LessWrong 2.0 Reader

FWIW I agree with you and wouldn't put it the way it is in Roger's post. Not sure what Roger would say in response.

There's no norm saying you can't be ignorant of stats and read, or even post about things not requiring an understanding of stats, but there's still a critical mass of people who do understand the topic well enough to enforce norms against actively contributing with that illiteracy. (E.g. how do you expect it to go over if someone makes a post claiming that p=0.05 means that there's a 95% change that the hypothesis is true?)

Taking it a step further, I'd say my household "has norms which basically require everyone to speak English", but that doesn't mean the little one is quite there yet or that we're gonna boot her for not already meeting the bar. It just means that she has to work hard to learn how to talk if she wants to be part of what's going on.

Lesswrong feels like that to me in that I would feel comfortable posting about things which require statistical literacy to understand, knowing that engagement which fails to meet that bar will be downvoted rather than getting downvoted for expecting to find a statistically literate audience here.

A real life use for smart contracts 😆

thanks. Can you say more about why?

I mean runaway sexual selection is basically H1, which I updated to being less plausible. See my answer here [LW(p) · GW(p)]. (You could comment there why you think my update might be wrong or so.)

Claude dot Ai did a remarkable job of summarizing my thoughts about the current state of things:

https://medium.com/@tanjent/unedited-chat-with-claude-dot-ai-about-politics-and-acting-against-ones-own-self-interest-b3b805d85015

I suspect that runaway sexual selection played a huge part.

Not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Universe seems to follow relatively simple deterministic laws. That doesn't mean you can use quantum field theory to predict the weather. But chaotic systems can be modeled as statistical ensembles. Temperature is a meaningful measurement even if we can't calculate the motion of all the individual gas molecules.

If you're referring to human irrationality in particular, we can study cognitive bias [? · GW], which is how human reasoning diverges from that of idealized agents in certain systematic ways. This is a topic of interest at both the individual level of psychology, and at the level of statistical ensembles in economics.

In terms of developing better misalignment risk countermeasures, I think the most important questions are probably:

• How to evaluate whether models should be trusted or untrusted: currently I don't have a good answer and this is bottlenecking the efforts to write concrete control proposals.
• How AI control should interact with AI security tools inside labs.

More generally:

• How can we get more evidence on whether scheming is plausible?
• How scary is underelicitation? How much should the results about password-locked models [LW · GW] or arguments about being able to generate small numbers of high-quality labels or demonstrations [AF · GW] affect this?

Curated. I think this model is pretty useful and well-compressed, and I'm glad to be able to concisely link to it.

The policy implications are still much open to debate, for here on LessWrong and for other ecosystems in the world.

I have observed a transition. 12 years ago, the left-right split was based on many loosely correlated factors and strategic/inertial effects, creating bizarre situations like near perfect correlation between opinions on Gay Marriage and privatization of social security. I think at that time you could reason much better if you could recognize that the separation between left and right was not natural. I at least have a ton of cached arguments from this era because it became such a familiar dynamic. 

Nowadays, I don't think this old schema really applies, especially among the actual elected officers and party leadership. The effective left right split is mono-factor: you are right exactly in proportion to your personal loyalty to one Donald J. Trump, resulting in bizarre situations like Dick Cheney being classified as "Left."