LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I wrote the entry in the context of the question "how can I gain the effectiveness-benefits of confidence and extreme ambition, without distorting my world-model/expectations?"

I had recently been discovering abstract arguments that seemed to strongly suggest it would be most altruistic/effective for me to pursue extremely ambitious projects;  both because 1) the low-likelihood high-payoff quadrant had highest expected utility, but also because 2) the likelihood of success for extremely ambitious projects seemed higher than I thought.  (Plus some other reasons.)  I figured that I needn't feel confident about success in order to feel confident about the approach.

Is the recording schedule based on Patreon cash flow? I.e. if more people support, could we get episodes faster? Or is it also limited by your time? (not sure how much manual labour goes into this vs just paying for the service) Would it be possible to put money toward a specific project? This may be an interesting incentive for people who'd like to see more of their favourite story sooner:)

From what you write, Acemoglu's suggestions seem unlikely to be very successful in particular given international competition. I paint a bit b/w, but I think the following logic remains salient also in the messy real world:

1. If your country unilaterally tries to halt development of the infinitely lucrative AI inventions that could automate jobs, other regions will be more than eager to accommodate the inventing companies. So, from the country's egoistic perspective, might as well develop the inventions domestically and at least benefit from being the inventor rather than the adopter
2. If your country unilaterally tries to halt adoption of the technology, there are numerous capable countries keen to adopt and to swamp you with their sales
3. If you'd really be able to coordinate globally to enable 1. or 2. globally - extremely unlikely in the current environment and given the huge incentives for individual countries to remain weak in enforcement - then it seems you might as well try to impose directly the economic first best solution w.r.t. robots vs. labor: high global tax rates and redistribution.

Separately, I at least spontaneously wonder: How would one even want to go about differentiating what is the 'bad automation' to be discouraged, from legit automation without which no modern economy could competitively run anyway? For a random example, say if Excel wouldn't yet exist (or, for its next update..), we'd have to say: Sorry, cannot do such software, as any given spreadsheet has the risk of removing thousands of hours of work...?! Or at least: Please, Excel, ask the human to manually confirm each cell's calculation...?? So I don't know how we'd in practice enforce non-automation. Just 'it uses a large LLM' feels weirdly arbitrary condition - though, ok, I could see how, due to a lack of alternatives, one might use something like that as an ad-hoc criterion, with all the problems it brings. But again, I think points 1. & 2. mean this is unrealistic or unsuccessful anyway.

Lol just the last few days I was running through Leetcode's SQL 50 problems to refresh myself. They're some good, fun puzzles.

I'll look into R and basic statistical methods as well.

This is a very interesting topic to me- but unfortunately I think I'm finding the example topic to be a barrier. I don't enough about math or transformers for the examples to make real sense to me and connect to the abstracted idea of how to make effective flashcards to build intuition.

Almost all of these are about "cancellation" by means of transferring money from the government to those in debt. Are there similar arguments against draining some of the ~trillion dollars held by university endowments to return to students who (it could be argued) were implicitly promised an outcome they didn't get? That seems a lot closer to the plain meaning of "cancelling debt".

Yeah. This prompts me to make a brief version of a post I'd had on my TODO list for awhile:

"In the 21st century, being quick and competent at 'orienting' is one of the most important skills." 

(in the OODA Loop [LW · GW] sense, i.e. observe -> orient -> decide -> act)

We don't know exactly what's coming with AI or other technologies, we can make plans informed by our best-guesses, but we should be on the lookout for things that should prompt some kind of strategic orientation. @jacobjacob [LW · GW] has helped prioritize noticing things like "LLMs are pretty soon going to be affect the strategic landscape, we should be ready to take advantage of the technology and/or respond to a world where other people are doing that."

I like Robert's comment here because it feels skillful at noticing a subtle thing that is happening, and promoting it to strategic attention. The object-level observation seems important and I hope people in the AI landscape get good at this sort of noticing.

It also feels kinda related to the original context of OODA-looping, which was about fighter pilots dogfighting. One of the skills was "get inside of the enemy's OODA loop and disrupt their ability to orient." If this were intentional on OpenAI's part (or part of subconscious strategy), it'd be a kinda clever attempt to disrupt our observation step.

I'm not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but one thing I do is store things I need for work and travel in consistent bags.

For example, my work laptop and my badge live in specific parts of a work-specific backpack, and I never the leave the badge anywhere except in the specific pocket of the backpack or attached to my belt.

For travel, I keep a couple things that are annoying to forget in my carry-on bag (travel-sized soap, conditioner, toothpaste, an un-opened toothbrush, a multi-country power-adapter and a spare swim suit). A battery and anti-nausea meds live in a specific backpack.

There's trade-offs with some of these (it costs money to have an extra swim suit and backpack -- if you don't already have them), but some are basically free: the anti-nausea meds and badge need to live somewhere, so why not in the backpack I'll always have on me in the situation where I need them?

I’m using a different but similar approach of incorporating SRS into Roam instead ( https://vlad.roam.garden/apply-Spaced-Repetition-to-evergreen-notes-that-you-want-to-remember-or-periodically-rise-to-attention  ). 

Doublecrux sounds like a better thing than debate, but why such an event should be live? (apart from "it saves money/time not to postprocess")