LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Some issues have legible, material stakes.

Scrolling down... the table of how important are individual topics for young people; "student debt" is at its very bottom.

(Also, inflation on the very top? But isn't inflation a good thing if all you have is an enormous debt?)

But then no need for stealth at all?

I wasn't referring to the A10, but the use of e.g. f-35s in ground support roles - as heavily practised by the IDF for example.

This, and also most people on ACX respect Scott and his opinions, so if he demonstrates that he has put a lot of thought into this, and then he makes a conclusion, it will sound convincing to most.

Basically, we need to consider not just how many people believe some idea, but also how strongly. The typical situation with a conspiracy theory is that we have a small group that believes X very strongly, and a large group that believes non-X with various degrees of strength, from strongly to almost zero. What happens then is that people with a strong belief typically don't change their mind, while people with zero belief (who until now just took one side by default, because they never heard about the other) will flip a coin. Therefore the typical outcome is that the conspiracy theory becomes better known.

Or maybe the zero belief is not literally "never heard about theory" but "never met an actual person who also believes the theory" and as the debate starts, they find each other, and thus the conspiracy theory becomes socially acceptable (even being in a minority feels very different from being alone).

When the conspiracy theory is wildly known, and everyone already knows a few believers, most damage was already done.

Rationalist-adjacent community is often the opposite of the wider society, in that the mainstream beliefs are low-status, and we need to be reminded that they sometimes actually exist for a good reason. There is always this suspicion that people who have mainstream beliefs are simply too stupid to think independently. Therefore a debate will improve the case of the mainstream belief.

First of all, it‘s certainly important to distinguish between a probability model and a strategy. The job of a probability model is simply to suggest the probability of certain events and to describe how probabilities are affected by the realization of other events. A strategy on the other hand is to guide decision making to arrive at certain predefined goals.

Of course. As soon as we are talking about goals and strategies we are not talking about just probabilities anymore. We are also talking about utilities and expected utilities. However, probabilities do not suddenly change because of it. Probabilistic model is the same, there are simply additional considerations as well. 

My point is, that the probabilities a model suggests you to have based on the currently available evidence do NOT neccessarily have to match the probabilities that are relevant to your strategy and decisions.

Whether or not your probability model leads to optimal descision making is the test allowing to falsify it. There are no separate "theoretical probabilities" and "decision making probabilities". Only the ones that guide your behaviour can be correct. What's the point of a theory that is not applicable to practice, anyway?

If your model claims that the probability based on your evidence is 1/3 but the optimal decision making happens when you act as if it's 1/2, then your model is wrong and you switch to a model that claims that the probability is 1/2. That's the whole reason why betting arguments are popular.

If Beauty is awake and doesn‘t know if it is the day her bet counts, it is in fact a rational strategy to behave and decide as if her bet counts today.

Questions of what "counts" or "matters" are not the realm of probability. However, the Beauty is free to adjust her utilities based on the specifics of the betting scheme.

All your model suggests are probabilities conditional on the realization of certain events.

The model says that 

P(Heads|Red) = 1/3 

P(Heads|Blue) = 1/3

but

P(Heads|Red or Blue) = 1/2

Which obviosly translates in a betting scheme: someone who bets on Tails only when the room is Red wins 2/3 of times and someone who bets on Tails only when the room is Blue wins 2/3 of times, while someone who always bet on Tails wins only 1/2 of time.

This leads to a conclusion that observing event "Red" instead of "Red or Blue" is possible only for someone who has been expecting to observe event "Red" in particular. Likewise, observing HTHHTTHT is possible for a person who was expecting this particular sequence of coin tosses, instead of any combination with length 8.  See Another Non-Anthropic Paradox: The Unsurprising Rareness of Rare Events [LW · GW]

I am honored to be part of enabling more people from around the world to contribute to the safe and responsible development of AI. 

Clouds are a thing.

Tactical support aircraft are not stealth like A-10 but can be used only if airdefence is supressed

Flying very low, like 10-30 meters above the ground in night will protect against even MANPADS - it will fly above you in a few seconds.
 I recommend an interesting blog https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/p/its-the-range-stupid-part-1 which discuss a lot about air defence and current war

MLP or KAN doesn't make much difference for the GPUs as it is lots of matrix multiplications anyway. It might make some difference in how the data is routed to all the GPU cores as the structure (width, depth) of the matrixes might be different, but I don't know the details of that.