April 2022 Welcome & Open Thread

Hello all,

I am not new, but I read much more than I comment. I have not written any articles yet.
I've known LessWrong for maybe 10 years, but it didn't captivate me then. When I started reading SSC again at the beginning of the pandemic, I also came back to LessWrong and got captivated this time. I have subscribed to some authors and try to stay up to date on the curated list. I don't have the time/concentration to read everything I want, unfortunately. "The Engines of Cognition" is still lying around here wrapped up.

About me: I'm a Berlin freelance developer in my early 30s. I enjoy reading, educational and entertaining videos, board and PC games (cooperative, singleplayer and occasional competitive multiplayer).

Some stuff on LessWrong that I have enjoyed. Feel free to ask me for more links (on and off LessWrong):
* All of A Map that Reflects the Territory [? · GW]
* Bayeswatch [? · GW] by lsusr
* Theses on Sleep [LW · GW] by guzey
* Cryonics signup guide [? · GW] by mingyuan
* Can you control the past [LW · GW] by Joe Carlsmith

€: I'm also looking for a project from July onwards. Feel free to message me if you are looking for a developer.

Hello!

Here's another old lurker. I don't remember when I started reading the occasional article, but it must not have been much later than 2009. I came back on and off to the site, and in the last years got interested in becoming part of the community, though I'll probably have to learn an unfathomable lot before I can contribute much. I'm still slowly reading the Sequences.

Are there any efforts underway to move the content from Arbital to some platform that's, frankly, less buggy, unfinished, and inconvenient to use? Seems to me like a worthwhile thing to do if one wants people to actually read it, see Beware Trivial Inconveniences [LW · GW].

(Apologies if the above comes across as more caustic than it was meant to be, I'm still feeling my way around LessWrong's communication norms)

Feature request: I'd like to have options on /allPosts or the front page to filter out the posts I've already read or bookmarked.

Stephen Wolfram recently announced that he has a name for "the result of following all computational rules in all possible ways" (he calls it "the ruliad"), and that it describes, or is, not just all possible worlds, but all possible mathematics. There is a Tegmark-like collapse of the distinction between physics and mathematics here (and also echoes of physicist John Wheeler's older idea that "pregeometry" might be a statistical mechanics of logical propositions). Wolfram's version might deserve precise understanding and critical scrutiny by people interested in such things. 

"But -" said Professor McGonagall. She glanced at Mad-Eye Moody, who was nodding his approval, and at Severus, who was keeping his face decidedly blank. "Mr. Potter, you just stunned Mad-Eye Moody! The most famous Dark wizard hunter in the history of the Auror Office! That should've been impossible!"

Moody let out a dark chuckle. "What's your answer to that one, kid? I'm curious."

"Well..." Harry said. "First of all, Professor McGonagall, neither of us were fighting seriously."

"Neither of you?"

"Of course," Harry said. "In a serious fight, Mr. Moody would've dropped all my copies immediately without waiting for them to attack. And on my side, if it was actually necessary to take down the most famous Auror in the history of the office, I'd get Headmaster Dumbledore to do it for me.

and then

"You might say that Mr. Moody was testing me to see if I would try to fight him, or try to win. That is, whether I'd carry out the role of somebody fighting - use standard spells I already knew, even though I didn't expect the consequences of that action to be victory - or if I'd search through unusual plans until I found something that could win.

− HPMoR, Chapter 86

I wonder if there is some wisdom here related to AI alignment. Maybe the goal should be to get Terry Tao to do it.

Short-term change to Frontpage vs Personal classification

Generally, the frontpage vs personal blog status [LW · GW] is not based on the quality of the post, only on its timelessness and the relevance of its topic to the general LessWrong audience. However, the mod team is noticing the large influx of AI posts in the last few weeks that are dominating the latest posts list.

To prevent everyone having their latest posts list dominated by default, we are making the temporary decision to only frontpage posts on AI that are above a certain quality bar. If a post seems to be retreading old ground, not be reasoned in depth, or generally doesn't strike us as advancing the field much, we'll probably leave it on personal blog for now.

If you want to view all of these posts, ensure that you've got "personal blogposts" set to visible on your frontpage.

If you want to keep personal blogposts visible while reducing the number of AI posts shown, you can use the frotnage page tag filters to apply a soft filter (karma penalty) to posts tagged "AI".  Give them a -10 penalty or something.

I recently wanted to find some information about how-the-site-works (because I was trying to use the UI to do something^[1] and not getting the results I expected) and could not find any easy way to look up this kind of information. Information is distributed across many posts of varying ages, and I can only determine whether something is still accurate by finding more recent information that contradicts it. Old posts may have screenshots depicting an older version of the site, where even if the same functionality is still available now, it doesn't necessarily work quite the same. I think documentation of site features needs to be available in one place that is kept up to date, such as a wiki.

1. ^{^}

   I didn't understand until recently how to filter Latest Posts by tags. As it turns out, the "Add Tag Filter" button does not, by itself, filter anything: it only adds to the list of tags on which I can then apply a filter, and selecting a tag that is already on this list (which the menu by default invites me to do, offering a list of the core tags) does nothing (giving me the least possible information about what the feature is supposed to do). Hovering on a tag name, where I would have located the answer if I had paid close enough attention, brings up something that looks almost exactly like a non-interactable link preview but for one extra line of mostly low-contrast text, and after failing to notice this important distinction I went on a long detour around the site looking at old feature announcement posts.

I think there is a slight GUI bug. When I typed this comment and clicked submit, the text gets submitted as a comment, but also stays in the comment box. Meaning I can post the same comment twice just by clicking submit twice.

I mean this mostly humorously (I know it's uncommon here but it feels worth it), but also somewhat seriously. Reading about the Death With Dignity [LW · GW] stuff, and then hearing about how it is a minority [LW(p) · GW(p)] opinion [LW(p) · GW(p)], it feels like a Doctor vs Pharmacist situation. Eliezer/MIRI being the Pharmacist, and the more prevalent viewpoint of things being less grim being the Doctor.

There may actually be some insight hidden in that analogy. I'm not sure. A pharmacist kinda has more domain specific knowledge. A doctor has more formal credentials, is higher status, more conservative. Just thinking out loud.

I've just received 184.49€ from CFAR for Good Heart Week, while my profile says I only got 143 Good Heart Tokens, and those should correspond to 143$ -> 136€, and that's without PayPal fees for the transaction and currency conversion. What am I missing?

I think there is a slight GUI bug. When I typed this comment and clicked submit, the text gets submitted as a comment, but also stays in the comment box. Meaning I can post the same comment twice just by clicking submit twice.

Is there a way to replace the karma displayed on a user's page with (4 * post karma + comment karma)? I don't feel great about looking at a user's page to see whether other people take their ideas seriously, but karma is a useful feature, and to the extent we have it displayed, I want to see the more useful number.

Also, what's the correlation between post karma and comment karma among users with at least 1000 karma?

Is anyone out there good at LineageOS? I'm trying to put LineageOS onto my Motorola G7 but it's not working. I think I am making a mistake somewhere.

I am willing to pay $100 to someone who can walk me through the steps via a video call. Alternatively, I can trade one or two hours of tutoring/coaching/writing.

Attempting to edit my account preferences and submit gives me this error:

{"id":"users.email_already_taken","value":"xxxxx@xxxxx.com"}

and fails to save the account preferences.

Weird tiny bug related to Good Heart Week:

This was the lower hover tooltip (above the comments) from the current Zvi Covid post [LW · GW]:

a) This still mentions Good Heart tokens.

b) The closing parenthesis is missing, but only while the number of votes is 1. I wonder how that happened?

But after refreshing the page, the hover tooltip now only displays "Votes", and no Good Heart tokens are mentioned anymore?_?

Anyone know of some good explainers about why the cost of childcare is so freaking high now? How is it that back in the 1800s, house wives would routinely raise 8-10 children each on average and nowadays people have trouble affording a single child?

When logging to the AF using github I get an Internal Server Error (callback [? · GW])

Tangent to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xF7gBJYsy6qenmmCS/don-t-die-with-dignity-instead-play-to-your-outs?commentId=P9EiLDCgxRwJNi6bs: [LW · GW] I do not believe “epistemic status” and “confidence level” are ‘really’ interchangeable—almost at all, really, whereas log-odds and probability are interconvertible.

Epistemic status : provenance :: confidence level : canonicity, ish. Related, but importantly distinct, parts of the process of determining in what ways to trust some information.