LessWrong 2.0 Reader

This sounds to me like the classic rationalist failure mode of doing stuff which is unusually popular among rationalists, rather than studying what experts or top performers are doing and then adopting the techniques, conceptual models, and ways of working that actually lead to good results.

Or in other words, the primary thing when thinking about how to optimize a business is not being rationalist; it is to succeed in business (according to your chosen definition).

Happily there's considerable scholarship on business, and CommonCog has done a fantastic job organizing and explaining the good parts. I highly recommend reading and discussing and reflecting on the whole site - it's a better education in business than any MBA program I know of.

Thank you for sharing your thoughtful ideas and vision for YouCongress, Nathan! 

Regarding auto-updates of current legislation, I've been considering building something akin to subreddits (let's call them "halls" here) on top of our current topics. Some would be automated by us (e.g. AI polls, climate polls, bills in US Congress), while others would be managed by users. The latter would allow the owner(s) of the hall to add new or existing polls manually or via the API. For example, someone could create a hall about their local region or topic of interest. This user-driven approach could offer a wider coverage. 

The downside here is whether this may lead to duplicated polls. 

What are your thoughts on this?

Such as this one!

Suppose you trained a regular SAE in the normal way with a dictionary size of 2304. Do you expect the latents to be systematically different from the ones in your meta-SAE?

For example, here's one systematic difference. The regular SAE is optimized to reconstruct activations uniformly sampled from your token dataset. The meta-SAE is optimized to reconstruct decoder vectors, which in turn were optimized to reconstruct activations from the token dataset -- however, different decoder vectors have different frequencies of firing in the token dataset, so uniform over decoder vectors != uniform over token dataset. This means that, relative to the regular SAE, the meta-SAE will tend to have less precise / granular latents for concepts that occur frequently in the token dataset, and more precise / granular latents for concepts that occur rarely in the token dataset (but are frequent enough that they are represented in the set of decoder vectors).

It's not totally clear which of these is "better" or more "fundamental", though if you're trying to optimize reconstructed loss, you should expect the regular SAE to do better based on this systematic difference.

(You could of course change the training for the meta-SAE to decrease this systematic difference, e.g. by sampling from the decoder vectors in proportion to their average magnitude over the token dataset, instead of sampling uniformly.)

I am yet to find a statement by Popper that I disagree with.

I think Seth is not so much contradicting you here but using a deterministic definition of "self" as that which we are referring to as a particular categorisation of the deterministic process, the one experienced as "making decisions", and importantly "deliberating over decisions". Whether we are determined or not, the effort one puts into their choices is not wasted, it is data-processing that produces better outcomes in general.

One might be determined to throw in the towel on cognitive effort if they were to take a particular interpretation of determinism, and they, and the rest of us, would be worse off for it. So, the more of us who expend the effort to convince others of the benefits of continuing cognitive effort in spite of a deterministic universe are doing a service to the future, determined or otherwise.

Very well said, I have expressed this exact sentiment more clumsily many times. I concur.

In the absence of AI we can already pass through this phase of realisation/acceptance (the nausea of the realisation of being an object)

Clearly—Sartre was going through it in the early 20th century. I think, while I've never had much trouble with squaring my existence with materialism, I do feel like this period is giving me somewhat of a relapse, and as you say, this is not really within my control.

This feels like the intersection of Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Exactly, I think I was having a continental moment, please do forgive me, we can now return to our scheduled rationality. But really, that's what I'm on about, our claim on rationality has, I guess, been pretty important to me, and I may just be suffering the side effects of seeing it being eroded in real time (the claim, not the rationality itself).

Well that is (commendably) the most positive interpretation of the pet hypothesis I've heard. When we think about it, we're really half way there already. By many measures, many of us are living in what anyone in the past would call Utopia, and are very much cared for by many over-arching systems, the market, the government, the internet. I've also never been one to complain "Oh, but what will I do with all my spare time if I don't have to work?"

Perhaps my daughter will have time to reach goals she actually wants to achieve rather than those of necessity. I appreciate your thoughts. 

Why does the plot start at 3x3 instead of 2x2? Of course, it is not common to have games with only one choice, but for Chicken that is what you end up with when removong one option. You could even start the investigation at 2x1 options.