A few months ago I complained that automatic translation sucks when you translate between two languages which are not English, and that the result is the same as if you translated through English. When translating between two Slavic languages, even sentences where you practically just had to transcribe Cyrillic to Latin and change a few vowels, both Google Translate and DeepL succeeded to randomize the word order, misgender every noun, and mistranslate concepts that happen to be translated to English as the same word.

I tried some translation today, and from my perspective, Claude is almost perfect. Google Translate sucks the same way it did before (maybe I am not fair here, I did not try exactly the same text), and DeepL is somewhere in between. You can give Claude a book and tell to translate it to another language, and the result is pleasant to read. (I haven't tried other LLMs.)

This seems to support the hypothesis that Claude is multilingual in some deep sense.

I assume that Google Translate does not prioritize English on purpose, it's just that it has way more English texts that any other language, so if e.g. two Russian words map to the same English word, it treats it as strong evidence that those two words are the same. Claude can see that the two words are used differently, and can match them correctly to corresponding two words in a different language. (This is just a guess; I don't really understand how these things work under the hood.)

What would be your proposed alternative to Harry Potter fanfiction? Something else fan fiction? Original fiction? Not a fiction?

As I see it, choosing the Harry Potter universe that many readers already know allows it to use the contrast between how the different versions of Harry Potter behave.

Harry Potter in the books is frankly an idiot. Every year the most powerful dark wizard is trying to murder him, and he always only survives because he gets lucky... and yet the only thing he worries about is quidditch. Voldemort doesn't seem very smart either; his only smart move in the entire series was making the horcruces. Otherwise he is just a bully who can say "avada kedavra" faster than anyone. It seems like if he really tried to kill Harry, then Harry wouldn't have a chance. Seriously, if you can possess people, including teachers at Hogwarts, how difficult it would be to say "Harry, come here" and then stab him with a knife? The entire society of wizards seems to have a huge collective blind spot about doing anything that does not involve magic. Which is weird, considering that many students are coming from muggle families.

So I guess if your message is that people are idiots, it can be well delivered in a fan fiction from the universe where all people are idiots, and the book had millions of readers who didn't mind this fact, probably because in similar circumstances they also would have acted the same way.

Are there many people who pay for 3 Saturdays and then skip one? I would be surprised.

What age is the target group? An adult person can probably easily find 3 free Saturdays in a row. For a student living with parents it will probably be more difficult, because it means 3 weekends when the parents cannot organize any whole-weekend activity.

How about "make computers stupid again"?

The actions and statements of this current Trump administration show more support than ever for bold governance such as revitalizing letters of marque.

Against Russia? (As far as I know, most cyber attacks come from there.) In my opinion, unlikely.

I suspect that many people in the rationalist community have a blind spot about prediction markets, and see them as some kind of cooperative effort to make true predictions.

Instead, from the financial perspective, they are zero-sum games, and the best players play accordingly. If making the correct prediction is the winning move, so be it. If it is something else, that works, too.

I suspect that anonymous prediction markets (where people cannot get famous as superforecasters, only either gain or lose money) would make even better predictions that the current ones where many people have a conflict of interest.

I don't think I'm interested. You didn't update at all based on our previous bet.

That should make you more interested (financially) in betting against the person.

So, as I see it, the best case is when the skill degrades gracefully (provides the benefits even if other people are unaware of it or doing it wrong); and the second best case is if it has tests, so you know when you can safely use it, and when you need to switch to some plan B.

In case of rationality, I think there is "individual rationality" and "group rationality". Some things you can do alone, for example keep a diary of your predictions. You can get more benefit from talking to other rational people, but there is also the risk that they turn out to be not that rational and their advice actually harmful. (And I am not just talking about LW-style rationality here, but generally when you should take advice from people around you.) So you should check what the people around you are sane about, and only take that kind of advice from them; with everything else you are probably better using common sense / outside view.

I am also thinking about constructivist education, which works great when it does, but it does not degrade gracefully. (If you have a stupid teacher, it is better if he or she just follows a good textbook, rather than trying to guide the pupils' cognitive processes.) How can we derive the benefits where we can, but also avoid the degradation? Probably some kind of certification. But this requires an ability to admit things like "this method cannot scale, because we do not have enough teachers who would pass the certification".

I don't have a coherent theory of motivation, because when I look at myself, it seems that different parts of my life work quite differently.

For example, when I used to write SF, the social motivation was very important. I had friends who liked SF books and movies, we talked about that a lot, many of us hoped to write something good one day. So I had a community, and an audience. My first attempts had some small success, which inspired me to work harder and achieve more. And then... at some moment this all went down in flames... skipping the unimportant details, I think my mistake was becoming visibly more successful than some people in our community who had higher social status than me, so I got the "status slap-down" and the community became much less friendly towards me, and I lost an important source of motivation. For some time I was motivated by a desire to prove them wrong (for example I avoided a soft blacklist by publishing my story under a pseudonym), but gradually writing stopped being fun, and I stopped writing.

For an opposite example, I am interested in mathematics. Sometimes I read a textbook, do some exercises, try to figure something out. I would prefer to have people around me willing to discuss these topics, but the fact that I don't doesn't stop me at all.

Somewhere in the middle is programming. I am motivated to learn new things, but I am not motivated to finish my projects, and I suspect that having an audience would help here.

I guess I find learning intrinsically rewarding, but producing things requires a social reward (which I need to receive during the process, not only after having completed the product).

With regards to homeostasis, I think I have always tried to achieve more, it's just that my energy and motivation are very limited (more than previously now that I have kids). When I have some free time, I try new things, but often I feel too tired just trying to survive the day. That is, this is partially about me, and partially about my environment. Of course, a stronger internal drive can compensate for a less friendly environment, but a friendly environment can also make a great difference.

Is it possible that the relation between GLP-1 and willpower is basically about willpower depletion? The more mental energy you spend fighting your urge to eat, the less is left for everything else. GLP-1 reduces the hunger, suddenly you have more willpower for everything else.