LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Good question! I would find it plausible that it would have changed, except maybe if the people you'd call would be in their fifties or older.

You're saying governments can't address existential risk, because they only care about what happens within their borders and term limits. And therefore we should entrust existential risk to firms, which only care about their own profit in the next quarter?!

A piece of advice I frequently hear: always make sure you call somebody in the company you're applying for.

Is this still up-to-date advice? Or is messaging someone over LinkedIn or similar more appropriate? Mostly asking because I got the impression that the internet changed the norms to no one doing phone calls anymore.

Good article. 

It's an asymmetry worth pointing out.

It seems related to some concept of "low interest rate phenomenon in ideas". Sometimes in a low interest rate environment, people fund all sorts of stuff, because they want any return and credit is cheap. Later much of this looks bunk. Likewise, much EA behaviour around the plentiful money and status of the FTX era looks profligate by todays standards. In the same way I wonder what ideas are held up by some vague consensus rather than being good ideas.

Feels like there is something off about the following graph. Ie these people could write better critiques. Many care a lot. Émile spends a lot of time on their work for instance. I don't think effort really catches what's going on.

I think it's a mix of effort status and norms. In our community it's high status to bend over backwards to write a critique (not that we always succeed). For Émile, as an example, I don't think this is the case. Perhaps, they gain status by articles that are widely shared and link ideas they dislike to a broader worldview. 

I like his UI. In fact, I shared about CQ2 with Andy in February since his notes site was the only other place where I had seen the sliding pane design. He said CQ2 is neat!

Based on the link, it seems you follow the Theravada tradition. 

For what it's worth, I don't really follow any one tradition, though Culadasa does indeed have a Theravada background.

The problem with calling parts of a learning algorithm a prior that are not free variables, is that then anything (every part of any learning algorithm) would count as a prior. So even the Bayesian conditionalization rule itself. But that's not what Bayesians consider part of a prior.

I'd definitely call any assumption about which forms preferred explanations should take as a "prior". Maybe I have a more flexible concept of what counts as Bayesian than you, in that sense? Priors don't need to be free parameters, the process has to start somewhere. But if you already have some data and then acquire some more data, obviously the previous data will still affect your conclusions.

All of that can be accounted for in a Bayesian framework though?

I mean that those factors don't presuppose different priors. You could still end up with different "posteriors" even with the same "starting point".

An example for an (informal) alternative to Bayesian updating, that doesn't require subjective priors, is Inference to the Best Explanation. One could, of course, model the criteria that determine the goodness of explanations as a sort of "prior". But those criteria would be part of the hypothetical IBE algorithm, not a free variable like in Bayesian updating. One could also claim that there are no objective facts about the goodness of explanations and that IBE is invalid. But that's an open question.