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M. Y. Zuo
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There seems to be some folks who might derive useful insights from a third-party, and mostly neutral, perspective of how the community appears after an honest and sustained effort of engagement, someone who doesn't really place AI risk as their top priority but who also doesn't completely ignore it like some critics, or opponents, of LW might. Notably I've encountered some folks who had strong personal opinions one way or another but refrained from writing them in a public, or even pseudo-anonymous, manner. There also appears to be a large group of lurkers or once-in-a-blue-moon posters who nonetheless have some views of the community and might benefit from someone willing to take the risk to do a write-up. First off, addressing the popular critiques and praises: There has definitely been some evaporative cooling of the community in the past decade or so. Some of the most insightful members have gone on to do bigger things, and the average quality of new posts is somewhat less than where it was a decade ago. Or so far as I can tell via the archives. This isn't very surprising as this is the common trajectory of every community that rapidly grows in size. It would have taken a super-human effort to retain the same level of quality going from 100 to 1000 users, let alone from 1000 to 10000, and so on. So I don't think that would have been a fair expectation to place on the moderators, or anyone else involved, of a decade ago. On the flip side, there is a larger cross-section of society represented in the 2022 userbase, And there has been a correspondent softening of the hard edges that may have been off putting to some a decade ago. Relatedly, the proportion of really bizarre or challenging writing has gone down, for better and for worse. For example, there definitely does appear to be some unique benefit from a community with lots of oddballs with jarring writing styles, but the downside is obvious because nobody really desires to have their norms be cons
One of the things that’s always bugged me is the unstated assumption that its even possible for someone online to produce credible analysis of extremely complex systems, like geopolitics, if given enough time. But upon closer examination it doesn’t really seem to be an assumption backed by anything, there’s no...
Many talk about IQ in many places, in all kinds of contexts and situations, and IQ can be ‘provable’ to a certain degree of reliability and consistency using methods such as Raven’s progressive matrices. But how is the general intelligence of the individual proven to any degree of reliability/consistency/validity/etc…? The...
A lot of this recent talk about OpenAI, various events, their future path, etc., seems to make an assumption that further scaling beyond GPT4 will pose some sort of 'danger' that scales up linearly or super-linearly with the amount of compute. And thus pose an extraordinary danger if you plug...
Nowadays, even fairly sophisticated accounting and auditing concepts are well known by those with on-the-job work experience in any sizeable firm. Such as systems for controlling the flow of money from spending accounts, corporate cards, etc., procedures for leaving a highly legible audit trail, and so on. And to a...
... And if you don't believe there is one on LW or elsewhere, what what you consider to be the ideal? 'genuineness' here refers to all the positive qualities we associate with the word 'genuine' such as truthfulness, completeness (to their best knowledge at the time of record), fidelity, consistency...
An interesting idea, that's stuck around in my thoughts but escaped elaboration until the recent issue of an influx of new users became prominent, is the idea of pseudonymity. Pseudonymity is important because although a real-name system works fine for stopping most low-effort or spam-like posts, not every potential participant...
There are many excellently written posts and comments on LW that describe why turning vague beliefs into concrete action is valuable. Specifically, using bets as a highly effective strategy to signal through all the noise of the modern world. I've found myself nodding to these sentiments so many times that...