teenager | mathematics enthusiast | MIT class of 2026 | vaguely Grey Triber | personal website: https://duck-master.github.io
duck_master
Karma: 71
Here’s a manually sorted list of meetup places in the USA, somewhat arbitrarily/unscientifically grouped by region for even greater convenience. I spent the past hour on this, so please make good use of it. (Warning: this is a long comment.)
NEW ENGLAND
Connecticut: Hartford
Massachusetts: Cambridge/Boston, Newton, Northampton
Vermont: Burlington
MID-ATLANTIC
DC: Washington
Maryland: Baltimore, College Park
New Jersey: Princeton
New York State: Java Village/Buffalo, Manhattan/New York City, Massapequa, Rochester
Pennsylvania: Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
Virginia: Charlottesville, Norfolk, Richmond
West Virginia: Charlestown
MIDWEST
Michigan: Ann Arbor, Jackson
Illinois: Chicago, Urbana-Champaign
Indiana: South Bend, West Lafayette
Ohio: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo
Wisconsin: La Crosse, Madison, Stone Lake
SOUTHEAST
Alabama: Huntsville, Tuscaloosa
Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Gulf Breeze, Miami, West Palm Beach
Georgia: Atlanta
North Carolina: Asheville, Charlotte, Durham
Tennessee: Memphis
SOUTHWEST
Arizona: Phoenix, Tucson
Arkansas: Fayetteville
Colorado: Boulder, Carbondale, Denver
Louisiana: New Orleans
Missouri: Kansas City, St. Louis
Nevada: Las Vegas
New Mexico: Taos
Texas: Austin, College Station, Dallas, Houston, Lubbock, San Antonio, Westlake
Utah: Logan, Salt Lake City
NORTHWEST
Alaska: Anchorage
Minnesota: Minneapolis
South Dakota: Sioux Falls
Oregon: Corvallis, Eugene, Portland
Washington State: Bellingham, Redmond, Seattle
CALIFORNIA (subdivided)
Bay Area/Silicon Valley: Berkeley/Oakland, San Francisco, Sunnyvale
Central Valley: Davis, Grass Valley, Sacramento
Southern California: El Centro, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, San Diego
This is an extremely important point. (I remember thinking a long time ago that Wikipedia just Exists, and that although random people are allowed to edit it, doing it is generally Wrong.) FWIW I’m an editor now—User:Duckmather.
Predicting: Quick Start
2023 ACX Meetups Everywhere—Newton, MA
Thank you for creating this website! I’ve signed up and started contributing.
One tip I have for other users: many of the neurons are not about vague sentiments or topics (as in most of the auto-suggested explanations), but are rather about very specific keywords or turns of phrase. I’d even guess that many of the neurons are effectively regexes.
Also apparently Neuronpedia cut me off for the day after I did ~20 neuron puzzles. If this limit could be raised for power users or something like that, it could potentially be beneficial.
To be fair, there is no evidence requirement for upvoting, either.
I could see why someone would want this (eg Reddit’s upvote/downvote system seems to be terrible), but I think LW is small and homogenous-ish enough that it works okay here.
Speaking of MathML are there other ways for one to put mathematical formulas into html? I know Wikipedia uses <math> and its own template {{math}} (here’s the help page), but I’m not sure about any others. There’s also LaTeX (which I think is the best program for putting mathematical formulas into text in general), as well as some other bespoke things in Google Docs and Microsoft Word that I don’t quite understand.
Thank you for building this! I have just signed up for it.
I’ve noticed that two of the three Manifold markets (Will a nuclear weapon detonate in New York City by end of 2023? and Will a nuclear weapon cause over 1,000 deaths in 2023?) could use a few thousand mana in subsidies to reduce the chance of a false alarm, even though both are moderately well-traded already. (I’ve just bet both of them down, but I personally don’t have enough mana to feel comfortable subsidizing both.)
Question: I’m not old enough to drink alcohol, and I think this place is a bar—but would I even be allowed in the bar?
Since this is a literally a question about soliciting predictions, it should have one of those embedded-interactive-predictions-with-histograms gadgets* to make predicting easier. Also, it might be worth it to have two prediction gadgets, since this is basically a prediction: one gadget to predict what Recognized AI Safety Experts (tm) predict about how much damage unsafe AIs will do, and one gadget to predict about how much damage unsafe AIs will actually do (to mitigate weird second-order effects having to do with predicting a prediction).
*I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be called.
I think this applies to every wiki ever, and also to this very site. There are probably a lot of others that I’m missing but this is a start.
I agree with you (meaning G Gorden Worley III) that Wikipedia is reliable, and I too treat it as reliable. (It’s so well-known as a reliable source that even Google uses it!) I also agree that an army of bots and humans undo any defacing that may occur, and that Wikipedia having to depend on other sources helps keep it unbiased. I also agree with the OP that Wikipedia’s status as not-super-reliable among the Powers that Be does help somewhat.
So I think that the actual secret of Wikipedia’s success is a combination of the two: Mild illegibility prevents rampant defacement, citations do the rest. If Wikipedia was both viewed as Legibly Completely Accurate and also didn’t cite anything, then it would be defaced to hell and back and rendered meaningless; but even if everyone somehow decided one day that Wikipedia was ultra-accurate and also that they had a supreme moral imperative to edit it, I still think that Wikipedia would still turn out okay as a reliable source if it made the un-cited content very obvious, e.g. if each [citation needed] tag was put in size 128 Comic Sans and accompanied by an earrape siren* and even if there was just a bot that put those tags after literally everything without a citation**. (If Wikipedia is illegible, of course it’s going to be fine.)
*I think trolls might work around this by citing completely unrelated things, but this problem sounds like it could be taken care of by humans or by relatively simple NLP.
**This contravenes current Wikipedia policy, but in the worst-case scenario of Ultra-Legible Wikipedia, I think it would quickly get repealed.
@Diffractor: I think I got a MIRIxDiscord invite in a way somehow related to this event. Check your PMs for details. (I’m just commenting here to get attention because I think this might be mildly important.)
Don’t worry, it was kind of a natural stopping point anyways, as the discussion was winding down.
More specifically: if two points are in a convex set, then the entire line segment connecting them must also be in the set.
Google doc where we posted our confusions/thoughts earlier: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lKG_y_Voe02OkRGG9yaxtMuGM_dQBUKjj9DXTA8rMxE/edit
My ongoing confusions/thoughts:
What if the super intelligent deity is less than maximally evil or maximally good? (E.g. the deity picking the median-performance world)
What about the dutch-bookability of infraBayesians? (the classical dutch-book arguments seem to suggest pretty strongly that non-classical-Bayesians can be arbitrarily exploited for resources)
Is there a meaningful metaphysical interpretation of infraBayesianism that does not involve Murphy? (similarly to how Bayesianism can be metaphysically viewed as “there’s a real, static world out there, but I’m probabilistically unsure about it”)
Hello LessWrong! I’m duck_master. I’ve lurked around this website since roughly the start of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic but I have never really been super active as of yet (in fact I wrote my first ever post last month). I’ve been around on the AstralCodexTen comment section and on Discord, though, among a half-dozen other websites and platforms. Here’s my personal website (note: rarely updated) for your perusal.
I am a lifelong mathematics enthusiast and a current MIT student. (I’m majoring in mathematics and computer science; I added the latter part out of peer pressure since computer science is really taking off in these days.) I am particularly interested in axiomatic mathematics, formal theorem provers, and the P vs NP problem, though I typically won’t complain about anything mathematical as long as the relevant abstraction tower isn’t too high (and I could potentially pivot to applied math in the future).
During the height of the pandemic in mid-2020, I initially “converted” to rationalism (previously I had been a Christian), but never really followed through and I actually became more irrational over the course of 2021 and 2022 (and not even in a metarational way, but purely in a my-life-is-getting-worse way). This year, I am hoping that I can connect with the rationalist and postrat communities more and be more systematic about my rationality practice.