LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Do you think a 3-state dark mode selector is better than a 1-state (where “auto” is the only state)? My website is 1-state, on the assumption that auto will work for almost everyone and it lets me skip the UI clutter of having a lighting toggle that most people won’t use.

Gwern discusses this on his “Design Graveyard” page:

Auto-dark mode: a good idea but “readers are why we can’t have nice things”.

OSes/browsers have defined a ‘global dark mode’ toggle the reader can set if they want dark mode everywhere, and this is available to a web page; if you are implementing a dark mode for your website, it then seems natural to just make it a feature and turn on iff the toggle is on. There is no need for complicated UI-cluttering widgets with complicated implementations. And yet—if you do do that, readers will regularly complain about the website acting bizarre or being dark in the daytime, having apparently forgotten that they enabled it (or never understood what that setting meant).

A widget is necessary to give readers control, although even there it can be screwed up: many websites settle for a simple negation switch of the global toggle, but if you do that, someone who sets dark mode at day will be exposed to blinding white at night… Our widget works better than that. Mostly.

Is it possible that someday dark-mode will become so widespread, and users so educated, that we could quietly drop the widget? Yes, even by 2023 dark-mode had become quite popular, and I suspect that an auto-dark-mode would cause much less confusion in 2024 or 2025. However, we are stuck with the widget—once we had a widget, the temptation to stick in more controls (for reader-mode and then disabling/enabling popups) was impossible to resist, and who knows, it may yet accrete more features (site-wide fulltext search?), rendering removal impossible.

(The site-wide fulltext search feature has since been added, of course.)

You are right, and it's a serious counterargument to consider.

You are also right that the Anthropic Trilemma and Magic by Forgetting do not work with path-dependent identity.

Okay, glad we are on the same page here.

However, we can almost recreate the magic machine from the Anthropic Trilemma using path-based identity

I'm not sure I understand your example and how it recreates the magic. Let me try to describe to it with my own words, and then correct me if I got something wrong.

You are put to sleep. Then you are splitted into two people. Then, on random, one of them is put into red room and one into green room. Let's say that person 1 is in red room and 2 in green room. Then the person 2 is splitted into two people: 21 and 22. Both of them are keept in green rooms. Then everyone is awaken. What should be your credence to awake in a red room?

Here there are three possibilities: 50% to be 1 in a red room and 25% chance to be either 21 or 22 in green rooms. No matter how much a person in a green room is split, the total probability for greenness stays the same. All is quite normal and there is no magic.

Now let's add a twist.

Instead of putting both 21 and 22 in green rooms, one of them - let it be 21 - is put in a red room.

In this situation, total probability for red room is P(1) + P(21) = 75%. And if we split the 2 more and put more of its parts in red rooms we get highter and highter probability to be in red room. Therefore we get magical ability to manipulate probability.

Am I getting you correctly?

I do not see anything problematic with such "manipulation of probability". We do not change our estimate just because more people with the same experience are created. We change the estemate because different fraction of people get different experience. This is no more magical than putting both 1 and 2 into red rooms and noticing that suddenly the probability for being in red room reached 100%, compared to the initial formulation where it was mere 50%. Of course it did! That's completely lawful behaviour of probability theoretic reasoning.

Notice that we can't actually recreate the anthropic trilemma and be certain to win lottery this way. Because we can't move people between branches. Therefore everything adds up to normality.

Also, path-dependent identity opens the door to back-causation and premonition, because if we normalize outputs of some black box where paths are mixed, similar to the magic machine discussed above

We just need to restrict the mixing of the paths, which is the restriction of QM anyway. Or maybe I'm missing something? Could you give me an example with such backwards causality? Because as far as I see, everything is quite straightforward.

The main problem of path-dependent identity is that we assume the existence of a "global hidden variable" for any observer. It is hidden as it can't be measured by an outside viewer and only represents the subjective chances of the observer to be one copy and not another. And it is global as it depends on the observer's path, not their current state. It therefore contradicts the view that mind is equal to a Turing computer (functionalism) and requires the existence of some identity carrier which moves through paths (qualia, quantum continuity, or soul).

Seems like we are just confused about this "identity" thingy and therefore don't know how to correctly reason about it. In such situations we are supposed to 

• Acknowledge that we are are confused
• Stop speculating on top of our confusion and jumping to conclusions based on it
• Outline the possible options to the best of our understanding and keep an open mind until we manage to resolve the confusion

It's already clear that "mind" and "identity" are not the same thing. We can talk about identities of things that do not possess a mind, and identities are unique while, there can exist copies of the same mind.So minds can very well be Turing computers, but identities are something else, or even not a thing at all. 

Our intuitive desire to drag in consciousness/qualia/soul also appears completely unhelpful after thinking about it for the first five minutes. Non-conscious minds can do the same probability theoretic reasonings as conscious ones. Nothing changes if 1, 21 and 22 from the problem above are not humans but programs executed on different computers.

Whatever extra variable we need it seems to be something that a Laplace's demon would know. It's a knowledge about whether a mind was split into n instances simultaneously or through multiple steps. It indeed means that something else except the immediate state of the mind is important for "indentity" considerations, but this something can very well be completely physical - just the past history of causes and effects that led to this state of the mind.

Reminds me of Internal Family Systems, which has a nice amount of research behind it if you want to learn more.

This is a great idea. I've brainstormed and compiled a list of additional ideas that could also help raise fertility rates. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#boosting-western-fertility

Do you think a 3-state dark mode selector is better than a 1-state (where "auto" is the only state)? My website is 1-state, on the assumption that auto will work for almost everyone and it lets me skip the UI clutter of having a lighting toggle that most people won't use.

Also, I don't know if the site has been updated but it looks to me like turntrout.com's two modes aren't dark and light, they're auto and light. When I set Firefox's appearance to dark or auto, turntrout.com's dark mode appears dark, but when I set Firefox to light, turntrout.com appears light. turntrout.com's light mode appears to be light regardless of my Firefox setting.

However it is true that doing something with a 10% success rate 10 times will net you an average of 1 success.

For the easier to work out case of doing something with a 50% success rate 2 times:

• 25% chance of 0 successes
• 50% chance of 1 success
• 25% chance of 2 successes

Gives an average of 1 success.

Of course this only matters for the sort of thing where 2 successes is better than 1 success:

• 10% chance of finding a monogamous partner 10 times yields 0.63 monogamous partners in expectation.
• 10% chance of finding a polyamorous partner 10 times yields 1.00 polyamorous partners in expectation.

e^3 is ~20, so for large n you get 95% of success by doing 3n attempts.

Agreed, I was trying to convey something that I think is underrated succinctly, obviously going to miss some nuances.

Open Philanthropy's AI safety work tends toward large grants in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions, meaning individuals and organizations with lower funding needs won't be funded by them

This is directionally true but projects seeking less money should still apply to OP if relevant; a substantial minority of recent OP AI safety and GCR capacity building grants are <$100K.

Nice. I have a suggestion how to improve the article. Put a clearly stated theorem somewhere in the middle, in its own block, like in academic math articles.