All of seed's Comments + Replies
I personally found the memes funny. To address your objection:
...Overall, the content she posts feels like engagement bait. It feels like it is trying to convince me of something rather than make me smarter about something. It feels like it is trying to convey feelings at me rather than facts. It feels like it is making me stupider.
To give an analogy, it feels like PETA content. When I initially went vegan, it wasn’t PETA content that convinced me. It was Brian Tomasik content and videos of grinding male chicks. While it’s true that I am "out of di
I like the dress code you propose, it looks so pretty! I was on the fence about going and this post helped me make up my mind. You made it sound more like a real party.
Hi! I wrote two extensions you suggested:
- "Emotion highlighter" detecting and highlighting paragraphs with 6 basic emotions
It's very basic API call right now, I'll think about improving it once I see if anyone uses it at all and what improvements they want (more emotions / more precise highlighting / better classification?).
- "Simple English translator" converting all text on a webpage into plain English.
They use your OpenAI API key to analyze all text on a webpage once you click the extension, and OpenAI charges $5.00 / 1M input tokens as of the ti...
>> High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options.
This is demonstrably untrue in cases of suicide. 70% of people who survive a suicide attempt do not attempt it again, so their decision to try is probably a bout of temporary madness / irrationality, and not an expression of stable well-considered preference for death over life.
Long Live the Queen takes about 4 hours. It would take some luck to beat it on the first try, but generally you win by using common sense and training useful skills.
What were the most impressive results that were supposedly accomplished? Maybe we should run some experiments to see if they can be reproduced?
Interesting post and self-improvement advice!
I want to add to that when you're learning a behavior that is new to you, you want to start out in a low-risk setting. You are probably going to make mistakes. For example, when you first try to act high-status and assertive, you may overdo it and come off as aggressive and rude. So you want to start practicing in a safe setting where mistakes won't cost you a job, e.g. anonymously on the internet or with friends. Or if you do write to your boss, have a friend look over the letter. Then move on to more high stak...
I appreciate you writing this post! I was curious about the evidence for lab leak, but was too lazy to investigate on my won.
You point out COVID-19 is the only sarbecovirus with furin cleavage site. But couldn't it have evolved by switching host from some other species? According to Nature, "viruses more often evolve by jumping from one host species to another than by remaining within a particular species."
So the general prevalence of furin cleavage sites seems relevant too. Did anyone look into what that is?
Didn't they demonstrate that transformers could be mesaoptimizers? (I never properly understood the paper, so it's a genuine question.) Uncovering Mesaoptimization Algorithms in Transformers
Not to mention that the default result of rebellion is failure. (Figure from https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/)
OP doesn't claim that dictators are unchecked in their power, he jokingly claims that dictators and monarchs inevitably end up overthrown. Which is, of course, false: there were ~55 authoritarian leaders in the world in 2015, and 11 of them were 69 years old or older, on their way to die of old age. Dictator's handbook has quite a few examples of dictators ruling until their natural death, too.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/10/when-dictators-die/
I agree that it's his main point; however, he's also making an observation that most terrorists are incompetent, impulsive, have poor preparation and planning, and choose difficult forms of attacks when better options are available. The post has several anecdotes illustrating that.
He believes the incompetence is caused by terrorist acting on social incentives instead of optimizing for their stated goals. However, what if some terrorist group has one earnest terrorist, or what if the chatbot provides the social encouragement need to spur a terrorist t...
Ok, so LLMs don't give an advantage in bioterrorism planning to a team of RAND researchers. Does it mean they don't give an advantage to actual terrorists, who are notoriously incompetent? https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective#sn17
I think you're zeroing in on the hypothesis that your list had a problem too early. There are many possible reasons to fail college, like having a mental health issue or not being very motivated to succeed in the first place. Do you know that he actually read your list?
In my experience the biggest predictor of teaching success is whether the person asked to be taught)
If you are leaving relatives or friends behind, consider developing some kind of code language, because people in Russia might be afraid to tell you their real opinions over the phone in plain speech.
I believe there is nothing wrong or irrational about taking collective action or calling to it. On the contrary, a culture that prohibited collective action has failed at instrumental rationality and is about to be conquered by a culture that didn't. So I am strongly opposed to your first suggested rule.
Yes, I believe we shouldn't get involved in politics if it endangers alignment research efforts or otherwise hurts the community for little gain. But we should take collective actions which carry negligible risks and huge expected benefits. Rationality is about winning. Being divided makes us weak and less likely to win. Let's not do this.
Will MIRI want to hire programmers once the pandemic is over? What kind of programmers? What other kinds of people do you seek to hire?
I agree that this statement could be understood this way, and I don't find your interpretation objectionable. It also could be understood to mean that Russian POWs say what they say to stop torture, there is no disclaimer against this interpretation. I should probably have interpreted everything in the most charitable way possible, if it was one thing. I am pushing back because several things made me feel paranoid.
Advising Ukrainans to flee while banning commenters from giving any advice to Western powers or discussing morality and justice seemed not neutr...
I don't think the statement implies that Russian POWs would be treated inhumanely.
I think it implies that if Russian POWs are saying things like "we didn't know we were aggressors", you cannot distinguish between whether they are saying that because it is true or the fact that they are saying it because they fear inhumane treatment.
And even in the second case, you may not be able to distinguish between Russian POWs who have correct fears of possible inhumane treatment if they are non-compliant and Russian POWs who have unfounded fears (i.e., the situation ...
There is also this isolating effect when the media tells a lie, e.g. denies some true fact X, and most people don't buy it, but they decide "this is what we're all conspiring to tell our enemies". And while you're busy trying to "convince" your opponent that X actually happened, you never get to discuss whether X is the right thing to do.
Wait, I thought EA already had 46$ billion they didn't know where to spend, so I should prioritize direct work over earning to give? https://80000hours.org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/
I thought so too. This comment thread on ACX shattered that assumption of mine. EA institutions should hire people to do "direct work". If there aren't enough qualified people applying for these positions, and EA has 46 billion dollars, then their institutions should (get this) increase the salaries they offer until there are.
To quote EY:
...There's this thing called "Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage". There's this idea called "professional specialization". There's this notion of "economies of scale". There's this concept of "gains from trade".&nb
It seems like the source of your disagreement is that you do not believe turkeys actually suffer (as you write "suffer" in scare quotes), while the OP clearly believes they do. I think this question needs to be settled first before we decide which emotional reactions are reasonable. (I myself have no idea what the answer is.)
Radical actions. The word "radical" means someone trying to find and eliminate root causes of social problems, rather than just their symptoms. Many people pursue radical goals through peaceful means (spreading ideas, starting a commune, attending a peaceful protest or boycotting would be examples), yet "radical act" is commonly used as a synonym to "violent act".
Extremism. Means having views far outside the mainstream attitude of society. But also carries a strong negative connotation, in some countries is prohibited by law and mentioned alongside "terror...
What the heck did I do wrong, why are you downvoting me, guys?
Berlin.
Are you saying that MIRI enforces altruism in their employees? If so, how do they do that, exactly?
Scott Aaronson, for example, blogs about "blank faced" non-self-explaining authoritarian bureaucrats being a constant problem in academia. Venkatesh Rao writes about the corporate world, and the picture presented is one of a simulation constantly maintained thorough improv.
Well, I once met a person in academia who was convinced she'd be utterly bored anywhere outside academia.
If you want an unbiased perspective on what life is like outside the rationality community, you should talk to people not associated with the rationality community. (Yes, ...
How do you know it's useful though? Did you apply the advice? Did it help?
>> Sometimes I try to tell the people what I can see, and that doesn't always go well. I'm not sure why.
Can you describe a concrete example? Without looking at a few examples, it is hard to tell if a "context-free integrity" fallacy is to blame, or you are just making bad arguments, or something.
One benefit is that you can do calisthenics everywhere (even in prison), no need for special equipment.
What's to stop the prosecutor from lying about their Briers score?
We have exercised our innovative technique of meta-honesty to successfully dupe some computer programmers into thinking we want their participation.
I actually thought Ty was a real person. :)
And Y/2 pain, probably? (Or the conclusion doesn't follow.)
How do you measure intelligence though? Obviously you don't mean IQ, since IQ test scores are deliberately calibrated to be normally distributed.
Generally, I feel like all these bold claims need some supporting evidence. E.g.
Increased information makes smart people smarter and stupid people stupider.
Citation needed?
I totally agree that it's useful to hang out with a diverse set of people.
It also helps to treat people's opinion of you as an instrumental goal. Every time I'm worried what someone thinks of me, I ask myself if this person's opinion is important, and why - can they hurt me or help me in any way? Sometimes the answer is yes, e.g. I want to impress employers, or I need voters to like me if I'm doing politics. Often, though, the answer is that the person is not going to affect my life in any way, and so their opinion doesn't matter. People's opinions may als...
Is starting capital really a bottleneck for entrepreneurs? Don't you just get money from investors?
Elon Musk and Bill Gates only needed a laptop to start their business. Or, from Warren Buffet's biography: "In 1945, as a high school sophomore, Buffett and a friend spent $25 to purchase a used pinball machine, which they placed in the local barber shop. Within months, they owned several machines in three different barber shops across Omaha. They sold the business later in the year for $1,200 to a war veteran. ... In high school, he invested in a busin...
Were long-standing research problems actually ever presented at IMO? AFAIK, problems featured there already have solutions.
I feel like I'm missing context. Why did this community come to care about blackmail laws in the first place?
I'm so confused. How did Luna survive the Killing Curse?
Same way she avoided getting stunned in her duels.
I think Wanda was in front of her, so she got hit, and Luna pretended to die.
Great observation! I was struggling with the same issue when I moved from studying math to graduate ML research. Depth-first search is the right approach to reading a math textbook. Say, you started to learn homology theory and realized you don't know what's an Abelian group. You should stop and go read about Abelian groups, or you won't understand what comes next.
However, the same approach was getting me in trouble when trying to understand state-of-the-art in voice processing. I would start reading an article in the morning, and by the evening I'd ...
Do you know anyone who wants such a forum?
Cheers to simon, ericf and myself, for offering an optimal solution! And cheers to abstractapplic for organizing the challenge.
The leaderboard (if you're not here, I couldn't figure out what your final decision was, or you added more than 10 points):
simon, ericf 0.9375
[('CHA', 8), ('CON', 15), ('DEX', 13), ('INT', 13), ('STR', 8), ('WIS', 15)]
seed 0.9375
[('CHA', 8), ('CON', 14), ('DEX', 13), ('INT', 13), ('STR', 8), ('WIS', 16)]
Samuel Clamons 0.8095
[('CHA', 8), ('CON', 17), ('DEX', 13), ('INT', 13), ('STR', 7), ('WIS', 14)]
Asgard 0.7857&n...
I wonder if it has something to do with age-related hearing loss. I remember when I was a teen, rock music sounded like antimelodic screeching to me too, but I listened because my friends liked it, and I liked the lyrics. Now the same songs sound like legit music to me. Maybe it's because our hearing range shrinks with age, so the high-pitched sounds become quieter and the song doesn't sound like screeching anymore.
CHA+4, STR+2, WIS+4
Is it a secret / part of the puzzle, where this data came from?
Do adventurers gain additional status points during their Great Quest, and if yes, are these stats measured at the beginning or at the end of their quest?
Is this data from some real Dungeons and Dragons game results?
This was very funny and the best HPMOR continuation I've read so far.
If OP was geniunely curious, she could've looked for evidence beyond her personal feelings (e.g. ran an internet survey) and / or asked Kat privately. What OP did here is called "concern trolling".