LessWrong 2.0 Reader

My description was a pretty quick gloss, but yep, the government is large and I know partners have been inquiring with various offices. Getting money is always going to be a problem. Honestly part of it is, let's say it takes three years to get funding for [something you care about], it's not actually that long in government timelines but it feels like forever when you work at a small organization or company and your work revolves around that particular thing. 

(Let me know if I misunderstood; I'm reading your second sentence as "why aren't the companies...") On company size: The industry is split between emitter companies and consumer product companies; the emitter companies sell the far-UV emitter (basically the lightbulb) to a different company that builds the housing for consumers. The emitter companies are usually a branch of a larger electronics/lighting company; the consumer product companies are usually very small. 

Some companies have run their own studies, but most of their installations are much too small to be studies in themselves. One problem I've heard about in the case of at least one larger installation is that the customer who sought the installation wanted the data to remain confidential. Otherwise, large studies are indeed mostly too costly for these companies to self-fund entirely, but they may offer partial funding or provide their lamps at-cost or as donations to studies. 

From my observations it's fairly common for post-rationalists to go to rationalist events and vice-versa, so there's at least engagement on the level of waving hello in the lunchroom. There's enough overlap in identification that some people people in both categories read each other's blogs, and the essays that wind up at the intersection of both interests will have some back and forth in the comments. Are you looking for something more substantial than that?

I can't think of any reverting rationalists off the top of my head, though they might well be out there.

Isn't this already the commonly-accepted reason why sunglasses are cool?

Anyway, Claude agrees with you (see 1 and 3)

I think the best Less Wrong Census for mental illness would be 2016 [? · GW], though 2012 did ask about autism. You're probably going to have better luck using the 2024 SSC/ACX survey data, as it's more recent and bigger.

Have fun! 

It may be that what we call lucid dreaming is just an instance of dreaming that “you” are aware that “you” are dreaming. Consider the following:

(1) It must be possible for humans to have dreams where the narrative includes the notion that you are aware of dreaming—where the dream constructs a scenario that mimics lucidity, but this awareness is merely part of the dream’s content.

(2) It is not necessarily possible for humans to engage in lucid dreaming, as traditionally understood.

Distinguishing between lucid dreaming and (1) seems challenging, though evidence does exist that increases the posterior probability of true lucid dreaming (e.g., eye movement tests and neurological correlates of consciousness).

I'm just a layman on this topic, so my views on this may be somewhat naive and uninformed.

Donation opportunities for restricting AI companies 

• Pause AI: protests and lobbying
• Stop AI: is barricading OpenAI
• FoxGlove: a legal non-profit targeting big tech scaling.
• Disruption Network Institute: whistleblowers and researchers reporting on the AI military misuses.
• Distributed AI Research Institute:  AI ethics researchers giving general AI advocates hell and advocating for specialised models serving communities.
• European Guild for AI Regulation:  lobbying in the EU against the data scraping that makes large models possible.
• Concept Art Association:  lobbying in the EU against the data scraping that makes large models possible.
  
   

In my pipeline:  

• funding a 'horror documentary' against AI by an award-winning documentary maker (got a speculation grant of $50k)
• funding lawyers in the EU for some high-profile lawsuits and targeted consultations with EU AI Office.
   

If you're a donor, I can give you details on their current activities. I worked with staff in each of these organisations. DM me.

One is introspecting on your current mental state ("I feel a headache starting")

That's mostly what I had in mind as well. It still implies the ability to access a hierarchical model of your current state.

You're not just able to access low-level facts like "I am currently outputting the string 'disliked'", you also have access to high-level facts like "I disliked the third scene because it was violent", "I found the plot arcs boring", "I hated this movie", from which the low-level behaviors are generated.

Or using your example, "I feel a headache starting" is itself a high-level claim. The low-level claim is "I am experiencing a negative-valence sensation from the sensory modality A of magnitude X", and the concept of a "headache" is a natural abstraction over a dataset of such low-level sensory experiences.

It sounds like the core idea is a variant of the Intelligence Manhattan Project idea, but with a focus on long term international stability & a ban on competitors.

Perhaps the industry would be more likely to adopt this plan if GUARD could seek revenue the way corporations currently do: by selling stock & API subscriptions. This would also increase productivity for GUARD & shorten the dangerous arms race interval.

I have a pedantic and a non-pedantic answer to this. Pedantic: you say X is "usually considered good" if it increases welfare. Perhaps you mean to imply that if X is usually considered good then it is good. In this case, I refer you to the rest of the paragraph you quote.

Non-pedantic: yes, it's true that once you accept some fundamental assumptions about goodness and badness you can go about theorising and looking for evidence. I'm suggesting that motivated reasoning is the mechanism that makes those fundamental assumptions believable.

I added a paragraph mentioning this, because I think your reaction is probably common.