LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Readers might also be interested in some of the discussion in this earlier post on "coup probes" [LW · GW] which have some discussion of the benefits and limitations of this sort of approach.

(Note that I advised on this linked post and the work discussed in it.)

Thanks for the feedback! I too am skeptical of the finance videos, agreeing that the video probably came across my radar due to the figures being popular rather than displaying believable tacit knowledge.

I've gone back and forth on whether to remove the videos from the list or just add your expert anecdata as a disclaimer on the videos. In the spirit of quantity vs. quality, I'm leaning toward keeping the videos on the list.

Many who believe in God derive meaning, despite God theoretically being able to do anything they can do but better, from the fact that He chose not to do the tasks they are good at, and left them tasks to try to accomplish. Its common for such people to believe that this meaning would disappear if God disappeared, but whenever such a person does come to no longer believe in God, they often continue to see meaning in their life^[1].

Now atheists worry about building God because it may destroy all meaning to our actions. I expect we'll adapt.

(edit: That is to say, I don't think you've adequately described what "meaning of life" is if you're worried about it going away in the situation you describe)

Man, that top one was a mess. Fixed now, thank you!

Thanks for the feedback! I'd be curious to hear more about (1) what subjects you're referring to and (2) how learning tacit knowledge with video has changed your learning habits (if your view here is based on your own experience).

"What Dragons?", says the lion, "I see no Dragons, only a big empty universe. I am the most mighty thing here."

Whether or not the Imagined Dragons are real isn't relevant to the gazelles if there is no solid evidence with which to convince the lions. The lions will do what they will do. Maybe some of the lions do decide to believe in the Dragons, but there is no way to force all of them to do so. The remainder will laugh at the dragon-fearing lions and feast on extra gazelles. Their children will reproduce faster.

Paul Ekmans software is decent. When I used it (before it was a SaaS, just a cd) it just basicallyflashed an expression for a moment then went back to neutral pic. After some training it did help to identify micro expressions in people

Doing nothing might be preferable to intervening in that case. But I'm not sure if the advanced civilization in Bostrom's scenario is intervening or merely opining. I would hope the latter.

Something else to play around with that I've tried. You can force the models to handle each digit separately by putting a space between each digit of a number like "3 2 3 * 4 3 7 = "

Here are some candidates from Claude and Gemini (Claude Opus seemed considerably better than Gemini Pro for this task). Unfortunately they are quite unreliable: I've already removed many examples from this list which I already knew to have multiple independent discoverers (like e.g. CRISPR and general relativity). If you're familiar with the history of any of these enough to say that they clearly were/weren't very counterfactual, please leave a comment.

• Noether's Theorem
• Mendel's Laws of Inheritance
• Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem (Claude mentions Von Neumann as an independent discoverer for the Second Incompleteness Theorem)
• Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics
• Onnes' discovery of superconductivity
• Pauling's discovery of the alpha helix structure in proteins
• McClintock's work on transposons
• Observation of the cosmic microwave background
• Lorentz's work on deterministic chaos
• Prusiner's discovery of prions
• Yamanaka factors for inducing pluripotency
• Langmuir's adsorption isotherm (I have no idea what this is)