LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes, I used ChatGPT to polish the English, it did a great job 👍 while I am of course myself responsible for every point in this post.

To your comments:

This post points out that it’s better for the business to actively co-shape UBI instead of passively rejecting it. For humanitarian reasons, it’s good to ensure the existential minimum for everyone, even those too old or too sick to learn or work. If this minimum is already covered by other governmental programs or philanthropic organizations, there’s no need to include it in UBI. If business co-shape UBI, they can ask it to be conditioned on completing training programs, like the certificates offered by Microsoft. It’s an illusion that the market can automatically solve the problem. The market mechanisms only says that in an economic downturn, staff should be laid off. When the economy recovers, they can be re-hired. But the market mechanism doesn’t take care to maintain a disciplined reserve workforce in the meantime. When business starts to re-hire, they may find it difficult to find qualified staff, because part of the workforce drifted off in the meantime, some got mental problems, or alcohol/drug problems, some were radicalized, beside the agony suffered by the laid-off staff and destabilization faced by the society, it also becomes more expensive for the business to find qualified staff when they need them. Of course you can say that it’s the government’s job to take care for the unemployed, but of course government has to raise taxes for its social programs. If business actively co-shapes, it can make such programs more effective and efficient, have the reserve workforce trained in the way they can better find a job or start self-employment/start-up that can better meet the needs of the economy, and that at a lower cost.

I'm inclined to bite this bullet too, though it feels somewhat strange. Weird implication: you can increase the amount of reality-fluid assigned to you by giving yourself amnesia.

I explored a similar line of reasoning here: Magic by forgetting [LW · GW]

I think that yes, the sameness of humans as agents is generated by the process of self-identification in which a human being is identifies herself through a short string of information "Name, age, sex, profession + few more kilobytes". Evidence for this is the success of improv theatre, where people quickly adopt completely new roles through one-line instructions. 

If yes, then we should expect ourselves to be agents that exist in a universe that abstracts well, because "high-level agents" embedded in such universes are "supported" by a larger equivalence class of universes (since they draw on reality fluid from an entire pool of "low-level" agents).

I think that your conclusion is valid. 

If I’ll probably see them again, I don’t miss people. I thought people saying they miss you were just being overly polite.

Yeah I definitely agree you should start learning as young as possible. I think I would usually advise someone starting out to learn general math/CS stuff and do AI safety on the side, since there's way more high-quality knowledge in those fields. Although "just dive in to AI" seems to have worked out well for some people like Chris Olah, and timelines are plausibly pretty short so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes this world.

Interesting post! I’ve wondered the same thing before.

I’m doing a much more half-arsed version, as a casual quantum foundations enjoyer alongside a technical writing job, and also getting endlessly distracted by other things I find interesting, so my output is not impressive. But it’s a pretty fun hobby and I’m surprised more people don’t try this!

Hi Neel,

you're absolutely right, all research in the gemmascope paper was performed on the open source Gemma 2 model. I wanted to group up all research that my paper was based on in a concise sentence and by doing so erroneously put you in the 'proprietary LLMs' section. I went ahead and corrected the mistake.

My apologies.

I hope you still enjoyed the project and thank you for your great research work at DeepMind. =)

Could you post coordinates next time? I can't find the entrance on Elizabeth St. you're referring to

The corresponding arbital page is now (apparently) dead.

A link appears to have broken, does anyone know what “null” was supposed to link to in “policy  null ” (note the extra spaces around “null”