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."

(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 slot)

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.

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.

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.

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")

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."

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.

Metastrategy = Cultivating good "luck surface area"?

Metastrategy: being good at looking at an arbitrary situation/problem, and figure out what your goals are, and what strategies/plans/tactics to employ in pursuit of those goals.

Luck Surface area: exposing yourself to a lot of situations where you are more likely to get valuable things in a not-very-predictable way. Being "good at cultivating luck surface area" means going to events/talking-to-people/consuming information that are more likely to give you random opportunities / new ways of thinking / new partners.

At one of my metastrategy workshops, while I talked with a participant about what actions had been most valuable the previous year, many of the things were like "we published a blogpost, or went to an event, and then kinda randomly found people who helped us a bunch, i.e. gave us money or we ended up hiring them."

This led me to utter the sentence "yeah, okay I grudgingly admit that 'increasing your luck surface area' is more important than being good at 'metastrategy'", and I improvised a session on "where did a lot of your good luck come from this year, and how could you capitalize more on that?"

But, thinking later, I think maybe actually "being good at metastrategy" and "being good at managing luck surface area" are maybe basically the same thing?

That is:

If already know how to handle a given situation, you're basically using "strategy", not "metastrategy."

If you don't already know, what you wanna do is strategically direct your thoughts in novel directions (maybe by doing crazy brainstorming, maybe by doing structured "think about the problem in a bunch of different ways that seem likely to help", maybe by taking a shower and letting your mind wander, maybe by talking to people who will likely have good advice about your problem.

This is basically "exposing luck surface area" for your cognition.

Thinking about it more and chatting with a friend: Managing Luck Surface Area seems like a subset of metastrategy but not the whole thing.

One counter example they gave was "reading a book that will basically tell you a crucial fact, or teach you a specific skill", where you basically know it will work and that it's a necessary prerequisite for solving your problem. 

But it does seem like the "luck surface area"-ish portion of metastrategy is usually more important for most people/situations, esp. if you're going to find plans that are 10-100x better than your current plan. (Although, once you locate a hypothesis "get a ton of domain-expertise in a given field" might be the right next step. That's sort of blurring back into "regular strategy" rather than "metastrategy", although the line is fuzzy)