I didn't like the new feed until I found the Source Weights sliders and was able to upweight Recent Comments and Latest Posts to 50, restoring some of the old behavior. But I think I still prefer the old interface. Not sure yet if I'll keep this opinion or learn to interact with LW in some other way.
I liked reading recent comments because
- they're highly diverse, which is what I'm looking for when I scroll LW (when I want to focus I do something else, like pull up a tag for lit review or read all the comments on a thread)
- Also I can't help but feel like in an algorithmically curated feed my brain is constantly being manipulated in ways I can't control
- I know I'm not missing anything. Twitter is an endless sea which sends me endless flotsam, and is thus frustrating to interact with. On Reddit every good post is likely to make it to the front page. On LW every post with good discussion has a high volume of good comments, so one can randomly sample using recent comments.
- they're fresh, so when I reply I'm likely to get more engagement, whereas I don't know what discussions to participate in in a way that gets engagement from the current opaque feed structure.
I also think the interface could be improved a bit. This one took up a huge amount of vertical space on my screen and I didn't understand any of the three comments, nor were they relevant to me. Many of the comments are only understandable with context from a parent one is unlikely to read, so these should either be filtered out or just take up less space.
To clarify I'm not very confident that AI will be aligned; I still have a >5% p(takeover doom | 10% of AI investment is spent on safety). I'm not really sure why it feels different emotionally but I guess this is just how brains are sometimes.
I'm glad to see this post come out. I've previously opined that solving these kinds of problems is what proves a field has become paradigmatic:
Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. ––Thomas Kuhn
It has been proven many times across scientific fields that a method that can solve these proxy tasks is more likely to achieve an application. The approaches sketched out here seem like a particularly good fit for a large lab like GDM, because the North Star can be somewhat legible and the team has enough resources to tackle a series of proxy tasks that are relevant and impressive. Not that it would be a bad fit elsewhere either.
And in terms of communication costs (which are paid at the synaptic junction for the synapse -> dendrite -> soma path), that 1e5 eV is only enough to carry a reliable 1 bit signal only about ~100mm (1e5 nm) distance through irreversible wires (the wire bit energy for axons/dendrites and modern cmos is about the same).
This model of interconnect energy has been thoroughly debunked here, as coax cables violate it by a factor of 200: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fm88c8SvXvemk3BhW/brain-efficiency-cannell-prize-contest-award-ceremony
If it applies in the specific cases of axons and cmos there should be justification of why it does, though given the amount of prior discussion I don't think this would be fruitful.
Meta-assassination markets: is it a terrible idea to start a prediction market “Will any would-be assassin of me be caught and themselves assassinated before end of 2030, AND I survive 2030” and take a big short position? The market terms will say it also resolves no if there is collusion between the assassin and meta-assassin or the same person hired both.
I will expect to lose a small amount of money to incentivize meta-assassins, which will disincentivize assassins. However the largest advantage is that I would personally derive joy from this, as long as it doesn't increase my risk.
Dynamic pricing is reducing consumer surplus, and in the limit of perfect AI pricing algorithms and no competition it would go to zero. If most nonfungible goods were subject to perfect price discrimination, what would the world look like? I genuinely have little idea.
There must be increased firm profits but consumer surplus will only come from commodities. So even the firm owners have nothing to spend their wealth on that actually gives them >ε utility more than sitting at home, making sandwiches from commodity bread and cheese and watching commodity TV.
- Does economic growth continue to happen or does it all get eaten by advertising or something?
- If so does consumer utility increase, and by what mechanism? Does everyone have so much money to spend on commodities that they become incredibly high quality and other goods have to drop in price?
I wonder if most of the population accepts these as valid reasons. I don't feel much jealousy and fear it's ruining my dating prospects to even be open to poly, even though it's plausible that I would rarely or never date additional people
Seems difficult for three reasons:
- Many other companies are trying to build an AGI so a company trying to do this would have to first win the race and disempower everyone else; this means they will have fewer resources for safety
- The AI will have to act antagonistically to humanity, so it could not be at all corrigible
- The AI will need to act correctly until 2125, which is much farther out of distribution than any AI we have observed
Given these difficulties I'd put it below 50/50, but this challenge seems significantly harder than the one I think we will actually face, which is more like having an AI we can defer to that doesn't try to sabotage the next stage of AI research, for each stage until the capability level that COULD disempower 2025 humanity, plus maybe other things to keep the balance of power stable.
Also I'm not sure what "drawn from the same distribution" means here, AI safety is trying dozens of theoretical and empirical directions, plus red teaming and model organisms can get much more elaborate with impractical resource investments, so things will look very qualitatively different in a couple of decades.
Just how expensive are missiles and how bad is NATO at producing them? This article claims that the US navy has 10,000 VLS cells but only about 17,000 missiles (mostly the small SM-2 type), meaning the entire fleet couldn't be reloaded even once after depleting their magazines.
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Don't exactly disagree but there's a difference between Starship landing reliably and scaling up vs truly being "finished".
$15/kg basically requires airline-like operations (keeping total operational cost to 3-4x fuel cost) while maintaining a 4% payload fraction. I don't think the next version of Starship is capable of this due to the sheer number of kinks to work out to get the number of maintenance items down to ~0 per launch, so the first time it could happen is with a later version of Starship similar to what happened with the Falcon 9 Block 5, which took 8 years after the first Falcon 9 launch and had almost 2x the payload. Also possible that it requires a complete redesign (9 meter -> 12 meter diameter, new engines) or future advances in e.g. TPS material, or doesn't happen until all the maintenance is automated.