Dagon

I'm not a professional philosopher. I've done a lot of reading and thinking about decision theory, economic preferences and behaviors, etc. I think I've absorbed most of LW from the beginning. We often have posts exploring morality, and I find the premise that it's anything but a social consensus of...

Ok, nobody is actually a strict, or even particularly careful bayesean reasoner. Still, what probability do you reserve to "my model doesn't apply, everything I know is wrong"? If you SEE a coin flip come up heads (and examine the coin and perform whatever tests you like), what's your posterior...

Based on low-quality articles that seem to be coming up with more regularity, and as mentioned in a few recent posts, AI-generated posts are likely to be a permanent feature of LW (and most online forums, I expect). I wonder if we should focus on harm reduction (or actual value...

Most (all?) of the decision theory discussion I've seen has been about prediction or contradiction of choice, mostly about how to model the fact that decisions have causes, and those causes could be legible to other agents, or correlated with future experiences in ways that affect the choice under question....

I guarantee someone's thinking about this, but I haven't seen the scammers selling it yet, so I don't know how transparent or discoverable the scraping/input methods are for LLM source data. Is there any indication that websites or publishers are modifying their pages/data in ways that give themselves more weight...

Raemon's recent post reminded me that I'm unsure how best to think about bureaucracies and apparent organizational friction, and that I keep meaning to explore why something about my intuition rebels against the "Maze" framing. I've read a bit of economic and public choice theory, and worked in for-profit organizations...

There's a lot of discussion and research into AI alignment, almost always about variants of how to define/create a utility function (or meta-function, if it changes over time) that is actually aligned with ... something. That something is at least humanity's survival, but often something like flourishing or other semi-abstract...