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Comment by DominikPeters on Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky · 2023-03-30T20:55:42.488Z · LW · GW

Time appears to have commissioned a graphic for the article (the animated gif with red background and yellow circuits forming a mushroom cloud, captioned "Illustration for TIME by Lon Tweeten", with nothing suggesting it to be a stock photo), so there appears to be some level of editorial spotlighting. The article currently also appears on time.com in a section titled "Editor's picks" in a list of 4 articles, where the other 3 are not "Ideas" articles.

Comment by DominikPeters on GPT can write Quines now (GPT-4) · 2023-03-15T11:10:13.653Z · LW · GW

Github code searches for "python quine" and "python quine format" also don't throw up things I'd call similar.

Comment by DominikPeters on Failing to fix a dangerous intersection · 2022-07-01T22:57:40.631Z · LW · GW

Agree in general. For this particular case, there don't appear to be any signs. https://goo.gl/maps/BZifQWTNCg3gdTaV7

Comment by DominikPeters on It’s Probably Not Lithium · 2022-06-29T23:03:05.246Z · LW · GW

Restaurants in Germany don't tend to offer free tap water, so you need to buy bottled water. I think that Germans just like the taste of sparkling mineral water, hence why they drink it so much.

Comment by DominikPeters on Omicron Post #9 · 2021-12-23T23:44:46.078Z · LW · GW

Commenters from the United Kingdom and especially London report dramatic changes in behavior. London is reported to be a ghost town ahead of Christmas

To judge local covid behavior, I sometimes look at YouTube videos of walks around various cities, which is a somewhat weird genre but informative. At least in very central London, it looked quite busy yesterday: 

Comment by DominikPeters on [$10k bounty] Read and compile Robin Hanson’s best posts · 2021-10-21T15:53:47.677Z · LW · GW

The first author archives page that throws a 404 is https://www.overcomingbias.com/author/robin-hanson/page/332, but https://www.overcomingbias.com/author/robin-hanson/page/331 exists. Each page contains 10 posts, except the last one (page 331) which contains two posts. So there are 3302 posts by Hanson.

Comment by DominikPeters on Problems with using approval voting to elect to a multi-individual body? · 2021-10-13T14:15:37.312Z · LW · GW

There is quite a lot of active research in computer science about this topic. Here is a recent survey: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01795 

PAV has already been mentioned, and is a very good rule if you want to ensure proportional representation. Its sequential version is not known to guarantee any representation properties, though in practice it might do well. There are some other good rules around, including Phragmén's rule, which unlike SeqPAV provably satisfies representation guarantees. Like SeqPAV, it produces outcomes that can easily be explained.

Regarding your question (2), the proportional rules I mentioned may in the worst case return a committee whose utility (i.e. utilitarian social welfare) is a 1/sqrt(k) fraction of the highest possible utility, where k is the size of the committee. See Section 5.5.2 of the survey I linked.

Comment by DominikPeters on 100 Tips for a Better Life · 2020-12-24T03:52:50.143Z · LW · GW

The advice is meant in the context of police investigating a crime. Because police can be very convincing that it will be okay to answer a few innocent questions, it seems useful to have this advice drilled into one's mind. By the way, the author of the linked lecture now recommends asking for a lawyer instead of directly invoking the right to stay silent, after some recent SCOTUS rulings.

Comment by DominikPeters on Offloading Executive Functioning to Morality · 2017-10-16T01:39:03.176Z · LW · GW

For keeping my place clean and presentable, I find it helpful to invite people over to socialise at mine (rather than a pub or restaurant).

Comment by DominikPeters on Offloading Executive Functioning to Morality · 2017-10-16T01:36:24.640Z · LW · GW

I'm a grad student in CS theory, so it is not really expected of me to go to the office everyday, no-one checks (can check?) that I have done any work this week, and people don't really expect that deadlines (for things like peer reviews) are kept, because everyone is used to academics missing deadlines. I often envy people in customer service jobs, where not much motivation / will power seems to be needed to keep going (because the customer is going to be annoyed if not). I wonder whether there is any way to salvage such theory research jobs along the lines suggested in the post; would be super-useful to me and presumably others.

Comment by DominikPeters on Oxford Prioritisation Project Review · 2017-10-14T12:09:45.167Z · LW · GW

I was a team member of OxPrio. To answer your question, we granted the money to 80,000 hours. I personally agree with your reasoning that the grant amount was too small compared to the effort put in; 800 person-hours is an underestimate (only counting the work of the two most-committed team members), and counterfactually the time could have been spent more productively than working minimum-wage. However, I don't follow why giving the money to "basically anywhere" would have been good enough, since "remotely effective charities" plausibly still vary significantly in cost-effectiveness: for our OxPrio shortlist, we saw two orders of magnitude difference in our model's cost-effectiveness estimates among the 4 options.