Didn't like the post then, still don't like it in 2024. I think there are defensible points interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes. 

First: generalizes from personal experiences that are not universal. I think a lot of people don't have this or don't struggle with this or find it worth it, and the piece assumes everyone feels the way the author feels.  

Second: the thing it describes is a bias, and I don't think the essay realizes this.

Okay, part of the thing is that this doesn't make a case or acknowledge this romantic factor as being differe... (read more)

(Self-review.) I'm as proud of this post as I am disappointed that it was necessary. As I explained to my prereaders on 19 October 2023:

My intent is to raise the level of the discourse by presenting an engagement between the standard MIRI view and a view that's relatively optimistic about prosaic alignment. The bet is that my simulated dialogue (with me writing both parts) can do a better job than the arguments being had by separate people in the wild; I think Simplicia understands things that e.g. Matthew Barnett doesn't. (The karma system loved my dial

My wife completed two cycles of IVF this year, and we had the sequence data from the preimplantation genetic testing on the resulting embryos analyzed for polygenic factors by the unnamed startup mentioned in this post.

I can personally confirm that the practical advice in this post is generally excellent.

The basic IVF + testing process is pretty straightforward (if expensive), but navigating the medical bureaucracy can be a hassle once you want to do anything unusual (like using a non-default PGT provider), and many clinics aren't going to help you with an... (read more)

This post deserves to be remembered as a LessWrong classic. 

1. It directly tries to solve a difficult and important cluster of problems (whether it succeeds is yet to be seen).
2. It uses a new diagrammatic method of manipulating sets of independence relations.
3. It's a technical result! These feel like they're getting rarer on LessWrong and should be encouraged.

There are several problems that are fundamentally about attaching very different world models together and transferring information from one to the other. 

• Ontology identification involves taking a

I remain both skeptical some core claims in this post, and convinced of its importance. GeneSmith is one of few people with such a big-picture, fresh, wildly ambitious angle on beneficial biotechnology, and I'd love to see more of this genre.

One one hand on the object level, I basically don't buy the argument that in-vivo editing could lead to substantial cognitive enhancement in adults. Brain development is incredibly important for adult cognition, and in the maybe 1%--20% residual you're going well off-distribution for any predictors trained on unedite... (read more)

I wish this had been called "Duncan's Guidelines for Discourse" or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they're not consensus. And while I support Duncan's right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can't make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me. 

A concise and clear facilitation of a relatively unknown alignment strategy that relies on pursuing other relatively unknown alignment strategies.

If you've ever wondered how many promising alignment strategies never see the light of the day, AE Studio would be the place to ask this question.

Overall, I believe that this strategy will have a positive impact on "widening" the field of AI alignment, which will, in turn, improve our chances of avoiding catastrophic outcomes.

Retrospectives are great, but I'm very confused at the juxtaposition of the Lightcone Offices being maybe net-harmful in early 2023 and Lighthaven being a priority in early 2025. Isn't the latter basically just a higher-production-value version of the former? What changed? (Or after taking the needed "space to reconsider our relationship to this whole ecosystem", did you decide that the ecosystem is OK after all?)

I think it's good that this post was written, shared to LessWrong, and got a bunch of karma. And (though I haven't fully re-read it) it seems like the author was careful to distinguish observation from inference and to include details in defense of Ziz when relevant. I appreciate that.

I don't think it's a good fit for the 2023 review. Unless Ziz gets back in the news, there's not much reason for someone in 2025 or later to be reading this.

If I was going to recommend it, I think the reason would be some combination of

• This is a good example of investigative

I forgot about this one! It's so great! Yudkowsky is a truly excellent fiction writer. I found myself laughing multiple times reading this + some OpenAI capabilities researchers I know were too. And now rereading it... yep it stands the test of time.

I came back to this because I was thinking about how hopeless the situation w.r.t. AGI alignment seems and then a voice in my head said "it could be worse, remember the situation described in that short story?"

I'm voting against including this in the Review, at max level, because I think it too-often mischaracterizes the views of the people it quotes. And it seems real bad for a post that is mainly about describing other people's views and the drawing big conclusions from that data to inaccurately describe those views and then draw conclusions from inaccurate data.

I'd be interested in hearing about this from people who favor putting this post in the review. Did you check on the sources for some of Elizabeth's claims and think that she described them well? Did yo... (read more)

I still like this post overall, but various things have changed that interestingly affect the content of the post:

• We'd now be just starting the 3rd year of university in Buck's analogy. Does this seem right? I guess maybe. It feels a bit late to me. (Maybe I feel more like a 2nd year.)
• Redwood is doing less blue-sky research and is much more focused on how to make very straightforward strategies work well, particularly in the context of control. We're also spending more time thinking about exactly what will and should be implemented and what overall plan

What have you learned since then? Have you changed your mind or your ontology?

I've learned even more chemistry and biology, and I've changed my mind about lots of things, but not the points in this post. Those had solid foundations I understood well and redundant arguments, so the odds of that were low.

What would you change about the post? (Consider actually changing it.)

The post seems OK. I could have handled replies to comments better. For example, the top comment was by Thomas Kwa, and I replied to part of it as follows:

Regarding 5, my underst

I think this post is very good (note: I am the author).

Nietzsche is brought up often in different contexts related to ethics, politics, and the best way to live. This post is the best summary on the Internet of his substantive moral theory, as opposed to vague gesturing based on selected quotes. So it's useful for people who

• are interested in what Nietzsche's arguments, as a result of their secondhand impressions
• have specific questions like "Why does Nietzsche think that the best people are more important"
• want to know whether something can be well-described

This is excellent. Before reading this post in 2023, I had the confusion described. Roughly, that Aumann agreement is rationally correct, but this mostly doesn't happen, showing that mostly people aren't rational. After reading this post, I understood that Aumann agreement is extremely common, and the exceptions where it doesn't work are best understood as exceptions. Coming back to read it in 2024, it seems obvious. This is a symptom of the post doing its job in 2023.

This is part of a general pattern. When I think that human behavior is irrational, I know... (read more)

Going through the post, I figured I would backtest the mentioned strategies seeing how well they performed. 

Starting with NoahK's suggested big stock tickers: "TSM, MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, ASML, NVDA"

If you naively bought these stocks weighted by market cap, you would have made a 60% annual return:

You would have also very strongly outperformed the S&P 500. That is quite good. 

Let's look at one of the proposed AI index funds that was mentioned: 

iShares has one under ticket IRBO. Let's see what it holds... Looks like very low concentration (all

I plugged the stocks mentioned in here into Double's backtesting tool. I couldn't get 6 of the stocks (Samsung, one of the solar ones, 4 other random ones). At least in 2024 the companies listed weighted by market cap produced a return of about 36%, being roughly on par with the S&P 500 (which clearly had an amazing year): 

I think this, or something like this, should be in a place of prominence on LessWrong. The Best Of collection might not be the place, but it's the place I can vote on, so I'd like to vote for it here.

I used "or something like this" above intentionally. The format of this post — an introduction of why these guidelines exist, short one or two sentence explanations of the guideline, and then expanded explanations with "ways you might feel when you're about to break the X Guideline" — is excellent. It turns each guideline into a mini-lesson, which can be broke... (read more)

I quite liked this post, and strong upvoted it at the time. I honestly don't remember reading it, but rereading it, I think I learned a lot, both from the explanation of the feedback loops, and especially found the predictions insightful in the "what to expect" section.

Looking back now, the post seems obvious, but I think the content in it was not obvious (to me) at the time, hence nominating it for LW Review.

The post studies handicapped chess as a domain to study how player capability and starting position affect win probabilities. From the conclusion:

In the view of Miles and others, the initially gargantuan resource imbalance between the AI and humanity doesn’t matter, because the AGI is so super-duper smart, it will be able to come up with the “perfect” plan to overcome any resource imbalance, like a GM playing against a little kid that doesn't understand the rules very well. 

The problem with this argument is that you can use the exact same reason

This post was fun to read, important, and reasonably timeless (I've found myself going back to it and linking to it several times). (Why is it important? Because it was a particularly vivid example of a major corporation deploying an AI that was blatantly, aggressively misaligned, despite presumably making at least some attempt to align it.)

+9. Fatebook has been a game changer for me, in terms of how practical it is to weave predictions into my decisionmaking. I donated $1000 to Sage to support it.

It's not listed here, but one of the most crucial things is the Fatebook Chrome Extension, which makes it possible to frictionless integrate it into my normal orienting process (which I do in google docs. You can also do it in the web version of Roam).

I've started work on "Enriched Fatebook" poweruser view that shows your calibration at a more granular level. I have several ideas for how to build ad... (read more)

I like the emphasis in this post on the role of patterns in the world in shaping behaviour, the fact that some of those patterns incentivise misaligned behaviour such as deception, and further that our best efforts at alignment and control are themselves patterns that could have this effect. I also like the idea that our control systems (even if obscured from the agent) can present as "errors" with respect to which the agent is therefore motivated to learn to "error correct".

This post and the sharp left turn are among the most important high-level takes on... (read more)

By all means, strategically violate social customs. But if you irritate people by doing it, you may be advancing your own epistemics by making them talk to you, but you're actually hurting their epistemics by making them irritated with whatever belief you're trying to pitch. Lack of social grace is very much not an epistemic virtue.

This post captures a fairly common belief in the rationalist community. It's important to understand why it's wrong.

Emotions play a strong role in human reasoning. I finally wrote up at least a little sketch of why that happens.... (read more)

I kinda like this post, and I think it's pointing at something worth keeping in mind. But I don't think the thesis is very clear or very well argued, and I currently have it at -1 in the 2023 review.

Some concrete things.

• There are lots of forms of social grace, and it's not clear which ones are included. Surely "getting on the train without waiting for others to disembark first" isn't an epistemic virtue. I'd normally think of "distinguishing between map and territory" as an epistemic virtue but not particularly a social grace, but the last two paragraphs m

This article provides object-level arguments for thinking that deceptive alignment is very unlikely.

Recently, some organizations (Redwood Research, Anthropic) have been focusing on AI control in general and avoiding deceptive alignment in particular. I would like to see future works from these organizations explaining why deceptive alignment is likely enough to spend considerable resources on it.

Overall, while I don't agree that deceptive alignment is <1% likely, this article made me update towards deceptive alignment being somewhat less likely.

I've been notified that this post was nominated as a finalist for the Less Wrong 2023 Review! This is fantastic news, and I'm deeply honored! As part of the notification I was encouraged to write a self-review, with some example prompts like "Do you still endorse this?" and "What further work do you think should be done exploring the ideas here?”

Fiction is pretty Out Of Distribution for Less Wrong posts. I almost didn’t post it, because what is the point? I mean that literally... what IS the point of fiction on Less Wrong? Most often it’s to help demonstra... (read more)

As a rough heuristic: "Everything is fuzzy; every bell curve has tails that matter."

It's important to be precise, and it's important to be nuanced, and it's important to keep the other elements in view even though the universe is overwhelmingly made of just hydrogen and helium.

But sometimes, it's also important to simply point straight at the true thing.  "Men are larger than women" is a true thing, even though many, many individual women are larger than many, many individual men, and even though the categories "men" and "women" and "larger" are thems... (read more)

I think that someone reading this would be challenged to figure out for themselves what assumptions they think are justified in good discourse, and would fix some possible bad advice they took from reading Sabien's post. I give this a +4.

(Below is a not especially focused discussion of some points raised; perhaps after I've done more reviews I can come back and tighten this up.)

Sabien's Fifth guideline is "Aim for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth."

My guess is that the idea that motivates Sab... (read more)

I still agree with a lot of that post and am still essentially operating on it. 

I also think that it's interesting to read the comments because at the time the promise of those who thought my post was wrong was that Anthropic's RSP would get better and that this was only the beginning. With RSP V2 being worse and less specific than RSP V1, it's clear that this was overoptimistic. 

Now, risk management in AI has also gone a lot more mainstream than it was a year ago, in large parts thanks to the UK AISI who started operating on it. People have also... (read more)

This was a hasty and not exactly beautifully-written post. It didn't get much traction here on LW, but it had more engagement on its EA Forum crosspost (some interesting debate in the comments).

I still endorse the key messages, which are:

• don't rule out international and inter-bloc cooperation!
  • it's realistic and possible, though it hangs in the balance
  • it might be our only hope
• lazy generalisations have power
  • us-vs-them rhetoric is self-reinforcing

Not content with upbraiding CAIS, I also went after Scott Alexander later in the month for similar l... (read more)

I find myself linking back to this often. I don't still fully endorse quite everything here, but the core messages still seem true even with things seeming further along.

I do think it should likely get updated soon for 2025.

(Self review) Does this essay belong in the Best Of collection? That's a good question. Do people go back and read all the Best Of posts? Do they read the Best Of posts from previous years? Speaking as the person who wrote this, if there was a collection of posts everyone on LessWrong read when they joined, I might not need this essay included in that collection because the essay would have already succeeded. I'd want basically any other essay that taught an object-level thing.

Then again, this essay is a useful pointer to why a group might repeat informati... (read more)

Most LessWrong readers do not attend meetups, and this is basically useless to them. Some readers do attend meetups, which Ziz will not attend because the organizers are aware of this and are will keep Ziz out. Some organizers aren't aware, and this is a useful thing to be able to point to in that case, though since this was written describing a developing situation it would be kind of nice to have a conclusion or update somewhere near the top.

Overall, I wouldn't want this in the Best Of collection, but I do expect to link people to it in the future.

Tentative +9, I aim to read/re-read the whole sequence before the final vote and write a more thorough review.

My current quickly written sense of the sequence is that it is a high-effort, thoughtfully written attempt to help people with something like 'generating the true hypotheses' rather than 'evaluating the hypotheses that I already have'. Or 'how to do ontological updates well and on-purpose'.

Skimming the first few posts, there's an art here that I don't see other people talking about unprompted very much (as a general thing one can do well, of course... (read more)

Perhaps the largest, most detailed piece of AI risk skepticism of 2023. It engages directly with one of the leading figures on the "high p(doom)" side of the debate.

The article generated a lot of discussion. As of January 4, 2025, it had 230 comments.

Overall, this article updated me towards strongly lowering my p(doom). It is thorough, it is clearly written and it proposes object-level solutions to problems raised by Yudkowski.

The thing I want most from LessWrong and the Rationality Community writ large is the martial art of rationality. That was the Sequences post that hooked me, that is the thing I personally want to find if it exists. Therefore, posts that are actually trying to build a real art of rationality (or warn of failed approaches) are the kind of thing I'm going to pay attention to, and if they look like they actually might work I'm going to strongly vote for including them in the Best Of LessWrong collection.

Feedbackloop-first Rationality sure looks like an actual ... (read more)

The TLDR has multiple conclusions but this is my winner:

My conclusion -- springing to a great degree from how painful seeking clear predictions in 700 pages of words has been -- is that if anyone says "I have a great track record" without pointing to specific predictions that they made, you should probably ignore them, or maybe point out their lack of epistemic virtue if you have the energy to spare for doing that kind of criticism productively.

There is a skill in writing things that, when read later, are likely to be interpreted as correct predictions... (read more)

This was just a really good post. It starts off imaginative and on something I'd never really thought about - hey, spring shoes are a great idea, or at least the dream of them is. It looks at different ways this has sort have been implemented, checks assumptions, and goes down to the basic physics of it, and then explores some related ideas. I like someone who's just interested in a very specific thing exploring the idea critically from different angles and from the underlying principles. I want to read more posts like this. I also, now, want shoes with springs on them. 

The original post, the actual bet, and the short scuffle in the comments is exactly the kind of epistemic virtue, basic respect, and straight-talking object-level discussion that I like about LessWrong. 

I'm surprised and saddened that there aren't more posts like this one around (prediction markets are one thing; loud, public bets on carefully written LW posts are another).

Having something like this occur every ~month seems important from the standpoint of keeping the garden on its toes and remind everyone that beliefs must pay rent, possibly in the form of PayPal cash transfers. 

I think I roughly stand behind my perspective in this dialogue. I feel somewhat more cynical than I did at the time I did this dialogue, perhaps partially due to actual updates from the world and partially because I was trying to argue for the optimistic case here which put me in a somewhat different frame.

Here are some ways my perspective differs now:

• I wish I said something like: "AI companies probably won't actually pause unilaterally, so the hope for voluntary RSPs has to be building consensus or helping to motivate developing countermeasures". I don'

I love Fatebook as a user, and also this feels like an odd fit for the Best Of LessWrong collection.

I usually think of the Best Of LessWrong collection as being the best posts from a given year. The collection used to be physical books, printed on paper, which I could physically hand to someone. By that standard, this isn't very good. What exactly would someone do with this post if they read it in a book? It's kind of just a (well written) advertisement. The magic happens if they go to the website.

But man, the last few years have been a giant leap forward ... (read more)

I think Elizabeth is correct here, and also that vegan advocates would be considerably more effective with higher epistemic standards:

I think veganism comes with trade-offs, health is one of the axes, and that the health issues are often but not always solvable. This is orthogonal to the moral issue of animal suffering. If I’m right, animal EAs need to change their messaging around vegan diets, and start self-policing misinformation. If I’m wrong, I need to write some retractions and/or shut the hell up.

The post unfortunately suffers for its length, de... (read more)

My views remain similar to when I wrote this post, and the state of nearcasted interventions still looks reasonably similar to me. I have some slightly different thoughts on how we should relate to interventions around communication, but relatively prioritizing communication still seems reasonable to me.

One change in my perspective is that I'm now somewhat less excited about allocating larger fractions of resources toward specifically AI welfare. (I now think 0.2% seems better than 1%.) I've updated toward thinking safety concerns will get a smaller fracti... (read more)

Possibly one of the most impactful AI control papers of 2023. It went far beyond LessWrong, making into a separate 30-minute video dedicated to (positively) reviewing the proposed solution.

The paper also enjoyed some academic success. As of January 3, 2025, it not only has 23 citations on LessWrong, but also 24 citations on Google Scholar.

This paper strongly updated me towards thinking that AI control is possible, feasible and should be actively implemented to prevent catastrophic outcomes.

I'm pleased with this dialogue and glad I did it. Outreach to policymakers is an important & complicated topic. No single post will be able to explain all the nuances, but I think this post explains a lot, and I still think it's a useful resource for people interested in engaging with policymakers.

A lot has changed since this dialogue, and I've also learned a lot since then. Here are a few examples:

• I think it's no longer as useful to emphasize "AI is a big deal for national/global security." This is now pretty well-established.
  • Instead, I would encourag

Does this look like a motte-and-bailey to you?

1. Bailey: GPTs are Predictors, not Imitators (nor Simulators).
2. Motte: The training task for GPTs is a prediction task.

The title and the concluding sentence both plainly advocate for (1), but it's not really touched by the overall post, and I think it's up for debate (related: reward is not the optimization target). Instead there is an argument for (2). Perhaps the intention of the final sentence was to oppose Simulators? If that's the case, cite it, be explicit. This could be a really easy thing for an editor... (read more)

I read this post in full back in February. It's very comprehensive. Thanks again to Zvi for compiling all of these. 

To this day, it's infuriating that we don't have any explanation whatsoever from Microsoft/OpenAI on what went wrong with Bing Chat. Bing clearly did a bunch of actions its creators did not want. Why? Bing Chat would be a great model organism of misalignment. I'd be especially eager to run interpretability experiments on it. 

The whole Bing chat fiasco is also gave me the impetus to look deeper into AI safety (although I think absent Bing, I would've came around to it eventually).

Sometimes when I re-read Yudkowsky's older writings I am still comfortable with the model and conclusion, but the evidence seems less solid than on first reading. In this post, Matthew Barnett poses problems for the evidence from Japan in Yudkowsky's Inadequacy and Modesty. Broadly he claims that Haruhiko Kuroda's policy was not as starkly beneficial as Yudkowsky claims, although he doesn't claim the policy was a mistake.

LessWrong doesn't have a great system for handling (alleged) flaws in older posts. Higher rated posts have become more visible with the "... (read more)

(I only discovered this post in 2024, so I'm less sure it will stand the test of time for me)

This post is up there with The God of Humanity, and the God of the Robot Utilitarians as the posts that contributed the most to making me confront the conflict between wanting to live a good life and wanting to make the future go well.

I read this post while struggling half burnt out on a policy job, having lost touch with the fire that drove me to AI safety in the first place, and this imaginary dialogue brought back this fire I had initially found while reading HP... (read more)

This post skillfully addressed IMO the most urgent issue in alignment:; bridging the gap between doomers and optimists.

If half of alignment thinkers think alignment is very difficult, while half think it's pretty achievable, decision-makers will be prone to just choose whichever expert opinion supports what they want to do anyway.

This and its following acts are the best work I know of in refining the key cruxes. And they do so in a compact, readable, and even fun form.

I think this isn't the sort of post that ages well or poorly, because it isn't topical, but I think this post turned out pretty well. It gradually builds from preliminaries that most readers have probably seen before, into some pretty counterintuitive facts that aren't widely appreciated.

At the end of the post, I listed three questions and wrote that I hope to write about some of them soon. I never did, so I figured I'd use this review to briefly give my takes.

1. This comment from Fabien Roger tests some of my modeling choices for robustness, and finds that t

Tsvi has many underrated posts. This one was rated correctly.

I didn't previously have a crisp conceptual handle for the category that Tsvi calls Playful Thinking. Initially it seemed a slightly unnatural category. Now it's such a natural category that perhaps it should be called "Thinking", and other kinds should be the ones with a modifier (e.g. maybe Directed Thinking?).

 Tsvi gives many theoretical justifications for engaging in Playful Thinking. I want to talk about one because it was only briefly mentioned in the post: 

Your sense of fun decor

This post and its precusor from 2018 present a strong and well-written argument for the centrality of mathematical theory to AI alignment. I think the learning-theoretic agenda, as well as Hutter's work on ASI safety in the setting of AIXI, currently seems underrated and will rise in status. It is fashionable to talk about automating AI alignment research, but who is thinking hard about what those armies of researchers are supposed to do? Conceivably one of the main things they should do is solve the problems that Vanessa has articulated here. 
 

T... (read more)

It's great to have a LessWrong post that states the relationship between expected quality and a noisy measurement of quality:

$$E\left[\text{Quality}\right]=0.5\cdot \text{Performance}$$

(Why 0.5? Remember that performance is a sum of two random variables with standard deviation 1: the quality of the intervention and the noise of the trial. So when you see a performance number like 4, in expectation the quality of the intervention is 2 and the contribution from the noise of the trial (i.e. how lucky you got in the RCT) is also 2.)

We previously had a popular post on this topic, the tai... (read more)

My ultimate goal with this post was to use vegan advocacy as an especially legible example of a deepseated problem in effective altruism, which we could use to understand and eventually remove the problem at the root. As far as I know, the only person who has tried to use it as an example is me, and that work didn't have much visible effect either. I haven't seen anyone else reference this post while discussing a different problem. It's possible this happens out of sight (Lincoln Quirk implies this here), but if I'd achieved my goal it would be clearly visible. 

This essay is an example of the ancient LessWrong genre, "dumb mistakes your brain might be making which feel obvious once someone points them out." I love this genre, and think You Don't Get To Have Cool Flaws should be included in the Best Of LessWrong posts.

It's so easy to make this mistake! In fiction, complex and beloved characters have flaws. Fiction can set examples we try to live up to. Flaws are easier to emulate than virtues. I can't train as hard as Batman, and I can't be as wealthy as Batman, but I can brood! Brooding is easy! But the flaw isn'... (read more)

This post raises a large number of engineering challenges. Some of those engineering challenges rely on other assumptions being made. For example, the use of energy carrying molecules rather than electricity or mechanical power which can cross vacuum boundaries easily. Overall a lot of "If we solve X via method Y (which is the only way to do it) problem Z occurs" without considering making several changes at once that synergistically avoid multiple problems.

"Too much energy" means too much to be competitive with normal biological processes.

That goalpos... (read more)

This is a very nice meta-level discussion of why consciousness discourse gets so bad, and I do genuinely appreciate trying to get cruxes and draw out the generators of a disagreement, which is useful in difficult situations.

One factor that is not really discussed, but amplifies the problem of discourse around consciousness is that people use the word consciousness to denote a scientific and a moral thing, and people often want to know the answer to whether something is conscious because they want to use it to determine whether uploading is good, or whether... (read more)

I think this post is really helpful and has clarified my thinking about the different levels of AI alignment difficulty. It seems like a unique post with no historical equivalent, making it a major contribution to the AI alignment literature.

As you point out in the introduction, many LessWrong posts provide detailed accounts of specific AI risk threat models or worldviews. However, since each post typically explores only one perspective, readers must piece together insights from different posts to understand the full spectrum of views.

The new alignment dif... (read more)

Was a widely impactful piece of work, beyond the bounds of the less wrong community

(Self-review.) I claim that this post is significant for articulating a solution to the mystery of disagreement (why people seem to believe different things, in flagrant violation of Aumann's agreement theorem): much of the mystery dissolves if a lot of apparent "disagreements" are actually disguised conflicts. The basic idea isn't particularly original, but I'm proud of the synthesis and writeup. Arguing that the distinction between deception and bias is less decision-relevant than commonly believed seems like an improvement over hang-wringing over where the boundary is.

This series explains why we like some things and not others, including ideas. It's cutting edge psychological theory.

The truth should be rewarded. Even if it's obvious. Everyday this post is more blatantly correct.

This post makes an easy to digest and compelling case for getting serious about giving up flaws. Many people build their identity around various flaws, and having a post that crisply makes the case that doing so is net bad is helpful to be able to point people at when you see them suffering in this way.

I think this post is quite important because it is about Skin in the Game. Normally we love it, but here is the doubly-interesting case of wanting to reduce the financial version in order to allow the space for better thinking.

The content of the question is good by itself as a moment in time of thinking about the problem. The answers to the question are good both for what they contain, and also for what they do not contain, by which I mean what we want to see come up in questions of this kind to answer them better.

As a follow-up, I would like to see a more... (read more)

(Self review) I stand by this post, I think it's an important idea, I think not enough people are using this technique, and this adds nothing but a different way of writing something that was already in the rationalist canon.

If you do not sometimes stop, start a timer, think for five minutes, come to a conclusion and then move on, I believe you are missing an important mental skill and you should fix that. This skill helps me. I have observed some of the most effective people I know personally use this skill. You should at least try it.

You know what follow... (read more)