LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yeah, the officially approved way is to just generate an alt. 

(But please don't vote with multiple accounts, we will probably notice, and we will ban you if we do)

No, but you can create an alt account.

What do you think is the main issue preventing companies from making more ethical recommendation algorithms? Is it the difficulty of determining objectively what is accurate and ethical? Or is it more about the incentives, like an unwillingness to sacrifice addictiveness and part of their audience?

The next major update can be Claude 4.0 (and Gemini 2.0) and after that we all agree to use actual normal version numbering rather than dating?

Date-based versions aren't the most popular, but it's not an unheard of thing that Anthropic just made up: see CalVer, as contrasted to SemVer. (For things that change frequently in small ways, it's convenient to just slap the date on it rather than having to soul-search about whether to increment the second or the third number.)

For raw IQ, sure. I just mean "conversational flavor".

Good recommendation engines are really important for our epistemic environment, in my opinion more than for example prediction markets. Because it indeed affects so much of the content that people ingest in their daily lives, on a large scale.

The tough question is how tractable it is. Tournesol has some audience, but also seems to struggle to scale it up despite pretty mature software. I really don't know how effective it would be to pressure companies like Facebook or TikTok, or to push for regulation, or to conduct more research on how to improve recommendation algorithms. Seems worth investigating whether there are cost-effective opportunities, whether through grants or job recommendations.

Section 3.3(f)(iii):

Within 120 days of the date of this memorandum, DOE, acting primarily through the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and in close coordination with AISI and NSA, shall seek to develop the capability to perform rapid systematic testing of AI models’ capacity to generate or exacerbate nuclear and radiological risks. This initiative shall involve the development and maintenance of infrastructure capable of running classified and unclassified tests, including using restricted data and relevant classified threat information. This initiative shall also feature the creation and regular updating of automated evaluations, the development of an interface for enabling human-led red-teaming, and the establishment of technical and legal tooling necessary for facilitating the rapid and secure transfer of United States Government, open-weight, and proprietary models to these facilities.

It sounds like the plan is for AI labs to transmit models to government datacenters for testing. I anticipate at least one government agency will quietly keep a copy for internal use.

This is my favorite exchange I have ever read on LessWrong.

To be clear, GiveWell won’t be shocked by anything I’ve said so far. They’ve commissioned work and published reports on this. But as you might expect, these quality of life adjustments wouldnt feature in GiveWell’s calculations anyway, since the pitch to donors is about the price paid for a life, or a DALY.

Can you clarify what you mean by these quality of life adjustments not featuring in GiveWell's calculations? 

To be more concrete, let's take their CEA of HKI's vitamin A supplementation (VAS) program in Burkina Faso. They estimate that a $1M grant would avert 553 under-5 deaths (~80% of total program benefit) and incrementally increase future income for the ~560,000 additional children receiving VAS (~20%) (these figures vary considerably by location by the way, from 60 deaths averted in Anambra, Nigeria to 1,475 deaths averted in Niger) then they convert this to 81,811 income-doubling equivalents (their altruistic common denominator — they don't use DALYs in any of their CEAs, so I'm always befuddled when people claim they do), make a lot of leverage- and funging-related adjustments which reduces this to 75,272 income doublings, then compare it with the 3,355 income doublings they estimate would be generated by donating that $1M to GiveDirectly to get their 22.4x cash multiplier for HKI VAS in Burkina Faso. 

So: are you saying that GiveWell should add a "QoL discount" when converting lives saved and income increase, like what Happier Lives Institute suggests [EA · GW] for non-Epicurean accounts of badness of death? 

I have known some rich people.  They don't act as a coordinated group almost ever; and the group they don't form, is flatly not capable of accurately predicting and deliberately directing world-historical equilibria over centuries.

Beg to differ. Rich people congregate, populate, and settle in areas, and form orgs and egregore that push away and hide the poor and the problems that make them uncomfortable, and this happens largely unconsciously - phenomenologically - yet there is organizational agency in it. And this kind of wealth phenomena has certainly steered world-historical equilibria over centuries. My point is: it's not a "conspiracy" of rich people, it's a phenomenon of rich people, and I think you should include the phenomenology of wealthy populations in your modeling.