LessWrong 2.0 Reader

With #3, I think you fell into the trap of being overly-specific and overly-committed to a specific organizational strategy. It would be very reasonable to assume that OA would be working on multimodal, because you need that for efficiency & generalization & ability to do things like text instructions to control a robot arm, and indeed, I quote TR about how they are working hard on large multimodal self-supervised Transformers... but you assumed that would have to be the "GPT-3", instead of a parallel project while GPT-3 winds up being a scaled up GPT-2. It would have made more sense to split the predictions and try to be agnostic about whether OA would choose to do 2 big models or attempt 1 multimodal model, since it could be the case that the multimodal stuff would not mature in time (as seems to be the case), and predict instead more end outcomes like "human-level text article generation" or "models with >100b parameters", since there are many possible routes to relatively few outcomes of interest.

Having been reading meditation content there was an association while watching Day9 promote their game project Straigts of Danger.

In the game there is a single boat and 20 players each of which controls a walking humanoid on the boat. The players can move their humanoid on buttons to control the boat. Because the players don't have voice chat explicit coordinatino is hard and lot of multiple people doing contradictory plans at the same time makes multiple non-sensical buttons being pressed make the boat so almost random things.

As a caster/presenter Day9 didn't himself play but the players probably were watching the stream. Using language like "we" and narrating from the view point of the point it could seem like he was controlling the boat. But infact he was not pressing any boat controlling buttons but only giving slight suggestions to autonumous human players.

Achieving a high level of coordination was referred to as "becoming a mind". While in there it was more for humorous effect it is an interesting theorethical question can individuals ever make an organisation that properly counted as a separate mind from the constituents and what conditions such a delineation would follow.

Wow. And "This is our monthly coffee meetup" sure is a surprising next line.

Sure is a clickbaity event title

Thanks! This is great.

"Aspirationalist" is actually... maybe surprisingly good as a word? Aspiring Rationalist was bad because it was too long, but I might actually be able to use Aspirationalist in conversation.

It has the downside of getting even more obviously appreviated to "Aspie Rat", but, well, maybe that's fine. :P

Heh. We may know different slices of those who identify as Rationalists and those we're calling Philosophical techno-nerds. I agree that there's probably only about 80% overlap, but I'd say the variance in rigor and in behavior is pretty close to the same in the two groups, just with a wider variety of topics that can be too-narrowly analyzed in the PTNs.

Awesome, thanks for following up on this.

Right at the start under "How to use this book", there is this paragraph:

If you have never been to a CFAR workshop, and don’t have any near-term
plans to come to one, then you may be the kind of person who would love to
set their eyes on a guide to improving one’s rationality, full of straightforward
instructions and exercises on how to think more clearly, act more effectively,
learn more from your experiences, make better decisions, and do more with
your life. This book is not that guide (nor is the workshop itself, for that
matter). It was never intended to be that guide.

I'm partway through reading the sequences, have read plenty of other LW posts, but have no possibility to attend CFAR workshops anytime soon. Still, I want to get more experience with applied rationality. Would you say reading (parts of) this handbook and trying exercises that seem relevant to my situation is a reasonable thing to try (while minding all your precautions)? Or do you know of a better way to train one's skills in applying rationality?

Better to want two things, suffer the conflict and loss, and achieve one thing, than to want no things and achieve no things.

I would say "Better to want two things, suffer the conflict and loss, and achieve no things, than to want no things and achieve no things."