LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Dan Neidle: The 20,000% spike at £100,000 is absolutely not a joke – someone earning £99,999.99 with two children under three in London will lose an immediate £20k if they earn a penny more. The practical effect is clearer if we plot gross vs net income.

Can't it actually be good to encourage people to not work? I'd imagine if everyone in the United Kingdom worked half the number of hours, salaries wouldn't decrease very much. Their society, as a whole, doesn't need to work so many hours to maintain the quality of life, they only individually need to because they drive each others' wages down.

If the above is true, aren't the postmodernists right? Isn't all this talk of 'truth' just an attempt to assert the privilege of your own beliefs over others, when there's nothing that can actually compare a belief to reality itself, outside of anyone's head?

No, we are talking about personal epistemology. That is, if we cannot compare a belief to reality, you cannot also compare it to some other persons beliefs (there is reality at least in between). We want truth to be a way of privledging some of our beliefs over other beliefs, in a way so that we can functionalize an epistemology. 

For this, what we want are beliefs where our expected value for the difference between the believed results and the actual results (that is our loss in ML terms (retroactivly)) and expected informaiton magintutde, bayesian, are small, are more true, which propogates according to our update rule (that is, our "logical system")

We don't want to talk about partial rationality; we want notions of rationality which bounded agents can fully satisfy.

Why expect this kind of thing to exist? It seems to me that the ideas of computational boundedness and optimality are naturally in tension. 

Yep, thank you!

I've now summarized those details as they were presented in the video. 'Staying more grounded in how bad it is' with more precision would require you or whoever learning more about these developments from the respective companies on your own, though the summaries I've now provided can hopefully serve as a starting point for doing so. 

You say this:

If you’re thinking, “Wait no, I’m pretty sure my group is fundamentally about X, which is fundamentally good,” then you’re probably still in Red or Blue.

But you also say this:

First, the Grey tribe is about something, [...] things that people already think are good in themselves.

Doesn't the first statement completely undermine the second one?

Seems the perfect post to link one of the best blog posts I have ever read on the internet: How Japanese zoning works. 

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

[ Look at those same authors with some other mention-counting tool, you mean? ]

I'm still interested in this question! Someone could look at the sources I discuss in my tweet and see if this is real. https://x.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1869357399108198489

Interesting question: why are people quickly becoming less interested in previous standards?

[ Source ]