LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yep I'm saying you're wrong about this. If money compounds but you don't have utility=log($) then you shouldn't Kelly bet

Thank you for writing this! This is my favorite thing on this site in a while.

This was a shocking revelation to me, I only discovered it a few months ago when I was wondering why one USB-c cable was data transferring between my laptop and an external SSD so much slower than another.
What is astounding is, at least in bricks and mortar retail, the price differential between different capabilities of cables. It's so high sometimes as to not even seem like a good deal "this cable costs three times that one, but only charges 30% faster with only one device I have which is capable of that speed of charging"

Memento Errata

I love this phrase. It could practically be a LW motto, or a title for some adjacent project, or something like that. It's even self-referencing -- or at least, Claude tells me it's grammatically incorrect, and that feels appropriate.

I'd just define exploitation to be precisely the opposite of shapley bargaining [LW · GW], situations where a person is not being compensated in proportion to their bargaining power.

This definition encompasses any situation where a person has grievances and it makes sense for them to complain about them and take a stand, or, where striking could reasonably be expected to lead to a stable bargaining equilibrium with higher net utility (not all strikes fall into this category).

This definition also doesn't fully capture the common sense meaning of exploitation, but I don't think a useful concept can.

What kind of changes or outcomes would you expect to see if people around these parts instead of publishing their work independently started trying to get it into traditional ML conferences and related publications?

I am surprised that you find theoretical physics research less tight funding-wise than AI alignment [is this because the paths to funding in physics are well-worn, rather than better resourced?].

This whole post was a little discouraging. I hope that the research community can find a way forward.

A thing that I often see happening when people talk about "normie-legible status systems" is that they gaslight themselves into believing that some status system that is extraordinarily legible, or they are part of, is something that is consensus.

Academia is the most intense example of this. Most people don't care that much about academic status! This also happens in the other direction. Youtube is a major source of status in much of the world, especially among young people, but is considered low-brow whenever people argue about this, and so people dismiss it.

I also think people tend to do a fallacy of gray thing where if a status system is not maximally legible (like writing popular blogposts, or running a popular podcast, or making popular Youtube videos, or being popular on Twitter), they dismiss the status system as not real and "illegible".

I think modeling the real status and reputation systems that are present in the world is important, but for example, trying to ascent the academic status hierarchy is a bad use of time and resources. It's extremely competitive, and not actually that influential outside of the academic bubble. It is in some fields better correlated with actual skills and integrity and intelligence, and so I still think a reasonable thing to consider, but I think most people are better placed to trade off a bit of legibility against a whole amount of net realness in status (this importantly does not mean your LW quick takes will be the thing that causes you to become world-renowned, I am not saying "just say smart things and the world will recognize you", I am saying "don't think that only the most legible status systems, or the one with the most mobs hunting dissenters from the status system are the only real ways of gaining recognition in the world").

I agree with you that as stated the analogy is risking dangerous superficiality.

• The 'cognitive' work of evolution came from the billion years of evolution in the innumerable forms of life that lived, hunted and reproduced through the eons. Effectively we could see evolution-by-natural selection as a something like a simple, highly-parallel, stochastic, slow algorithm. I.e. a simple many-tape random Turing machine taking a very large number of timesteps.

• A way to try and maybe put some (vegan) meat on the bones of this analogy would be to look at conditional KT-complexity. KT-complexity is a version of Kolmogorov complexity that also accounts for the time- cost of running the generating program.
  - In KT-complexity pseudorandomness functions just like randomness. 

  - Algorithms may indeed be copied and the copy operation is fast and takes very little memory overhead.
  - Just as in Kolmogorov complexity we rejiggle and think in terms of an algorithmic probability.
  - a private-public key is trivial in a pure Kolmogorov complexity framework but correctly modelled in a KT-complexity framework.

To deepen the analogy with thermodynamics one should probably carefully read John Wentworth's generalized heat engines [LW · GW] and Kolmogorov sufficient statistics. 

If you're mobile (able to be in the UK) and willing to try a different lifestyle, consider going to the EA hotel aka CEEALAR, they offer free food and accomodation for a bunch of people, including many people working on AI safety. Alternatively, taking a quick look at https://www.aisafety.com/funders, the current best options are maybe LTFF, OpenPhil, CLR, or maybe AE Studios?