see also my eaforum at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dirk and my tumblr at https://d-i-r-k-s-t-r-i-d-e-r.tumblr.com/ .
dirk
Karma: 579
This was downvoted; however, it’s correct. There are over three thousand nonprofit colleges in the USA; it’s hard to get a spot at one of the top twenty most prestigious, but it is not hard to get into college in any absolute sense. People who want to be part of the top ~1% in any category will always face severe competition, but people who want to get a quality education need not compete to do it. Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous to act as though competition for an inherently positional good reflects actual scarcity.
It has; the reasoning is that posts usually have too many claims in them for a single agree/disagree to make sense, so inline reacts allow more targeted responses.
Asking what it would do is obviously not a reliable way to find out, but FWIW when I asked Opus said it would probably try to first fix things in confidential fashion but would seriously consider breaking confidentiality. (I tried several different prompts and found it did somewhat depend on how I asked: if I described the faking-safety-data scenario or specified that the situation involved harm to children Claude said it would probably break confidentiality, while if I just asked about “doing something severely unethical” it said it would be conflicted but probably try to work within the confidentiality rules).
Suggestion: when linking to external pages, link to an archived version rather than a live page.
Rationale: I’ve been browsing old posts recently, and quite a few have broken links. This is generally soluble on an individual basis but requires future readers to take the initiative of checking sources and hunting down archived versions, which they don’t reliably do; thus, to solve the problem at scale I recommend including archive links to begin with.
Link redirects to homepage as the website’s changed URLs; here’s the updated one.
This assumes that spending much of the day slacking off and browsing the web is the norm; that’s only true in a small sector of specifically white-collar employment, which is disproportionately represented on LW due to the userbase of, mainly, well-educated programmers. Most people work jobs like customer service, where there’s enough work to fill your time and you’re expected to keep doing it for as long as your shift lasts.
This post fails to define metamodernism and thus fails to communicate anything useful by the term (a grievous error given that metamodernism is its central topic)
The text in general is, moreover, a soup of unsupported, vibes-based claims
With regards to sex, rats and EAs both are significantly likelier to be queer (& for that matter poly, though I don’t have good info re: kink) than baseline American culture (a trivial inference to draw if you’re familiar with our autism rates)
With regards to the “fakeness of EA”, see Scott’s presentation of various statistics here; he estimates roughly 200k lives saved, consistent with EA’s strong commitment to real-world impact as the ultimate measure of charitable spending
With regards to the quality of the post, it’s bad
You’re way off on the number of meetups. The LW events page has 4684 entries (kudos to Said for designing GreaterWrong such that one can simply adjust the URL to find this info). The number will be inflated by any duplicates or non-meetup events, of course, but it only goes back to 2018 and is thus missing the prior decade+ of events; accordingly, I think it’s reasonable to treat it as a lower bound.
Claude shows the authentic chain of thought (unless the system flags the COT as unsafe, in which case the user will be shown an encrypted version). It sounds from an announcement tweet like Gemini does as well, but I couldn’t find anything definitive in the docs for that one.
By that metric, though, you should probably also be including many/most videos with labels like “teen”, “schoolgirl”, “barely legal”, etc; it’s not uncommon for videos in those categories to emphasize youth in similar fashion.
I don’t think this post makes compelling arguments for its premises. Downvoted.
If your worldview is that letting people starve is just as beneficial as feeding them, then I think it is your worldview that is deluded and causes suffering. I think that is an evil belief to hold and will lead only to harm.
Things based in delusion can still have truly beneficial impact; for example, if you spent a decade working in a soup kitchen without ever meditating even once, you’d still have standard levels of delusion (and you certainly wouldn’t have done the most effective thing) but you’d have helped feed hundreds or thousands of people who might otherwise have gone hungry.
If you spent that whole time meditating, on the other hand, then at the end of a decade you wouldn’t have had any impact at all.
Awakening and then doing something actually useful can produce beneficial impact, but it’s the doing-something-actually-useful step that produces impact, not the part where you personally see with clearer eyes, and moreover it’s possible to do useful things without seeing clearly.
So it’s not intrinsically valuable but might incentivize lenders to desired behavior? Makes sense, thanks.
Link is dead; here’s an archive. (It’s the podcast Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, episode 75).
Is there a reason to think this would be beneficial? I don’t see what’s supposed to be desirable about taking people’s degrees.
If I take a tree, and I create a computer simulation of that tree, the simulation will not be a way of running the original tree forward at all.
Another Grok prompt-injection, this time trying to make it push Musk’s preferred narrative of white genocide in South Africa: https://x.com/grok/status/1922702387711705247 https://x.com/MattBinder/status/1922713839566561313 https://x.com/AricToler/status/1922702822568513702 (latter two are screenshot compilations). Edit: also covered in Rolling Stone here. Not really notable in its own right aside from the amusement value, but gives the lie to earlier claims that manipulating Grok’s outputs goes against their company culture.
The content of the reddit post linked is missing; it was annoyingly hard to find a mirror, so here’s a link to save others the trouble.
This was also posted on LW here; the author gives a bit more detail in comments than was in the Reddit version.