I suppose its the difference between the LW team taking responsibility for any text the feature shows people (which you are), and the LW team endorsing any text the feature shows (which you are not). I think this is Richard's issue, although the importance is not obvious to me.

Could be an interesting poll question in the next LW poll. 

Something like: 
How often do you use LLMs?
Never used them
Messed about with one once or twice
Monthly
Weekly
Every Day
 

I think a reasonable-seeming metric on which humans are doubtless the winners is "energy controlled".

Total up all the human metabolic energy, plus the output of the world's power grids, the energy of all that petrol/gas burning in cars/boilers. If you are feeling generous you could give humans a percentage of all the metabolic energy going through farm animals.

Its a bit weird, because on the one hand its obvious that collectively humans control the planet in a way no other organism does. But, you are looking for a metric where plants and single-celled organisms are allowed to participate, and they can't properly be said to control anything, even themselves.

I think this question is maybe logically flawed.

Say I have a shuffled deck of cards. You say the probability that the top card is the Ace of Spades is 1/52. I show you the top card, it is the 5 of diamonds. I then ask, knowing what you know now, what probability you should have given.

I picked a card analogy, and you picked a dice one. I think the card one is better in this case, for weird idiosyncratic reasons I give below that might just be irrelevant to the train of thought you are on.

Cards vs Dice: If we could reset the whole planet to its exact state 1 week before the election then we would I think get the same result (I don't think quantum will mess with us in one week). What if we do a coarser grained reset? So if there was a kettle of water at 90 degrees a week before the election that kettle is reset to contain the same volume of water in the same part of my kitchen, and the water is still 90 degrees, but the individual water molecules have different momenta. For some value of "macro" the world is reset to the same macrostate but not the same microstate, it had 1 week before election day. If we imagine this experiment I still think Trump wins every (or almost every) time, given what we know now. For me to think this kind of thermal-level randomness made a difference in one week it would have to have been much closer. 

In my head things that change on the coarse-grained reset feel more like unrolled dice, and things that don't more like facedown cards. Although in detail the distinction is fuzzy: it is based on an arbitrary line between micro an macro, and it is time sensitive, because cards that are going to be shuffled in the future are in the same category as dice.

EDIT: I did as asked, and replied without reading your comments on the EA forum. Reading that I think we are actually in complete agreement, although you actually know the proper terms for the things I gestured at.

This idea (without the name) is very relevant in First Aid training.

For example, if you learn CPR from some organisations they will teach you compressions-only CPR, while others will also teach you to do the breaths. I have heard it claimed by first aid teachers that the reason for this is because doing the best possible CPR requires the breaths, but that someone who learned CPR one afternoon over a year ago and hasn't practiced since is unlikely to do effective breaths, and that person would be better of keeping to compressions only.

In First Aid books a common attempt to solve this problem is to give sweeping commands at the beginning (often with the word "never" somewhat abused), and then give specific exceptions later. The aim is that if you will remember one thing it will hopefully be the blanket rule, not the specific exception. I think that method probably has something to recommend for it, its hard to imagine how you could remember the exception without remembering the rule it is an exception too.

[For example the Life Support book, tells you 'never' to give anyone medicine or drugs, as you are a First Aider, not a Doctor. It also tells you to give aspirin to someone having a heart attack if they have not taken any other drugs. I think it also recommends antihistamines for swelling insect stings.]

I find that surprising, given that so much of your writing feels kind of crisp and minimalist. Short punchy sentences. If that is how you think your mind is very unlike mine.

Much as I liked the book I think its not a good recomendation for an 11 year old. There are definitely maths-y 11 year olds who would really enjoy the subject matter once they get into it. (Stuff about formal systems and so on). But if we gave GEB to such an 11 year old I think the dozens of pages at the beginning on the history of music and Bach running around getting donations would repel most of  them. (Urgh, mum tricked me into reading about classical music).

I am all for giving young people a challenge, but I think GEB is challenging on too many different fronts all at once. Its loooong. Its written somewhat in academic-ese. And the subject matter is advanced. So any 11 year old who could deal with one of that trinity also has to face the other two.

Yes, you could fix it by making the portal pay for lifting. An alternative fix would be to let gravity go through portals, so the ball feels the Earth's gravity by the direct route and also through the portal. Which I think makes the column between the two portals zero G, with gravity returning towards normal as you move radially. This solution only deals with the steady-state though, at the moment portals appear or disappear the gravitational potential energy of objects (especially those near the portal) would step abruptly.

Its quite a fun situation to think about.

“If I’m thinking about what someone else might do and feel in situation X by analogy to what I might do and feel in situation X, and then if situation X is unpleasant than that simulation will be unpleasant, and I’ll get a generally unpleasant feeling by doing that.”

I think this is definitely true. Although, sometimes people solve that problem by just not thinking about what the other person is feeling. If the other person has ~no power, so that failing to simulate them carries ~no costs, then this option is ~free.

This kind of thing might form some kind of an explanation for Stockholm Syndrome. If you are kidnapped, and your survival potentially depends on your ability to model your kidnapper's motivations, and you have nothing else to think about all day, then any overspill from that simulating will be maximised. (Although from the wikipedia article on Stockholm syndrome it looks like it is somewhat mythical  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)

I agree that its super unlikely to make any difference, if the LLM player is consistently building pylons in order to build assimilators that is a weakness at every level of slowdown so has little or no implications for your results.