Raemon

LessWrong team member / moderator. I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.

Sequences

Feedbackloop-First Rationality
The Coordination Frontier
Privacy Practices
Keep your beliefs cruxy and your frames explicit
LW Open Source Guide
Tensions in Truthseeking
Project Hufflepuff
Rational Ritual
Drawing Less Wrong

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Raemon50

Or: when the current policy stops making sense, we can figure out a new policy. 

In particular, when the current policy stops making sense, AI moderation tools may also be more powerful and can enable a wider range of policies. 

Raemon20

I mean, the sanctions are ‘if we think your content looks LLM generated, we’ll reject it and/or give a warning and/or eventually delete or ban.’ We do this for several users a day. 

That may get harder someday but it’s certainly not unenforceable now. 

Raemon22

I agree it'll get harder to validate, but I think having something like this policy is, like, a prerequisite (or at least helpful grounding) for the mindset change.

Raemon50

Curated. I think figuring out whether and how we can apply AI to AI safety is one of the most important questions, and I like this post for exploring this through many more different angles than we'd historically seen.

A thing I both like and dislike about this post is that it's more focused on laying out the questions than giving answers. This makes it easier for me the post to "help me think it through myself" (rather than just telling me a "we should do X" style answer). 

But it lays out a dizzying enough array of different concerns that I found it sort of hard to translate this into "okay what actually should I actually think about next?". I'd have found it helpful if the post ended with some kind of recap of "here's the areas that seem most important to be tracking, for me."

Raemon*2214

(note: This is Raemon's random take rather than considered Team Consensus)

Part of the question here is "what sort of engine is overall maintainable, from a moderation perspective?".

LLMs make it easy for tons of people to be submitting content to LessWrong without really checking whether it's true and relevant. It's not enough for a given piece to be true. It needs to be reliably true, with low cost to moderator attention.

Right now, basically LLMs don't produce anywhere near good enough content. So, presently, letting people submit AI generated content without adding significant additional value is a recipe for LW admins to spend a bunch of extra time each day deciding whether to moderate a bunch of content that we're realistically going to say "no" to.

(Some of the content is ~on par with the bottom 25% of LW content, but the bottom 25% of LW content is honestly below the quality bar we prefer the site to be at, and the reason we let those comments/posts in at all is because it's too expensive to really check if it's reasonable, and when we're unsure, we sometimes to default to "let it in, and let the automatic rate limits handle it". But, the automated rate limits would not be sufficient to handle an influx of LLM slop)

But, even when we imagine content that should theoretically be "just over the bar", there are secondorder effects of LW being a site with a potentially large amount of AI content that nobody is really sure if it's accurate or whether anyone endorses it and whether we are entering into some slow rolling epistemic disaster.

So, my guess for the bar for "how good quality do we need to be talking about for AI content to be net-positive" is more at least top-50% and maybe top-25% of baseline LW users. And when we get to that point probably the world looks pretty different.

Raemon82

My lived experience is that AI-assisted-coding hasn't actually improved my workflow much since o1-preview, although other people I know have reported differently.

Raemon70

It seems like my workshops would generally work better if they were spaced out over 3 Saturdays, instead of crammed into 2.5 days in one weekend. 

This would give people more time to try applying the skills in their day to day, and see what strategic problems they actually run into each week. Then on each Saturday, they could spend some time reviewing last week, thinking about what they want to get out of this workshop day, and then making a plan for next week.

My main hesitation is I kind of expect people to flake more when it's spread out over 3 weeks, or for it to be harder to find 3 Saturdays in a row that work as opposed to 1 full weekend in a row.

I also think there is a bit of a special workshop container that you get when there's 3 days in a row, and it's a bit sad to lose that container. 

But, two ideas I've considered so far are:

  • Charge more, and people get a partial refund if they attend all three sessions.
  • Have there be 4 days instead of 3, and design it such that if people miss a day it's not that big a deal.

I've also been thinking about a more immersive-program experience, where for 3-4 weeks, people are living/working onsite at Lighthaven, mostly working on some ambitious-but-confusing project, but with periodic lessons and checkins about practical metastrategy. (This is basically a different product than "the current workshop", and much higher commitment, but it's closer to what I originally wanted with Feedbackloop-first Rationality, and is what I most expect to actually work)

I'm curious to hear what people think about these.

Raemon127

Also, have you tracked the previous discussion on Old Scott Alexander and LessWrong about generally "mysterious straight lines" being a surprisingly common phenomenon in economics. i.e. On an old AI post Oli noted:

This is one of my major go-to examples of this really weird linear phenomenon:

150 years of a completely straight line! There were two world wars in there, the development of artificial fertilizer, the broad industrialization of society, the invention of the car. And all throughout the line just carries one, with no significant perturbations.

This doesn't mean we should automatically take new proposed Straight Line Phenomena at face value, I don't actually know if this is more like "pretty common actually" or "there are a few notable times it was true that are drawing undue attention." But I'm at least not like "this is a never-before-seen anomaly")

Raemon1413

I think it's also "My Little Pony Fanfics are more cringe than Harry Potter fanfics, and there is something about the combo of My Little Pony and AIs taking over the world that is extra cringe."

Raemon20

I'm here from the future trying to decide how much to believe in and how common are Gods of Straight Lines, and curious if you could say more arguing about this.

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