LessWrong 2.0 Reader

You can't trust exit polls on demographics crosstabs. From Matt Yglesias on Slow Boring:

Over and above the challenge inherent in any statistical sampling exercise, the basic problem exit pollsters have is that they have no way of knowing what the electorate they are trying to sample actually looks like, but they do know who won the election. They end up weighting their sample to match the election results, which is good because otherwise you’d have polling error about the topline outcome, which would look absurd. But this weighting process can introduce major errors in the crosstabs.

For example, the 2020 exit poll sample seems to have included too many college- educated white people. That was a Biden-leaning demographic group, so in a conventional poll, it would have simply exaggerated Biden’s share of the total vote. But the exit poll knows the “right answer” for Biden’s aggregate vote share, so to compensate for overcounting white college graduates in the electorate, it has to understate Biden’s level of support within this group. That is then further offset by overstating Biden’s level of support within all other groups. So we got a lot of hot takes in the immediate aftermath of the election about Biden’s underperformance with white college graduates, which was fake, while people missed real trends, like Trump doing better with non-white voters.

To get the kind of data that people want exit polls to deliver, you actually need to wait quite a bit for more information to become available from the Census and the voter files about who actually voted. Eventually, Catalist produced its “What Happened in 2020” document, and Pew published its “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory” report. But those take months to assemble, and unfortunately, conventional wisdom can congeal in the interim.

So just say no to exit poll demographic analysis!

Finally, note to self, probably still don’t use SQLite if you have a good alternative? Twice is suspicious, although they did fix the bug same day and it wasn’t ever released.

SQLite is well-known for its incredibly thorough test suite and relatively few CVEs, and with ~156kloc (excluding tests) it's not a very large project, so I think this would be an over-reaction. I'd guess that other databases have more and worse security vulnerabilities due to their attack surface—see MySQL with its ~4.4mloc (including tests). Big Sleep was probably now used on SQLite because it's a fairly small project of which large parts can fit into an LLMs' context window.

Maybe someone will try to translate the SQLite code to Rust or Zig using LLMs—until then we're stuck.

(Perhaps you're thinking of this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKu66pFKDHFYPaZ6q/the-hero-with-a-thousand-chances [LW · GW])

Intelligence also has costs and has components that have to be invented, which explains why not all species are already human-level smart. One of the questions here is which selection pressures were so especially and exceptionally strong in the case of humans, that humans fell off the cliff.

https://www.google.com/search?q=spx futures

I was specifically looking at Nov 5th 0:00-6:00, which twitched enough to show aliveness, while manifold and polymarket moved in smooth synchrony.

Sure, if Muslim Americans voted 100% for Harris, she still would have lost (although she would have flipped Michigan). However, I just don't see any way Stein would have gotten double digits in Dearborn if Muslim Americans weren't explicitly retaliating against Harris for the Biden administration's handling of Gaza.

But 200,000 registered voters in a state Trump won by 80,000 is a critical demographic in a swing state like Michigan. The exit polls show a 40% swing in Dearborn away from Democrats, enough for "we will vote Green/Republican if you give us what we want" to be a credible threat, which I'm seen some (maybe Scott Alexander?) claim isn't possible, as it would require a large group of people to coordinate to vote against their interests. Seemingly irrational threats ("I will vote for someone with a worse Gaza policy than you if you don't change your Gaza policy") are entirely rational if you have a track record of actually carrying them out.

On second thought, a lot of groups swung heavily towards Trump, and it's not clear that Gaza is responsible for the majority of it amongst Muslim Americans. I should do more research.

Although possibly the red candidate would care more about CATXOKLA red issues and the blue about CATXOKLA blue issues, so it just increases variance rather than expected satisfaction?

The advantage comes from having the parties care about your particular issues rather than those of the current swing states. This would look like both candidates being more favorable to you even if it's still 50-50 which of them wins (and even if they're still in roughly the same places on the left-right axis).

I definitely agree that specific examples would make the argument much stronger. At least, it would allow me to understand what kind of "false alarms" are we talking about here: is it mere tech hypes (such as cold fusion), or specifically humanity-destroying events (such as nuclear war)?

I think we didn't have so many things that threatened to destroy humanity. Maybe it's just my ignorance speaking, but the nuclear war is the only example that comes to my mind. (Global warming, although possibly a great disaster, is alone not an extinction threat to entire humanity.) And mere tech hypes that didn't threaten to destroy humanity don't seem like a relevant category for the AI danger.

Perhaps more importantly, with things like LK99 or cold fusion, the only source of hype was "people enthusiastically writing papers". With AI, the situation is more like "anyone can use (for free, if it's only a few times a day) a technology that would be considered sci-fi five years ago". Like, the controversy is about how far and fast it will get, but there is no doubt that it is already here... and even if somehow magically the state of AI would never improve beyond where it is today, we would still have a few more years of social impact at more people would learn to use it and find new ways how to use it.

EDIT: By "sci-fi" I mean, imagine creating a robotic head that uses speech recognition and synthesis to communicate with humans, uploading the latest LLM into it, and sending it by a time machine five or ten years into the past. Or rather, sending thousands of such robotic heads. People would be totally scared (not just because of the time travel). And finding out that the robotic heads often hallucinate would only calm them down a little.

Linda Linsefors of the Center for Applied Rationality

Hi, thanks for the mention.

But I'd like to point out that I never worked for CFAR in any capacity. I have attended two CFAR workshops. I think that calling me "of the Center for Applied Rationality" is very misleading, and I'd prefer it if you remove that part, or possibly re-phrase it.