Great post; I thought that there were some pretty bad interpretations of the METR result and wanted to write an article like this one (but didn't have the time). I'm glad to see the efficient lesswrong ideas market at work :)

(to their credit, I think METR mostly presented their results honestly.)

Hate to be that person, but is that April 18th deadline AoE/PDT/a secret third thing?

I don't think you're supposed to get the virtue of Void, if you got it, it wouldn't void anymore, would it?

If people outside of labs are interested in doing this, I think it'll be cool to look for cases of scheming in evals like The Agent Company, where they have an agent act as a remote worker for a company. They ask the agent to complete a wide range of tasks (e.g., helping with recruiting, messaging coworkers, writing code). 

You could imagine building on top of their eval and adding morally ambiguous tasks, or just look through the existing transcripts to see if there's anything interesting there (the paper mentions that models would sometimes "deceive" itself into thinking that it's completed a task (see pg. 13). Not sure how interesting this is, but I'd love to see if someone could find out). 

One thing not mentioned here (and I think should be talked about more) is that the naturally occurring genetic distribution is very unequal in a moral sense. A more egalitarian society would put a stop to Eugenics Performed by a Blind, Idiot God. 

Have your doctor ever asked about if you have a family history of [illness]? For so many diseases, if your parents have it, you're more likely to have it, and your kids are more likely to have it. These illnesses plague families for generations. 

I have a higher than average chance of getting hypertension. Without technology, so will my future kids. With gene editing, we can just stop that, once and for all. A just world is a world where no child is born predetermined to endure avoidable illness simply because of ancestral bad luck.

I'm not sure if the rationalists did anything they shouldn't do re: Ziz. Going forward though, I think epistemic learned helplessness/memetic immune systems should be among the first things to introduce to newcomers to the site/community. Being wary that some ideas are, in a sense, out to get you, is a central part of how I process information. 

Not exactly sure how to implement that recommendation though. You also don't want people to use it as a fully general counterargument to anything they don't like. 

Ranting a bit here, but it just feels like the collection of rationalist thought is so complex and, even with the various attempts at organizing everything. Thinking well is hard, and involves many concepts, and we haven't figured it all out yet! It's kind of sad to see journalists trying to understand the rationalist community and TDT.

Another thing that comes to mind is the FAIR site (formerly mormon apologetics), where members of the latter day saints church tries to correct various misconceptions people have about the church.^[1] There's a ton of writing on there, and provides an example of how people have tried to, uh, improve their PR through writing stuff online to clear up misconceptions. 

And did it work? I suspect it probably had a small positive effect. I know very little about this, but my hunch would be that the popularity of mormons comes from having lots of them everywhere in society, and people get to meet them and realize that those people are pretty nice.

(See also Scott Alexander's book review on The Secrets to Our Success)

Why are people so bad at reasoning? For the same reason they’re so bad at letting poisonous spiders walk all over their face without freaking out. Both “skills” are really bad ideas, most of the people who tried them died in the process, so evolution removed those genes from the population, and successful cultures stigmatized them enough to give people an internalized fear of even trying.

1. ^{^}

   They also provide various evidence for their faith. The one I find particularly funny concerns whether Joseph Smith could have written the book of mormon. It states that Smith (1) had limited education (2) was not a writer and that (3) the book of mormon was very long and had 258k words. 
   
   This calls to mind a certain other author, with limited formal education, little fiction writing experience, non-mainstream sexual preferences, and also wrote a very long book (660k words!) that reached many people in the world who ended up finding him very convincing... 

You link a comment by clicking the timestamp next to the username (which, now that I say it, does seem quite unintuitive... Maybe it should also be possible via the three dots on the right side).

While this post didn't yield a comprehensive theory of how fact finding works in neural networks, it's filled with small experimental results that I find useful for building out my own intuitions around neural network computation.

I think that's speaks to how well these experiments are scoped out that even a set of not-globally-coherent findings yield useful information. 

So I think the first claim here is wrong. 

Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc.

If you want to master something, you should do things that causally/counter factually increase your ability (in the order of most to least cost-effective). You should adopt interventions that actually make you better compared to the case that you haven't done them. 

Any intervention could have different treatment effects on some people versus others. In other words, maybe spending a lot of time around other adults worked for those children, but it might not work for your child. Just like how penicillin helps in people who don't have an allergic reaction to them. 

With that out of the way though, I thought this is a super cool post and is one of those lesswrong posts that I remember after reading it once. I think a huge part of the value is just opening up the space of possibilities we can imagine for children. 

In other words, I think the post detailed a set of interventions that potentially have a positive treatment effect and seem worthy to try. Absent this post, I might not have came up with these interventions myself (or, more likely, I would have to go through the trouble of doing the research the author did). Thanks for sharing these stories!