LessWrong 2.0 Reader

some OpenAI board members who the Office of National AI Strategy was allowed to appoint, and they did in fact try to fire Sam Altman over the UAE move, but somehow a week later Sam was running the Multinational Artificial Narrow Intelligence Alignment Consortium, which sort of morphed into OpenAI's oversight body, which sort of morphed into OpenAI's parent company, and, well, you can guess who was running that.

pretty sassy abbreviations spiced in there.'Đ

This comment received a lot of backlash. Admittedly, my comment wasn't as diplomatic as it might've been nor did I elaborate on my own reasoning. In my defence, I didn't think the original article was making much of an effort to get at the truth (see other criticisms above). Rather, it is a (very) one-sided account advocating that we should not consider the other side of the story (ie, it is an attack on both-sidesism).

The attack on both-sidesism is consistent with findings referenced in the video below. Both sides are prone to such anti-democratic behaviour, but the findings also suggest that one side is "slightly more willing to sacrifice democracy (by supporting actions that benefit their own party at the expense of democracy)". This might be a case in point.

Feel free to watch the whole thing, but the tldr part starts at 4:05.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVqjH6MaqRY

The events of Nov 6/7, 2024 might support the argument that the original argument was indeed self-defeating; ie, an argument against the argument against both-sidesism---effectively, an argument for both-sidesism.

Except there's more at play than just winning the election. If you're a voter in a swing state, the candidates are paying more attention to you, and making more promises catering to you. The parties are picking candidates they think will appeal to you. Even if your odds of winning stay the same, the prize for winning gets bigger.

It was exiting a few elections ago when Colorado was in play by both parties. We even got to host the Democratic convention in Denver. Now, they just ignore us.

I really feel like we're talking past each other here, because I have no idea how any of what you said relates to what I said, except the first paragraph.

As for that, what you describe sounds worse than a median researcher problem, instead sounding like a situation ripe for group think instead!

This proposal increases the influence of the states, in the sense of "how much does it matter that any given person bothered to vote?", but does it increase their preference satisfaction? If the 4 states each conceive of themselves as red or blue states, then each of them will be thinking "under the current system I estimate an X% chance that we'll elect my party's president while under the new system I estimate a Y% chance we'll elect my party's president". If both sides are perfect predictors then one will conclude that Y<X so they should not do the deal. If both sides are imperfect predictors such that they both think Y>X, then the outside view still tells them it's equally likely that they're the sucker here and shouldn't participate.

Were whichever markets you're looking at open at this time? Most stuff doesn't trade that much out of hours.

I mostly think it's too loose a heuristic and that you should dig into more details

What's the most important technical question in AI safety right now?

Finding two bugs in a large codebase doesn't seem especially suspicious to me.

While I agree that people are in general overconfident, including LessWrongers, I don't particularly think this is because Bayesianism is philosophically incorrect, but rather due to both practical limits on computation combined with sometimes not realizing how data-poor their efforts truly are.

(There are philosophical problems with Bayesianism, but not ones that predict very well the current issues of overconfidence in real human reasoning, so I don't see why Bayesianism is so central here. Separately, while I'm not sure there can ever be a complete theory of epistemology, I do think that Bayesianism is actually quite general, and a lot of the principles of Bayesianism is probably implemented in human brains, allowing for practicality concerns like cost of compute.)