LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Hm, good point. I'll amend the previous post.

When I think about a good business idea, but end up doing nothing, I often later find out that someone else did it.

How would a language like this survive a change in ontology? You take a category and split it into 5 subcategories. What if two years later you find out that a sixth subcategory exists?

If you update the language, you would have to rewrite all existing texts. The problem would not be that they contain archaic words -- it would be that all the words are still used, but now they mean something different.

Seemingly similar words (prepending one syllable to a long word or a sentence) will result in a wildly different meaning.

It's called "defensive democracy," and is standard practice in most of Europe.

Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain.

I think the advice works better as "if it's a social situation, and the situation calls for what you consider to be a lie, don't let that stop you." You do not have to tell someone that you're not feeling fine when they ask how you're doing. You do not need to tell them that actually the color they painted their house in is really ugly. And you certainly shouldn't go to a job interview, get asked for your biggest weakness, and actually state your biggest weakness.

If someone reads the advice and thinks "Lying, that's an idea! I'll use it every time I can" they've overcorrected by far too much.

I think this article would be much better with many specific examples. (If that would make it too long, just split it into a series of articles.)

The input of 2k characters is rather limiting, albeit understandable. Giving these instructions to an existing LLM (I used Gemini 2.5 Pro) gives longer, better results without the need for a dedicated tool. 

I agree. Any punishment in a system has the side effect of punishing you for using the system.

The second suggestion is an interesting one. It would probably work better if you had an AI watching you constantly and summarizing your daily activities. If doing some seemingly unimportant X predictably makes you more likely to do some desirable Y later, you want to know about it. But if you write your diary manually, there is a chance that you won't notice X, or won't consider it important enough to mention.

I wonder if this lurch happens at the two meter mark in countries that use the metric system?

 

No way. First, we do centimeters, so 195cm not 1.95m.

Second, 2m is crazy high. You pity people over 2m for their terrible life in a society that is not accustomed to that height, you don’t envy them. 

The alternative theory is that political bias has gotten much greater, and the acceptable political beliefs are strongly in the direction of trusting some groups and not trusting others. By that theory, progressive movements are trusted more because they have better press. Realizing that you can increase trust by creating worker co-ops would then be an example of Goodhart's Law--optimizing for "being trusted" independently of "being trustworthy" is not a worthy goal.