LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Also matters what the experience is like. High prestige university allows you to get a job at a high prestige company. Low prestige university makes it a lot harder to get considered for jobs at high prestige firms. You'll have to outperform high-prestige peers by, say, 50% to get noticed if you want access to the same sort of opportunities they get access to via prestige.

(To be clear, I'm not in favor of this sort of thing, I just want to be realistic about it and I wish someone had been real with me about it when I was 17 trying to decide where to go to college. Don't rely on your ability to outperform others. Take every advantage you can get and then leverage them to do even more!)

And this really makes it hard for me as an "indie hacker" to do what people often recommend: solve one very specific problem. Find a niche. Something narrow and focused. "Zoom in". This works in areas where problems have low cohesiveness, but not when they have high cohesiveness.

It's really hard to solve a lot of problems well. The value of an all-in-one product is that you really don't need anything else. Everything it doesn't do, or doesn't do well enough to meet your needs, is a ding against it, and it's relatively easy to peel off specific problem spaces from the general problem of basic business operations needs.

Here's a specific example from the company I'm part of (Anrok). We sell a product that aims to replace a SaaS business's need for an accounting team to be compliant with sales tax & VAT. We compete against both all-in-one solutions from billing systems that offer to also solve this problem because the problem is hard and they are trying to solve at least two problems: billing and tax. Since we just try to solve tax, we can do a better job of it. We also compete against accounting firms who try to offer you all-in-one services, but again same problem, plus the cost is a lot higher because they use humans to do what we do with code.

So I wouldn't worry too much about the existence of everything apps. It takes a long time to build a good everything app that actually does "everything" within its domain (think Salesforce or Jira), and even then "everything" is often achieved via outsourcing some of the everything to third parties who build plugins and integrations.

I was hoping people other than Jessica would share some specific curated insights they got. Syndiffeonesis is in fact a good insight.

I finally wrote one up! It ballooned into a whole LessWrong post.  [LW · GW]

I completely agree that Oliver is a great fit for leading on research infrastructure (and the default thing I was imagining was that he would run the institute; although it's possible it would be even better if he could arrange to be number two with a strong professional lead, giving him more freedom to focus attention on new initiatives within the institute, that isn't where I'd start). But I was specifically talking about the "research lead" role. By default I'd guess people in this role would report to the head of the institute, but also have a lot of intellectual freedom. (It might not even be a formal role; I think sometimes "star researchers" might do a lot of this work without it being formalized, but it still seems super important for someone to be doing.) I don't feel like Oliver's track record blows me away on any of the three subdimensions I named there, and your examples of successes at research infrastructure don't speak to it. This is compatible with him being stronger than I guess, because he hasn't tried in earnest at the things I'm pointing to. (I'm including some adjustment for this, but perhaps I'm undershooting. On the other hand I'd also expect him to level up at it faster if he's working on it in conjunction with people with strong track records.)

I think it's obvious that you want some beacon function (to make it an attractive option for people with strong outside options). That won't be entirely by having excellent people which will mean that internal research conversations are really good, but it seems to me like that was a significant part of what made FHI work (NB this wasn't just Nick, but people like Toby or Anders or Eric); I think it could be make-or-break for any new endeavour in a way that might be somewhat path-dependent in how it turns out; it seems right and proper to give it attention at this stage.

NOTE: this is CANCELLED for the lack of interest.

Maybe it could be FLCI to avoid collision with the existing FLI.

Thanks as well, 

I will just say that I am not saying those things for social purposes, I am just stating what I think is true. And I am not baseless as there are studies that show how kantianism and superrationality can resolve cooperative issues and be optimal for agents. You seem to purely disregard these elements, as if they don't exist (it's how it feels from my perspective)

There are differences in human evolutions that show behavioral changes, we have been pretty cooperative, more than other animals, many studies show that human cooperate even when it is not in their best selfish interest. 

However, we (also) have been constructing our civilization on destruction. Nature is based on selection, which is a massacre, so it is 'pretty' coherent for us to inherit those traits. 

Despite that, we have seen many positive growth in ethics that increasingly fit with kantianism. 

Evolution takes time and comes from deep-dark places, to me a core challenge is to transition towards super-cooperation while being a system made of irrational agents, during polycrises. 


There is also a gap between what people want (basically everybody agrees that there are urgent issues to handle as a society, but almost all declare that "others won't change"; I know this because I've been conversing with people from all age/background for half my life on subjects related to crises). What people happen to do under pressure due to the context and constraints isn't what they'd want if things were different, if they have had certain crucial informations before etc. 

When given the tools, such as the moral graph procedure that has been tested recently, things change to the better in a clear and direct way. People initially diverging start to see new aspects on which they converge. There are other studies related to crowd wisdom showing that certain ingredients need to be put together for wisdom to happen (Surowiecki's recipe: Independence, Diversity and Aggregation). We are in the process of building better systems, our institutions are yet catastrophic on many levels. 



In the eyes of many, I am still very pessimistic, so the apparent wishful thinking is quite relative (I think it's an important point)

I also think that an irrational artificial intelligence might still have high causal impact, and that it isn't easy to be rational even when we 'want to' at some level, or that we see what should be the rational road empirically, yet don't follow it. Irreducibility is inherent to reality

Anyway despite my very best I might be irrational right now, 
We all are, but I might be more than you who knows? 

Can you give examples of what you're looking for? Can I email you entries and expect a response?

Your answer might also be "I, Oliver, will play this role". My gut take would be excited for you to be like one of three people in this role (with strong co-leads, who are maybe complementary in the sense that they're strong at some styles of thinking you don't know exactly how to replicate), and kind of weakly pessimistic about you doing it alone. (It certainly might be that that pessimism is misplaced.)

For what it’s worth, my guess is that your pessimism is misplaced. Oliver certainly isn’t as famous as Bostrom, so I doubt he’d be a similar “beacon.” But I’m not sure a beacon is needed—historically, plenty of successful research institutions (e.g. Bells Labs, IAS, the Royal Society in most eras) weren’t led by their star researchers, and the track record of those that were strikes me as pretty mixed.

Oliver spends most of his time building infrastructure for researchers, and I think he’s become quite good at it. For example, you are reading this comment on (what strikes me as) rather obviously the best-designed forum on the internet; I think the review books LessWrong made are probably the second-best designed books I’ve seen, after those from Stripe Press; and the Lighthaven campus is an exceedingly nice place to work.

Personally, I think Oliver would probably be my literal top choice to head an institution like this.

Thanks for the conversation and exploration!  I have to admit that this doesn't match my observations and understanding of power and negotiation in the human agents I've been able to study, and I can't see why one would expect non-humans, even (perhaps especially) rational ones, to commit to alliances in this manner.

I can't tell if you're describing what you hope will happen, or what you think automatically happens, or what you want readers to strive for, but I'm not convinced.  This will likely be my last comment for awhile - feel free to rebut or respond, I'll read it and consider it, but likely not post.