LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Can you come up with a better way of doing Psychology research?

Yes. More emphasis on concrete useful results, less emphasis on trying to find simple correlations in complex situations.

For example, "Do power poses work?". They did studies like this one where they tell people to hold a pose for five minutes while preparing for a fake job interview, and then found that the pretend employers pretended to hire them more often in the "power pose" condition. Even assuming there's a real effect where those students from that university actually impress those judges more when they pose powerfully ahead of time... does that really imply that power posing will help other people get real jobs and keep them past the first day? 

That's like studying "Are car brakes really necessary?" by setting up a short track and seeing if the people who run the "red light" progress towards their destination quicker. Contrast that with studying the cars and driving behaviors that win races, coming up with your theories, and testing them by trying to actually win races. You'll find out very quickly if your "brakes aren't needed" hypothesis is a scientific breakthrough or foolishly naive.

Instead of studying "Does CBT work?", study the results of individual therapists, see if you can figure out what the more successful ones are doing differently than the less successful ones, and see if you can use what you learn to increase the effectiveness of your own therapy or the therapy of your students. If the answer turns out to be "The successful therapists all power pose pre-session, then perform textbook CBT" and that allows you to make better therapists, great. If it's something else, then you get to focus on the things that actually show up in the data.

The results should speak for themselves. If they don't, and you aren't keeping in very close contact with real world results, then it's super easy to go astray with internal feedback loops because the loop that matters isn't closed.

What is the sex recession ? And do we know it is caused by tindr ?

In broad strokes I agree with you. Here I was sharing my observation of four cases where a friend was involved this way. One case might have been miscommunication but it doesn't seem likely to me. The other three definitely weren't. In one of those I personally knew the guy; I liked him, but he was also emotionally very unstable and definitely not a safe father. I don't think the abuse was physical in any of those four cases.

Glib formality: current LLMs do approximate something like a speed prior solomonoff inductor for internetdata but do not approximate AIXI.

There is a whole class of domains that are not tractably accesible from next-token prediction on human generated data. For instance, learning how to beat alphaGo with only access to pre2014 human go games.

It does of course raise the difficulty level for the political maneuvering, but would make things far more credible which means that people could actually rely on it. It really is quite difficult to precommit to things you might not like, so structures that make it work seem interesting to me.

Shreeda Segan is working on building it, as a cashflow business. they need $10K to get to the MVP. https://manifund.org/projects/hire-a-dev-to-finish-and-launch-our-dating-site

The fact that there's a sex recession is pretty suggestive that tinder and the endless stream of tinder clones doesn't serve people very well. 

Even if you don't assess potential romantic partners by reading their essays, like I do, OkC's match percentage meant that you could easily filter out 95% of the pool to people who are more likely to be compatible with you, along whatever metrics of compatibility you care about.

Yeah I pretty much agree with this assessment. I think you could probably get to 80% with 100 million and ten years and maybe 50% with 30 million and 7 years. Perhaps I'm optimistic, but right now the entire field is bottlenecked by the need for $4 million to do primate testing.

OKcupid is certainly a better product for hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of unusually literate people, including ~all potential developers and most people in their social circles. It's not a small niche.

I kind of wished you both gave some reasoning as to why you believe that the agentic AI overhang/algorithmic overhang is likely, and I also wish that Nathan Helm Burger and Vladimir Nesov discussed this topic in a dialogue post.