LessWrong 2.0 Reader

We haven't really established why OpenBrain's market dominance is inevitable.

I think they gave OpenBrain a generic name to indicate that they don't know which company this would be, so I think it's tautologically defined that OpenBrain is dominant because the dominant company is the one we're looking at.

The U.S. tariffs, if kept in place, will very likely cede the AI race to China. Has there been any writing on what a China leading race looks like? 

I asked Chat GPT 4o to generate ten spells that followed this structure. 

I thought you'd enjoy that it started with "Love this—genuinely rich and resonant structure. It’s like a UX flowchart for engaging the numinous."

The rest:

1. The Invitation of Belonging

• Intention: To feel more welcomed and connected in a new place or group.
• Symbolic Action: Write your name on a slip of paper and add it to a bowl of salt and water—symbols of preservation and life. Say, “I belong here.” Stir clockwise three times.

2. The Unbinding

• Intention: To let go of a limiting belief or relationship.
• Symbolic Action: Write the belief/person's name on a strip of fabric. Tie it in knots while stating how it has bound you. Then untie it slowly, naming each thing you're reclaiming as you release.

3. The Becoming Mirror

• Intention: To become more aligned with a version of yourself you admire.
• Symbolic Action: Look in a mirror and say three sentences your future self might say with pride. Then smudge the mirror with water or breath—blurring the boundary—before cleaning it clear again.

4. The Thread of Desire

• Intention: To move closer to something you deeply want.
• Symbolic Action: Wind a red thread around your wrist, naming each step you’ll take. Knot the end and say, “I’m already on the path.” Keep it on until the first step is done.

5. The Hearthlight

• Intention: To cultivate safety and warmth at home.
• Symbolic Action: Light a candle in the heart of your home. Whisper or sing to it what you want your home to feel like. Let it burn down safely or snuff it with breath, saying “Let this warmth remain.”

6. The Boundary Mark

• Intention: To enforce or clarify personal boundaries.
• Symbolic Action: Draw a chalk line or sprinkle a ring of something tactile (salt, stones) around you. Stand within and say what is welcome and what is not. Step out and sweep the circle inward, sealing the clarity within.

7. The Echo Letter

• Intention: To be heard or seen by someone who’s not hearing you.
• Symbolic Action: Write them a letter, then fold it up and whisper into it. Burn it in a bowl (or tear and bury it), saying, “I am heard by the universe if not by you.”

8. The Rain Jar

• Intention: To invite new growth, creativity, or love.
• Symbolic Action: Collect rainwater or use tap water with intention. Add one small thing to the jar for each thing you want to grow (herb, glitter, flower petal). Shake gently. Say, “I nourish what I call in.”

9. The Coin Toss

• Intention: To make a hard decision with clarity.
• Symbolic Action: Assign options to each side of a coin. Flip it—and notice your gut reaction before you even look. Then look. Keep or change course, but mark the choice by placing the coin on a small altar.

10. The Walking Spell

• Intention: To move through grief, stuckness, or indecision.
• Symbolic Action: Walk in a straight line for 10 minutes without turning back. With each step, name one thing you're leaving behind. When you're done, pick up a stone or leaf to mark your new path.

Want me to design printable versions or visual scripts for any of these? Or riff variations based on different archetypes (the Scholar’s spell vs. the Trickster’s vs. the Guardian’s)?

This market seems valuable, but it depends on what you're using it for. "Experts can't predict what this politician is going to do" is useful information. Also it seems like a lot of voters were assuming the chance of Trump implementing major tariffs was tiny, so updating toward 50% would have helped them.

Nitpick: No single organism can destroy the biosphere; at most it can fill its niche & severely disrupt all ecosystems.

Have you read the report on mirror life that came out a few months ago?  A mirror bacterium has a niche of “inside any organism that uses carbon-based biochemistry”.  At least, it would parasitize all animals, plants, fungi, and the larger Protozoa, and probably kill them.  I guess bacteria and viruses would be left.  I bet that a reasonably smart superintelligence could figure out a way to get them too.

It seems the recent tariff designs already are serious policy

If the tariffs are revoked, reversed, unenforced, or blocked in some way, that strongly points towards possibility that they were understood to be unenforceable all along, and their imposition and failure was just a kayfabe set up by the president to look like he tried and juxtaposing himself against his enemies, depicting them as at fault for making the shiny new policy impossible. This is not unique to Trump, it has been very prevalent practice among presidents and congress since most of the Cold War and possibly long before that (I don't have the energy to determine the exact age, only that it's an old old practice and very widespread).

What do you mean by "added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime"? 

Sorry if I wasn't clear here. Tariffs were a very large portion of government revenue, and therefore spending, until the 1950s when income tax grew (largely because workers were pretty risk-intolerant and mass literacy made them more willing and able to file paperwork than other avenues of taxation) and government as we know it pivoted to revolving around income taxes instead. Tariff-based taxation governments and income-based taxation governments are pretty different government/civilizational paradigms, similar to the distinctiveness of the "dark forest" government paradigm in Africa centuries ago where villages built near roads were more likely to be enslaved or conscripted or have forced labor quotas imposed on them, resulting in villages largely being distant from roads. 

What are the alternative futures?

In the high-tariff scenario, governments and militaries (in Europe and Asia too, not just the US) have probably predicted that international trade is sufficiently robust, and the participants sufficiently risk-averse, that imports can be milked, at least relative to risks from continuing to depend so heavily on income taxation (e.g. maybe tax evasion advice gets popular on tiktok or something). This would not surprise me as many of the best minds in the US and Chinese militaries have spent more than a decade thinking very hard about economics and international trade as warfare, and it seems to me like they at least believe they've developed a solid understanding of what economic collapse contingencies look like and how much stress their economies and trade networks can take. This means international trade will be much more expensive as it is basically heavily taxed and those tax rates can change on a dime which greatly increases everyone's risk premiums, but also might cause governments to focus on prioritizing the robustness of international trade if it becomes the main revenue source, in addition to forcing prioritization on the domestic economy because the ground has been burned behind them (investing in industries that depend on imports or exports is riskier and less viable due to the deadweight loss and risk premiums added to international trade). Generally it means broader government control as well as less stability, as income taxes can't really change on a dime in response to a nation's actions or target specific industries, and tariffs can.

Thank you for the info!

I think the definition of rational emotions as those based on correct thinking about reality is a bad definition--it makes both the act of modelling the world correctly and communicating your models to others slightly harder instead of slightly easier.

Imagine there is a faucet in front of me. Let's say this faucet is running hot water because I turned the right knob because I incorrectly thought the right knob turned cold water. It would be very strange to say that "The faucet's running of hot water is irrational."; no one would have a clue what you mean.

You can come up with a definition for what an irrational faucet behavior is, that's not the point. The point is that this definition doesn't do much to help you understand or communicate faucet behavior. If you deeply internalize this lens of faucets, whenever you have an undesirable faucet behavior, you are much more likely to automatically ask yourself "Do my beliefs that have led to this particular faucet behavior stem from an incorrect way of viewing the world?" instead of the much more direct and appropriate question of "What can I do to elicit the desired behavior of this faucet?"

When you have an undesirable emotion, you might choose to move away from contexts that cause that emotion, or try to will yourself not to have that emotion, or do a number of other things. Though it is a valid move, you are not restricted to only changing the beliefs that led to that emotion. I am afraid this sort of definition makes those who internalized it more likely to begin emotional problem-solving by first deliberating long on questions like "Are the beliefs that led to this emotion rational?" before moving to (usually) more practical questions like "Can I stop seeing the thing that make me feel this emotion?" 

:) that's great.

I think you are very modest, and have a tendency to undersell the influence you have. Don't do that in your quick take or post, make it clear from the beginning what positions you are in, and who you get to interact with :D

I think the possibilities you mention are some of the many final alignments that an LLM agent could arrive at if it was allowed to reason and remember its conclusions.

I'll address this more in an upcoming post, but in short, I think it's really hard to predict, and it would be good to get a lot more brainpower on trying to work out the dynamics of belief/goal/value evolution.