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Back then I didn't try to get the hostel to sign the metaphorical assurance contract with me, maybe that'd work. A good dominant assurance contract website might work as well.

I guess if you go camping together then conferences are pretty scalable, and if I was to organize another event I'd probably try to first message a few people to get a minimal number of attendees together. After all, the spectrum between an extended party and a festival/conference is fluid.

Yes, good catch, this is based on research from the World Value Survey - I've added a citation.

i'll give two answers, the Official Event Guidelines and the practical social environment.^[1] i will say that i have have a bit of a COI in that i'm an event organizer; it'd be good if someone who isn't organizing the event, but e.g. attended the event last year, to either second my thoughts or give their own.

1. Official Event Guidelines
   1. Unsafe drug use of any kind is disallowed and strongly discouraged, both by the venue and by us.
   2. Illegal drug use is disallowed and strongly discouraged, both by the venue and by us.
   3. Alcohol use during the event is discouraged, but you can bring & drink your own if you drink responsibly. However, at the official afterparty (and possibly at some points during Summer Camp), we may serve drinks. Broadly, our rules with regard to alcohol are "drink responsibly; please don't drink during the day; definitely don't drink if you're going to drink irresponsibly, because that will be no fun for us and definitely no fun for you." The social environment will not be conducive to alcohol during the day, and probably not super conducive at night.
2. practical social environment
   1. during the main event, drugs & alcohol are pretty strongly discouraged. it makes the event lower quality for everyone.
   2. during the official afterparty, we'll probably serve alcohol in moderate, safe amounts. we will not be serving drugs, and the social environment will probably not be very conducive to drugs.
   3. i could imagine that external, unofficial parties/meetups/etc have a different vibe. for these, my guess is that if you can imagine something between a regular conference meetup at a bar and a college party, you're probably somewhere on the right track. note that you are on your own if you attend external, unnofficial parties.

1. ^{^}

   for future reference, i do not necessarily endorse the practical social environment. more formally, the stance i take was written in the first bullet point (the Official Event Guidelines), regardless of anything written in the second bullet point.

"Immunology" and "well-understood" are two phrases I am not used to seeing in close proximity to each other. I think with an "increasingly" in between it's technically true - the field has any model at all now, and that wasn't true in the past, and by that token the well-understoodness is increasing.

But that sentence could also be iterpreted as saying that the field is well-understood now, and is becoming even better understood as time passes. And I think you'd probably struggle to find an immunologist who would describe their field as "well-understood".

My experience has been that for most basic practical questions the answer is "it depends", and, upon closet examination, "it depends on some stuff that nobody currently knows". Now that was more than 10 years ago, so maybe the field has matured a lot since then. But concretely, I expect if you were to go up to an immunologist and say "I'm developing a novel peptide vaccine from the specifc abc surface protein of the specific xyz virus. Can you tell me whether this will trigger an autoimmune response due to cross-reactivity" the answer is going to be something more along the lines of "lol no, run in vitro tests followed by trials (you fool!)" and less along the lines of "sure, just plug it in to this off-the-shelf software".

Why must she not be able to climb out(/in) of the crib for napping there?

In software, network effects are strong. A solution people are already familiar with has an advantage. A solution integrated with other solutions you already use has an advantage (and it is easier to do the integration when both solutions are made by you). You can further lock the users in by e.g. creating a marketplace where people can sell plugins to your solution. Compared to all of this, things like "nice to use" remain merely wishes.

I've added a link to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Sorry - YouTube's taking an abnormally long time to process the video.

Orthogonality Thesis [? · GW]

The Orthogonality Thesis asserts that there can exist arbitrarily intelligent agents pursuing any kind of goal.

It basically says that intelligence and goals are independent

Images from A caveat to the Orthogonality Thesis [LW · GW].

While I claim that all intelligence that is capable to understand "I don't know what I don't know" can only seek power (alignment is impossible).

the ability of an AGI to have arbitrary utility functions is orthogonal (pun intended) to what behaviors are likely to result from those utility functions.

As I understand you say that there are Goals on one axis and Behaviors on other axis. I don't think Orthogonality Thesis is about that.

Yes, that would be cool [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Next to the author name of a post orcomment, there's a post-date/time element that looks like "1h 🔗". That is a copyable/bookmarkable link.