I have something like mixed feelings about the LW homepage being themed around "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies":

• On the object level, it seems good for people to pre-order and read the book.
• On the meta level, it seems like an endorsement of the book's message. I like LessWrong's niche as a neutral common space to rigorously discuss ideas (it's the best open space for doing so that I'm aware of). Endorsing a particular thesis (rather than e.g. a set of norms for discussion of ideas) feels like it goes against this neutrality.

Oh, UMA could totally mis-resolve this one. But my contention is that Polymarket would overrule such a resolution.

This is only tangential to your post, but I'm curious what you think of orexin antagonists as an insomnia treatment. Concretely, if you think that orexin agonists are a promising way to make people sleep less without making them more sleepy during the day, would it also follow that orexin antagonists merely make people sleep more, without actually making them less sleepy during the day?

Also: do you think orexin antagonists might have substantial negative side effects that are not obvious to the people taking them? (I ask this as someone who's trying orexin antagonists to treat my insomnia.)

This seems right to me!

Recognize this

✅

and you’ll be able to shift your focus to the real work: becoming comfortable with the worst-case scenarios your anxiety is protecting you from.

any advice? Thanks!

If one reads my posts, I think it should become very clear to the reader that either ARC's research direction is fundamentally unsound, or I'm still misunderstanding some of the very basics after more than a year of trying to grasp it.

I disagree. Instead, I think that either ARC's research direction is fundamentally unsound, or you're still misunderstanding some of the finer details after more than a year of trying to grasp it. Like, your post is a few layers deep in the argument tree, and the discussions we had about these details (e.g. in January) went even deeper. I don't really have a position on whether your objections ultimately point at an insurmountable obstacle for ARC's agenda, but if they do, I think one needs to really dig into the details in order to see that.

(ETA: I agree with your post overall, though!)

Alas, there is a $6,600 limit to how much you can donate to a political candidate (per election cycle).

My favorite example of a president being a good Bayesian is Abraham Lincoln (h/t Julia Galef):

See here and here for my attempts to do this a few years ago! Our project (which we called Pact) ultimately died, mostly because it was no one's first priority to make it happen. About once a year I get contacted by some person or group who's trying to do the same thing, asking about the lessons we learned.

I think it's a great idea -- at least in theory -- and I wish them the best of luck!

(For anyone who's inclined toward mechanism design and is interested in some of my thoughts around incentives for donors on such a platform, I wrote about that on my blog five years ago.)

Any chance we could get Ghibli Mode back? I miss my little blue monster :(