LESSWRONG
LW

Nominated Posts for the 2019 Review

Posts need at least 2 nominations to continue into the Review Phase.
Nominate posts that you have personally found useful and important.
Sort by: fewest nominations
95Naked mole-rats: A case study in biological weirdness
eukaryote
14
1 • 0
143Integrating disagreeing subagents
Kaj_Sotala
15
1 • 0
51AGI will drastically increase economies of scale
Ω
Wei Dai
Ω
25
1 • 0
73Moral Mazes and Short Termism
Zvi
21
1 • 0
61Book Review: Why Are The Prices So Damn High?
sarahconstantin
7
1 • 0
82Misconceptions about continuous takeoff
Ω
Matthew Barnett
Ω
38
1 • 0
91Reframing the evolutionary benefit of sex
paulfchristiano
21
1 • 0
86What I've Learned From My Parents' Arranged Marriage
squidious
16
1 • 0
533 Cultural Infrastructure Ideas from MAPLE
Unreal
15
1 • 0
42Self-consciousness wants to make everything about itself
jessicata
70
1 • 0
66Combat vs Nurture & Meta-Contrarianism
abramdemski
12
1 • 0
49How common is it for one entity to have a 3+ year technological lead on its nearest competitor?
QΩ
Daniel Kokotajlo
QΩ
20
1 • 0
151The Commitment Races problem
Ω
Daniel Kokotajlo
Ω
56
1 • 0
32Calibrating With Cards
[anonymous]
3
1 • 0
170Jeff Hawkins on neuromorphic AGI within 20 years
Steven Byrnes
24
1 • 0
64Imperfect Competition
Zvi
8
1 • 0
70Reneging prosocially by Duncan Sabien
philip_b
5
1 • 0
113CO2 Stripper Postmortem Thoughts
Diffractor
37
1 • 0
52Perfect Competition
Zvi
29
1 • 0
52"The Bitter Lesson", an article about compute vs human knowledge in AI
the gears to ascension
14
1 • 0
66Separation of Concerns
abramdemski
30
1 • 0
101The LessWrong 2018 Review
Raemon
91
1 • 0
121What Comes After Epistemic Spot Checks?
Elizabeth
9
1 • 0
112The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)
romeostevensit
139
2 • 3
104Gradient hacking
Ω
evhub
Ω
39
2 • 2
62[Part 2] Amplifying generalist research via forecasting – results from a preliminary exploration
jacobjacob, ozziegooen, Elizabeth, NunoSempere, bgold
10
2 • 1
144Mental Mountains
Scott Alexander
14
2 • 1
66In My Culture
[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien
59
2 • 2
174Evolution of Modularity
Ω
johnswentworth
Ω
12
2 • 1
158Make more land
jefftk
36
2 • 5
154Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality
habryka
66
2 • 1
108The AI Timelines Scam
jessicata
105
2 • 3
55Megaproject management
ryan_b
11
2 • 1
151The Costs of Reliability
sarahconstantin
13
2 • 2
89How do you assess the quality / reliability of a scientific study?
Q
Eli Tyre, waveman
Q
41
2 • 0
126Thoughts on Human Models
Ω
Ramana Kumar, Scott Garrabrant
Ω
32
2 • 1
86The strategy-stealing assumption
Ω
paulfchristiano
Ω
53
2 • 3
127Blackmail
Zvi
55
2 • 2
95What are the open problems in Human Rationality?
Q
Raemon, Wei Dai
Q
93
2 • 3
55Some Ways Coordination is Hard
Zvi
11
2 • 2
89The Power to Teach Concepts Better
Liron
22
2 • 1
124The Curse Of The Counterfactual
pjeby
34
2 • 1
209Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits
johnswentworth
24
2 • 1
151Forum participation as a research strategy
Wei Dai
45
2 • 1
174Why Subagents?
Ω
johnswentworth
Ω
48
2 • 1
107System 2 as working-memory augmented System 1 reasoning
Kaj_Sotala
23
2 • 0
126Everybody Knows
Zvi
21
2 • 1
115No nonsense version of the "racial algorithm bias"
Yuxi_Liu
20
2 • 0
96Reframing Impact
Ω
TurnTrout
Ω
15
2 • 1
1031960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled
Scott Alexander
15
2 • 1

2019 Review Discussion

You Get About Five Words
211
Raemon

Cross posted from the EA Forum.

Epistemic Status: all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced. Post errs on the side of simplistic poetry – take seriously but not literally.

If you want to coordinate with one person on a thing about something nuanced, you can spend as much time as you want talking to them – answering questions in realtime, addressing confusions as you notice them. You can trust them to go off and attempt complex tasks without as much oversight, and you can decide to change your collective plans quickly and nimbly.

You probably speak at around 100 words per minute. That's 6,000 words per hour. If you talk for 3 hours a day, every workday for a year, you can communicate 4.3 million words worth...

(See More – 246 more words)
1David James
Preface: I feel like I'm wearing the clown suit to a black tie event here. I'm new to LW and respect the high standards for discussion. So, I'll treat this an experiment. I'd rather be wrong, downvoted, and (hopefully) enlightened & persuaded than have this lingering suspicion that the emperor has no clothes. I should also say that I personally care a lot about the topic of communication and brevity, because I have a tendency to say too much at one time and/or use the wrong medium in doing so. If anyone needs to learn how to be brief, it is me, and I'll write a few hundred words if necessary to persuade you of it. Ok, that said, here are my top two concerns with the article: (1) This article strikes me as muddled and unclear. (i) I don't understand what "get" five words even means. (ii) I don't understand how coordination relates to the core claims or insight. My confusion leads to my second concern: (2) what can I take from this article? Let's start with the second part. Is the author saying if I'm a CEO of a company of thousands I only "get" five words? A quick aside: to me, "get" is an example of muddled language. What does the author mean w.r.t. (a) time period; (b) ... struggling for the right words here ... meaning? As to (a), do I "get" five words per message? Or five words some (unspecified) time frame? As to (b), is "get" a proxy for how many words the recipient/audience will read? But reading isn't enough for coordination, so I expect the author means something more. Does the author mean "read and understand" or "read and internalize" or "read and act on"? Anyhow, due to the paragraph above, I don't know how to convert "You only get five words" into a prediction. In this sense, to me, the claim it isn't even wrong, because I don't know how to put it into practice. Normally I would stop here, put the article aside, and move on. However, this article is featured here on LW and has many up-votes which suggests that others get a lot of value out of it. S
5Raemon
Thanks for the thoughts (no need to be nervous about arguing against a post – that's kinda the whole point of the site) For an example of what I mean, here's another post on a pretty similar subject, by someone with experience seeing how it played out at different large companies (Dan Luu) One motivating example at the time was seeing how the EA community organizers/leaders had lots of trouble communicating nuanced ideas. For example, "EA is talent constrained" was how a blogpost about "EA needs more extremely talented people in particular domains, more than it needs marginal money, right now". But people heard it as "EA needs people who are talented... I'm talented!" and then felt frustrated when they tried to apply for jobs, but, actually, what the post originally meant was specific talent gaps.
David James10

Thanks for your quick answer -- you answered before I was even done revising my question. :) I can personally relate to Dan Luu's examples. / This immediately makes me want to find potential solutions, but I won't jump to any right now. / For now, I'll just mention the ways in which Jacob Collier can explain music harmony at many levels.

Reply
Load More