Curated. This was one of the more inspiring things I read this year (in a year that had a moderate number of inspiring things!)

I really like how Sarah lays out the problem and desiderata for neutrality in our public/civic institutional spaces.

LessWrong's strength is being a fairly opinionated ”university^[1]” about how to do epistemics, which the rest of the world isn't necessarily bought into. Trying to make LW a civic institution would fail. But, this post has me more excited to revisit "what would be necessary to build good, civic infrastructure" (where "good" requires both "be 'good' in some kind of deep sense," but also "be memetically fit enough to compete with Twitter et all." One solution might be convincing Musk of specific policies rather than building a competitor)

1. ^{^}

   I.e. A gated community with epistemic standards, a process for teaching people, and a process for some of those people going on to do more research. 

You can make a post or shortform discussing it and see what people think. I recommend front loading the main arguments, evidence or takeaways so people can easily get a sense of it - people often bounce off long worldview posts from newcomers

Fwiw I didn't find the post hostile. 

I'm assuming "natural abstraction" is also a scalar property. Reading this paragraph, I refactored the concept in my mind to "some abstractions tend to be cheaper to abstract than others. agents will converge to using cheaper abstractions. Many cheapness properties generalize reasonably well across agents/observation-systems/environments, but, all of those could in theory come apart."

And the Strong NAH would be "cheap-to-abstract-ness will be very punctuated, or something" (i.e. you might expect less of a smooth gradient of cheapnesses across abstractions)

How would you solve the example legal situation you gave?

Thanks, this gave me the context I needed.

Put another way: this post seems like it’s arguing with someone but I’m not sure who.

I think I care a bunch about the subject matter of this post, but something about the way this post is written leaves me feeling confused and ungrounded.

Before reading this post, my background beliefs were:

1. Rationality doesn't (quite) equal Systemized Winning. Or, rather, that focusing on this seems to lead people astray more than helps them.
2. There's probably some laws of cognition to be discovered, about what sort of cognition will have various good properties, in idealized situations.
3. There's probably some messier laws of cognition that apply to humans (but those laws are maybe more complicated).
4. Neither sets of laws necessarily have a simple unifying framework that accomplishes All the Things (although I think the search for simplicity/elegance/all-inclusiveness is probably a productive search, i.e. it tends to yield good stuff along the way. "More elegance" is usually achievable on the margin.
5. There might be heuristics that work moderately well for humans much of the time, which approximate those laws.
   1. there are probably Very Rough heuristics you can tell an average person without lots of dependencies, and somewhat better heuristics you can give to people who are willing to learn lots of subskills.

Given all that... is there anything in-particular I am meant to take from this post? (I have right now only skimmed it, it felt effortful to comb for the novel bits). I can't tell whether the few concrete bits are particularly important, or just illustrative examples.

This is not very practically useful to me but dayumn it is cool

An individual Social Psychology lab (or lose collection of labs) can choose who to let in.

Frontier Lab AI companies can decide who to hire, and what sort of standards they want internally (and maybe, in a lose alliance with other Frontier Lab companies).

The Immoral Mazes outlines some reasons that you might think large institutions are dramatically worse than smaller ones (see: Recursive Middle Manager Hell for a shorter intro, although I don't spell out the part argument about how mazes are sort of "contagious" between large institutions)

But the simpler argument is "the fewer people you have, the easier it is for a few leaders to basically make personal choices based on their goals and values," rather than selection effects resulting in the largest institutions being better modeled as "following incentives" rather than "pursuing goals on purpose." (If an organization didn't follow the incentives, they'd be outcompeted by one that does)