Perhaps just [Shard theory alignment requires “magic”] to indicate that the word is used in a different way?
lise
Karma: 65
“Making the pie bigger” feels to me simply like there’s more stuff (= wealth?) to choose from. If everything would cost money, that would mean you have more options to spend your money on, either because new things are invented or because existing things get cheaper so you have to spend less of your money on them.
(commenting just to say I upvoted for the “horribly confusing” line)
Agreed with the overall point in this post that there is value in reframing and rediscovery. However,
the tendency of LW bloggers to rediscover ideas of famous philosophers and pretend that they discovered it first
consists of two points and I think the second one also deserves some consideration.
I don’t agree with the framing of pretense—if you don’t know about the earlier idea, you probably sincerely think you discovered it. But if such a “discovery” turns out to be a reframing after all, I think there is also a lot of value to be had in pointing this out: to integrate the idea in the common web of knowledge, to make clear to others that the idea exists in another form that they might already know or that might help to deepen their understanding.
So I would urge readers (or posters themselves) to please do keep pointing these correspondences out; in a spirit of helpfulness, of course, not as a ‘gotcha’.
If there isn’t, you could use a Nitter mirror & pull its RSS feed.
epistemic status: haven’t read “The Sense of Style” but I did read “Clear and Simple as the Truth”
I generally agree with your points on the consequences of using classic style & I like this post for naming and explaining them. But I don’t think classic style is bad in principle; rather, it’s bad in certain contexts (like on the LessWrong forum, but not e.g. in fiction books or manuals), and I wish you had more explicitly stated those contexts in which you think it is bad.
I specifically do not agree with your beef with the word “rationalizing”. For me (a non-native English speaker) it has a very clear meaning: it is related to “rational”, but adding the suffix -izing indicates that it means to [try to make something rational], just like “commoditizing” means to [try to make something a commodity]. Whether or not you succeed in doing so is another question. These kinds of relationships between words make a lot of sense and I think that they generally disambiguate, not confuse.
Words like to/two/too are a different case which I have no strong opinions on.
Meta level answer: I like the spotlights. Don’t always click on them but they also function as reminders that these topics exist & I can read more about them if I want to. Plus, I find them aesthetically pleasing on the page.
I like what you did there.
...but the fact that I (think that I) understand this post & can use this to my advantage — instead of going through the entire lengthy process of failing to convey wisdom on my own — means that you can unzip wisdom. At least a little. :)
I disagree that filtering the AI tag would accomplish this, at least for my purposes.
The thing about Alignment Forum crossposts is that they’re usually quite technical & focused purely on AI, containing the bulk of things I don’t want to see. The rest of the AI tag however often contains ideas about the human brain, analogies with the real world, and other content that I find interesting, even though the post ultimately ties those ideas back into an AI framing.
So a separate filter for this would be useful IMO.
Tiny Feature Request:
I like that there’s a “crossposted to the EA Forum; click to see comments” message on crossposts. I would like it even more though if it actually sent me to the post’s comments section if I click it. (But maybe that’s just me?)
I don’t know whether this is exactly what you meant by “missing insights”, but I’ve noticed that I use search way less than I should, in my own notes & resources as well as in web search engines.
In the case of my own notes, adding more SRS cards usually fixes this: if I’ve been actively learning cards on some concept, I often do remember that I have resources related to that concept I can check when it comes up.
In the case of the web… well, this is an ongoing process. There have been whole subdomains of my life where it hadn’t occurred to me that those are also things you can simply look up if you want. I’ve been trying to notice the moment where I realize I don’t know something, in order to trigger the “so I should Google it” action, but it takes time.
Also reminds me of the Thrive-Survive spectrum.
Apparently spreading “fake news” about the military will soon carry a prison term of max. 15 years. (The Russian parliament passed a bill a few hours ago, which could be signed into law as soon as Saturday.)
It is unclear to me how easy it is get the full 15 years and how much of the law only applies to news about the military.
This seems a useful distinction to make. I think your terms also make sense, as this was indeed the kind-of-thing I expected them to distinguish between when reading the title.
I do want to note that discussions about summit-seeking might include mountaineering considerations. If the price to get to the new equilibrium is very high, this could lead one to decide not to aim for this equilibrium at all, even though the equilibrium itself (the summit) is good in other dimensions.
Maybe this is already what you’re pointing at when you mention the “feasibility” of an equilibrium, but I think it’s worth stating explicitly.
Thanks for writing it up! I don’t know if I buy the human caregiver model, as OP said above, but I do like this way of thinking about it. Esp. the zone of proximal development thing is interesting, and for some reason I hadn’t thought about performance evaluation analogies before even though the correspondence is quite clear. Much food for thought.
If you have a list of such correspondences somewhere, I’d like to see it!
the movements of Polynesians across pacific Islands a couple of thousand years ago
In a nice coincidence, I read this review not a day after hearing about a genomic analysis study that did exactly this (published this September). It used the chromosome recombination idea to estimate when island populations split, and a different method comparing genetic variants to find which islands produced which new settler populations.
For those interested, here is the study, and here an article from Ars Technica summarizing it.
This is a useful analogy and very salient to me at this moment. I want to point at some related things:
1. The idea that all code inside a function should be written at one level of abstraction lower than its name. This would ensure that every function contains a set of boxes of approximately the same “size”, which build up the bigger box of the container function in a way that makes sense. (How do molecules add up to this brick? How do bricks add up to this wall?)
2. More generally, if all of the names in your code are well-chosen, it will read somewhat like prose. I think that this would contribute a lot towards ease of reading and will generate fewer distractions, especially for people less familiar with the codebase or language.The lesson I personally got out of this post is that we should be careful in naming concept handles for this same reason. Good concept handles will point at the underlying idea in a way that gives you a sense of what it means even without knowing the term. This lets it feel less like jargon (as “Hansonian markets” would have done, nice example) and makes it easier for other people to take part in a conversation/read up on a topic/etc without needing to step away to open the boxes every time.
(Most existing terminology is already so established that it would probably be more confusing to change it now. Which is very sad. It could streamline so many discussions, especially in interdisciplinary research, if things were named in a way that directs you to the right boxes to open.)
Another fix for this specifically is to use Firefox onn Android, which does something like a suspend on inactive tabs. In my experience this completely fixes the “slow and laggy” aspect even with hundreds of suspended tabs.
Of course then you don’t have a list of all your tabs, which is a useful resource you might want to create anyway.