LessWrong 2.0 Reader

One of people's biggest reasons not to vote for Trump is his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. What is your view on that?

I'm a lifelong independent centrist who leans clearly Republican in voting despite my nature. I actually mostly read Dem or Dem leaning sources for the majority of my political reading (though it isn't super skewed and I do make sure to seek out both sides). I would definitely vote for a Democrat that seemed like a good candidate with good policies (and have at the state level). I believe it is my duty as an American citizen to know a lot more about politics than I would prefer. (I kind of hate politics.)
I really wished there was a valid third option in 2016, but unfortunately I couldn't even find a third party candidate that seemed better than Trump even then. Hilary was a truly abysmal candidate. That isn't actually enough to get me to vote for someone, and I would rather do a protest vote than vote for someone that would be a bad choice. In the end, I only decided to vote for Trump two weeks before the election instead of a protest vote.
Due to preexisting animus, I probably would have ignored Trump's actual words and deeds on the 2016 campaign trail if the media hadn't constantly lied about them, but the things he said were both much truer than claimed, and actually made a lot of sense. The media has never stopped lying about Trump since then, but they just shredded their credibility with me and many others. I don't recall the sources, but unless I am remembering incorrectly (which is always a possibility), this lying campaign against Trump was directly suggested through op-eds in major newspapers, and then implemented. You can probably make good points against Trump, but no one seems to actually complain about things that are both true and actually bad? (I am very pedantic about truth, and find that I'm not interested in listening to people who twist things and then pretend they are true.)
I deeply want to change and improve things, and chafe at the idea of being restricted to some old formula for life but I've been forced to realize that conservatism is necessary. I am very much a centrist in terms of ideology, but in the current state of America, that means being very open to conservative ways and values. Understanding why what you are changing is the way it is, and being careful with the changes are both very necessary; since most things are actually pretty well tuned, incautious changes usually make things much worse. 
The extremely obvious reason why people support Trump is because he was a good and effective president (in comparison to other presidents, which is a low bar, I know). President is a very difficult job where people mostly screw up, and much of it is ceremonial, but Trump had a large number of successes compared to what I expected going in. The state of the country was clearly improved by his actions, and would be again. The country and world situation got much worse under his successor, Joe Biden (in a way that also mirrored the failures of Trump's predecessor).
I've had a strong personal distaste for Trump for decades, but he was either the best president in my lifetime or very near. I'm loyal to the America, so I've been forced to upgrade my opinion of him dramatically. I still wouldn't like to hang out with him, and wouldn't encourage others to do so, but that isn't the point of selecting a president. It's for the good of the country.
He's actually a centrist; there is a reason he was comfortable as a democrat before, and as a Republican now. None of his personal positions are extreme, and though he's willing to work with people more extreme than him, and it tends to be to the right, the only reason he worked primarily with Republicans is because the Democrats were busy trying to score political points instead of advancing their policies. Since Trump actually wants things, people can work with him if they choose to, and they don't have to do anything extreme to do so.
His opponents are pretty unimpressive at best. Kamala Harris was a terrible state politician (I'm Californian and saw what she did in my state); either corrupt as hell or incompetent as hell (likely both), though I don't have particular evidence at hand of it. She was a completely ineffectual VP. Her VP choice is deeply unimpressive. She obviously helped cover up Biden's decline into clearly being an unfit president. Her ideas are either stolen from Trump's campaign or incredibly harmful. Almost no one actually expects her to be a good president? Just a few months ago even the Democrats thought she was completely incompetent, and she was only selected for contingent reasons that had nothing to do with her quality as a candidate.
Additionally, the Democrats have gone too far, and the Republicans need to be given another turn. As an independent, I wouldn't want a particular party to grow too powerful, and the democrats are in a much stronger overall position in terms of controlling the country outside of politics. If Trump wins, the Democrats will still be in a strong position and have a lot of control over the next four years, while the Democrats might get away with going completely overboard like they have been trying to.
Some short points: He's not the most accurate speaker, and really doesn't care to be (which rubs me the wrong way), but he means what he says, and actually tries to follow through. I actually think he lies less than the standard politician, which is, I admit, mostly an inditement of his fellow politicians. He's the only president I know of to reduce regulation. He appointed very capable judges whose legal reasoning seems pretty good (even when I disagree with them). He was willing to work with the opposition, but had genuine goals for the good of the country rather than just being political. I know what I'm getting with him at this point (Trump is who he is). Trump will be term limited, so the next election would be an even fight between the Dems and Reps.
If you want to respond to my post, I'm open to pushback, though I don't know how much I would say since I am a long term lurker who rarely comments (mostly in bursts). I would prefer responding to things much shorter than my post here I admit. I'm not happy with how long this is, but I tend to be long winded on each point in a discussion and have to consciously dial it back. Since each part of my reply would likely be long, it would be difficult to respond to something this length personally. I would prefer to talk in general, rather get bogged down in details that are not actually important to how people actually view the situation. That said, important details are obviously important to talk about.

Thanks for the suggestion! This sounds pretty cool and I think would be worth trying.

One thing that might make this a bit tricky is finding the right subset of the data to feed into Claude. Each feature only fires very rarely so it can be easy to fool yourself into thinking that you found a good classifier when you haven’t.

For example, many of the features we found only fire when they see check. However, many cases of check don’t activate the feature. The problem we ran into is that check is such an infrequent occurrence that you can only get a good number of samples showing check by taking a ton of examples overall, or by upweighting the check class in your sampling.

So if we show Claude all the examples where a feature fired and then some equal number of randomly chosen examples where it didn’t, chances are that just using “is in check” will be a great classifier. I think we can get around this with prompting Claude to find as many restrictions as possible, but sort of an interesting thing that might come up.

Trump has certainly contributed to the amount of distrust the latter are now feeling, of course. Though I'm personally struggling to say whether this was due to his positioning alone, or (at least in part) thanks to an increasingly larger portions of the "machine" actively weaponizing more and more of its metaphorical antibodies against the threat of his highly unwarranted "invasion".

I think one thing you're missing is the huge right-wing media ecosystem, the part of the "machine" that supports Trump, even spreading lies to support him. Take for example the court case Dominion v. Fox which showed pretty clearly that Fox News is willing to broadcast statements they know are false, as long as it's what their audience wants to hear (i.e. they're audience captured). Fox News is one of the largest media networks in the US and when Trump and his attorneys said the election was stolen, and Fox News knew it wasn't stolen, they still said it was stolen.

We attempted [LW · GW]1.a "diversity measure based on sentence embeddings" and found that for Llama3.2-1B the diversity appears to decay after the cusp value for R; picking R at highest average diversity was a decent heuristic for finding meaningful steering vectors. The Llama model starts to produce highly repetitive output past the cusp. We demonstrated that repetitive completions were considered similar by our chosen sentence embedding model (SentenceTransformer all-mpnet-base-v2). Using "sum of variances" vs "mean of cosine similarities" didn't seem to matter.

hare/tortoise takeoff

Another issue is that a lot of o1’s thoughts consist of vagaries like “reviewing the details” or “considering the implementation”, and it’s not clear how to even determine if these steps are inferentially valid.

If you're referring to the chain of thought summaries you see when you select the o1-preview model in chatgpt, those are not the full chain of thought. Examples of the actual chain-of-thought can be found on the learning to reason with LLMs page with a few more examples in the o1 system card. Note that we are going off of OpenAI's word that these chain of thought examples are representative - if you try to figure out what actual reasoning o1 used to come to a conclusion you will run into the good old "Your request was flagged as potentially violating our usage policy. Please try again with a different prompt."

Great post!

I think schizophrenia is generally recognized as involving more deficiencies in local than long-distance cortex-to-cortex communication. I don't have any particular knockdown studies for this and your Google Scholar judo seems on a level with mine. But as far as I understand it, autism is the disorder associated with deficits in longer white matter tracts; I believe this is because axons grow too densely and mesh too tightly during fetal development, while in schizophrenia the opposite happens and you end up with fewer axons [also probably fewer neurons because fewer neural progenitor divisions but this wouldn't a priori affect the shape of the connectome].

I figure, when a neurotypical person is subvocalizing, there’s communication between the motor cortex parts that are issuing the subvocalization commands (assuming that that’s how subvocalization works, I dunno), and the sensory cortex parts that are detecting the subvocalization which is now happening. Basically, the sensory cortex has ample warning that the subvocalization is coming. It’s not surprised when it arrives.

But in schizophrenia, different parts of the cortex can’t reliably talk to each other. So maybe sometimes the sensory cortex detects that a subvocalization is now happening, but hadn’t gotten any signal in advance that this subvocalization was about to be produced endogenously, by a different part of the same cortex. So when it arrives, it’s a surprise, and thus is interpreted as exogenous, i.e. it feels like it’s coming from the outside.

I don't see how your theory would make this prediction. To me it seems like your theory predicts, if anything, weaker subvocalization in schizophrenics - not subvocalization that's more perceptible. The "it inhibits the warning shot but not the actual data packet" thing frankly feels like an epicycle.

I don't see how Dehaene clarifies anything or how your theory here relies on him.

I appreciate you sharing your perspective!  My first question for you is, are these the actual reasons you support Trump, or are these the arguments for him you'd present?  What I mean is that, as someone who doesn't support Trump, I have plenty of arguments I can give for why he's a poor candidate, but if I'm honest, my direct reason for not wanting to vote for him is a strong negative association I've built with him over the past 8 years.  Now, why do I have that negative association?  Well, hard to know 100%, but I suspect it's his divisive rhetoric.  I always hear him talking about us vs them, the media being unfair, lock her up, people rigging elections, etc.  I remember in 2016 when he won I thought, "hey, I didn't like how he campaigned, but now that he won, maybe he'll turn out to be decent president, and then in his "American carnage" inauguration speech he talked about how he was only going to be a president for the people who voted for him, and I was like "well, there goes that theory".  The other turning point for me was when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power repeatedly leading up to the 2020 election, which is a huge red flag for me.  So my actual reasons for not supporting Trump are: I dislike his divisive rhetoric and fear the impact of electing someone who rejects the tradition of peacefully giving up power when voted out.  
What are your actual reasons, if they are different from the issues you've already shared?

Sure, I'll attempt a steelman.  I don't know how well I'll do, and the purpose of this question is to help me understand so I could do better, but why not have a before/after version.  So here's my initial attempt at a steelman (I guess it ended up being more "honest" than a normal steelman, more like "channeling" a rational Trump supporter.)

Ok, is Trump actually a genius?  No.  Is he the smartest, most moral, or otherwise flawless candidate?  No.  But I don't need a role model to be President, I need someone who will create change, and Trump, more than any politician in my voting lifetime has offered a credible promise of change.  Despite all the "Hope and Change" every politician promises, they only ever got to their current position by conforming to the current system and not rocking the boat.  Trump is the first politician who got there by being independently wealthy and popular in the real world, outside of the political machine.  And yeah, I'd support Musk or someone else who ran for office like that.  I even liked Yang, though he had some ideas that were kind of out there for me.  Trump doesn't just promise change - he is a change from the norm.

Why do I want change?  I don't know - call me an optimist, but I gotta think we can do better than this.  Maybe I've just bought the propaganda, but I believe that there was a time when hard work paid off, and people valued family more than appearances, and I feel like we've lost that.  It feels like people who didn't work hard are getting ahead while people who are working are falling behind, and I keep hearing more virtue signalling and people obsessed with social media.  I'm willing to roll the dice on seeing what someone from outside the system can do.  

So yeah, I can give you tons of reasons why Trump is a better vote, and I believe them too, but the real reason I support him is because he has shown that he is willing to take real action, even if people don't like it.  As self-aggrandizing as he can be, he's not spending his career virtue signalling, he is willing to step on toes, and he will actually put America first.