Hello! I’ve mostly been lurking around on LessWrong for a little while and have found it to be a good source of AI news and other stuff. I like these posts - sometimes it feels somewhat intimidating in other parts. I hope to be commenting more on LessWrong in the future!

Confession: I've sometimes been getting Lesswrong users mixed up, in a very status-damaging way for them. 

Before messaging with lc, I mixed his writings and accomplishments with lsusr (e.g. I thought the same person wrote Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets and What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like). 

I thought that JenniferRM did demon research and used to work at MIRI, but I had I mixed her up with Jessicata. 

And, worst of all, I mixed up Thane Ruthenis with Thoth Hermes, causing me to think that Thane Ruthenis wrote Thoth's downvoted post The truth about false.

Has this happened to other people? The main thing is that I just didn't notice the mixup at all until ~a week after we first exchanged messages. It was just a funny manifestation of me not really paying much attention to some new names, and it's an easy fix on my end, but the consequences are pretty serious if this happens in general.

Hello, I came across this forum while reading an AI research paper where the authors quoted from Yudkowsky's "Hidden Complexity of Wishes." The linked source brought me here, and I've been reading some really exceptional articles ever since. 

By way of introduction, I'm working on the third edition of my book "Inside Cyber Warfare" and I've spent the last few months buried in AI research specifically in the areas of safety and security.  I view AGI as a serious threat to our future for two reasons. One, neither safety nor security have ever been prioritized over profits by corporations dating all the way back to the start of the industrial revolution.  And two, regulation has only ever come to an industry after a catastrophe or a significant loss of life has occurred, not before. 

I look forward to reading more of the content here, and engaging in what I hope will be many fruitful and enriching discussions with LessWrong's members. 

I notice I am confused.

I have written what I think is a really cool post: Announcing that I will be using prediction markets in practice in useful ways, and asking for a little bit of help with that (mainly people betting on the markets). But apparently the internet/LessWrong doesn't feel that way. (Compare to this comment of mine which got ~4.5 times the upvotes, and is basically a gimmick—in general I'm really confused about what'll get upvoted here and what will be ignored/downvoted, even after half a decade on this site).

I'm not, like, complaining about this, but I'd like to understand why this wasn't better received. Is it:

• The post is confusingly written, with too much exposition in the beginning (starts with a long quote)
• The post promises to do something without having done it, so people judge it as a pipedream
• The idea isn't actually that interesting: We've had replication markets, and the idea of using prediction markets to select experiments was proposed at least in 2013, and the idea is straightforward, as is the execution
• The title makes it sound like just another proposal and nothing that will actually be executed in practice
• Stuff like this doesn't matter because TA

I hope it's not too late to introduce myself, and I apologize if it is the case. I'm Miguel, a former accountant and decided to focus on researching /upskilling to help solve the AI alignment problem.

Sorry if I got people confused here, of what I was trying to do in the past months posting about my explorations on machine learning.

Feature suggestion: unexplained strong downvotes have been something that bothered people for a long time, and requiring a comment to strongly downvote has been suggested several times before. I agree that this is too much to require, so I have a similar but different idea. When you strong upvote (both positive and negative), you'll have some popup with a few reasons to pick from for why you chose to strongly vote (A bit like the new reacts feature). For strong downvotes it may look like this:

• This post is overrated, This post is hazardous, This post is fal

I've been a lurker here for a long time. Why did I join?

I have a project I would like to share and discuss with the community. But first, I would like to hear from you guys. Will my project fit in here? Is there interest?

My project is: I wrote a book for my 6yo son. It is a bedtime-reading kind of book for a reasonably nerdy intelligent modern child.

Reading to young kids is known to be very beneficial to their development. There are tons of great books for any age and interests. My wife and me have read and enjoyed a lot of them with our boy.

However, I sti... (read more)

I'm not a fan of @Review Bot because I think that when people are reading a discussion thread, they're thinking and talking about object-level stuff, i.e. the content of the post, and that's a good thing. Whereas the Review Bot comments draw attention away from that good thing and towards the less-desirable meta-level / social activity of pondering where a post sits on the axis from "yay" to "boo", and/or from "popular" to "unpopular".

(Just one guy's opinion, I don't feel super strongly about it.)

Some thoughts about e/acc that weren't worthy of a post:

• E/acc is similar to early 2010s social justice, in that it's little more than a war machine; they decided that injustice was bad and that therefore they were going to fight it, and that anyone who criticized them was either weakening the coalition or opposing the coalition.
• Likewise, E/acc decided that acceleration was good and anyone opposing them was evil luddites, and you had to use the full extent of your brain to "win" each confrontation as frequently as possible.
• E/acc people like Beff Jezos colli

Re-linking my feature request from yesterday.

Feature proposal: Highlights from the Comments, similar to Scott Alexander's version. 

You make a post containing what you judge to be the best of other people's comments on a topic or an important period like the OpenAI incident. The comments original karma isn't shown, but people can give them new votes and the positive votes will still accrue to the writer instead of the poster. 

This is because, like dialogues, writing lesswrong comments is good for prompting thought.

I don't know about highlighting other people's successful comments because the... (read more)

Hello! I'm a young accountant, studying to be a CPA. I've messed around in similar epistemic sandboxes all my life without knowing this community ever existed. This is a lovely place, reminds me of a short story Hemingway wrote called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. 

I came from r/valueinvesting. I'm very much interested in applying LW's latticework of knowledge towards improving the accounting profession. If there are Sequences and articles you think are relevant to this, I would eat it up. Thank you! 

I think the Dialogue feature is really good. I like using it, and I think it nudges community behavior in a good direction. Well done, Lightcone team.

Almost all the blogs in the world seem to have switched to Substack, so I'm wondering if I'm the only one whose browser is very slow in loading and displaying comments from Substack blogs. Or is this a firefox problem?

Weird idea: a Uber Eats-like interface for EA-endorsed donations.

Imagine: You open the app. It looks just like Uber Eats. Except instead of seeing the option to spend $12 on a hamburger, you see the option to spend $12 to provide malaria medicine to a sick child.

I don't know if this is a good idea or not. I think evaluating the consequences of this sort of stuff is complicated. Like, maybe it ends up being a PR problem or something, which hurts EA as a movement, which has large negative consequences.

I am confused by the dialogue system. I can't quite tell whether it's telling me the truth but being maddeningly vague about it, or whether it's lying to me, or whether I'm just misunderstanding something.

Every now and then I get a notification hanging off the "bell" icon at top right saying something like "New users interested in dialoguing with you".

On the face of it, this means: at least one specific person has specifically nominated me as someone they would like to have a dialogue with.

So I click on the thing and get taken to a page which shows me (if ... (read more)

Did anyone around here try Relationship Hero and has opinions?

Long time lurker introducing myself.

I'm a Music Video Maker who is hoping to use Instrumental Rationality towards accomplishing various creative-aesthetic goals and moving forward on my own personal Hamming Question. The Hammertime sequence has been something I've been very curious about but unsuccessful in implementing.

I'll be scribbling shortform notes which might document my grappling with goals. Most of them will be in some way related to the motion picture production or creativity in general. "Questions" as a topic may creep in, it's one of my favorit... (read more)

The new comments outline feature is great! Thanks, LW team :)

Hello! I have been reading and lurking the place for a long time. This place seemed different than other social media/forums because of the level of discussion held here. It's daunting to finally create an account, but I hope to start commenting/posting later.

Also, I find it funny to consider websites as "places", although it makes sense to call it that way.

Hey!

I'm an IT consultant who works very closely with an innovative AI-driven product.  Or, to cut the bullshit, I help deploy and integrate customer service platforms filled to the brim with those very chatbots that annoy endless customers daily.

But that's just my day job.  I'm working on a novel (or perhaps a piece of serialized fiction) that just might have silicon shoggoths in it.  That's the kind of content the local fauna enjoys, right?  It's a little too satirical to be entirely rational, but some recent twitter-chatter out of thi... (read more)

Hey there! I just got curious while reading steven pinker's book on rationality about the "rationality community" he keeps referring about then I saw him mentioning trying to be "less wrong" and then I searched it up to stumble upon this place. You guys read and write a lot just browsing here, maybe I should focus on increasing my attention span even more.

Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?

Hi LessWrong! I am Ville, I have been reading LW / ACX and other rationalish content for a while and was thinking of joining into the conversation. I have been writing on Medium previously, but have been struggling with the sheer amount of clickbait and low-effort content on the platform. I also don't really write frequently enough to justify a Substack or other dedicated personal blog.

However as LW has a very high standard for content, I am unsure if my writing would be something people here would enjoy. Most recently, I wrote a series of two fables about... (read more)

I had a discussion recently where I gave feedback to Ben P. about the dialogue UI. This got my brain turning, and a few other recommendations for UI changes bubbled up to top of mind.

Vote display (for karma and agree/disagree)

Histogram of distribution of votes (tiny, like sparklines, next to the vote buttons). There should be four bars: strong negative vote count, negative vote count, positive vote count, strong positive vote count. The sum of all votes is less informative and interesting to me than the distribution. I want to know the difference between s... (read more)

Dear LW team, I have found that I can upvote/agreement-vote deleted comments and it gives karma to author of deleted comment. Is it supposed to work like this?

I am seeing new a new "Quick Takes" feature on LessWrong. However, I can't find any announcement or documentation for the feature. I tried searching for "quick takes" and looking on the FAQ. Can someone describe "Quick Takes"?

By now there are several AI policy organizations. However, I am unsure what the typical AI safety policy is that any of them would enforce if they had unlimited power. Is there a summary of that?

It should probably say 2023 review instead of 2022 at the top of lesswrong.

I remember a Slate Star Codex post about a thought experiment that goes approximately like this:

• In the past, AI systems have taken over the universe and colonized it completely
• Those AI systems are in extremely strong multipolar competition with one another, and the competitive dynamics are incredibly complex
• In fact, those dynamics are so complex and inviolable that they constitute whole new physical laws
• So in fact we are just living "on" those competitive AI systems as a substrate, similar to how ecosystems have competing and cooperating cells as a su

Hello there. This seems to be a quirky corner of the internet that I should've discovered and started using years ago. Looking forward to reading these productive conversations! I am particularly interested in information, computation, complex system and intelligence.

@Ruby @Raemon @RobertM I've had a post waiting to be approved for almost two weeks now (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gSfPk8ZPoHe2PJADv/can-quantised-autoencoders-find-and-interpret-circuits-in, username: charlieoneill). Is this normal? Cheers!

@Habryka @Raemon I'm experiencing weird rendering behavior on Firefox on Android. Before voting, comments are sometimes rendered incorrectly in a way that gets fixed after I vote on them.

Is this a known issue?

Hello! First of many comments as I dive into the AI Alignment & Safety area to start contributing.  

Very new to this forum and AI in general, about to start my AI Safety & Alignment course to get familiar. Many posts in this forum feel advanced to me but I guess that is the beginning.