LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Hah, I didn't see your answer but our links complement nicely. 

I think my first link was the paper that was making some waves when it came out.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370220301855#se0050

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370221000722

I'd be worried about evaporative cooling. It seems that the net result of this would be that labs would be almost completely devoid of people earnest about safety.

I agree with you government pathways to impact are most plausible and until recently undervalued. I also agree with you there are weird competitive pressures at labs. 

If that's the case, that seems like a huge hole in your argument/concern. But from statistics taken for the US, it looks like AAPIs get oropharynx cancers at a significantly lower rate than both non-Hispanic Whites and general population both, despite a possibly-higher rate of smoking (for cultural reasons) and a definitely-much-higher rate of defective ALDH polymorphisms.

I agree with you when it comes to humans that an approximation is totally fine for [almost] all purposes. I'm not sure that this holds when it comes to thinking about potential superintelligent AI, however. If it turns out that even in a super high-fidelity multidimensional ethical model there are still inherent self-contradictions, how/would that impact the Alignment problem, for instance?

The oral flora contains a diversity of organisms, bacterial, viral, and fungal, including some yeasts. Don't some of them produce ethanol already? And adhere to the mucous membrane instead of enamel? It wouldn't surprise me if some even excrete acetaldehyde under some conditions. Is Lumina really such a change?

The ONS's definition of household:

A household is one person living alone, or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who share cooking facilities and share a living room, sitting room or dining area. A household can consist of more than one family, or no families in the case of a group of unrelated people.

Higher housing costs mean fewer households. Children live with their parents for longer. Graduates move into HMOs because they can't afford a one-bedroom flat. Households growing at a slower rate than dwellings doesn't mean there isn't a supply constraint; it can often mean the opposite.

If I wanted to prove your point, the test would be whether the number of dwellings grew faster than the number of people, not the number of households.

To make no choice is to make a choice, and to take no action is to take an action. I'd ask the flip side of Lao Mein here - how confident are you, exactly, that your current state of affairs is all that great in an absolute sense, and what are you willing to risk a small chance of in exchange for clear benefits now and in future?

For example, if the GPT-4 evaluator gave a weighted score of $2.0$ to a summary generated by Claude 2 and a weighted score of $3.0$ to its own summary for the same article, then its final normalized self-preference score for the Claude summary would be $2/(2+3)=0.4$.

Should this be 3/(2+3) = 0.6? Not sure I've understood correctly.

I suppose if you had more hidden states than observables, you could distinguish hidden-state prediction from next-token prediction by the dimension of the fractal.