LessWrong 2.0 Reader

>Do you think there is a situation where selected random people do not want to be in office/leadership and want to pursue their own passion/career and thus due to this reason may do a bad job? Is this mandatory?

I think a robust way to design the assembly (or multiple assemblies like with Bouricius's model) is to have many different people serving different term lengths. Some people may serve a term of only a couple days or weeks. Others might serve for years. 

For short-term service, I would make that mandatory. Everyone is required to come. 

For long term service, maybe those should be voluntary. 

As far as incentives go, there's a range of enforcement options for "mandatory" service. Perhaps you can just pay a big fine, as a percentage of your income, as an alternative to service. There probably ought to be mechanisms to defer service so you can time things a bit better with your life circumstances. 

The typical Citizens' Assembly will also offer benefits such as child care, parental care. 

A high paying salary will encourage the lower and middle class to participate. 

I have trouble coming up with ways to help small business owners to participate though. Could a small business owner drop their work for an entire year, even if it was well paid -- especially if the small business is so small there are no managers to cover their role? Perhaps there could be alternatives for them, such as part time work coupled with work-from-home. 

>What are some nuances about population and diversity? (I am not sure yet)

I have yet to hear about a case where Deliberative decision making techniques were tried and failed due to excessive diversity or cultural factors. I'm not an expert on the latest and greatest research here so I may be wrong. I do know that deliberation experiments have been performed all around the world, including East Asia, Africa, and India. 

An example deliberative poll was performed in Uganda, paper linked here:

https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/146/3/140/27163/Applying-Deliberative-Democracy-in-Africa-Uganda-s

I haven't fully read this yet. Note that James Fishkin is the guy that performs and advocates for these "deliberative polls". 

Very interesting, this would certainly cast doubt on 

But so far I haven't been noticing

After reading your comments I've been getting Claude to write up an XGBoost implementation for me, I should have made this reply comment when I started, but will post my results under my own comment chain.

I have not (but should) try to duplicate (or fail to do so) your findings - I haven't been quite testing the same thing.

How difficult would it be to turn this into an epub or pdf? Is there word of that coming soon?

Thanks for testing this! This is very interesting.

I'm still operating under the assumption that it does know the string, and is hallucinating, or that it can't retrieve it under these conditions. But slightly alarming that it apologises for lying, then lies again. 

Agreed. Seems plausible that it does recognize the string as the BIG-Bench canary (though on questioning it's very evasive, so I wouldn't say it's extremely likely). I'm leaning toward it having "forgotten" the actual string though ("forgotten" because it's plausible it can be extracted with the right prompt, but there isn't a good word for describing a larger elicitation gap).

Maybe like 10%?

Mm, I think if the question is "what accounts for the differences between the EA and rationalist movements today, wrt number of adherents, reputation, amount of influence, achievements" I would assign credit in the ratio of ~1:3 to differences in (values held by individuals):systems. Where systems are roughly: how the organizations are set up, how funding and information flows through the ecosystem.

I can think about that question if it seems relevant, but the initial claim of Elizabeth's was "I believe there are ways to recruit college students responsibly. I don't believe the way EA is doing it really has a chance to be responsible". So I was trying to give an account of the root cause there.

Also — and I recognize that I'm saying something relatively trivial here — the root cause of a problem in a system can of course be any seemingly minor part of it. Just because I'm saying one part of the system is causing problems (the culture's values) doesn't mean I'm saying that's what's primarily responsible for the output. The current cause of a software company's current problems might be the slow speed with which PR reviews are happening, but this shouldn't be mistaken for the claim that the credit allocation for the company's success is primarily that it can do PR reviews fast.

So to repeat, I'm saying that IMO the root cause of irresponsible movement growth and ponzi-scheme-like recruitment strategies was a lack of IMO very important values like dialogue and candor and respecting other people's sense-making and courage and so on, rather than an explanation more like 'those doing recruitment had poor feedback loops so had a hard time knowing what tradeoffs to make' (my paraphrase of your suggestion). 

I would have to think harder about which specific values I believe caused this particular issue, but that's my broad point.

This sounds like democracy-washing rule by unaccountable "experts".

One common question is whether the self-modeling task, which involves predicting a layer's own activations, would cause the network to merely learn the identity function. Intuitively, this might seem like an optimal outcome for minimizing the self-modeling loss.

I found this section confusing. If the identity function is the global optimum for self-modeling loss, isn’t it kinda surprising that training doesn’t converge to the identity function? Or does the identity function make it worse at the primary task? If so, why?

[I’m sure this is going to be wrong in some embarrassing way, but what the heck… What I’m imagining right now is as follows. There’s an N×1 activation vector in the second-to-last layer of the DNN, and then a M×N weight matrix constituting the linear transformation, and you multiply them to get a M×1 output layer of the DNN. The first M-N entries of that output layer are the “primary task” outputs, and the bottom N entries are the “self-modeling” outputs, which are compared to the earlier N×1 activation vector mentioned above. And when you’re talking about “identity matrix”, you actually mean that the bottom N×N block of the weight matrix is close to an identity matrix but evidently not quite. (Oops I’m leaving out the bias vector, oh well.) If I’m right so far, then it wouldn’t be the case that the identity matrix makes the thing worse at the primary task, because the top (M-N)×N block of the weight matrix can still be anything. Where am I going wrong?]

I didn't read this carefully--but it's largely irrelevant. Adult editing probably can't have very large effects because developmental windows have passed; but either way the core difficulty is in editor delivery. Germline engineering does not require better gene targets--the ones we already have are enough to go as far as we want. The core difficulty there is taking a stem cell and making it epigenomically competent to make a baby (i.e. make it like a natural gamete or zygote).

Insofar as you're thinking I said bad people, please don't let yourself make that mistake, I said bad values. 

I appreciate you drawing the distinction! The bit about "bad people" was more directed at Tsvi, or possibly the voters who agreevoted with Tsvi.

There's a lot of massively impactful difference in culture and values

Mm, I think if the question is "what accounts for the differences between the EA and rationalist movements today, wrt number of adherents, reputation, amount of influence, achievements" I would assign credit in the ratio of ~1:3 to differences in (values held by individuals):systems. Where systems are roughly: how the organizations are set up, how funding and information flows through the ecosystem.

(As I write this, I realize that maybe even caring about adherents/reputation/influence/achievement in the first place is an impact-based, EA-frame, and the thing that Ben cares about is more like "what accounts for the differences in their philosophies or gestalt of what it feels like to be in the movement"; I feel like I'm lowkey failing an ITT here...)