All of hath's Comments + Replies

I might start a newsletter on the economics of individual small businesses. Does anyone know anyone who owns or manages e.g. a restaurant, or a cafe, or a law firm, or a bookstore, or literally any kind of small business? Would love intros to such people so that I can ask them a bunch of questions about e.g. their main sources of revenue and costs or how they make pricing decisions.

I'd be interested in doing something resembling an interview/podcast, where my main role is to facilitate someone else talking about their models (and maybe asking questions that get them to look closer at blurry parts of their own models). If you have something you want to talk/write about, but don't feel like making a whole post about it, consider asking me to do a dialogue with you as a relatively low-effort way to publish your takes.

Some potential topics:

• What's your organization trying to do? What are some details about the world that are informing y

Took APCS (Java 101-102) in high school (culminating with coding Tetris in Java), read through Diveintopython3.net, done a bunch of miscellaneous programs in Python, lots of experience in Linux.

[APPRENTICE]:

For a bunch of these, the minimum viable product for mentoring me is a combination of pointing me to books/textbooks and checking in on me to make sure I actually do it.

Some things I'd like mentorship on:

• People willing to review my writing, and accountability on spewing out a bunch of blog posts. (and maybe on starting an actual novel!)
• Operations. I've run a couple large projects in the past, including a group house, and there's a lot I can do better. Would love to hear from people who have run group houses or organizations in the past.
• Economi

Some notes on the Dialogue format:

Seems like a less effortful/more social way of writing--like glowfic, but for nonfiction!

Probably better at conveying more implicit knowledge, like interviews do (maybe?)

Just because it's public doesn't mean we won't stop adding pieces to the dialogue; Elizabeth and I still have a lot to say.

Day 1, adding ~500 words of nuance.

• A lot of these models are “this was my lived experience, it seems to generalize a fair bit”. I sent out an interest form to see how much demand there was for something like this, as a way to test whether it did in fact generalize a bunch to other people, and it got a lot of responses. 
• Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, maybe on a grant, while you self-teach or work on a project”. I did this! It sucked!
  • Solo productivity is hard. Creating systems that help you get work/studying done every day, without e

Super rough expansion of the first couple bullet points, Day 0:

Intro:

• Why write this?
  • I’m writing this post because I have a bunch of models about group houses, minors, and the combination of the two that I think other people might be interested in. I also want to have some publicly available thing I can point to that says what this whole thing is about.
• Short version of what this was.
  • Ascension Beta was a month-long experimental group house I ran in October 2022, with participants aged 16-22. It was intended primarily as a test of the below models (to see if

I'm writing up my models on why my pet project, Ascension, is a good idea. This is the outline. As I expand the post, I'll add the incremental bits as comments.

Intro:

• Why write this?
• Short version of what this was.
• Why run Ascension (short version)

Models:

• Most important model here: it worked. Everything below is mostly informed by that, and the beta was a really good way to develop those models.
• High school, as an institution, is absolutely dog shit.
  • Signaling race to the bottom that sucks up all of your time.
• Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, ma

I'm reminded of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, an essay on the problems with handling "weird" data inputs that are normal for the people involved.

Meritxell has made the serious error of mentioning that she didn't fully grasp some of what Keltham said earlier about stock companies.

Keltham is currently explaining how a Lawful corporation has an internal prediction market, which forecasts the observable results on running various possible projects that company could be trying, which in turn is used to generate an estimate of marginal returns on marginal internal investment; this prevents a corporation from engaging in obvious madness like accepting an internal project with 6% returns while turning

Some quotes from Planecrash that I might collect into a full post:

Upcoming Posts

Now that I'm back from [Atlas Fellowship+SPARC+EAG+Future Forum], I have some post ideas to write up. A brief summary:

Agency and Authority, an actual in-depth, gears-level explanation of agency, parenting, the two kinds of respect, moral conflation with that respect, the fact that those in power are incentivized to make their underlings more legible and predictable to them, arbitrarily high punishments and outcome matrices, absolute control and concessions, incentives for those not in power and how those incentives turn you into less of an a... (read more)

I’m really sorry to hear that, man. It’s honestly a horrible thing that this is what happens to so many people; it’s another sign of a generally inadequate civilization.

For what it’s worth, the first chapter of Smarter Faster Better is explicitly on motivation, and how to build it from nothing. It mentions multiple patients with brain injuries who were able to take back control over their own lives because someone else wanted to help them become agentic. I think reading that might help.

On another note, thank you for being open about this. I appreciate all ... (read more)

Not only is this post great, but it led me to read more James Mickens. Thank you for that! (His writings can be found here).

Intercom doesn't change in Dark Mode. Also, the boxes around the comment section are faded, and the logo in the top left looks slightly off. Good job implementing it, though, and I'm extremely happy that LW has this feature.

If you are going to downvote this, at least argue why. 

Fair. Should've started with that.

To the extent that rationality has a purpose, I would argue that it is to do what it takes to achieve our goals,

I think there's a difference between "rationality is systematized winning" and "rationality is doing whatever it takes to achieve our goals". That difference requires more time to explain than I have right now.

if that includes creating "propaganda", so be it.

I think that if this works like they expect, it truly is a net positive.

I think that the whole AI... (read more)

You didn't refute his argument at all, you just said that other movements do the same thing. Isn't the entire point of rationality that we're meant to be truth-focused, and winning-focused, in ways that don't manipulate others? Are we not meant to hold ourselves to the standard of "Aim to explain, not persuade"? Just because others in the reference class of "movements" do something doesn't mean it's immediately something we should replicate! Is that not the obvious, immediate response? Your comment proves too much; it could be used to argue for literally a... (read more)

Can confirm that this is all accurate. Some of it is much less weird in context. Some of it is much, much weirder in context.

Yeah, my reaction to this was "you could have done a much better job of explaining the context" but:

"Your writing would be easier to understand if you explained things," the student said.

That was me, so I guess my opinion hasn't changed.

I'd like to have the ability to leave Google-Doc style suggestions on normal posts about typos; seems like something that might be superior of our current system of doing it through the comments? Removing the trivial inconvenience might go a long way.

Are you accepting minors for this program?

Thank you for the post, and thank you for all the editing you've done!

I'm an idiot; Blue Bottle is closed. Maybe the park next to it?

The park next to there works as well.

I've heard good things about Blue Bottle Coffee. It's also next to Lightcone.

I second this, I sincerely thought these were thoughts you held.

Yeah, you're right. Oops.

>Do you have any experience in programming or AI?

Programming yes, and I'd say I'm a skilled amateur, though I need to just do more programming. AI experience, not so much, other than reading (a large amount of) LW.

>Let's suppose you were organising a conference on AI safety. Can you name 5 or 6 ways that the conference could end up being net-negative?

1. The conference involves someone talking about an extremely taboo topic (eugenics, say) as part of their plan to save the world from AI; the conference is covered in major news outlets as "AI Safety has a

As far as I know, the purpose of the nomination is "provide an incentive for you to share the Atlas Fellowship with those you think might be interested" not "help make our admissions decisions". I agree that, if the nomination form was weighted heavily in the admissions decisions, we would be incentivized to speak highly of those who don't deserve it to get 500$.

1. High charisma/extroversion, not much else I can think of that's relevant there. (Other than generally being a fast learner at that type of thing.)
2. Not something I've done before.

Enjoy it while it lasts. /s

Are we changing from "payment sent every day at midnight" to "payment sent at end of week"?

Also this comment:

Eliezer, do you have any advice for someone wanting to enter this research space at (from your perspective) the eleventh hour?

I don't have any such advice at the moment. It's not clear to me what makes a difference at this point.

If you didn't already try, I bet Lightcone would let you post more if you asked over Intercom.

Thank you so much! Fixed.

(although, measuring impact on alignment to that degree might be of a similar difficulty as actually solving alignment).

Sure, but it's dignity in the specific realm of "facing unaligned AGI knowing we did everything we could", not dignity in general.

Do you have any ideas for how to go about measuring dignity?

I mean this completely seriously: now that MIRI has changed to the Death With Dignity strategy, is there anything that I or anyone on LW can do to help with said strategy, other than pursue independent alignment research? Not that pursuing alignment research is the wrong thing to do, just that you might have better ideas.

My inner Professor Quirrell is currently saying that if someone did have a moral policy in which animals had little-to-no value, they probably wouldn't abuse their pets where we could see; it'd be as if someone had read Snuff and thought "That man was a fool. He shouldn't have done that in public, because look what happened to him." Someone who really didn't care about animals in the slightest would still probably act like a normal member of society and just avoid interacting with animals whenever possible, because seeming like a stereotypical villain is g... (read more)

(there's also a level here of "i have no idea how to handle this situation/dynamic", and if you think I did something wrong either in the events described in these posts or by posting this, feel free to tell me i'm an idiot and that I should've done something different)

...I forgot about the annual review. I think I'll just say that doesn't count, and also commit to no more changes of the conditions.

EDIT: actually, just going to kill the market.

It's really interesting seeing the change in attitude toward low-effort asking-for-money posts. Earlier, people upvoted/put up with them; now people are actively punishing bullshit with strong downvotes. This is good for LW implementing monetary incentives in the future; we can punish Goodharters ourselves.

I've been working on setting up a TED talk at my high school, and since the beginning have been planning on asking for speakers through a post here. However, the day that we finally finished the website, and I can finally post here about it, is... when we're doing this whole GoodHeart thing. Not sure whether I should publish it today or tomorrow. (Pros: money. Cons: possibly fewer views because of everything else posted today.) What do you all think?

This book occupies the same genre as The Theory And Practice of Oligarchial Collectivism, though I'm not sure what to call that genre. Thank you so much. Would you recommend the longer book?

I think that was part of the whole "haha goodhart's law doesn't exist, making value is really easy" joke. However, it's also possible that that's... actually one of the hard-to-fake things they're looking for (along with actual competence/intelligence). See PG's Mean People Fail or Earnestness. I agree that "just give good money to good people" is a terrible idea, but there's a steelman of that which is "along with intelligence, originality, and domain expertise, being a Good Person (whatever that means) and being earnest is a really good trait in EA/LW an... (read more)

As a follow up: There have been a couple incidents with said teacher trying to assert authority and win debates over, like, actually listening to her students. Today, we had a quiz on 1984. When, during the allotted study time beforehand, students started to go over the material with each other, the teacher told everyone that this was a silent study time; after the quiz, she expanded on this, mentioning a story she had told earlier in the year. It was a story of how a student who had helped their friend on a quiz was rejected by a college the friend was ac... (read more)

(dialogue reconstructed as well as I can remember it)

For once, I actually cared about what we were doing in English. For our final essay on Macbeth I wrote 1260 words on Duncan's choices through the play, analyzing if he could have made better decisions given the information that he had, and trying to see whether his decisions would have worked out well if not for the supernatural occurrences of the play. This was a couple weeks after my English teacher had talked to me and told me that I wasn't putting enough effort into her class, and that I was doing si... (read more)