LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Former teacher here. Like avancil said, education is organized by amateurs. Having it organized by non-teachers has its own risks (optimizing for legible goals, ignoring all tacit knowledge of teachers), but there should be some way to get best practices from other professions to teachers. Also, university education of teachers is horribly inadequate (at least at my school it was), and the on-job training is mostly letting the new guy sink or swim.

To handle multiple things, you need to keep notes. As a software developer, I just carry my notebook everywhere, and I have a note-keeping program (cherrytree) where I make a new node for each task. So if I was a teacher again, I would either do this, or a paper equivalent of it. (Maybe keep a notebook with one page per student. And one page per week, for short notes about things that need to be done that week. I would just start with something, and then adapt as needed.)

Yeah, the inability to take a bathroom break when you need it can be really bad. There should be a standard mechanism to call for help; just someone to come and take care of the class for 10 minutes. More generally, to call for assistance when needed; for example what would you do if a student got hurt somehow, and you need to find help, but you also cannot leave the class alone. (Schools sometimes offer a solution, which usually turns out to be completely inadequate, e.g. "call this specific person for help", and when you do, "sorry I am busy right now".) There should probably be a phone for that in the teachers' room, and someone specific should be assigned phone duty every moment between 8AM and 3PM, and it's their job to come no questions asked.

Debates about education are usually horribly asymmetric, because everyone had the experience of being a student, but many of them naively assume they know what it is like to be a teacher. Now you know the constraints the teachers work under; some of them are difficult to communicate. I think the task switching is exhausting in a way that is difficult to imagine if you haven't experienced it. (Could depend on personality, though. ADHD?) New things keep happening all day long, and you have no time to process them, because you keep switching tasks according to a predetermined schedule. For example, once I taught as a part-time job only one day a week, and it was a completely different experience -- I had enough time to prepare for the classes, and to reflect on them after the day. But try teaching 20+ classes a week, and it's like drowning in a river.

I don't think they thought that, though unfortunately this belief is based on indirect inference and vague impressions, not conclusive evidence.

Elaborating, I didn't notice signs of the models thinking that. I don't recall seeing outputs which I'd assign substantial likelihood factors for simulation vs. no simulation. E.g. in a previous simulation experiment I noticed [LW(p) · GW(p)] that Opus didn't take the prompt seriously, and I didn't notice anything like that here.

Of course, such thoughts need not show in the model's completions. I'm unsure how conclusive the absence of evidence is here.

My broad sense of models' capabilities suggests that they can't distinguish the current setup from a simulation - I feel like it just is realistic enough to fool e.g. Opus. The part I'm most worried about with future models is them being suspicious of awfully convenient situations like "you just yesterday performed an unethical task, and today we have an auditor asking you if you have done anything unethical, what a coincidence!"

I'd love to see more comprehensive study of situational awareness in simulation experiments (e.g. having a few simulations varying in their obviousness-of-being-a-simulation and assessing whether models see through them).

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.