The page http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/new/ returns error for me for 12 hours, but other pages are fine. Is it only my glitch?

error text: "You have encountered an error in the code that runs Less Wrong. The site maintainers have been informed and will get to it is as soon as they can. In the unlikely event that you've bumped into this error before and think that no-one is paying attention, please report the error and how to reproduce it on http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/list'

If the error is localised you might still find awesome Less Wrong content in the Main article area or in the Discussion area.

I do not argue that my idea is sane; however I think your critique doesn't do it justice. So let me briefly point out that:

measuring probabilities of world destruction is very hard; being able to measure them at the 1e-12 level seems very, very hard

It's enough to use upper bounds. If we have e.g. an additional module to check our AI source code for errors, and such a module decreases probability of one of the bits being flipped, we can use our risk budget to calculate how many modules at minimum we need. Etc.

How should it decide what budget level to give itself?

It doesn't. You don't build any intelligent system without a risk budget. Initial budgets are distributed to humans, e.g. 10^-15 to each human alive in 2016.

looks like simple utility maximization (go to the movie if the benefits outweigh the costs) gives the right answer

If utility is dominated by survival of humanity, then simple utility maximization is exactly the same as reducing total "existential risk emissions" in the sense I want to use them above.

Whether or not your utility is dominated by survival of humanity is an individual question.

the budget replenishes

Not at all. A risk budget is decreased by your best estimate of your total risk "emission", which is what fraction of the future multiverse (weighted by probability) you spoiled.

So I think budgets are the wrong way to think about this--they rely too heavily on subjective perceptions of risk, they encourage being too cautious (or too risky) instead of seeing tail risks as linear in probability, and they don't update on survival when they should.

Quite likely they are - but probably not for these reasons.

CO2 emissions have the virtues that they are both easy to measure and their effects are roughly linear.* I don't see a similar thing being true for perceived risk, and I think conserved budgets are probably worse than overall preferences.

First: measuring probabilities of world destruction is very hard; being able to measure them at the 1e-12 level seems very, very hard, especially if most probabilities of world destruction are based around conflict. ("Will threatening my opponent here increase or decrease the probably of the world ending?")

Second: suppose we grant that the system has the ability to measure the probability of the world being destroyed, to arbitrary precision. How should it decide what budget level to give itself? (Suppose it's the original agent, instead of one handed a budget by its creator.)

To make it easier to think about, you can reformulate the question in terms of your own life. You can take actions that increase the chance that you die sooner rather than later, and gain some benefit from doing so. (Perhaps you decide to drive to a movie theater to see a new movie instead of something on Netflix.)

But now a few interesting things pop up. One, it looks like simple utility maximization (go to the movie if the benefits outweigh the costs) gives the right answer, and being more or less cautious than that suggests is a mistake (at least, of how the utility is measured).

Two, the budget replenishes. If I go to the theater on Friday and come back unharmed, then from the perspective of Thursday!me I took on some risk, but from the perspective of Saturday!me that risk turned out to not cost anything. That is, Thursday!me thinks I'm picking up 1e-7 in additional risk but Saturday!me knows that I survived, and still has '100%' of risk to allocate anew.

So I think budgets are the wrong way to think about this--they rely too heavily on subjective perceptions of risk, they encourage being too cautious (or too risky) instead of seeing tail risks as linear in probability, and they don't update on survival when they should.

*I don't mean that the overall effect of CO2 emissions are linear, which seems false, but instead that participants are small enough relative to overall CO2 production that they don't expect their choices to affect the overall CO2 price, and thus the price is linear for them individually.

I am worried that this change may reduce self-posts even further. After all, they will now have to compete with a host of other low effort links. I think that there should be separate sections for links and self-posts.

I'm unable to edit past posts of mine; it seems that this broke very recently and I'm wondering if it's related to the changes you made.

Specifically, when I click the Submit or the "Save and Continue" buttons after making an edit, it goes to lesswrong.com/submit with a blank screen. When I look at the HTTP error code it says it's a 404.

I also checked the post after that to see if the edit still went through, and it didn't. In other words, my edit did not get saved.

Do you know what's going on? There were a few corrections/expansions on past posts that I need to push live soon.

In feedly, I need to click once to get to the post and a second time to get to the link. Can you include a link within the body of the RSS so I can click to it directly?

This is really awesome and could change the fate of lesswrong. I really think this will bring people back (at least more than any other easy to implement change.) I personally expect to spend more time here now, at least.

One thing to take note of is that lesswrong, by default, sorts by /new. As the volume of posts increases, it may be necessary to change the default sort to /hot or /top/?t=week. Especially if you want it to be presentable to newcomers or even old timers coming back to the site, you want them to see the best links first.

Awesome! This strikes me as a very good thing, especially with your suggested social norms. I have 3 additional suggestions, though:

1. Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff. The title of the link serves much the same purpose, and gives readers enough info to decide whether or not to click through. This is standard practice on the more intellectual subreddit, since they already have the background context and knowledge that 90% of the article is spent explaining.

2. Add a social norm where the best comments get linked to. I enjoy Yvain's SSC posts, and the comments section often contains some gems, but digging through all of them to find the gems is tedious. I intend to quote or rephrase gems when I find them, and link to them in comments here.

3. Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I'm not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you're interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we're still small.