All of Godismyprior's Comments + Replies

before AI safety was the new goal of LW.

I'm pretty new, but I thought LW was basically established with that focus in place, wasn't it?

9habryka
It was probably the primary motivation for Eliezer writing the sequences and building the site, yeah.
Answer by Godismyprior40

On mobile I can edit the display name field under edit account, but I haven't ever changed my username, so I don't know if it goes unmutable after changing it once.

In my country, once a child enters public school they don't have the option of switching to homeschooling anymore. So I've often thought once I have kids, I should definitely start with homeschooling to preserve the option, and if we/ the kid(s) find out it doesn't work, they can always switch to public schooling. With your experience being that second path, how do you feel about this chain of reasoning?

That's too bad you have to choose so early on. The kids I saw who seemed the most successful in homeschooling were the ones who started in traditional school, and then left for a specific reason (child actor, competitive figure skater, wanted to write a novel, got bullied, etc). Many kids went back and forth and seemed to do well. A lot of parents homeschool their kids because they want to engrain an ideology on them (whether that be religious or not). I'd encourage you to stay grounded in what's best for your kid and will make them happy and satisfied, and not what lifestyle you want your kid to live. 

see gwern for an interesting read on deanonymization techniques:
https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity

If we could identify people who are likely to suffer high amounts of suffering, then should we put in sentience throttling so that they don't feel it?

For a long time I thought that even mild painkillers like paracetamol made me feel dull-witted and slow, which was reason for me not to use them. When I had an accident and was prescribed ibuprofen against the pain I refused to take it on the same grounds. I've changed my mind on this now though, and I feel that I caused needless suffering to myself in the past. It's fine to take painkillers and maybe feel... (read more)

I think Judea Pearl would answer that the do() operator is the most reductionistic explanation that is possible. The point of the do calculus is precisely that it can't be found in the data (the difference between do(x) and "see(x)") and requires causal assumptions. Without a causal model, there is no do operator. And conversely, one cannot create a causal model from pure data alone- The do operator is on a higher rung of "the ladder of causality" from bare probabilities.

I feel like there's a partial answer to your last question in that do-calculus is to c... (read more)

3Bunthut
I see no problem assuming that you start out with a prior over causal models - we do the same for propabilistic models after all. The question is how the updating works, and if, assuming the world has a causal structure, this way of updating can identify it. This can never distinguish between different causal models that predict the same propability distribution - all the advantage this would have over purely propabilistic updating would already be included in the prior. To update in a way that distinguishes between causal models, you need to update on information that do(event) is true for some event. Now in this case you could allow each causal model to decide when that is true,for the purposes of its own updating, so you are now allowed to define it in causal terms. This would still need some work from what I wrote in the question - you can't really change something independent of its causal antecendents, at least not when we're talking about the whole world which includes you, but perhaps some notion of independence would suffice. And then you would have to show that this really does converge on the true causal structure, if there is one.
Answer by Godismyprior60

The site seems less focused on providing as accurate information as possible and more focused on shining a particular light on it's topics. This can also be seen in the writing style, it's more casual and pointed than e.g. Wikipedia.

I personally think if you take the above into consideration, rationalwiki can be a good way to get some pointers into how a topic is percieved from a certain point of view, but you have to accept that you'll only get one perspective.

I like this idea, but I have a couple of thoughts.


Anything that approaches anonymity always seems to attract people that would otherwise be shunned, because they feel comfortable spewing nonesense behind a veil of anonymity. How would this be avoided?


And do we have an exampe of any network like this working? It would be nice to glean lessons from previous attempts.

I like the idea of unlimited posting, limited viewing- it's unusual. But it wouldn't be very user friendly. Scaling with karma does provide a good incentive, it would also mean people... (read more)

5Kenny
Users on this "network" are capable of being pseudonymous. Anonymity is probably also possible, tho (much?) harder. We don't seem to have attracted too many people "spewing nonsense", or that many at all. Requiring a personal connection to existing users will shut out a lot of potential users. And it's probably better for plausible deniability that we continue to allow anyone to signup. I – and I'd guess most other users – are not doing enough to reliably avoid de-anonymization. It requires very strict opsec in general. And I don't know how you could possibly calculate the probability of being de-anonymized, even with perfect information about everything you've leaked. Relying on your feelings is probably the only practical option, besides not sharing any info.

I know I'm a bit late, but that sounds like something that could (up to a point) be reasonably automated.


Apart from flutrackers.com, are there other sites in a similar trend that should be bell-checked? has there been a previous effort to create a general alarm bell along the lines of these ideas?

1DirectedEvolution
My "threshold" criteria here should help. It seems we'll likely get at least one front-page headline about a novel illness, and more likely many headlines, before the world reacts. My guess is that for those of us not working professionally in pandemic prevention, we'll know early enough from the press to be on watch. The point of this model is to get us to the next step, which is reasoning under uncertainty and acting appropriately. By the way, check out my updated alarm bell criteria, which I just posted yesterday.
As time went on, however, mail clients adapted. They learned (...)

I've heard the exact opposite! there was a hackernews post about this not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233#22810132

The prevailing attitude was that top posting has won out precisely because modern mail clients did not have good features for threading, and as such new users did not get used to anything other than top posting.

We have mostly standardized on a new system, where mail clients default to including the full earlier message, and where they hide this
... (read more)