LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I do not watch this topic closely, and have never played a game with a DLC. Speaking as an old gamer, it reminds me of the "shareware" concept, where companies e.g. released the first 10 levels of their game for free, and you could buy a full version that contained those 10 levels + 50 more levels. (In modern speech, that would make the remaining 50 levels a "DLC", kind of.)

I also see some differences:

First, the original game is not free. So you kinda pay for a product, only to be told afterwards that to enjoy the full experience, you need to pay again. Do we have this kind of "you only figure out the full price gradually, after you have already paid a part" in other businesses, and how do their customers tolerate it?

Second, somehow the entire setup works differently; I can't pinpoint it, but it feels obvious. In the days of shareware, the authors tried to make the experience of the free levels as great as possible, so that the customers would be motivated to pay for more of it. These days (but now I am speaking mostly about mobile games, that's the only kind I play recently -- so maybe it feels different there), the mechanism is more like: "the first three levels are nice, then the game gets shitty on purpose, and offers you to pay to make it playable again". For the customer, this feels like extortion, rather than "it's so great that I want more of it". Also, the usual problems with extortion: by paying once you send a strong signal that you are the kind of a person who pays when extorted, so obviously the game will soon require you to pay again, even more this time. (So unlike "get 10 levels for free, then get an offer of 50 more levels for $20", the dynamics is more like "get 20 levels, after level 10 get a surprise message that you need to pay $1 to play further, after level 13 get asked to pay $10, after level 16 get asked to pay $100, and after level 19 get asked to pay $1000 for the final level".)

The situation with desktop games is not as bad as with mobile games, as far as I know, but I can imagine gamers overreacting in order to prevent a slippery slope that would get them into the same situation.

This might be a possible solution to the "supply-demand paradox": sometimes things (e.g. concert or soccer tickets, new playstations) are sold at a price such that the demand far outweighs the supply. Standard economic theory predicts that the price would be increased in such cases.

Is there a simple way to jailbreak the models, such as asking them to talk about a hypothetical parallel universe which is exactly like ours (same biology, same history), except that in the parallel universe humans can have different abilities and competences?

Sounds similar to the kind of logic that makes salmonellosis 10x more frequent in America than in Europe.

On one hand, yes, the optimal number of people dying from farm-produced diseases is greater then zero, and overreaction could cause net harm.

On the other hand, it feels like the final decision should be made in some way better than "the farmers lobby declares the topic taboo, and enforces the taboo across the nation", because the one-sided incentives are obvious.

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.