LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Well please do derive it then, because to me it seems you just focused on one aspect and then concluded that that aspect definitely is the correct answer. 

If the goal was to reward the best and the brightest, then why does china make some of them disappear from time to time? Why reeducate the odd billionaire who misbehaves? The idea was to get him in power because he knows better and generates riches, no?

On giving away stuff for 'free': what would be good examples in your opinion? Steel? Silicon or finished solar cells? Electric cars and batteries? Masks useful during pandemics?

Seriously?

I agree with you on the network effects and winner takes all mechanics. But to me that is not related at all to exports and their subsidies. Just making good stuff at a reasonable price is enough. If desired, production can be subsidized, sure, but that has positive effects in your country as well. Chinese people own lots of real estate, to of the line electronics and electric cars, more so than we do. 

For what it's worth, I still prefer the original title, even after seeing the rationale for changing it. Oh well.

They cash in politically. 

Imagine some middle eastern oil and money rich country going abroad to help develop a subsaharan economy to help them extract their resources. Imagine china doing the same. Who will have more success?

Our cruxes is whether the amount of investment to build one has a positive expected return on investment, breaking down into

1. If you could populate such a city
2. Whether this is a "try everything regardless of cost" issue, given that a replacent is being developed for other reasons.

I suggest focusing on 1, as it's pretty fundamental to your idea and easier to get traction on

That is completely fair, and I was being uncharitable (which is evidently what happens when I post before I have my coffee, apologies.)

I do worry that we're not being clear enough that we don't have solutions for this worryingly near-term problem, and think that there's far too little public recognition that this is a hard or even unsolvable problem.

what came of this? (doing research on bounties, prizes, and retroactive funding rn)

I dreamt that you could donate LessWrong karma to other LW users. LW was also an airport, and a new user had requested donations because to build a new gate at the airport, your post needed to have at least 60 karma and he had a plan to construct a series of them. Some posts had exactly 60 karma, with titles like "Gate 36 done, let's move on to the next one - upvote the Gate 37 post!".

(If you're wondering what the karma donation mechanism was needed for if users could just upvote the posts normally - I don't know.)

Apparently the process of constructing gates was separate from connecting them to the security control, and things had stopped at gate 36/37 because it needed to be connected up with security first. I got the impression that this was waiting for the security people to get it done.

I really like this general diretion of work: suggestions for capabilities that would also help with understanding and controlling network behavior.  That would in turn be helpful for real alignment of network-based AGI. Proposing dual-use capabilities advances seems like a way to get alignment ideas actually implemented. That's what I've done in System 2 Alignment [LW · GW], although that's also a prediction about what developers might try for alignment by default.

Whether the approach you outline here would work is an empirical question, but it sounds likely enough that teams might actually put some effort into it. Preprocessing data to identify authors and similar categories wouldn't be that hard.

This helps with the problem Nate Soares characterized as making cognition aimable at all [LW · GW] - having AI pursue one coherent goal, (separately from worrying about whether you can direct that "goal slot" toward something that actually works). I think that's the alignment issue you're addressing (along with slop potentially leading to bad AI-assisted alignment). I briefly describe the LLM agent alignment part of that issue in Seven sources of goals in LLM agents [LW · GW]. 

I hope I'm reading you right about why you think reducing AI slop would help with alignment.

It's hard to see what a novel insight is exactly. Any example can be argued against. Can you give an example of one? Or of one you've personally had?

Various LLMs can spot issues in code bases that are not public. Do all of these count?

I think a classic example of an efficient market is one where goods are mostly fungible, e.g. the market for grain, or screws of a particular specification, or copper.

I imagine that inside those markets it feels a lot less like there's any good deals to sniff out. There's definitely bad ones like fraudsters or subpar quality, or someone selling holy screws for 10 times the price, or someone just praying on newcomers to the market who aren't yet calibrated to the standard price, but these are fairly easy to filter out with a bit of due diligence.