LessWrong 2.0 Reader

This is pretty inspiring to me. Thank you for sharing.

I suspect it would still involve billions of $ of funding, partnerships like the one with Microsoft, and other for-profit pressures to be the sort of player it is today. So I don't know that Musk's plan was viable at all.

Note that all of this happened before the scaling hypothesis was really formulated, much less made obvious.

We now know, with the benefit of hindsight that developing AI and it's precursors is extremely compute intensive, which means capital intensive. There was some reason to guess this might be true at the time, but it wasn't a forgone conclusion—it was still an open question if the key to AGI would be mostly some technical innovation that hadn't been developed yet.

Those people don't get substantial equity in most business in the world. They generally get paid a salary and benefits in exchange for their work, and that's about it.

Haven't looked too closely at this, but since there are some upvotes, wanted to comment with my initial two thoughts:

1. child consent is tricky.
2. likely many are foreign children, which may or may not be in the 75 million statistic

It is good to think critically, but I think it would be beneficial to present more evidence before making the claim or conclusion

The other day I was trying to think of information leaks that a competent conspiracy couldn't prevent, regarding this. I just thought of one small one: people will sometimes randomly die or have their homes raided. If the slavery is common, then sometimes the slaves will be discovered during these events. Even if the escapees wanted to silence the story out of shame, cops would probably gossip to the press.

So you can probably tally such events, crunch the numbers, and get a decent conspiracy-resistant estimate.

As a layman, I have not seen much unrealistic hype. I think the hype-level is just about right.

You should not bury such a good post in a shortform

Maybe it should be a game that everyone can play

You didn't ask me to pitch you but I will say a short pitch here for any bystanders. I know how to how find a handful of good people and I know how to let a good chef cook without isolating them either. And I can make a pretty good fried egg if we're starving.

One funny weak bit of evidence for my lack of politicking is that I have like six co-authored papers but no first-authored papers.

As always, I may not be the intended audience, so please excuse my questions that might be patently obvious to the intended audience.

Am I right in understanding a very simplified version of this model is that if you use willpower too much without deriving any net benefits, eventually you'll suffer 'burnout' which really is just a mistrust of using willpower ever, which may have negative effects on other aspects of your life even where willpower is needed like, say, cleaning your house?

Willpower, as I understand it is another word for 'patience' or 'discipline', variously described as the ability to choose to endure pain (physical or emotional). Whether willpower actually exists is a question I won't get into here, let's assume for the sake of this model it does, and fits the description of the ability to choose to endure pain.

For me this sentence I find especially alien to me:

your psyche’s conscious verbal planner “earns” willpower (earns trust with the rest of your psyche) by choosing actions that nourish your fundamental, bottom-up processes in the long run. 

what is the "psyche's conscious verbal planner"?  I don't know what this is or what part of my mind, person, identity, totality as a organism or anything really that I can equate this label to. Also without examples of what actions are that nourish (again, would cleaning the house, cooking healthy meals be examples?), that are fundamental and those that aren't, it's even harder to pin down what this is and why you attribute willpower to it.

It appears to have the ability to force one's-self to go on a date, which really makes the "verbal" descriptor confusing since a lot of the processes that are involved in going on a date don't feel like they are verbal, lexical, or take the form of the speaker's native language written or spoken. At least in my experience, a lot of the thoughts, feelings, and motivations behind going on a date are not innately verbal for me and if you asked me "why did you agree to see this person?" - even if I felt no fear of embarrassment explaining my reasons - I'd have a hard time putting that into words. Or the words I'd use would be so impossibly vague ("they seem cool") as to suggest that there was a nonverbal reasoning or motivation.

Would this 'conscious verbal planner' also be the part of my mind and body that searches an online store a week later to see if those shoes I want are on special? Or would you attribute that to a different entity?

Is there an unconscious verbal planner?

When I am thinking very carefully about what I'm saying, but not so minutely that I'm thinking about the correct grammatical use, would the grammar I use be my unconscious verbal planner, while the content of my speech be the conscious verbal planner?

A lot of example, for me, of willpower often are nonverbal and come from guilt. Guilt felt as a somatic or bodily thing. I can't verbalize why I feel guilty, although it verbally equates to the words "should"  "must" and even "ought" when used as imperatives, not as modals.