LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Y'know, you probably have the data to do a quick-and-dirty check here. Take a look at the GRE/SAT scores on the applications (both for applicant pool and for accepted scholars). If most scholars have much-less-than-perfect scores, then you're probably not hiring the top tier (standardized tests have a notoriously low ceiling). And assuming most scholars aren't hitting the test ceiling, you can also test the hypothesis about different domains by looking at the test score distributions for scholars in the different areas.

I in fact don’t use Google very much these days, and don’t particularly recommend that anyone else do so, either.

(If by “google” you meant “search engines in general”, then that’s a bit different, of course. But then, the analogy here would be to something like “carefully select which LLM products you use, try to minimize their use, avoid the popular ones, and otherwise take all possible steps to ensure that LLMs affect what you see and do as little as possible”.)

The most important thing is “There is a small number of individuals who are paying attention, who you can argue with, and if you don’t like what they’re doing, I encourage you to write blogposts or comments complaining about it. And if your arguments make sense to me/us, we might change our mind. If they don’t make sense, but there seems to be some consensus that the arguments are true, we might lose the Mandate of Heaven or something.”

There’s not, like, anything necessarily wrong with this, on its own terms, but… this is definitely not what “being held accountable” is.

It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.

This particular sort of comment doesn’t particularly move me.

All this really means is that you’ll just do with this whatever you feel like doing. Which, again, is not necessarily “wrong”, and really it’s the default scenario for, like… websites, in general… I just really would like to emphasize that “being held accountable” has approximately nothing to do with anything that you’re describing.

As far as the specifics go… well, the bad effect here is that instead of the site being a way for me to read the ideas and commentary of people whose thoughts and writings I find interesting, it becomes just another purveyor of AI “extruded writing product”. I really don’t know why I’d want more of that than there already is, all over the internet. I mean… it’s a bad thing. Pretty straightforwardly. If you don’t think so then I don’t know what to tell you.

All I can say is that this sort of thing drastically reduces my interest in participating here. But then, my participation level has already been fairly low for a while, so… maybe that doesn’t matter very much, either. On the other hand, I don’t think that I’m the only one who has this opinion of LLM outputs.

All sources are cited within here - https://www.mindprison.cc/p/the-cartesian-crisis

Dang, I missed seeing this before the solution was posted. And oh dear, it's high-complexity. Oh well, I'll give it a shot anyway!

Edit: Hah, I spent an hour checking one thing (which went nowhere), and then ran out of steam, and now I can no longer resist checking the answer. So much for that 😅 Next time I'll try to check my notifications more often so I see the next one before the answer is up, maybe that'll give me more drive to keep at it.

Yes, the field is definitely more funding constrained than talent constrained right now

Oh I misread it as "eighty percent of the effort" oops.

people sometimes talk about whether you should go into policy, ai research, ea direct work, etc. but afaict all of those fields work like normal careers where actually you have to spend several years resume-building before painstakingly convincing people you're worth hiring for paid work. so imo these are not actually high-leverage paths to impact and the fields are not in fact short on people.

Consider the reaction my comment from three months [LW(p) · GW(p)] ago got.

There’s a lot here and if my existing writing didn’t answer your questions, I’m not optimistic another comment will help^[1]. Instead, how about we find something to bet on? It’s difficult to identify something both cruxy and measurable, but here are two ideas:

I see a pattern of:
1. CEA takes some action with the best of intentions
2. It takes a few years for the toll to come out, but eventually there’s a negative consensus on it.
3. A representative of CEA agrees the negative consensus is deserved, but since it occurred under old leadership, doesn’t think anyone should draw conclusions about new leadership from it.
4. CEA announces new program with the best of intentions.

So I would bet that within 3 years, a CEA representative will repudiate a major project occurring under Zach’s watch.

I would also bet on more posts similar to Bad Omens in Current Community Building or University Groups Need Fixing coming out in a few years, talking about 2024 recruiting. 
 

1. ^{^}

   Although you might like Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes [LW · GW] (the predecessor to EA Vegan Advocacy is not Truthseeking) and Truthseeking when your disagreements lie in moral philosophy [LW · GW] and Love, Reverence, and Life [LW · GW] (dialogues with a vegan commenter on the same post)