LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I was also thinking recently that I would love this to exist! If I ever had the time I was going to try hacking it together in cursor

Check this out https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EFQ3F6kmt4WHXRqik/ugh-fields [LW · GW] 

A problem I have that I think is fairly common:

1. I notice an incoming message of some kind.
2. For whatever reason it's mildly aversive or I'm busy or something.
3. Time passes.
4. I feel guilty about not having replied yet.
5. Interacting with the message is associated with negative emotions and guilt, so it becomes more aversive.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the badness of not replying exceeds the escalating 4/5 cycle, or until the end of time.

Curious if anyone who once had this problem feels like they've resolved it, and if so what worked! 

Huh, seems to be working for me. What do you see when you click on it?

tinyurl.com/neel-mats-app

That's precisely the same thing. Thank you, that phrase somehow had never stuck in my mind

We (or at least a majority of humans) do still have inner desires to have kids, though; they just get balanced out by other considerations, mostly creature comforts/not wanting to deal with the hassle of kids. But yeah, evolution did not foresee birth control, so that's a substantial misgeneralization.

We are still a very successful species overall according to IGF, but birth rates continue to decline, which is why I made my last point about inner alignment possibly drifting farther and farther away the stronger the inner optimizer (e.g. human culture) becomes.

...and of course the comfiest things of all are tri blend t shirts, which contain a mix of both polyester and rayon. you can multi track drift poisons!

While true, bamboo rayon also isn't the best for human health or the environment, so it really is a pick your poison kind of deal. Here's a short write up from Patagonia about why they don't use it in their products, and of course a lot of Patagonia's things are polyester or polyester blends. (The terms viscose and rayon are generally interchangeable.)

It doesn't seem obvious to me which is worse between wearing polyester and bamboo rayon, health wise, but I do personally find rayon much more comfy.

Thank you, this has been a very interesting conversation so far.

I originally started writing a much longer reply explaining my position on the interpretation of QM in full, but realized that the explanation would grow so long that it would really need to be its own post. So instead, I'll just make a few shorter remarks. Sorry if these sound a bit snappy.

As soon as you assume that there exists an external universe, you can forget about your personal experience just try to estimate the length of the program that runs the universe.

And if one assumes an external universe evolving according to classical laws, the Bohmian interpretation has the lowest KC. If you're going to be baking extra assumptions into your theory, why not go all the way?

Interpretations and Kolmogorov Complexity

An interpretation is still a program. All programs have a KC (although it is usually ill-defined). Ultimately I don't think it matters whether we call these objects we're studying theories or interpretations.

Collapse postulate

Has nothing to do with how the universe operates, as I see it. If you'd like, I think we can cast Copenhagen into a more Many Worlds -like framework by considering Many Imaginary Worlds. This is an interpretation, in my opinion functionally equivalent to Copenhagen, where the worlds of MWI are assumed to represent imaginary possibilities rather than real universes. The collapse postulate, then, corresponds to observing that you inhabit a particular imaginary world -- observing that that world is real for you at the moment. By contrast, in ordinary MWI, all worlds are real, and observation simply reduces your uncertainty as to which observer (and in which world) you are.

If we accept the functional equivalence between Copenhagen and MIWI, this gives us an upper bound on the KC of Copenhagen. It is at most as complex as MWI. I would argue less.

Chess

I think we need to distinguish between "playing skill" and "positional evaluation skill". It could be said that DeepBlue is dumber than Kasparov in the sense of being worse at evaluating any given board position than him, while at the same time being a vastly better player than Kasparov simply because it evaluates exponentially more positions.

If you know that a player has made the right move for the wrong reasons, that should still increase your estimate of their playing skill, but not their positional evaluation skill.

Of course, in the case of chess, the two skills will be strongly correlated, and your estimate of the player's playing skill will still go down as you observe them making blunders in other positions. But this is not always so. In some fields, it is possible to reach a relatively high level of performance using relatively dumb heuristics.

Moving onto the case of logical arguments, playing skill corresponds to "getting the right answers" and positional evaluation skill corresponds to "using the right arguments".

In many cases it is much easier to find the right answers than to find correct proofs for those answers. For example, most proofs that Euler and Newton gave for their mathematical results are, technically, wrong by today's standards of rigor. Even worse, even today's proofs are not completely airtight, since they are not usually machine-verifiable.

And yet we "know" that the results are right. How can that be, if we also know that our arguments aren't 100% correct? Many reasons, but one is that we can see that our current proofs could be made more rigorous. We can see that they are steelmannable. And in fact, our current proofs were often reached by effectively steelmanning Euler's and Newton's proofs.

If we see DeepSeek making arguments that are steelmannable, that should increase our expectation that future models will, in fact, be able to steelman those arguments.

What is a reasonable response to an unsolicited message saying 'someone has hired someone to harm you', with scant details on who/what/when/where?

Personally, I'd read it, and the more seriously I took it, the less likely I would be to engage with the sender, I likely would not send an acknowledgement of receipt. Any additional communication from the sender, especially a message with an 'ask' like 'help me figure out who' or 'assist me in making internet content' would be viewed as extortion.

If someone showed up at my door, I might talk to them, and if they're a cop, I'd tell the cop that I'm concerned about the vaguely threatening messages I've gotten from 'some guy in another country'.

If you don't have much information ('just a social media name'), doing more 'sleuthing' is probably totally inappropriate.  The 'contractor' may or may not have done more, but either way, you're not really helping anything.

As far as law enforcement seeing you as a suspect/time waster/scammer, that's an easy one.  A cyber crime office will hear you confessing to some kind of 'hacking', other offices will hear that you have no actual details (so someone unknown, is threatening someone who is also unknown, no further details?  Sure ok I'll log it) and just assume you wasted their time.  Calling back to ask about status as a 'helpful tipster' suggests that you're motivated by something other than a desire to inform them, and let them prioritize your information.  This would likely be seen as suspicious.

Most agencies have an escalation path and can do 'international' effectively, they just have to really want to do it.  In this case, from what you've told us, I totally understand why you've gotten the response you've gotten.  

An online murder for hire website, where the people hiring are mostly larpers, the people taking the jobs are scammers, and the victims are basically unidentified is at best a loot pinata for someone with asset forfeiture authorities.  Assuming they can actually seize the crypto.

You might have better luck tracing crypto to exchanges, passing that information to national level cybercrime squads, and asking for 10% if they can seize anything (most agencies have policies like this).