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MondSemmel — LessWrong

Have any parties in the current European Parliamentary Election made public statements on AI?

The European parliamentary election is currently taking place (voting period: 2024-04-07 to 2024-07-10). While I assume my vote^[1] has ~no impact on x-risk either way, I'd nonetheless like to take into account if parties have made public statements on AI. But I'm not sure they do. Does anyone know, or how to find out?

I guess there's also the question of past legislative records on AI, which might be even more predictive of future behavior. There's the EU's AI Act, but I'm not sure what its current implementation status is, whether it's considered useful by AI x-risk folks, or what if any political parties have made any statements on it. I'm also not sure how to interpret the parties' parliamentary voting record on it.^[2]

^{^}
In case it matters, I'm from Germany, Bavaria.
^{^}
The roll-call vote results can be found here after clicking on "Artificial Intelligence Act". The 523/46/49 votes for the +/-/0 results are the votes in favor/against/abstained.

On what research policymakers actually need

MondSemmel

I saw this guest post on the Slow Boring substack, by a former senior US government official, and figured it might be of interest here. The post's original title is "The economic research policymakers actually need", but it seemed to me like the post could be applied just as well to other fields.

Excerpts (totaling ~750 words vs. the original's ~1500):

I was a senior administration official, here’s what was helpful

[Most] academic research isn’t helpful for programmatic policymaking — and isn’t designed to be. I can, of course, only speak to the policy areas I worked on at Commerce, but I believe many policymakers would benefit enormously from research that addressed today’s most pressing

... (read 707 more words →)

The Filan Cabinet Podcast with Oliver Habryka - Transcript

MondSemmel

MondSemmel, RobertM

This is a transcript of The Filan Cabinet podcast, episode 6, with host Daniel Filan and guest Oliver Habryka. The transcript is by MondSemmel. The original LessWrong post is here.

In addition to each "section" having a timestamp, phrases/sentences that were difficult to understand (and where the transcript is therefore most likely to contain errors) will also be marked with a timestamp, if you would like to listen to those parts yourself.

Introduction [0:00:00]

Daniel Filan: Hello everybody. In this episode, I'll be speaking with Oliver Habryka. Oli is the head of the Lightcone Infrastructure team, the organization behind the forum LessWrong. He's also done grantmaking on the Long-Term Future Fund. Before we start, you should know that... (read 21598 more words →)

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Open & Welcome Thread - November 2022

MondSemmel

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend... (read more)

Health & Lifestyle Interventions With Heavy-Tailed Outcomes?

MondSemmel

A key question for advice in a domain is: how are outcomes in this domain statistically distributed?

If extremely good and extremely bad outcomes are rare, you probably can't do much better than just copying the default or median behavior. The value of acquiring information in this domain seems low.

Conversely, if the distribution has a heavy tail, then changing your behavior can avert very bad outcomes and/or lead to very good outcomes. In this case, the value of information in this domain seems comparatively much higher.

Hence the question: Which health & lifestyle interventions have particularly heavy-tailed outcomes?

Example prompts:

Toothpaste: Without having looked into this topic, I'd expect commercially available toothpaste to mostly be in... (read more)

Open & Welcome Thread - June 2022

MondSemmel

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

Why Take Care Of Your Health?

MondSemmel

The Underspecified Normie

You’re well-aware of the benefits of a healthier lifestyle: less pain, more energy, more mobility and autonomy, a higher life expectancy, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.

Unfortunately, this knowledge doesn’t compel you to action. Your behavior mostly follows simple hyperbolic discounting - healthy actions pay off in the future, but the future is far away, and your TV / smartphone / snack is much closer.

But even if the knowledge that Health Is Good is uncompelling, maybe some other perspectives or frames might prove more fruitful for improving your health?

The Guilty Conscience

All your life you’ve been told what to do: “Go to bed already!” “Do your homework!” “Brush your... (read 1553 more words →)

MondSemmel's Shortform

MondSemmel

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Recommending Understand, a Game about Discerning the Rules

MondSemmel

I play a lot of video games. Enough to occasionally find a rare gem like the puzzle game Understand. Its inspirations include the games The Witness, Baba is You, and Zendo, as well as the 2-4-6 task in psychology. Understand costs 4$ (3.3€) and is available for Windows and macOS on the Steam game client. (EDIT: For Linux compatibility, see this discussion.)

But before I get to the game itself and why I recommend it on Less Wrong, a brief aside:

Why Recommend a Game on LW?

I've easily played >1000 video games, including most critically acclaimed puzzle games irrespective of popularity. That's a lot of time spent on leisure. When gamers compliment a game,... (read 1112 more words →)

Quotes from the WWMoR Podcast Episode with Eliezer

MondSemmel

Spoiler warning: This post contains full spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I listened to this WWMoR podcast episode in which Eliezer had a guest appearance. I didn't see a transcript for the podcast, but found some of his replies interesting, so here is my attempt at a partial transcript.

All quotes are by Eliezer (EY), and I tried to quote him verbatim. I can't guarantee perfect accuracy (nor spelling or punctuation, for that matter), so assume that any errors are my own. That said, I provide timestamps so you can check the context for yourself if so desired.

Quotes and Excerpts

13:00 (= at the 13-minute mark)

If you'd been meant to learn

... (read 934 more words →)