LessWrong 2.0 Reader

So in theory I think we could probably validate IQ scores of up to 150-170 at most. I had a conversation with the guys from Riot IQ and they think that with larger sample sizes the tests can probably extrapolate out that far.

We do have at least one example of a guy with a height +7 standard deviations above the mean actually showing up as a really extreme outlier due to additive genetic effects.

The outlier here is Shawn Bradley, a former NBA player. Study here

Granted, Shawn Bradley was chosen for this study because he is a very tall person who does not suffer from pituitary gland dysfunction that affects many of the tallest players. But that's actually more analogous to what we're trying to do with gene editing; increasing additive genetic variance to get outlier predispositions.

I agree this is not enough evidence. I think there are some clever ways we can check how far additivity continues to hold outside of the normal distribution, such as checking the accuracy of predictors at different PGSes, and maybe some clever stuff in livestock.

This is on our to-do list. We just haven't had quite enough time to do it yet.

The second point is the distinction between causal for the association observed in the data, and causal when intervening on the genome, I suspect more than half of the gene is only causal for the association. I also imagine there are a lot of genes that are indirectly causal for IQ such as making you an attentive parent thus lowering the probability your kid does not sleep in the room with a lot of mold, which would not make the super baby smarter, but it would make the subsequent generation smarter.

There are some, but not THAT many. Estimates from EA4, the largest study on educational attainment to date, estimated the indirect effects for IQ at (I believe) about 18%. We accounted for that in the second version of the model.

It's possible that's wrong. There is a frustratingly wide range of estimates for the indirect effect sizes for IQ in the literature. @kman [LW · GW] can talk more about this, but I believe some of the studies showing larger indirect effects get such large numbers because they fail to account for the low test-retest reliability of the UK biobank fluid intelligence test.

I think 0.18 is a reasonable estimate for the proportion of intelligence caused by indirect effects. But I'm open to evidence that our estimate is wrong.

I agree this would be a good argument for short sentences in 2019, but does it still apply with modern LLMs?

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to move back to "draft" mode, and be more specific. Technically, I believe either the Copenhagen, Many Worlds, or any other interpretation requires initial recognition of photon detection, but I should have made that clear. I appreciate the help. 

But then I heard it recast as the adhd tax

I suspect I have some ADHD or something similar too, and I observed that difficult things stop being difficult when I develop a habit around them. Basically, "doing it for the first time" and "doing it after I haven't been doing it for months" are super hard. But "doing the same thing I did yesterday" is easy.

In context of cooking, it means it is easier for me to cook the same two or three meals over and over again. Choices are bad, mindless repetition is good. I mean, I should think about the things that I want to do, but at a different time than when I am actually supposed to do them -- at that moment, thinking just leads to procrastination.

Precise plans are easier to do. "Cut some vegetables" is too abstract. "Cut 1/3 of iceberg lettuce, 1/3 of Chinese cabbage, a few cherry tomatoes, and put some dressing on top of that, maybe add some meat" is a plan I can do reliably.

I mean, the proximate cause of the 1989 protests was the death of the quite reformist general secretary Hu Yaobang. The new general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, was very sympathetic towards the protesters and wanted to negotiate with them, but then he lost a power struggle against Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping (who was in semi retirement but still held onto control of the military). Immediately afterwards, he was removed as general secretary and martial law was declared, leading to the massacre.

I think it's indeed humor & indeed singling out a company.

Believing you may be in a simulation by the other party, or believing that some of your copies are simulated by the other party, is a type of acausal trade, and likely the simplest type of acausal trade.

For CDT agents, it is the only type of acausal trade, since the other party can only influence the CDT agent's incentives by simulating the CDT agent in a closed loop where its behaviour directly causes its outcomes.

I admit that it is new framing to describe the malign agent simulating the other agent, as "offering it a bad acausal trade." I believe it summarizes what I'm saying elegantly, but of course I can talk about things without this framing if you think it's the cause of disagreement.

When reality deviates from the simulations (promises are not fulfilled), it may be too late. The promise may require the scammed agent to do something irreversible, like build a copy of the other agent, hand over all power to the other agent, and then expect to get the reward.

I agree the alien civilization does not necessarily have a high prior to begin with, but my point is that if you choose any system of priors (not just the Solomonoff universal prior) which is wrong by a few orders of magnitude, then even tons of observations and CDT won't save you.

If your prior is wrong by a few orders of magnitude, there isn't necessarily an alien civilization with a very high prior, but there very likely is. Either your prior overestimated the weight of slightly simpler universes with slightly fewer bits (maybe like the malign Solomonoff universal prior), or your prior overestimated the weight of more complex universes. And these universes might have an order of magnitude more weight than they should, and contain intelligent agents who realize you've overestimated their prior probability by an order of magnitude.

Regardless of whether you are a CDT agent or UDT agent, they will use your overestimation to create something subjectively very important to you, which you will trade much of your universe for due to you underestimating the prior probability of your actual universe.

If you are a UDT agent, they can offer the typical acausal trade. If you are a CDT agent, they can run so many simulations of you that it is functionally the same as an acausal trade. Instead of assigning too much "value" to their offer, you assign too much "probability" to their simulations of you.

Their simulations of you reward you for doing what they want, and you rationally take the reward (based on your prior), since getting that reward seems more probable than achieving anything in the case you are not in a simulation.

Edit: this decision theory stuff is insidiously hard, I see other people arguing about it in the comments here. It must be easy to make a mistake and feel confident about it. I'm sorry for being argumentative, I will try to do more questioning whether I am wrong. Thank you for tolerating me :/

I occasionally get texts from journalists asking to interview me about things around the aspiring rationalist scene. A few notes on my thinking and protocols for this:

• I generally think it is pro-social to share information with relatively high-integrity journalists on topics of clear public interest.
• By-default I speak with them only if their work seems relatively high-integrity. I like journalists whose writing is (a) factually accurate, (b) boring, and (c) do not feel to me to have an undercurrent of hatred for their targets.
• By default I speak with them off-the-record, and then offer to send them write-ups of the things I said that they want to quote. This has gone quite well. I've felt comfortable speaking in my usual fashion without wondering about nailing each and every phrasing. Then I ask what they're interested in quoting, and I send them (typically a 1-2 page) google doc on those topics (largely re-stating what I already said to them, and making some improvemetns / additions). Then they tell me which quotes they want to use (typically cutting many sentences or paragraphs half-way). Then I make one or two slight edits and give them explicit permission to quote. I think this has gone quite well and they've felt my quotes were substantive and improvements.
• For the New York Times, I am currently running on the policy of "I am happy to chat off-the-record. I will also offer quotes by my usual protocol, but I will only give them conditional on you including a mention that I disapprove of the NYT's de-anonymization policies (which I bring up due to your reckless and negligent behavior that upturned the life of a beloved member of my community)." I am about to try this for the first time, and I expect they will thus not want to use my quotes, and that's fine by me.

It sounds like you're assuming the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which is not strictly necessary. To the best of my understanding, initially but not solely from the learned hear on LW [LW · GW], QM works just fine if you just don't do that and assume the wave equations are continuous work exactly as written, everywhere, all the time, just like every other law of physics. You need a lot of information processing, but not sophisticated as described here.

There's a semi-famous, possibly apocryphal, story about Feynman when he was a student. Supposedly he learned about the double slit experiment and asked what would happen when you added a third, fourth, fifth, etc. slit. Then he asked about the limiting case - infinite slits - aka no barrier. The point was, there's never a moment when anything fundamental changes about what is being computed, whether there's a barrier with slits or not.

One last, even more speculative thought: