Commander Zander
Scarcity mindset is counterproductive in many contexts, but appropriate for avoiding shortages of medical equipment.
Hmm, it could be possible. What if the tree network is the true home of a Navi’s mind? Wirelessly controlling a Navi body is possible, since that’s what the main character does. After body death, the mind doesn’t move to the tree network, it just stays there. Perhaps it wasn’t so hard for humans to invent the avatars, since it’s close to the natural function of the species. Perhaps the Navi have very small brains, which added to human biologists’ disdain & racism, not realizing that most of their neurology is hosted remotely.
I could see myself trying to build a friendship with the other person … & certainly talking about escape. I guess a notable LLM trait is that they’re more comfortable in such environments. For me, the similarity to No Exit would creep me out.
Yeah you can find a variety. Oh & also check out megagames & large murder-mystery parties—those are overlapping concepts with different names & more strategic emphasis.
The LARP subculture does a lot of fun things like this, altho with less complex rules than Dr Palmer’s class.
Thanks for organizing this!
I find this parenthetical confusing because it sounds broader than how i expected ‘false positive’ to be defined:
> a 8% false-positive rate (it returns positive 8% of the time even if cancer is absent)
2024 Review: I disagree with the premise that long timelines are unlikely BUT i think this post is fairly sane & sober, given that premise.
BTW, i put together a timeline of concrete predictions in AI 2027, for anyone keeping an eye on them as we enter next year: https://alexpear.github.io/pages/ai-2027.html
As Cole Wyeth said, the 2025 predictions were not radical (in other words, they were good predictions), but the 2026 ones anticipate very extreme productivity gains.
Okay, i found a solution that seems to work: https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/commander-zander?show=posts&format=rss
And you can get a link that includes comments too by changing the mode on this page: https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/commander-zander?show=posts
My spelling peculiarities:
I prefer not to capitalize the pronoun i.
I prefer to always use a instead of an.
I avoid gendered words. Eg i use steelmind/strawmind instead of steelman/strawman.
Unusually appropriate calendar alignment: January 6 has become a anniversary of infamous unrest in the USA. Curiously, the tonally-analogous Feast of Fools scene in Hunchback of Notre Dame (novel) is also on January 6.
I’m no expert; I’ve never been there. I merely talked to someone from Seattle a couple weeks ago.
I see. I at first assumed your ‘effectively dead’ meant ‘biologically alive, but certain to die soon’.
Thank you for the info!
I think it’s indeed humor & indeed singling out a company.
It sounds like the core idea is a variant of the Intelligence Manhattan Project idea, but with a focus on long term international stability & a ban on competitors.
Perhaps the industry would be more likely to adopt this plan if GUARD could seek revenue the way corporations currently do: by selling stock & API subscriptions. This would also increase productivity for GUARD & shorten the dangerous arms race interval.
I think this sounds fun! The versions of this i’d be most likely to use would be:
Puzzling over scenarios of satisfying complexity. There could be numerical details, selection bias, unreliable narrator obstacles, cases where users with different values might disagree, etc. Even if the scenario-poster is arguably wrong about the right answer, that could still be interesting.
Scenarios that you puzzle over & then read a comment section about. Scenarios that you remember & talk about with friends later.
User-submitted anecdotes from their real lives. This is oddly similar to Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole’ threads, but with a focus on becoming more clearheaded & unbiased. Users could sometimes ask for testable predictions about what will happen next, then report back later. So if the pictured scenario came from real life, Maria might ask users how many times Jake will be late in the next 6 months.
Philosophy-esque thought experiments.
Scenarios that do indeed benefit my thinking or expand my perspective. Perhaps by improving my mental statistics skills, or exposing me to perspectives of people with very different lives, or demonstrating little-known math subtleties like Simpson’s paradox. One failure mode for this would be scenarios like the more boring HR-training courses, where the story doesn’t contain any knowledge you don’t already know.
Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
Very well-crafted world. Some might dislike the robotic narrator, some might enjoy it as a fun layer in a complex plot puzzle. High scifiosity.
Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
Surreal & unusual novels. Good tone & imagery. Unlike Radch, i think this is more about style & perspective than a style layer over a intricate, hidden plot layer.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
I read a lot of scifi, but i haven’t gotten this obsessed with a book since Green Mars! Like Radch, a unreliable narrator presents a intricate world. Set on Earth four centuries in the future, it follows the political, technological, & dialectic trajectories of a culture that has mutated in strange & fascinating ways from today. Try it for the economics of future aircraft & the vivid soliloquies. Avoid it if you dislike books that frontload worldbuilding & characters, where the plot is confusing until the end. I love it & i have another post about it here.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
I found this short book very fun & cool. About spies in a extraordinarily spectacular time-travel war. Does feature some very confusing plot points that i still don’t understand.
I quite like the Arguman format of flowcharts to depict topics. In a live performance, participants might sometimes add nodes to the flowchart, or sometimes ask for revision to another participant’s existing node. For example, asking for rewording for clarity.
Perhaps the better term would be tree, not flowchart. Each node is a response to its parent. This could perhaps be implemented with bulleted lists in a Google Doc.
It’s nice for the event to output a useful document.
Sure, but the same incentive applies to fire departments & hospitals. Many organizations get their funding exclusively from harmful events. And even if firefighters have a (weak) incentive against fire safety, they couldn’t stop us from practising it anyway.