I doubt I know enough to ask good questions. The article has a very bare-bones reference to it, so here are some basic questions:
What is the high level objective?
Describe the training from the outside: when, where, who, how much?
Describe the training from the inside: what gets taught, what gets learned?
What role do you expect mentors to play?
How do you support the mentors in playing that role?
That is true with an assumption. The assumption is that I will regularly return to LessWrong and read EA articles if I see them. My own assessment of myself is that I won’t, so the assumption would be false. (I could be wrong.) I generally avoid EA articles because I’m not all that interested in them. No knock on the field, it’s just not why I’m here. But the fact that I have to wade through articles on EA and all the other topics I don’t care about deters me from returning to LessWrong, which I do less frequently than I wish I would, because I miss the optimal time to comment on articles.
Can you explain more about your Mentorship Training Program?
I think the key part of that sentence was “I’d like …”
I can think of several reasons why someone might want to do such a thing.
They want to begin or enhance a reputation for being an authority in the field.
They want the organization that they represent to begin or enhance its reputation in the field and to popularize the particular spin that their organization places on such information.
They are studying the field anyway, so the investment is essentially prettying up their own precis of materials they are reading anyway.
They want to help the LW community and this is the way they choose to contribute. (For example, if there was interest in the field of law in which I specialize, I’d do the same, but I can;t see that fitting in here.)
Then, empirically, I note that people (who know these fields better than I) do actually post this kind of content here. But I don’t see the karma system recognizing them for that contribution as much as being the “editor” of the whatever section would recognize them.
(Subsequently edited for terrible formatting)
This is a proposal to replace (or supplement) the tagging system with a classification system for content that would be based on three elements: subject, type, and organization.
For me, one of the problems with current LessWrong is that it has too many interesting distractions in it. Ideally, I would want to follow just a few things, with highly groomed content. For example, I’d like to see a section devoted to summaries of recent behavioral psychology articles by someone who understands them better than I do. I suspect that other people would like to see other things that I’d prefer to filter out. Examples: artificial intelligence research, effective altruism, personal productivity. I’m not knocking these subjects; but when I allocate time, I’d like to be able to allocate 100% to what I want to see and 0% to what I don’t.
That suggests that one area where Less Wrong could be improved is at the top level of organization. I’d suggest that content be organized in subjects, like Behavioral Psychology, Effective Altruism, Personal Productivity, and Artificial Intelligence. Now you might say that the tagging system does this. It kind of does, but it is insufficiently prescriptive. An article on effective altruism could have no tags, or many, or not the ones I think of.
Currently, the content is also classified by type, in Main and Discussion. Frankly, the difference between the two makes little sense to me. But I think there is another classification that would be helpful when combined with prescriptive subjects. I’d classify content type more like this:
Research, used for summarizing a publication elsewhere, with the summary provided by someone who know something about it
Link, used for identifying some information that might be of use to the community
Commentary, used for the normal kind of stuff that shows up in discussion
Sequence, assigned by moderators to the original stuff that made this site what it is, or at least was
Reading, used for reading groups for specific books
Meetups, used only to announce Meetups
Organization, used to announce and promote organized action
Then a third classification of content is by organization. The community needs to remain connected to the organizations it spawned. So the third content classification would be by organization, which could be empty. Possible initial values would be MIRI, CFAR, FLI, etc. I’d hope that those organizations would ensure that at least their own research got into the relevant subject under a Research classification, and that their own blog posts got thrown over into the relevant subject under a Link classification.
This would make it easier for me to justify coming back to read Less Wrong daily, because I wouldn’t expose my self to wonderful distrations in order to find the things I’d like to keep up on.
My advice is probably better suited for a liberal arts major (compared to a STEM major, say).
Learn more than you know now about the jobs that your field of study might support—especially salary and life style. This seems like a big blind spot to a lot of students.
Go to professors’ office hours. They are fascinating people and know way more than you do. (P.S. I’m not a professor.)
Audit classes that you wish you had time to take.
Actually do the homework before the class in which it is due. (This is less of a problem for STEM majors than in humanities and many liberal arts; in the latter, homework is often just reading.)
Do the optional reading, even if it really is optional.
Take extensive notes on the reading. In class, focus on listening. Good lecturers are synthesizing the facts you should already have consumed. Your notes from class should be much briefer. You should be able to study for tests strictly from your notes, without needing the book, except as an occasional reference.
Sit near the front of class.
If you have to choose between one semester of microeconomics and one semester of macroeconomics, take micro.
Take at least two statistics classes.
Leave your video games at your parents’ house.
Learn an exercise routine that you can stick to for the rest of your life.
Surely “unvisited” is insignificant. There’s no current science suggesting any means of faster-than-light travel. So, if you assume that extraterrestrial life would have lifespans grossly similar to terrestrial lifespans, we ought to remain unvisited.
“Saturated in the Great Silence” seems like a far more significant point.
I’ve not read the Rifkin book, so it may have a response to the criticism I’m about to make of your rendition of the key idea.
“The margin” is a concept that is set in a temporal context. That is, the margin is about a decision being made. Historically, economists think primarily of the short term margin: changed to production that can occur without changes in capital (and so, prototypically only using variations in inputs such as labor, energy, and raw materials). This is where marginal cost can fall to zero.
But economists also recognize two further changes, which can be classified as medium and long term margins, but which is which often depends on the structure of the industry. One type of change is the application of additional capital. Typically, this is the medium term margin. The second is competitors entering or exiting the market. This is usually the long-term margin. At this margin, marginal costs never ever fall to zero.
Under a condition of zero short-term marginal costs driving prices below the long-term average cost, competitors will exit the market or differentiate themselves. In the former situation, you eventually arrive at a duopoly or monopoly. In the latter situation, you end up with monopolistic competition (which I think is a fairer description of most consumer goods, for example).
Thus, I think the idea of prices generally falling to zero because short-term marginal costs fall to zero is misplaced. To put it simply, marginal costs are not total costs.
A couple of points that I think are relevant:
First, dividing users of bitcoins into people who spend it quickly and those who hold it obscures the more fundamental truth that all bitcoin users hold them for some period of time.
Second, all businesses have cash holdings. Larger ones have entire treasury departments devoted to doing nothing more than getting a few more basis points on that cash by active management in interest bearing accounts.
The combine to make me very skeptical that people will accept a currency that depreciates in value and is not already accepted. Imagine the interest rate that they would have to obtain just to offset the decay fee. If prospective users know that they can’t get such an interest rate, why would they ever sign up for a system that guarantees them a loss?
This seems to me that it significantly raises transaction costs without significantly creating benefits. The value paid in cash in our real economy today will be equal to the sum of the cash payment plus the net present value of risk-discounted future payments in your model. That means that there is zero benefit to the parties involved, but introduces a transfer of risk, and increases the complexity of the transaction.
The place the rubber hits the road on this problem is that companies who would receive payment under this approach will not sign up to a system that causes their holdings of cash in the system to decay, if there are other alternatives. You can compare this to inflation in, say, US dollar holdings. The difference is that the US dollar is already widely accepted. It does not have a problem convincing people to accept it. Your system will.
Historically, one of the features that made any commodity more likely to become a currency was that it would not decay. For example, precious metals typically won out over comparably divisible commodities like grain because metals don’t rot after a year or so. A currency that rots doesn’t seem like a winner.
I was originally for a pace of two per week, just knowing my own work schedule. But if there are truly going to be 800 articles represented in the book, then one a day is the only workable solution. Do we know that the book will be broken out into something like 800 articles?
I think there’s something in business that is similar to the hero-sidekick dichotomy you suggest. In business, I see people who are great individual contributors, but their career path “upwards” takes them into management, at which they suck. The notion that being good at managing doers is “higher” than doing has a parallel in supposed superiority of heroes to sidekicks. It’s not a promotion to go from sidekick to hero: it might very well be an awkward misalignment.
Is there something underlying both of these? It might be something about leader-follower and the prestige that comes with being a leader.
I am a maybe. How will I know who you are?
On the poor little macaronis, I think she visualized them having their legs pulled off while still alive. She had already discovered the joy that is bacon, and I think she knew more than Homer Simpson about its tasty source.
(Bacon is my one-word rebuttal to all claims of vegetarian superiority. Also my one-word attempt to convert all orthodox jews and muslims. I’m always surprised it doesn’t work 100% of the time.)
It seems like fathers everywhere do this thing about where they tell lies to their children to see what they will believe. Is it that universal? If so, does that say something about it being hardwired?
My own favorite one was from when I took my kids and my parents to eat at a restaurant. My daughter, who was about two, loved macaroni and cheese. She was hungry and discontent at how long the food was taking. My father calmly explained to her that it took a while for the cooks to “pull all the little legs off the macaronis.” Her eyes got big and started to tear up as she presumably visualized macaronis having their legs pulled off. A quick retraction was in order. I doubt she was indelibly scarred.
I request evidence for the following assertion:
Children have deepseated evolved instincts to trust what adults tell them.
I think that, at the very least, that statement is far too broad, because it ignores stranger anxiety. Did you mean “what parents (or the equivalent figures) tell them”?
I’m a lawyer, over 20 years out from law school. I took the LSAT cold, so I’m not a good candidate for your questions. I’ve always liked taking tests and always did well on standardized ones. I did well on the LSAT.
The reason I am responding is to add a bit of information. Lawyers talk, among ourselves and to law students, about what it means to “think like a lawyer.” It is a topic of fairly serious debate in jurisprudence for a number of reasons. One is that lawyers have a lot of power in American society. There are issues of justification and effects there. Another is the underlying sense that we really do think differently from most people. We see it in our everyday lives and it sparks our curiosity. There are many other reasons.
So, it makes me wonder what the MRI images would show when comparing lawyers’ brains to comparable non-lawyers brains.
I’m a super-dummy when it comes to thinking about AI. I rightly leave it to people better equipped and more motivated than me.
But, can someone explain to me why a solution would not involve some form of “don’t do things to people or their property without their permission”? Certainly, that would lead to a sub-optimal use of AI in some people’s opinions. But it would completely respect the opinions of those who disagree.
Recognizing that I am probably the least AI-knowledgeable person to have posted a comment here, I ask, what am I missing?
The work of Elinor Ostrom (2009 Nobel prize co-winner in economics) seems relevant. The Wikipedia page on her does a decent introduction. The relevant part of her work was in how societies use customs (other than market transactions) to regulate use of common resources. The relevant observation here is that the customs often seem strange and non-sensical, but they work. She summarized her findings, “A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory.”
Similarly, the work of Peter Leeson on ordeals seems relevant. Ordeals were medieval methods of determining the outcome of what would today be a lawsuit. An example of an ordeal is (literally) trial by fire or trial by battle. Leeson shows how this facially strange and non-sensical custom actually served its purpose of dispensing justice. His research along these lines is surprising, unorthodox, and amusing.