LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The thing that comes to mind, when I think of "formidable master of rationality", is a highly experienced engineer trying to debug problems, especially high-urgency problems that the normal customer support teams haven't been able to handle.  You have a fresh phenomenon, which the creators of the existing product apparently didn't anticipate (or if they did, they didn't think it worth adding functionality to handle it), which casts doubt on existing diagnostic systems.  You have priors on which tools are likely to still work, priors on which underlying problems are likely to cause which symptoms; tests you can try, each of which has its own cost and range of likely outcomes, and some of which you might invent on the spot; all of these lead to updating your probability distribution over what the underlying problem might be.

Medical diagnostics, as illustrated by Dr. House, can be similar, although I suspect the frequency of "inventing new tests to diagnose a never-before-seen problem" is lower there.

Gaby, it seems, cannot imagine any reason one might think that children are good or that the country would be better off with more of them. They couldn’t mean what they say about demographic collapse and our dependence on growth. They couldn’t be genuine in their values. It must be a political takeover, or racism.

To understand either Gaby Del Valle's reaction or your reaction to Gaby Del Valle's reaction, it would be helpful if you wrote anything about the conference. Judging based on my prior, it is likely that people organizing such a conference are not orthogonal to other general political ideology. 

(My datapoint: people promoting more births etc were invited to different podcasts and it was mentioned they had a podcast of their own as well, so I searched that and was surprised that it seemed to be filled with almost cartoonish politics.)

On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:

• here's the scaling laws for tokamaks
• here's how much money we'd need
• ... so let's make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.

... and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.

The current boom accepted that faction's story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same "scale up the tokamaks" strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.

The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don't require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the "scale up the tokamaks" faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.

I completed it.

I wish I read this sooner. Do you have a prototype or does this exist yet?

You're welcome!

Last year I had a version of that question where (mimicking a question the LW team asked) I said I'd keep it private. Reading the answers felt nice, and I realized an anonymous but public version of that could be really nice for a lot of people.

In general, at any given level of child maturity and parental risk tolerance, devices like this watch let children have more independence.

What has changed over the last few decades is primarily a large decrease in parental risk tolerance. I don't know what's driving this, but it's probably downstream from increasing wealth, lower child mortality, and the demographic transition.

I think the passphrase got introduced when there was a monetary reward attached at one point, and then reused for some prisoner's dilemma questions later.

Our post font is pretty big, but for many reasons it IMO makes sense for the comment font to be smaller. So that plus LaTeX is a bit of a dicey combination.

Thank you for taking the survey!

I wasn't the one who first put the ID key in there, but I've kept it because it means I can sometimes compare the same person across years. I'm interested in whether people get more rational- for many definitions of that word- as a result of ongoing exposure to LessWrong and the community.