In that case also consider installing PowerToys and pressing Alt+Space to open applications or files (to avoid unhelpful internet searches etc.).

I like this sequence and am aware it is not finished yet. Here's my I am understanding so far. After reading the sequence, I think I can predict your response to the first 5 conundrums, so my previous confusion there (why cluster rather than factor) seems resolved. But I think I still disagree with the later examples that I was confused with before reading your sequence. One example of conundrums where I think I get what your reply would be:

• "Why isn't factor analysis considered the main research tool?"

  Factor analysis doesn't capture the main bottlenecks (people being depressed for different reasons, people are successful for different reasons etc.)

  For others, I don't see how they connect well. My replies would be:

• "What is gifted child syndrome/twice-exceptionals?"

  I don't know why you focus on this one? My impression why there's a focus on this group is because helping them might be worth the investment? Or because the people writing and consuming that theorizing tend to be higher iq. Also, maybe "that phenomenon where desirable trait X and Y tend to be anticorrelated, because the others tend to not want to hang out with you as much, or you don't want to hang out with them" (writing and math being anticorrelated in the average US college)? I don't see the relation in the log-normals, other that maybe in your thinking you might want to single out that group, because it might have bottlenecks that are different?

• "Why would progressivism have paradoxical effects on diversity?"

  I am confused? I can see you making the argument that the diversity angle might sometimes be the correct one if it is the bottleneck for a person (black person being arrested for doing drugs in the US? While less of a bottleneck for a lot of other minorities?)

• "What's wrong with symptom treatment?"

  Do you think people's intuition here is correctly adjusting for something like the epsilon fallacy? Or to quickly jumping to simplistic conclusions like in this college cost post you link (in a different context), where someone might (in my view accidentally) see the increasing number of small courses as a cause rather than a symptom?

• "What value does qualitative research provide?"

  I am reminded of

  My answer to "If not Bayesianism, then what?" is: all of human intellectual effort. Figuring out how things work, what's true or false, what's effective or useless, is "human complete."

  and

  I actually started to talk about finding loosely-coupled constraints in an earlier draft of the post, but that quickly turned into the entire skill of model-building. That was when I decided to just go with the games, at least for this post.

  I feel like so far this sequence has mostly told me what tools not to use and, in practice, I cannot think of a case where reading this sequence has helped pick a better tool, but I was already pretty fond of log normals.

So I should look out for that, e.g. by doing some manual fermi estimates or other direct checking about ABC or by investigating the strength of the steelman of reaction XYZ, or by keeping an eye out for people systematically reacting with XYZ without good foundation so I can notice this,

Accusing people in my head of not being numerate enough when this happens has helped, because then I don't want to be a hypocrite. GPT4o or o1 are good at fermi estimates, making this even easier.

I noticed the tag posts imported from Arbital that haven't been edited on LW yet can't be found when searching those tags from the "Add Tags" button above posts. Adding ineffective edits like spaces at the end of a paragraph seems to fix that problem.

I noticed the tag posts imported from Arbital that haven't been edited on LW yet can't be found when searching those tags from the "Add Tags" button above posts. Adding ineffective edits like spaces at the end of a paragraph seems to fix that problem.

I didn't downvote, but my impression is the post seems to hand-wave away a lot of problems and gives the impression you haven't actually thought clearly and in detail about whether the ideas you propose here are feasible.

Some people have been thinking for quite some time now that an AI that wants to be changed would be great, but that it's not that easy to create one, so how is your proposal different? Maybe checkout the corrigibility tag. Figuring out which desiderata are actually feasible to implement and how is the hard part. Same goes for your Matroshka bunkers. What useful work are you getting out of your 100% safe Matroshka bunkers? After you thought about that for 5 minutes+, maybe checkout the AI boxing tag and the AI oracle tag. Maybe there is something to the reversibility idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Also using so many tags gives a bad impression ("AI Timelines"? "Tiling Agents"? "Infinities in Ethics"?). Read the description of the tags.

Finding some some friend (or language model?) to play Zendo (the science game) with makes this really intuitive on a gut level. Guessing a rule based on whether a sequence of 3 integers is either accepted or rejected works pretty well via text.

NOTE: I posted this to LW and I'm new here so I don't totally know the cross-posting policies. Hope it's alright that I posted here too!

It seems you posted on LW twice instead or in addition to cross-posting to the EA forum.

I just tried this with o3-mini-high and o3-mini. o3-mini-high identified and prevented the fork correctly, while o3-mini did not even correctly identify it lost.

Yes!