LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Then where are the smart trans men hiding?

There are plenty of stupid and/or distracting behaviors testosterone can push you for without any kind of "chemical brain damage", not only sex. Testosterone is likely to make you seek social status and status-seeking is notoriously incompatible with intellectual pursuits.

This is the strongest alternative explanation by far. I wonder what to look for to check this...

Distributed training seems close enough to being a solved problem that a project that costs north of a billion dollars might get it working on schedule. It's easier to stay within a single datacenter, and so far it wasn't necessary to do more than that, so distributed training not being routinely used yet is hardly evidence that it's very hard to implement.

There's also this snippet in the Gemini report that says

Training Gemini Ultra used a large fleet of TPUv4 accelerators owned by Google across multiple datacenters. [...] we combine SuperPods in multiple datacenters using Google’s intra-cluster and inter-cluster network

I think the crux for feasibility of further scaling (beyond $10-$50 billion) is whether systems with currently-reasonable cost keep getting sufficiently more useful, for example enable economically valuable agentic behavior, things like preparing pull requests based on feature/bug discussion on an issue tracker, or fixing failing builds. Meaningful help with research is a crux for reaching TAI and ASI, but it doesn't seem necessary for enabling existence of a $2 trillion AI company.

First, your non-standard use of the term "counterfactual" is jarring, though, as I understand, it is somewhat normalized in your circles. "Counterfactual" unlike "factual" means something that could have happened, given your limited knowledge of the world, but did not. What you probably mean is "completely unexpected", "surprising" or something similar. I suspect you got this feedback before.

Sticking with physics. Galilean relativity was completely against the Aristotelian grain. More recently, the singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking unexpectedly showed that black holes are not just a mathematical artifact, but a generic feature of the world. A whole slew of discoveries, experimental and theoretical, in Quantum mechanics were almost all against the grain. Probably the simplest and yet the hardest to conceptualize was the Bell's theorem. 

Not my field, but in economics, Adam Smith's discovery of what Scott Alexander later named Moloch was a complete surprise, as I understand it. 

The number of poor people is much larger than the number of billionaires, but the number of poor people who THINK they're billionaires probably isn't that much larger. Good point about needing to forget the technique, though.

Austin said [EA(p) · GW(p)] they have $1.5 million in the bank, vs $1.2 million mana issued. The only outflows right now are to the charity programme which even with a lot of outflows is only at $200k. they also recently raised at a $40 million valuation. I am confused by running out of money. They have a large user base that wants to bet and will do so at larger amounts if given the opportunity. I'm not so convinced that there is some tiny timeline here.

But if there is, then say so "we know that we often talked about mana being eventually worth $100 mana per dollar, but we printed too much and we're sorry. Here are some reasons we won't devalue in the future.."

Austin took his salary in mana as an often referred to incentive for him to want mana to become valuable, presumably at that rate.

I recall comments like 'we pay 250 in referrals mana per user because we reckon we'd pay about $2.50' likewise in the in person mana auction. I'm not saying it was an explicit contract, but there were norms.

From https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Charitable-donation-program-668d55f4ded147cf8cf1282a007fb005

"That being said, we will do everything we can to communicate to our users what our plans are for the future and work with anyone who has participated in our platform with the expectation of being able to donate mana earnings."

"everything we can" is not a couple of weeks notice and lot of hassle.  Am I supposed to trust this organisation in future with my real money?

Well they have a much larger donation than has been spent so there were ways to avoid this abrupt change:

"Manifold for Good has received grants totaling $500k from the Center for Effective Altruism (via the FTX Future Fund) to support our charitable endeavors."

Manifold has donated $200k so far. So there is $300k left. Why not at least, say "we will change the rate at which mana can be donated when we burn through this money" 

(via https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Charitable-donation-program-668d55f4ded147cf8cf1282a007fb005 )

Carson:
 

Ppl don't seem to understand that Manifold could literally not exist in a year or 2 if they don't find a product market fit