LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think there might be something to this, so the rest of what I have to say is nit-picking, not an objection to the basic premise.

1. In karmamudra, one imagines oneself (and one’s partner) as enlightened beings. The intention to act as you imagine an enlightened beings would act might be an important safeguard against all sorts of badness.

2. An obvious question is whether chöd is rather more BDSM-y than other forms of meditation.
 

I deferred my decision to after visiting the Learning Theory course [LW · GW]. At the time, the timing had made them seem vaguely affiliated with this programme.

Ha, sadly it is a pseudonym. My parents were neither that lucky nor that prescient when it came to naming me.

Very not important question: is Gene Smith your actual name or a pseudonymn? 

Either way, it's the perfect name for the author of this post. 

Hats off to you gene smith. 

Personally it doesn't feel reassuring that a single person can change the production system prompt without any internal discussion/review and that they would decide to blame a single person/competitor for the problem.

So far interest in the programme was modest. I would appreciate it to hear from people who either (i) deliberated whether to apply and decided against it or (ii) feel that they might meet the requirements but are not interested. Specifically, what held you back and what changes (if any) would persuade you to apply?

It doesn't work at that small of a scale. More generally, this principle doesn't work on any scale too small to support an international industrial economy. It wouldn't even work for trade between different tribes of farmers. This is a phenomenon that you only see at very large scales of human behavior. You need massive coordination failures colliding with each other for these ideas to kick in.

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 :)