I am Issa Rice. https://issarice.com/
riceissa(Issa Rice)
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Ah ok, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!
It seems to already be on LW.
Edit: oops, looks like the essay was posted on LW in response to this comment.
I’m unable to apply this tag to posts (this tag doesn’t show up when I search to add a tag).
For people who find this post in the future, Abram discussed several of the points in the bullet-point list above in Probability vs Likelihood.
Regarding base-rate neglect, I’ve noticed that in some situations my mind seems to automatically do the correct thing. For example if a car alarm or fire alarm goes off, I don’t think “someone is stealing the car” or “there’s a fire”. L(theft|alarm) is high, but P(theft|alarm) is low, and my mind seems to naturally know this difference. So I suspect something more is going on here than just confusing probability and likelihood, though that may be part of the answer.
I understood all of the other examples, but this one confused me:
A scenario is likely if it explains the data well. For example, many conspiracy theories are very likely because they have an answer for every question: a powerful group is conspiring to cover up the truth, meaning that the evidence we see is exactly what they’d want us to see.
If the conspiracy theory really was very likely, then we should be updating on this to have a higher posterior probability on the conspiracy theory. But in almost all cases we don’t actually believe the conspiracy theory is any more likely than we started out with. I think what’s actually going on is the thing Eliezer talked about in Technical Explanation where the conspiracy theory originally has the probability mass very spread out across different outcomes, but then as soon as it learns the actual outcome, it retroactively concentrates the probability mass on that outcome. So I want to say that the conspiracy theory is both unlikely (because it did not make an advance prediction) and improbable (very low prior combined with the unlikeliness). I’m curious if you agree with that or if I’ve misunderstood the example somehow.
Timeline of AI safety
Thanks, I like your rewrite and will post questions instead in the future.
I think I understand your concerns and agree with most of it. One thing that does still feel “off” to me is: given that there seems to be a lot of in-person-only discussions about “cutting edge” ideas and “inside scoop” like things (that trickle out via venues like Twitter and random Facebook threads, and only much later get written up as blog posts), how can people who primarily interact with the community online (such as me) keep up with this? I don’t want to have to pay attention to everything that’s out there on Twitter or Facebook, and would like a short document that gets to the point and links out to other things if I feel curious. (I’m willing to grant that my emotional experience might be rare, and that the typical user would instead feel alienated in just the way you describe.)
The closest thing I’ve seen is Unusual applications of spaced repetition memory systems.
For those reading this thread in the future, Alex has now adopted a more structured approach to reviewing the math he has learned.
Thanks, that worked and I was able to fix the rest of the images.
I just tried doing this in a post, and while the images look fine in the editor, they come out huge once the post is published. Any ideas on what I can do to fix this? (I don’t see any option in the editor to resize the images, and I’m scared of converting the post to markdown.)
Discovery fiction for the Pythagorean theorem
Some thoughts in response:
I agree that it’s better to focus on ideas instead of people. I might have a disagreement about how successfully LessWrong has managed this, so that from your perspective it looks like this page is pushing the status quo toward something we don’t want vs looking from my perspective like it’s just doing things more explicitly/transparently (which I prefer).
I agree that writing about people can be dicey. I might have disagreement about how well this problem can be avoided.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “defensible style”, but I’m taking it to mean something like “obsession with having citations from respected sources for every assertion, like what you see on Wikipedia”. So the concern is that once we allow lots of pages about people, that will force us to write defensibly, and this culture will infect pages not about people to also be written similarly defensibly. I hadn’t thought of this, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It seems possible to have separate norms/rules for different kinds of pages (Wikipedia does in fact have extra rules for biographies of living persons). But I also don’t think I can point to any particularly good examples of wikis that cover people (other than Wikipedia, which I guess is sort of a counterexample).
I agree that summarizing his ideas or intellectual culture would be better, but that takes way more work, e.g. to figure out what this culture is/how to carve up the space, how to name it, and figuring out what his core ideas are.
Currently the wiki has basically no entries for people (we have one for Eliezer, but none for Scott Alexander or Lukeprog for example)
There do seem to be stubs for both Scott Alexander and Lukeprog, both similar in size to this Vervaeke page. So I think I’m confused about what the status quo is vs what you are saying the status quo is.
I’m not sure what cluster you are trying to point to by saying “wiki pages like this”.
For this page in particular: I’ve been hearing more and more about Vervaeke, so I wanted to find out what the community has already figured out about him. It seems like the answer so far is “not much”, but as the situation changes I’m excited to have some canonical place where this information can be written up. He seems like an interesting enough guy, or at any rate he seems to have caught the attention of other interesting people, and that seems like a good enough reason to have some place like this.
If that’s not a good enough reason, I’m curious to hear of a concrete alternative policy and how it applies to this situation. Vervaeke isn’t notable enough to have a page on Wikipedia. Maybe I could write a LW question asking something like “What do people know about this guy?” Or maybe I could write a post with the above content. A shortform post would be easy, but seems difficult to find (not canonical enough). Or maybe you would recommend no action at all?
Thanks!
I tried creating a wiki-tag page today, and here are some questions I ran into that don’t seem to be answered by this FAQ:
Is there a way to add wiki-links like on the old wiki? I tried using the [[double square brackets]] like on MediaWiki, but this did not work (at least on the new editor).
Is there a way to quickly see if a wiki-tag page on a topic already exists? On the creation page, typing something in the box does not show existing pages with that substring. What I’m doing right now is to look on the all tags page (searching with my browser) and also looking at the wiki 1.0 imported pages list and again searching there. I feel like there must be a better way than this, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Is there a way to add MediaWiki-like <ref> tags? Or is there some preferred alternative way to add references on wiki-tag pages?
The Slack invite link seems to have expired. Is there a new one I can use?
I also just encountered Flashcards for your soul.