LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I remember writing a note a few years ago on who I wished would to create a long site, and your pseudonym was on the list. Happy to see that this has happened, even if for unfortunate reasons.

In my understanding of english, when people say algorithm about social media systems, it doesn't encompass very simple, transparent ones. It would be like calling a rock a spirit.

Maybe we should call those recommenders?

I guess in the real world the rules aren’t harder per se but just less clear and not written down. I think both the rules and tools needed to solve contest math questions at least feel harder than the vast majority of rules and tools human minds deal with. Someone like Terrence Tao, who is a master of these, excelled in every subject when he was a kid (iirc).

I think LLMs have a pretty good model of human behavior, so for anything related to human judgement, in theory this isn’t why it’s not doing well.

And where rules are unwritten/unknown (say biology), are the rules not at least captured by current methods? The next steps are probably like baking the intuitions of something like alphafold into something like o1. Whatever that means. R&D is what’s important and there is generally vast sums of data there.

Any thoughts on potential connections with task arithmetic?

I think I speak for all of the LessWrong commentariat when I say I am sad to see you go. 

That said, congratulations for building such a wonderfully eigen website!

my dude, top level post- this does not read like a shortform

I agree that there was a lot more to that exchange than that quick summary.

My point was that there wasn't enough or it wasn't careful enough.

Thanks, this is closely related!

The two suggestions that come to mind after brief thought are:

1. Search the internet for prompts others have found to work for this. I expect a fairly lengthy and complicated prompt would do better than a short straightforward one.
2. Use a base model as a source of creativity, then run that output through a chat model to clean it up (grammar, logical consistency, etc)

Coffee culture in America doesn't have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn't last (after all, Americans - infamous smugglers in general - were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.

(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky - as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)