LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I don't understand Eliezer's explanation. Imagine Alice is hard-working and Bob is lazy. Then Alice can make goods and sell them to Bob. Half the money she'll spend on having fun, the other half she'll save. In this situation she's rich and has a trade surplus, but the other parts of the explanation - different productivity between different parts of Alice (?) and inability to judge her own work fairly (?) - don't seem to be present.

Update: 

From Igor Babuschkin of xAI: "The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet 😬"

https://x.com/ibab/status/1893774017376485466?t=vqJvcSPltsMI5sdGYZJnjg&s=19

Thanks for clarifying. If you ever pitch your ideas to potential investors or something, I recommend avoid talking about hundreds of embryos, at least not without acknowledging that this is unrealistic with current technologies. When reading, I was a bit worried that you might be divorced from reality, thinking in sci-fi terms, not knowing the basic realities about IVF. This made it difficult for me to trust other things you were saying about domains I know nothing about. Just letting you know in case it's helpful :)

The alternative is to pit people against each other in some competitive games, 1 on 1 or in teams. I don't think the feeling you get from such games is consistent with "being competent doesn't feel like being competent, it feels like the thing just being really easy", probably mainly because there is skill level matching, there are always opponents who pose you a real challenge. 

Hmm maybe such games need some more long tail probabilistic matching, to sometimes feel the difference. Or maybe variable team sizes, with many incompetent people versus few competent, to get a more "doomguy" feeling.

I found the graph confusing, why one set of points is unstable/stable

Just notice that systems are not stable, even if you got to decide all policy in a given point in time,  policy will naturally warp and people will abuse it. 

If killing people, quickly etc was normal, I assume regimes would use this to stop people from unseating them. (Trump may have been killed, see the attempts to paint him as a rapist)

I would only use the death penalty where we're close to certain X actually committed the crime. That's fairly common for shoplifting and murder, but unfortunately far less common in rape (unless it's e.g. on a street with CCTV cameras). I guess for probable rape I probably wouldn't impose the death penalty and hope that they'll get caught for a violent crimes later.

Please record this course and release the problems 

Hitler 

Trump - if killing people on short time lines was accepted...

Girl owes guy money, gets him killed for rape. (Her friends join in)

People who were canceled?

I could see nasty business issues, mafias using this etc - but that sounds like a novel so we'll leave it aside

Thanks for commenting. However, he also wrote in the same paragraph:

There are no written records of it, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened, or something like that.

He wrote "or something like that", so I think that allows some variation of two (main) groups fighting each other in a war. He gave his reasoning for why individuals would team into larger groups in the previous paragraph, but I will agree that it's mostly speculative how many warring groups there were. Regardless, I'm convinced that the island's environmental degradation and population collapse were both most likely caused by overpopulation.