure AGI

I consider this evidence that we need to bring more rationalists together more often.

Hear, hear!

I use a slight variant of this. Deep enough pockets, with my wallet placed in on top of my keys. It's slightly more work to access the keys, since I have to remove the wallet first, but that also means they can't easily fall out. In fact, I've only ever once lost keys with this strategy, and that was due to locking them inside a house with a deadlock.

It depends how you do it. Some of my data is backed up via Google drive in almost as automatic a way as is possible. Add a new folder to your documents library (Windows 7+), make this folder the default save location for the library, make it the folder where google drive manages backups automatically (there is a program you download to do this). Now you just need to pick the documents folder whenever you initially save something important, and the rest is handled for you. The same would be easily doable with dropbox.

I haven't found a bullet-proof method, I'm afraid. The large majority of artists I've contacted have turned out not to be suitable, too expensive, or (mostly) just flaky. My primary methods have been browsing deviantart in relevant categories, and finding active artists with either the same art style that I want, or a show of competence in multiple styles; or the same evaluation but applied to the Indie Gamer art portfolio forum.

One thing to bear in mind is that even if an artist is too busy to work for you themself, they may know people who they'll be happy to refer to you.

I recently re-evaluated whether I should continue making the game I took a few years off work to develop a while ago, which is mostly finished except for artwork / animations. I was unsure as to whether it was worth continuing with or whether it was just sunk cost keeping me going. After ignoring the sunk costs, and re-running the calculations, I decided it was worth continuing, and have since got in contact with several artists to get work on it rolling again.

As John_Maxwell_IV says, it really depends on the project. A good recent example is the knockout javascript library. My last job was focused on building javascript/REST-API driven dynamic admin interfaces. Without knockout, having to use just jquery & native JS I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I may have been an order of magnitude less productive. Some of the more advanced features I was able to deliver would probably have been too complex to manage.

Of course, not everybody working away at their own new great idea should expect to be able to have anywhere near that level of impact, but I think it gives a good estimate of the sort of impact that is within grasp for the most successful experiments / projects.

An easy first step is to just report the problem with the documentation when you find it. Something can't get fixed if it's not found, and reporting bugs should be pretty simple through the github interface for your standard project.

As for contributing fixes, you'll need to have a little experience with forking, creating pull-requests etc, but the nice thing is that these are basically free to play around with for open source projects on git-hub (or bitbucket). Most documentation will be in one of a few basic formats in the project's source code (markdown... (read more)

Programming libraries and making them freely available, as in a large number of open-source projects seems to me like a definite positive. For instance, the jquery javascript library is freely available, such that learning it is a transferrable skill between jobs, a foundation that other projects can build upon, and means the messy work of ensuring cross-platform javascript compatibility only has to be performed in one place, instead of again and again. There are many other examples of useful pieces of programming infrastructure provided for by volunteer w... (read more)

Quora hack: Add '?share=1' to the end of the url, and you can read everything.

Usually I'll read it in depth first, then once I know if it's worth taking notes, I'll return to it and scan through quickly for those points I know are worth grabbing.

If you want to gain personal skills, a good avenue for spending money is removing distractions that decrease the time you have to devote to these skills. For example, hire cleaners or gardeners to free up the time spent on necessary chores.

wondering why is it that the more senior a researcher becomes, the more (s)he resembles a manager.

It's not the only profession where this is the case. Programming is notorious for having no career progression after your first decade unless you want to get into management and stop or slow programming activity.

Fantastic post. Usually with posts along the lines of AI & epistemology I just quickly scan them as I expect them to go over my head, or descend straight into jargon, but this was extremely well explained, and a joy to follow.

Purely anecdotal, but since I started taking cold showers, ~20 degrees C has gone from being switch to warm clothing territory, to fine in a t-shirt instead.

Taken the survey. Thanks for doing this, Yvain.

Obligatory non-standard font grumble.

I wish I could put some decks at “low throttle” and some at “high throttle” (say, I want to learn 20 driving code cards a day, but only 3 vim cards). Anki has a setting that says how many new cards you get, but it's global; so either I change that setting all the time (which can be done fairly quickly), or control the influx by leaving stuff in Google Docs.

I just double-checked. You can. Create a new option group for a deck, go to its options, and change the number of new cards, reviewed cards, etc per day. I currently have Latin vocab set to 5 new per day, Japanese vocab set to 10 for instance. (Done through Anki for Windows, unsure if you can set this up through the web or phone).

I haven't tried authoring an article myself, but a quick look now seems to indicate that you can't upload images, only link to them. This means images must be hosted on third parties, meaning you have to upload it there and if not directly under your control, it's vulnerable to link rot. It seems like this would be inconvenient.

Short answer: https://www.beeminder.com/illuminosity

Long answer: Anything I want to repeat, with reminders, that is measurable (the enforcement is nice, but actually much less important than the reminders, tracking and ease of entering data for me).

• A dark close-up of a security camera. In its lens you can see a threatened-looking human.
• A chess board, human pieces vs robotic. The human is in checkmate.
• An opened laptop on top of a pile of skulls.
• A robotic hand grasping the world. See 1, 2

An Alien Mind: The Risks of AI

Is there much known about how to recall information you've memorised at the right time / in the right context? I can memorise pieces of knowledge just fine with Anki, and if someone asks me a question about that piece of information I can tell them the answer no problem. However, recalling in the right situation that a piece of information exists and using it -- that I'm finding much more of a challenge. I've been trying to find information on instilling information in such a way as to recall it in the right context for the last few days, but none of the a... (read more)

Does your scale really go from 1-100? It seems unlikely to me that you could really notice the difference between a 32 and a 33, for instance, and I notice everything in your example is an increment of 5.

Downvoted as I don't think Effective Altruism is broad enough to justify an entire sub-reddit if we're still sticking to a small overall number.