All of Screwtape's Comments + Replies
Debbie's particular shape is arranged in part to isolate honesty and predictability as useful. If I'd just had her hiding bad things and confabulating good things I'd worry the takeaway would be solely that doing bad things or having a bad average was the problem, so I set her up such that the average stayed put and the curve just flattened out. I think the individual pieces do make sense though, if not in that particular combination.
Hiding good actions happens due to humbleness or status regulation or shyness or just because it's private.
- A church ne
Frontpage is mostly what the admins and mods think is worth frontpaging, plus what users upvote. It's also a positional good, there can only be so many things on the front page. This is a more specific and useful question though! Yeah, if the LW team frontpaged more AI governance and less of everything else, and the average user upvoted more AI governance and less of everything else, the frontpage would have more AI governance on it. I wouldn't be a fan, but I'd understand the move that was the goal. My understanding is that's not the goal.
Not having a use...
I don't have the technical AI Safety skillset myself. My guess is to show up with specific questions if you need a technical answer, try and make a couple of specific contacts you can run big plans past or reach out to if you unexpectedly get traction, and use your LessWrong presence to establish a pointer to you and your work so people looking for what you're doing can find you. That seems worthwhile. After that, maybe crosspost when it's easy? Zvi might be a good example, where it's relatively easy to crosspost between LessWrong and Substack, though he's...
1It might be useful for you to taboo "LessWrong" at least briefly.
I have a spiel that may turn into a post someday about how communities aren't people, the short version being that if you ask "why doesn't the community do X?" the answer is usually that no individual in the community took it upon themselves to be the hero. Other times, someone did, but the result didn't look like the community doing X it looks like individuals doing X.
Is the question "why does the average user on this website not put much more focus on AI Governance and outreach?" Half of Le...
I'll speak up for notecards: I use binder clips to sort them by category or date once in a while. While they are a bit small for complex or detailed drawings, in a pinch you can lay them slightly overlapping (perhaps with a little tape on the back) and get as big a sheet as you want. They won't replace my sketchbook for doing portraiture anytime soon, but that's a minority of my paper time.
Overall, I love this post and I like hearing other people's approaches to paper!
This post feels like it may have been written in response to some specific interpersonal drama. If it was, then I'd like to make it clear that I have absolutely no idea what it was and therefore no opinion on it. I just think this is a useful concept in general.
Thumbs up, I appreciate knowing it lands even for people with no idea of the specific cases.
Other than the murder thing, I'm talking about something I've seen more than once. Like I said in the post, part of what I'm supposed to do for ACX meetups is handle complaints, which creates some unusu...
Basically agreed.
Though also relevant is the degree of maliciousness required and what the subject might get out of it. In the "bobcat instead of office chair" example, this is pretty willful willingness to cause physical harm and the sender doesn't really get anything out of it other than sadistic kicks and making the world much weirder. If the sender sent a much cheaper chair model, there's a less weird motivation (they keep the change) and there's less extra work involved.
I'm going to note I'm having a little trouble parsing your sentences here.
Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.
I think the thing you're saying is that you downvoted because you think instead of writing this essay, I should have told a specific person that I think they're being some kind of jerk (mailing metaphorical bobcats) to a small number of people while being nice to the majority of people. Further, that I'm incorrect about how bad the jerkishness is....
Yep, and also as things scale you just get less information about everyone.
An random local meetup might fit in one room, sometimes splitting into two rooms so it's easier to have multiple conversations. I can have line of sight to everyone at once and hear it if voices start getting raised. With meetups in ten cities, I can at least wave at most attendees, and have had a couple hours of conversation with the organizers. With meetups in a hundred cities, I have only demographic guesses about who the attendees are, and it takes time and effort to...
Somewhat agreed.
I'm trying to point at something loosely in this vicinity in section V, about hunting in packs - replace "one of them has three good friends" with "one of them paid three people" - where sometimes a bunch of negative reports are happening because someone is making up or deeply exaggerating accusations and routing them to you through different sources. I don't know that it's my first assumption; I currently think "Erin is mailing metaphorical bobcats to a small number of people" happens more often than "Frank is coordinating a bun...
Huh. That article does not have as much information as I want on how that election process works, but I'll swap to William The Conqueror as an example. Thanks for pointing it out.
It's the second example I've had to swap which probably should dock me some kind of points here, though I still feel pretty good about the overall thesis.
Even if a skill isn't as useful if you're the only one to know it, if the skill is still somewhat useful that can work. I like literacy as an example; crazy good if most people have it, still useful if only you have it, usually obvious pretty quickly if other people don't have it.
Individual and group rationality are pretty relevant here. In a sense, one thing I'm pointing at is a way to bootstrap (some) rationality skills from the easier individual domain in to the harder group domain; focus on places where the same skill is relevant in both arenas. It's a...
If I try this again next year I plan to use the exact same text and values on both sides, which hopefully will clear up most of that kind of issue. It doesn't really fix marginal value, but I'm not sure that's fatal to this kind of analysis- I can quote a reasonable price for an apple even though my marginal value of apples drops very fast by the time I hit three digits of apples. I could try and fix this by picking things I think people value vaguely the same but then we miss out on catching scope insensitivity.
11.2% is if I remove the CFAR attendees. 36.8% is if I remove the non-attendees. Possibly this is a backwards way of setting things up but I think it's right?
Say I have a general population and I know how many pushups they can do on average (call this Everyone Average), and I remove everyone who goes to the gym and see how many pushups those remaining can do on average (Call this Gym-Removed Average) and then I go back to the general population again this time removing everyone who doesn't go to the gym (Call this No-Gym-Removed Average.)
This i...
No, I think I'm actually just wrong here and River is correct. I don't know how I wound up with the clockwise rule in my head but I just checked the new driver's pamphlet and it's first to the intersection. Updated.
but predicted that it was instead about sensitivity to subtle changes in the wording of questions.
If I try this again next year I'm inclined to keep the wording the same instead of trying to be subtle.
Regarding the dutch book numbers: it seems like, for each of the individual-question presentations of that data, you removed the outliers. When performing the dutch book calculations, however, it seems like you keep the outliers in.
Yep. Well, in the individual reports I reported the version with the outliers, and then sometimes did another pass without outlie...
Hrm. I guess what would be helpful here would be a sense of the range; the average briers floated around .20 to .23, and I don't have a sense of whether that's a tight clustering with a bit of noise or a meaningful difference. To use running a mile as a comparison, differences of seconds mostly aren't important (except at high levels) but differences of minutes are, right?
If Other is larger than I expect, I think of that as a reason to try and figure out what the parts of Other are. Amusingly enough for the question, I'm optimistic about solving this by letting people do more free response and having an LLM sift through the responses.
Thank you! I felt quite clever setting it up.
Yeah, I should probably add a bit at the start or end of that section that everything in it is potentially selection effect. I don't know how to look at the thing I'm curious about without that.
Thinking out loud: If you get a random selection of people from the Pushup Club and count how many pushups they can do, then do the same for general population, the difference could be selection effect. People who like doing pushups are more likely to go to pushup club in the first place, and more likely to stick with it. But I can't realistically pay a bunch of Mec...
No, I think that's correct.
There's 107 people who answered above 200, 21 who answered exactly 200, and 113 people who answered below 200. The second quartile (aka the median) is 200. But nobody guessed a negative number, so the people who guessed low aren't pulling the mean down that much. Meanwhile 33 people guessed 1000 or higher, and they can yank the mean a lot without doing that much to the median. If you're asking people to generate numbers, you tend to get whole number quartiles because nobody guesses there's 100.5 stations.
Imagine a the set [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,100,100]. The average is ~23.444, but the median is 2.
Or have I misunderstood the thing that you think needs to be corrected?
Wouldn't that get rid of all of the table of contents?
Ideally I'd have a hierarchy of headings. I think what's happening is it picks up some (but not all) lines that are entirely bold, and treats those as a sort of Heading 4.
Future Survey Discussion thread
A Screwtape Point (and upvotes) to whoever can tell me how to fix the table of contents.
That's just plain unfortunate.
Huh. Let me check with the local organizer and see if they have an update.
Ooh, please share the butter beer recipe?
I was leaning towards reading part of Dumbledore's letter in 119. There are a lot of funny, silly lines I want to quote throughout the day but this piece is short and poignant.
...There can only be one king upon the chessboard.
There can only be one piece whose value is beyond price.
That piece is not the world, it is the world's peoples, wizard and Muggle alike, goblins and house-elves and all.
While survives any remnant of our kind, that piece is yet in play, though the stars should die in heaven.
And if that
Thank you for pointing that out, I've changed it to point at the github. Maybe at some point it'll get updated or have a new domain.
Now, does anyone have any clues why that url was chosen for that content? Murder isn't usually part of escorting, but it's so close to something Hanson might talk about that I'm not sure it's random. . .
I'd say it's level-1 advice that is better than the level-0 move of just criticizing and never praising, which is indeed a failure case people can fall into. When people notice you're doing it or if you execute it poorly it can come off badly, though I think still better than the level-0 failure it's meant to fix.
110x is a bit tricky in a small post like this, but I agree with the direction. Thank you for the nudge. I broke the guide out into its own line and bolded it, does that seem better?
You might enjoy knowing this got a brief shoutout during Boston's Secular Solstice. Thank you for your service!
That's fair- sounds like you've been lurking for a while! I'm a big Scott Alexander fan. He's got some old writing here if you want more stuff to read.
What kind of things would you like to publish or coauthor?
Welcome to LessWrong Nicolas. How'd you come across the site? I'm always interested what leads people here.
Hm, not really I guess. (Oops, I guess I forgot to mention that part!)
It is a useful datapoint I try to look for :) If the activity is getting use and people are having fun that's positive and good to hear.
The first problem I wanted Meetup In A Box to solve was would-be organizers going "I would run something, but I coming up with content and describing it sounds like too much effort." Now they have something they can cut and paste from, and thus meetups happen that otherwise wouldn't.
The second problem I wanted Meetup In A Box to solve was organizers goin...
I've found that a lot of exercises want a big list of questions. (Calibration Trivia, Dissent Collusion, Outrangeous, and Pastcasting off the top of my head.) I should crowdsource more of these or spend more time adding questions somehow.
I'm a bit confused on your proposed change- if you roll a 1 or a 2 you can say you looked up the answer, or you can lie and say you didn't. Whether you actually look up the answer seems irrelevant? Is it that misleading the Lonesome is easier if the Collective knows the answer?
Thank you for the report from OBNYC! It's good hear this has gone well :) Does it seem like it's working as practice?
TTRPG design and implementation is a topic I feel fairly knowledgeable on. I think the concept of the Chicanery tag is useful to them. I wouldn't expect including the tag literally in a game to improve most games, but I do think giving GMs and other players indications of how much Chicanery is recommended for different areas of rules would be useful. Let me try and dig into this difference of opinion.
Broadly, I think you're using the word comprehensive broadly, I think the GM world-model often has blank spots because keeping a consistent world-model ...
You are correct, that should be fixed. That's a straightforward mistake on my part, thank you for pointing it out!
(In case that came across as sarcastic, I sincerely appreciate your stating the position clearly and think lots of other people probably hold that position. I'm being a little silly with paraphrasing a meme, but I mean it in a friendly kind of silly way.)
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1Your preferences are reasonable preferences, and also I disagree with them and plan to push the weird fanfiction and cognitive self-improvement angles on LessWrong. May I offer you a nice AlignmentForum in this trying time?
Yeah, I don't know how typical that frontpage full of AI is, I just checked as I was writing the review. It seems like if you don't de-emphasize AI content at this point though, it's easy for AI to overwhelm everything else.
One idea if you want like, a minimal change (as opposed to a more radical archipelago approach) is to penalize each extra post of the same tag on the frontpage? I don't know how complicated that would be under the hood. I'd be happy to see the one or two hottest AI posts, I just don't want to see 3/4ths AI and have to search for t...
I will cheerfully bet at 1:1 odds that half the people who show up on LessWrong do not know how to filter posts on the frontpage. Last time I asked that on a survey it was close to 50% and I'm pretty sure selection effects for who takes the LW Census pushed that number up.
Yep, in what's possibly an excess of charity/politeness I sure was glossing "exploiting loopholes and don't want their valuable loopholes removed" as one example of where someone was having an unusual benefit.
I guess other forums don't literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they're told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I feel like I have encountered fora that had genuinely more active moderation norms. There's a lot of personal discord servers I can think of with the same rough approach as a dinner party. There are reddit threads
Also, uh, I notice the juxtaposition of "I've been banned from other places, hence this attitude" and "in practice [other fo...
1Mhm, I do think that sometimes happens and I wish more of those places would say "The rule is the moderator shall do whatever they think reasonable." That's basically my moderation rule for like, my dinner parties, or the ~30 person discord I mostly use to advertise D&D games.
But uh, I also suspect "The moderators shall do whatever they want" (and the insinuation that the moderators are capricious and tyrannical) is a common criticism leveled when clearness is sacrificed and the user disagrees with a moderation call.
Imagine a forum with two rules...
Eh, I think unclear rules and high standards are fine for some purposes. Take a fiction magazine. Good ones have a high standard for what they publish, and (apart from some formatting and wordcount rules) the main rule is it has to fit the editor's taste. The same is true for scientific publications.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.
I mildly disagree with this. The New Users Guide says
...LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that's uncommon for web foru
Yeah, it's easy to not be on the pareto frontier. Sometimes you can just make things better, and most people aren't going to argue much against doing that. They might argue a little, because change is a cost. A few people will argue a lot, because they have some unusual benefit. If lots of people argue a lot, that suggests a tradeoff is happening.
My observation is that some people do not prioritize one of the three corners of this triangle, and are confused when others argue about tradeoffs they don't see as important.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Do you mean, what do I suggest doing when it's equally easy to add something new to the list vs fixing a ball that's been dropped?
I think this approach is best used when fixing a dropped ball is costly. Consider the example of taking fifteen children on a hike. Fixing the situation if you have fourteen children at the end of the hike is stressful.
I love a good conlang. This one feels like an interesting start, though I'll be upfront and say I don't think this is a bottleneck on anything AI related.
Some thoughts and questions, in no particular order:
- "Here's how words are made" is a start. What's the grammar like? I think that's where a lot of ambiguity creeps in to language.
- Am I allowed to stop an encoding partway? For instance, am I allowed to say
- I kind of like th
... (read more)kakasu meti suto just mean noun, it's a fruiting plant in the Rosaceae family, or do I have to keep going to be grammatically correct?