Open & Welcome Thread December 2021

Hey everyone, my name is Kay. I'm 24 years old. My friends would describe me as reliable, ambitious, curious and funny. I was raised by Polish parents in Germany, where I finished my high school and undergrad education in business administration.  Later I discovered a love for philosophy which eventually made me study it for some time before I realized that I was itching to learn how to program and build things. So I switched fields and started doing Data Science in 2019. Now, I'm at a point where I'd like to devote the upcoming months to studying reinforcement learning. I can't think of a more exciting career than working on general artificial intelligence or superintelligence more broadly. 

I'm currently looking for a reinforcement learning study-/paper-reading group. It is important for me to be surrounded by ambitious and self-motivated people whom I can learn from. In case you know of any such group, I'd greatly appreciate it if you shared it with me.  Otherwise, feel free to contact me and I'll make sure we'll create a study group ourselves.

Hello everyone ! My name is Lucie, and I am studying computer science. I'm fascinated by this website and started binge reading the sequences after finishing reading HPMOR. With all the information I was exposed to on this website during the last week, I am hyped and thinking frantically about how can all of this change my life goals.

However, I know that for me only reading more and more post, and getting more and more information will only sustain me for a while. When my hype die down, I think I will not be as motivated as right now into reading posts if I don't find a way to tie it to my life more than pure curiosity.

I think I need to fill at least a bit part of a community and tie it into my social life to keep my interest for long enough. Therefore, I'm making this comment, and asking you how to meet some people from this community, either online or offline.

Right now, I'm a bit lost as to what is the next step for me in this journey. I don't know whether the lack of explicit way of getting into the community is an intentional filter for people with enough intrinsic motivation to continue learning on their own for a long time ? Is there a will for new active members, whatever that means ?

So anyway, if you want to help me, to chat or to meet in Berlin, feel free to reply or to send me a message !

Hello, LessWrong! I've been a lurker here for a while but today decided to create an account. I'm not sure why but my guess is that I think it'll cause me to visit LW more often and - hopefully - improve my thinking.

My first contact with LW happened years ago. I don't remember how I arrived but I remember being very confused about what's going on here. The posts were touching on strange and unfamiliar ideas ("alignment, what alignment?") and I couldn't follow the reasoning/conversations so I didn't stick around. My current understanding of that experience is that I was totally unprepared to really think about ideas I was unfamiliar with and I lacked the attention span for deeper thought. I'm at the very beginning of the journey to develop these skills.

I'm interested and curious about too many things. Or rather, my curiosity tends to be mostly "on the surface", without going deep into the subject. I believe a lot of the effect comes from the ADHD. I got diagnosed in the last 6 months and thanks to medication I'm finally experiencing that it's actually possible to dive deep into challenging subjects/ideas. Getting diagnosed as a adult made me experience a sense of loss - all these years that I've been struggling and fighting with myself could be spent more productively! Of course it's not that simple and ADHD has its pros, for sure. But after a while I can tell that medication for me is like a enabling technology, it opens up new possibilities. One of those is finally being able to engage more deeply with the ideas here on LW.

Feature suggestion: The ability to automatically add posts to sequences on profiles.

For instance, Zvi posts weekly COVID updates, and it would be nice to be able to link to the sequence [? · GW] and be confident it will contain all of his COVID-related posts. Currently it's incumbent upon him to manually add those posts to that sequence. It would be nice if he could instead define a regular expression that reads the title of posts he makes and adds them to a sequence if they match a rule that he defines.

Meta comment to reiterate that at this point the Open Thread wording definitely has to be cleaned up. Right now the thread looks pretty incomprehensible for newcomers (and it also wasn't tagged as Open Thread until now).

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I'm very interested to try the new two-axis voting system but it seems to only be active on one [LW · GW] post which also happens to be very tied up with some current Bay Area-specific issues which limits who can actually engage with it. I also think it would be good for the community to get to "practice" with such voting on some topics which are easier to discuss so norms can be established before moving on to the more explosive ones. I'd like to see more posts with this enabled, perhaps a few more people with posts having >20 comments currently on the frontpage could be asked about it, or a pinned post could be made by the mods explaining it and enabling people to ask for it.

I do think that group-politics-related posts might have the greatest potential to benefit from this type of voting (especially relative to the current system).

I just noticed (again) that link previews on (only?) old posts are sometimes broken, e. g. when I open this [? · GW] in a new window/tab. At first I suspected it's something about the old link formats but more testing made me more and more confused, and now it seems more and more again like maybe that is relevant?

1. Opening a link of the form /s/.../p/... in a new window/tab (i.e. not in an existing LW context) always(? - ~10 tests done) breaks the previews on links in the text, and they don't get the ° decoration. (Tags, pingbacks etc. still work.) The same seems to sometimes also break /posts/.../..., but sometimes not? (Very weakly tested hypothesis: It breaks very old posts that still use the old /lw/XX/... link format?)
2. Opening the same article in an existing tab (by following an internal link) correctly goes through the text, adds the °s and then previews work.

Can someone reproduce this? Is this a bug with timing or initialization order or something like that?

For comments on revising the wording, comment on this comment [LW · GW].

For comments on features, suggestions, feature suggestions, comment on this comment. (self link here [LW(p) · GW(p)])

A friend noticed that I am confused about the effects of removing genetic load.

The story I've heard being advanced by e.g. Steve Hsu goes like this:

If you remove rare mutations from the genome of an animal (replacing them with the common variants), e.g. everything that less than 1% of other animals in the same species share, you will remove mostly slightly harmful mutations. So, the animal with modal genes would be healthier, stronger and probably more intelligent than the typical animal from that species.

But I'm confused about rare slightly beneficial mutations. Some of them might not be beneficial enough to have reached fixation, so they would be removed as well. Why shouldn't the effects then cancel out?

I can imagine two answers: First, slightly beneficial mutations are much rarer than slightly harmful mutations, or second, perhaps helpful mutations either reach fixation quickly or disappear quickly, while slightly harmful mutations linger for a long time.

Is any of these two is accurate? Or am I overlooking something crucial?