LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Good write up! People Cannot Handle "fill in the blank" on smartphones. Sex, food, drugs, social status, betting, binge watching, shopping etc. in abundance and a click away is something we cannot not handle. If some of biggest corporations in the world spends billions upon billions each year to grab our attention, they will win and "you" will on average loose, unless you pull the cord (or turn off the wifi...) or have extreme will power. 

I am definitely not the one to throw the first rock, but is it not pretty embarrassing that most of us who thought we were so smart and independent are mere serfs, both intellectually and physically, to a little piece of electronics that have completely and utterly hijacked our brains and bodies.

Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vcuBJgfSCvyPmqG7a/list-of-collective-intelligence-projects [LW · GW]

I had never thought about approaching this topic from the abstract, but I'm judging from the karma that this is actually what people want, rather than existing projects.

I'm surprised! I thought people were overall disinterested about this topic, but it seems more like the problem itself hadn't been stated to start with.

if you ask mathematicians whether ZFC + not Consistent(ZFC) is consistent, they will say "no, of course not!"

I suspect than many people's intuitive interpretation of "consistent" is ω-consistent, especially if they are not aware of the distinction.

I find it difficult to make distinct categories, but there seem to be two dimensions along which to classify relations:

1. How intense is the relation / how much we "click" emotionally and intellectually.
2. Whether the relation is expected to survive the change of current context.

(Even this is not a clear distinction, because "my relatives" is kinda contextual, but the context is there forever.)

Mapping to your system: close friends = high intensity context independent; friendly acquaintances = high intensity contextual; acquaintances = low intensity contextual.

One quadrant seems to be missing, but maybe that makes sense: if the relation is low intensity, why would people bother to keep it outside of the context where it originated.

It's a great idea. I ended up bolding the one line that states my conclusion to make it easier to spot.

Strong agree.

Hiding the main result beyond spoiler makes for a great reveal, but less useful for skimming.

That's crazy how close that is. $e=\sqrt[3]{32}0$ (to the nearest half a percent) will be a fun fact that I remember now!

Thanks for the Quenya tip. I tried Artano and it didn't work very quickly. Given that apparently it does in fact work, I can try that again. 

Creating an inhumanly good model of a human is related to formulating their preferences.

How does this relate to my idea? I'm not talking about figuring out human preferences.

Thus it's a step towards eliminating path-dependence of particular life stories

What is "path-dependence of particular life stories"?

I think things (minds, physical objects, social phenomena) should be characterized by computations that they could simulate/incarnate.

Are there other ways to characterize objects? Feels like a very general (or even fully general) framework. I believe my idea can be framed like this, too.

Do you think a 3-state dark mode selector is better than a 1-state (where “auto” is the only state)? My website is 1-state, on the assumption that auto will work for almost everyone and it lets me skip the UI clutter of having a lighting toggle that most people won’t use.

Gwern discusses this on his “Design Graveyard” page:

Auto-dark mode: a good idea but “readers are why we can’t have nice things”.

OSes/browsers have defined a ‘global dark mode’ toggle the reader can set if they want dark mode everywhere, and this is available to a web page; if you are implementing a dark mode for your website, it then seems natural to just make it a feature and turn on iff the toggle is on. There is no need for complicated UI-cluttering widgets with complicated implementations. And yet—if you do do that, readers will regularly complain about the website acting bizarre or being dark in the daytime, having apparently forgotten that they enabled it (or never understood what that setting meant).

A widget is necessary to give readers control, although even there it can be screwed up: many websites settle for a simple negation switch of the global toggle, but if you do that, someone who sets dark mode at day will be exposed to blinding white at night… Our widget works better than that. Mostly.

Is it possible that someday dark-mode will become so widespread, and users so educated, that we could quietly drop the widget? Yes, even by 2023 dark-mode had become quite popular, and I suspect that an auto-dark-mode would cause much less confusion in 2024 or 2025. However, we are stuck with the widget—once we had a widget, the temptation to stick in more controls (for reader-mode and then disabling/enabling popups) was impossible to resist, and who knows, it may yet accrete more features (site-wide fulltext search?), rendering removal impossible.

(The site-wide fulltext search feature has since been added, of course.)