LessWrong 2.0 Reader

If you don’t think OpenAI is going to make trillions reasonably often, and also pay them out, then you should want to sell your stake, and fast.

And vice-versa. I bought a chunk of Microsoft a while ago, because that was the closest thing I could do to buying stock in OpenAI.

Thanks! I think the term duration is interesting and creative. 

Do you think for the short-term ones there might be pre-studies they need to do for the exact topics they need to learn on? Or maybe could design the short-term ones for topics that can be learnt quickly and solved quickly? I am a little worried about the consistency in policy as well (for example even with work, when a person on a project take vacation, and someone need to cover for them, there are a lot of onboarding docs, and prior knowledge to transfer), but could not find a good way just yet. I will think more about these.

The post basically says that the taking actions like "running EA global" is the "principles-first" approach as it is not "cause-first". None of the actions he advocates as principle-first are about, rewarding people for upholding principles or holding people accountable for violating principles. 

How can a strategy for "principle-first" that does not deal with the questions of how to set incentives for people to uphold principles be a good strategy?

If you read the discussion on this page with regards to university groups not upholding principles, there are issues. Zach's proposed strategy sees funding them in the way they currently operate, as a good example of what he sees as principle-first because:

Our Groups program supports EA groups that engage with members who prioritize a variety of causes.
Our current training for facilitators for the intro program emphasizes framing EA as a question and not acting as if there is a clear answer.

This suggests that Zach sees the current training for facilitators already as working well and not as something that should be changed. Suggesting that just because EA groups prioritize a variety of causes they are principles-first seems to me like appropriating the term principle-first to talk about something that's not about principles. 

When it comes to the actual principles, not seeing integrity, honesty, and thinking about incentives as important key principles also feels like a bad choice. One lesson from the whole FTX saga would be that those principles are important and that's not a lesson that Zach draws. 

If you think this is a good strategy, what would a bad "principle-first" strategy look like? What could Zach have done worse?

I love the xkcd book vibes of this post.

Incidentally, female chimps seem to live 25% longer than males—imagine human women lived until 90 while men died at 71.

Arithmetic error? both 71*1.25 and 71.5*1.25 to the nearest integer are 89, not 90. The error might (low-confidence, 10%) have been caused by calculating a 12.5% increase of 80 (exactly 90) and also dividing 80 by 1.125 (~71.1).

Indirectly, because 90 papers seems like a tiny number, vs. what got published on arxiv during that same time interval. (Depending on how one counts) I wouldn't be surprised if there were > 90 papers from outside the labs even looking only at the unlearning category.

We can imagine two versions of the mysterious-poverty-restoring-force hypothesis:

Weak: Despite changes in overall productivity, poverty persists.
Strong: Despite changes in overall productivity, the proportion of the population in poverty remains constant. 

I think weak is almost certainly true, you're right that UBI won't eliminate poverty. But I think strong is likely false - people desperately struggling: people living relatively comfortably, with slack for hobbies and "fun spending" of time and money doesn't seem constant over history. 

I suspect UBI, because the gains are evenly spread (unlike gains from technological development, many of which are disproportionately allocated to the top 10%), would have a pretty sizable impact on the ratio of people living in poverty to people living in comfort.

Which would be a good thing as nominally they claim to let everyone opt out of scraping already by using robots.txt and other methods, and so the canary shouldn't do anything there that people couldn't already do.

I think what you are looking for is this:

Scott Alexander [LW · GW]:

People used to ask me for writing advice. And I, in all earnestness, would say “Just transcribe your thoughts onto paper exactly like they sound in your head.” It turns out that doesn’t work for other people. Maybe it doesn’t work for me either, and it just feels like it does.

and

I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.

But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.

(the included link is also directly relevant)

I'm very familiar with this issue; e.g. I regularly see Steam devs get hounded in forums and reviews whenever they dare increase their prices.

I wonder to which extent this frustration about prices comes from gamers being relatively young and international, and thus having much lower purchasing power? Though I suppose it could also be a subset of the more general issue that people hate paying for software.