Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 14 January 2017 18:15 (+0200) WHEN: 14 January 2017 06:15:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Lva Tolstoho St, 3, Kyiv, Ukraine We plan to have a short talk about the technological singularity followed by a discussion about the same, talk about the origins of cognitive biases...
Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 29 December 2016 18:15 (+0200) WHEN: 29 December 2016 06:15:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Lva Tolstoho St, 3, Kyiv, Ukraine On the agenda are short self-introductions and topical discussion. You can find more information about the upcoming meetup (in Ukrainian) here: https://www.meetup.com/Less-Wrong-Kyiv/events/236403936/. If you plan...
Discussion article for the meetup : Kyiv: 21 December 2016 18:15 (+0200) WHEN: 21 December 2016 06:15:00PM (+0200) WHERE: Lva Tolstoho St, 3, Kyiv, Ukraine This is a preliminary free form meetup for those who want to see more LessWrong meetups in Kyiv. Among other things, we want to discuss...
We plan to have a short talk about the technological singularity followed by a discussion about the same, talk about the origins of cognitive biases and play Fallacymania. You can find more information about the upcoming meetup (in Ukrainian) here: https://www.meetup.com/LessWrong-Kyiv/events/236816739/. If you plan on coming, please join our group on Meetup.com and RSVP there so that we know how many people to expect. If you join the group, you will get email notifications about future meetups.
On the agenda are short self-introductions and topical discussion. You can find more information about the upcoming meetup (in Ukrainian) here: https://www.meetup.com/Less-Wrong-Kyiv/events/236403936/. If you plan on coming, please join our group and RSVP on Meetup.com so that we know how many people to expect. If you join the group you will get email notifications about future meetups.
This is a preliminary free form meetup for those who want to see more LessWrong meetups in Kyiv. Among other things, we want to discuss what we'd like the future meetups to be like. The meetup will be held at the "Chasopys" anti-cafe.
You can expect a few people from the previous meetup and the LessWrongRussian Slack chat there. For an ongoing discussion check out #kyiv_meetups on https://lesswrongru.slack.com/ (go here to register for the Slack).
I like "the VCR disagreement". It sounds nice and evokes visual associations (a courtroom, a VCR) that might help one remember it. Since no alternative has been found or proposed I will start using this term for the phenomenon.
On a related note, I wonder if there is a search system that matches vague descriptions of phenomena to (existing) definitions better than Google. (Googling "a search system that matches vague descriptions of phenomena to existing definitions" didn't yield any interesting results.)
I found that variations on the following exchange are very common on programming forums:
Alice: Programming language feature X is misused more often than not. It's bad.
Bob: Every language feature can be misused. That does not make it bad.
Suppose Alice is correct on the statistics: most code that uses feature X uses it in a way that Alice and Bob would both agree to be wrong. Suppose Bob still disagrees with her over it making the feature bad. He disagrees not because he thinks the good uses outweigh the bad ones but because it is possible, in principle, to only use feature X the right way. Is there a specific name for their kind of disagreement?
Less Wrong and its comments are a treasure trove of ethical problems, both theoretical and practical, and possible solutions to them (the largest one to my knowledge; do let me know if you are aware of a larger forum for this topic). However, this knowledge is not easy to navigate, especially to an outsider who might have a practical interest in it. I think this is a problem worth solving and one possible solution I came up with is to create a StackExchange-style service for (utilitarian, rationalist) ethics. Would you consider such a platform for ethical questions to be useful? Would you participate?
Possible benefits:
Making existing problems and their answers easier to navigate through the use of tagging and a stricter question-answer format.
Accumulation of new interesting problems.
The closest I have found is http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethics, which doesn't appear to be very active and it being a part of a more traditional philosophy forum might be a hindrance.
Edit: a semi-relevant example.
Am I correct in assuming the color you chose for the "Startup culture" block is a reference to Y Combinator or is this a coincidence?
Yes.
It's very rare that a precommitment to holding a belief in spite of the evidence is the best way to investigate a topic related to that belief.
What valid very rare cases of this do you think of? One that comes to my mind is that at least might be valid is that of "faking it 'till you make it". People precommit to holding a belief for a while in spite of the evidence in order to improve qualities that depend on them holding that belief. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find conclusive studies on whether "faking it 'till you make it" works for psychological improvement in general with a quick... (read more)
If I believed in ghosts and wanted to investigate a haunted mansion I think it would be in my best interest to persuade myself temporarily to not believe in ghosts for the length of the investigation. In fact, I'd benefit only if I turned myself into a Narnia-style sceptic about them (one who wouldn't believe or alieve in them in spite of the evidence). Given what I think are the rules of how ghosts are supposed to work [1] I would assume that a ghost out to kill me couldn't do so by physical violence (e.g., lifting and throwing a kitchen knife -- unless it was a poltergeist) but would instead try... (read more)