LessWrong Team
Ruby
I’d be interested in a comparison with the Latest tab.
Typo? Do you mean “click on Recommended”? I think the answer is no, in order to have recommendations for individuals (and everyone), they have browsing data.
1) LessWrong itself doesn’t aim for a super high degree of infosec. I don’t believe our data is sensitive to warrant large security overhead.
2) I trust Recombee with our data about as much as our trust ourselves to not have a security breach. Maybe actually I could imagine LessWrong being of more interest to someone or some group and getting attacked.
It might help to understand what your specific privacy concerns are.
Take the wheel, Shoggoth! (Lesswrong is trying out changes to the frontpage algorithm)
Hard to answer without knowing your background. I might try online courses or ask Chat-GPT here for advice.
Curated. It’s a funny thing how fiction can sharpen our predictions, at least fiction that’s aiming to be at least plausible in some world model. Perhaps it’s the exercise of playing our models forwards in detail rather than isolated abstracted predictions. This is a good example. Even if it seems implausible, noting why is interesting. Curating, and I hope to see more of these built on differing assumptions and reaching different places. Cheers.
Curated. Beyond the object level arguments for how to do plots here that are pretty interesting, I like this post for the periodic reminder/extra evidence that relatively “minor” details in how information is presented can nudge/bias interpretation and understanding.
I think the claims around bordering lines become strongly true if there were established convention, and more weakly so the way currently are. Obviously one ought to be conscious in reading and creating graphs for whether 0 is included.
Jobs, Relationships, and Other Cults
I’d be pretty interested in the non-cartoonish version, also from people who are more competent and savvy.
For balanced feedback, I enjoyed the choice of diction, and particularly those two words.
Trivia: in racetracks, a “chicane” is a random “unnecessary” kink or twist inserted to make it more complicated (and more challenging/fun).
My understanding is commitment is you say that won’t swerve first in a game of chicken. Pre-commitment is throwing your steering wheel out the window so that there’s no way that you could swerve even if you changed your mind.
Sparsity seems like maybe a relevant keyword.
I feel like marring the reputation of a person in response to wrongdoing has a very important basic purpose for warning other people about interacting with the wrongdoer, i.e. Sarah Smith is dishonest, so don’t trust things she says to be true. This is valuable in worlds where everyone is already a fixed truth-teller/liar and everybody has fixed values.
I like the content/concept here but feel “curse of doom” doesn’t communicate the idea very well. This does seem like effectively a curse of dimensionality though? (Perhaps that’s what inspired this name). Not sure of “Pareto Best of the Curse of Dimensionality” is the right name, but I think it gets at the idea better than generic “doom”.
Curated. This post feels to me like a kind of a survey of the mental skills and properties people do/don’t have for effectiveness, of which I don’t recall any other examples right now, and so is quite interesting. I think it’s both interesting from allowing someone to ask themselves if they’re weak on any of these, but also helpful in modeling others and answering questions of the sort “why don’t people just X?”. For all that we spend a tonne of time interacting with people, people’s internal mental lives are private, and so much like shower habits (I’m told) vary a lot more than externally observable behaviors.
I would like to see the “scope sensitivity” piece fleshed out more. I can see how it applies to eliminating annoyances that take 10 minutes every day and add up, but I don’t think that’s at the heart of rationality. I’d be curious how much mileage someone gets from just reflection on their own mind, and how much that can be done without invoking numeracy.
The “context window” analogy for human minds
Throughput vs. Latency
Taking responsibility and partial derivatives
The proper response to mistakes that have harmed others?
It does, quite a bit! Definitely speeds me up somewhere between 20% and 100% depending on task. And I think it’s a bigger deal for those now working on code and who are newer to it.
Over the years the idea of a closed forum for more sensitive discussion has been raised, but never seemed to quite make sense. Significant issues included:
- It seems really hard or impossible to make it secure from nation state attacks
- It seems that members would likely leak stuff (even if it’s via their own devices not being adequately secure or what)
I’m thinking you can get some degree of inconvenience (and therefore delay), but hard to have large shared infrastructure that’s that secure from attack.