Hello! I’ve mostly been lurking around on LessWrong for a little while and have found it to be a good source of AI news and other stuff. I like these posts - sometimes it feels somewhat intimidating in other parts. I hope to be commenting more on LessWrong in the future!

Confession: I've sometimes been getting Lesswrong users mixed up, in a very status-damaging way for them. 

Before messaging with lc, I mixed his writings and accomplishments with lsusr (e.g. I thought the same person wrote Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets [LW · GW] and What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like [LW · GW]). 

I thought that JenniferRM did demon research and used to work at MIRI, but I had I mixed her up with Jessicata. 

And, worst of all, I mixed up Thane Ruthenis with Thoth Hermes, causing me to think that Thane Ruthenis wrote Thoth's downvoted post The truth about false [LW · GW].

Has this happened to other people? The main thing is that I just didn't notice the mixup at all until ~a week after we first exchanged messages. It was just a funny manifestation of me not really paying much attention to some new names, and it's an easy fix on my end, but the consequences are pretty serious if this happens in general.

It would save me a fair amount of time if all lesswrong posts had an "export BibTex citation" button, exactly like the feature on arxiv.  This would be particularly useful for alignment forum posts!

Hello everyone!

After several years seeing (and reading) links to LessWrong posts scattered in other areas of the internet, I decided to sign up for an account today myself and see if I can't find a new community to contribute to here :)

I look forward to reading, writing, and thinking with you all in the future!

I want to express appreciation for a feature the Lightcone team implemented a long time ago: Blocking all posts tagged "AI Alignment" keeps this website usable for me.

Hello, I came across this forum while reading an AI research paper where the authors quoted from Yudkowsky's "Hidden Complexity of Wishes." The linked source brought me here, and I've been reading some really exceptional articles ever since. 

By way of introduction, I'm working on the third edition of my book "Inside Cyber Warfare" and I've spent the last few months buried in AI research specifically in the areas of safety and security.  I view AGI as a serious threat to our future for two reasons. One, neither safety nor security have ever been prioritized over profits by corporations dating all the way back to the start of the industrial revolution.  And two, regulation has only ever come to an industry after a catastrophe or a significant loss of life has occurred, not before. 

I look forward to reading more of the content here, and engaging in what I hope will be many fruitful and enriching discussions with LessWrong's members. 

I notice I am confused.

I have written what I think is a really cool post [LW · GW]: Announcing that I will be using prediction markets in practice in useful ways, and asking for a little bit of help with that (mainly people betting on the markets). But apparently the internet/LessWrong doesn't feel that way. (Compare to this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] of mine which got ~4.5 times the upvotes, and is basically a gimmick—in general I'm really confused about what'll get upvoted here and what will be ignored/downvoted, even after half a decade on this site).

I'm not, like, complaining about this, but I'd like to understand why this wasn't better received. Is it:

• The post is confusingly written, with too much exposition in the beginning (starts with a long quote)
• The post promises to do something without having done it, so people judge it as a pipedream
• The idea isn't actually that interesting: We've had replication markets, and the idea of using prediction markets to select experiments was proposed at least in 2013, and the idea is straightforward, as is the execution
• The title makes it sound like just another proposal and nothing that will actually be executed in practice
• Stuff like this doesn't matter because TAI soon

I disagree with some of these, but that's not the point, the point is why my prediction of the reception of the post was wrong. So: Why isn't this kinda cool and worth participating in?

↑ comment by papetoast · 2023-12-05T03:19:06.772Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The title doesn't set a good expectation of the contents. If I am a person interested in "Please Bet On My Quantified Self Decision Markets", I want to bet. I won't expect to (and shouldn't be expected to) read all your lengthy experimental details. It took a while for me to find the markets.

Replies from: niplav

↑ comment by niplav · 2023-12-05T11:08:19.394Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's funny, I've already changed the title from "Using Prediction Platforms To Select Quantified Self Experiments". I guess the problem is really the block quote, which I'll move somewhere later in the post.

Hey, I've been reading stuff from this community since about 2017. I'm now in the SERI MATS program where I'm working with Vanessa Kosoy. Looking forward to contributing something back after lurking for so long :P

I hope it's not too late to introduce myself, and I apologize if it is the case. I'm Miguel, a former accountant and decided to focus on researching /upskilling to help solve the AI alignment problem.

Sorry if I got people confused here, of what I was trying to do in the past months posting about my explorations on machine learning.

Feature suggestion: unexplained strong downvotes have been something that bothered people for a long time, and requiring a comment to strongly downvote has been suggested several times before. I agree that this is too much to require, so I have a similar but different idea. When you strong upvote (both positive and negative), you'll have some popup with a few reasons to pick from for why you chose to strongly vote (A bit like the new reacts feature). For strong downvotes it may look like this:

• This post is overrated, This post is hazardous, This post is false, This post is below standards.

And for strong upvotes it may look like

• This post is underrated, this post is important, etc.

Choosing one of them will be required in order to strongvote (though both will have an 'other' option, so you don't have to pick a reason that isn't actually your reason). Those reasons will be shown anonymously either to the author or to everyone.

I've been a lurker here for a long time. Why did I join?

I have a project I would like to share and discuss with the community. But first, I would like to hear from you guys. Will my project fit in here? Is there interest?

My project is: I wrote a book for my 6yo son. It is a bedtime-reading kind of book for a reasonably nerdy intelligent modern child.

Reading to young kids is known to be very beneficial to their development. There are tons of great books for any age and interests. My wife and me have read and enjoyed a lot of them with our boy.

However, I still wasn't satisfied. Most of what I could find was too stale, pedestrian, or just plain irrelevant to a child growing up in the modern world. The world is already vastly different from what the authors of these books had to experience. Right now, our world is on the verge of becoming even more unrecognizably different.

So, I wrote my own. I did read it to my boy, and he enjoyed it a lot. My wife enjoyed it too, and suggested it might be interesting to others.

Why Lesswrong? I think there are both cons and pros (in that order) to publishing it here.

Cons: This is not a book teaching young kids rational thinking as such. Its focus is more on psychological matters: overwhelm, emotions, attachments, obligations. One of the book's themes is cheating: with so much help available from the increasingly sentient technology, when using that help becomes cheating? Another core topic is happiness: what makes us happy? How to achieve and maintain that state? Can there be a cheated happiness?

Pros: It is a weird and rather complex book. Its subject matter includes virtual companions, space travel, and benevolent but still scary superintelligences. My boy is a bit of a language nerd, so there are elements of language-themed wordlbuilding as well. Overall, even though it's a book for kids, I was trying to make it interesting for adults too - at least, for adults who are somewhat similar to me. Lesswrong is one of the few places I know where such people gather.

More cons: Despite sounding vaguely sci-fi, it's not serious sci-fi. I don't pretend to describe the real, or even to any extent realistic, world. It's basically a fairy tale. At times, it chooses to be poetic at the expense of rationality. Also, at times it's quite idiosyncratic to our family so may sound confusing or even off-putting to others.

More pros: I do think it's reasonably well written and fun to read :)

I'm not a fan of @Review Bot [LW · GW] because I think that when people are reading a discussion thread, they're thinking and talking about object-level stuff, i.e. the content of the post, and that's a good thing. Whereas the Review Bot comments draw attention away from that good thing and towards the less-desirable meta-level / social activity of pondering where a post sits on the axis from "yay" to "boo", and/or from "popular" to "unpopular".

(Just one guy's opinion, I don't feel super strongly about it.)

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-02-14T00:56:37.227Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think currently the bot is more noticeable than where it will when we have cleared out the 2023/2024 backlog. Usually the bot just makes a comment on a post when it reaches 100 karma, but since we are just starting it, it's leaving a lot of comments at the same time whenever older posts get voted on that don't yet have a market.

The key UI component I care about is actually not the comment (which was just the most natural place to put this information), but the way the post shows up in post-lists: 

The karma number gets a slightly different (golden-ish) color, and then you can see the likelihood that it ends up at the top of the review on hover as well as at the top of the post. 

The central goal is to both allows us to pull forward a bunch of the benefits of the review, and to create a more natural integration of the review into the everyday experience of the site.

Some thoughts about e/acc that weren't worthy of a post:

• E/acc is similar to early 2010s social justice, in that it's little more than a war machine [LW(p) · GW(p)]; they decided that injustice was bad and that therefore they were going to fight it, and that anyone who criticized them was either weakening the coalition or opposing the coalition.
• Likewise, E/acc decided that acceleration was good and anyone opposing them was evil luddites, and you had to use the full extent of your brain to "win" each confrontation as frequently as possible.
• E/acc people like Beff Jezos collided with AI safety gradually, so they encountered a worldview is logically developed and probably obviously correct, but they encountered it piece by piece.
• As a result, they thought up justifications on every rare occasion that they encountered AI safety's logic debunking their takes. 
• Over time, they progressively ended up twisted into a pro-extinction, pro-paperclip shape, and layered a war machine on top of that stance, which now sufficient to defend against true scissor statements from AI safety (e.g. 85% of e/acc themselves don't want human extinction, but your leaders do).

Hello! I'm Andy - I've recently become very interested in AI interpretability, and am looking forward to discussing ideas here!

Re-linking my feature request from yesterday [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Feature proposal: Highlights from the Comments, similar to Scott Alexander's version. 

You make a post containing what you judge to be the best of other people's comments on a topic or an important period like the OpenAI incident. The comments original karma isn't shown, but people can give them new votes and the positive votes will still accrue to the writer instead of the poster. 

This is because, like dialogues, writing lesswrong comments is good for prompting thought.

I don't know about highlighting other people's successful comments because they might not want them displayed (maybe some kind of button you click to request permission to use their comment in your own highlights post? they would only click a button to accept or reject).

↑ comment by Screwtape · 2023-12-06T18:30:22.461Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm tentatively tempted to start doing this in a shortform.

I notice I feel like it's fine to highlight someone's comment? They put it on the site, so it's not private. I'd be keeping it on the same site, not taking it somewhere else without attribution. I wouldn't generally like my contributions moved between places or attributed to me on other pseudonyms, and maybe there's a stronger argument here than I'm thinking.

Replies from: TrevorWiesinger

↑ comment by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2023-12-06T20:16:37.641Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How do shortforms work? Doesn't virtually nobody see them?

Replies from: Screwtape

↑ comment by Screwtape · 2023-12-06T20:25:08.456Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My understanding is shortforms have next to no visibility unless people are already subscribed to a particular person's shortform feed. That seems about right for me? If I'm interested in what say, Scott thinks the best comments are but not interested in what Ray thinks the best comments are, then I subscribe to one but not the other.

I'm not saying this is the best possible UX, I'm just noting I'm tempted to try this with the affordances I have.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2023-12-06T20:30:30.057Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As a quick note, I think it's pretty likely we will copy the EA Forum's Quick Takes section: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/ 

I quite like how it works, and I think it gives about the right level of visibility to shortform posts.

Replies from: Screwtape, TrevorWiesinger

↑ comment by Screwtape · 2023-12-06T23:50:35.561Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Tangential question: I know how to view all the posts by karma or by other criteria. Is there a way to view all comments by karma or other criteria? It occurs to me that part of the reason I don't usually read comment threads except on my own posts is that I don't know where the good discussion is happening.

↑ comment by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2024-02-28T05:30:51.622Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oh boy, I can't wait for this.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-02-28T05:32:21.514Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's done as of yesterday!

Hello! I'm a young accountant, studying to be a CPA. I've messed around in similar epistemic sandboxes all my life without knowing this community ever existed. This is a lovely place, reminds me of a short story Hemingway wrote called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. 

I came from r/valueinvesting. I'm very much interested in applying LW's latticework of knowledge towards improving the accounting profession. If there are Sequences and articles you think are relevant to this, I would eat it up. Thank you! 

I think the Dialogue feature is really good. I like using it, and I think it nudges community behavior in a good direction. Well done, Lightcone team.

LWCW 2024 Save The Date

tl;dr: This year’s LWCW happens 13-16th September 2024. Applications open April/May. We’re expanding to 250 attendees and looking for people interested in assisting our Orga Team.

The main event info is here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tBYRFJNgvKWLeE9ih/less-wrong-community-weekend-2024 [? · GW]

And fragments from that post:

Friday 13th September- Monday 16th September 2024 is the 11th annual LessWrong Community Weekend (LWCW) in Berlin. This is world’s largest rationalist social gathering which brings together 250 aspiring rationalists from across Europe and beyond for four days of socialising, fun and intellectual exploration.

Here is an announcement post from last year [? · GW], so you can develop a sense of what the event is like if you’ve never been. For those who want to extend their stay in Berlin, EAGx is happening the same weekend and next weekend will be the EA Summer Camp.

Details

When: Friday 13th September - Monday 16h September 2024. The event begins with an opening ceremony on Friday afternoon. People are free to leave on Sunday evening, but some activities continue until Monday

Prices: All your money goes into paying for the venue, food, equipment and other expenses directly associated with the event. The exact prices will be announced when the applications open, for now we can estimate between 150€ and 250€. Owing to our generous donors, we can provide some financial aid for those who won’t be able to afford the price.

Contact: If you have any questions post them in the comments below or email lwcw.europe[at]gmail.com

Help Us Spread The Word

LWCW is volunteer organised with no marketing budget so we rely on word of mouth to get the message out. If you’re able to, please consider sharing this post on social media or sending the link to all your friends who might enjoy attending.

I'm going to be in Berkeley February 8 - 25. If anyone wants to meet, hit me up!

If you watch the first episode of Hazbin Hotel (quick plot synopsis, Hell's princess argues for reform in the treatment of the damned to an unsympathetic audience) there's a musical number called 'Hell Is Forever' sung by a sneering maniac in the face of an earnest protagonist asking for basic, incremental fixes.

It isn't directly related to any of the causes this site usually champions, but if you've ever worked with the legal/incarceration system and had the temerity to question the way things operate the vibe will be very familiar.  

Hazbin Hotel Official Full Episode "OVERTURE" | Prime Video (youtube.com)

Almost all the blogs in the world seem to have switched to Substack, so I'm wondering if I'm the only one whose browser is very slow in loading and displaying comments from Substack blogs. Or is this a firefox problem?

Weird idea: a Uber Eats-like interface for EA-endorsed donations.

Imagine: You open the app. It looks just like Uber Eats. Except instead of seeing the option to spend $12 on a hamburger, you see the option to spend $12 to provide malaria medicine to a sick child.

I don't know if this is a good idea or not. I think evaluating the consequences of this sort of stuff is complicated. Like, maybe it ends up being a PR problem or something, which hurts EA as a movement, which has large negative consequences.

I am confused by the dialogue system. I can't quite tell whether it's telling me the truth but being maddeningly vague about it, or whether it's lying to me, or whether I'm just misunderstanding something.

Every now and then I get a notification hanging off the "bell" icon at top right saying something like "New users interested in dialoguing with you".

On the face of it, this means: at least one specific person has specifically nominated me as someone they would like to have a dialogue with.

So I click on the thing and get taken to a page which shows me (if I'm understanding the text correctly) a list of users I've upvoted recently, divided up according to whether they're "recently active on dialogue matching".

I don't see any indication of the form "this user has nominated you as someone they would like to dialogue with" -- which is fair enough, since there's something to be said for making it possible to say "I'd like to have a dialogue with X" but not tell X that unless they also want to have a dialogue with you. But I also don't see anything of the form "N users have specifically nominated you as someone they would like to dialogue with".

So I have no way to tell whether there's actually someone who would specifically like to Do The Thing with me, or whether it's just that the LW machinery wants me to feel like there is, and the only real basis for this notification I've received is that there are some people who maybe kinda would be a good match, on the basis that I've upvoted them and they've upvoted me or something.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but my natural inclination is to think "if there were actually specific people, then there'd be something explicitly saying so, so probably there aren't". So the general impression I get from this system is (my apologies for the analogy) kinda like a slightly scammy dating app which tells you "73 hot singles are interested in your profile" or something, not because there are actually 73 people who have expressed an interest in dating you but because if they say that then you're more likely to use the app and pay their subscription or view their advertisements.

(Being Old by internet standards and married, I haven't actually used any scammy dating apps, or indeed any not-scammy dating apps. So my impression that that's a thing they sometimes do might be wrong.)

Is there some full explanation somewhere of how this stuff works and what the notifications mean? I do understand that e.g. if X looks at the dialogue-matching list, sees Y there, and checks the little box for Y, and if Y does the same for X, then both of them get told "you and this specific other person are interested in having a dialogue with one another". But I don't understand what "users interested in dialoguing with you" means.

(Another thing I don't know is what LW is telling other users about me on the dialogue-matching page. They get a list of topics I've written/commented on, but so far as I can see I don't have any way to see that list. And they get a list of things I've written that they've read, which of course varies from user to user and it's none of my business what it is for any given person. All this means that I have very little idea what some other user expects, if they have checked the box next to my name.)

Did anyone around here try Relationship Hero and has opinions?

Long time lurker introducing myself.

I'm a Music Video Maker who is hoping to use Instrumental Rationality towards accomplishing various creative-aesthetic goals and moving forward on my own personal Hamming Question. The Hammertime [? · GW]sequence has been something I've been very curious about but unsuccessful in implementing.

I'll be scribbling shortform notes which might document my grappling with goals. Most of them will be in some way related to the motion picture production or creativity in general. "Questions" as a topic may creep in, it's one of my favorite topics. Having trained as a documentary filmmaker in a previous life, I have spent a lot of time interviewing people and loved it. I also curate a list of interesting or good questions. I get joy from being asked interesting questions.

I don't like that when you disagree with someone, as in hitting the "x" for the agree/disagree voting [LW · GW], the "x" appears red. It makes me feel on some level like I am saying that the comment is bad when I merely intend to disagree with it.

The new comments outline feature is great! Thanks, LW team :)

Hello! I have been reading and lurking the place for a long time. This place seemed different than other social media/forums because of the level of discussion held here. It's daunting to finally create an account, but I hope to start commenting/posting later.

Also, I find it funny to consider websites as "places", although it makes sense to call it that way.

Hey!

I'm an IT consultant who works very closely with an innovative AI-driven product.  Or, to cut the bullshit, I help deploy and integrate customer service platforms filled to the brim with those very chatbots that annoy endless customers daily.

But that's just my day job.  I'm working on a novel (or perhaps a piece of serialized fiction) that just might have silicon shoggoths in it.  That's the kind of content the local fauna enjoys, right?  It's a little too satirical to be entirely rational, but some recent twitter-chatter out of this community has me convinced that I might have tapped into the right zeitgeists.

Looking for some tips on posting fiction here.  Just one long nested thread of chapters?  Or is there a better way to do it?

Curious about people's guesses in this market: 

Hey there! I just got curious while reading steven pinker's book on rationality about the "rationality community" he keeps referring about then I saw him mentioning trying to be "less wrong" and then I searched it up to stumble upon this place. You guys read and write a lot just browsing here, maybe I should focus on increasing my attention span even more.

Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?

Hi LessWrong! I am Ville, I have been reading LW / ACX and other rationalish content for a while and was thinking of joining into the conversation. I have been writing on Medium previously, but have been struggling with the sheer amount of clickbait and low-effort content on the platform. I also don't really write frequently enough to justify a Substack or other dedicated personal blog.

However as LW has a very high standard for content, I am unsure if my writing would be something people here would enjoy. Most recently, I wrote a series of two fables about the risks of measures becoming targets,  concerning search engine optimisation and biological clocks. These were an attempt to blend creative writing with non-fiction, as I've been a bit disillusioned with the typical, slightly dry, non-fiction writing. While the concepts are quite elementary, I feel especially the post on biological clocks might give some food for thought as the topic of how to measure the effectiveness of anti-ageing / life extension treatments will have to be solved at some point, and relying on biomarkers can backfire in all kinds of ways.

My question to more experienced users is whether you think the below blog posts would be something the LW community would like to see posted and discussed on the platform?
- https://villekuosmanen.medium.com/the-fall-of-googlopolis-76140339c3fc
- https://villekuosmanen.medium.com/aldix-and-the-book-of-life-5da3f0001b6c

In any case, I am hoping to join some conversations here in the future! Also, I live in London so some of you may have seen me in the events at Newspeak House (such as the ACX meet-up in autumn) and I am planning on attending more events in the future.

I had a discussion recently where I gave feedback to Ben P. about the dialogue UI. This got my brain turning, and a few other recommendations for UI changes bubbled up to top of mind.

Vote display (for karma and agree/disagree)

Histogram of distribution of votes (tiny, like sparklines, next to the vote buttons). There should be four bars: strong negative vote count, negative vote count, positive vote count, strong positive vote count. The sum of all votes is less informative and interesting to me than the distribution. I want to know the difference between something being controversial versus meh. Or, for example, if something is strongly liked by a few, but mildly disliked by many.

Comment Optimization
(I'm not saying these things need to be mandatory, just having them as options would be sufficient. I do think they should be on-by-default though.)
Hide number of up/down votes, poster name, agree/disagree until you've voted on karma or agree/disagree respectively. 
Hide emojis & underlines until you've voted karma and agree/disagree.

Vote buttons at bottom of comments, rather than top. (Optimizing for reading long comments where the top of the comment will be out of sight. Also, don't want someone to vote on the comment before they've read the whole thing!)

Agree/disagree voting on posts, not just comments. Maybe even on paragraphs? But others' votes not visible unless you place your own.

Less collapsing of comments. Long comments are a good thing! I rarely think long comments are empty rants. They almost always have logical structure and points that need the whole thing to understand. Collapsing/shortening should happen only on request.
The thing that should be collapsed is comment threads. Maybe don't show anything but the first message in a thread and the thread comment count until a vote has been registered for a comment. Discourage skimming, encourage careful reading.

The comment map is helpful. Even more helpful would be if it had indicators for where you'd interacted with those comments. So that you can either deliberately go back to a comment you agreed/disagreed with to find a useful quote, or avoid the comments you've interacted with in order to find novel comments to read.

Profile Optimization
The number of posts or comments displayed on main page or a person's profile is way too short. I want to be able to set a preference for showing like... 50 or 100 or 300 before needing to click 'see more'.

And I'm usually looking for either a comment OR a post, and know ahead of time which type. So the sections should start collapsed entirely by default, or simply be links. A link to "posts", "comments", "short forms", "all writing combined". Being able to then sort the viewed category either by recency or karma or reactivity (total number of agree and disagree votes) or controversy (highest number of pairs of agree/disagree votes, ie min(agree, disagree)/2 )

If I have the full text of the users' most recent comments and posts in a list of 300 items long, it's easy for me to text search for keywords. This is a much better option than trying to use a search system built/maintained by the site.

Loading so many items at once may take some time. You could load in batches, displaying them as they get loaded (and showing a spinning loading symbol at the top while this happens.) This is far preferable to having to click for each batch!

Similarly, I always want the front page to display the top 100 or 200 posts, not like... 15 or whatever.

Dear LW team, I have found that I can upvote/agreement-vote deleted comments and it gives karma to author of deleted comment. Is it supposed to work like this?

I am seeing new a new "Quick Takes" feature on LessWrong. However, I can't find any announcement or documentation for the feature. I tried searching for "quick takes" and looking on the FAQ [? · GW]. Can someone describe "Quick Takes"?

By now there are several AI policy organizations. However, I am unsure what the typical AI safety policy is that any of them would enforce if they had unlimited power. Is there a summary of that?

It should probably say 2023 review instead of 2022 at the top of lesswrong.

I remember a Slate Star Codex post about a thought experiment that goes approximately like this:

• In the past, AI systems have taken over the universe and colonized it completely
• Those AI systems are in extremely strong multipolar competition with one another, and the competitive dynamics are incredibly complex
• In fact, those dynamics are so complex and inviolable that they constitute whole new physical laws
• So in fact we are just living "on" those competitive AI systems as a substrate, similar to how ecosystems have competing and cooperating cells as a substrate
• This might've already happened multiple times

Does anyone know which post I'm remembering? I've tried googling but Google is not very helpful.

Hello there. This seems to be a quirky corner of the internet that I should've discovered and started using years ago. Looking forward to reading these productive conversations! I am particularly interested in information, computation, complex system and intelligence.

@Ruby [LW · GW] @Raemon [LW · GW] @RobertM [LW · GW] I've had a post waiting to be approved for almost two weeks now (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gSfPk8ZPoHe2PJADv/can-quantised-autoencoders-find-and-interpret-circuits-in, username: charlieoneill). Is this normal? Cheers!

Hello! I'm building a tool with a one of a kind UI for LessWrong kind of deep, rational discussions. I've always loved how writing forces a deeper clarity of thinking and focuses on getting to the right answer. The tool is called CQ2. 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, but both of them have a UI crafted for deep discussions. It's open source as well.

I simulated some LessWrong discussions there – they turned out to be more organised and easy to follow. 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 hyper-focus on one thing at a time and avoid losing context.

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 think my comment might come off as an ad, but I (and CQ2) strongly share LessWrong's "improving our reasoning and decision-making" core belief.

I found LessWrong a few months back. It's a wonderful platform and I particularly love the clean design.

@Habryka [LW · GW] @Raemon [LW · GW] I'm experiencing weird rendering behavior on Firefox on Android. Before voting, comments are sometimes rendered incorrectly in a way that gets fixed after I vote on them.

Is this a known issue?

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-03-02T23:50:04.865Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have not seen this! Could you post a screenshot?

Replies from: alex-rozenshteyn

↑ comment by rpglover64 (alex-rozenshteyn) · 2024-03-03T16:32:15.136Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

before: 

after: 

Here the difference seems only to be spacing, but I've also seen bulleted lists appear. I think but I can't recall for sure that I've seen something similar happen to top-level posts.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2024-03-04T02:22:11.279Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you! I will have someone look into this early next week, and hopefully fix it.

Hello, my name is Peter and recently I read Basics of Rationalist Discourse and iteratively checked/updated the current post based on the points stated in those basics:

I (possibly falsely) feel that moral (i.e. "what should be") theories should be reducible because I see the analogy with the demand of "what is" theories to be reducible due to Occam's razor. I admit that my feeling might be false (and I know analogy might not be a sufficient reason), and I am ready to admit that it is. However, despite reading the whole Mere Goodness from RAZ I cannot remember any reasons (maybe they are there, and I don't blame the author (EY), if not), but many interesting statements (e.g. about becoming the pleasure brain center itself). And I remember there was such a long dialog there that might have explained this to me but I didn't comprehend its bottom line.
 

This post is not intended to have any conclusion more general than about my state of mind, and if there is such an impact, I don't mean it.

Hello! First of many comments as I dive into the AI Alignment & Safety area to start contributing.  

Very new to this forum and AI in general, about to start my AI Safety & Alignment course to get familiar. Many posts in this forum feel advanced to me but I guess that is the beginning.