LessWrong 2.0 Reader

This feels a bit loose on the definitions. I agree that finitism seems intuitively reasonable, and that the finite amount of information we can have about the terrain of the world out there around us is a reason that, as far as I can currently see ahead, it ought to never be possible to conclude the greater multiverse is able to contain infinities.

But I also don't see any way to strongly conclude the multiverse must not contain infinite-sized objects. I know folks who insist that if that's possible, there should be exactly one, infinite, agent in the multiverse.

In any case, I agree with philip_b that this post is pretty hard to parse and harder to check for mathematical validity.

Claude is such a swell dude tbh. hope he's ok

I think that you're right that people's jobs are a significant thing driving the difference here (thanks), but I'd guess that the bigger impact of jobs is via jobs --> culture than via jobs --> individual decisions. This impression is based on a sense of "when visiting Constellation, I feel less pull to engage in the open-ended idea exploration vs at FHI", as well as "at FHI, I think people whose main job was something else would still not-infrequently spend some time engaging with the big open questions of the day".

I might be wrong about that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My introduction to Dennett, half a lifetime ago, was this talk: 

That was the start of his profound influence on my thinking. I especially appreciated his continuous and unapologetic defense of the meme as a useful concept, despite the many detractors of memetics.

Sad to know that we won't be hearing from him anymore.

This isn't anything fundamentally new, is it? You could have the same discussion in the past about say, books. Goods and services that exist only in the realm of ideas have been around for ages. 

DMed a link to an interface which lets you select system prompt and model (including Claude). This is open to researchers to test, but not positing fully publicly as it is not very resistant to people who want to burn credits right now.

Other researchers feel free to DM me if you'd like access.

Careful: this event page is a duplicate of https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JWWaknqcT3zJHrdNu/acx-schelling-meetup-6 [? · GW]

I took the word "Metaverse" to mean virtual worlds, but perhaps this is narrower than the OP intended. A dating app where the users are there to find people to physically meet is not what I would call a virtual world. Broaden it that far and you might as well call LessWrong part of "the Metaverse".

But I am curious about these dating apps. What manner of virtual goods are these? Can you do anything with them other than showing that you bought them? That hasn't turned out too well for NFTs, "a complicated way of buying nothing" as Penny Arcade put it.

I think you’re trying to point towards multimodal distributions ?

If you can decompose P(X) as P(X) = P(X|H1)P(H1) + ... + P(X|Hn)P(Hn), and the P(X|Hn) are nice unimodal distributions (like a normal distribution), you end up with a multimodal distribution.

If moderators started rate-limiting Nora Belrose or someone else whose work I thought was particularly good

I actually did get rate-limited today, unfortunately.