I knew about melatonin and red/blue light from reading people in this community. I also had a vague understanding that circadian rhythms controlled falling asleep and were based on light, but I don't think I'd seen things spelled out as clearly as they are here. Thank you for putting this together and I do look forward to the rest of your series.

Didn't see the original, but it looks good now.

(The line spacing got all wacko, sorry about that)

That prompted me to look up how to make line breaks in Markdown syntax, which I'd been wondering about myself for a while.

Try typing two or more spaces and then hitting enter
whenever you want a new line.

Thanks for responding. Unfortunately I think that guide only works for comments? Or at least, it only works for Markdown syntax. Do you know of any way to put Markdown syntax in a Main or Discussion post?

Sorry for the late reply, and thanks for the offer! Unfortunately I wasn't actually talking about doing it myself, just putting it out there as an idea. Good luck though; it sounds like a valuable thing for the rationality community to have.

Improbable idea for surviving heat death: computers made from time crystals. (h/t Nostalgebraist and Scott)

Keep the same upvote/downvote system for individual comments and posts, but don't keep a total karma score for each user on their user page. Alternatively, keep a total karma score, but don't keep a total percent-positive score. (I believe the EA forum uses the former system, and Reddit the latter, but please correct me if I'm wrong about this.) [pollid:1006]

True, but that's only from a very limited number of sources (~4?); it doesn't include the dozens of smaller blogs. It's also a straight feed--no filtering out of housekeeping, meta posts, etc.--and it only shows 5 links which are quickly pushed aside by newer ones, while a section for links would keep all of them accessible and searchable.

Ideas from recent discussion regarding changes to the Promotion system:

[in progress]

Have Promotion be based on some kind of popular vote (not necessarily karma) or some other kind of community decision, instead of an Editor's decision. [pollid:1004]

Allow posts from Discussion to be Promoted without having to first be moved to Main.

This is already possible by logging into the Username account and sending a message or reply from there, but we could do something to make it more convenient. Thanks for the idea.

ETA: One possible issue with this I see is that the anonymity might encourage people to be meaner than they would be when posting/messaging under their main account, but perhaps there are ways around this?

[pollid:1000]

Ideas from recent discussion regarding changes to the karma system and/or addition of new sections:

[in progress]

Make downvotes cost some of the downvoter's karma. (h/t RichardKennaway and Houshalter) [pollid:997]

Only allow users with a certain amount of karma to downvote. (The actual amount can be worked out later.) (h/t ete and Houshalter) [pollid:998]

Create a new and separate from Main and Discussion section with either no karma, like the SSC discussions, or only upvotes, like Tumblr, Facebook and other social media services used by rationalists. [pollid:999]

Create a new section for links to interesting posts on external rationalist blogs. (h/t Houshalter) [I apologize for the overlap with the previous poll; I found this idea only after I'd made it.] [pollid:1001]

On second thought, I'll risk it. (I might post a comment to it with a compilation of my ideas and my favorites of others' ideas, but it might take me a while.)

Good point, thanks. I was already not a fan of the way the polls made the post look, so I went ahead and took them down. I could replace them with something better, but I think this thread has already gotten most of the attention it's going to get, so I might as well just leave the post as it is.

Would you be willing to run a survey on Discussion also about Main being based on upvotes instead of a mix of self-selection and moderation? As well as all ideas that seem interesting to you that people suggest here?

I'd rather not expose myself to the potential downvotes of a full Discussion post, and I also don't know how to put polls in full posts, only in comments. Nonetheless I am pretty pro-poll in general and I'll try to include more of them with my ideas.

Perhaps official downvote policies messaged to a user the first time they pass that would help too.

Anything with messages could be implemented by a bot account, right? That could be made without having to change the Less Wrong code itself.

Maybe we could send a message to users with guidelines on downvoting every time they downvote something? This would gently discourage heavy and/or poorly reasoned downvoting, likely without doing too much damage to the kind of downvoting we want. One issue with this is it would likely be very difficult or practically impossible for a bot account to know when someone downvotes something without changing the LW code. (Though it probably wouldn't require a very big change, and things could be limited to just the bot account(s).)

[pollid:989]

I do not have the time to engage in the social interactions required to even be aware of where all this posting elsewhere is going on, but I want to read it.

There's a Masterlist for rational Tumblr, but I'm not aware of a complete list of all rationalist blogs across platforms.

Perhaps the Less Wrong community might find it useful to start one? If it were hosted here on LW, it might also reinforce LW's position as a central hub of the rationality community, which is relevant to the OP.

It doesn't help that even the most offhand posting is generally treated as if it was an academic paper and reviewed skewered accordingly :-p.

I agree. There are definitely times for unfiltered criticism, but most people require a feeling of security to be their most creative.

Is anyone in favor of creating a new upvote-only section of LW?

[pollid:988]

A few tangential ideas off the top of my head:

If the moderation and self selection of Main was changed into something that attracts those who have been on LW for a long time, and discussion was changed to something like Newcomers discussion, LW could go back to being the main space, with a two tier system (maybe one modulated by karma as well).

1. People have been proposing for a while that we create a third section of LW for open threads and similar content.

2. We could have a section without any karma scores for posts/upvote only, though we could still keep the same system for comments.

3. We could allow Discussion posts to be Promoted while still using the Discussion karma system.

4. We could have Promotion somehow be based on popular vote (not necessarily karma), instead of a moderator's judgement.

I don't think this is how it works with people. Especially ones with full 'net access.

You're right; that was poorly phrased. I meant that they would have a lot less tying them down to the mainstream, like heavy schoolwork, expectations to get a good job, etc. Speaking from my own experience, not having those makes a huge difference in what ideas you're able to take seriously.

The Internet exposes one to many ideas, but 99% of them are nonsense, and smart people with the freedom to think about the things they want to think about eventually become pretty good at seeing that (again speaking from personal experience), so I think Internet access helps rather than hurts this "blank slate"-ness.

If we have 200-300 years before well proved catastrophe, this technic may work.

If you're talking about significant population changes in IQ, then I agree, it would take a while to make that happen with only reproduction incentives. However, I was thinking more along the lines of just having a few thousands or tens of thousands of >145 IQ people more than we would otherwise, and that could be achieved in as little as one or two generations (< 50 years) if the program were successful enough.

Now for a slightly crazier idea. (Again, I'm just thinking out loud.) You take the children and send them to be unschooled by middle-class foster families, both to save money, and to make sure they are not getting the intellectual stimulation they need from their environment alone, which they might if you sent them to upper-class private schools, for example. But, you make sure they have Internet access, and you gradually introduce them to appropriately challenging MOOCs on math and philosophy specially made for them, designed to teach them a) the ethics of why they should want to save the world (think some of Nate's posts) and b) the skills they would need to do it (e.g., they should be up to speed on what MIRI recommends for aspiring AI researchers before they graduate high school).

The point of separating them from other smart people is that smart people tend to be mostly interested in money, power, status, etc., and that could spread to them if they are immersed in it. If their focus growing up is simply to find intellectual stimulation, then they would be essentially blank slates and when they're introduced to problems that are very challenging and stimulating, have other smart people working on them, and are really, really* important, they might be more likely to take them seriously.

*Please see my clarification below.

Do martial arts training until you get the falling more or less right. While this might be helpful against muggers the main benefit is the reduced probability of injury in various unfortunate situation.

As someone with ~3 years of aikido experience, I second this.

What's the easiest way to put a poll in a top-level article?

Thanks for taking the time to put all that together! I'll keep it in mind.

In the interest of helping to bridge the inferential distance of others reading this, here's a link to the wiki page for Oracle AI.

Thanks; I've put a library request in for it, though it'll probably be a few months until I get it.

What Is Mathematics? was the only one I was able to find from a local library. I've put a request in for it and I should be getting it soon. Thanks for the recommendation; if it helps me to not hate math then I might be able to do something actually useful for existential risk reduction.

(I know there are almost certainly problems with what I'm about to suggest, but I just thought I'd put it out there. I welcome corrections and constructive criticisms.)

You mention gene therapy to produce high-IQ people, but if that turns out not to be practical, or if we want to get started before we have the technology, couldn't we achieve the same through reproduction incentives? For example, paying and encouraging male geniuses to donate lots of sperm, and paying and encouraging lots of gifted-level or higher women to donate eggs (men can donate sperm more frequently than women can donate eggs, so the higher levels of women would not be enough to match the higher levels of men, and you'd have to bring in the next-highest level), and then just having the children of the two groups be born from surrogates, whose IQ AFAIK should not have any effect on the child's, and can therefore be selected based on how cheaply they can be hired?

I shouldn't have phrased that so confidently; I was essentially just thinking out loud. Would anyone who knows more about decision theory mind explaining where I went wrong?

Deterrent effects would fall under "things present and to come".

Fair enough, but there's also a sense in which deterrence is acausal. In order to make a truly credible threat of retaliation for defection, you have to be completely willing to follow through with the retaliation if they defect, even if, after the defection, following through does not seem to have any future benefits.

I have found that when you are like 16, you often want everything to be super logical and everything that is not feels stupid. And growing up largely means accepting "common sense", which at the end of the day means relying more on pattern recognition.

For a counterexample, I am 16 and almost all my decisions/perceptions are based on implicit pattern recognition more than explicit reasoning.

ETA: I think I missed your point.

That may be the case now, but a part of my brain is certain that in the past downvotes did have a significant effect on ordering. Like, if a 10-point comment got one downvote, it would fall below a 6-point comment without any downvotes. Feelings of certainty are of course very unreliable, but I don't see any obvious reasons why this one is wrong.

Is it just me/my browser, or has something changed in the Less Wrong code regarding the "Best" comment ordering? For example, it seemed like before if there were a bunch of 0% positive comments and a 50% positive comment, then the latter would almost always be at the bottom, but now I'm seeing them and even negative karma posts above or between neutral or positive karma posts. Has anyone else noticed this?

Good luck and I wish you the best! You're one of the people I most aspire to be like.

You don't have to be angry (and it is probably better if you aren't), but deterrents are still a thing.

I wonder if a movie with an AI box-based story would have any potential? Perhaps something treated as more of a psychological horror/thriller than as a guns-and-explosions action movie might help to distance people's intuitions from "AI is 'The Terminator', right?"

It appears that MetaMed has gone out of business. Wikipedia uses the past tense "was" in their page for MetaMed, and provides this as a source for it.

Key quote from the article:

Tallinn learned the importance of feedback loops himself the hard way, after seeing the demise of one of his startups, medical consulting firm Metamed.

Oh wow, I tried logging in to it and the reply buttons on existing comments weren't even there. Thanks for providing the account and pointing this out.

Two hypotheses come to mind, firstly, as estimator said, perhaps you missed something about the email confirmation when you set up the account, (same for Halfwitz), and secondly, maybe it's an IP address thing intended to discourage throwaway accounts?

I'm not sure I accept your premises? I could certainly be wrong, but I have not gotten the impression that comments can be prevented by low karma, only posts to Discussion or Main. (And I recall the minimum as 20, not 2.*) The most obvious way to get the karma needed to post is by commenting on existing posts (including open threads and welcome threads), and new users with zero initial karma regularly do this without any apparent difficulty, so unless I'm missing something, I don't think it's a problem?

*ETA: It seems that 2 is the minimum for Discussion, while 20 is the minimum for Main.

Links for posterity:

Existential Risks and Extreme Opportunities | Stuart Armstrong | TEDxAthens

Why aim for the stars when the galaxies are just as easy? | Stuart Armstrong | TEDxVienna

Well, for a start there's the Rationalist Masterlist currently hosted by Yxoque (MathiasZaman here on LW). You could announce your presence there and ask to be added to the list, or just lurk around some of the blogs for a while and send anonymous asks to people to get a feel for the community before you set up an account.

If he could establish such a reputation as a consultant for commercial organizations, I imagine he could make quite a lot of money to do EA with.

When I try to convince people like Scott that they're actually very good at math, they often say "No, you don't understand, I'm really bad at math, you're overestimating my mathematical ability because of my writing ability." To which my response is "I know you think that, I've seen many people in your rough direction who think that they're really bad at math, and say that I don't understand how bad they are, and they're almost always wrong: they almost never know that what they were having trouble with wasn't representative of math."

I do currently think I'm really bad at math, which may very well be true, but I do also find it very plausible that I've so far only been exposed to unsatisfactory math curricula/teachers, and then had a sort of vicious-cycle of reinforcement, where I would get insecure about my weakness in "math" (especially relative weakness), and learn to hate the "math" and feel helpless about learning it, which in turn would make it harder to learn and increase my relative weakness.

Still, I might not be too far gone. Can you recommend anything I could try that you consider more representative of math?

Thanks!

There is a not necessarily large, but definitely significant chance that developing machine intelligence compatible with human values may very well be the single most important thing that humans have or will ever do, and it seems very likely that economic forces will make strong machine intelligence happen soon, even if we're not ready for it.

So I have two questions about this: firstly, and this is probably my youthful inexperience talking (a big part of why I'm posting this here), but I see so many rationalists do so much awesome work on things like social justice, social work, medicine, and all kinds of poverty-focused effective altruism, but how can it be that the ultimate fate of humanity to either thrive beyond imagination or perish utterly may rest on our actions in this century, and yet people who recognize this possibility don't do everything they can to make it go the way we need it to? This sort of segues in to my second question, which is what is the most any person, more specifically, I can do for FAI? I'm still in high school, so there really isn't that much keeping me from devoting my life to helping the cause of making sure AI is friendly. What would that look like? I'm a village idiot by LW standards, and especially bad at math, so I don't think I'd be very useful on the "front lines" so to speak, but perhaps I could try to make a lot of money and do FAI-focused EA? I might be more socially oriented/socially capable than many here, perhaps I could try to raise awareness or lobby for legislation?

Relevant: The Third Alternative

[META]

MrMind, I'm just letting you know that I'd be happy to take over posting the majority of OTs in case you ever want a break. To be honest, I'm interested in the karma, but I can get karma elsewhere, and I definitely don't want to feel like I'm taking yours. (Also, it was rude of me before to post OTs without checking with you.) If you think our preferences are approximately equal, perhaps we could try posting on alternate weeks or something like that?

I know a lot of you probably aren't all that interested in mainstream television, but I've noticed something in the 8th series of Doctor Who which might be somewhat relevant here. It seems the new Twelfth Doctor has a sort of Shut Up and Multiply utilitarian attitude. There have been several instances in the 8th series where he is faced with something like the fat man variation of the trolley problem and actually pushes the metaphorical fat man, even in situations that are less clear cut than the original problem. This might represent a step in the right direction for mainstream cultural acceptance of, or at least just exposure to quantitative moral reasoning instead of emotional. (Granted, the Doctor is far from a rational protagonist in many ways, but still, every little bit helps.)

When reading this chapter I couldn't help but think of another parallel in that Hermione is going to be the one-person special ops division of a world-saving conspiracy.

Well, hopefully this conspiracy will be a lot more effective and ethical.

I hope the Epilogue will feature Hermione in action. It sounds like she'll be perfect as a light side Dragon (TV Tropes) for Harry, as well as simply awesome in her own right.

I'm struck with Dumbledore's ruthlessness.

Pretend to kill someone to keep your enemies in line, but really just stash them away to be used as a trump card again later, whether as a hostage or a way to reconcile with your enemy. That's good.

I'm not sure I'd call Dumbledore "ruthless" just for this. While there might very well have been pragmatic benefits to hiding Narcissa instead of actually killing her that Dumbledore took into account, that's not at all incompatible with a simple desire to not cause an unnecessary death.