LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I am impressed with how far you thought this through. Amend the constitution, including the constitution amendment section

The opposing states in the coalition will simply declare war against the defectors. It's surely worth keeping your own army to keep being a swing bloc.

Yes, I agree it's worse. If ONLY a better understanding of statistics by Phd students and research faculty was at the root of our cultural confusion around science.

I want this to be a board game

I don't know if this would be good for the country, but it would certainly be good political entertainment.

Doesn't everybody always code in a strong time-discount? I have never seen code without it.

There are severe issues with the measure I'm about to employ (not least is everything listed in https://www.sqlite.org/cves.html) , but the order of magnitude is still meaningful:

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=sqlite 170 records

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=postgresql 292 records (+74 postgres and maybe another 100 or so under pg; the specific spelling “postgresql” isn't used as consistently as “sqlite” and “mysql” is)

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=mysql 2026 records

Thanks for forwarding my thoughts!

I'm glad your team is equipped to do small, quick grants - from where I am on the outside, it's easy to accidentally think of OpenPhil as a single funding monolith, so I'm always grateful for directional updates that help the community understand how to better orient to y'all.

I agree that 3months seems reasonable when 500k+ is at stake! (I think, just skimming the application, I mentally rounded off "3 months or less" to "about 3 months", as kind of a learned heuristic on how orgs relate to timelines they publish.)

As another data point from the Survival and Flourishing Funds, turnaround (from our application to decision) was about 5 months this year, for an ultimately 90k grant (we were applying for up to 1.2m). I think this year they were unusually slow due to changing over their processes; in past years it's been closer to 2-3 months.

Our own philosophy at Manifund does emphasize "moving money quickly", to almost a sacred level. This comes from watching programs like Fast Grants and Future Fund, and also our own lived experience as grantees. For grantees, knowing 1 month sooner that money is coming, often means that one can start hiring and executing 1 month sooner - and the impact of executing even 1 day sooner can sometimes be immense (see: https://www.1daysooner.org/about/ )

Sorry! My response:

1. Yeah you might be right about this, maybe I should get less excited and say something like "it feels like it should cut in half but taking into account Richard's meta argument I should adjust downwards and maybe it's just a couple percentage points"

2. If the conditional obtains, that's also evidence about a bunch of other correlated good things though (timelines being slightly longer, people being somewhat more reasonable in general, etc.) so maybe it is legit to think this would have quite a big effect

3. Are you sure there are so many different factors that are of this size and importance or bigger, such that my p(doom) should be oscilating wildly etc.? Name three. In particular, name three that are (a) of at least this importance, and (b) that have actually happened (or switched from probabily-will-happen-to-probably-won't) in the last three years. If you can't name three, then it seems like your claim is false; my p(doom) won't be oscilating unduly wildly.

What would be some concrete examples/areas to work on for human flourishing? (Just saw a similar question on the definition; I wonder what could be some concrete areas or examples)