LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Don't think so. It is plausible that Manifund is eating the Stripe fees themselves, so we might end up getting ~1% more money, but I am not sure.

Yes, we have a brokerage account and a Coinbase account and can accept basically whatever crazy asset you want to give to us. We of course also accept bank transfers to avoid the Stripe fees.

Are you looking for comments/review, or just showing your work?

There currently doesn't really exist any good way for people who want to contribute to AI existential risk reduction to give money in a way that meaningfully gives them assistance in figuring out what things are good to fund. This is particularly sad since I think there is now a huge amount of interest from funders and philanthropists who want to somehow help with AI x-risk stuff, as progress in capabilities has made work in the space a lot more urgent, but the ecosystem is currently at a particular low-point in terms of trust and ability to direct that funding towards productive ends.

Really? What's the holdup here exactly? How is it still hard to give funders a decent up-to-date guide to the ecosystem, or a knowledgeable contact person, at this stage? For a workable budget version today, can't people just get a link to this [LW · GW] and then contact orgs they're interested in?

the outcome they are imagining for online spaces without moderation of what people say is essentially a fabricated option

Yep. In real life, intelligent debate is already difficult because so many people are stupid and arrogant. But online this is multiplied by the fact that during the time that takes it for a smart person to think about a topic and write a meaningful comment, an idiot can write hundreds of comments.

And that's before we get to organized posting, where you pay minimum wage to dozens of people to create accounts on hundreds of websites, and post the "opinions" they receive each morning by e-mail. (And if this isn't already automated, it will be soon.)

So an unmoderated space in practice means "whoever can vomit their insults faster, wins".

I'm of the opinion that democracies tolerably work in a pretty narrow range of conditions

One problem is that a large part of the population is idiots, and it is relatively easy to weaponize them. In the past we were mostly protected by the fact that the idiots were difficult to reach. Then we got mass media, which made it easy to weaponize the idiots in your country. Then we got internet, which made it easy to weaponize the idiots in other countries. It took some time for internet to evolve from "that mysterious thing the nerds use" to "the place where the average people spend a large part of their day", but now we are there.

I've run two workshops at LightHaven and it's pretty unthinkable to run a workshop anywhere else in the Bay Area. Lightcone has really made it easy to run overnight events without setup

I notice this is downvoted and by a new user. On the surface, it looks like something I would strongly consider applying to, depending on what happens in my personal life over the next month. Can anyone let me know (either here or privately) if this is reputable?

Thermal vision cuts right through tree cover, traditional camouflage and the cover of night.

Human soldiers in the open are helpless against cheap FPS drones with thermal vision.

A military channel went through a dozen countermeasures Nothing worked except one: Umbrellas.

https://youtube.com/shorts/gSDpovJmE-o?si=LlWHvclmOtCA47Mc

Can you give an example in another domain where philosophical reasoning about a topic led to empirical facts about that topic?

Yes -- I think evolution is a pretty clean example. Darwin didn't have any more facts than other biologists or philosophers, and he didn't derive his theory by collecting facts; he was just doing better philosophy than everyone else. His philosophy led to a large set of empirical predictions, those predictions were validated, and that's how and when the theory was broadly accepted. (Edit: I think that's a pretty accurate description of what happened, maybe you could argue with some parts of it?)

I think we should expect that consciousness works out the same way -- the problem has been solved, the solution comes with a large set of empirical predictions, it will be broadly accepted once the empirical evidence is overwhelming, and not before. (I would count camp #1 [LW · GW] broadly as a 'theory' with the empirical prediction that no crisp divide between conscious and unconscious processing exists in the brain, and that consciousness has no elegant mathematical structure in any meaningful sense. I'd consider this empirically validated once all higher cognitive functions have been reverse-engineered as regular algorithms with no crisp/qualitative features separating conscious and unconscious cognition.)

(GPT-4o says that before evolution was proposed, the evolution of humans was considered a question of philosophy, so I think it's quite analogous in that sense.)

Oh shit. It's worse even. I read the decimal separators as thousand separators.

I'm gonna just strike through my comment.

Thanks for noticing ... <3