I meant use LW instead of trying to start a new site that duplicates (and competes with) its function. LW is the place people post those alignment idea; why try to compete with it?
Maybe that’s what you meant. It should be possible to do another site that searches and cross-references LW posts.
To some extent, this functionality is already provided by recent LLMs; you can ask them what posts on LW cover ideas, and they’ve got decent answers.
Improving that functionality or just spreading the idea that you’re wasting your time if you write up your idea before doing a bunch of LLM queries and deep research reports. Just searches typically don’t work to surface similar ideas since the terminology is usually completely different even between ideas that are essentially exactly the same.
Yeah. One thing is I think this would be valuable for topics other than just alignment, but if the idea works well there wouldn’t be a reason not to have LW have it’s own version or have tight coupling with search and cross reference of LW posts.
wasting your time if you write up your idea before doing a bunch of LLM queries and deep research reports
This is another idea I dislike. I feel like I am more conscientious about this problem than other people and so in the past I would put a lot of effort into researching before expressing my own views. I think this had 3 negative effects. (1) Often I would get exhausted and lose interest in the topic before expressing my view. If it was novel or interesting, I would never know and neither would anyone else. (2) If there were subtle interesting aspects to my original view, I risked overwriting them as I researched without noticing. I could write my views and then research and then review them, but in practice I rarely do that. (3) There is no publicly visible evidence showing that I have been heavily engaged in reading and thinking about AIA (or any of the other things I have focused on). This is bad both because other people cannot point out any misconceptions I might have, and also it is difficult to find interested people in that class or know how many of them there are.
I think people like me would find it easier to express their ideas if it was very likely it would get categorized into a proper location where any useful insight it may contain could be extracted, or referenced, and if it was purely redundant it could basically be marked as such and linked to the node representing that idea so it wouldn’t clog up the information channel but would instead provide statistics about that node and tie my identity to that node.
Just searches typically don’t work to surface similar ideas since the terminology is usually completely different even between ideas that are essentially exactly the same.
Yeah, exactly, this is a big problem and is why I want karma and intrinsic social reward motivation directing people to try to link those deeper, harder to link ideas. My view is that it shouldn’t be the platform that provides the de-duplication tools, but many different people should try building LLM bots and doing the work manually. The platform would provide the incentivization (karma, social, probably not monitary), and maybe would also provide the integrated version of the many users individually suggested links.
Understood on raising the bar for writing. I think there’s a tradeoff; you might be wasting your time but you do get the visible evidence you’ve been thinking about it (although evidence that you thought about something but didn’t bother to research others’ thinking on that topic is… questionably positive).
But sure, if that’s what you or anyone finds motivating, it would be great to get the value from that use of time by cataloguing it better.
It does need to be mostly-automated though. People with deep knowledge have little time to read let alone to aid others’ reading.
It does need to be mostly-automated though. People with deep knowledge have little time to read let alone to aid others’ reading.
Yes, exactly. I’m getting quite idealistic here, but I’m imagining it as an ecosystem.
People with deep knowledge wouldn’t need to waste their time with things that are obviously reduplication of existing ideas, but would be able to find anything novel that is currently lost in the noise.
The entry point for relative novices would be posting some question or claim (there isn’t much difference between a search to a search engine and a prompt for conversation on social media) then very low effort spiders would create potential ties between what they said and places in the many conversation graphs it could fit. This would be how a user “locates themselves” in the conversation. From this point they could start learning about the conversation graph surrounding them, navigating either by reading nearby nodes or other posts within their node, or by writing new related posts that spiders either suggest are at other locations in the graph, or suggest that are original branches off from the existing graph.
If you are interested in watching specific parts of the graph you might get notified that someone has entered your part of the graph and review their posts as written, which would let you add higher quality human links, more strongly tying them into the conversation graph. You might also decide that they are going in interesting directions, in which case you might paraphrase their idea as a genuinely original node branching off from the nearby location. You might instead decide that the spiders were mistaken about locating this person’s posting as being in the relevant part of the graph, in which case you could mark opposition to the link, weakening it and providing a negative training signal for the spiders (or other people) who suggested the link.
To some extent this is how things already work with tagging, but it really doesn’t come close to my ideals of deeply deduplicating conversations into their simplest (but fully represented) form.
Oh yeah, having it link to external resources (LW, wiki, etc...) is probably a really good idea. I’ll expand on the idea a bit and make a post for it.
I meant use LW instead of trying to start a new site that duplicates (and competes with) its function. LW is the place people post those alignment idea; why try to compete with it?
Maybe that’s what you meant. It should be possible to do another site that searches and cross-references LW posts.
To some extent, this functionality is already provided by recent LLMs; you can ask them what posts on LW cover ideas, and they’ve got decent answers.
Improving that functionality or just spreading the idea that you’re wasting your time if you write up your idea before doing a bunch of LLM queries and deep research reports. Just searches typically don’t work to surface similar ideas since the terminology is usually completely different even between ideas that are essentially exactly the same.
Yeah. One thing is I think this would be valuable for topics other than just alignment, but if the idea works well there wouldn’t be a reason not to have LW have it’s own version or have tight coupling with search and cross reference of LW posts.
This is another idea I dislike. I feel like I am more conscientious about this problem than other people and so in the past I would put a lot of effort into researching before expressing my own views. I think this had 3 negative effects. (1) Often I would get exhausted and lose interest in the topic before expressing my view. If it was novel or interesting, I would never know and neither would anyone else. (2) If there were subtle interesting aspects to my original view, I risked overwriting them as I researched without noticing. I could write my views and then research and then review them, but in practice I rarely do that. (3) There is no publicly visible evidence showing that I have been heavily engaged in reading and thinking about AIA (or any of the other things I have focused on). This is bad both because other people cannot point out any misconceptions I might have, and also it is difficult to find interested people in that class or know how many of them there are.
I think people like me would find it easier to express their ideas if it was very likely it would get categorized into a proper location where any useful insight it may contain could be extracted, or referenced, and if it was purely redundant it could basically be marked as such and linked to the node representing that idea so it wouldn’t clog up the information channel but would instead provide statistics about that node and tie my identity to that node.
Yeah, exactly, this is a big problem and is why I want karma and intrinsic social reward motivation directing people to try to link those deeper, harder to link ideas. My view is that it shouldn’t be the platform that provides the de-duplication tools, but many different people should try building LLM bots and doing the work manually. The platform would provide the incentivization (karma, social, probably not monitary), and maybe would also provide the integrated version of the many users individually suggested links.
Understood on raising the bar for writing. I think there’s a tradeoff; you might be wasting your time but you do get the visible evidence you’ve been thinking about it (although evidence that you thought about something but didn’t bother to research others’ thinking on that topic is… questionably positive).
But sure, if that’s what you or anyone finds motivating, it would be great to get the value from that use of time by cataloguing it better.
It does need to be mostly-automated though. People with deep knowledge have little time to read let alone to aid others’ reading.
Yes, exactly. I’m getting quite idealistic here, but I’m imagining it as an ecosystem.
People with deep knowledge wouldn’t need to waste their time with things that are obviously reduplication of existing ideas, but would be able to find anything novel that is currently lost in the noise.
The entry point for relative novices would be posting some question or claim (there isn’t much difference between a search to a search engine and a prompt for conversation on social media) then very low effort spiders would create potential ties between what they said and places in the many conversation graphs it could fit. This would be how a user “locates themselves” in the conversation. From this point they could start learning about the conversation graph surrounding them, navigating either by reading nearby nodes or other posts within their node, or by writing new related posts that spiders either suggest are at other locations in the graph, or suggest that are original branches off from the existing graph.
If you are interested in watching specific parts of the graph you might get notified that someone has entered your part of the graph and review their posts as written, which would let you add higher quality human links, more strongly tying them into the conversation graph. You might also decide that they are going in interesting directions, in which case you might paraphrase their idea as a genuinely original node branching off from the nearby location. You might instead decide that the spiders were mistaken about locating this person’s posting as being in the relevant part of the graph, in which case you could mark opposition to the link, weakening it and providing a negative training signal for the spiders (or other people) who suggested the link.
To some extent this is how things already work with tagging, but it really doesn’t come close to my ideals of deeply deduplicating conversations into their simplest (but fully represented) form.