I think the larger effect is treating the probabilities as independent when they're not.

Suppose I have a jar of jelly beans, which are either all red, all green or all blue. You want to know what the probability of drawing 100 blue jelly beans is. Is it ${\frac{1}{3}}^{100}\approx 2\cdot {10}^{-48}$? No, of course not. That's what you get if you multiply 1/3 by itself 100 times. But you should condition on your results as you go. P(jelly1 = blue)⋅P(jelly2=blue|jelly1=blue)⋅P(jelly3=blue|jelly1=blue,jelly2=blue) ...

Every factor but the first is 1, so the probability is $\frac{1}{3}$.

I know many of you folks care a lot about how AI goes. I'm curious how you connect that with – or actively disconnect that from – the new workshops.

The question I'm most interested in: do you have a set of values you intend the workshops to do well by, that don't involve AI, and that you don't intend to let AI pre-empt?^[1][2]

I'm also interested in any thinking you have about how the workshops support the role of x-risk, but if I could pick one question, it'd be the former.

1. ^{^}

   At least in a given workshop. Perhaps you'd stop doing the workshops overall if your thoughts about AI changed

2. ^{^}

   Barring edge cases, like someone trying to build an AGI in the basement or whatever

It looks like last year it was Fall, and the year before it was Autumn.

I agree, but that's controlled by your browser, and not something that (AFAIK) LessWrong can alter. On desktop we have the TOC scroll bar, that shows how far through the article you are. Possibly on mobile we should have a horizontal scroll bar for the article body.

(I think, by 'positive', Ben meant "explain positions that the group agrees with" rather than "say some nice things about each group")

I thought Richard was saying "why would the [thing you do to offset] become worth it once you've done [thing you want to offset]? Probably it's worth doing or not, and probably [thing you want to offset] is bad to do or fine, irrespective of choosing the other"

One issue for me: I don't want to spend that much time reading text where most of the content didn't come from a human mind. If someone used a bunch of LLM, that makes the contentful stuff less likely to be meaningful. So I want to make use of quick heuristics to triage

Yes, the moderator comment part is a good question, I nearly explicitly mentioned that.

I wanted to make it clear I was clarifying an edge case, and setting some precedent. I also wanted to use a bit of "mod voice" to say that LessWrong is generally not a place where it's OK to post heavily-LLM-produced writing. I think those are appropriate uses of the moderator comment, but I'm substantially uncertain.

Regarding policies: on LessWrong, moderation is mostly done reactively by moderators, who intervene when they think something is going wrong. Mostly, we don't appeal to an explicit policy, but try and justify our reasoning for the decision. Policies clarified upfront are the exception rather than the rule; the LLM writing policy was largely (I'm tempted to say primarily?) written for making it easy to handle particularly egregious cases, like users basically posting the output of a ChatGPT session, which, IIRC, was happening at a noticeable frequency when the policy was written.

It takes more time and effort to moderate any given decision in a reactive way, but it saves a lot of time up front. It also think it makes it easier for people to argue with our decisions, because they can dispute them in the specific case, rather than trying to overturn a whole explicit policy. Of course, there are probably also costs borne from inconsistency.

I didn't like the writing in Buck's post, but I didn't explicitly notice it was AI. I'm treating the fact that I didn't notice it as a bellwether for its acceptability; Buck, I think, exerted a more acceptable level of control over the final prose. Another factor is the level of upvoting. Your post was substantially more upvoted (though the gap is narrowing).

If I were to rewrite the LLM policy, I think I would be more precise about what people must do with the "1 minute per 50 words". I'm tempted to ask for that time to be spent copy-editing the output, not thinking upfront or guiding the LLM. I think that Buck's post would be in violation of that rule, and I'm not confident whether that would be the right outcome.

I also use some LLM-y phrases or punctuation sometimes! It's a bit disturbing when it happens, but that's life. I still remember the first time I wrote a little pastiche for a group chat and someone asked if ChatGPT wrote it ... alas!

I'd like to clarify why I left my comment.

This post is pretty highly upvoted. In fact, it's the second most upvoted post of the week it was published. That makes it both very prominent, and somewhat norm-establishing for LessWrong.

That makes it particularly important to, like Habryka said, clarify an edge case of our LLM writing policy. I wouldn't be surprised if this post gets referenced by someone whose content I reject, or return to draft. I want to be able to say to the person whose content I reject, "Yep, your post isn't that much less-edited than Katalina's, but Katalina's was explicitly on the edge, and I said so at the time".

Separately, I wanted to publically pushback against LLM writing on LessWrong. Because this post is so upvoted, I think it risks normalising this level of LLM writing. I think it would be quite bad for LessWrong if people started to post a bunch of LLM writing to it^[1]; it's epistemically weak in some ways I mentioned in my previous comment (like kind of making up people's experience)^[2].

Thanks for all your work on law and AI. I know this is the second time I've moderated you recently, and I appreciate that you keep engaging with LessWrong! I think the legal lens is valuable and underprovided here, so thanks for that. I would like to engage with your arguments more (I think I might have some substantive disagreements with parts of this post), but this isn't the post I'll do it on.

P.S. "As a lawyer" was not the LLM-y part of that sentence. I can imagine lots of these are just normal writing, but the density seemed quite high for no LLM involvement.

1. ^{^}

   At least, this month. Maybe at some point soon LLM writing will become valuable enough that we should use it a lot.

2. ^{^}

   I also find LLM writing quality to be weak, but I am more willing to accept we should have bad writing than bad thinking on LessWrong.

The most egregious example in the TL;DR to me is "Anything less collapses into Goodharting and fines-as-business-cost", but also "regulation has to act before harm occurs, not after", the bulleted list with bold intros, the "not outcome or intent" finisher for a sentence, "these are merely illustrative examples, not formal proposals" are some other yellow to red flag examples in that section.