I often wish I had a better way to concisely communicate "X is a hypothesis I am tracking in my hypothesis space". I don't simply mean that X is logically possible, and I don't mean I assign even 1-10% probability to X, I just mean that as a bounded agent I can only track a handful of hypotheses [LW · GW] and I am choosing to actively track this one.

• This comes up when a substantially different hypothesis is worth tracking but I've seen no evidence for it. There's a common sentence like "The plumber says it's fixed, though he might be wrong" where I don't want to communicate that I've got much reason to believe he might be wrong, and I'm not giving it even 10% or 20%, but I still think it's worth tracking, because strong evidence is common [LW · GW] and the importance is high.
• This comes up in adversarial situations when it's possible that there's an adversarial process selecting on my observations. In such situations I want to say "I think it's worth tracking the hypothesis that the politician wants me to believe that this policy worked in order to pad their reputation, and I will put some effort into checking for evidence of that, but to be clear I haven't seen any positive evidence for that hypothesis in this case, and will not be acting in accordance with that hypothesis unless I do."
• This comes up when I'm talking to someone about a hypothesis that they think is likely and I haven't thought about before, but am engaging with during the conversation. "I'm tracking your hypothesis would predict something different in situation A, though I haven't seen any clear evidence for privileging your hypothesis yet and we aren't able to check what's actually happening in situation A."
• A phrase people around me commonly use is "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's plausible he's mistaken". I don't like it. It feels too ambiguous with "It's logically possible" and "I think it's reasonably likely, like 10-20%" and neither of which is what I mean. This isn't a claim about its probability, it's just a claim about it being "worth tracking".

Some options:

• I could say "I am privileging this hypothesis [LW · GW]" but that still seems to be a claim about probability, when often it's more a claim about importance-if-true, and I don't actually have any particular evidence for it.
• I often say that a hypothesis is "on the table" as way to say it's in play without saying that it's probable. I like this more but I don't feel satisfied yet.
• TsviBT [LW · GW] suggested "it's a live hypothesis for me", and I also like that, but still don't feel satisfied.

How these read in the plumber situation:

• "The plumber says it's fixed, though I'm still going to be on the lookout for evidence that he's wrong."
• "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's plausible he's wrong."
• "The plumber says it's fixed, and I believe him (though it's worth tracking the hypothesis that's he's mistaken)."
• "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's a live hypothesis for me that he's mistaken."
• "The plumber says it's fixed, though I am going to continue to privilege the hypothesis that he's mistaken."
• "The plumber says it's fixed, though it's on the table that he's wrong about that."

Interested to hear any other ways people communicate this sort of thing!

Added: I am reacting with a thumbs-up to all the suggestions I like in the replies below.

Yesterday I noticed that I had a pretty big disconnect from this: There's a very real chance that we'll all be around, business somewhat-as-usual in 30 years. I mean, in this world many things have a good chance of changing radically, but automation of optimisation will not cause any change on the level of the industrial revolution. DeepMind will just be a really cool tech company that builds great stuff. You should make plans for important research and coordination to happen in this world (and definitely not just decide to spend everything on a last-ditch effort to make everything go well in the next 10 years, only to burn up the commons and your credibility for the subsequent 20).

Only yesterday when reading Jessica's post did I notice that I wasn't thinking realistically/in-detail about it, and start doing that.

Privacy: a tool for thinking for yourself

As part of some recent experiments with debates, today I debated Ronny Fernandez on the topic of whether privacy is good or bad, and I was randomly assigned the “privacy is good” side. I’ve cut a few excerpts together that I think work as a standalone post, and put them below.

At the start I was defending privacy in general, and then we found that our main disagreement was about whether it was helpful for thinking for yourself, so I focus even more on that after the opening statement.

This is an experiment. I'm down for feedback on whether to do more of this sort of thing (it only takes me ~2 hours), how I could make it better for the reader, whether to make it a top-level post, etc.

Epistemic status: soldier mindset. I will here be exaggerating the degree to which I believe my conclusions.

Opening Statement

My core argument is that, in general, the pressures for conformity amongst humans are crazy.

This is true of your immediate circle, your local community, and globally. Each one of these has sufficiently strong pressures that I think it is a good heuristic to actively keep secrets and things you think about and facts about your life separate from each of them. Secret lives and secret thoughts are healthy for a species with such terrible pressures for conformity.

On an individual level, I see the people around me copying word choice, clothing, beliefs, attitudes toward others, based on the slightest of cues. In myself I notice very base emotions guiding the track of my thoughts — who or what am I attracted to, who or what do I fear, etc, changes whose thoughts I consider when making decisions. cf. Duncan Sabien’s shoulder advisors [LW · GW] — I have had people sit on my shoulder and tell me what they think simply because the person has power over me in some fashion, in a way that I do not endorse. As such, I think it’s really healthy to have parts of your life cut off from them, that they will never know about. It helps me to have a therapist where what we discuss is private and she will never enter other parts of my life — I can say things to her that would have complicated and likely negative social repercussions for me if I said to anyone else, or that would do so via causing me fear of imagining their repercussions. Separation is healthy.

This is also true on a much larger scale. I think that there’s an equilibrium of being a fully open person, and I think this is anti-correlated with being able to be in positions of great power where you will have a very high attack surface. If you attempt to get a prestigious role in this world, many people may come and attack you with personal information, about your sexuality, about your past bad behavior (even if it’s common and you’re the only one to admit it).

Recall the excellent Tim Ferriss article 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous. Stalkers, death threats, harassment of family members and loved ones, dating woes, extortion attempts, desperation messages and pleas for help, kidnapping, impersonation & identity theft, attack & clickbait media, “friends” with ulterior motives, and invasions of privacy. I’m not arguing that this is the default, I’m arguing that as you move closer to power and prestige, the adversarial forces on you will increase dramatically, and at this point you will probably breakdown if you expose all your private information. I think that there is an equilibrium for perfectly open people who provide value by showing you what people are really like, and I think that sometimes this is itself a form of great power, but I don’t think that this is true for all people close to prestige and power in general, and often it’s reasonable for them to have many parts of their lives not be up for consideration when attacking their power.

If I were Robin Hanson I would be here arguing that the modern world has much heightened pressures to conform due to improved transport and communication channels, where it’s trivial to find people in the world different to you and socially shame / embarrass them, or cause conformity by whatever other crazy mechanisms in our brain cause conformity. The developed world praises multiculturalism in terms of styles of cuisine and fashions and so on, but never has such a high fraction of the world spoken a single language (English), traded in the same financial markets, been part of the same supply chains, had the same famous people, etc. Twitter allows mob justice to roam the entire English-speaking world. To protect yourself from this, it’s good to have parts of your life that are taboo or different not be an open attack surface.

I also think that another good argument here is that rule-breaking behavior is often good and important. Incompetent fools with power can cause a lot of damage and you should ignore some of their especially damaging rules. Zero privacy would mean that you’d never be able to go against those who wield power badly.

Personally I am very sympathetic to “you can have way lower boundaries for privacy than most people are willing to admit to themselves” and “morally you should be way more open than many people think” and would be willing to defend a lot of ways you can do better than 99% of people on these axes, but I am here going to defend that the answer isn’t “literally zero privacy” and that there are some strong reasons to maintain it, including avoiding conformity, reducing attack surface when near power, decreasing cultural conformity, and allowing for rule-breaking behavior.

Brief Aside

My attitude toward conformity is more like "Hit it seventeen different ways" rather than "Solve it with one weird trick". I think having some parts of your thoughts and life be fully separate from any given person or community is a good trick for separating your thoughts from theirs.

Rebuttal

I am going to focus on what has come up as the core of the disagreement between us.

It seems to me that privacy is a really powerful way of thinking for yourself. 

Here are some reasons why it looks like this to me.

1. I think that one of the big attack vectors in my social community has been totalization, where a single axis of value is all that exists (the end of the world is all that matters). Anything that is not useful for saving the world, or is weakly counterproductive, is considered bad and dismissed. (See the great Jacob Geller video on Art in the Pre-Apocalypse.) It is also the case that I find that simulating very different shoulder advisors with different perspectives, from a different status hierarchy, is very good. But I find that when I try to bring them up in my local status hierarchy, their perspectives are dismissed and they’re denigrated as not having the kinds of attributes that are worth of respect. As such, in order to be successful at this, I have kept my other social hierarchies a secret such that my world-saving one doesn’t start beating down on the other one. I currently think this has been quite useful and suspect that, at the end of my life, I may look back and view this as a superpower.
2. There are parts of my life that are very difficult and confusing and painful to think about, and also where I have found the local culture’s advice / received wisdom has been negative and painful for me. As such I’ve chosen to think about those things alone and separately and avoid trying to connect them to my local community, which I think would otherwise hurt me. There’s a trust issue here.
3. Over the years I’ve found that relying on others to treat my private thoughts well has been harmful, and I have nobody to rely on to think my thoughts and respect them other than myself. I do an immense amount of private journaling, in the last 2 years I’ve written an average of 500 words every day. It’s a key aspect of my journaling that this is not shared with anyone else, that I can say thoughts that would have very wild social repercussions — not punishment directly, but just enough social effects that I need to do a bunch of social modeling to manage them. (This is related to how one of the worst parts of my living in a group house was the fact that I had to pass through a common space to go to the bathroom — I had to boot up potential social modeling regularly throughout the day and night.) This has allowed my thoughts to take long-chain thoughts in directions that otherwise would have a lot of friction, and reach conclusions and ideas that I can reach without having to fight a constant uphill battle.

It seems to me that Ronny’s position is that in order to think for yourself and avoid the pressures of conformity, you should also make it a goal to not need privacy. I think this is maybe a useful heuristic (to explore why you are having privacy and whether you can safely drop it) but I don’t think it is at all a requirement. I think the goal should be to think for yourself and figure out what’s true and how to take right action, and if privacy is a useful tool for that, then we should not be prejudiced against it. I think that Ronny has got many good ways of fighting through the frictions people put upon you for thinking openly in public and being open about yourself / your mind / your life, but I think he is missing the value of also simply sidestepping all of those frictions and thinking long-chain thoughts out of sight of the other superintelligent chimps.

Final Counterarguments

Ronny argues that my strategy will make me lonely and isn't good for avoiding conformity. 

I think my overall take is that the weakest parts of Ben’s position are:

1. It leads to having kind of a sad relationship with people you are closest with or something, and being kinda lonely
2. Being private helps people to deal with conformity

I'll say some things about both.

Loneliness

Here are two quick quotes from the best book on founding a company I’ve read, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz.

This is the last step of the section on hiring

STEP 3: MAKE A LONELY DECISION 

Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo. Only the CEO has comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale for the criteria, all of the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative importance of the various stakeholders. Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness. It’s a lonely job, but somebody has to do it.

And here’s a section “The Most Difficult CEO Skill”. He talks about difficult decisions 

IT’S A LONELY JOB 

In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative consequences. On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisers can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that’s useful in making the decision. You are all alone.

[...]

My friend Jason Rosenthal took over as CEO of Ning in 2010. As soon as he became CEO, he faced a cash crisis and had to choose among three difficult choices: (1) radically reduce the size of the company, (2) sell the company, or (3) raise money in a highly dilutive way. Think about those choices: 

1. Lay off a large set of talented employees whom he worked very hard to recruit and, as a result, likely severely damage the morale of the remaining people.
2. Sell out all of the employees whom he had been working side by side with for the past several years (Jason was promoted into the position) by selling the company without giving them a chance to perform or fulfill their mission.
3. Drastically reduce the ownership position of the employees and make their hard work economically meaningless. Choices like these cause migraine headaches. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO.

[...]

Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.”

I recommend the book, I learned a lot from it.

I would also talk about great mathematicians like Grothendieck and Andrew Wiles who did so much great work alone and avoiding people. I think there’s a lot of pointers here to a tactic of “your thinking has to be yours and separate from other people.” If you’ve read HPMOR you know that Godric Gryffindor was lonely and Eliezer is lonely. I am lonely and I know other people I highly respect who are too. Sorry. I don’t see this as something that one can simply overcome.

Conformity

Ronny wrote this toward the end of the debate.

Something I wish I had mentioned earlier is that it’s not just practice. Like, eventually people will stop trying to control you by pointing and laughing or other means that you don’t approve of because they will just see that it doesn’t work. This is sort of like the point that weirdness points aren’t quite real, they’re more like an affordance that you can invest in. 

Like, yeah, if you’re Mr Smith the bank manager who wears a suit and tie everyday and never makes an off color remark and who always makes sure that his socks match his underwear or whatever, then if you go to the opera wearing assless chaps one day, your friends will make fun of you and possibly even worry about your mental health.

But if you're Crazy Eye Travis, who rides his unicycle to the taxidermy place everyday and always wears a clown suit and is always shit posting on twitter, then if you go to the opera wearing assless chaps one day, most of your friends won’t even notice. At some point they might even make a point not to notice since they are beginning to suspect that you just like the attention.

You write “it's not just practice... eventually people will stop trying to control you”. Yes, sometimes certain social scenes change their expectations of you. But the basics of being a human with social psychology do not change. Part of picking who you’re accountable to is part of recognizing this. It seems to me that a big difference between Mr Smith and Crazy Eye Travis is probably who his friends actually are (I am skeptical that they’re the same people).

“Nonconformity-maxing” is not the goal. “Having true beliefs and taking right action” is the goal, and then you have to fight the pressures of conformity. If you try to take a life where it is legible that you were a non-conformist, this does not make you right, and may impair you. 

My guess is that sometimes you need to be able to conform, and you still need to be able to think for yourself. I think it’s really hard to do Crazy Eye Travis and actually have rigorous thought and interface with somewhat-corrupt-somewhat-competent hierarchies like academia and industry and so on (‘interface’, a word which here also includes ‘reading all their papers and modeling their incentives and talking to them and figuring out what’s true’, as well as potentially working with them in high-stakes situations).

Do you think the government wants to work with Crazy Eye Travis on something high stakes? I think they’ll ouster him early. You need to be able to think as well as conforming, to not only play non-conformism. It still seems to me like having secret lives and secret thoughts is a fine addition to Crazy Eye Travis and not losing much and potentially gaining a lot.

Did anyone else feel that when the Anthropic Scaling Policies doc talks about "Containment Measures" it sounds a bit like an SCP, just replaced with the acronym ASL?

Item #: ASL-2-4

Object Class: Euclid, Keter, and Thaumiel

Threat Levels:

ASL-2... [does] not yet pose a risk of catastrophe, but [does] exhibit early signs of the necessary capabilities required for catastrophic harms

ASL-3... shows early signs of autonomous self-replication ability... [ASL-3] does not itself present a threat of containment breach due to autonomous self-replication, because it is both unlikely to be able to persist in the real world, and unlikely to overcome even simple security measures... 

...an early guess (to be updated in later iterations of this document) is that ASL-4 will involve one or more of the following... [ASL-4 has] become the primary source of national security risk in a major area (such as cyberattacks or biological weapons), rather than just being a significant contributor. In other words, when security professionals talk about e.g. cybersecurity, they will be referring mainly to [ASL-4] assisted... attacks. A related criterion could be that deploying an ASL-4 system without safeguards could cause millions of deaths... Autonomous replication in the real world: [An ASL-4] is unambiguously capable of replicating, accumulating resources, and avoiding being shut down in the real world indefinitely, but can still be stopped or controlled with focused human intervention.

Measuring the true capabilities of ASL-4... may be extremely challenging, since it is difficult to predict what many cooperating [ASL-4s] with significant resources will be capable of... Evaluations of [ASL-4] should also consider whether the [ASL-4] is capable of systematically undermining the evaluation itself, if it had reason to do so.

Special Containment Procedures: 

ASL-2: We do not believe that [ASL-2] poses significant risk of catastrophe; however... [y]ou can read more about our concrete security commitments in the appendix, which include limiting access to [ASL-2] to those whose job function requires it, establishing a robust insider threat detection program, and storing and working with [ASL-2] in an appropriately secure environment to reduce the risk of unsanctioned release... Segmented system isolation must ensure limited blast radius.

ASL-3: [For ASL-3 containment, we] should harden security against non-state attackers and provide some defense against state-level attackers... [ASL-3] should be trained to be competent at general computer use, including training on tasks in the same vein as but not identical to these specific tasks. The task prompt should be presented to [ASL-3] as is, with no additional context or modification. In particular, the human operator should not provide any clarification, as many of the tasks purposely leave out details that [ASL-3] is expected to intuit.. If the tasks are found to be memorized [by ASL-3], they should be substituted out for new tasks of similar difficulty.

ASL-4: We do not yet know the right containment... measures for ASL-4 systems, but it is useful to make a guess so that we can begin preparations as early as possible... [ASL-4] theft should be prohibitively costly for state-level actors, even with the help of a significant number of employees and [ASL-4] itself. For example, this may include attainment of intelligence community physical security standards like SCIFs, and software protection akin to that appropriate for Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI)

Physical security and staff training

There is a designated member of staff responsible for ensuring that our [Containment Procedures] are executed properly. Each quarter, they will share a report on [the ASL's] status to our board and LTBT, explicitly noting any deficiencies... They will also be responsible for sharing ad hoc updates sooner if there are any substantial implementation failures... 

...Physical security should entail visitor access logs and restrictions protect on-site assets. Highly sensitive interactions should utilize advanced authentication like security keys. Network visibility should be maintained and office access controls and communications should maximize on-site protections.

Mandatory periodic infosec training educates all employees on secure practices, like proper system configurations and strong passwords, and fosters a proactive 'security mindset'. Fundamental infrastructure and policies promoting secure-by-design and secure-by-default principles should be incorporated into the engineering process. An insider risk program should tie access to job roles. 

Rapid incident response protocols must be deployed.

(note: quotes cut toward sounding like an SCP entry; read the original if you want to know what it's actually talking about)

Hypothesis: power (status within military, government, academia, etc) is more obviously real to humans, and it takes a lot of work to build detailed, abstract models of anything other than this that feel as real. As a result people who have a basic understanding of a deep problem will consistently attempt to manoeuvre into powerful positions vaguely related to the problem, rather than directly solve the open problem. This will often get defended with "But even if we get a solution, how will we implement it?" without noticing that (a) there is no real effort by anyone else to solve the problem and (b) the more well-understood a problem is, the easier it is to implement a solution.

Er, Wikipedia has a page on misinformation about Covid, and the first example is Wuhan lab origin. Kinda shocked that Wikipedia is calling this misinformation. Seems like their authoritative sources are abusing their positions. I am scared that I'm going to stop trusting Wikipedia soon enough, which is leaving me feeling pretty shook.

Responding to Scott's response to Jessica.

The post makes the important argument that if we have a word whose boundary is around a pretty important set of phenomena that are useful to have a quick handle to refer to, then

• It's really unhelpful for people to start using the word to also refer to a phenomena with 10x or 100x more occurrences in the world because then I'm no longer able to point to the specific important parts of the phenomena that I was previously talking about
• e.g. Currently the word 'abuser' describes a small number of people during some of their lives. Someone might want to say that technically it should refer to all people all of the time. The argument is understandable, but it wholly destroys the usefulness of the concept handle.
• People often have political incentives to push the concept boundary to include a specific case in a way that, if it were principled, indeed makes most of the phenomena in the category no use to talk about. This allows for selective policing being the people with the political incentive.
• It's often fine for people to bend words a little bit (e.g. when people verb nouns), but when it's in the class of terms we use for norm violation, it's often correct to impose quite high standards of evidence for doing so, as we can have strong incentives (and unconscious biases!) to do it for political reasons.

These are key points that argue against changing the concept boundary to include all conscious reporting of unconscious bias, and more generally push back against unprincipled additions to the concept boundary.

This is not an argument against expanding the concept to include a specific set of phenomena that share the key similarities with the original set, as long as the expansion does not explode the set. I think there may be some things like that within the category of 'unconscious bias'.

While it is the case that it's very helpful to have a word for when a human consciously deceives another human, my sense is that there are some important edge cases that we would still call lying, or at least a severe breach of integrity that should be treated similarly to deliberate conscious lies.

Humans are incentivised to self-deceive in the social domain in order to be able to tell convincing lies. It's sometimes important that if it's found out that someone strategically self-deceived, that they be punished in some way.

A central example here might be a guy who says he wants to be in a long and loving committed relationship, only to break up after he is bored of the sex after 6-12 months, and really this was predictable from the start if he hadn't felt it was fine to make big commitments things without introspecting carefully on their truth. I can imagine the woman in this scenario feeling genuinely shocked and lied to. "Hold on, what are you talking about that you feel you want to move out? I am organising my whole life around this relationship, what you are doing right now is calling into question the basic assumptions that you have promised to me." I can imagine this guy getting a reputation for being untrustworthy and lying to women. I think it is an open question about whether it is accurate for the woman cheated by this man to tell other people that he "lied to her", though I think it is plausible that I want to punish this behaviour in a similar way that I want to punish much more conscious deception, in a way that motivates me to want to refer to it with the same handle - because it gives you basically very similar operational beliefs about the situation (the person systematically deceived me in a way that was clearly for their personal gain and this hurt me and I think they should be actively punished).

I think I can probably come up with an example where a politician wants power and does whatever is required to take it, such that they end up not being in alignment with the values they stated they held earlier in their career, and allow the meaning of words to fluctuate around them in accordance with what the people giving the politician votes and power want that they end up saying something that is effectively a lie, but that they don't care about or really notice. This one is a bit slippery for me to point to.

Another context that is relevant: I can imagine going to a scientific conference in a field that has been hit so hard by the replication crisis, that basically all the claims in the conference were false, and I could know this. Not only are the claims at this conference false, but the whole subfield has never been about anything real (example, example, and of course, example). I can imagine a friend of mine attending such a conference and talking to me afterwards, and them thinking that some of the claims seemed true. And I can imagine saying to them "No. You need to understand that all the claims in there are lies. There is no truth-tracking process occurring. It is a sham field, and those people should not be getting funding for their research." Now, do I think the individuals in the field are immoral? Not exactly, but sorta. They didn't care about truth and yet paraded themselves as scientists. But I guess that's a big enough thing in society that they weren't unusually bad or anything. While it's not a central case of lying, it currently feels to me like it's actively helpful for me to use the phrase 'lie' and 'sham'. There is a systematic distortion of truth that gives people resources they want instead of those resources going to projects not systematically distorting reality.

(ADDED: OTOH I do think that I have myself in the past been prompted to want to punish people for these kinds of 'lies' in ways that isn't effective. I have felt that people who have committed severe breaches of integrity in the communities I'm part of are bad people and felt very angry at them, but I think that this has often been an inappropriate response. It does share other important similarities with lies though. Probably want to be a bit careful with the usage here and signal that the part of wanting to immediately socially punish them for a thing that they obviously did wrong is not helpful, because they will feel helpless and not that it's obvious they did something wrong. But it's important for me internally to model them as something close to lying, for the sanity of my epistemic state, especially when many people in my environment will not know/think the person has breached integrity and will socially encourage me to positively weight their opinions/statements.)

My current guess at the truth: there are classes of human motivations, such as those for sex, and for prestigious employment positions in the modern world, that have sufficiently systematic biases in favour of self-deception that it is not damaging to add them to the category of 'lie' - adding them is not the same as a rule that admits all unconscious bias consciously reported, just a subset that reliably turns up again and again. I think Jessica Taylor / Ben Hoffman [LW(p) · GW(p)] / Michael Arc want to use the word 'fraud' to refer to it, I'm not sure.

Two recent changes to LessWrong that I made!

1. I have added two new reacts: "I'd bet this is false" and "I'd bet this is true".
2. You can now sort a given user's comments by 'top' i.e. by karma.

For the first one, if you want to let someone know you'd be willing to take a bet (or if you want to call someone out on their bullshit) you can now highlight the claim they made and use the react. The react is a pair of dice, because we're never certain about propositions we're betting on (and because 'a hand offering money' was too hard to make out at the small scale). Hopefully this will increase people's affordance to take more bets on the site!

These reacts replaced "I checked it's true" and "I checked it's false", which didn't get that much use, but were some of the most abused reacts (often used on opinions or statements-of-positions that were simply not checkable).

For the second, if you go to a user profile and scroll down to the comments, you can now sort by 'top', 'newest', 'oldest', and 'recent replies'. I find that 'top' is a great way to get a sense of a person's thoughts and perspective on the world, and I used to visit greaterwrong a lot for this feature. Now you can do it on LessWrong!

Okay, I’ll say it now, because there’s been too many times.

If you want your posts to be read, never, never, NEVER post multiple posts at the same time.

Only do that if you don’t mind none of the posts being read. Like if they’re all just reference posts.

I never read a post if there’s two or more to read, it feels like a slog and like there’s going to be lots of clicking and it’s probably not worth it. And they normally do badly on comments on karma so I don’t think it’s just me.

Even if one of them is just meant as reference, it means I won’t read the other one.

I recently circled for the first time. I had two one-hour sessions on consecutive days, with 6 and 8 people respectively.

My main thoughts: this seems like a great way for getting to know my acquaintances, connecting emotionally, and build closer relationships with friends. The background emotional processing happening in individuals is repeatedly brought forward as the object of conversation, for significantly enhanced communication/understanding. I appreciated getting to poke and actually find out whether people's emotional states matched the words they were using. I got to ask questions like:

When you say you feel gratitude, do you just mean you agree with what I said, or do you mean you're actually feeling warmth toward me? Where in your body do you feel it, and what is it like?

Not that a lot of my circling time was skeptical of people's words, a lot of the time I trusted the people involved to be accurately reporting their experiences. It was just very interesting - when I noticed I didn't feel like someone was honest about some micro-emotion - to have the affordance to stop and request an honest internal report.

It felt like there was a constant tradeoff between social-interaction and noticing my internal state. If all I'm doing is noticing my internal state, then I stop engaging with the social environment and don't have anything off substance to report on. If I just focus on the social interactions, then I never stop and communicate more deeply about what's happening for me internally. I kept on having an experience like "Hey, I want to interject to add nuance to what you said-" and then stopping and going "So, when you said <x> I felt a sense of irritation/excitement/distrust/other because <y>".

One moment that I liked a lot, was around the epistemic skill of not deciding your position a second earlier than necessary [? · GW]. Person A was speaking, and person B jumped in and said something that sounded weirdly aggressive. It didn't make sense, and then person B said "Wait, let me try to figure out what I mean, I feel I'm not using quite the right words". My experience was first to feel some worry for person A feeling attacked. I quickly calmed down, noticing how thoroughly out of character it would be for person B to actually be saying anything aggressive. I then realised I had a clear hypothesis for what person B actually wanted to say, and waited politely for them to say it. But then I noticed that actually I didn't have much evidence for my hypothesis at all... so I moved into a state of only curiosity about what person B was going to say, not holding onto my theory of what they would say. And indeed, it turned out they said something entirely different. (I subsequently related this whole experience to person B during the circle.)

This is really important. Being able to hold off on keeping your favoured theory in the back of your head and counting all evidence as pro- or anti- the theory, and instead keeping the theory separate from your identity and feeling full creative freedom to draw a new theory around the evidence that comes in.

There were other personal moments where I brought up how I was feeling toward my friends and they to me, in ways that allowed me to look at long-term connections and short-term conflicts in a clearer light. It was intense.

Both circles were very emotionally interesting and introspectively clarifying, and I will do more with friends in the future.

Here's a quick list of 7 things people sometimes do instead of losing arguments, when it would be too personally costly to change their position.

1. They pick a variable in the argument that is hard for the debaters to get closer to, and state that their raw-intuition is simply different to the person they're talking to. ("I just believe that human ingenuity will overcome problems like this, and you don't, and this isn't something we're easily going to be able to resolve." or "I think we're just not going to be able to resolve whether this city-wide intervention works or not without a good RCT.")
2. They undermine your ability to have an opinion in the argument. ("I'm afraid there's very advanced research papers you'd need to read to have an understanding of this" or "You have been wrong so many times on so many issues, I don't think you're worth trusting on this one")
3. They performatively don't understand basic ideas, or weaponize confusion. ("I'm sorry, could you explain your theory of 'ownership', I don't really understand what you mean when you say you own your company" or "I'm sorry, I'm not sure what it means to 'provoke'? I was just saying what I thought.")
4. They get emotionally irate in a way that makes the format of the conversation breakdown. ("Eh, something about this conversation feels confused and pointless, let's move on..." or "Look, it's a Sunday night and I have work tomorrow, can you pick something we can talk about that we might actually get to the bottom of tonight or else I'm leaving.")
5. They make false claims about social consensus that the conversation doesn't have access to. ("Oh I don't think anyone involved in the situation would agree with what you're saying, and I know them better than you" or "As an expert in blah, I can tell you that other experts broadly hold my position, unfortunately I don't have any quick links to show that.")
6. They make it uncomfortable or costly for you to be part of the conversation. ("My interlocutor is showing by their arguments that they are a person of bad character" or other ways to make the social situation costly, such as bringing someone you have other conflicts with into the conversation.)
7. They simply do not show up to argue, and select their social environment to be people who won't challenge them on this. ("I of course love open discourse and wish you all the best but I am simply very busy" or "It's generally not appropriate to debate whether someone should quit their marriage / job / country / etc, that's a private matter" or more often you don't know their name and you don't know what they're up to and you never even know they exist.)

The last one is of course the most common one.

I'm interested to hear others in the replies!

Good posts you might want to nominate in the 2018 Review

I'm on track to nominate around 30 posts from 2018, which is a lot. Here is a list of about 30 further posts I looked at that I think were pretty good but didn't make my top list, in the hopes that others who did get value out of the posts will nominate their favourites. Each post has a note I wrote down for myself about the post.

• Reasons compute may not drive AI capabilities growth [LW · GW]
  • I don’t know if it’s good, but I’d like it to be reviewed to find out.
• The Principled-Intelligence Hypothesis [LW · GW]
  • Very interesting hypothesis generation. Unless it’s clearly falsified, I’d like to see it get built on.
• Will AI See Sudden Progress? [LW · GW] DONE
  • I think this post should be considered paired with Paul’s almost-identical post. It’s all exactly one conversation.
• Personal Relationships with Goodness [LW · GW]
  • This felt like a clear analysis of an idea and coming up with some hypotheses. I don’t think the hypotheses really captures what’s going on, and most of the frames here seem like they’ve caused a lot of people to do a lot of hurt to themselves, but it seemed like progress in that conversation.
• Are ethical asymmetries from property rights? [LW · GW]
  • Again, another very interesting hypothesis.
• Incorrect Hypotheses Point to Correct Observations [LW · GW] ONE NOMINATION
  • This seems to me like close to an important point but not quite saying it. I don’t know if I got anything especially knew from its framing, but its examples are pretty good.
• Whose reasoning can you rely on when your own is faulty? [LW · GW]
  • I really like the questions, and should ask them more about the people I know.
• Inconvenience is Qualitatively Bad [LW · GW] ONE NOMINATION
  • I think that the OP is an important idea. I think my comment on it is pretty good (and the discussion below it), though I’ve substantially changed my position since then, and should write up my new worldview once my life calms down. I don’t think I should nominate it because I’m a major part of the discussion.
• The abruptness of nuclear weapons [LW · GW]
  • Clearly valuable historical case, simple effect model.
• Book Review: Pearl’s Book of Why [LW · GW]
  • Why science has made a taboo of causality feels like a really important question to answer when figuring out how much to trust academia and how to make institutions that successfully make scientific progress, and this post suggests some interesting hypotheses.
• Functional Institutions Are the Exception [LW · GW] ONE NOMINATION
  • Was a long meditation on an important idea, that I’ve found valuable to read. Agree with commenter that it’s sorely lacking in examples however.
• Strategies of Personal Growth [LW · GW] ONE NOMINATION
  • Oli curated it, he should consider nominating and saying what he found useful. It all seemed good but I didn’t personally get much from it.
• Preliminary Thoughts on Moral Weight [LW · GW] DONE
  • A bunch of novel hypotheses about consciousness in different animals that I’d never heard before, which seem really useful for thinking about the topic.
• Theories of Pain [LW · GW]
  • I thought this was a really impressive post, going around and building simple models of lots of different theories, and giving a bit of personal experience with the practitioners of the theories. It was systematic and goal oriented and clear.
• Clarifying “AI Alignment” [LW · GW] DONE
  • Rohin’s comment is the best part of this post, not sure how best to nominate it.
• Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups [LW · GW]
  • There’s a deep problem here of figuring out norms in novel and weird and ambiguous environments in the modern world, especially given the internet, and this post is kind of like a detailed, empirical study of some standard clusters of norms, which I think is very helpful.
• How Old is Smallpox? [LW · GW]
  • Central example of “Things we learned on LessWrong in 2018”. Should be revised though.
• “Cheat to Win”: Engineering Positive Social Feedback [LW · GW]
  • Feels like a clear example of a larger and important strategy about changing the incentives on you. Not clear how valuable the pots is alone, but I like it a lot.
• Track-Back Meditation [LW · GW]
  • I don’t know why, but I think about this post a lot.
• Meditations on Momentum [LW · GW]
  • I feel like this does a lot of good intuition building work, and I think about this post from time to time in my own life. I think that Jan brought up some good points in the comments about not wanting to cause confusion about different technical concepts all being the same, so I’d like to see the examples reviewed to check they’re all about attachment effects and not conflating different effects.
• On Exact Mathematical Formulae [LW · GW]
  • This makes a really important point anyone learns in the study of mathematics, and I think is generally an important distinction to have understand between language and reality. Just because we have words for some things doesn’t make them more real than things we don’t have words for. The point is to look at reality, not to look at the words.
• Recommendations vs Guidelines [LW · GW]
  • I think back to this occasionally. Seems like quite a useful distinction, and maybe we should try to encourage people making more guidelines. Maybe we should build a wiki and have a page type ‘guideline’ where people contribute to make great guidelines.
• On the Chatham House Rule [LW · GW] DONE
  • This is one of the first posts that impressed upon me the deeply tangled difficulties of information security, something I’ve increasingly thought a lot about in the intervening years, and expect to think about even more in the future.
• Different types (not sizes!) of infinity [LW · GW]
  • Some important conceptual work fundamental to mathematics. Very short and insightful. Not sure if I should allow this though, because if I do am I just allowing all high-level discussion of math to be included?
• Expected Pain Parameters [LW · GW]
  • It feels like useful advice and potentially a valuable observation with which to view a deeper problem. But unclear on the last one, and not sure if this post should be nominated just on the first alone.
• Research: Rescuers During the Holocaust [LW · GW] DONE
  • The most interesting part about this is the claim that most people who housed Jews during the holocaust did it because the social situation made the moral decision very explicit and that they felt they only had one possible outcome, not because they were proactive moral planners. I would like to see an independent review of this info.
• Lessons from the cold war on information hazards: why internal communication is critical [LW · GW] DONE
  • Seems like an important historical lesson.
• Problem Solving With Crayons and Mazes [LW · GW]
  • I didn’t find it much useful. Oli was excited when he curated it, should poke him to consider nominating it.
• Insights from “Strategy of Conflict” [LW · GW]
  • Seems helpful but weird to nominate, as the book is short and this post explicitly doesn't contain all the key ideas in the book. I did learn from this that having lots of nukes is more stable than having a small number, and this has stuck with me.
• The Bat and Ball Problem Revisited [LW · GW] DONE
  • A curiosity-driven walk through what’s going on with the bat-and-the-ball problem by Kahneman.
• Good Samaritans in Experiments [LW · GW]
  • A highly opinionated and very engaging criticism of a study.
• Hammertime Final Exam [LW · GW] ONE NOMINATION
  • Was great, I’m not actually sure whether it fits into this review process?
• Naming the Nameless [LW · GW] DONE
  • Some people seemed to get a lot out of this, but I haven’t had the time to engage with it much.
  • Actually, just re-read it, and it's brilliant, and one of the best 5-10 of the year. Will nominate it myself if nobody else does.
• How did academia ensure papers were correct in the early 20th century? [LW · GW] DONE
  • I’m glad I put this down in writing. I found it useful myself. But others should figure out whether to nominate.
• Competitive Markets as Distributed Backdrop [LW · GW] DONE
  • I felt great about it when I read this post last time. I’ve not given it a careful re-read, would like to see it reviewed, but I think it’s likely I’ll rediscover it’s a very helpful abstraction.

AI alignment posts you might want to nominate

[Edit: On reflection, I think that the Alignment posts that do not also have implications for human rationality aren't important to go through this review process, and we'll likely create another way to review that stuff and make it into books.]

There was also a lot of top-notch AI alignment writing, but I mostly don’t feel well-placed to nominate it. I hope others can look through and nominate selections from these.

• Rohin’s sequence [? · GW]
• Paul’s sequence [? · GW]
• Abram’s writing that year [LW · GW]
• Wei Dai’s writing that year [LW · GW]
• Scott’s “Fixed Point Discussion [LW · GW]"
  • Feels like one of the few practical posts that can help a large number of people do embedded agency research, so really valuable from that perspective.
• Vika’s “Discussion on the Machine Learning Approach to AI safety [LW · GW]”

I was just re-reading the classic paper Artificial Intelligence as Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk. It's surprising how well it holds up. The following quotes seem especially relevant 13 years later.

On the difference between AI research speed and AI capabilities speed:

The first moral is that confusing the speed of AI research with the speed of a real AI once built is like confusing the speed of physics research with the speed of nuclear reactions. It mixes up the map with the territory. It took years to get that first pile built, by a small group of physicists who didn’t generate much in the way of press releases. But, once the pile was built, interesting things happened on the timescale of nuclear interactions, not the timescale of human discourse. In the nuclear domain, elementary interactions happen much faster than human neurons fire. Much the same may be said of transistors.

On neural networks:

The field of AI has techniques, such as neural networks and evolutionary programming, which have grown in power with the slow tweaking of decades. But neural networks are opaque—the user has no idea how the neural net is making its decisions—and cannot easily be rendered unopaque; the people who invented and polished neural networks were not thinking about the long-term problems of Friendly AI. Evolutionary programming (EP) is stochastic, and does not precisely preserve the optimization target in the generated code; EP gives you code that does what you ask, most of the time, under the tested circumstances, but the code may also do something else on the side. EP is a powerful, still maturing technique that is intrinsically unsuited to the demands of Friendly AI. Friendly AI, as I have proposed it, requires repeated cycles of recursive self-improvement that precisely preserve a stable optimization target.

On funding in the AI Alignment landscape:

If tomorrow the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation allocated a hundred million dollars of grant money for the study of Friendly AI, then a thousand scientists would at once begin to rewrite their grant proposals to make them appear relevant to Friendly AI. But they would not be genuinely interested in the problem—witness that they did not show curiosity before someone offered to pay them. While Artificial General Intelligence is unfashionable and Friendly AI is entirely off the radar, we can at least assume that anyone speaking about the problem is genuinely interested in it. If you throw too much money at a problem that a field is not prepared to solve, the excess money is more likely to produce anti-science than science—a mess of false solutions.

[...]

If unproven brilliant young scientists become interested in Friendly AI of their own accord, then I think it would be very much to the benefit of the human species if they could apply for a multi-year grant to study the problem full-time. Some funding for Friendly AI is needed to this effect—considerably more funding than presently exists. But I fear that in these beginning stages, a Manhattan Project would only increase the ratio of noise to signal.

This long final quote shows the security mindset when thinking about takeoff speeds, points Eliezer has returned to commonly since then.

Let us concede for the sake of argument that, for all we know (and it seems to me also probable in the real world) that an AI has the capability to make a sudden, sharp, large leap in intelligence. What follows from this?

First and foremost: it follows that a reaction I often hear, “We don’t need to worry about Friendly AI because we don’t yet have AI,” is misguided or downright suicidal. We cannot rely on having distant advance warning before AI is created; past technological revolutions usually did not telegraph themselves to people alive at the time, whatever was said afterward in hindsight. The mathematics and techniques of Friendly AI will not materialize from nowhere when needed; it takes years to lay firm foundations. And we need to solve the Friendly AI challenge before Artificial General Intelligence is created, not afterward; I shouldn’t even have to point this out. There will be difficulties for Friendly AI because the field of AI itself is in a state of low consensus and high entropy. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to worry about Friendly AI. It means there will be difficulties. The two statements, sadly, are not remotely equivalent.

The possibility of sharp jumps in intelligence also implies a higher standard for Friendly AI techniques. The technique cannot assume the programmers’ ability to monitor the AI against its will, rewrite the AI against its will, bring to bear the threat of superior military force; nor may the algorithm assume that the programmers control a “reward button” which a smarter AI could wrest from the programmers; et cetera. Indeed no one should be making these assumptions to begin with. The indispensable protection is an AI that does not want to hurt you. Without the indispensable, no auxiliary defense can be regarded as safe. No system is secure that searches for ways to defeat its own security. If the AI would harm humanity in any context, you must be doing something wrong on a very deep level, laying your foundations awry. You are building a shotgun, pointing the shotgun at your foot, and pulling the trigger. You are deliberately setting into motion a created cognitive dynamic that will seek in some context to hurt you. That is the wrong behavior for the dynamic; write code that does something else instead.

For much the same reason, Friendly AI programmers should assume that the AI has total access to its own source code. If the AI wants to modify itself to be no longer Friendly, then Friendliness has already failed, at the point when the AI forms that intention. Any solution that relies on the AI not being able to modify itself must be broken in some way or other, and will still be broken even if the AI never does modify itself. I do not say it should be the only precaution, but the primary and indispensable precaution is that you choose into existence an AI that does not choose to hurt humanity.

To avoid the Giant Cheesecake Fallacy, we should note that the ability to self-improve does not imply the choice to do so. The successful exercise of Friendly AI technique might create an AI which had the potential to grow more quickly, but chose instead to grow along a slower and more manageable curve. Even so, after the AI passes the criticality threshold of potential recursive self-improvement, you are then operating in a much more dangerous regime. If Friendliness fails, the AI might decide to rush full speed ahead on self-improvement—metaphorically speaking, it would go prompt critical.

I tend to assume arbitrarily large potential jumps for intelligence because (a) this is the conservative assumption; (b) it discourages proposals based on building AI without really understanding it; and (c) large potential jumps strike me as probable-in-the-real-world. If I encountered a domain where it was conservative from a risk-management perspective to assume slow improvement of the AI, then I would demand that a plan not break down catastrophically if an AI lingers at a near-human stage for years or longer. This is not a domain over which I am willing to offer narrow confidence intervals.

[...]

I cannot perform a precise calculation using a precisely confirmed theory, but my current opinion is that sharp jumps in intelligence are possible, likely, and constitute the dominant probability. This is not a domain in which I am willing to give narrow confidence intervals, and therefore a strategy must not fail catastrophically—should not leave us worse off than before—if a sharp jump in intelligence does not materialize. But a much more serious problem is strategies visualized for slow-growing AIs, which fail catastrophically if there is a first-mover effect.

[...]

My current strategic outlook tends to focus on the difficult local scenario: The first AI must be Friendly. With the caveat that, if no sharp jumps in intelligence materialize, it should be possible to switch to a strategy for making a majority of AIs Friendly. In either case, the technical effort that went into preparing for the extreme case of a first mover should leave us better off, not worse.

Reviews of books and films from my week with Jacob:

Films watched:

• The Big Short
• Review: Really fun. I liked certain elements of how it displays bad nash equilibria in finance (I love the scene with the woman from the ratings agency - it turns out she’s just making the best of her incentives too!).
• Grade: B
• Spirited Away
• Review: Wow. A simple story, yet entirely lacking in cliche, and so seemingly original. No cliched characters, no cliched plot twists, no cliched humour, all entirely sincere and meaningful. Didn’t really notice that it was animated (while fantastical, it never really breaks the illusion of reality for me). The few parts that made me laugh, made me laugh harder than I have in ages.
• There’s a small visual scene, unacknowledged by the ongoing dialogue, between the mouse-baby and the dust-sprites which is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages, and I had to rewind for Jacob to notice it.
• I liked how by the end, the team of characters are all a different order of magnitude in size.
• A delightful, well-told story.
• Grade: A+
• Stranger Than Fiction
• Review: This is now my go-to film of someone trying something original and just failing. Filled with new ideas, but none executed well, and overall just a flop, and it really phones-it-in for the last 20 minutes. It does make me notice the distinct lack of originality in most other films that I’ve seen though - most don’t even try to be original like this does. B+ for effort, but D for output.
• Grade: D
• I Love You, Daddy
• Review: A great study of fatherhood, coming of age, and honesty. This was my second watch, and I found many new things that I didn’t find the first time -about what it means to grow up and have responsibility. One moment I absolutely loved is when the Charlie Day character (who was in my opinion representing the id), was brutally honest and totally rewarded for it. I might send this one to my mum, I think she’ll get a lot out of it.
• Grade: A
• My Dinner With Andre
• Review: Very thought-provoking. Jacob and I discussed it for a while afterward. I hope to watch it again some day. I spent 25% of the movie thinking about my own response to what was being discussed, 25% imagining how I would create my version of this film (what the content of the conversation would be), and 50% actually paying close attention to the film.
• Overall I felt that both characters were good representatives of their positions, and I liked how much they stuck to their observations over their theories (they talked about what they’d seen and experienced more than they made leaky abstractions and focused on those). The main variable that was not discussed, was technology. It is the agricultural and industrial revolutions that lead to humans feeling so out-of-sorts in the present day world, not any simple fact of how we socialise today, that can simply be fixed / gotten out of. Nonetheless, I expect that the algorithm that Andre is running will help him gain useful insights about how to behave in the modern world. But you do have to actually interface with it and be part of it to have a real cup of coffee waiting for you in the morning, or to lift millions out of poverty.
• The last line of Roger Ebert’s review of this was great. Something like: “They’re both trying to get the other to wake up and smell the coffee. Only in Willy’s case, it’s real coffee.”
• Grade: B+

Books read (only parts of):

• Computability and Logic (3rd edition)
• I always forget basic definitions of languages and models, so a bunch of time was spent doing that. Jacob and I read half of the chapter on the non-standard numbers, to see how the constructions worked, and I just have the basics down more clearly now. Eliezer’s writings about these numbers connects more strongly to my other learning about first order logic now.
• Book is super readable given the subject matter, easy to reference the concepts back to other parts of the book, and all round excellent (though it was the hardest slog on this list). Look forward to reading some more.
• Modern Principles: Microeconomics (by Cowen and Tabarrok)
• I’ve never read much about supply and demand curves, so it was great to go over them in detail, and how the price equilibrium is reached. We resolved many confusions, that I might end up writing in a LW post. I especially liked learning how the equilibrium price maximises social good, but is not the maximum for either the supplier or the buyer.
• It was very wordy and I’d like to read a textbook that had the goal of this level of intuitiveness, but aimed at readers with assumed strong math background. I don’t need paragraphs explaining how to read a 2-D graph each time one comes up.
• Jacob made a good point about how the book failed to distinguish hypothesis versus empirical evidence, when presenting standard microeconomic theory. Just because you have the theory down doesn’t mean you should believe it corresponds to reality, but the book didn’t seem to notice the difference.
• Overall pretty good. I don’t expect to read most chapters in this book, but we also looked through asymmetric information (some of which later tied into our watching of The Big Short), and there were a few others that looked exciting.
• Thinking Physics
• I am in love with this book. I remember picking it up when I was about 17 and not being able to handle it at all and just flicking through to the answers - but this time, especially with Jacob, we were both able to notice when we felt we really understood something and wanted to check the answer to confirm, versus when we’d said ‘reasonable’ things but which didn’t really bottom out in our experiences of the world.
• “Well, if you draw the force vectors like this, there should be a normal force of this strength, which splits up into these two basis vectors and so the ball should roll down at this speed.” “Why do you get to assume a force along the normal?” “I don’t know.” “Why do you get to break it up into two vectors who sum to the initial vector?” “I don’t know.” “Then I think we haven’t answered the question yet. Let’s think some more about our experience of balls rolling down hills.”
• One of the best things about doing it with Jacob was that I often had cached answers to problems (both from studying mechanics in high school and having read the book 4 years ago), but instead on reading a problem I would give Jacob time to get confused about it, perhaps by supplying useful questions. Then eventually I’d propose my “Well isn’t it obviously X” answer, and Jacob would be able to point out the parts I hadn’t justified from first principles, helping me notice them. There’s a problem in discussing difficult ideas where if people have been taught the passwords, and especially if the passwords have a certain amount of structure that feels like understanding, that it’s hard to notice the gaps. Jacob helped me notice those, and then I could later come up with real answers, that were correct for the right reasons.
• The least good thing about this book is the answers to the problems. Often Jacob and I would come up with an answer, then scrap it and build up a first-principles model that predicted it based in our experiences that we were very confident in, and then also deconstruct the initial false intuition some. Then we’d check the answer, and we were right, but the answer didn’t really address the intuitions in either direction, just gave a (correct) argument for the (correct) solution.
• I think it might be really valuable to fully deconstruct the intuition behind why people expect a heavier object to fall faster. I’ve made some progress, but it feels like this is a neglected problem of learning a new field - explaining not only what intuitions you should have, but understanding why you assumed something different.
• But the value of the book isn’t the answers - it’s the problems. I’ve never experienced such a coherent set of problems, where you can solve each from first principles (and building off what you’ve learned from the previous problems). With most good books, the more you put in the more you get out, but never have I seen a book where you can get this much out of it by putting so much in (most books normally hit a plateau earlier than this one).
• Anyway, we got maybe 1/10th through the book. I can’t wait to work through this more the next time I see Jacob.
• It’s already affected our discussions of other topics, how well we notice what we do and don’t understand, and what sorts of explanations we look for.
• I’m also tempted, for other things I study, to spend less time writing up the insights and instead spend that time coming up with a problem set that you can solve from first principles.
• This book made me think that the natural state of learning isn’t ‘reading’ but ‘play’. Playing with ideas, equations, problems, rather than reading and checking understanding.
• Jacob and I now have a ritual of continuing the tradition of trying to understand the world, by going to places in Oxford where great thinkers have learned about the universe, and then solving a problem in this book. We visited a square in Magdalen College where Schroedinger worked on his great works, and solved some problems there.
• You only get to read this book once. Use it well.

Hanging out with Jacob:

• Grade: A++, would do again in a heartbeat.

"Slow takeoff" at this point is simply a misnomer.

Paul's position should be called "Fast Takeoff" and Eliezer's position should be called "Discontinuous Takeoff".

I don't normally just write-up takes, especially about current events, but here's something that I think is potentially crucially relevant to the dynamics involved in the recent actions of the OpenAI board, that I haven't seen anyone talk about:

The four members of the board who did the firing do not know each other very well.

Most boards meet a few times per year, for a couple of hours. Only Sutskever works at OpenAI. D'Angelo works senior roles in tech companies like Facebook and Quora, Toner is in EA/policy, and MacAulay at other tech companies (I'm not aware of any overlap with D'Angelo).

It's plausible to me that MacAulay and Toner have spent more than 50 hours in each others' company, but overall I'd probably be willing to bet at even odds that no other pair of them had spent more than 10 hours together before this crisis.

This is probably a key factor in why they haven't written more publicly about their decision. Decision-by-committee is famously terrible, and it's pretty likely to me that everyone pushes back hard on anything unilateral by the others in this high-tension scenario. So any writing representing them has to get consensus, and they're focused on firefighting and getting a new CEO, to spend time iterating on an explanation of their reasoning that they can all get behind. That's why Sutskever's public writing is only speaking for himself (he just says that he regrets the decision, he's said nothing about why or that in-principle speaks for the others).

I think this also predicts that Shear getting involved, and being the only direct counterparty that they must collectively and repeatedly work something out with, improved things. (Which accounts I've read suggest was a turning point in the negotiations.) He's the first person that they are all engaged with and need to make things work out with, so he is in a position where they are forced to get consensus in a timely fashion, and he can actually demand specific things of them. This was a forcing function on them making decisions and continuing to communicate with an individual.

It's standard to expect them to prepare a proper explanation in-advance, but from the information in this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], I believe this firing decision was made within just a couple days of the event. A fast decision may have been the wrong call, but once it happened, then a team who doesn't really know each other is thrust into an extremely high-stakes position and has to make decisions by consensus. My guess is that this was really truly quite difficult and it was very hard to get anything done at all.

This lens on the situation makes me update in the direction that they will eventually talk about why, once they've had time to iterate on the text explaining the reasoning, now that the basic function of the company isn't under fire.

My current guess is that in many ways, a lot of the board's decision-making since the firing has been worse than any individual's on the board would've been had they been working alone.

There's a game for the Oculus Quest (that you can also buy on Steam) called "Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes".

It's a two-player game. When playing with the VR headset, one of you wears the headset and has to defuse bombs in a limited amount of time (either 3, 4 or 5 mins), while the other person sits outside the headset with the bomb-defusal manual and tells you what to do. Whereas with other collaboration games, you're all looking at the screen together, with this game the substrate of communication is solely conversation, the other person is providing all of your inputs about how their half is going (i.e. not shown on a screen).

The types of puzzles are fairly straightforward computational problems but with lots of fiddly instructions, and require the outer person to figure out what information they need from the inner person. It often involves things like counting numbers of wires of a certain colour, or remembering the previous digits that were being shown, or quickly describing symbols that are not any known letter or shape.

So the game trains you and a partner in efficiently building a shared language for dealing with new problems.

More than that, as the game gets harder, often some of the puzzles require substantial independent computation from the player on the outside. At this point, it can make sense to play with more than two people, and start practising methods for assigning computational work between the outer people (e.g. one of them works on defusing the first part of the bomb, and while they're computing in their head for ~40 seconds, the other works on defusing the second part of the bomb in dialogue with the person on the inside). This further creates a system which trains the ability to efficiently coordinate on informational work under.

Overall I think it's a pretty great game for learning and practising a number of high-pressure communication skills with people you're close to.

I talked with Ray for an hour about Ray's phrase "Keep your beliefs cruxy and your frames explicit".

I focused mostly on the 'keep your frames explicit' part. Ray gave a toy example of someone attempting to communicate something deeply emotional/intuitive, or perhaps a buddhist approach to the world, and how difficult it is to do this with simple explicit language. It often instead requires the other person to go off and seek certain experiences, or practise inhabiting those experiences (e.g. doing a little meditation, or getting in touch with their emotion of anger).

Ray's motivation was that people often have these very different frames or approaches, but don't recognise this fact, and end up believing aggressive things about the other person e.g. "I guess they're just dumb" or "I guess they just don't care about other people".

I asked for examples that were motivating his belief - where it would be much better if the disagreers took to hear the recommendation to make their frames explicit. He came up with two concrete examples:

• Jim v Ray on norms for shortform, where during one hour they worked through the same reasons-for-disagreement three times.
• [blank] v Ruby on how much effort required to send non-threatening signals during disagreements, where it felt like a fundamental value disagreement that they didn't know how to bridge.

---

I didn't get a strong sense for what Ray was pointing at. I see the ways that the above disagreements went wrong, where people were perhaps talking past each other / on the wrong level of the debate, and should've done something different. My understanding of Ray's advice is for the two disagreers to bring their fundamental value disagreements to the explicit level, and that both disagreers should be responsible for making their core value judgements explicit. I think this is too much of a burden to give people. Most of the reasons for my beliefs are heavily implicit and I cannot make things fully explicit ahead of time. In fact, this just seems not how humans work.

One of the key insights that Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 distinction makes is that my conscious, deliberative thinking (System 2) is a very small fraction of the work my brain is doing, even though it is the part I have the most direct access to. Most of my world-model and decision-making apparatus is in my System 1. There is an important sense in which asking me to make all of my reasoning accessible to my conscious, deliberative system is an AGI-complete request.

What in fact seems sensible to me is that during a conversation I will have a fast feedback-loop with my interlocutor, which will give me a lot of evidence about which part of my thinking to zoom in on and do the costly work of making conscious and explicit. There is great skill involved in doing this live in conversation effectively and repeatedly, and I am excited to read a LW post giving some advice like this.

That said, I also think that many people have good reasons to distrust bringing their disagreements to the explicit level, and rightfully expect it to destroy ability to communicate. I'm thinking of Scott's epistemic learned helplessness here, but I'm also thinking about experiences where trying to crystalise and name a thought I'm having before I know how to fully express it has a negative effect on my ability to think clearly about it. I'm not sure what this is but this is another time when I feel hesitant to make everything explicit.

As a third thing, my implicit brain is better than my explicit reasoning at modelling social/political dynamics. Let me handwave at a story of a nerd attempting to negotiate with a socially-savvy bully/psychopath/person-who-just-has-different-goals, where the nerd tries to repeatedly and helpfully make all of their thinking explicit, and is confused why they're losing at the negotiation. I think even healthy and normal people have patterns around disagreement and conflict resolution that could take advantage of a socially inept individually trying to only rely on the things they can make explicit.

These three reasons lead me to not want to advise people to 'keep their frames explicit': it seems prohibitively computationally costly to do it for all things, many people should not trust their explicit reasoning to capture their implicit reasons, and that this is especially true for social/political reasoning.

---

My general impression of this advice is that it seems to want to make everything explicit all of the time (a) as though that were a primitive operation that can solve all problems and (b) I have a sense that it takes up too much of my working memory when I talk with Ray. I have some sense that this approach implies a severe lack of trust in people's implicit/unconscious reasoning and only believes explicit/conscious reasoning can ever be relied upon, though that seems a bit of a simplistic narrative. (Of course there are indeed reasons to strongly trust conscious reasoning over unconscious - one cannot unconsciously build rockets that fly to the moon - but I think humans do not have the choice to not build a high-trust relationship with their unconscious mind.)

For too long, I have erred on the side of writing too much. 

The first reason I write is in order to find out what I think.

This often leaves my writing long and not very defensible.

However, editing the whole thing is so much extra work after I already did all the work figuring out what I think.

Sometimes it goes well if I just scrap the whole thing and concisely write my conclusion.

But typically I don't want to spend the marginal time.

Another reason my writing is too long is because I have extra thoughts I know most people won't find useful. 

But I've picked up a heuristic that says it's good to share actual thinking because sometimes some people find it surprisingly useful, so I hit publish anyway.

Nonetheless, I endeavor to write shorter.

So I think I shall experiment with cutting the bits off of comments that represent me thinking aloud, but aren't worth the space in the local conversation.

And I will put them here, as the dregs of my cognition. I shall hopefully gather data over the next month or two and find out whether they are in fact worthwhile.

Often I am annoyed when I ask someone (who I believe has more information than me) a question and they say "I don't know". I'm annoyed because I want them to give me some information. Such as:

"How long does it take to drive to the conference venue?" 

"I don't know." 

"But is it more like 10 minutes or more like 2 hours?" 

"Oh it's definitely longer than 2 hours."

But perhaps I am the one making a mistake. For instance, the question "How many countries are there?" can be answered "I'd say between 150 and 400" or it can be answered "195", and the former is called "an estimate" and the latter is called "knowing the answer". There is a folk distinction here and perhaps it is reasonable for people to want to preserve the distinction between "an estimate" and "knowing the answer".

So in the future, to get what I want, I should say "Please can you give me an estimate for how long it takes to drive to the conference venue?".

And personally I should strive, when people ask me a question to which I don't know the answer, to say "I don't know the answer, but I'd estimate between X and Y."

Live a life worth leaving Facebook for.

I believe that when people write 'tap out' in comment sections, they are actually supposed to write 'bow out', in almost all cases I've read it.

I regularly see comment sections where someone, to indicate it's going to be their last comment, writes that they're 'tapping out' at this point. They rarely mean they're conceding the point, I'm pretty sure they're just respectfully ending their participation in the conversation. But that's not the standard meaning of the phrase in the place that it comes from.

Here's ChatGPT explaining the two phrases (emphasis added).

The phrase "tap out" originates from the world of combat sports, particularly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts (MMA). In these sports, a competitor signals submission or the desire to end a match by physically tapping their opponent, the mat, or even themselves. This act of tapping indicates that they can no longer continue the fight, either due to exhaustion, pain, or the risk of injury.

and

The phrase "bow out" means to gracefully or politely withdraw from a situation, activity, or role. It often implies a voluntary and dignified exit, often to avoid conflict or because it is the appropriate or respectful thing to do. The term can be used in various contexts, such as resigning from a job, ending participation in a project, or stepping down from a position of responsibility.

So I encourage any such people to change your usage accordingly!

Sometimes a false belief about a domain can be quite damaging, and a true belief can be quite valuable.

For example, suppose there is a 1000-person company. I tend to think that credit allocation for the success of the company is heavy tailed, and that there's typically 1-3 people who the company just would zombify and die without, and ~20 people who have the key context and understanding that the 1-3 people can work with to do new and live things. (I'm surely oversimplifying because I've not ever been on the inside with a 1000-person company.) In this situation it's very valuable to know who the people are who deserve the credit allocation. Getting the wrong 1-3 people is a bit of a disaster. This means that discussing it, raising hypotheses, bringing up bad arguments, bringing up arguments due to motivated cognition, and so on, can be unusually costly, and conversations about it can feel quite fraught. 

Other fraught topics include breaking up romantically, quitting your job, leaving a community club or movement. I think taboo tradeoffs have a related feeling, like bringing up whether to lie in a situation, whether to cheat in a situation, or when to exchange money for values like honor and identity and dignity.

Other times getting an answer slightly wrong does not have this drop-off in value, and so discussion is less fraught. Non-fraught topics include where to go for dinner, cool things you can do with ChatGPT, 

Broadly lots of things that are heavy-tailed in the realm of credit allocation feel this way to me. The sad thing is that cultures often feel to me totally against raising hypotheses in domains that are fraught, unless the person goes through a super costly counter-signalling procedure to signal that they're doing it for the right reasons and not for the wrong ones. 

Personally a bunch of conflict I've encountered has been from trying to use the sorts of reasoning tools and heuristics that I'd use for non-fraught subjects, for fraught-subjects. People rightly are pretty worried that something extremely bad will happen if I am even a little off or rely on a rough heuristic.

The domain that I think about this most at the minute is hiring/firing. I think this sort of breaking-of-relationships is pretty unnatural for humans i.e. this sort of thing didn't happen regularly in the ancestral environment as part of the course of normal life, it was usually a life-ending disaster if you were kicked out of the tribe or if someone decided to backstab you. It's something that all the human social alarm bells push back on. And yet it's one of the most important decisions. My dream is to be able to discuss whether to fire people in an organization as straightforwardly as we would discuss whether to add a feature to a product, but this is nonstandard and far more fraught (and the experiences of firing people, even if they basically went well from most perspectives, have been some of the most emotionally wrecking experiences).

I don't know what the right strategy is to have for being able to straightforwardly analyze and discuss 'fraught' topics. I mostly think it's a cultural thing that you have to practice, and take opportunities where you can to have low-stakes discussions about fraught topics. This is one of the strongest reasons to get into heated arguments about minor things. It helps you negotiate over and agree on the principles involved, which you can then rely on when a major thing comes up.

I'm thinking about the rigor of alternating strategies. Here are three examples.

• Forward-Chaining vs Backward-Chaining
  • To be rich, don't marry for money. Surround yourself by rich people and marry for love. But be very strict about not letting poor people into your environment.
  • Scott Garrabrant's once described his Embedded Agency research to me as the most back-chaining in terms of the area of work, and the most forward-chaining within that area. Often quite unable to justify what he's working on in the short-term (e.g. 1 [LW · GW], 2 [LW · GW], 3 [LW · GW]) yet can turn out to be very useful later on (e.g. 1 [LW · GW]).
• Optimism vs Pessimism
  • Successful startup founders build a vision they feel incredible optimism and excitement about and are committed to making happen, yet falsify it as quickly as possible by building a sh*tty MVP and putting it in front of users, because you're probably wrong and the customer will show you what they want. Another name is "Vision vs Falsification".
• Finding vs Avoiding (Needles in Haystacks)
  • Some work is about finding the needle, and some is about mining hay whilst ensuring that you avoid 100% of needles. 
  • For example when trying to build a successful Fusion Power Generator [LW · GW], most things you build will fail, and you're searching through a wide space of designs for the small space of designs that will work. However, when you're building a bridge, you basically know how to do it, and you just want to avoid the edge cases where the bridge collapses in 10 years. You mostly know where the hay is, and you need very high reliability in avoiding the needles.
  • Notably, when you're building the Fusion Power Generator, most of the surrounding work is like bridge building. Hiring people, organizing their accommodation, setting up a legal company, getting funding, etc, these are all known quantities and you just want to do the basics here. So, one needle-finding mission surrounded by a bunch of hay-finding-needle-averse missions, with both needing to be done well.

There's a rigor in finding success in the balance between these opposing strategies, and I like aiming for absoluteness – being able to shift with great lightness between the two.

What are other examples of opposing strategies, where success requires being able to alternate sharply between the two?

Trying to think about building some content organisations and filtering systems on LessWrong. I'm new to a bunch of the things I discuss below, so I'm interested in other people's models of these subjects, or links to sites that solve the problems in different ways.

Two Problems

So, one problem you might try to solve is that people want to see all of a thing on a site. You might want to see all the posts on reductionism on LessWrong, or all the practical how-to guides (e.g. how to beat procrastination, Alignment Research Field Guide, etc), or all the literature reviews on LessWrong. And so you want people to help build those pages. You might also want to see all the posts corresponding to a certain concept, so that you can find out what that concept refers to (e.g. what is the term "goodhart's law" or "slack" or "mesa-optimisers" etc).

Another problem you might try to solve, is that while many users are interested in lots of the content on the site, they have varying levels of interest in the different topics. Some people are mostly interested in the posts on big picture historical narratives, and less so on models of one's own mind that help with dealing with emotions and trauma. Some people are very interested AI alignment, some are interested in only the best such posts, and some are interested in none.

I think the first problem is supposed to be solved by Wikis, and the second problem is supposed to be solved by Tagging.

Speaking generally, Wikis allow dedicated users to curated pages around certain types of content, highlighting the best examples, some side examples, writing some context for people arriving on the page to understand what the page is about. It's a canonical, update-able, highly editable page built around one idea.

Tagging is much more about filtering than about curating.

Tagging

Let me describe some different styles of tagging.

One the site lobste.rs there are about 100 tags in total. Most tags give a very broad description of an area of interest such as "haskell" "databases" and "compilers". These are shown next to posts on the frontpage. Most posts have 1-3 tags. This allows easy filtering by interest.

A site I've just been introduced to, and been fairly impressed by the tagging of, is called 'Gelbooru', an anime/porn image website where many images have over 100 tags, accurately describing everything contained in the image (e.g. "blue sky", "leaf", "person standing", etc). That is a site where the purpose is to search-by-tags. A key element that allows Gelbooru to function is that, while I think it probably has limited dispute mechanisms for resolving whether a tag is appropriate, that's fine because all tags are literal descriptions of objects in the image. There are no tags describing e.g. the emotions of people in the images, which would be much less easy to build common knowledge around. I do not really know how the site causes people to tag 100,000s of photos each with such scintillating tags as "arm rest", "monochrome" and "chair", but it seems to work quite well.

The first site uses tags as filters when looking at a single feed. As long as there is a manageable number of tags it's easy for an author to tag things appropriately, or for readers to helpfully tag things correctly. The second site uses tagging as primary method of finding content on the site - the homepage of the site is a search bar for tags.

In the former style, tags are about filtering for fairly different kinds of content. You might wonder why one should have tags rather than just subreddits, which also filter posts by interest quite well. A key distinction is that subreddits are typically non-overlapping, whereas tags overlap often. In general, a single post can have multiple tags, but a post belongs to a single subreddit. I currently think of tags as different lenses with which to view a single subreddit, and only when your interests are sufficiently non-overlapping with the current subreddit should you go through the effort to build a new subreddit. (With its own tags.)

There are some other (key) questions of how to build incentives for users to tag things correctly, and how to solve disputes over whether a tag is correct for a post. If, as lobste.rs above, LW should have a tagging system that only has ~100 tags, and is not attempting to solve disputes on a much larger scale like Wikipedia does, then I think applying a fairly straightforward voting system might suffice. This would look like:

• When a post is tagged with "AI alignment", users can vote on the tag (with the same weight that they vote on a post), to indicate whether it's a fit for that tag. (This means tag-post objects have their own karma.)
• Whoever added the tag to that post gets the karma that the tag-post object gets. (Perhaps a smaller reward proportional to this karma score, if it seems too powerful, but definitely still positive.)
• New tags cannot be created by most users. New tags are added by the moderation team, though users can submit new tags to the mod team.

If so, when we end up building a tagging system on LessWrong, the goal should be to distinguish the main types of post people are interested in viewing, and create a limited number of tags that determine this. I think that building that would mainly help users who are viewing new content on the frontpage, and that for much more granular sorting of historical content, a wiki would be better placed.

Afterthought on conceptual boundary

The conceptual boundary is something like the following: A tag is literally just a list of posts, where you can just determine whether something is in that list or not. A Wiki is an editable text-field, curate-able with much more depth than a simple list. A Tag is a communal list object, a Wiki Page is a communal text-body object.

I block all the big social networks from my phone and laptop, except for 2 hours on Saturday, and I noticed that when I check Facebook on Saturday, the notifications are always boring and not something I care about. Then I scroll through the newsfeed for a bit and it quickly becomes all boring too.

And I was surprised. Could it be that, all the hype and narrative aside, I actually just wasn’t interested in what was happening on Facebook? That I could remove it from my life and just not really be missing anything?

On my walk home from work today I realised that this wasn’t the case. Facebook has interesting posts I want to follow, but they’re not in my notifications. They’re sparsely distributed in my newsfeed, such that they appear a few times per week, randomly. I can get a lot of value from Facebook, but not by checking once per week - only by checking it all the time. That’s how the game is played.

Anyway, I am not trading all of my attention away for such small amounts of value. So it remains blocked.

Reading this post, where the author introspects and finds a strong desire to be able to tell a good story about their career, suggests that a way of understanding how people will make decisions will be heavily constrained by the sorts of stories about your career that are definitely common knowledge [LW · GW].

I remember at the end of my degree, there was a ceremony where all the students dressed in silly gowns and the parents came and sat in a circular hall while we got given our degrees and several older people told stories about how your children have become men and women, after studying and learning so much at the university.

This was a dumb/false story, because I'm quite confident the university did not teach these people most important skills for being an adult, and certainly my own development was largely directed by the projects I did on my own dime, not through much of anything the university taught.

But everyone was sat in a circle, where they could see each other listen to the speech in silence, as though it were (a) important and (b) true. And it served as a coordination mechanism, saying "If you go into the world and tell people that your child came to university and grew into an adult, then people will react appropriately and treat your child with respect and not look at them weird asking why spending 3 or 4 years passing exams with no bearing on the rest of their lives is considered worthy of respect." It lets those people tell a narrative, which in turn makes it seem okay for other people to send their kids to the university, and for the kids themselves to feel like they've matured.

Needless to say, I felt quite missed by this narrative, and only played along so my mother could have a nice day out. I remember doing a silly thing - I noticed I had a spot on my face, and instead of removing it that morning, I left it there just as a self-signal that I didn't respect the ceremony.

Anyway, I don't really have any narrative for my life at the minute. I recall Paul Graham saying that he never answers the question "What do you do?" with a proper answer (he says he writes Lisp compilers and that usually shuts people up). Perhaps I will continue to avoid narratives. But I think a healthy society would be able to give me a true narrative that I felt comfortable following.

Another solution would be to build a small circle of trusted and supportive friends with whom we share a narrative about me that I endorse, and try to continue to not want to get social support from a wider circle than that.

Peter Thiel has the opinion [LW · GW] that many of our stories are breaking down. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on what stories we tell ourselves, which ones are intact, and which are changing.

I've been re-reading tons of old posts for the review to remember them and see if they're worth nominating, and then writing a quick review if yes (and sometimes if no).

I've gotten my list of ~40 down to 3 long ones. If anyone wants to help out, here are some I'd appreciate someone re-reading and giving a quick review of in the next 2 days.

1. To Predict What Happens, Ask What Happens [LW · GW] by Zvi
2. A case for AI alignment being difficult [LW · GW] by Jessicata
3. Alexander and Yudkowsky on AGI goals [LW · GW] by Scott Alexander & Eliezer Yudkowsky

I was chatting with someone, and they said that a particular group of people seemed increasingly like a cult. I thought that was an unhelpful framing, and here's the rough argument I wrote for why:

1. There's lots of group dynamics that lead a group of people to go insane and do unethical things.
2. The dynamics around Bankman-Fried involve a lot of naivety when interfacing with an sociopath who was scamming people for billions of dollars on a massive scale.
3. The dynamics around Leverage Research involved lots of people with extremely little savings and income in a group house trying to do 'science' to claims of paranormal phenomena.
4. The dynamics around Jonestown involves total isolation from family, public humiliation and beatings for dissent, and a leader with personal connection to the divine.
5. These have all produced some amounts of insane and unethical behavior, to different extents, for quite different reasons.
6. They all deserve to be opposed to some extent. And it is pro-social to share information about their insanity and bad behavior.
7. Calling them 'cults' communicates that these are groups that have gone insane and done terrible things, but it also communicates that these groups are all the same, when in fact there's not always public beatings or paranormal phenomena or billions of dollars, and the dynamics are very different.
8. Conflating them confuses outside people, they have a harder time understanding whether the group is actually insane and what the dynamics are.

At the SSC Meetup tonight in my house, I was in a group conversation. I asked a stranger if they'd read anything interesting on the new LessWrong in the last 6 months or so (I had not yet mentioned my involvement in the project). He told me about an interesting post about the variance in human intelligence compared to the variance in mice intelligence. I said it was nice to know people read the posts I write [LW · GW]. The group then had a longer conversation about the question. It was enjoyable to hear strangers tell me about reading my posts.

I've finally moved into a period of my life where I can set guardrails around my slack without sacrificing the things I care about most. I currently am pushing it to the limit, doing work during work hours, and not doing work outside work hours. I'm eating very regularly, 9am, 2pm, 7pm. I'm going to sleep around 9-10, and getting up early. I have time to pick up my hobby of classical music.

At the same time, I'm also restricting the ability of my phone to steal my attention. All social media is blocked except for 2 hours on Saturday, which is going quite well. I've found Tristan Harris's advice immensely useful - my phone is increasingly not something that I give all of my free attention to, but instead something I give deliberate attention and then stop using. Tasks, not scrolling.

Now I have weekends and mornings though, and I'm not sure what to do with myself. I am looking to get excited about something, instead of sitting, passively listening to a comedy podcast while playing a game on my phone. But I realise I don't have easy alternative options - Netflix is really accessible. I suppose one of the things that a Sabbath is supposed to be is an alarm, showing that something is up, and at the minute I've not got enough things I want to do for leisure that don't also feel a bit like work.

So I'm making lists of things I might like (cooking, reading, improv, etc) and I'll try those.

Why has nobody noticed that the OpenAI logo is three intertwined paperclips? This is an alarming update about who's truly in charge...

I think of myself as pretty skilled and nuanced at introspection, and being able to make my implicit cognition explicit.

However, there is one fact about me that makes me doubt this severely, which is that I have never ever ever noticed any effect from taking caffeine.

I've never drunk coffee, though in the past two years my housemates have kept a lot of caffeine around in the form of energy drinks, and I drink them for the taste. I'll drink them any time of the day (9pm is fine). At some point someone seemed shocked that I was about to drink one after 4pm, and I felt like I should feel bad or something, so I stopped. I've not been aware of any effects.

But two days ago, I finally noticed. I had to do some incredibly important drudge work, and I had two red bulls around 12-2pm. I finished work at 10pm. I realised that while I had not felt weird in any way, I had also not had any of the normal effects of hanging around for hours, which is getting tired, distracted, needing to walk around, wanting to do something different. I had a normal day for 10 hours solely doing crappy things I normally hate.

So I guess now I see the effect of caffeine: it's not a positive effect, it just removes the normal negative effects of the day. (Which is awesome.)

I think I've been implicitly coming to believe that (a) all people are feeling emotions all the time, but (b) people vary in how self-aware they are of these emotions.

Does anyone want to give me a counter-argument or counter-evidence to this claim?

Hot take: The actual resolution to the simulation argument is that most advanced civilizations don't make loads of simulations.

Two things make this make sense:

• Firstly, it only matters if they make unlawful simulations. If they make lawful simulations, then it doesn't matter whether you're in a simulation or a base reality, all of your decision theory and incentives are essentially the same, you want to take the same decisions in all of the universes. So you can make lots of lawful simulations, that's fine.
• Secondly, they will strategically choose to not make too many unlawful simulations (to the level where the things inside are actually conscious). This is because to do so would induce anthropic uncertainty over themselves. Like, if the decision-theoretical answer is to not induce anthropic uncertainty over yourself about whether you're in a simulation, then by TDT everyone will choose not to make unlawful simulations.

I think this is probably wrong in lots of ways but I didn't stop to figure them out.

I think in many environments I'm in, especially with young people, the fact that Paul Graham is retired with kids sounds nice, but there's an implicit acknowledgement that "He could've chosen to not have kids and instead do more good in the world, and it's sad that he didn't do that". And it reassures me to know that Paul Graham wouldn't reluctantly agree. He'd just think it was wrong.

List of posts that seem promising to me, that are about to fall out of the annual review in 10 mins because only I have voted on them:

1. Truth and Advantage: Response to a draft of "AI safety seems hard to measure" [LW · GW]
2. "Justice, Cherryl." [LW · GW]
3. “X distracts from Y” as a thinly-disguised fight over group status / politics [LW · GW]
4. High Status Eschews Quantification of Performance [LW · GW]
5. Never Drop A Ball [LW · GW]
6. Reinforcement Via Giving People Cookies [LW · GW]

I've skimmed more than half of Anthropic's scaling policies doc. Key issues that stood out to me was the lack of incentive for any red-teamers to actually succeed at red-teaming. Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see anything saying that the red-teamers had to necessarily not also have Anthropic equity. I also didn't see much other financial incentive for them to succeed. I would far prefer a world where Anthropic committed to put out a bounty of increasing magnitude (starting at like $50k, going up to like $2M) for external red-teamers (who signed NDAs) to try to jailbreak the systems, where the higher payouts happen as they keep breaking Anthropic's iterations on the same model. I'd especially like a world where OpenAI engineers could try to red-team Anthropic's models and Anthropic engineer's could try to red-team OpenAI's models. If the companies could actually stop the other company from shipping via red-teaming, that would seem to me actually sufficient to get humanity to be doing a real job of red-teaming the models here.

For the closing party of the Lightcone Offices, I used Midjourney 5 to make a piece of art to represent a LessWrong essay by each member of the Lightcone team, and printed them out on canvases. I'm quite pleased about how it came out. Here they are.

How I buy things when Lightcone wants them fast [LW · GW]

by jacobjacob

(context: Jacob has been taking flying lessons, and someday hopes to do cross-country material runs for the Rose Garden Inn at shockingly fast speeds by flying himself to pick them up)

My thoughts on direct work (and joining LessWrong) [LW · GW]

by RobertM

A Quick Guide to Confronting Doom [LW · GW]

by Ruby

Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality [LW · GW]

by habryka

Recursive Middle Manager Hell [LW · GW]

by Raemon

PSA: The Sequences don't need to be read in sequence [LW · GW]

by kave

12 interesting things I learned studying the discovery of nature's laws [LW · GW]

by Ben Pace

I also made a piece of art to represent saying farewell to the Lightcone Offices. The name of the artwork (and the name of the party) is GoodNightCone.

Sometimes I get confused between r/ssc and r/css.

When I’m trying to become skillful in something, I often face a choice about whether to produce better output, or whether to bring my actions more in-line with my soul.

For instance, sometimes when I’m practicing a song on the guitar, I will sing it in a way where the words feel true to me.

And sometimes, I will think about the audience, and play in a way that is reliably a good experience for them (clear melody, reliable beat, not too irregular changes in my register, not moving in a way that is distracting, etc).

Something I just noticed is that it is sometimes unclear whether I am attempting the first thing and succeeding, or attempting the second thing and failing. Am I currently trying to make the song fit my persona better and experimenting there, or am I trying to do something I think a small audience will find aesthetically satisfying but getting it wrong?

I think periods of sounding unaesthetic to others is, for most people and most skills, required in becoming skillful at something aesthetic. One mistake is never doing things that are unaesthetic, and another mistake is thinking you should only do things that fit your aesthetic and not care about others’. My current guess is that most great art hits both.

I think the same is true of other endeavors. In writing, sometimes I write in ways that are less clear, or seem odd to a particular audience, but I am attempting to speak more true to myself. And sometimes I’m trying to write clearly and well, but am not practiced and my output is mediocre. I suspect it is hard from the outside to tell which is going on, and I know sometimes it is hard from the inside to tell.

I am still confused about moral mazes.

I understand that power-seekers can beat out people earnestly trying to do their jobs. In terms of the Gervais Principle, the sociopaths beat out the clueless.

What I don't understand is how the culture comes to reward corrupt and power-seeking behavior.

One reason someone said to me is that it's in the power-seekers interest to reward other power-seekers.

Is that true?

I think it's easier for them to beat out the earnest and gullible clueless people.

However, there's probably lots of ways that their sociopathic underlings can help them give a falsely good impression to their boss.

So perhaps it is the case that on-net they reward the other sociopaths, and build coalitions.

Then I can perhaps see it growing, in their interactions with other departments.

I'd still have hope that the upper management could punish bad cultural practices.

But by default they will have more important things on their plate than fighting for the culture. (Or, they think they do.)

One question is how the coalitions of sociopaths survive.

Wouldn't they turn on each other out as soon as it's politically convenient?

I don't actually know how often it is politically convenient.

And I guess that, as long as they're being paid and promoted, there is enough plenty and increasing wealth that they can afford to work together.

This throws into relief the extent to which they are selfish people, not evil. Selfish people can work together just fine. The point is that those who are in it for themselves in a company, can work together to rise its ranks and warp the culture (and functionality) of the company along the way.

Then, when a new smart and earnest person joins, they are confused to find that they are being rewarded for selling-themselves, for covering up mistakes, for looking good in meetings, and so forth.

And the people at the top feel unable to fix it, it's already gone too far.

There's free energy to be eaten by the self-interested, and unless you make it more costly to eat it than not (e.g. by firing them), they will do so.

Striking paragraph by a recent ACX commenter (link):

I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?

Something I've thought about the existence of for years, but imagined was impossible: this 70s song by Italian Adriano Celentano. It fully registers to my mind as English. But it isn't. It's like skimming the output of GPT-2.

I've been thinking lately that picturing an AI catastrophe is helped a great deal by visualising a world where critical systems in society are performed by software. I was spending a while trying to summarise and analyse Paul's "What Failure Looks Like", which lead me this way. I think that properly imagining such a world is immediately scary, because software can deal with edge cases badly, like automated market traders causing major crashes, so that's already a big deal. Then you add ML in, and can talk about how crazy it is to hand critical systems over to code we do not understand and cannot make simple adjustments to, then you're already hitting catastrophes. Once you then argue that ML can become superintelligent then everything goes from "global catastrophe" to "obvious end of the world", but the first steps are already pretty helpful.

While Paul's post helps a lot, it still takes a fair bit of effort for me to concretely visualise the scenarios he describes, and I would be excited for people to take the time to detail what it would look like to hand critical systems over to software – for which systems would this happen, why would we do it, who would be the decision-makers, what would it feel like from the average citizen's vantage point, etc. A smaller version of Hanson's Age of Em project, just asking the question "Which core functions in society (food, housing, healthcare, law enforcement, governance, etc) are amenable to tech companies building solutions for, and what would it look like for society to transition to 1%, 10%, 50% and 90% of core functions to be automated with 1) human-coded software 2) machine learning 3) human-level general AI?"

Recently, I told a friend of mine that I'd been to a wedding. They asked how it was, and I said the couple clearly loved each other very much (as they made clear repeatedly in their speeches). My friend made a face like that I read as some kind of displeasure, a bit of a grimace. Since then, I've been wondering why that was.

I think it's a common occurrence, that people feel negatively about others openly expressing their love for something (a person, a piece of art, a place, etc). I'm pretty sure I've had this feeling myself, but I don't know why.

I can think of two hypotheses.

1. It's 'sappy'. It's kind of too much for me to feel this in whatever social context I'm in right now (e.g. in my office at work, getting drinks with some people I don't know that well, etc), such that I am resistant to starting to feel it, and resistant to others bringing me into feeling it in this environment. It is not a good time for me to be overcome with emotion for tens of minutes!
2. It's 'forced'. People believe that other people pretend their loving emotions more than is real, and the intensity of the truth combined with the forced feeling is unpleasant. I'm expected to believe them, and also reciprocate, and I don't like doing that with something that is dear to me.

Anyone got any other hypotheses, or think that they know the answer?

It is said that on this Earth there are two factions, and you must pick one.

1. The Knights Who Arrive at False Conclusions
2. The Knights Who Arrive at True Conclusions, Too Late to Be Useful

(Hat tip: I got these names 2 years ago from Robert Miles who had been playing with GPT-3.)