LessWrong 2.0 Reader

GEB

Amazing post, I really enjoyed the perspective explored here.

An extension that might be useful for me as an illiquid path enjoyer is what arbitrage or risk-reduction opportunities you see existing out there?

VCs can get by by doing a lot of smaller bets and if you want to be anti-fragile as an illiquid bet it becomes quite hard as you're part of the cogs in the anti-fragile system. What Taleb says about that is that then these people should be praised because they dare to take on that risk. But there has to be some sort of system one could for example develop with peers and similar?

What is the many bets risk reduction strat here, is it just to make a bunch of smaller MVPs to gain info?

I would be very curious to hear your perspective on this.

Fantastic life skill to be able to sleep in a noise environment on a hard floor.  Most Chinese can do it so easily, and I would frequently less kids anywhere up to 4-5 years old being carried sleeping down the road by guardians.

I think super valuable when it comes to adulthood and sharing a bed - one less potential source of difficulties if adaption to noisy environment when sleeping makes snoring a non-issue.

It is the literary, TV and movie references, a lot of stuff also tied to technology and social developments of the 80's-00's (particularly Ank-Morpork situated stories) and a lot of classical and allusions.  'Education' used to lean on common knowledge of a relatively narrow corpus of literature and history Shakespeare, chivalry, European history, classics etc for the social advantage those common references gave and was thus fed to boomers and gen-x, y but I think it's now rapidly slipping into obscurity as few younger people read and schools shift away from teaching it in face of all that's new in the world.  I guess there are a lot of jokes that pre-teens will get, but so many that they will miss.  Seems a waste of such delightful prose.

That slides presentation presents me with a "you need access" screen. Is it OK to be public?

I thought this was an interesting take on the Boundaries problem in agent foundations from the perspective of IIT. It is on the amazing Michael Levin's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5cXtdZ4blKM

One of the main things that makes it interesting to me is that around 25-30 mins in, ot computationally goes through the main reason why I don't think we will have agentic behaviour from AI in at least a couple of years. GPTs just don't have a high IIT Phi value. How will it find it's own boundaries? How will it find the underlying causal structures that it is part of? Maybe this can be done through external memory but will that be enough or do we need it in the core stack of the scaling-based training loop?

A side note is that, one of the main things that I didn't understand about IIT before was how it really is about looking at meta-substrates or "signals" as Douglas Hofstadter would call them are optimally re-organising themselves to be as predictable for themselves in the future. Yet it does and it integrates really well into ActInf (at least to the extent that I currently understand it.)

Yeah, powering through it.  I've tried adult Fiction and Sci-Fi but he's not interested in it yet - not grokking adult motivations, attitudes and behaviors yet, so feeding him stuff that he enjoys to foster habit of reading.   

I think children can sleep in most places as long as they feel safe. Some parents seem to think that their children can only sleep in tightly controlled environments: Quiet, dark, comfy. But I think that is often a result of training. If the children never sleep in any other environments how can they feel suddenly safe there? Or if the parents or other people are stressed in the other environments, children will notice that something is off and not feel safe and not sleep. But a place with lots of friendly, happy people seems quite safe to me.

I found a photo of two of my kids sleeping "on stage." This table was right next to the stage at my sisters wedding and the music was not quiet for sure.

Submission statement: I mostly finished this a year ago, but held off on posting because I was planning on improving it and writing a corresponding "here's the concepts without the math" post. Might still happen, but now I'm not aiming at a specific timeline.

Things I now want to change:

• Soften the confidence in the vNM axioms, since there's been some good criticisms
• Revamp the whole ontological crisis section to be more general
• Rewrite from academese to easier
• Move proofs to an appendix
• Create some manim videos to illustrate
• Merge with this post [LW · GW]
• Many other things

Still, I hope this is kinda useful for some people.

Edit: Also, there's some issues with the MathJax and dollar signs, I will fix this later.

It's been moved to https://laneless.substack.com/ .