LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Just a quick comment from my side:

PLEASE JUST READ YUDKOWSKY'S SEQUENCES

This post has received a lot of downvotes so far with NO substantive counter arguments from you guys. Please don't be misled by your emotions and try to look beyond the surface layer. Substance >> Style

It looks to me you're falling prey to some trivial Russell Conjugation. Please reread the sequences and take the following to heart:

"the real secret to rationality is noticing when someone is saying something for reasons unrelated to its truthfulness, and then applying this to yourself"

I'm open to changing my stance, I just want to figure out the actual truth. Common guys, you're better than this

"Bullying has distinct negative connotation"

I mention the concept of Russell Conjugation multiple times in my article. Did you read it?

"Bullies have bad intentions"

Intentions don't matter, results do. That's why capitalism works

when you're stuck at the bottom of an attractor a hard kick to somewhere else can be good enough even with unknown side effects.

If it really wanted to, there would be nothing at all stopping the US military from launching a coup on its civilian government.

There are enormous hurdles preventing the U.S. military from overthrowing the civilian government.

The confusion in your statement is caused by blocking up all the members of the armed forces in the term "U.S. military". Principally, a coup is an act of coordination. Any given faction or person in the U.S. military would have an extremely difficult time organizing the forces necessary without being stopped by civilian or military law enforcement first, and then maintaining control of their civilian government afterwards without the legitimacy of democratic governance.

In general, "more powerful entities control weaker entities" is a constant. If you see something else, your eyes are probably betraying you.

No, because I have no way to improve my ability to see loopholes and flaws, so there's always going to be residual uncertainty that can't be reduced. Risk aversion does the rest.

I hadn't made that connection yet. Excellent insight, thank you!

The examples you provided don't actually support the "one funeral at a time" narrative in your title. Take Barbara McClintock's jumping genes or Barry Marshall's H. pylori discovery -- in both cases, many scientists changed their views based on compelling evidence while very much alive. There are plenty of other examples of this. For example, the acceptance of prions as disease agents, the role of microbiomes in health, dark energy, and mitochondria's bacterial origins all show how consensus can shift rapidly once a sufficient amount of evidence has accumulated. Scientists change their minds all. the. time. 

This is not to say that there are not fads or incorrect beliefs in science -- of course there are. And sometimes it can takes years or decades for them to be overwhelmed. But the "funeral" framing in particular is not only historically inaccurate but also promotes a harmful view that death is necessary for progress. What we actually see in these examples is that scientific views change when sufficient evidence accumulates and a sufficient number of people are convinced, regardless of generational turnover. Suggesting we need scientists to die rather than be convinced by evidence is both incorrect and ethically fraught. I am saddened to see it here and therefore strong downvoted this post. 

Yeah that's fair, I'm just so used to American odds for gambling that I mentally use them all the time for these sorts of things.

Probably should have used good old fashioned odds instead.

The reason casino's show something like "Yankee's +110 Red sox -120" is so you can easily see the casino's rake or something. 

I'm pretty sure Ryan is rejecting the claim that the people hiring for the roles in question are worse-than-average at detecting illegible talent.

Depends on what you mean by "resume building", but I don't think this is true for "need to do a bunch of AI safety work for free" or similar.  i.e. for technical research, many people that have gone through MATS and then been hired at or founded their own safety orgs have no prior experience doing anything that looks like AI safety research, and some don't even have much in the way of ML backgrounds.  Many people switch directly out of industry careers into doing e.g. ops or software work that isn't technical research.  Policy might seem a bit trickier but I know several people who did not spend anything like years doing resume building before finding policy roles or starting their own policy orgs and getting funding.  (Though I think policy might actually be the most "straightforward" to break into, since all you need to do to demonstrate compentence is publish a sufficiently good written artifact; admittedly this is mostly for starting your own thing.  If you want to get hired at a "larger" policy org resume building might matter more.)