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This book chapter and this paper, maybe?
Thanks for writing this post, I really liked it!
Due to the high upvotes, I figure it has a decent chance to feature in the LW Review for 2024, so I figured I'd make some typo & edit suggestions. Feel free to ignore.
An approach that may not be well received in all social circles, but probably in those closer to lesswrong, is -> An approach that may not be well received in all social circles, but probably is well received in those closer to LessWrong, is [I feel like an "is" is missing in the middle, but this edit makes the sentence a bit awkward due to the "lesswrong, is" follow-up]
in exchange for the utility you get out of it yourself -> in exchange for the utility you yourself get out of smoking
The idea is that when when people make some decision -> The idea is that when
whenpeople make some decisioninstead of deciding for the other option. -> instead of deciding on the other option.
even though that would not be expected thing to do. -> even though that would not be the expected thing to do.
opt-in style questions -> opt-in-style questions
Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and make any such should-claims. -> Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and not meant to make any such should-claims.
So these songs have now all gotten at least 1k views within 9 days. That seems like a great performance, right? I wonder where all the traffic came from. Besides this LW post, presumably the recent ACX link also helped a ton. But I do also wonder which fraction of the traffic came organically via the Youtube algorithm itself.
No, those are clickbait. 4 is straightforwardly misleading with the meaning of the word "hunt". 2 and 3 grab attention via big dollar numbers without explaining any context. And 1 and 5 are clickbait but wouldn't be if an arbitrary viewer could at any time actually do the things described in the titles, rather than these videos being about some competition that's already happened.
Whereas a title saying "Click on this blog post to win $1000" wouldn't be clickbait if anyone could click on the blog post and immediately receive $1000. It would become clickbait if it was e.g. a limited-time offer and expired, but would not be clickbait if the title was changed at that point.
Have you or anyone else on the LW team written anywhere about the effects of your new rate-limiting infrastructure, which was IIRC implemented last year? E.g. have some metrics improved which you care about?
I don't really agree with this definition of clickbait. A title that merely accurately communicates what the post is about, is usually a boring one and thus communicates that the post is boring and not worth reading. Also see my comment here. Excerpt:
Similarly, a bunch of things have to line up for an article to go viral: someone has to click on your content (A), then like it (B), and then finally follow a call to action like sharing it or donating (C). From this perspective, it's important to put a significant fraction of one's efforts on quality (B) into efforts on presentation / clickability (A).
(Side note: If this sounds like advocacy for clickbait, I think it isn't. The de facto problem with a clickbaity title like "9 Easy Tips to Win At Life" is not the title per se, but that the corresponding content never delivers.)
Maybe the takeaway is that it's hard to build support behind the prevention of risks that 1. are technical/abstract and 2. fall on the private sector and not individuals 3. have a heavy right tail. Given these challenges, organizations that find prevention inconvenient often succeed in lobbying themselves out of costly legislation.
Which is also something of a problem for popularising AI alignment. Some aspects of AI (in particular AI art) do have their detractors already, but that won't necessarily result in policy that helps vs. x-risk.
Did you see the checkbox "Only show authors confirmed attending"? I didn't understand the color coding without that, but found it very clear once I checked the box.
FYI, a few of the tracks' file names include branding (to an audio trimmer website), which might not be desirable.
That sounds pretty close to what I read the subtext of the original post to be.
Addendum: Also, some browser tabs in desktop Firefox begin autoplaying (even though they'd been previously set to paused) after I wake my Windows 11 PC from sleep.
If you do get around to implementing such toggles / HTML <details> elements in the WYSIWYG editor, I recommend checking out how Notion implements their toggles, and especially their toggle headings.
Feedback on the playlists widget: Clicking the trash can icon empties the playlist, but the playlist is restored on reloading the browser window. So one can't permanently empty the playlist.
... which is helpful insofar as there also doesn't seem to be a way to repopulate the playlist otherwise. I thought the "Listen Now" button on the frontpage would do the latter, but it only starts playback of the playlist, but doesn't repopulate it if it's been erased.
Bug reports for both desktop Firefox and desktop MS Edge: See this screenshot.
1) Probably the top-left corner should not read "Playlists / 15" but rather something else, e.g. the current song position (e.g. 4 / 15).
2) React votes (like the heart vote) are rendered in front of the playlist widget, while the rest of the post and the comments is rendered behind it.
Bug report for desktop Firefox, both when logged in and in a private browser tab: When the playlist is on some paused song (e.g. Road to Wisdom) and I refresh this browser window via F5, then the playlist briefly and temporarily jumps to the unpaused Litany of Gendlin, until the page fully loads again and the playlist widget is reloaded, at which point we're at the paused Road of Wisdom again. This bug does not occur in MS Edge.
Have you considered putting these on Youtube, just to see what happens?
Can you share some about how you created these? E.g. are the song lyrics also done by a LLM? And what specific tools did you use? E.g. is the process easy enough to turn arbitrary LW posts into songs?
Offtopic question: When did LW introduce Notion-style toggles (the ones used to hide the song lyrics), and how can I use them myself? I didn't find the answer in lesswrong.com/editor.
The song playlist is not in the same order as the list of songs in this post. Is there a canonical order?
For Christian Rudder, maybe you can contact Penguin Random House, his publisher for the book "Dataclysm"? Either to ask for his contact data, or to directly forward your conference invitation.
For the benefit of others, what's the application deadline?
without talking about the serious risks [...] even amounts that you wouldn't think would be that bad e.g. ~ 45 minutes a day.
Well, what are the stats here? How frequent are such negative outcomes, and how frequent would they have to be to be (not) worth mentioning? E.g. at >1 in 100 this might warrant an automatic disclaimer, whereas at <1 in 100k, it would hardly be worth mentioning, right?
Also, which fraction of meditators does that for 45 minutes per day? For people who "meditate daily" or who "have a meditation hobby", I would be astonished if the fraction were >5%. Or is the idea that there are severe risks even for doing something like that for just a week?
Maybe OP's idea is that people say that Internet access is a really valuable thing they're very thankful for yadda yadda, but they don't actually treat it that way, and so the low status of a service like this is right where it should be.
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.
I'd already clicked on most of the articles, so I also didn't realize that some cells were marked as unread, but I agree that titles with the unread background are comparatively easier to read. And the readability on all titles benefited from the stronger shadows you've implemented. Overall my impression is that those stronger shadows make the page slightly less pretty but a lot more readable.
TopWrong, PeakWrong, MountWrong, ...
Thanks for making this :).
Feedback on aesthetics and UX:
- Art and layout are pretty!
- I find the white text on colored backgrounds hard to read. In particular, some cells have white backgrounds and a white font which only offers contrast via a thin shadow outline. Also, the font color stays constant, but the backgrounds don't, which makes for a somewhat jarring experience of reading text in adjacent cells.
- When I move my cursor from hovering one cell to another, the art instantly changes, in a way I find pretty disorienting.
- Overall, it feels like there's way more flickering on the page than on the rest of LW.
- The section headings (e.g. "Rationality", "Optimization") cannot be read from left to right, but require tilting one's head or something, which seems suboptimal.
- The "Show All" UX is confusing: first you hover a cell in e.g. "Rationality"; then a small plus sign appears in the bottom left, which is apparently clickable; and only then a "Show All" appears all the way in the bottom right. In particular, it's weird that the buttons are in different corners, rather than in the same corner.
Other feedback:
- Major kudos to the LW team for continuing to work on stuff like this <3.
- I'm not loving the name "LeastWrong".
- I agree with some of the other objections, e.g. how this sounds from outside the community.
- Also, while a title like "Best of LessWrong" would be more wordy and less funny, it seems clearer and easier to understand. E.g. I could link someone to "Best of LessWrong" and the name would be self-explanatory, whereas linking to "LeastWrong" is more of an insider. And it's not like this community suffers from an insufficient supply of jargon.
- Also, does "LeastWrong" even capture the spirit of the yearly LW Reviews? Truth and accuracy are important considerations, to be sure, but we as a community don't actually have the manpower to 100% vet the reviewed posts. Furthermore, tons of other things are also considered during the review vote: like "this post was important to me", "I referenced this post a lot", "this post (or author) makes LW better (or worse)", etc. Not to mention that there's guidance by the LW team for what an upvote/downvote is supposed to mean, and this meaning has changed over time! E.g. IIRC at some point we were asked to consider whether a post contributed to intellectual progress or some such. It seems to me like "LeastWrong" doesn't properly capture all that, and rather makes it sound like we as a community have decided that these are the most accurate posts on LW.
I know what you mean, and it used to absolutely be an issue in our group, especially with games like Eldritch Horror or Pandemic Legacy, i.e. multi-hour games where you have full information about everything every player is doing. That said, an obvious design which circumvents this problem is co-op games where every player has some private information: then other players can't play for you and vice versa.
Incidentally, all the non-team co-op games I suggested above have this design.
Just One is a co-op party game where the active player must guess a word and each other player independently provides a word hint. Then the hint givers compare hints and eliminate all hints that were given multiple times (hence the title, "Just One").
Resulting game flow: If everyone tries to give an "obvious" hint (e.g. giving the hint "metal" for the word "steel"), then multiple people will likely give the same hint, and as such this hint will be unavailable to the active player. Whereas if nobody gives obvious hints, there's a higher chance that there are no duplicate hints to eliminate, so the active player can work with a lot of hints but might get misled by all hints being non-obvious. This makes it an interesting challenge for what kinds of hints to give and how to interpret the hints one receives.
Meanwhile Letter Jam is a bit like Hanabi: Every player has one letter card facing away from themselves, so everyone but themselves knows what it is. The goal is for everyone to guess their 4-7 letter cards in as few rounds as possible. Every round one player (chosen by the group) gives a word hint to the other players based on the letters they see.
E.g. suppose there are four players. Then I would see the letter cards of the three other players, plus 1-2 letters visible to everyone, plus finally a joker which can substitute for any one letter. And suppose I see the player letters P L A, and an open letter T. Then I could make the word hint PLANT (by using the joker for the N). This hint is given silently by placing numbered poker chips next to the letters I want to use, e.g. the 1-chip in front of the player with the letter P. Here's how these hints look like to the other players: player 1 sees ?LA*T, player 2 P?A*T, player 3 PL?*T. Based on such hints, players try to narrow down what their own letter is.
The hint I gave involved the joker and thus doesn't provide much info on the hidden letters, whereas one great hint can directly help multiple players guess their current letter and proceed to the next one. But even if one player is much better at giving hints, they still rely on others to also provide hints, since you cannot identify your own letters when you give a hint. And even if you could give 5 perfect hints and would then need 5 perfect hints yourself, that's still much less efficient (i.e. it requires more rounds) than if each player can contribute a perfect hint.
When I play an N-player game I want everyone to both:
- Try to win
- Win about 1/N of the time
This may be besides the point of your post, but: you can do even better than that, and without a need for handicapping, by playing co-op board games instead. Versus-style board games are just one type of game, and while you can modify their rules to come closer to equality of outcomes, that seems like a rather convoluted way of getting there. Like, in this situation, why play a zero-sum game when you could play a positive-sum game instead?[1]
Or if entirely co-op games don't seem appealing, another option along this axis is to play team-based games; then you can balance team strengths by which and how many people you assign to each team.
Some co-op board game recommendations suitable even for groups of widely disparate skill levels: Letter Jam, Just One.
A co-op game for groups that want a challenge: Hanabi.
Some team-based board game recommendations: Codenames, Decrypto. I wrote about these two games here.
- ^
Speaking from my own experience, when I grew up I only knew versus board games, stuff like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. But once I discovered co-op board games, I eventually realized that I had a lot more fun playing those with my siblings.
Off-topic tip: in addition to normal posts, LW also has a "Question" type of post which offers better UX for question-style posts like this one.
I basically can't read stuff without noticing typos and grammar issues, so I make a ton of typo and edit suggestions. For some authors and works (currently the web serial Super Supportive in particular), a significant fraction of my suggestions consists of using more hyphens.
I liked this explainer. Thanks for writing it! More generally, I appreciate efforts to explain novel stuff in simple terms.
Feedback: I wanted to adjust my LW Review votes on the final day (I had only distributed ~300-ish points so far), but the review is considered over at Jan 31st 15:21 CET (= 6:21 am PST), even though the review page said the review would last until Jan 31st. Is that intentional?
In any case, I've gotten frequently confused with these deadlines, so I request that they be posted incl. timestamps and timezones from now on.
Check out the Fun Theory sequence, if you haven't already.
Thanks for doing this event every year!
Since I didn't see it mentioned in the post, I'll reiterate my concern that if AI stuff is not considered separately from non-AI stuff, then votes on AI stuff might swamp everything else:
For clarity, are the review & post results going to be separated into AI and non-AI stuff again, like they IIRC were in some previous year?
...
Overall my attitude is like, if the top 7 posts are all AI posts, that's not because they're necessarily better than the best non-AI posts, but rather because AI has been The Topic since 2022, plus the readership has dramatically shifted towards AI content. At which point we might as well declare LW to be a full-time AI site and consider all the rest to be mere hobbyist content =(. Such a ranking outcome would disincentivize authors from writing about the latter. Better to split the ranking into two top-25s or something.
Also, if the rankings are not split up, then if one only visits LW for AI or non-AI content, that gives an annoying strategic incentive to review-downvote all the other content. That doesn't occur if the rankings are separate.
To elaborate on that last point: Due to how quadratic voting works, if you want to maximize the effect of your votes on the relative rankings of a lot of posts (rather than for a few posts in particular), then the optimal voting pattern is to upvote all posts of the category you like +1, and downvote all posts of the disliked category by -1. (Net effect: a delta of +2 vote review karma on 250 posts of one's choosing.) Two natural candidates for this are AI vs. non-AI stuff. But if these categories are ranked separately, then the incentive for strategic voting disappears.
And besides the strategic voting stuff, another issue is that much of the AI stuff is very technical, so I often feel like I can't make an informed vote one way or another.
I completed the survey.
we carve up the results in different ways for different purposes.
I meant for stuff like prizes etc.
Overall my attitude is like, if the top 7 posts are all AI posts, that's not because they're necessarily better than the best non-AI posts, but rather because AI has been The Topic since 2022, plus the readership has dramatically shifted towards AI content. At which point we might as well declare LW to be a full-time AI site and consider all the rest to be mere hobbyist content =(. Such a ranking outcome would disincentivize authors from writing about the latter. Better to split the ranking into two top-25s or something.
Also, if the rankings are not split up, then if one only visits LW for AI or non-AI content, that gives an annoying strategic incentive to review-downvote all the other content. That doesn't occur if the rankings are separate.
Last year we awarded prizes for good reviews. This year we will also award prizes! We're aiming for something similar to last year's, though we haven't yet worked out the details (size, scope, etc).
What are you looking for in reviews? What makes for good ones?
For clarity, are the review & post results going to be separated into AI and non-AI stuff again, like they IIRC were in some previous year? I'd like to review some non-AI posts, but wouldn't bother doing so if all the top spots are going to be won by AI posts by default.
What is up with the voting patterns on this post?_? My comment sits at 0 karma (3 votes) and -17 agreement karma (5 votes), and yet no-one bothered to reply or react to any part of it?
Your conclusion doesn't follow. A community is fully in its rights to use social pressure to discourage things it disagrees with (like libel suits), and others are fully in their rights to do those discouraged things anyway if they're willing to bear the social costs.
Cults also famously use all kinds of pressure tactics to prevent members from seeking out the law. This is bad. We should not be like this.
This is fallacious reasoning. It equivocates social discouragement with the far more extreme pressure tactics of cults. It also equivocates "discouraging libel suits" with "prevent from seeking out the law". And it implies that only cults do this kind of discouragement.
Separately, comparing Habryka to a cult-leader is a remarkable and remarkably unfounded non-sequitur.
And well, you're a very high prestige person.
I stumbled over this part. What makes someone high prestige? Their total LW karma? To me that doesn't really make sense as a proxy for prestige.
Self-reviews and postmortems are great! Even a caricature of a self-review provides valuable information: "Look at my great/terrible take from last year. I've changed my mind about nothing/everything since." And of course the actual self-reviews are much more useful than that.
Hi there, lsusr!
I read the post & comment which you linked, and indeed felt that the critical comment was too combative. (As a counterexample, I like this criticism of EY for how civil it is.) That being said, I think I understand the sentiment behind its tone: the commenter saw your post make a bunch of strong claims, felt that these claims were wrong and/or insufficiently supported by sources, and wrote the critical comment in a moment of annoyance.
To give a concrete example, "We do not censor other people more conventional-minded than ourselves." is an interesting but highly controversial claim. Both because hardly anything in the world has a 100% correlation, and because it leads to unintuitive logical implications like "two people cannot simultaneously want to censor one another".
Anyway, given that the post began with a controversial claim, I expected the rest of the post to support this initial claim with lots of sources and arguments. Instead, you took the claim further and built on it. That's a valid way to write, but it puts the essay in an awkward spot with readers that disagree with the initial claim. For this reason, I'm also a bit confused about the purpose of the essay: was it meant to be a libertarian manifesto, or an attempt to convince readers, or what? EDIT: Also, the majority of LW readers are not libertarians. What reaction did you expect to receive from them?
If I were to make a suggestion, the essay might have worked better if it had been a dialogue between a pro-liberty and a pro-censorship character. Why? Firstly, if readers feel like an argument is insufficiently supported, they can criticize or yell at the character, rather than at you. And secondly, such a dialogue would've required making a stronger case in favor of censorship, and it would've given the censorship character the opportunity to push back against claims by the liberty character. This would've forestalled having readers make similar counterarguments. (Also see Scott's Nonfiction Writing Advice, section "Anticipate and defuse counterarguments".)
Typo: plagerism -> plagiarism (4x, incl. in the title)
Remember to link to this feedback on Intercom, to increase the chance that the LW team sees it.
I've only skimmed the post, but I've strong-upvoted it for the civil tone. Some EY-critical posts here are written in such an inflammatory manner that they put me off reading them, and even make me suspicious of the epistemics that produced this criticism. In contrast, I really appreciate the ability to write about strong factual disagreements without devolving into name-calling.
I’d claim that according to that metric, which is of course a very different metric than the pleasure of the people presently on the platform, the websites you list all did very well.
You'd have to provide some compelling argument that the website redesigns actually do better at this, though.
Here are two counter-arguments:
- The Schelling Fence argument: the current app had a good reason for looking like it looked, and it was battle-tested. The new design has no such advantage.
- Maybe you know your redesign will piss off your current user base, but you care more about acquiring new users. Still, this is not cost-free. For example, this reliably results in terrible review scores on app stores. And on reddit, some pissed-off reddit users used bots to delete all their old comments, which made the entire website worse for all users old and new alike.
Finally, let's take one example of a recent redesign which looks vaguely prettier at a glance, but where the functionality is just straight-up worse: Fitbit's recent app redesign (example post) made information much harder to see and interpret, and that in an app designed for health & exercise tracking.