All of Eric B's Comments + Replies

Seems like greenlinking to the term gets you that, minus auto-suggest which seems like it'd get unwieldy as we expand to lots of topics?

Yep, that is what I meant. Create new page is less exposed now we've moved the Arbital math home. It's accessible via the hamburger menu in the top right still, and you can link to it like this, but that's not particularly easy to find. I'm pretty sure we'll want to improve that, and generally make it easier to navigate between the wiki and discussion areas of Arbital.

Yep, I think when we've got good support for browsing by tag we'll be able to tag things with #term or #definition, and it'll work?

By splits I just meant if people disagree they could make al... (read more)

Making a page and greenlinking to it (with comments / edits / splits available) seems fine to me?

Reddit's reputation system gives new arrivals equal weight to long-standing highly trusted members of the community, and does not include priors about content quality based on poster's history. It's the simplest thing which could barely work, and does not allow for high quality discussion to scale without relying heavily on moderators or other social things not present in all communities and not able to resist certain forms of attack. It also lacks adequate indexing and browsing by topic, making discussions temporary rather than able to produce lasting art... (read more)

I foresee good reputation systems being extremely valuable (essentially necessary to scale while maintaining quality), with high credence on that being more important than argument structuring features.

Yep, there's at least high variability. Especially if the things it could be taken to mean are things people generally have similar credence for.

And, nods, this was partly a test of trying to disambiguate a claim, and I found it harder than expected / think I did not do very well. Maybe just words would have been better rather than numbers, and more of them. Or maybe doing a simple version and having other people see where it was ambiguous rather than trying to clarify in a vacuum is easier?

It's in the same direction, yea. Even if relocating on earth captured all the wins (I would guess in most scenarios not, due to very different selection effects), that is way better than a warm scarf.

I don't expect the very early colony to be any use in terms of directing AGI research. The full self-sustaining million person civilization made mostly of geniuses version which it seeds is the interesting part, but the early stage is a requisite for something valuable.

Yea, that's not obvious to me either. It's totally plausible that this happens on Earth in ... (read more)

A bunch of specifics being pinned down would help. e.g. are the shelters inhabited, or just available? are they isolated in a way that stops them being raided? seasteading-based? self-sustaining? what stops people forcing their way in if disaster strikes?

It may be easier to fund off-earth colonies to this level, because it provides directly for individuals. Few would sell their house for a spot in a disaster shelter, some would for a ticket to mars.

Neat, I'm a contrarian. I guess I should explain why my credence is about 80% different from everyone else's :)

Obviously, being off earth would provide essentially no protection from a uFAI. It may, however. shift the odds of us getting an aligned AI in the first place.

Maybe this is because I'm taking this to mean more than most, I only think it helps if well-established and significant, but by my models both the rate of technological progress and ability to coordinate seems to be proportional to something like density of awesome people with a non-terrible... (read more)

nods, definitely want to encourage discussion. However, people may not want their reasons for vetoing widely known, or even the fact that it was them who vetoed someone. The structure has to be carefully designed. I have a vague plan, but best not go into that level of zoom until the team is together, I think.

soften, perhaps talk about encouraging good epistemic norms, give details/examples so people don't get scared? no enforcement or require.

Perhaps this could be all in a note, with the only default-viewable thing saying we're financially stable? Unsure about this one, but my guess is the average reader does not care about the details too much.

The current note feels kinda startup-pitchy, which is probably not a good look here.

Repetition of scope in the note is mildly awkward.

I'd lean towards mostly positives / integrating these two, rather than just negatives we want to avoid (not pure positive either though). Perhaps emphasize that we want a system where the staff are helpful and approachable? And where new people with valuable input are rapidly recognized and their ideas shown to more people?

I'd add a once sentence "this is what it is / why it matters" thing. Perhaps something about efficiently bringing people to to the edge of human understanding?

Discussions should be taggable with multiple domains, so the one place seems not quite right. Keep up with all discussion in any topic?

soften or remove, especially the word dictate. facilitate perhaps?

Links to examples would go great here.

kinda awkwardly worded, could pack more of a punch with some optimization.

Seems ill-fitting with the others, I'd drop this entirely. I doubt anyone who would aggressively exploit bugs will be swayed by it.

Encourage, not demand :), and maybe link to a blog post about why betting is good too?

Something more humble will probably work better, "hope" is a good word here. Deprecated -> archived ? And we'd probably want to bulk-import including comments before stepping up as official replacement ("good content" is questionable PR), the work will be in hooking up the sequences and similar to Arbital's nav features.

eventual and unilateral don't really fit, and this sentence does not really make sense in general. Community building is hard because humans are messy systems with all sorts of behavioral patterns and complex interactions, not because we need mass adoption. Also, mass readership and mass community involvement are pretty different, we can do okay with a smallish community of awesome people if they're working well.

In both the notes, "recent pivot", I'd avoid pivot framing, to go with the whole "we're building the next part" thing.

Also, the framing of "the final decisions are made by the core team" sounds vaguely power / conflict-y, I'd suggest something more gentle.

And mention Nate as a previous adviser?

Perhaps, it currently feels ambiguous as to whether you're looking to use volunteers, or just saying you've got a good hiring pool.

Is there any part of Arbital we can put as "hey, want to make this part?" so the community can help push this forward (an external prediction market for bayes points with an API we can use?)? If yes or maybe, maybe saying we're looking into ways to harness devs who want to help out part time?

I'd really want to tell this not as a whole new vision, but as moving onto a different part of an existing vision. We did already have plans for discussion, and the grand experiment to improve human knowledge exchange was there.

I'd tell this story fairly differently. This is not really how I saw math, and presenting it as not-a-failure is pretty important PR-wise. We do have a really good amount of math content, and want to talk about it as a place we got to test out our wiki features and get valuable feedback in a non-controversial domain before moving on to building other parts.

awkwardish, probably best drop functional, and maybe use network of knowledge rather than database?

Hits good points, but awkwardly structured / worded in a few places. I can fix, but would reorganize/rewrite a bunch.

Also worth considering quoting or summarizing one core paragraph, for people who have not read it or want a refresher. Load the things into readers heads :)

Oh, and the greenlink to her post wants a summary.

Needs some cushioning, to avoid setting expectations of not just powerful dictator-staff and arrogant experts. Something showing we want the higher ups to be helpful and awesome, not just powerful and able to suppress bad things.

The structuring feels fairly awkward, I'd rewrite with high-value of X changed to something more human-friendly, and naturally integrated with examples.

nods, it's definitely something we want, and an 80/20 version was on the last list of wiki features to prioritize. The focus for the next while is going to be discussion features (for details see the announcement in #updates or #general), but when we return to improving the wiki side of Arbital it'll be one of the earlier pieces to add. I've fixed the link in case for now.

Not sure if it's high value to go into details, I'm unsure which parts help and it's not a set of things I'd expect people to be able to replicate based on a text description. Mostly talking a lot, trying to transfer lots of concepts which seem like they may be valuable, and sharing a bunch of bits of my development path as they seem relevant.

I may try and write a guide for it when I've got a larger sample size and feedback to work with. Which would totally happen if this thing exists :)

Mention them?

Done!

I suspect if I were doing it I'd find it easier to structure and interlink with split first, but whichever workflow suits you is fine.

This page looks like it's going to be very large, perhaps splitting a bunch of parts out into children would make it more digestible and reusable?

Looks like a mathjax error?

Note to self (or others): Add link from https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Decision_theory when this exists.

Maybe the alternate variants would be best on separate child pages, with links to them from this page?

eric_b [2:39 AM]
I'd add a "what is a 'number' anyway"-type page with an explanation of the general constructive, formal definitions of different types of number, for people who've been confused by the education system's tendency to be informal and be taught by people who don't have a clear idea what a number is.

Edit: this is maybe just a lens on "Number" (edited)

eric_b [2:46 AM]
I'd consider replacing irrational and transcendental with just real to reduce the scope, it's still ~15 pages, if we want one for each math level

[2:47]
(15 new pages, and a bun... (read more)