LessWrong 2.0 Reader

There’s a lot here and if my existing writing didn’t answer your questions, I’m not optimistic another comment will help. Instead, how about we find something to bet on? It’s difficult to identify something both cruxy and measurable, but here are two ideas:

I see a pattern of:
1. CEA takes some action with the best of intentions
2. It takes a few years for the toll to come out, but eventually there’s a negative consensus on it.
3. A representative of CEA agrees the negative consensus is deserved, but since it occurred under old leadership, doesn’t think anyone should draw conclusions about new leadership from it.
4. CEA announces new program with the best of intentions.

So I would bet that within 3 years, a CEA representative will repudiate a major project occurring under Zach’s watch.

I would also bet on more posts similar to Bad Omens in Current Community Building or University Groups Need Fixing coming out in a few years, talking about 2024 recruiting. 
 

Arguably, "basic logical principles" are those that are true in natural language. Otherwise nothing stops us from considering absurd logical systems where "true and true" is false, or the like. Likewise, "one plus one is two" seems to be a "basic mathematical principle" in natural language. Any axiomatization which produces "one plus one is three" can be dismissed on grounds of contradicting the meanings of terms like "one" or "plus" in natural language.

The trouble with set theory is that, unlike logic or arithmetic, it often doesn't involve strong intuitions from natural language. Sets are a fairly artificial concept compared to natural language collections (empty sets, for example, can produce arbitrary nestings), especially when it comes to infinite sets.

So, I think Fight 1 is funny, but it is kind of high context, involving reading two somewhat long stories. (Planecrash in particular is past a million words long!) I'd considered "Who would win in a fight, Eliezer Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander? ["Eliezer", "Scott", "Wait, what's this? It's Aella with a steel chair!"]" and "Who is the rightful caliph? ["Eliezer Yudkowsky","Scott Alexander", "Wait, what's this? It's Robin Hanson with a steel chair!"]" but feel a bit weird about including real people. 

I think they're just as funny though, and far more people will understand it, so maybe I should switch. Anyone have convincing thoughts here?

It would be nice to see at least three questions which would demonstrate how person extracts evidence from others' words, how much time and emotions could they spend if they needed to communicate a point precisely, etc.

I'll have to sleep on that, actually. Will return tomorrow, presumably with more concrete ideas)

I don't think there's a lot of value in distinguishing 3000 and 1,000,000 and probably for any aggregate you'll want to show this will just be "later than 2200" or something like that. But yes this way they can't make a statement that this will be 1,000,000 which is some downside.

I'm not a big fan of looking at the neighbors to decide whether this is a missing answer or high estimate (it's OK to not want to answer this one question). So some N/A or -1 should be ok.

(Just to make it clear, I'm not saying this is an important problem)

99.9% of all cryptocurrency projects are complete scams (conservative estimate).

On first skim, I agree with the estimate as stated and would post a limit order for either side. I'd also like to note that "crypto in general is terrible" instead of "all crypto is terrible", as there have been applications developed that do not allow you to lose all funds without explicit acknowledgement.

Similarly, Cyber Security is terrible.  Basically every computer on the internet is infected with multiple types of malware.

It is presumably terrible (or, 30%, result of availability bias), and I've observed bugs happen because functionality upgrade did not consider its interaction with all other code. However, I disagree that every computer is infected; probably you meant that it is under constant stream of attack attempts?

The insecure domains mainly work because people have charted known paths, and shown that if you follow those paths your loss probability is non-null but small. As a matter of IT, it would be really nice to have systems which don't logically fail at all, but that requires good education and pressure-resistance skills for software developers.

I have no opinion on the difference and chatgpt agrees with you, so sure, changed to "eighty percent of the benefit."

The most important thing is "There is a small number of individuals who are paying attention, who you can argue with, and if you don't like what they're doing, I encourage you to write blogposts or comments complaining about it. And if your arguments make sense to me/us, we might change our mind. If they don't make sense, but there seems to be some consensus that the arguments are true, we might lose the Mandate of Heaven or something."

I will personally be using my best judgment to guide my decisionmaking. Habryka is the one actually making final calls about what gets shipped to the site, insofar as I update that we're doing a wrong thing, I'll argue about it."

It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.

This particular sort of comment doesn't particularly move me. I'm more likely to be moved by "I predict that if AI used in such and such a way it'll have such and such effects, and those effects are bad." Which I won't necessarily automatically believe, but, I might update on if it's argued well or seems intuitively obvious once it's pointed out.

I'll be generally tracking a lot of potential negative effects and if it seems like it's turning out "the effects were more likely" or "the effects were worse than I thought", I'll try to update swiftly.

Thanks for the year catch.

I could check their expected price of bitcoin, but that feels like more weight than I want to put on bitcoin- it's already a little bit overlapping with the S&P question. What I'd like to replace it with is something that 1. will have a definitive answer by next summer, 2. people have enough context to understand the question, and 3. isn't at obvious. 

The questions are not checking for social skills. I am not sure how I'd do that on an online survey that's going to be self reported, and if you have thoughts about that I'm kind of curious? What percentage of the survey being about social skills would be sufficient? (I'm heavily into meetups and in-person gatherings for LessWrong events, so I might be one of the more receptive audiences for this line of argument!)

I think TMS doesn't rewrite anything, instead activating neural circuits in another pattern? Then, new pattern is not depressed, brain can notice that (on either conscious or subconscious level) and make appropriate changes to neural connections.

Basically, I believe that whatever resulting patterns (including "other parts of you changed into something non-native and alien") you dis-endorse, are "committed" with significantly lower probability.