LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Arxiv is basically one huge, glacially slow internet comment section, where you reply to an article by citing it.

I guess Leopold was right^[1].  AI arms race it is.

1. ^{^}

   I suppose it is possible that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I'm skeptical given how fast it's happened.

There is just one problem that Libet discovered: There is no time for S(A) to cause A.

My favorite example is throwing a ball: A is the releasing of the ball at the right moment to hit a target. This requires Millisecond precision of release. The S(A) is precisely timed to coincide with the release. It feels like you are releasing the ball at the moment your hand releases it. But that can't be true because the signal from the brain alone takes longer than the duration of a thought. If your theory were right, you would feel the intention to release the ball and a moment later would have the sensation of the result happening. 

Now, one solution around this would be to time-tag thoughts and reorder them afterwords, maybe in memory - a bit like out-of-order execution in CPUs handles parallel execution of sequential instructions. But I'm not sure that is what is going on or that you think it is.  

So, my conclusion is that there is a common cause of both S(A) and A.

And my interpretation of Daniel Ingram's comments is different from yours.

In Mind and Body, the earliest insight stage, those who know what to look for and how to leverage this way of perceiving reality will take the opportunity to notice the intention to breathe that precedes the breath, the intention to move the foot that precedes the foot moving, the intention to think a thought that precedes the thinking of the thought, and even the intention to move attention that precedes attention moving.

These "intentions to think/do" that Ingraham refers to are not things untrained people can notice. There are things in the mind that precede the S(A) and A and cause them but people normally can't notice them and thus can't be S(A). I say these precursors are the same things picked up in the Libet experiments and neurological measurements.

I agree that it is easy to automatically lump the two concepts together.

I think another important part of this is that there are limited methods for most consumers to coordinate against companies to lower their prices. There's shopping elsewhere, leaving a bad review, or moral outrage. The last may have a chance of blowing up socially, such as becoming a boycott (but boycotts are often considered ineffective), or it may encourage the government to step in. In our current environment, the government often operates as the coordination method to punish companies for behaving in ways that people don't want. In a much more libertarian society we would want this replaced with other methods, so that consumers can make it harder to put themselves in a prisoner's dilemma or stag hunt against each other.

If we had common organizations for more mild coordination than the state interfering, then I believe this would improve the default mentality because there would be more options.

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.