Open Thread Spring 2024

Does anybody know what happened to Julia Galef?

Hello! I'm building an open source communication tool with a one-of-a-kind UI for LessWrong kind of deep, rational discussions. The tool is called CQ2 (https://cq2.co). It has a sliding panes design with quote-level threads. There's a concept of "posts" for more serious discussions with many people and there's "chat" for less serious ones, and both of them have a UI crafted for deep discussions.

I simulated some LessWrong discussions there – they turned out to be a lot more organised and easy to follow. You can check them out in the chat channel and direct message part of the demo on the site. However, it is a bit inconvenient – there's horizontal scrolling and one needs to click to open new threads. Since forums need to prioritize convenience, I think CQ2's design isn't good for LessWrong. But I think the inconvenience is worth it for such discussions at writing-first teams, since it helps them with hyper-focusing on one thing at a time and avoid losing context in order to come to a conclusion and make decisions.

If you have such discussions at work, I would love to learn about your team, your frustrations with existing communication tools, and better understand how CQ2 can help! I would appreciate any feedback or leads! I feel my comment might come off as an ad, but I (and CQ2) strongly share LessWrong's "improving our reasoning and decision-making" core belief and it's open source.

I found LessWrong a few months back. It's a wonderful platform and I particularly love the clean design. I've always loved how writing forces a deeper clarity of thinking and focuses on getting to the right answer.

P.S. I had mistakenly posted this comment in the previous, old Open Thread, hence resharing here.

↑ comment by papetoast · 2024-04-21T08:08:41.697Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I just stumbled on this website: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes It has a similar UI but for Obsidian-like linked notes. The UI seem pretty good.

Replies from: anand-baburajan

↑ comment by Anand Baburajan (anand-baburajan) · 2024-04-23T09:44:27.857Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like his UI. In fact, I shared about CQ2 with Andy in February since his notes site was the only other place where I had seen the sliding pane design. He said CQ2 is neat!

Hi! I have been lurking here for over a year but I've been too shy to participate until now. I'm 14, and I've been homeschooled all my life. I like math and physics and psychology, and I've learned lots of interesting things here. I really enjoyed reading the sequences last year. I've also been to some meetups in my city and the people there (despite – or maybe because of – being twice my age) are very cool. Thank you all for existing!

Hello everyone! My name is Roman Maksimovich, I am an immigrant from Russia, currently finishing high school in Serbia. My primary specialization is mathematics, and back in middle school I have had enough education in abstract mathematics (from calculus to category theory and topology) to call myself a mathematician.

My other strong interests include computer science and programming (specifically functional programming, theoretical CS, AI, and systems programming s.a. Linux) as well as languages (specifically Asian languages like Japanese).

I ended up here after reading HP:MOR, which I consider to be an all-time masterpiece. The Sequences are very good too, although not that gripping. Rationality is a very important principle in my life, and so far I found the forum to be very well-organized and the posts to be very informative and well-written, so I will definitely stick around and try to engage in the forum to the best of my ability.

I thought I might do a bit of self-advertising as well. Here's my GitHub: https://github.com/thornoar

If any of you use this very niche mathematical graphics tool called Asymptote, you might be interested to know that I have been developing a cool 6000-line Asymptote library called 'smoothmanifold', which is sort of like a JavaScript framework (an analogy that I do not like) but for drawing abstract mathematical diagrams with Asymptote, whose main problem is the lack of abstraction. In plain Asymptote, you usually have to specify all the coordinates manually and draw objects line by line. In my library I make it so that the code resembles the logical structure of the picture more. You can draw a set as a blob on the plane, and then draw arrows that connect different sets, which would be a nightmare to do manually. And this is only the beginning -- there is a lot more features. If any of this is what interests you, feel free to read the README.md.

I have also written some mathematical papers, the most recent one paired with a software program for strong password creation. If you are interested in cryptography and cybersecurity, and would to create strong passwords using a hashing algorithm, you can take a look at 'password-hash', which contains both the algorithm source and binaries, as well as the paper/documentation.

Hi LessWrong Community!

I'm new here, though I've been an LW reader for a while. I'm representing complicated.world website, where we strive to use similar rationality approach as here and we also explore philosophical problems. The difference is that, instead of being a community-driven portal like you, we are a small team which is working internally to achieve consensus and only then we publish our articles. This means that we are not nearly as pluralistic, diverse or democratic as you are, but on the other hand we try to present a single coherent view on all discussed problems, each rooted in basic axioms. I really value the LW community (our entire team does) and would like to start contributing here. I would also like to present from time to time a linkpost from our website - I hope this is ok. We are also a not-for-profit website.

Hello! I'm dipping my toes into this forum, coming primarily from the Scott Alexander side of rationalism. Wanted to introduce myself, and share that i'm working on a post about ethics/ethical frameworks i hope to share here eventually!

Feature request: I'd like to be able to play the LW playlist (and future playlists!) from LW. I found it a better UI than Spotify and Youtube, partly because it didn't stop me from browsing around LW and partly because it had the lyrics on the bottom of the screen. So... maybe there could be a toggle in the settings to re-enable it?

There are several sequences which are visible on the profiles of their authors, but haven't yet been added to the library [? · GW]. Those are:

• «Boundaries» Sequence (Andrew Critch) [? · GW]
• Maximal Lottery-Lotteries (Scott Garrabrant) [? · GW]
• Geometric Rationality (Scott Garrabrant) [? · GW]
• UDT 1.01 (Diffractor) [? · GW]
• Unifying Bargaining (Diffractor) [? · GW]
• Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (Kaj Sotala) [? · GW]
• The Sense Of Physical Necessity: A Naturalism Demo (LoganStrohl) [? · GW]
• Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power? (Joe Carlsmith) [? · GW]

I think these are good enough to be moved into the library.

Obscure request:

Short story by Yudkowsky, on a reddit short fiction subreddit, about a time traveler coming back to the 19th century from the 21st. The time traveler is incredibly distraught about the red tape in the future, screaming about molasses and how it's illegal to sell food on the street.

Nevermind, found it.

Hi! I have lurked for quite a while and wonder if I can/should participate more. I'm interested in science in general, speculative fiction and simulation/sandbox games among other stuff. I like reading speculations about the impact of AI and other technologies, but find many of the alignment-related discussions too focused on what the author wants/values rather than what future technologies can really cause. Also, any game recommendations with a hard science/AI/transhumanist theme that are truly simulation-like and not narratively railroading?

How efficient are equity markets? No, not in the EMH sense. 

My take is that market efficiency viewed from economics/finance is about total surplus maximization -- the area between the supply and demand curves. Clearly when S and D are order schedules and P and Q correspond to the S&D intersection one maximizes the area of the triangle defined in the graph.

But existing equity markets don't work off an ordered schedule but largely match trades in a somewhat random order -- people place orders (bids and offers) throughout the day and as they come in during market hours trades occur.

Given these are pure pecuniary markets the total surplus represents something of a total profit in the market for the day's activities (clearly something different than the total profits to the actual share owners who sold so calling it profit might be a bit confusing). One might think markets should be structured to maximize that area but clearly that is not the case. 

It would be a very unsual case for the daily order flow to perfectly match with the implied day demand and supply curves that would represent the bids and offers (lets call them the "real" bids and offers but I'm not entirely sure how to distinquish that from other bids and offers that will start evaporating as soon as they become the market bid or offer). So would a settlement structure line mutual funds produce a better outcome for equities? 

Maybe. In other words, rather than putting a market order in and having it executed right then or putting a limit order in and if the market moves to that price it executes, all orders get put in the order book and then at market close the clearing price is determed and those trades that actually make sense occur. What is prevented is the case of either buyers above the clearlin price from getting paired with sellers that are also above the clearling price, or the reverse, buyers biding below the clearing price pairing with sellers who are also willing to sell below the clearin price. Elimination of both inframarginal and extramarginal trades that represend low value exchange pairings.

One thing I wonder about here is what information might be lost/masked and if the informational value might outweigh the reduction in suplus captured. But I'm also not sure that whatever information might be seen in the current structure is not also present in the end of day S&D schedules and so fully reflected in the price outcomes.

PSA: Tooth decay might be reversible! The recent discussion around the Lumina [LW · GW] anti-cavity prophylaxis reminded me of a certain dentist's YouTube channel I'd stumbled upon recently, claiming that tooth decay can be arrested and reversed using widely available over-the-counter dental care products. I remember my dentist from years back telling me that if regular brushing and flossing doesn't work, and the decay is progressing, then the only treatment option is a filling. I wish I'd known about alternatives back then, because I definitely would have tried that first. Remineralization wouldn't have helped in the case when I broke a tooth, but I maybe could have avoided all my other fillings. I am very suspicious of random health claims on the Internet, but this one seemed reasonably safe and cheap to try, even if it ultimately doesn't work.

I’m in the market for a new productivity coach / accountability buddy, to chat with periodically (I’ve been doing one ≈20-minute meeting every 2 weeks) about work habits, and set goals, and so on. I’m open to either paying fair market rate, or to a reciprocal arrangement where we trade advice and promises etc. I slightly prefer someone not directly involved in AGI safety/alignment—since that’s my field and I don’t want us to get nerd-sniped into object-level discussions—but whatever, that’s not a hard requirement. You can reply here, or DM or email me. :) update: I’m all set now

Post upvotes are at the bottom but user comment upvotes are at the top of each comment. Sometimes I'll read a very long comment and then have to scroll aaaaall the way back up to upvote it. Is there some reason for this that I'm missing or is it just an oversight?

Is there a post in the Sequences about when it is justifiable to not pursue going down a rabbit hole? It's a fairly general question, but the specific context is a tale as old as time. My brother, who has been an atheist for decades, moved to Utah. After 10 years, he now asserts that he was wrong and his "rigorous pursuit" of verifying with logic and his own eyes, leads him to believe the Bible is literally true. I worry about his mental health so I don't want to debate him, but felt like I should give some kind of justification for why I'm not personally embarking on a bible study. There's a potential subtext of, by not following his path, I am either not that rational, or lack integrity. The subtext may not really be there, but I figure if I can provide a well thought out response or summarize something from EY, it might make things feel more friendly, e.g. "I personally don't have enough evidence to justify spending the time on this, but I will keep an open mind if any new evidence comes up."

Is it really desirable to have the new "review bot" in all the 100+ karma comment sections? To me it feels like unnecessary clutter, similar to injecting ads.

I have the mild impression that Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel trilogy is somewhat popular in the community?^[1] Is it true and if so, why?

1. ^{^}

   E.g. Scott Alexander references Elua in Mediations on Moloch and I know of at least one prominent LWer who was a big enough fan of it to reference Elua in their discord handle.

Unsure if there is normally a thread for putting only semi-interesting news articles, but here is a recently posted news article by Wired that seems.... rather inflammatory toward Effective Altruism. I have not read the article myself yet, but a quick skim confirms the title is not only to get clickbait anger clicks, the rest of the article also seems extremely critical of EA, transhumanism, and Rationality. 

I am going to post it here, though I am not entirely sure if getting this article more clicks is a good thing, so if you have no interest in reading it maybe don't click it so we don't further encourage inflammatory clickbait tactics. 

https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

I don't think this crosses the line regarding poltics on the board but note that as a warning header.

I was just struck by a though related to the upcoming elections in the USA. Age of both party's candidate have been noted and create both some concern and even risks for the country.

No age limits exist and I suspect trying to get get legislative action on that would be slow to impossible as it undoubtedly would be a new ammendment to the Constitution.

BUT, I don't think there is any law or other restriction on any political party imposing their own age limit for any candidate they will nomimate to Federal or State positions. If not, and if anyone knows please speak up:

1. Would the existing incentive strucutures suggest it might be easier for a political party to do this than expecting Congress to address these concerns?
2. Should any party enact such a rule, would that be a completitive advantage in the way of improved (at the margins at least) for that party in the competition for membership and voters?
3. Would that in any way help to improve the performance of parties by mitigating both entrenched status quo leadership and perhaps reduce overall factionalism within the party?

Feature Suggestion: add a number to the hidden author names.

I enjoy keeping the author names hidden when reading the site, but find it difficult to follow comment threads when there isn't a persistent id for each poster. I think a number would suffice while keeping the hiddenness.

How much power is required to run the most efficient superhuman chess engines? There's this discussion saying Stockfish running on a phone is superhuman, but is that one watt or 10 watts? Could we beat grandmasters with 0.1 watts if we tried?

Any thoughts on Symbolica? (or "categorical deep learning" more broadly?)

All current state of the art large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are based on the same core architecture. As a result, they all suffer from the same limitations.

Extant models are expensive to train, complex to deploy, difficult to validate, and infamously prone to hallucination. Symbolica is redesigning how machines learn from the ground up. 

We use the powerfully expressive language of category theory to develop models capable of learning algebraic structure. This enables our models to have a robust and structured model of the world; one that is explainable and verifiable.

It’s time for machines, like humans, to think symbolically.

1. How likely is it that Symbolica [or sth similar] produces a commercially viable product?
2. How likely is it that Symbolica creates a viable alternative for the current/classical DL?
   1. I don't think it's that different from the intentions behind Conjecture's CoEms proposal. [LW · GW] (And it looks like Symbolica have more theory and experimental results backing up their ideas.)
      1. Symbolica don't use the framing of AI [safety/alignment/X-risk], but many people behind the project are associated with the Topos Institute that hosted some talks from e.g. Scott Garrabrant or Andrew Critch.
3. What is the expected value of their research for safety/verifiability/etc?
   1. Sounds relevant to @davidad [LW · GW]'s plan [LW · GW], so I'd be especially curious to know his take.
4. How likely is it that whatever Symbolica produces meaningfully contributes to doom (e.g. by advancing capabilities research without at the same time sufficiently/differentially advancing interpretability/verifiability of AI systems)?

(There's also PlantingSpace but their shtick seems to be more "use probabilistic programming and category theory to build a cool Narrow AI-ish product" whereas Symbolica want to use category theory to revolutionize deep learning.)

Does anyone have high quality analysis of how effective machines are for strength training and building muscles. Not free weights specifically machines. Im not the pickiest on how one operationalizes 'work'. More interested in the quality of the analysis. But some questions:

-- Do users get hurt frequently? Are the injuries chronic? (This is the most important question)

-- Do people who use them consistently gain muscle

-- Can you gain a 'lot' of muscle and strength liek you can with free weights. Or people cap out quickly if they are fit

-- Does strength from free weight carry over to other things. To barbells? To bodyweight calisthenics? To sports?

As I said im not the pickiest. Id rather have a great analysis of 'carryover to curling' than a meh quality analysis that covered all of my questions.

I've came across a poll about exchanging probability estimates with another rationalist: https://manifold.markets/1941159478/you-think-something-is-30-likely-bu?r=QW5U.

You think something is 30% likely but a friend thinks 70%. To what does that change your opinion?

I feel like there can be specially-constructed problems when the result probability is 0, but haven't been able to construct an example. Are there any?

Does anyone recommend a good book on finance? I'd like to understand most of the terms used in this post [LW · GW], and then some, but the old repository [LW · GW] doesn't have any suggestions.

Hi any it may concern,

You could say I have a technical moat in a certain area and came across an idea/cluster of ideas that seemed unusually connected and potentially alignment-significant but whose publication seems potentially capabilities-enhancing. (I consulted with one other person and they also found it difficult to ascertain or summarize)

I was considering writing to EY on here as an obvious person who would both be someone more likely to be able to determine plausibility/risk across a less familiar domain and have an idea of what further to do. Is there any precedent or better idea for my situation? I suppose a general version is: "How can someone concerned with risk who can't easily further ascertain things themselves determine whether something is relevant to alignment/capabilities without increasing risk?" 

feel free to ask any questions that could help, and thank you anyone!

Bug report: I got notified about Joe Carlsmith's most recent post twice, the second time after ~4 hours

Has anybody tried to estimate how prevalent sexual abuse is in EA circles/orgs compared to general population?