Open Thread Spring 2024

Sam Altman appears to have been using non-disparagements at least as far back as 2017-2018, even for things that really don't seem to have needed such things at all, like a research nonprofit arm of YC.* It's unclear if that example is also a lifetime non-disparagement (I've asked), but nevertheless, given that track record, you should assume the OA research non-profit also tried to impose it, followed by the OA LLC (obviously), and so Paul F. Christiano (and all of the Anthropic founders) would presumably be bound.

This would explain why Anthropic executives never say anything bad about OA, and refuse to explain exactly what broken promises by Altman triggered their failed attempt to remove Altman and subsequent exodus.

(I have also asked Sam Altman on Twitter, since he follows me, apropos of his vested equity statement, how far back these NDAs go, if the Anthropic founders are still bound, and if they are, whether they will be unbound.)

* Note that Elon Musk's SpaceX does the same thing and is even worse because they will cancel your shares after you leave for half a year, and if they get mad at you after that expires, they may simply lock you out of tender offers indefinitely - which is not much different inasmuch as SpaceX may never IPO. Given the close connections there, Musk may be where Altman picked this bag of tricks up.

+1. Also curious about Jade Leung (formerly Open AI)– she's currently the CTO for the UK AI Safety Institute. Also Geoffrey Irving (formerly DeepMind), who is a research director at the UKAISI.

Relevant market

hey, welcome! Congrats on de-lurking, I think? I fondly remember my own teenage years of lurking online -- one certainly learns a lot about the human condition.

If I was sending my 14-year-old self a time capsule of LW, it'd start with the sequences, and beyond that I'd emphasize the writings of adults examining how their own cognition works. Two reasons -- first, being aware that one is living in a brain as it finishes wiring itself together is super entertaining if you're into that kind of thing, and even more fun when you have better data to guess how it's going to end up. (I got the gist of that from having well-educated and openminded parents, who explained that it's prudent to hold off on recreational drug use until one's brain is entirely done with being a kid, because most recreational substances make one's brain temporarily more childlike in some way and the real thing is better. Now I'm in my 30s and can confirm that's how such things, including alcohol, have worked for me)

Second, my 20s would have been much better if someone had taken kid-me aside and explained some neurodiversity stuff to her: "here's the range of normal, here's the degree of suffering that's not expected nor normal and is worth consulting a professional for even if you're managing through great effort to keep it together", etc.

If you'd like to capitalize on your age for some free internet karma, I would personally enjoy reading your thoughts on what your peers think of technology, how they get their information, and how you're all updating the language at the moment.

I also wish that my 14-year-old self had paid more attention to the musical trends and attempted to guess which music that was popular while I was of highschool age would stand the test of time and remain on the radio over the subsequent decades. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I could probably have taken some decent guesses, but I didn't so now I'll never know whether I would have guessed right :)

Hello and welcome to the site! I'm glad you're saying hello despite having been too shy :-)

Do let us know in this thread or in the intercom in the bottom right if you run into any problems.

As of May 16, 2024 an easily findable USDA/CDC report says that widely dispersed cow herds are being detectably infected.

So far, that I can find reports of, only one human dairy worker has been detected as having an eye infection.

I saw a link to a report on twitter from an enterprising journalist who claimed to have gotten some milk directly from small local farms in Texas, and the first lab she tried refuse to test it. They asked the farms. The farms said no. The labs were happy to go with this!

So, the data I've been able to get so far is consistent with many possibly real worlds.

The worst plausible world would involve a jump to humans, undetected for quite a while, allowing time for adaptive evolution, and an "influenza normal" attack rate of 5% -10% for adults and ~30% for kids, and an "avian flu plausible" mortality rate of 56%(??) (but maybe not until this winter when cold weather causes lots of enclosed air sharing?) which implies that by June of 2025 maybe half a billion people (~= 7B*0.12*0.56) will be dead???

But probably not, for a variety of reasons.

However, I sure hope that the (half imaginary?) Administrators who would hypothetically exist in some bureaucracy somewhere (if there was a benevolent and competent government) have noticed that paying two or three people $100k each to make lots of phone calls and do real math (and check each other's math) and invoke various kinds of legal authority to track down the real facts and ensure that nothing that bad happens is a no-brainer in terms of EV.

↑ comment by JenniferRM · 2024-05-23T14:59:31.075Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Also, there's now a second detected human case, this one in Michigan instead of Texas.

Both had a surprising-to-me "pinkeye" symptom profile. Weird!

The dairy worker in Michigan had various "compartments" tested and their nasal compartment (and people they lived with) were all negative. Hopeful?

Apparently and also hopefully this virus is NOT freakishly good at infecting humans and also weirdly many other animals (like covid was with human ACE2, in precisely the ways people have talked about when discussing gain-of-function in years prior to covid).

If we're being foolishly mechanical in our inferences "n=2 with 2 survivors" could get rule of succession treatment. In that case we pseudocount 1 for each category of interest (hence if n=0 we say 50% survival chance based on nothing but pseudocounts), and now we have 3 survivors (2 real) versus 1 dead (0 real) and guess that the worst the mortality rate here would be maybe 1/4 == 25% (?? (as an ass number)), which is pleasantly lower than overall observed base rates for avian flu mortality in humans! :-)

Naive impressions: a natural virus, with pretty clear reservoirs (first birds and now dairy cows), on the maybe slightly less bad side of "potentially killing millions of people"?

I haven't heard anything about sequencing yet (hopefully in a BSL4 (or homebrew BSL5, even though official BSL5s don't exist yet), but presumably they might not bother to treat this as super dangerous by default until they verify that it is positively safe) but I also haven't personally looked for sequencing work on this new thing.

When people did very dangerous Gain-of-Function research with a cousin of this, in ferrets, over 10 year ago (causing a great uproar among some) the supporters argued that it was was worth creating especially horrible diseases on purpose in labs in order to see the details, like a bunch of geeks who would Be As Gods And Know Good From Evil... and they confirmed back then that a handful of mutations separated "what we should properly fear" from "stuff that was ambient".

Four amino acid substitutions in the host receptor-binding protein hemagglutinin, and one in the polymerase complex protein basic polymerase 2, were consistently present in airborne-transmitted viruses. (same source)

It seems silly to ignore this, and let that hilariously imprudent research of old go to waste? :-)

The transmissible viruses were sensitive to the antiviral drug oseltamivir and reacted well with antisera raised against H5 influenza vaccine strains. (still the same source)

(Image sauce.)

Since some random scientists playing with equipment bought using taxpayer money already took the crazy risks back then, it would be silly to now ignore the information they bought so dearly (with such large and negative EV) back then  <3

To be clear, that drug worked against something that might not even be the same thing.

All biological STEM stuff is a crapshoot. Lots and lots of stamp-collecting. Lots of guess and check. Lots of "the closest example we think we know might work like X" reasoning. Biological systems or techniques can do almost anything physically possible eventually, but each incremental improvement in repeatability (going from having to try 10 million times to get something to happen to having to try 1 million times (or going from having to try 8 times on average to 4 times on average) due to "progress" ) is kinda "as difficult as the previous increment in progress that made things an order of magnitude more repeatable".

The new flu just went from 1 to 2. I hope it never gets to 4.

Katelyn Jetelina has been providing some useful information on this. Her conclusion at this point seems to be 'more data needed'.

The only thing I can conclude looking around for her is that she's out of the public eye. Hope she's ok, but I'd guess she's doing fine and just didn't feel like being a public figure anymore. Interested if anyone can confirm that, but if it's true I want to make sure to not pry.

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.

Update: now you can create discussions on CQ2! And, here's a demo with an actual LessWrong discussion between Vanessa and Rob: https://cq2.co/demo.

This is cool!

Two pieces of feedback: 

1. I think it's quite important that I can at least see the number of responses to a comment before I have to click on the comment icon. Currently it only shows me a generic comment icon if there are any replies.
2. I think one of the core use-cases of a comment UI is reading back and forth between two users. This UI currently makes that a quite disjointed operation. I think it's fine to prioritize a different UI experience, but it does feel like a big loss to me.

Ooh, nice. I've been wanting this kind of discussion software for awhile. I do have a suggestion: maybe, when hovering over a highlighted passage, you could get some kind of indicator of how many child comments are under that section, and/or change the highlight contrast for threads that have more children, so we can tell which branches of the discussion got the most attention

Congratulations! I'm in today's lucky 10,000 for learning that Asymptote exists. Perhaps due to my not being much of a mathematician, I didn't understand it very clearly from the README... but the examples comparing code to its output make sense! Comparing your examples to the kind of things Asymptote likes to show off (https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/), I see why you might have needed to build the additional tooling.

I don't think you necessarily have to compare smoothmanifold to a JavaScript framework to get the point across -- it seems to be an abstraction layer that allows one to describe a drawn image in slightly more general terms than Asymptote supports.

I admire how you're investing so much effort to use your talents to help others.

Additional Context that I realized might be useful for anyone that wants to offer advice: 
I'm in my early 20's, so when I say 'portfolio' there's nothing really there outside of hobby projects that aren't that presentable to employers, and my degree is like a mix of engineering and physics simulation. Additionally, I live in Austin, so that might help with opportunities, yet I'm not entirely sure where to look for those.

Hey! 

It seems like an interesting philosophy. Feel free to crosspost. You've definitely chosen some ambitious topics to try to cover, which I am generally a fan of.

My recommendation would be to get an LTFF, manifund, or survival and flourishing fund grant to work on the research, then if it seems to be going well, try getting into MATS, or move to Berkeley & work in an office with other independent researchers like FAR for a while, and use either of those situations to find co-founders for an org that you can scale to a greater number of people.

Alternatively, you can call up your smart & trustworthy college friends to help start your org.

I do think there's just not that much experience or skill around these parts with setting up highly effective & scalable organizations, so what help can be provided won't be that helpful. In terms of resources for how to do that, I'd recommend Y Combinator's How to Start a Startup lecture recordings, and I've been recommended the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business.

It should also be noted that if you do want to build a large org in this space, once you get to the large org phase, OpenPhil has historically been less happy to fund you (unless you're also making AGI^[1]).

Hey metalcrow! Great to have you here! Hope you have a good time and looking forward to seeing your post!

I was unsure whether people would prefer that, and decided yesterday to instead cut it, but IDK, I do like it. I might clean up the code and find some way to re-activate it on the site.

This probably should be made more transparent, but the reason why these aren't in the library is because they don't have images for the sequence-item. We display all sequences that people create that have proper images on the library (otherwise we just show it on user's profiles).

↑ comment by nim · 2024-05-06T20:35:34.629Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Can random people donate images for the sequence-items that are missing them, or can images only be provided by the authors? I notice that I am surprised that some sequences are missing out on being listed just because images weren't uploaded, considering that I don't recall having experienced other sequences' art as particularly transformative or essential.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-05-06T22:01:48.764Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Only the authors (and admins) can do it. 

If you paste some images here that seem good to you, I can edit them unilaterally, and will message the authors to tell them I did that. 

Replies from: Lorxus

↑ comment by Lorxus · 2024-05-09T20:46:32.082Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm neither of these users, but for temporarily secret reasons I care a lot about having the Geometric Rationality and Maximal Lottery-Lottery sequences be slightly higher-quality. Warning: these are AI-generated, if that's a problem. It's that, an abstract pattern, or programmer art from me.

Two options for Maximal Lottery-Lotteries:

 

Two options for Geometric Rationality:

Replies from: gilch, nim

↑ comment by gilch · 2024-05-16T02:49:13.799Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How did you manage to prompt these? My attempts with Stable Diffusion so far have usually not produced anything suitable.

↑ comment by nim · 2024-05-09T23:39:30.177Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am delighted that you chimed in here; these are pleasingly composed and increase my desire to read the relevant sequences. Your post makes me feel like I meaningfully contributed to the improvement of these sequences by merely asking a potentially dumb question in public, which is the internet at its very best.

Artistically, I think the top (fox face) image for lotteries cropped for its bottom 2/3 would be slightly preferable to the other, and the bottom (monochrome white/blue) for geometric makes a nicer banner in the aspect ratio that they're shown as.

Replies from: habryka4, Lorxus

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-05-10T02:05:39.036Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Uploaded them both!

Replies from: Lorxus

↑ comment by Lorxus · 2024-05-10T12:32:44.464Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Excellent, thanks!

↑ comment by Lorxus · 2024-05-10T02:01:30.997Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Your post makes me feel like I meaningfully contributed to the improvement of these sequences by merely asking a potentially dumb question in public, which is the internet at its very best.

 IMO you did! Like I said in my comment, for reasons that are secret temporarily I care about those two sequences a lot, but I might not have thought to just ask whether they could be added to the library, nor did I know that the blocker was suitable imagery.

Post upvotes are both at the bottom and top, but repeating them for comments at the bottom looks a lot too cluttered. Having them at the top is IMO more important since you want to be able to tell how good something is before you read it.

Welcome! I hope you have a good time here!

Welcome! If you have the emotional capacity to happily tolerate being disagreed with or ignored, you should absolutely participate in discussions. In the best case, you teach others something they didn't know before, or get a misconception of your own corrected. In the worst case, your remarks are downvoted or ignored.

Your question on games would do well fleshed out into at least a quick take, if not a whole post, answering:

• What games you've ruled out for this and why
• what games in other genres you've found to capture the "truly simulation-like" aspect that you're seeking
• examples of game experiences that you experience as narrative railroading
• examples of ways that games that get mostly there do a "hard science/AI/transhumanist theme" in the way that you're looking for
• perhaps what you get from it being a game that you miss if it's a book, movie, or show?

If you've tried a lot of things and disliked most, then good clear descriptions of what you dislike about them can actually function as helpful positive recommendations for people with different preferences.

Where else would it go? We need a minimum level of saliency to get accurate markets, and I care about the signal from the markets a good amount.

Welcome! I hope you have a good time here!

EDIT: looks like habryka got there earlier and I didn't see it.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXJfH7oZ62Xojnrqs/#sLay9Tv65zeXaQzR4 [LW · GW]

Intercom is indeed hidden on mobile (since it'd be pretty intrusive at that screen size).

It's not the most obvious place, but the content lives here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXJfH7oZ62Xojnrqs/lesswrong-moderation-messaging-container?commentId=sLay9Tv65zeXaQzR4 [LW(p) · GW(p)] 

@Ruby [LW · GW] @RobertM [LW · GW] 

You can "bookmark" a post, is that equivalent to your desired "read later"?

Maybe because somebody didn't think your post qualified as a "Question"? I don't see any guidelines on what qualifies as a "question" versus a "post" -- and personally I wouldn't have downvoted because of this --- but your question seems a little long/opinionated. 

I've been using a remineralization toothpaste imported from Japan for several years now, ever since I mentioned reading about remineralization to a dentist from Japan. She recommended the brand to me. FDA is apparently bogging down release in the US, but it's available on Amazon anyway. It seems to have slowed, but not stopped, the formation of cavities. It does seem to result in faster plaque build-up around my gumline, like the bacterial colonies are accumulating some of the minerals not absorbed by the teeth. The brand I use is apagard. [Edit: I'm now trying the recommended mouthwash CloSys as the link above recommended, using it before brushing, and using Listerine after. The CloSys seems quite gentle and pleasant as a mouthwash. Listerine is harsh, but does leave my teeth feeling cleaner for much longer. I'll try this for a few years and see if it changes my rate of cavity formation.]

I apologize for my lack of time to find the sources for this belief, so I could well be wrong, but my recollection of looking up a similar idea is that I found it to be reversible only in the very earliest stages, when the tooth has weakened but not yet developed a cavity proper.

In practice it is not as bad as uniform volume throughout the day would be for two reasons:

• Market-makers narrow spreads to prevent any low-value-exchange pairings that would be predictable price fluctuations. They do extract some profits in the process.
• Volume is much higher near the open and close.

I would guess that any improvements of this scheme would manifest as tighter effective spreads, and a reduction in profits of HFT firms (which seem to provide less value to society than other financial firms).

A new update

Hi John,

thank you for sharing the job postings. We’re starting something really exciting, and as research leads on the team, we - Paul Lessard and Bruno Gavranović - thought we’d provide clarifications.

Symbolica was not started to improve ML using category theory. Instead, Symbolica was founded ~2 years ago, with its 2M seed funding round aimed at tackling the problem of symbolic reasoning, but at the time, its path to getting there wasn’t via categorical deep learning (CDL). The original plan was to use hypergraph rewriting as means of doing learning more efficiently. That approach however was eventually shown unviable.

Symbolica’s pivot to CDL started about five months ago. Bruno had just finished his Ph.D. thesis laying the foundations for the topic and we reoriented much of the organization towards this research direction. In particular, we began: a) refining a roadmap to develop and apply CDL, and b) writing a position paper, in collaboration with with researchers at Google DeepMind which you’ve cited below.

Over these last few months, it has become clear that our hunches about applicability are actually exciting and viable research directions. We’ve made fantastic progress, even doing some of the research we planned to advocate for in the aforementioned position paper. Really, we discovered just how much Taking Categories Seriously gives you in the field of Deep Learning.

Many advances in DL are about creating models which identify robust and general patterns in data (see the Transformers/Attention mechanism, for instance). In many ways this is exactly what CT is about: it is an indispensable tool for many scientists, including ourselves, to understand the world around us: to find robust patterns in data, but also to communicate, verify, and explain our reasoning.

At the same time, the research engineering team of Symbolica has made significant, independent, and concrete progress implementing a particular deep learning model that operates on text data, but not in an autoregressive manner as most GPT-style models do.

These developments were key signals to Vinod and other investors, leading to the closing of the 31M funding round.

We are now developing a research programme merging the two, leveraging insights from theories of structure, e.g. categorical algebra, as means of formalising the process by which we find structure in data. This has twofold consequence: pushing models to identify more robust patterns in data, but also interpretable and verifiable ones.

In summary:

a) The push to apply category theory was not based on a singular whim, as the the post might suggest,

but that instead

b) Symbolica is developing a serious research programme devoted to applying category theory to deep learning, not merely hiring category theorists

All of this is to add extra context for evaluating the company, its team, and our direction, which does not come across in the recently published tech articles.

We strongly encourage interested parties to look at all of the job ads, which we’ve tailored to particular roles. Roughly, in the CDL team, we’re looking for either

1) expertise in category theory, and a strong interest in deep learning, or

2) expertise in deep learning, and a strong interest in category theory.

at all levels of seniority.

Happy to answer any other questions/thoughts.

Bruno Gavranović,

Paul Lessard

I'd bet against anything particularly commercially successful. Manifold could give better and more precise predictions if you operationalize "commercially viable".

Hello and welcome! I also found all of this stuff via HPMoR many years ago. Hope you have a good time commenting more!

Welcome! Looking forward to having you around!

The ferrett.

More concrete than your actual question, but there's a couple options you can take:

• acknowledge that there's a form of social truth whereby the things people insist upon believing are functionally true. For instance, there may be no absolute moral value to criticism of a particular leader, but in certain countries the social system creates a very unambiguous negative value to it. Stick to the observable -- if he does an experiment, replicate that experiment for yourself and share the results. If you get different results, examine why. IMO, attempting in good faith to replicate whatever experiments have convinced him that the world works differently from how he previously thought would be the best steelman for someone framing religion as rationalism.

• There is of course the "which bible?" question. Irrefutable proof of the veracity of the old testament, if someone had it, wouldn't answer the question of which modern religion incorporating it is "most correct".

• It's entirely valid and consistent with rationalism to have the personal preference to not accept any document as fully and literally true. If you can gently find out how he handles the internal contradictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible), you've got a ready-made argument for taking some things figuratively.

And as unsolicited social advice, distinct from the questions of rationalism -- don't strawman him into someone who criticizes your atheism until he as an actual human tells you what if any actual critiques he has. That's not nice. What is nice is to frame it as a harm reduction option, because organized religion can be great for some people with mental health struggles, and tell him the truth about what you see in his current behavior that you like and support. For instance if his church gets him more involved with the community, or encourages him to do more healthy behaviors or less unhealthy ones, maintain common ground by endorsing the outcomes of his beliefs rather than endorsing the beliefs themselves.

If your brother has a history of being rational and evidence driven, you might encourage them to spend some time lurking on /r/AcademicBiblical on Reddit. They require citations for each post or comment, so he may be frustrated if he tries to participate, especially if in the midst of a mental health crisis. But lurking would be very informative very quickly.

I was a long time participant there before leaving Reddit, and it's a great place for evidence driven discussion of the texts. Its a mix of atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Norse pagans, etc. (I'm an Agnostic myself that strongly believes we're in a simulation, so it really was all sorts there.)

Might be a healthy reality check to apologist literalism, even if not necessarily disrupting a newfound theological inclination.

The nice things about a rabbit hole is that while not always, it's often the case that someone else has traveled down whatever one you aren't up for descending into.

(Though I will say in its defense, that particular field is way more interesting than you'd ever think if you never engaged with the material through an academic lens. There's a lot of very helpful lessons in critical analysis wrapped up in the field given the strong anchoring and survivorship biases and how that's handled both responsibly and irresponsibly by different camps.)

Theism is a symptom of epistemic deficiency [LW · GW]. Atheism follows from epistemic sufficiency, but not all atheists are rational or sane. The epistemically virtuous do not believe on insufficient evidence, nor ignore or groundlessly dismiss evidence relevant to beliefs they hold.

That goes for both of you. The Litany of Tarsky [? · GW] is the correct attitude for a rationalist, and it's about not thumbing the scales. If your brother were sane (to rationalist standards), he would not hold such a belief, given the state of readily available evidence. If he hasn't figured this out, it's either because he's put his thumb on the scales or refuses to look. Organized religions (that have survived) teach their adherents not to look (ironically), and that it is virtuous to thumb the scales (faith), and that is something they have in common with cults, although not always to the same degree. These tactics are dark arts [? · GW]—symmetric weapons [LW · GW], that can promote any other beliefs (false or otherwise) just as easily.

If you feel like talking to him about it, but don't want it to devolve into a debate, Street Epistemology is a pretty good approach. It can help dislodge irrational beliefs without attacking them directly, by instead promoting better epistemics (by Socratically poking holes in bad epistemics).

To answer your direct question, I think Privileging the Hypothesis [LW · GW] is pretty relevant. Einstein's Arrogance [LW · GW] goes into more detail about the same key rationality concept of locating the hypothesis [? · GW].

EY may be too busy to respond, but you can probably feel pretty safe consulting with MIRI employees in general. Perhaps also Conjecture employees, and Redwood Research employees, if you read and agree with their views on safety. That at least gives you a wider net of people to potentially give you feedback.

My model is that it's mostly popular because Scott Alexander referenced it in Meditations on Moloch, and the rest is just kind of background popularity, but not sure.

I did a non-in-depth reading of the article during my lunch break, and found it to be of lower quality than I would have predicted. 

I am open to an alternative interpretation of the article, but most of it seems very critical of the Effective Altruism movement on the basis of "calculating expected values for the impact on peoples lives is a bad method to gauge the effectiveness of aid, or how you are impacting peoples lives." 

The article begins by establishing that many medicines have side effects. Since some of these side effects are undesirable, the author suggests, though they do not state explicitly, that the medicine may also be undesirable if the side effect is bad enough. They go on to suggest that Givewell, and other EA efforts at aid are not very aware of the side effects of their efforts, and that the efforts may therefore do more harm than good. The author does not stoop so low as to actually provide evidence of this, or even make any explicit claims that could be checked or contradicted, but merely suggests that givewell does not do a good job of this.

This is the less charitable part of my interpretation (no pun intended), but I feel the author spends a lot of the article constantly suggesting that trying to be altruistic, especially in an organized or systematic way, is ineffective, maybe harmful and generally not worth the effort. Mostly the author does this by suggesting anecdotal stories of their investigations into charity, and how they feel much wiser now.

The author then moves on to their association of SBF with Effective Altruism, going so far as to say: "Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect prophet of EA, the epitome of its moral bankruptcy." In general, the author goes on to give a case for how SBF is the classic utilitarian villain, justifying his immoral acts through oh-so esoteric calculations of improving good around the world on net. 

The author goes on to lay out a general criticism of Effective Altruism as relying on arbitrary utilitarian measures of moral value, such as what counts as a life saved. The author suggests Effective Altruism has become popular because Billionaires like how it makes a straightforward case for converting wealth into moral good, and generally attempts to undermine this premise. 

The author is generally extremely critical of EA, and any effort at organized charity, and suggests that the best alternative to EA (or utilitarian moral reasoning in general, I presume) is the following:

 

the “dearest test.” When you have some big call to make, sit down with a person very dear to you—a parent, partner, child, or friend—and look them in the eyes. Say that you’re making a decision that will affect the lives of many people, to the point that some strangers might be hurt. Say that you believe that the lives of these strangers are just as valuable as anyone else’s. Then tell your dearest, “I believe in my decisions, enough that I’d still make them even if one of the people who could be hurt was you.”

Or you can do the “mirror test.” Look into the mirror and describe what you’re doing that will affect the lives of other people. See whether you can tell yourself, with conviction, that you’re willing to be one of the people who is hurt or dies because of what you’re now deciding. Be accountable, at least, to yourself.

Which I suppose is fine, but I think this reveals the author is primarily concerned about their personal role or responsibility in causing positive or negative moral events, and that the author has very little regard for a consequentialist view of the actual state of reality. Unfortunately, the author does very little do directly engage in dialogue about moral values, and makes the assumption throughout the entire article that everyone does, or at least should, share their own moral values. 

The author finishes the article with an anecdote of their friend, who they suggest is a better example of being an altruist since they fly out to an island themselves, where they provide direct aid with water stations, and the direct accountability and lack of billionaires demonstrates how selfless and good he is. 
 

I don't know who this author is, but I get the feeling they are very proud of this article, and they should surely congratulate themselves on spending their time, and the time of their readers so well. 

TL;DR
All in all, I think this article can best be summarized by honestly expressing that I feel I wasted my time reading it, and writing this summary. I considered deleting my post on this article, so that I would not risk others also wasting their time on it, but I will leave this summary up so that they can at least waste less time on this article. 

There is a box which contains money iff the front and back are painted the same color. Each side is independently 30% to be blue, and 70% to be red. You observe that the front is blue, and your friend observes that the back is red.

"No one assigns 70% to this statement." (Yes, your friend is an idiot, but that can be remedied, if needed, with a slight modification in the statement)

From what I understand, because the US Electoral College is structured such that state laws determine who the electors will vote for as president, you wouldn't need any constitutional amendment or federal legislative action to impose an age limit for the US presidential election in particular. In contrast, I think the lower age limit of 35 for US presidents is a constitutional requirement, and as such would not be nearly as easy to change.

On a somewhat related note, there's an interesting attempt by US states to assign electoral votes based on the national popular vote.

In 48 of the 50 states, state laws mandate that the winner of the plurality of the statewide popular vote receive all of that state's electoral votes.

Based on this Wikipedia quote, I imagine states could impose arbitrary requirements for who can or cannot receive the electoral votes, including imposing an age limit. Basically, add a clause to the state laws that "Electors must abstain if the winner of the plurality does not fulfill the following requirements...".

EDIT: Note, however, that if no candidate gets a majority of the electoral vote (270+ votes), then the US House of Representatives elects the US President instead. So while such a state law would disincentivize particular candidates, if such a candidate ran for president anyway and won the plurality of the state vote, then the abstention of the electors might well result in the Electoral College disempowering itself. And furthermore the House of Representatives could still elect an arbitrary candidate.

EDIT2: Okay, I think I've come up with a better state law design: If the winner of the plurality of state votes exceeds the age limit, then assign the electoral votes to either the second place instead (regardless of their age), or alternatively to whoever of the top two candidates is younger. Either version ensures that the electoral college will not abstain, which makes the House of Representatives route less likely. And either version disincentivizes a scenario where the presidential candidates of both parties exceed the age limit, since in this case, both parties are incentivized to run either a candidate below the age limit, or if not that, then at least a younger candidate than the opposing party's. And only the former strategy results in a stable outcome, whereas the strategy of running a younger candidate above the age limit can be circumvented by the opposing party running a still younger candidate.

Age limits do exist: you have to be at least 35 to run for President, at least 30 for Senator, and 25 for Representative. This automatically adds a decade or two to your candidates.

I think the best bet is to vote for a generally reasonable party. Despite their many flaws, it seems like Green Party or SPD are the best choices right now. (CDU seems to be too influenced in business interests, the current FDP is even worse)

The alternative would be to vote for a small party with a good agenda to help signal-boost them, but I don't know who's around these days.

It's kinda ill-formed question, because you can get the same performance if you compute moves longer with lower power. I guess you are searching for something like"energy per move".

You might find this link helpful for your questions. 

This is a link to the glossory from the above site.

This is from the FRB of St. Louis.

Last, I would suggest you can also just ask any of the available LLM's out there now to explain the term you are interested in and get a pretty good initial explanation.

As for books, I have three. How good they are is subjective as one textbook is from years ago but they should cover most of the investment markets side of things:

Options as a Strategic Investment (Lawrence McMIllan)

Technical Analysis (Kirkpatrick & Dahlquist)

Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management (Frank Reilly) -- the old textbook I kept around.

If your interest in more in the economic terms and theory area you might look for The MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics or a similar dictionary of economic terms.

I don't see many particularly exotic finance terms, but I would think a recent edition of Brigham and Ehrhardt's "Financial Management: Theory and Practice" is probably the most authoritative (but not being available for 'preview' on Google Books I haven't been able to do a quick ctrl+f to see if it uses a sample of terms in that post). However I suspect that even one of those Tony Robbins books on investing will provide you the terminology or even Investopedia.

It sounds like you're on the "Enriched" tab, i.e. a feed of posts that includes some algorithmically suggested posts. Probably you were switched over to it in an AB test [LW · GW]. I'm not 100% sure how you were supposed to find that out. From reading that post, my guess is that via the stickied "LW Frontpage Experiments" at the top of your feed.

So, the reason you're seeing some old posts is because our recommendations engine thinks you might like them (though I understand the team working on it has put a fair bit of effort towards biasing it towards some of our good, older content, like the Sequences — which seems like a good idea to me, too).

You can switch back to the normal view by clicking "Latest" at the top of the list of posts:

Three is a bit much. I am honestly not sure what's better. My guess is putting them all into one. (Context, I am one of the LTFF fund managers)

That post ran into some cross-posting problems so had to re-do

It's really hard to get any kind of baseline here, and my guess is it differs hugely between different populations, but my guess (based on doing informal fermis here a bunch of times over the years) would be a lot lower than the average for the population, at least because of demographic factors, and then probably some extra.