LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I've arguably lived under totalitarianism (depending on how you define it), and my parents definitely have and told me many stories about it [LW · GW]. I think AGI increases risk of totalitarianism [LW · GW], and support a pause in part to have more time to figure out how to make the AI transition go well in that regard.

This will make more sense if you have a basic grasp on quantum mechanics, but if you're willing to accept "energy comes in discrete units" as a premise then you should be mostly fine.

My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech. Instead, the thing where energy is equally likely to be in any of the degrees of freedom just comes from using a measure over your phase space such that the dynamical law of your system preservers that measure!

The Iowa Election Markets were roughly contemporaneous with Hanson's work. They are often co-credited.

Even if someone made a discovery decades earlier than it otherwise would have been, the long term consequences of that may be small or unpredictable. If your goal is to "achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research" (presumably predictably positive ones) you could potentially do that in certain fields (e.g., AI safety) even if you only counterfactually advance the science by a few months or years. I'm a bit confused why you're asking people to think in the direction outlined in the OP.

I meant that the idea that we should have "BSL-5" is the kind of silly thing that novice EAs propose that doesn't make sense because there literally isn't something significantly more restrictive

I mean, I'm sure something more restrictive is possible. But my issue with BSL levels isn't that they include too few BSL-type restrictions, it's that "lists of restrictions" are a poor way of managing risk when the attack surface is enormous. I'm sure someday we'll figure out how to gain this information in a safer way—e.g., by running simulations of GoF experiments instead of literally building the dangerous thing—but at present, the best available safeguards aren't sufficient.

I also think that "nearly all EA's focused on biorisk think gain of function research should be banned" is obviously underspecified, and wrong because of the details. 

I'm confused why you find this underspecified. Obviously policy about this should be careful and targeted, but I just meant "gain of function" in the common-use sense—e.g., the sense used in the 2014 ban on federal funding for such research.

Some of my considerations for college choice for my kid, that I suspect others may also want to think more about or discuss:

1. status/signaling benefits for the parents (This is probably a major consideration for many parents to push their kids into elite schools. How much do you endorse it?)
2. sex ratio at the school and its effect on the local "dating culture"
3. political/ideological indoctrination by professors/peers
4. workload (having more/less time/energy to pursue one's own interests)

Why aren't males way smarter than females on average? Males have ~13% higher cortical neuron density and 11% heavier brains...

Men are smarter than women, by about 2-4 points on average. Men are also larger, and so need bigger brains to compensate for their size anyways.

We're talking about a tablespoon of (olive, traditionally) oil and vinegar mixed for a serving of simple sharp vinaigrette salad dressing, yeah. From a flavor perspective, generally it's hard for the vinegar to stick to the leaves without the oil.

If you aren't comfortable with adding a refined oil, adding unrefined fats like nuts and seeds, eggs or meat, should have some similar benefits in making the vitamins more nutritionally available, and also have the benefit of the nutrients of the nuts, seeds, eggs or meat, yes. Often these are added to salad anyway.

You probably don't want to add additional greens with the caloric content of oil to a salad; the difference in caloric density means that 1 tablespoon of oil translates to 2 pounds of lettuce (more than 2 heads), and you're already eating probably as many greens as you can stomach!

Edit: I should also acknowledge that less processed (cold pressed, extra virgin, and so forth) olive oil has had fewer nutrients destroyed; and may be the best choice for salad dressing. But we do need to be careful about thinking processing only destroys nutrients - cooking, again for example, often destroys some nutrients and opens others up to accessibility.

You can go through an archive of NYT Connections puzzles I used in my leaderboard. The scoring I use allows only one try and gives partial credit, so if you make a mistake after getting 1 line correct, that's 0.25 for the puzzle. Top humans get near 100%. Top LLMs score around 30%. Timing is not taken into account.

This is shockingly similar to what I'm going through.  And the fries that fucked me up the other night are indeed fried in canola oil. I'm cautiously optimistic but I know how complicated these things can be -_-. Will report back!