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Less Wrong
''LessWrong'' (also written ''Less Wrong'') is a community blog and forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Purpose ''LessWrong'' promotes lifestyle changes believed by its community to lead to increased rationality and self-improvement. Posts often focus on avoiding biases related to decision-making and the evaluation of evidence. One suggestion is the use of Bayes' theorem as a decision-making tool. There is also a focus on psychological barriers that prevent good decision-making, including fear conditioning and cognitive biases that have been studied by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. ''LessWrong'' is also concerned with transhumanism, existential threats and the singularity. ''The New York Observer'' noted that "Despite describing itself as a forum on 'the art of human rationality,' the New York Less Wrong group... is fixated on a branch of futurism that wou ...
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Internet Forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible. Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; example: a single conversation is called a " thread", or ''topic''. A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread and can be replied to by as many people as so wish. Depending on the forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in to post messages. On most forums, users do not have to l ...
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List Of Cognitive Biases
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics. Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy information-processingMartin Hilbert (2012) "Toward a synthesis of cognitive biases: How noisy information processing can bias human decision making"'. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 211–237; free access to the study here: https://www.martinhilbert.net/toward-a-synthesis-of-cognitive-biases/). Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought. Explanations include ...
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BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of ''The Huffington Post'', started as a co-founder and investor in BuzzFeed and is now the executive chairman. Originally known for online quizzes, " listicles", and pop culture articles, the company has grown into a global media and technology company, providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics, DIY, animals, and business. In late 2011, BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith of ''Politico'' as editor-in-chief, to expand the site into long-form journalism and reportage. After years of investment in investigative journalism, by 2021 '' BuzzFeed News'' had won the National Magazine Award, the George Polk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for the Michael Kelly Award. BuzzFeed generat ...
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The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, ''The New Yorker'' has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric American culture, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue. Overview and history ''The New Yorker'' was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a ''New York Times'' reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted t ...
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Slate Star Codex
''Slate Star Codex'' (SSC) was a blog focused on science, medicine (especially within psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism. The blog was written by Scott Alexander Siskind, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, under the pen name Scott Alexander. ''Slate Star Codex'' was launched in 2013, and was discontinued on June 23, 2020, as Alexander feared publication of his full name in a ''New York Times'' article. , the blog is partially back online, with the content restored but commenting disabled. A successor blog, ''Astral Codex Ten'', was launched on Substack on January 21, 2021. Alexander also blogged at the rationalist community blog ''LessWrong''. Notable posts ''The New Yorker'' states that the volume of content Alexander has written on ''Slate Star Codex'' makes the blog difficult to summarize, with an ebook of all posts running to around nine thousand pages. Many posts are book reviews (typically in the social sciences or medicine) or reviews of a topic in th ...
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Robin Hanson
Robin Dale Hanson (born August 28, 1959) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute, Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR (Scoring rule#Logarithmic scoring rule, Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point (where Hanson is Chief Scientist), and has conducted research on Signalling (economics), signalling. Background Hanson received a Bachelor of Science, BS in physics from the University of California, Irvine in 1981, an Master of Science, MS in physics and an Master of Arts, MA in Conceptual Foundations of Science from the University of Chicago in 1984, and a PhD in social science from Caltech in 1997 for his thesis titled ''Four puzzles in inf ...
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Eliezer Yudkowsky, Stanford 2006 (square Crop)
Eliezer (, "Help/Court of El") was the name of at least three different individuals in the Bible. Eliezer of Damascus Eliezer of Damascus () was, according to the Targums, the son of Nimrod. Eliezer was head of the patriarch Abraham's household, as mentioned in the Book of Genesis (15:2). Medieval biblical exegetes have explained the noun ''ben mešeq'' as meaning "butler; steward; overseer", while the name ''Damméseq Eliʿézer'' is explained by Targum Onkelos as meaning "Eliezer the Damascene." Others say that he was given the name "Damascus" by Abraham who purchased Eliezer from Nimrod, and had passed through the city of Damascus while returning with his servant from Babylonia. Other translations of Genesis describe Eliezer as Abraham's heir. There is an interpretation in Bereshit Rabbah (43:2), cited by Rashi, that Eliezer went alone with Abraham to rescue Lot, with the reference to "his initiates" stated to be 318 in number () being the numerical value of Eliezer' ...
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Doomsday Cult
A doomsday cult is a cult, that believes in apocalypticism and millenarianism, including both those that predict disaster and those that attempt to destroy the entire universe. Sociologist John Lofland coined the term ''doomsday cult'' in his 1966 study of a group of members of the Unification Church of the United States: '' Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith''. In 1958, Leon Festinger published a study of a group with cataclysmic predictions: '' When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World''. Festinger and other researchers have attempted to explain the commitment of members to their doomsday cult after the leader's prophecies have proven false. Festinger attributed this phenomenon to the coping method of dissonance reduction, a form of rationalization. Members often dedicate themselves with renewed vigor to the group's cause after a failed prophecy, rationaliz ...
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Futurism
Futurism ( it, Futurismo, link=no) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and according to its doctrine, aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 '' Manifesto of Futurism'', Boccioni's 1913 sculpture ''Unique Forms of Continuity in Space'', Balla's 1913–1914 painting ''Abstract Speed + Sound'', and Russolo's ''The Art of Noises'' (1913). Although Futurism was largely an Italian phenomenon, parallel movements emerged in Russia, where some Russian Futurists would later go on to found groups of ...
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The New York Observer
''The New York Observer'' was a weekly newspaper printed from 1987 to 2016, when it ceased print publication and became the online-only newspaper ''Observer''. The media site focuses on culture, real estate, media, politics and the entertainment and publishing industries. History The ''Observer'' was first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, as a weekly newspaper by Arthur L. Carter, a former investment banker. The ''New York Observer'' had also been the title of an earlier weekly religious paper founded by Sidney E. Morse in 1823. In July 2006, the paper was purchased by the American real estate figure Jared Kushner, then 25 years old. The paper began its life as a broadsheet, and was then printed in tabloid format every Wednesday, and currently has an exclusively online format. It is headquartered at 1 Whitehall Street in Manhattan. Previous writers for the publication include Kara Bloomgarden–Smoke, Kim Velsey, Matthew Kassel, Jillian Jorgensen, Joe Co ...
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Technological Singularity
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I.J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.Vinge, Vernor"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", in ''Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace'', G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, pp. 11–22, 1993. The first person to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was John v ...
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Existential Risk
A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential is known as an "existential risk." Over the last two decades, a number of academic and non-profit organizations have been established to research global catastrophic and existential risks, formulate potential mitigation measures and either advocate for or implement these measures. Definition and classification Defining global catastrophic risks The term global catastrophic risk "lacks a sharp definition", and generally refers (loosely) to a risk that could inflict "serious damage to human well-being on a global scale". Humanity has suffered large catastrophes before. Some of these have caused serious damage but were only local in scope—e.g. the Black Death may have resulted in the de ...
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