Sometimes I comment here.
Alex Power
Karma: 43
So I wrote a Substack post “Contra LessWrong on AGI”, which some of you might be interested in: https://www.newslettr.com/p/contra-lesswrong-on-agi
Don’t call them “bots”, call them “toons”.
Gestalt means “an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts”. It is something like that; but sometimes more and sometimes less. The best way to describe it is the operation on a vector-based NLP system that takes {cat|dog} and returns “domestic pet”.
There is a bit of a trick with the first example, {take a card|take a page} and “take a {card|page}” may mean something different.
For the second example, setting up a fork of Debian and setting up a mirror of Debian look very similar up to a certain point, but very different after that point. The term is intended to refer only to the attributes during the timeframe where they look similar.
“Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.”—August Strindberg
A literary work in hypertext. I’m not sure I even know how to describe it.
I’ve called this the “phlogiston” theory of obesity—something systemic and undetected is at work.
It’s not necessarily wrong, there’s certainly some evidence that the same behavior 100 years ago would have had different results. On the other hand, the general alleviation of poverty and famines, as well as the presence of “hyper-processed” foods like Oreos are certainly part of the reason and are largely ignored.
If I had to guess what the “phlogiston” is, I would guess CO2 concentration. I don’t have any evidence whatsoever, but it’s a politically-convenient theory and the timing mostly works.
My longer-form thoughts are at Substack.
Because it’s political. Some people are invested in Ivermectin being effective, other people are invested in it not being effective. The extant studies are all inconclusive due to a small N, and mostly have problems with their methodology; if you pick and choose your studies in the right way you can get whatever result you want.
And the individual studies are often extremely bad. I note Cadegiani et al, who claim that Ivermectin (and also Hydroxychloroquine, and also Nitazoxanide) are each so effective, either individually or combined (they didn’t bother to track which patients got which drugs) that it is unethical to use a placebo group in studying those drugs. I’m not sure how Elsevier can be affiliated with a journal that publishes material like that and retain any credibility.
The answers suggesting “this shouldn’t be a test you can study for” seem very misguided. This is a yellow belt, not a black belt. If you think you can become a card-carrying Rationalist without studying books, you are mistaken.
I would expect a battery of short-answer questions, maybe 6 hours/75 questions. Prove the Pythagorean Theorem. What is Bayes’ Theorem? Is Pascal’s Wager accurate? What impact do human emotions have in decision making? If humans evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys? Was George Washington a myth?
There is an aesthetic desire for a more flashy test, a gom jabbar for the rationalist. I would expect that would be an intermediate test between the yellow belt and the black belt. The various “Explain this mysterious system” questions are good, so I’ll suggest some puzzle where “what do you think you know and why do you think you know it” is the key to the solution.
I do need to explicitly call out one point here. Making edits to an existing page is often ignored. Creating a new page is always reviewed by somebody; and there is a consistent backlog due to a lack of volunteers to do the reviewing. As a result, many promising stub articles are treated quickly and poorly. There’s no solution here other than to find more reviewers (which does take quite a bit of project-specific knowledge; you need to understand reference formatting, categories, article structure, etc.).
You’re absolutely correct that the page should have been made into a redirect rather than turned into a draft. Mistakes happen; you can fix it.
Regarding WELLBY specifically:
Technically, your content wasn’t “deleted”, it was “draftified”. This can fairly be called an arcane technical detail.
The important difference is that you can click a button to ask someone else to review the removal.
The second issue is that the only source is the 2021 World Happiness Report itself, which appears to have invented the term. If a term is recently invented and hasn’t been discussed by anyone else, it will not have a stand-alone Wikipedia article. (you can complain about “notability” if you want, to somebody else). The term is discussed in the article on the World Happiness Report. Why aren’t you happy with that?
There are frequent complaints (here and elsewhere) that Wikipedia editing has gatekeepers. And if you want to edit the article on Donald Trump, change the history of the Troubles in Ireland, or claim something about who owns the Spratly Islands, there are gatekeepers. If you want to work on the vast swaths of the encyclopedia that aren’t complete and aren’t hot political topics, it’s rare that you will come across any response to your edits at all.
I think there’s a logical error. You claim to be deducing “IF route FAST is taken THEN I will arrive at 3pm”, but what you should actually be deducing is “IF route SLOW is taken THEN (IF route FAST is taken THEN I will arrive at 3pm)”. What you end up with is proving that “route SLOW is taken” is logically equivalent to “IF route FAST is taken THEN I will arrive at 3pm AND IF route SLOW is taken THEN I will arrive at 2pm”, but neither of them are proved.
No, “raising awareness” is not a solution. Saying “all we need is awareness” is a lazy copout, somewhere between an appeal to magic and a pyramid scheme.
If other people here agree with this, I will have to add it to https://www.newslettr.com/p/contra-lesswrong-on-agi