There's another blogger, Nathan Tankus, who is also reporting accounts directly from his sources within the BFS. He wears his bias on his sleeve and goes wild with the hyperbole, but he is a prolific public intellectual of some sort so he may be accurately reporting the basic facts. He also did an interview on Odd Lots but it didn't really have anything new.
I would be surprised if it were ethically important for you to donate that much. LW has made a pretty big difference to my life (e.g. my career, marriage, and a big chunk of my bank account are causally downstream of LW existing) and I estimated that there are probably something like $100m dollars worth of people for whom it was similarly impactful as me, and then a long tail of more people for whom it was somewhat less impactful, so I owed on the order of 1% of my net worth, such that if everyone like me who saw this fundraiser did the same then it would ...
Thanks for this elaboration. One reason I would be more hopeful than in the case of private airplanes (less so potable water) is that it seems like, while providing me a private airplane may mostly only benefit me and my family by making my life more leisurely, providing me or my children genetic enhancement may be very socially productive, at least improving our productivity and making us consume less healthcare resources. So it would seem possible to end up with an arrangement where it's socially financed and the surplus is shared.
It's interesting that y...
Can you elaborate on why you think that genetic modification is more prone to creating inequality than other kinds of technology? You mentioned religious reasons in your original comment. Are there other reasons? On priors, I might expect it to follow a typical cost curve where it gets cheaper and more accessible over time, and where the most valuable modifications are subsidized for some people who can't afford them.
You are right. When I wrote my initial comment, I believed the argument was self-evident and did not require elaboration. However, "self-evidence" is not an objective concept, and I likely do not share the same socio-cultural environment as most users of this platform. Upon reading your comment and Ben Pace's, I realize that this apparent self-evidence is far from universally shared and requires further explanation. I have already expanded on my argument in my previous response, but here are the specific reasons why I think the author's project (and indeed...
To me, since LessWrong has a smart community that attracts people with high standards and integrity, by default if you (a median LW commenter) write your considered opinion about something, I take that very seriously and assume that it's much, much more likely to be useful than an LLM's opinion.
So if you post a comment that looks like an LLM wrote it, and you don't explain which parts were the LLM's opinion and which parts were your opinion, then that makes it difficult to use it. And if there's a norm of posting comments that are partly unmarked LLM opini...
I have been to lots of conferences at lots of kinds of conference centers and Lighthaven seems very unusual:
I think it's great that rationalist conferences have this extremely attractive space to use that actively makes people want to come, rather than if they were in like, a random hotel or office campus.
As for LW, I would say something sort of...
I would think to approach this by figuring something like the Shapley value of the involved parties, by answering the questions "for a given amount of funding, how many people would have been willing to provide this funding if necessary" and "given an amount of funding, how many people would have been willing and able to do the work of the Lightcone crew to produce similar output."
I don't know much about how Lightcone operates, but my instinct is that the people are difficult to replace, because I don't see many other very similar projects to Lighthaven an...
Yes, we have a brokerage account and a Coinbase account and can accept basically whatever crazy asset you want to give to us, including hard to value ones (and honestly, it sounds fun to go on an adventure to figure out how much a first edition MtG Black Lotus costs, how to sell it, and how to make sure you get an appropriate tax return, if that's the kind of asset you want to donate).
We of course also accept bank transfers to avoid the Stripe fees.
But as a secondary point, I think today's models can already use bash tools reasonably well.
Perhaps that's true, I haven't seen a lot of examples of them trying. I did see Buck's anecdote which was a good illustration of doing a simple task competently (finding the IP address of an unknown machine on the local network).
I don't work in AI so maybe I don't know what parts of R&D might be most difficult for current SOTA models. But based on the fact that large-scale LLMs are sort of a new field that hasn't had that much labor applied to it yet, I would...
I'm not confident but I am avoiding working on these tools because I think that "scaffolding overhang" in this field may well be most of the gap towards superintelligent autonomous agents.
If you imagine a o1-level entity with "perfect scaffolding", i.e. it can get any info on a computer into its context whenever it wants, and it can choose to invoke any computer functionality that a human could invoke, and it can store and retrieve knowledge for itself at will, and its training includes the use of those functionalities, it's not completely clear to me that...
I don't have a bunch of citations but I spend time in multiple rationalist social spaces and it seems to me that I would in fact be excluded from many of them if I stuck to sex-based pronouns, because as stated above there are many trans people in the community, of whom many hold to the consensus progressive norms on this. The EA Forum policy is not unrepresentative of the typical sentiment.
So I don't agree that the statements are misleading.
(I note that my typical habit is to use singular they for visibly NB/trans people, and I am not excluded for that. So it's not precisely a kind of compelled speech.)
2 data points: I have 15-20 years of experience at a variety of companies but no college and no FANG, currently semi-retired. Recruiters still spam me with many offers and my professional network wants to hire me at their small companies.
A friend of mine has ~2 years of experience as a web dev and some experience as a mechanical engineer + random personal projects, no college, and he worked hard to look for a software job and found absolutely nothing, with most companies never contacting him after an application.
One and a half years later it seems like AI tools are able to sort of help humans with very rote programming work (e.g. changing or writing code to accomplish a simple goal, implementing versions of things that are well-known to the AI like a textbook algorithm or a browser form to enter data, answering documentation-like questions about a system) but aren't much help yet on the more skilled labor parts of software engineering.
I don't know whether this resembles your experience at all, but for me, skills translate pretty directly to moment-to-moment life satisfaction, because the most satisfying kind of experience is doing something that exercises my existing skills. I would say that only very recently (in my 30s) do I feel "capped out" on life satisfaction from skills (because I am already quite skilled at almost everything I spend all my time doing) and I have thereby begun spending more time trying to do more specific things in the world.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn't they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
Why do you feel so strongly about using so much eye contact in normal conversations? I sometimes make eye contact and sometimes don't and that seems fine.
I agree with your sentiment that being very uncomfortable with eye contact is probably an indication of some other psychological thing you could work on, but it sounds like you maybe feel more strongly about it than that.
I played General Anderson and also wrote that note. My feeling is that this year seemed more "game-like" and less "ritual-like" than past years, but the "game" part suffered for the reasons I mentioned above, and the combination to me felt awkward. Choosing to emphasize either the "game" nature or the "ritual" nature seems to have some pros and cons. Since participating in the game inevitably made me curious about the choices involved, I will be interested to hear the LW team's opinion on this in the retrospective.
I think you should go to college if it sounds pleasant and fulfilling to go to one of the colleges you could go to (as Saul stated colleges have many fancy amenities) and you are OK with sacrificing:
in order to do something pleasant and fulfilling. You should also go to college if you don't have any plan to get a job you like without a college degree, but you do have a plan to do it with a college degree, sinc...
Do you believe the result about priming people with a $1500 bill and a $150 bill? That pattern matches perfectly to an infinite list of priming research that failed to replicate, so by default I would assume it is probably wrong.
The one about people scoring better after harvest makes a lot more sense since, like, it's a real difference and not some priming thing, so I am not as skeptical about that.
It kind of weirds me out that this post has such a high karma score. It's a fun read, and maybe it will help some Wikipedia admins get their house in order, but I don't like "we good guys are being wronged by the bad outsider" content on LessWrong. No offense to Trace who is a great writer and clearly worked hard putting all this together.
It seems like this is a place where "controversial" and "taboo" diverge in meaning. The politician would notice that the sentence was about a taboo topic and bounce off, but that's probably totally unconnected to whether or not it would be controversial among people who know anything about genetics or intelligence and are actually expressing a belief. For example, they would bounce off regardless of whether the number in the sentence was 1%, 50%, or 90%.
It definitely depends. I think there are lots of people for which there are lots of domains of information for which they are highly trustworthy in realtime conversation. For example, if I am working as a programmer, and I talk to my smart, productive coworker and ask him some normal questions about the system he built recently, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibrated on what he knows. Or if I talk to my friend with a physics PhD and ask him some question like what makes there be friction, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibr...
It seems like the students think that eliminating the distractions wouldn't improve how much they learn in class. That sounds ridiculous to me, but public school classrooms are a weird environment that already aren't really set up well to teach anyone anything, so maybe it could be true. Is it credible?
It is credible that eliminating all preventable distractions (phones, earbuds, etc.) wouldn't improve learning much. As a teen, I bet you were distracted during class by all sorts of things contained entirely within your head. I know I was!
There's a somewhat stronger case that video games and social media have given students more things to be preoccupied about even if you make these things inaccessible during class. But I also think that just being a hormonal teen is often distracting enough to fill in any attention vacancies faster than the median lesson can.
As a non-physicist I kind of had the idea that the reason I was taught Newtonian mechanics in high school was that it was assumed I wasn't going to have the time, motivation, or brainpower to learn some kind of fancy, real university version of it, so the alternate idea that it's useful for intuition-building of the concepts is novel and interesting to me.
Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it's very important, but my sense is that it's some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don't already know what it's supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don't like "I will go listen to it" as an answer.
So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don't get it yet.
I still don't get why you are even considering finishing the degree, even though you clearly tried to explain it to me. Taking eight college classes is a lot of work actually? "Why not" doesn't really seem to cover it. How is doing a "terrible" commute several times per week for two semesters and spending many hours per week a low cost?
You sort of imply that someone is judging you for not having the degree but you didn't give any examples of actually being judged.
If you really really want to prove to yourself that you can do it, or if you really want to learn more math (I agree that taking college courses seems like a fine way to learn more math) then I understand, but based on your post it's not clear to me.
Launched a few days ago, the plan is:
Happy to get feedback on this, still figuring out what exactly helps parents and how to set it up right.
This isn't quite what you asked for, but I did feel a related switch.
When I was a kid, I thought that probably people in positions of power were smart people working towards smart goals under difficult constraints that made their actions sometimes look foolish to me, who knew little. Then there was a specific moment in my early 20s, when the political topic of the day was the design of Obamacare, and so if you followed the news, you would see all the day-to-day arguments between legislators and policy analysts about what would go in the legislation and why...
I am surprised by this, for example. Can you give examples of some of your controversial takes on any issues? I am wondering if you just do not have very controversial takes.
Controversial is obviously relative to the audience, but I have lots of opinionated beliefs that might make various audiences mad at me. Some different flavors include
I am 37 and I am a partially retired programmer after a ~20 year career. I basically try to maximize clarity while obeying normal politeness norms, prioritizing clarity and honesty over politeness where the topic is important (e.g. delivering actionable criticism or bad news.) I would say that during my career I received very strong evidence that this is an effective communication style for working well with others. For example, I have had numerous coworkers spontaneously tell me that they respected my straightforwardness, and seek out my feedback on what ...
Lucas Watson, who co-wrote Hanano Puzzle 2, just published an exceptional new game, I Wanna Lockpick, which I would put in your tier 1.
One thing which I really enjoyed about it is that it uses its mechanics to build interesting puzzles in all of the different puzzle categories above, and mixes them freely, so it feels like there is a nice variety of kinds of thinking involved.
I disagree with the summarization suggestion for the same reason that I disagree with many of the items -- I don't have (much of) the problem they are trying to solve, so why would I expend effort to attack a problem I don't have?
The most obvious is "carrying extra batteries for my phone." My phone never runs out of battery; I should not carry batteries that I will never use. Similarly: I don't have a problem with losing things, such that I need extra. (If I had extra, I would plausibly give them away to save physical space!) I don't find myself wishing I ...
Are you really saying you think everything on this list is "obviously" beneficial? I probably only agree with half the stuff on the list. For example, I certainly disagree that I should "summarize things that I read" (?) or that I should have a "good mentor" by emailing people to request that they mentor me.
Looks like LLM content.