I love this kind of post which gives a name to a specific behavior and also gives good examples for identifying it. They feel very validating for noticing the same fallacy that annoys me, but which I encounter so infrequently that it’s hard to notice any pattern and articulate what feels wrong about it.
moonlight
Karma: 21
As a New User to LessWrong, my calculations show that the post certainly did its job! (n=1 p=0)
Discussed tangible directions for research in agent foundations, which was really useful for helping me find a foothold for what people in this field “actually” work on.
I’m also keen in general of this approach of talking about your plans and progress yearly, I think it would be great if everyone doing important things (research and else) would publish something similar. It helps with perspective building of both the person writing the post itself, but also about how the field has changed as seen through their eyes.
Good reference for decorating in an intentional manner, I really like these kinds of posts discussing various aspects we tend to just do automatically, and bring a “smarter” way to approach them. It made me reconsider the importance of lighting in my room and helped me realize that “oh, yeah, that’s actually important, and this is actually a good idea! I’ll do that.” I hope we can start seeing more posts like this.
A practical exercise which is both fun and helps me think better? Sign me up.
I definitely enjoyed doing thinking physics exercises in my free time, they feel similar to chess in the way that they’re a fun activity to do in my free time while also making me feel like I’m spending my time doing something really useful, which is really great to feel.
They also provide a tangible way of seeing your “prediction ability” for your own thinking and planning improve, which is helpful in staying motivated in regard to self-improvement exercises.
I can recommend to anyone on the fence about this to try their hands at a few thinking physics exercises!
Good point.
You’ve made me realize that I’ve misrepresented how my intuitive mind processes this. After thinking about it a bit, a better way to write it would be:
Child 1: P(B) = 1⁄2, P(G) = 1⁄2
Child 2: P(B) = 1⁄2, P(G) = 1⁄2
Combined as unordered set {Child 1, Child 2}The core distinction seems to be to be if you considered it an unordered set or an ordered one. I’m unsure of any way to represent that in easy to read text format, the form written above is best I’ve got.
when we hear the “I have two children, at least one of whom is a boy” part, we set the probability of two boys to 1⁄3 because the possibilities {(boy, girl), (girl, boy), (boy, boy)} are a-priori equally likely
Why is this the most common assumption? This never made much sense to me whenever I’ve encountered this problem.
It’s much more intuitive to think about the scenario as:
2xB
1xB 1xG
2xGRather than:
BB
BG
GB
GGAnd to come to an answer of 1⁄2 instead of 1⁄3. The question doesn’t state anything about the children’s gender being related to the order they were born.
Proposed Feature for LessWrong: Live AI Toolbox
A wiki page/post/something, where people can find AI tools and use cases useful for AI Safety (or even generally useful for your life), which gets updated as new tools/models come out.
I feel this is a place where everyone’s dropping the ball. As capabilities improve, AI tools become more and more useful, and we could make use of a centralized toolbox for staying up-to-date on what’s (probably) best for every job, and to also share very helpful ways to use them.
Example 1: I’ve been struggling while trying to learn technical AI Safety concepts. The best method I’ve discovered for me to learn something new is talking with LLMs about it. I’ve been using Claude for this, just because it’s the main LLM I use. Should I continue using it? Is the new Gemini 2 Flash better for this? Should I download the free courses on AI Safety, such as the one from BlueDot or the Arbital collection, upload them to Notebooklm, and be able to get sources and references for every answer I receive? Is there a better workflow I’m not aware of?
Example 2: I’m helping an initiative focused on “slowing AI development” by bringing it to my country with translations, social media, and a website. I’ve needed help with:
- Finding AI Safety resources to refer to
- Finding communication strategies for activism and for AI in particular
- Wording the content in the best way to reach people
- Designing the content
- Designing the website
- Planning the whole infrastructure
I could improve myself at all those skills by reading free education content on these topics. However, that would take way too much time, especially when there are AI tools to help with all of those. I’ve used:
- Gemini Deep Research to find psychology studies on communication, activism, wording of online content, and AI Safety resources
- Claude for planning, rewording, feedback, reviewing my output while pretending to be a non-technical person
For the design tasks though, I’ve been struggling. I’ve tried to do them myself, but was deeply unimpressed. By googling “AI social media design”, the first page results are 6 different tools and a few outdated reddit threads talking about this. I randomly got an email from a platform called “creatie ai”, which apparently I have a pro subscription until the end of the year because I was an early user. Thinking it was just a common spam email, I almost ignored it, but then realized it’s exactly what I needed. I’ve tried it, and now I have a very good starting point for the landing page, much better than what I had before.
A basic classification that I can see working for organizing it would be:
1. Human enhancing
a) Learning
b) Ideas (feedback on ideas, finding connections with existing knowledge, etc.)
c) Research (as in “google 100 websites to find relevant things” research, not technical research)
d) Improving (feedback on your content, helping you be more unbiased, etc.)
2. Skill replacement (name TBD; replacing the work for skills you’re not good in)
a) Design
b) Coding (static websites for example)
Looking for feedback and for people who’d want to help bring this to life.
The fact that the author decided to include it in the blog post is telling enough that the image is representative of the real vibes. There isn’t just an “AI slop image”, but also the author’s intent to use it as a quick glance into the real vibes, in a faster and more accurate way than just words would have done.