I wrote this because I am increasingly noticing that the rules for "which worlds to keep in mind/optimize" are often quite different from "which worlds my spreadsheets say are the most likely worlds". And that this is in conflict with my heuristics which would've said "optimize the world-models in your head for being the most accurate ones – the ones that will give you the most accurate answers to most questions" rather than something like "optimize the world-models in your head for being the most useful ones".

(Though the true answer is some more complicated function combining both practical utility and map-territory correspondence.)

I'm not sure I understand what's confusing about this.

I will note that what is confusing to one person need not be confusing to another person. In my experience it is a common state of affairs for one person in a conversation to be confused and the other not (whether it be because the latter person is pre-confused, post-confused, or simply because their path to understanding a phenomena didn't pass through the state of their interlocutor).

It seems probable to me that I have found this subject more confusing than have others.

Update from chatting with him: he said he was a just freelancer doing a year exclusively with NYT, and he wasn’t in a position to write on behalf of the NYT on the issue (e.g. around their deanonymization policies). This wasn’t satisfying to me, and so I will keep to being off-the-record.

I occasionally get texts from journalists asking to interview me about things around the aspiring rationalist scene. A few notes on my thinking and protocols for this:

• I generally think it is pro-social to share information with serious journalists on topics of clear public interest.
• By-default I speak with them only if their work seems relatively high-integrity. I like journalists whose writing is (a) factually accurate, (b) boring, and (c) do not feel to me to have an undercurrent of hatred for their subjects.
• By default I speak with them off-the-record, and then offer to send them write-ups of the things I said that they want to quote. This has gone quite well. I've felt comfortable speaking in my usual fashion without worrying about nailing each and every phrasing. Then I ask what they're interested in quoting, and I send them (typically a 1-2 page) google doc on those topics (largely re-stating what I already said to them, and making some improvements / additions). Then they tell me which quotes they want to use (typically cutting many sentences or paragraphs half-way). Then I make one or two slight edits and give them explicit permission to quote. I think this has gone quite well and they've felt my quotes were substantive and improvements.
• For the New York Times, I am currently trying out the policy of "I am happy to chat off-the-record. I will also offer quotes by my usual protocol, but I will only give them conditional on you including a mention that I disapprove of the NYT's de-anonymization policies (which I bring up due to your reckless and negligent behavior that upturned the life of a beloved member of my community)." I am about to try this for the first time, and I expect they will thus not want to use my quotes, and that's fine by me.

Oops! Then we have taken that feature down for a bit until further testing is done (and the devs have had a little more sleep).

While we always strive to deliver the premium unfinished experience you expect from EA, it seems this bug slipped past our extensive testing. We apologize; a day-one patch is already in development.

(I expect you will see your picoLightcones in the next 30-60 mins.)

Edit: And you should have now gotten them, and any future purchases should go through ~immediately.

[Comment moved here for visibility by the community.]

An idea I've been thinking about for LessOnline this year, is a blogging awards ceremony. The idea being that there's a voting procedure on the blogposts of the year, in a bunch of different categories, a shortlist is made and winners are awarded a prize. 

I like opportunities for celebrating things in the online, written, truth-seeking ecosystem. I'm interested in reacts on whether people would be pro something like this happening, and comments on suggestions for how to do it well. (Epistemic status: tentatively excited about this idea.)

Here's my first idea for what the categories would be this year.

1. Blog of the year
2. Best original contribution (e.g. novel discovery, did some science, etc)
3. Best explanation of a complex idea
4. Biggest mistake admitted (H/T @ymekshout for suggesting this one)
5. Best fiction
6. Best counter-argument
7. Best prediction
8. Most productive dialogue
9. Most beautiful non-fiction
10. Best new blog

As for structure, I'm not really sure. Here's my first idea.

• How to nominate? Anyone can nominate a blogpost for $10. Anyone with a LessOnline ticket gets a free nomination. Anything published in 2024 is eligible.
• How is it judged? For the first year I'd probably keep it small and simple, perhaps hand-selected ~10 judges and pay them a little to each read 5 nominations in 4 different categories and vote on those.

I've also not got a name in mind yet. It's not a generic "Blogging Awards", tons of blogposts would not naturally be included (e.g. food blogs, fashion blogs, travel blogs, etc). I think "Blogging-With-High-Epistemic-Aspirations Awards" is too long. "Rationalist Blogging Awards" is a reasonably narrow pointer but I don't want to risk intertwining too much with a narrow social group's identity when there's probably a good alternative name that also points toward the substance.

Suggestions and feedback appreciated!

Thanks!

Zvi's post is imported, so it's stored a little differently than normal posts. Here's two copies I made stored differently (1, 2), I'd appreciate you letting me know if either of these look correct on mobile.

(Currently it looks fine on my iPhone, are you on an Android?)

Same, here's a screenshot. Perhaps Molony is using a third-party web viewer?

Seeing this, I update toward a heuristic of "all polymarket variation within 4 percentage points are noise".