LessWrong Team
Ruby
Take the wheel, Shoggoth! (Lesswrong is trying out changes to the frontpage algorithm)
Curated. It’s a funny thing how fiction can sharpen our predictions, at least fiction that’s aiming to be at least plausible in some world model. Perhaps it’s the exercise of playing our models forwards in detail rather than isolated abstracted predictions. This is a good example. Even if it seems implausible, noting why is interesting. Curating, and I hope to see more of these built on differing assumptions and reaching different places. Cheers.
Curated. Beyond the object level arguments for how to do plots here that are pretty interesting, I like this post for the periodic reminder/extra evidence that relatively “minor” details in how information is presented can nudge/bias interpretation and understanding.
I think the claims around bordering lines become strongly true if there were established convention, and more weakly so the way currently are. Obviously one ought to be conscious in reading and creating graphs for whether 0 is included.
Jobs, Relationships, and Other Cults
I’d be pretty interested in the non-cartoonish version, also from people who are more competent and savvy.
For balanced feedback, I enjoyed the choice of diction, and particularly those two words.
Trivia: in racetracks, a “chicane” is a random “unnecessary” kink or twist inserted to make it more complicated (and more challenging/fun).
My understanding is commitment is you say that won’t swerve first in a game of chicken. Pre-commitment is throwing your steering wheel out the window so that there’s no way that you could swerve even if you changed your mind.
Sparsity seems like maybe a relevant keyword.
I feel like marring the reputation of a person in response to wrongdoing has a very important basic purpose for warning other people about interacting with the wrongdoer, i.e. Sarah Smith is dishonest, so don’t trust things she says to be true. This is valuable in worlds where everyone is already a fixed truth-teller/liar and everybody has fixed values.
I like the content/concept here but feel “curse of doom” doesn’t communicate the idea very well. This does seem like effectively a curse of dimensionality though? (Perhaps that’s what inspired this name). Not sure of “Pareto Best of the Curse of Dimensionality” is the right name, but I think it gets at the idea better than generic “doom”.
Curated. This post feels to me like a kind of a survey of the mental skills and properties people do/don’t have for effectiveness, of which I don’t recall any other examples right now, and so is quite interesting. I think it’s both interesting from allowing someone to ask themselves if they’re weak on any of these, but also helpful in modeling others and answering questions of the sort “why don’t people just X?”. For all that we spend a tonne of time interacting with people, people’s internal mental lives are private, and so much like shower habits (I’m told) vary a lot more than externally observable behaviors.
I would like to see the “scope sensitivity” piece fleshed out more. I can see how it applies to eliminating annoyances that take 10 minutes every day and add up, but I don’t think that’s at the heart of rationality. I’d be curious how much mileage someone gets from just reflection on their own mind, and how much that can be done without invoking numeracy.
The “context window” analogy for human minds
Throughput vs. Latency
Taking responsibility and partial derivatives
The proper response to mistakes that have harmed others?
It does, quite a bit! Definitely speeds me up somewhere between 20% and 100% depending on task. And I think it’s a bigger deal for those now working on code and who are newer to it.
This is basically what we do, capped by our team capacity. For most of the last ~2 years, we had ~4 people working full-time on LessWrong plus shared stuff we get from EA Forum team. Since the last few months, we reallocated people from elsewhere in the org and are at ~6 people, though several are newer to working on code. So pretty small startup. Dialogues has been the big focus of late (plus behind the scenes performance optimizations and code infrastructure).
All that to say, we could do more with more money and people. If you know skilled developers willing to live in the Berkeley area, please let us know!
My intuition (not rigorous) is there a multiple levels in the consequentialist/deontoligical/consequentialist dealio.
I believe that unconditional friendship is approximately something one can enter into, but one enters into it for contingent reasons (perhaps in a Newcomb-like way – I’ll unconditionally be your friend because I’m betting that you’ll unconditionally be my friend). Your ability to credibly enter such relationships (at least in my conception of them) is dependent on you not starting to be more “conditional” because you doubt that the other person is also being there. This I think is related to not being a “fair weather” friend. I continue to be your friend even when it’s not fun (you’re sick, need taking care of whatever) even if I wouldn’t have become your friend to do that. And vice versa. Kind of a mutual insurance policy.
Same thing could be with contracts, agreements, and other collaborations. In a Newcomb-like way, I commit to being honest, being cooperative, etc to a very high degree even in the face of doubts about you. (Maybe you stop by the time someone is threatening your family, not sure what Ben, et al, think about that.) But the fact I entered into this commitment was based on the probabilities I assigned to your behavior at the start.
I see interesting points on both sides here. Something about how this comment(s) is expressed makes me feel uncomfortable, like this isn’t the right tone for exploring disagreements about correct moral/cooperative behavior, it at least it makes it a lot harder for me to participate. I think it’s something like it feels like performing moral outrage/indignation in a way that feels more persuadey than explainy, and more in the direction of social pressure, norms-enforcery. The phrase “shame on you” is a particularly clear thing I’ll point at that makes me perceive this.
Hard to answer without knowing your background. I might try online courses or ask Chat-GPT here for advice.