A real life use for smart contracts 😆
towards_keeperhood on What are the primary drivers that caused selection pressure for intelligence in humans?thanks. Can you say more about why?
I mean runaway sexual selection is basically H1, which I updated to being less plausible. See my answer here [LW(p) · GW(p)]. (You could comment there why you think my update might be wrong or so.)
tanjent on tanjent's ShortformClaude dot Ai did a remarkable job of summarizing my thoughts about the current state of things:
https://medium.com/@tanjent/unedited-chat-with-claude-dot-ai-about-politics-and-acting-against-ones-own-self-interest-b3b805d85015
ape-in-the-coat on What are the primary drivers that caused selection pressure for intelligence in humans?I suspect that runaway sexual selection played a huge part.
gilch on Open Thread Fall 2024Not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Universe seems to follow relatively simple deterministic laws. That doesn't mean you can use quantum field theory to predict the weather. But chaotic systems can be modeled as statistical ensembles. Temperature is a meaningful measurement even if we can't calculate the motion of all the individual gas molecules.
If you're referring to human irrationality in particular, we can study cognitive bias [? · GW], which is how human reasoning diverges from that of idealized agents in certain systematic ways. This is a topic of interest at both the individual level of psychology, and at the level of statistical ensembles in economics.
buck on Thomas Kwa's ShortformIn terms of developing better misalignment risk countermeasures, I think the most important questions are probably:
More generally:
Curated. I think this model is pretty useful and well-compressed, and I'm glad to be able to concisely link to it.
The policy implications are still much open to debate, for here on LessWrong and for other ecosystems in the world.
hastings-greer on Both-Sidesism—When Fair & Balanced Goes WrongI have observed a transition. 12 years ago, the left-right split was based on many loosely correlated factors and strategic/inertial effects, creating bizarre situations like near perfect correlation between opinions on Gay Marriage and privatization of social security. I think at that time you could reason much better if you could recognize that the separation between left and right was not natural. I at least have a ton of cached arguments from this era because it became such a familiar dynamic.
Nowadays, I don't think this old schema really applies, especially among the actual elected officers and party leadership. The effective left right split is mono-factor: you are right exactly in proportion to your personal loyalty to one Donald J. Trump, resulting in bizarre situations like Dick Cheney being classified as "Left."
That no one rebuilt old OkCupid updates me a lot about how much the startup world actually makes the world better
The prevailing ideology of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech world, is that startups are an engine (maybe even the engine) that drives progress towards a future that's better than the past, by creating new products that add value to people's lives.
I now think this is true in a limited way. Software is eating the world, and lots of bureaucracy is being replaced by automation which is generally cheaper, faster, and a better UX. But I now think that this narrative is largely propaganda.
It's been 8 years since Match bought and ruined OkCupid and no one, in the whole tech ecosystem, stepped up to make a dating app even as good as old OkC is a huge black mark against the whole SV ideology of technology changing the world for the better.
Finding a partner is such a huge, real, pain point for millions of people. The existing solutions are so bad and extractive. A good solution has already been demonstrated. And yet not a single competent founder wanted to solve that problem for planet earth, instead of doing something else, that (arguably) would have been more profitable. At minimum, someone could have forgone venture funding and built this as a cashflow business.
It's true that this is a market that depends on economies of scale, because the quality of your product is proportional to the size of your matching pool. But I don't buy that this is insurmountable. Just like with any startup, you start by serving a niche market really well, and then expand outward from there. (The first niche I would try for is by building an amazing match-making experience for female grad students at a particular top university. If you create a great experience for the women, the men will come, and I'd rather build an initial product for relatively smart customers. But there are dozens of niches one could try for.)
But it seems like no one tried to recreate OkC, much less creating something better, until the manifold team built manifold.love (currently in maintenance mode)? Not that no one succeeded. To my knowledge, no else one even tried. Possibly Luna counts, but I've heard through the grapevine that they spent substantial effort running giant parties, compared to actually developing and launching their product—from which I infer that they were not very serious. I've been looking for good dating apps. I think if a serious founder was trying seriously, I would have heard about it.
Thousands of funders a year, and no one?!
That's such a massive failure, for almost a decade, that it suggests to me that the SV ideology of building things that make people's lives better is broadly propaganda. The best founders might be relentlessly resourceful, but a tiny fraction of them seem to be motivated by creating value for the world, or this low hanging fruit wouldn't have been left hanging for so long.
This is of course in addition to the long list of big tech companies who exploit their network-effect monopoly power to extract value from their users (often creating negative societal externalities in the process), more than creating value for them. But it's a weaker update that there are some tech companies that do ethically dubious stuff, compared to the stronger update that there was no startup that took on this obvious, underserved, human problem.
My guess is that the tech world is a silo of competence (because competence is financially rewarded), but operates from an ideology with major distortions / blindspots, that are disconnected from commonsense reasoning about what's Good. eg following profit incentives, and excitement about doing big things (independent from whether those good things have humane or inhumane impacts) off a cliff.
ryan_b on The Median Researcher ProblemTo me memetic normally reads something like "has a high propensity to become a meme" or "is meme-like" I had no trouble interpreting the post from this basis.
I push back against trying to hew closely to usages from the field of genetics. Fundamentally I feel like that is not what talking about memes is for; it was an analogy from the start, not meant for the same level of rigor. Further, memes and how meme-like things are is much more widely talked about than genetics, so insofar as we privilege usage considerations I claim switching to one matching genetics would require more inferential work from readers overall because the population of readers conversant with genetics is smaller.
I also feel like the value of speaking in terms of memes in the post is that the replication crises is largely the fault of non-rigorous treatment; that is to say in many fields the statistical analysis parts really were/are more of a meme inside the field rather than a rigorous practice. People just read other people's published papers analysis sections, and write something shaped like that, replicability be damned.