All of alexei's Comments + Replies

This is really good and I found it very useful for what I'm currently working on.

One note: it felt a bit disconnected. And I didn't get the impression that RL is "unreasonably effective."

Yeah, makes sense. Also note that if Many Worlds is true and quantum immortality exists, you will never (from your own point of view) die.

Yeah, splitting it into two parts would have been better.

What exactly do you mean by "things that try very hard to break down the map/territory distinction"?

Good points. I agree that there are many ways to slice these practices. This goes along with habryka's point that I should have split this post into two parts, which I agree with as well.

I'd predict that most people teach mindfulness horribly wrong. I'd also predict that the way it's usually taught does not resonate with most people, and they end up not doing the thing. (This was true for me the first few times I encountered it.) (Also, I know people who've done meditation for years and they're not much further along than when they started because they're still not doing the thing.) I'd also predict that they didn't do it for long enough. (Conservatively, I'd say you need 6 months to see some re... (read more)

I sympathize. It's a giant and weird project the likes of which the world has not seen in a while. If I wrote down how to implement just what we built so far so that someone could read it an unambiguously translate it into the current product, I think the document would be around 200 pages. And what we implemented was may be ~15% of Eliezer's full vision that he was describing in his document.

By the way, we followed Eliezer's direct vision for only 1.5 years. Then we took matters into our own hands and the design went elsewhere.

Turns out it&... (read more)

No.

What habryka said. Basically you're totally underestimating the complexity of the project and how granular and specific things get if you're to build them in a way Eliezer would approve.

It's too easy for people to just recommend their best lawyer friends. I suppose if you really trust your friends not to recommend their lawyer friends just because of the relationship (a big if!) then you could take their advice.

Oh no, totally the same feelings. You get it. :)

However, since then I've gotten over that "should universe" and went back to "is universe", where this is just how people are. Won't be making that mistake twice. Sounds like we learned the same lesson. :)

Yes, it's possible we weren't ideal. On the other hand, sometimes you have to play the hand you're dealt. I don't think disagreement by itself is necesserily bad.

Advisor.

Yes.

Yes about the prestige. That was the realization I had in 2017.

Be careful: I think Arbital as an idea has evolved to be extremely sticky and "obviously good". The antidote is to find a problem that actually exists and people want solved (and ideally will pay for). And only then take parts of Arbital that might provide a solution.

Yes, there is a good case to be made that Eliezer's vision hasn't been fully tried. But I also think it's impossible to try it because the exact design is locked inside Eliezer's head, so he would be the bottleneck. (That is, unless you found someone who thought like him and could be on the team full time. We have tried to find a person like that, but couldn't.)

I maintain that someone doing their own project in this area would be a better bet. And they can take features / inspiration / overall direction from Arbital.

We did some work on the community design. That's what Eric Bruylant did part time (slack channel, writing guidelines, etc..). He worked with the Wikipedia community (and other forums) in the past, so he certainly had the right experience. But overall I agree with your sentiment.

Thanks for the comment. Yeah, we definitely planned to make a lot of money. But I think the steps from what we were building to where we would be making money were too indirect / too far.

Sound correct to me. Also, I think it's much easier to start / contribute to a page on Wikipedia. Arbital's pages were trying to be educational and readable, which, I think is a higher bar.

To clarify, I'm not arguing that Tezos is shiny right now. It was shiny during ICO, and now it's possible I wouldn't buy it.

But OCaml was certainly one of the big factors that lept at me. It signalled that they were serious about writing code that could be proven to be correct. (This is in contrast to Ethereum's Solidity.) Basically: 1) I looked at what they were promising to do, and it seemed to have enough additional good things beyond Ethereum, 2) nobody I saw was disputing their tech, so I didn't have to understand it in detail... (read more)

The cost is actually not that high. I spent may be 5-10 hours researching Bitcoin (about 5 hours before I invested; 10 hours total). There aren't that many things one can invest 5-10 hours into and instantly make money. In fact, none of your examples come even close. Those are huge fields that you need to sink a ton of hours into before you can start reaping rewards. And none of them have direct monetary rewards like crypto.

I googled Tezos for a while and still do not have any idea why this has a strong "signal".

Ok, then may be I've ove... (read more)

It was around $4 when I wrote the FB post literally two days ago. :D

If I heard correctly that AF forum is moving to LW 2.0, you'll have to solve the math blogging problem. ;) And with the current features you're already 50% there. (Assuming they are working well, which right now it doesn't quite look like that.)

Thanks for the response. After reading it, it's now even more clear to what extent collaborative explanations is just not a thing that can easily work.

FWIW, I ran into the same issue with Arbital, and very quickly decided to change it to $$. Otherwise, any time you're writing a post about money, it's super inconvinient.

Of course it needs a good admin supporting it

Yup, that's a nonstarter for most casual bloggers.

Huh!! 2015, no less. I'll check them out.

Fun fact: originally Eliezer called the project Zanaduu (a play on Xanadu-doomed).

I'll bet that parts of Arbital will show up across various products (and I've already seen some), but I would be very very surprised if we get something that has the entire package in the next 5 years.

... but if they did, they were not assertive enough in applying it.

... experience / domain knowledge are somewhat underrated in the community compared to generic rationality skills

Yes to both.

And yes, I'd love to see LW 2.0 execute my plan and become a social network. (They already did the first few steps; just instead of math, they did rationality.)

Two features I miss the most are greenlinks (hover over a link to see summary) and claims (vote with probability / agreement).

But I think this question should be answered by LW community needs.

Well, trying to build a system that will dynamically link pages together to form a sequence based on requisites would be hard. But I think basically all other features are very modular.

Yes, there are components one can put together to make it all work well. But there is nothing as simple and as good looking as Medium.

Which version of product are you talking about specifically?

Also, part of the reasoning was that if we had a functioning product, we could try many things with it. (In practice, we only got to try a few.)

I'm curious if these papers / blogs would have been written at some point anyway, or if they happened because of the call to action? And to what extend was the prize money a motivator?

Sounds beautiful, thank you for sharing!

Link please.

Looks like at some point one of our scripts did something funky to this page (probably replaced [1] with a link to the page with id 1) and now it's broken.

One can imagine an agent that is smart about finding and training itself on new features. You seed it with one set of features, but over time it replaces that set with much better features fitting the data. To me it even seems possible that something like that could get to AGI level. This is not "self-modification" in the classic sense, so I'm wondering where that falls in this classification scheme.

But if we can keep our eyes out for a low-effort way to solve the problem, the return still feels high.

It's very likely that because we haven't seen any solution to this problem, the ones that do exist are not low-effort. This is part of Eliezer's argument (as you'll probably get from the doc).

I basically agree with everything here.

Yes, yes, yes. I've recently realized these things too. Very much agree.

Eric Rogstad's stark disagreement made me realize that there are two ways to interpret this question, and specifically "Less Wrong renaissance" phrase: 1) the effort that goes on at LW.com where they are upgrading and fixing the community and the website, 2) all other efforts to revitalized the broader online community.

Even if the platform had pros and cons, you'd still need to decide for any given claim whether some piece of evidence is a pro or a con and by how much. I'm not even sure what a good solution to that might look like that isn't basically a reputation system.

My main point of disagreement is that it's sometimes hard to say if some evidence is "for" or "against." It might also be subjective. Or it might be _, for which I don't have a word, but an example would be General Relativity as it relates to Newtonian Physics.

Each leader takes small steps to avoid trading off others' goals too aggressively.

This seems hard, especially depending on what kind of project you are doing. Startups, for example, are often pretty extreme in their trade-offs. Compromising would lead to a sub-par solution.