Open Thread: June 2023 (Inline Reacts!)

Oh, so that's what "inline" reacts are! This brings me back: back in 2014, I wrote a prototype discussion forum (inspired by a weird sun Tweet) where you could upvote or downvote snippets within a post or comment, which would get correspondingly colored blue or red. The backend was Django, and the substring voting worked by traversing the DOM tree and working out the character indices where the current selection starts and ends. More innocent times! I miss jQuery.

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↑ comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2023-06-12T06:14:01.198Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Replies from: Raemon, Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2023-06-14T21:30:17.779Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Should be fixed now.

Replies from: lahwran

↑ comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2023-06-15T03:54:37.589Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

looks good, ish, though now it's barely noticeable:

↑ comment by Raemon · 2023-06-13T21:31:33.498Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

oh no

Courtesy of the programming language checklist.

So you're proposing a new economic policy. Here's why your policy will not work.

Your policy depends on science/theorizing that:
    ☐ has been replicated only once
    ☐ has failed to replicate
    ☐ for which there exist no replication attempts
    ☐ was last taken seriously sometime around 1900
    ☐ requires a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with 200 free parameters to perfectly track reality perfectly
Your policy would:
    ☐ disincentivize good things
    ☐ incentivize bad things
    ☐ both
    ☐ be wildly unpopular, even though you think it's the best thing since sliced bread (it's not)
    ☐ You seem to think that taking options away from people helps them
Your policy just reinvents
    ☐ land-value taxes, but worse
    ☐ universal basic income, but worse
    ☐ price discrimination, but worse
    ☐ demand subsidy, but worse
    ☐ demand subsidy, better, but that's still no excuse
    ☐ Your policy sneakily redistributes money from poor to rich people
    ☐ Your policy only works if every country on earth accepts it at the same time
    ☐ You actually have no idea what failure/success of your policy would look like
You claim it fixes
    ☐ climate change
    ☐ godlessness
    ☐ police violence
    ☐ wet socks
    ☐ teenage depression
    ☐ rising rents
    ☐ war
    ☐ falling/rising sperm counts/testosterone levels
You seem to assume that
    ☐ privatization always works
    ☐ privatization never works
    ☐ your country will never become a dictatorship
    ☐ your country will always stay a dictatorship
    the cost of coordination is
        ☐ negligible
        ☐ zero
        ☐ negative
        ☐ Your policy is a Pareto-worsening
In conclusion,
    ☐ You have copied and mashed together some good ideas with some mediocre ideas
    ☐ You have not even tried to understand basic economics/political science/sociology concepts
    ☐ Living under your policy is an adequate punishment for inventing it

I only very recently noticed that you can put \newcommand definitions in equations in LW posts and they'll apply to all the equations in that post. This is an enormous help for writing long technical posts, so I think it'd be nice if it was (a) more discoverable and (b) easier to use. For (b), the annoying thing right now is that I have to put newcommands into one of the equations, so either I need to make a dedicated one, or I need to know which equation I used. Also, the field for entering equations isn't great for entering things with many lines.

Feature suggestion to improve this: in the options section below the post editor, have a multiline text field where you can put LaTeX, and then inject that LaTeX code into MathJax as a preamble (or just add an otherwise empty equation to the page, I don't know to what extent MathJax supports preambles).

Hi, the name is Jay and I have been working with data through out my career with usually dipping my mind into ML, Data Engineering or data visualizations.

I am joining today because the guidelines and intro of the community made me want become a part of it and it sounds like a place where I can feel safe to contribute my thoughts and learning and also learn from others.

Nice to e-meet you all

I'm surprised there's no tag for either "AI consciousness" or "AI rights", given that there have been several posts discussing both. However, there's a lot of overlap between the two, so perhaps both would be redundant, and the question of which is broader/more fitting becomes relevant. Thoughts?

(Sorry if this is not the right place to put this.)

Inline reactions aren't working for me in Firefox 88 on Xubuntu 16.04: when I select text, I can see the smiley icon next to the comment, but it disappears when I mouse over it.

This probably doesn't count as a bug report; while some companies need to support old software for a long time, in this case, I'm just imagining jimrandomh [LW · GW] incredulously telling me, "Wait, you're running Firefox 88, on Xenial?! Why? What's wrong with you? You're a terrible person," and me not having any satisfactory reply.

Why do mathematicians always build roads thru empty regions of land?

One of the field axioms is that the operations commute.

―by dkl9

Is there a way to find all the posts that you have strong upvoted? I bet there is a hidden query that I can use on the All Posts page but I can't find it easily.

If it actually doesn't exist then this comment acts as my vote on getting it implemented.

Putting this in the OT because I'm risking asking something silly and basic here—after reading “Are Bayesian methods guaranteed to overfit?” [LW · GW], it feels like there should exist a Bayesian-update analogue to Kelly betting: underfitting enough to preserve some property that's important because the environment is unpredictable, catastrophic losses have distortionary effects, etc., where fitting to the observations ‘as well as possible’ is analogous to playing purely for expected value and thus turns out to be ‘wrong’ in the kind of iterated games we wind up in in reality. Dweomite's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] is part of what inspired this, because of the way it enumerated reasons having to do with limited training data.

Is this maybe an existing well-known concept that I missed the boat on, or something that's already known to be unworkable or undefinable for some reason? Or what?

I've just pushed an update to the Reacts Palette. I aimed to a) remove some reacts that either weren't getting used, or seemed to be used confusingly, b) add some reacts that seem missing, c) reorganize them so they were a bit easier to parse.

And, the biggest change is d) which is to mark how likely a claim is via reacting. I'm imagining this primarily used via inline-reacting. If a lot of people end up using it might make sense to build a more specialized system for this, but it seemed to cheap to add via Reacts for the immediate future.

It looks like this now, when you first open the palette. It deliberately doesn't emphasize the ability to scroll-for-more-reacts, at first, because I think people are probably already fairly overwhelmed with the default palette.

I like the dynamic of how the reacts make it easier to give positive feedback. 

When reading the recent UAP betting threat, I feel like I would want to have a react to congratulate people for taking their beliefs seriously enough to bet. 

Hi! I'm doing the seemingly common thing of making an account under a pseudonym so I can have discussions and get smarter without the terrifying and probably dangerous prospect of having all of my partially-formed opinions freely associated with my IRL identity. I thank you all in advance for helping me be less stupid!

Does anyone here know of (or would be willing to offer) funding for creating experimental visualization tools?

I’ve been working on a program which I think has a lot of potential, but it’s the sort of thing where I expect it to be most powerful in the context of “accidental” discoveries made while playing with it (see e.g. early use of the microscope, etc.).

Inline reacts are now live on all new posts! 

(Authors can switch old posts to use reacts if they'd like)

Other intellectual communities often become specialized in analyzing arguments only of a very specific type, and because AGI-risk arguments aren't of that type, their members can't easily engage with those arguments. For example:

...if you look, say, at COVID or climate change fears, in both cases, there are many models you can look at, including--and then models with data. I'm not saying you have to like those models. But the point is: there's something you look at and then you make up your mind whether or not you like those models; and then they're tested against data. So, when it comes to AGI and existential risk, it turns out as best I can ascertain, in the 20 years or so we've been talking about this seriously, there isn't a single model done. Period. Flat out.

So, I don't think any idea should be dismissed. I've just been inviting those individuals to actually join the discourse of science. 'Show us your models. Let us see their assumptions and let's talk about those.' The practice, instead, is to write these very long pieces online, which just stack arguments vertically and raise the level of anxiety. It's a bad practice in virtually any theory of risk communication.

-- Tyler Cowen, Risks and Impact of Artificial Intelligence
 

is there a canonical source for "the argument for AGI ruin" somewhere, preferably laid out as an explicit argument with premises and a conclusion?

-- David Chalmers, Twitter

Is work already being done to reformulate AI-risk arguments for these communities?

Well, hi everyone. I must confess i feel a little bit overwhelmed by how deep this website can go but i'll try to not be biased on how smart my reply look :)

I'm Giacomo, a 26 yo graphic designer based in Italy that just fell in love by the possibilities of this website. 
All these portals leading to even more portals of knowledge i can't wait to dive in.

I think it's gonna be a fun ride.

Is there an organisation that can hire independent alignment researchers who already have funding, in order to help with visas for a place that has other researchers, perhaps somewhere in the UK? Is there a need for such an organisation?