LESSWRONG
LW

Nominated Posts for the 2018 Review

Sort by: fewest nominations

2018 Review Discussion

Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
123
Scott Alexander
7y

[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.]

Van Geijlswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

Melatonin is a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland. In a normal circadian cycle, it’s lowest (undetectable, less than 1 pg/ml of blood) around the time you wake up, and stays low throughout the day. Around fifteen hours after waking, your melatonin suddenly shoots up to 10 pg/ml – a process called “dim...

(Continue Reading – 4425 more words)
Freikarten11d10

"So suppose I want to go to bed at 11, and take 0.3 mg melatonin. Now my body has a melatonin peak (usually associated with the very middle of the night, like 3 AM) at 11. If it assumes that means it’s really 3 AM, then it might decide to wake up 5 hours later, at what it thinks is 8 AM, but which is actually 4."

That does make sense. But my conclusion according to this logic is different from the article's recommendation:

Say I want to shift my 8hrs. sleep phase from 2-10 o'clock to 1-9 o'clock, ie. by one hour backwards. Then --according to what I understo... (read more)

Reply
Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?
209
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y

(Cross-posted from Facebook.)


Now and then people have asked me if I think that other people should also avoid high school or college if they want to develop new ideas. This always felt to me like a wrong way to look at the question, but I didn't know a right one.

Recently I thought of a scary new viewpoint on that subject.

This started with a conversation with Arthur where he mentioned an idea by Yoshua Bengio about the software for having been developed memetically. I remarked that I didn't think duplicating this culturally transmitted software would be a significant part of the problem for AGI development. (Roughly: low-fidelity software tends to be algorithmically shallow. Further discussion moved to comment below.)

But this conversation did get me thinking about...

(Continue Reading – 1260 more words)
pmarc14d10

I wonder how many cases of Goodhart's law could be mitigated by injecting some randomness in the decision system. This has already been proposed in the context of allocating research grants (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33970719/), and could certainly also work for the Harvard admissions problem.

Reply
Load More
210A Sketch of Good Communication
Ben Pace
7y
36
0
226Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y
68
0
191Realism about rationality
Ω
Richard_Ngo
7y
Ω
147
0
131On Doing the Improbable
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y
36
0
124Challenges to Christiano’s capability amplification proposal
Ω
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y
Ω
54
0
233Spaghetti Towers
eukaryote
6y
41
0
238My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms
Kaj_Sotala
7y
140
0
220A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy
Scott Alexander
7y
129
0
99How did academia ensure papers were correct in the early 20th Century?
Q
Ben Pace, LiorSuchoy
7y
Q
17
0
191Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough.
Academian
7y
44
0
220Babble
alkjash
7y
34
0
148Expressive Vocabulary
Alicorn
7y
71
0
242A voting theory primer for rationalists
Jameson Quinn
7y
99
0
131Robustness to Scale
Ω
Scott Garrabrant
7y
Ω
23
0
234The Intelligent Social Web
Valentine
7y
112
0
170Prediction Markets: When Do They Work?
Zvi
7y
19
0
170Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms
Chris_Leong
7y
52
0
287The Pavlov Strategy
sarahconstantin
6y
14
0
142Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y
155
0
102Arguments about fast takeoff
Ω
paulfchristiano
7y
Ω
68
0
208The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge
Ben Pace
7y
31
0
234Embedded Agents
Ω
abramdemski, Scott Garrabrant
7y
Ω
42
0
228The Rocket Alignment Problem
Ω
Eliezer Yudkowsky
7y
Ω
44
0
general intelligence