We do NOT have evidence that ever a smarter agent/being was controlled by a lesser intelligent agent/being.
Some people say that we are controlled by our gut flora, not sure if that counts. Also, toxoplasmosis, cordyceps...
There's this technique that people in minimalism circles talk about where you pack up all your stuff as if you were moving.
Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to approach this. Pack up your stuff, even write the date on the box.
It is possible to err in both directions. Probably it is more natural to collect more things than you need (because once you have those extra things, it requires a conscious decision to get rid of them). But I have also seen people underestimate the fact they they will need more of something (e.g. plates, forks) if someone visits them. Even if you know you will never have visitors, it is good to have an extra plate or two, because sometimes they break.
I agree, but... what would be the proper way, for an average American, to protest against the actions of Israel?
Attacking random people is obviously stupid and immoral, even the people at the embassy are innocent, boycotting is illegal, elections are rare... what would be the proper way to redirect the energy these people obviously have?
I wrote my piece on Dimensionalization in part to help AIs do it better.
I don't use AI frequently, and I have no idea how useful this is in practice, but it find this approach fascinating, to write one article for humans on how to use the AI and another article for the AI on how to serve the humans.
Potentially good news is that we might contribute to raising the LLM sanity waterline?
Makes me wonder, when LLMs are trained on texts not just from LW but also from Reddit, is the karma information included? That is, is upvoted content somehow considered more important than downvoted, or is it treated all the same way?
If it is all the same, maybe the datasets could be improved by removing negative-karma content?
I don't know a standard name. I call it "fallacy of the revealed preferences", because these situations have in common "you do X, someone concludes that X is what you actually wanted because that's what you did, duh".
More precisely, the entire concept of "revealed preferences" is prone to the motte-and-bailey game, where the correct conclusion is "given the options and constraints that you had at the moment, you chose X", but it gets interpreted as "X is what you would freely choose even if you had no constraints". (People usually don't state it explicitly like this, they just... don't mention the constraints, or even the possibility of having constraints.)
I wonder whether there is some non-obvious signal involved in claiming that your work is the meaning of your life. A possible hypothesis: "the rich do what they want, the poor do what they must". The more money you have, the less you are constrained when choosing your job -- you can afford to choose based on what you like, as opposed to having to take whatever allows you to survive. The extreme case would be a trust fund kid, who can have the job tailored to his or her hobbies. (Maybe not literally "Playing Minecraft LLC", but at least something related; for example producing or distributing computer games.)
What I see as a possible problem is that a large amount of trust is already required to start a co-op.