LessWrong 2.0 Reader

All of these are high-risk high-reward ventures, given reasonably likely contingency scenarios for how the world changes over the next 20 years (e.g. institutional decline, epistemics do not improve, etc) derived from a faster version of the world's changes over the last 60 years.

EA itself is also in that exact same category of high-risk high-reward ventures, so we know that OP's risk tolerance is already quite high as it is (e.g. due to moral hazard for OP employees and affiliates OP hoping that OP is around for the long haul, which is notable because building real bonds of trust is more expensive for smarter more creative people and building it in or near OP is a significant investment).

I think the interchangeability is just hard to understand. Even though I know they are the same thing, it is still really hard to intuitively see them as being equal. I personally try (but not very hard) to stick with X -> Y in mathy discussions and if/only if for normal discussions

passed the ITT

@Pazzaz [LW · GW] That's the Ideological Turing Test. [LW · GW] I agree that really ought have been written out in full. 

At this point, a thought rang aloud in my mind: "why do all the primeval situations end up in a conflict?" I believe the answer in this story is: Senku was reasonably sure that he could beat Tsukasa and then achieve a better world than a compromise, and vice versa. Also, Tsukasa might have had less social priming towards cooperation.

As it happened, I recently watched all of Dr Stone too, and have mixed feelings about it but a lot of my observations are in the same vein.

I think you underplay the extremity of this: Tsukasa's problem is that Senku wins by default in this scenario. As soon as Senku revives a few dozen more people and reveals that the secret is nitric acid produced from bat guano (among many other possible sources), Tsukasa has basically lost. Even if he kills Senku then, there may well be a chemist or someone among the revived, who can easily replicate it.

So a more realistic scenario would be something like, Senku is revived after Tsukasa mistakenly thinks he's killed Senku, hikes a week or two away, finds one of Japan's myriad of caves/mountains, starts reviving people, and a year later, Tsukasa's hunter-gatherers, venturing afield after a hard winter, discover that there's dozens of settlements of thousands of revived people who are busy reviving more, and the modern world is on the way to a reboot and there is nothing some teenagers dressed up like Fist of the North Star villains can do about it, because they can't revive many people themselves without defeating the whole point. It is all-or-nothing. (Eventually, Tsukasa just totally loses everything and has to settle for being bought off, in essence, because Senku manages to accumulate enough of an advantage even without revivals. The series unconvincingly says that Tsukasa's politics were superficial and so he got what he really wanted in the end, to try to rationalize how it worked out for him. Seems like cope to me!)

It is, in fact, remarkably similar to nuclear weapons or pandemics or even more so, AI, in terms of how unleashing a particular process almost immediately becomes irreversible, and so the phase immediately before the unleashing becomes all-important (even though it looks like 2 highschoolers bickering over being a tankie and how awful a world with mortgages in it is, or some nerds arguing about speculative physics).

I reject the premises of this blatantly loaded question.

The strategy Trump attempted to win the election using alternative electors to keep Biden from getting a majority so that Congress would decide the Presidency, reprising the similar (successful) strategy employed by Hayes in 1876, was unlikely to succeed from the outset, and poorly executed to boot. So yeah, I think it was "bad" in that sense, but probably not what you mean. Do I think it was an insurrection or a putsch, or a threat to "our democracy," or anything like that? No, no more than this appeal to electors in 2016 to change their votes was a foiled plot to overthrow the government. 

Once upon a time I worked on language models and we trained on data that was correctly split from tuning data that was correctly split from test data.

And then we sent our results to the QA team who had their own data, and if their results were not good enough, we tried again. Good enough meant "enough lift over previous benchmarks". So back and forth we went until QA reported success. On their dataset. Their unchanging test dataset.

But clearly since we correctly split all of our data, and since we could not see the contents of QA's test dataset, no leakage could be occurring.

Reverend Thomas Bayes didn't strike me as a genius either, but of course the bar was a lot lower back then. 

Norman Borlaug (father of the Green Revolution) didn't come across as very smart to me. Reading his Wikipedia page, there didn't seem to be notable early childhood signs of genius, or anecdotes about how bright he is. 

(I think I agree with you. I wasn't thinking super hard about the full context of the conversation. I was just intrigued by Nate's challenge. I don't really think engaging with my comment is going to be a good use of your time)

(we can safely assume that the future civ discards all the AIs that can tell they're simulated a priori; that's an easy tell.)

Yeah, that's fair. It seemed more relevant to this specific hypothetical. I wasn't really answering the question in its proper context and wasn't applying steelmans or adjustments based on the actual full context of the conversation (and wouldn't have written a comment without doing so, but was intrigued by your challenge).