We don't have any plans yet; we might circle back in a year and build a leaderboard, or we might not. (It's also possible for third-parties to do that with our API). If we do anything like that, I promise the scoring will be incentive-compatible.

There really ought to be a parallel food supply chain, for scientific/research purposes, where all ingredients are high-purity, in a similar way to how the ingredients going into a semiconductor factory are high-purity. Manufacture high-purity soil from ultrapure ingredients, fill a greenhouse with plants with known genomes, water them with ultrapure water. Raise animals fed with high-purity plants. Reproduce a typical American diet in this way.

This would be very expensive compared to normal food, but quite scientifically valuable. You could randomize a study population to identical diets, using either high-purity or regular ingredients. This would give a definitive answer to whether obesity (and any other health problems) is caused by a contaminant. Then you could replace portions of the inputs with the default supply chain, and figure out where the problems are.

Part of why studying nutrition is hard is that we know things were better in some important way 100 years ago, but we no longer have access to that baseline. But this is fixable.

Sorry about that, a fix is in progress. Unmaking a prediction will no longer crash. The UI will incorrectly display the cancelled prediction in the leftmost bucket; that will be fixed in a few minutes without you needing to re-do any predictions.

You can change this in your user settings! It's in the Site Customization section; it's labelled "Hide other users' Elicit predictions until I have predicted myself". (Our Claims feature is no longer linked to Elicit, but this setting carries over from back when it was.)

You can prevent this by putting a note in some place that isn't public but would be found later, such as a will, that says that any purported suicide note is fake unless it contains a particular password.

Unfortunately while this strategy might occasionally reveal a death to have been murder, it doesn't really work as a deterrent; someone who thinks you've done this would make the death look like an accident or medical issue instead.

Lots of people are pushing back on this, but I do want to say explicitly that I agree that raw LLM-produced text is mostly not up to LW standards, and that the writing style that current-gen LLMs produce by default sucks. In the new-user-posting-for-the-first-time moderation queue, next to the SEO spam, we do see some essays that look like raw LLM output, and we reject these.

That doesn't mean LLMs don't have good use around the edges. In the case of defining commonly-used jargon, there is no need for insight or originality, the task is search-engine-adjacent, and so I think LLMs have a role there. That said, if the glossary content is coming out bad in practice, that's important feedback.

In your climate, defection from the natural gas and electric grid is very far from being economical, because the peak energy demand for the year is dominated by heating, and solar peaks in the summer, so you would need to have extreme oversizing of the panels to provide sufficient energy in the winter.

I think the prediction here is that people will detach only from the electric grid, not from the natural gas grid. If you use natural gas heat instead of a heat pump for part of the winter, then you don't need to oversize your solar panels as much.

If you set aside the pricing structure and just look at the underlying economics, the power grid will still be definitely needed for all the loads that are too dense for rooftop solar, ie industry, car chargers, office buildings, apartment buildings, and some commercial buildings. If every suburban house detached from the grid, these consumers would see big increases in their transmission costs, but they wouldn't have much choice but to pay them. This might lead to a world where downtown areas and cities have electric grids, but rural areas and the sparser parts of suburbs don't.

There's an additional backup-power option not mentioned here, which is that some electric cars can feed their battery back to a house. So if there's a long string of cloudy days but the roads are still usable, you can transport power from the grid to an off-grid house by charging at a public charger, and discharging at home. This might be a better option than a natural-gas generator, especially if it only comes up rarely.

If rural areas switch to a regime where everyone has solar+batteries, and the power grid only reaches downtown and industrial areas... that actually seems like it might just be optimal? The price of disributed generation and storage falls over time, but the cost of power lines doesn't, so there should be a crossover point somewhere where the power lines aren't worth it. Maybe net-metering will cause the switchover to happen too soon, but it does seem like a switchover should happen eventually.

Many people seem to have a single bucket in their thinking, which merges "moral condemnation" and "negative product review". This produces weird effects, like writing angry callout posts for a business having high prices.

I think a large fraction of libertarian thinking is just the abillity to keep these straight, so that the next thought after "business has high prices" is "shop elsewhere" rather than "coordinate punishment".