I think this post is very good (note: I am the author).
Nietzsche is brought up often in different contexts related to ethics, politics, and the best way to live. This post is the best summary on the Internet of his substantive moral theory, as opposed to vague gesturing based on selected quotes. So it's useful for people who
By "calligraphy" do you mean cursive writing?
So why don't the four states sign a compact to assign all their electoral votes in 2028 and future presidential elections to the winner of the aggregate popular vote in those four states? Would this even be legal?
It would be legal to make an agreement like this (states are authorized to appoint electors and direct their votes however they like; see Chiafalo v. Washington) but it's not enforceable in the sense that if one of the states reneges, the outcome of the presidential election won't be reversed.
lol fixed thanks
Yeah it's for the bounty. Hanson suggested that a list of links might be preferred to a printed book, at least for now, since he might want to edit the posts.
Brief comments on what's bad about the output:
The instruction is to write an article arguing that AI-generated posts suffer from verbosity, hedging, and unclear trains of thought. But ChatGPT makes that complaint in a single sentence in the first paragraph and then spends 6 paragraphs adding a bunch of its own arguments:
I added to your prompt the instructions
Be brief and write concise prose in the style of Paul Graham. Don't hedge or repeat yourself or go on tangents.
And the output is still bad, but now mostly for the flaw (also present in your output) that ChatGPT can't resist making the complaint about "human authenticity" and "transparency/trust" when that's not what you're talking about:
...I've noticed a troubling trend on online forums: a surge in posts that clearly seem to be generated by AI. These posts are verbose, meandering, and devoid of real substance. They prese
Is this word long or short? Only say "long" or "short". The word is: {word}.
To test out Cursor for fun I asked models whether various words of different lengths were "long" and measured the relative probability of "Yes" vs "No" answers to get a P(long) out of them. But when I use scrambled words of the same length and letter distribution, GPT 3.5 doesn't think any of them are long.
Update: I got Claude to generate many words with connotations related to long ("mile" or "anaconda" or "immeasurable") and short ("wee" or "monosyllabic" or "inconspicuous" or "infinitesimal") It looks like the models have a slight bias toward the connot...
Just flagging that for humans, a "long" word might mean a word that's long to pronounce rather than long to write (i.e. ~number of syllables instead of number of letters)
What's the actual probability of casting a decisive vote in a presidential election (by state)?
I remember the Gelman/Silver/Edlin "What is the probability your vote will make a difference?" (2012) methodology:
...1. Let E be the number of electoral votes in your state. We estimate the probability that these are necessary for an electoral college win by computing the proportion of the 10,000 simulations for which the electoral vote margin based on all the other states is less than E, plus 1/2 the proportion of simulations for which the margin based on all other
FiveThirtyEight released their prediction today that Biden currently has a 53% of winning the election | Tweet
The other day I asked:
...Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that
- Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
- Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
- either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
- Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood
Even if gas fe
I think the FiveThirtyEight model is pretty bad this year. This makes sense to me, because it's a pretty different model: Nate Silver owns the former FiveThirtyEight model IP (and will be publishing it on his Substack later this month), so FiveThirtyEight needed to create a new model from scratch. They hired G. Elliott Morris, whose 2020 forecasts were pretty crazy in my opinion.
Here are some concrete things about FiveThirtyEight's model that don't make sense to me:
Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that
Even if gas fees take a few percentage points off we should expect to make money trading on some of this stuff, right (the money is only locked up...
I like "Could you repeat that in the same words?" so that people don't try to rephrase their point for no reason.
In addition to daydreaming, sometimes you're just thinking about the first of a series of points that your interlocutor made one after the other (a lot of rationalists talk too fast).
By "subscriber growth" in OP I meant both paid and free subscribers.
My thinking was that people subscribe after seeing posts they like, so if they get to see the body of a good post they're more likely to subscribe than if they only see the title and the paywall. But I guess if this effect mostly affects would-be free subscribers then the effect mostly matters insofar as free subscribers lead to (other) paid subscriptions.
(I say mostly since I think high view/subscriber counts are nice to have even without pay.)
Paid-only Substack posts get you money from people who are willing to pay for the posts, but reduce both (a) views on the paid posts themselves and (b) related subscriber growth (which could in theory drive longer-term profit).
So if two strategies are
then regarding (b) above. the second strategy has less risk of prematurely stunting subscriber growth, since the best posts are still free. Regarding (a), it's much less bad to lose view counts on your worst posts.
3. put the spiciest posts behind a paywall, because you have something to say but don't want the entire internet freaking out about it.
[Book Review] The 8 Mansion Murders by Takemaru Abiko
As a kid I read a lot of the Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot canon. Recently I learned that there's a Japanese genre of honkaku ("orthodox") mystery novels whose gimmick is a fastidious devotion to the "fair play" principles of Golden Age detective fiction, where the author is expected to provide everything that the attentive reader would need to come up with the solution himself. It looks like a lot of these honkaku mysteries include diagrams of relevant locations, genre-savvy characters, and a...
Ask LLMs for feedback on "the" rather than "my" essay/response/code, to get more critical feedback.
Seems true anecdotally, and prompting GPT-4 to give a score between 1 and 5 for ~100 poems/stories/descriptions resulted in an average score of 4.26 when prompted with "Score my ..." versus an average score of 4.0 when prompted with "Score the ..." (code).
https://x.com/panickssery/status/1792586407623393435
If I understand the term "double crux" correctly, to say that something is a double crux is just to say that it is "crucial to our disagreement."
Quick Take: People should not say the word "cruxy" when already there exists the word "crucial." | Twitter
Crucial sometimes just means "important" but has a primary meaning of "decisive" or "pivotal" (it also derives from the word "crux"). This is what's meant by a "crucial battle" or "crucial role" or "crucial game (in a tournament)" and so on.
So if Alice and Bob agree that Alice will work hard on her upcoming exam, but only Bob thinks that she will fail her exam—because he thinks that she will study the wrong topics (h/t @Saul Munn)—then they might have ...
This story is inspired by The Trouble With Being Born, a collection of aphorisms by the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (discussed more here), including the following aphorisms:
...A stranger comes and tells me he has killed someone. He is not wanted by the police because no one suspects him. I am the only one who knows he is the killer. What am I to do? I lack the courage as well as the treachery (for he has entrusted me with a secret—and what a secret!) to turn him in. I feel I am his accomplice, and resign myself to being arrested and punished as such. At
...Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, previous works have shown these models are sensitive towards prompt wording, and few-shot demonstrations and their order, posing challenges to fair assessment of these models. As these models become more powerful, it becomes imperative to understand and address these limitations. In this paper, we focus on LLMs robustness on the tas
Do non-elite groups factor into OP's analysis. I interpreted is as inter-elite veto, e.g. between the regional factions of the U.S. or between religious factions, and less about any "people who didn't go to Oxbridge and don't live in London"-type factions.
I can't think of examples where a movement that wasn't elite-led destabilized and successfully destroyed a regime, but I might be cheating in the way I define "elites" or "led."
...But, as other commenters have noted, the UK government does not have structural checks and balances. In my understanding, what they have instead is a bizarrely, miraculously strong respect for precedent and consensus about what "is constitutional" despite (or maybe because of?) the lack of a written constitution. For the UK, and maybe other, less-established democracies (i.e. all of them), I'm tempted to attribute this to the "repeated game" nature of politics: when your democracy has been around long enough, you come to expect that you and the other facti
Changes my view, edited the post.
Thanks for taking the time to respond; I didn't figure the post would get so much reach.
Wow, thanks for replying.
If the model has beaten GMs at all, then it can only be so weak, right? I'm glad I didn't make stronger claims than I did.
I think my questions about what humans-who-challenge-bots are like was fair, and the point about smurfing is interesting. I'd be interested in other impressions you have about those players.
Is the model's Lichess profile/game history available?
Powerful
Could refer to them in writing as "MC-effectiveness measures"
Could someone explain how Rawls's veil of ignorance justifies the kind of society he supports? (To be clear I have an SEP-level understanding and wouldn't be surprised to be misunderstanding him.)
It seems to fail at every step individually:
Here's Resolution 2712 from a few weeks ago, on "The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question:
...The Security Council,
(here I skip preambulatory clauses that altogether are as long as the rest of the text),
1. Demands that all parties comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, notably with regard to the protection of civilians, especially children;
2. Calls for urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip for a sufficient number of days to enable, co
But herd morality is not just hostile to higher men, it's hostile to all positive development in mankind in general. If you glorify everything which makes weak and weary, you trap society in a prison of its own making.
Sometimes Nietzsche will use terms like "life" in e.g. "[a] tendency hostile to life is therefore characteristic of [herd] morality." But in context this refers to the higher type (in this specific passage to the man "raised to his greatest power and splendor"). The term "anti-nature" is the same way.
This is complicated by the sense in which ...
The Übermensch is discussed as an ideal kind of higher man only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and disappears afterward. Zarathustra is often especially obscure and the Übermensch's importance in understanding Nietzsche is overstated in popular culture compared to the broader higher type of person exemplified by actual persons like Goethe.
My first guess was that it's noise from the label ordering (some of the digits must be harder to learn than others). Ran it 10 times with the labels shuffled each time:
Still unsure.
It'll be a public good
Typo, thanks for spotting
Conditional of course
Second the recommendation for Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style. His own summary here: https://davidlabaree.com/2021/07/08/pinker-why-academics-stink-at-writing/
...The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader so she can see for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known and is not the same
The prime example of this is the relation between parents and children
For what it's worth, I would not be surprised if Huemer argued that children have no general obligation to obey their parents.
In these proposals, what is to stop these security forces from simply conquering anyone and everyone that isn't under the protection of one? Nothing. Security forces have no reason to fight each other to protect your right not to belong to one. And they will conquer, since the ones that don't, won't grow to keep pace. It is thus the same as the example given of a job offer you can't refuse, except that here the deal offered likely is terrible (since they have no reason to give you a good one.).
Channeling Huemer, I'd say that the world's states are in a kind of anarchy and they don't simply gobble each other up all the time.
I think this post is very funny (disclaimer: I wrote this post).
A number of commenters (both here and on r/slatestarcodex) think it's also profound, basically because of its reference to the anti-critical-thinking position better argued in the Michael Huemer paper that I cite about halfway through the post.
The question of when to defer to experts and when to think for yourself is important. This post is fun as satire or hyperbole, though it ultimately doesn't take any real stance on the question.