LessWrong 2.0 Reader

A decision tree that's ostensibly both normative and exhaustive of the space at hand.

I don't know, I'm not familiar with the history; probably zero. It's a metaphor. The things the two scenarios are supposed to have in common are first-time-ness, danger, and technical difficulty. I point out in the post that the AGI scenario is actually irreducibly harder than first-time heavier-than-air flight: you can't safely directly simulate intelligent computations themselves for testing, because then you're just running the actual computation.

But as for the application of "green light" standards - the actual Wright brothers were only risking their own lives. Why should someone else need to judge their project for safety?

Reasonable guess a priori, but I saw some data from GeneSmith at one point which looked like the interactions are almost always additive (i.e. no nontrivial interaction terms), at least within the distribution of today's population. Unfortunately I don't have a reference on hand, but you should ask GeneSmith if interested.

I have argued for a combo of sortition + standardized testing on a g-loaded test + extremely high salaries. You take the Nth percentile and apply sortition to that pool to get a parliament. Achieving the average IQ of current legislative bodies is easy with this method while retaining the anti-corruption features of sortition - and I suspect you could go much higher 

You try for as g-loaded a test as possible. You use some cosmological source of randomness everyone can verify - "the cosmos chose you to rule, citizen! You will be paid N million a year." You consider sortition as an anti-corruption mechanism and standardized testing as an anti-populism measure, adjusting the parameters to your taste.

I think this has some interesting properties and wrote a long essay about it at one point in the past, but it is very unappealing to most people and I am not sure if the political economy even works out. There is a history standardized tests being trusted as gates to bureaucratic power (and people rioting when the tests were not far) in a way the populous accepts, but they do get Goodharted often. 

Many ideas are hard to fully express in words. Maybe no idea can be precisely and accurately captured. Something is always left out when we use our words.

What I think makes some people faster (and arguably better) writers is that they natively think in terms of communication with others, whereas I natively think in terms of world modeling, and then try to come up with words that explain the word model. They don't have to go through a complex thought process to figure out how to transmit their world model to others, because they just say thing that convey the messages that exist in their head, and those messages are generated based on their model of the world.

Yep! In fact, an earlier draft of this post included a mention of Paul Graham, because he's a popular and well-liked example of someone who has a similar process to the one I use (though I don't know if he does it for the same reasons).

In that earlier draft, I contrasted Graham with Scott Alexander, who I vaguely recall mentioning that he basically sits down at his computer and a couple hours later a finish piece of writing has appeared. But I couldn't find a good reference of this being Scott's process, so maybe it's just a thing I talked with him about in person one time.

In the end I decided this was an unnecessary tangent for the body of the text, but I'm very glad to have a chance to talk about it in the comments! Thanks!

I find that surprising, given that so much of your writing feels kind of crisp and minimalist. Short punchy sentences. If that is how you think your mind is very unlike mine.

If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more [...] If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she's making an impact. 

First of all, thank you, love it when people suggest I receive money. Timothy and I have talked about fundraising for a continued podcast. I would strongly prefer most of the funding be crowdfunding, for the reason you say. If we did this it would almost certainly be through Manifund. Signing up for Patreon and noting this as the reason also works, although for my own sanity this will always be a side project.

I should note that my work on EA up through May was covered by a Lightspeed grant, but I don't consider that EA money.

For me, I felt like publishing in scientific journals required me to be dishonest.

...what?

Quoting a little more context:

I encounter this idea all the time when I’m talking to academics about academia. I give ‘em my whole spiel about publishing, being honest, blah blah blah, and they go, “Well, we don’t live in a utopia. You have to make tradeoffs in life.” Yes, of course! But the whole point of tradeoffs is to trade something you value less for something you value more. The thing you care about the most—that’s the thing you don’t compromise on!

(This is, by the way, Negotiations 101.)

For me, I felt like publishing in scientific journals required me to be dishonest. So I stopped publishing in scientific journals.

The "whole spiel" has a link to another essay by the same author. At the very end, it gives an example of what they mean by "being honest" -- what science can look like when one isn't worried about peer review.

see also: These Are Your Doges, If It Please You