LessWrong Team
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Ruby
Karma: 14,575
Oh, that’s the audio player widget. Seems it is broken here! Thank you for the report.
Cheers for the feedback, I apologize for confusing and annoyingness.
What do you mean by “makes the URL bar useless”? What’s the use you’re hoping would still be there? (typing in a different address should still workThe point of the modals is they don’t lose your place in the feed in a way that’s hard technically to do with proper navigation, though it’s possible we should just figure out how to do that.
And ah yeah, the “view all comments” isn’t a link on right-click, but I can make it be so (the titles are already that). That’s a good idea.
All comment threads are what I call a “linear-slice” (parent-child-child-child) with no branching. Conveying this relationship while breaking with the convention of the rest of the site (nesting) has proven tricky, but I’m reluctant to give up the horizontal space, and it looks cleaner. But two comments next to each other are just parent/child, and if there are ommitted comments, there’s a bar saying “+N” that when clicked, will display them.
Something I will do is make it so the post-modal and comments-modal is one, and when you click to view a particular comment, you’ll be shown it but the rest will also be there, which should hopefully help with orienting.
Thanks again for writing up those thoughts!
I’m curious for examples, feel free to DM if you don’t want to draw further attention to them
Thread for feedback on the New Feed
Question, complaints, confusions, bug reports, feature requests, and long philosophical screeds – here is the place!
I think that intellectual intimacy should include having similar mental capacities.
Seems right, for both reasons of understanding and trust.
A part of me wants to argue that these are intertwined
I think the default is they’re intertwined but the interesting thing is they can come apart: for example, you develop feelings of connection and intimacy through shared experience, falsely assume you can trust (or shared values or whatever), but then it turns out the experiences shared never actually filtered for that.
This matches with the dual: mania. All plans, even terrible ones, seem like they’ll succeed and this has flow through effects to elevated mood, hyperactivity, etc.
Whether or not this happens in all minds, the fact that people can alternate fairly rapidly between depression and mania with minimal trigger suggests there can be some kind of fragile “chemical balance” or something that’s easily upset. It’s possible that’s just in mood disorders and more stable minds are just vulnerable to the “too many negative updates at once” thing without greater instability.
To clarify here, I think what Habryka says about LW generally promoting lots of content being normal is overwhelmingly true (e.g. spotlights and curation) and this is book is completely typical of what we’d promote to attention, i.e. high quality writing and reasoning. I might say promotion is equivalent to upvote, not to agree-vote.
I still think there details in the promotion here that I think make inferring LW agreement and endorsement reasonable:
lack of disclaimers around disagreement (absence is evidence) together with a good prior that LW team agrees a lot with Eliezer/Nate view on AI risk
promoting during pre-order (which I do find surprising)
that we promoted this in a new way (I don’t think this is as strong evidence as we did before, mostly it’s that we’ve only recently started doing this for events and this is the first book to come along, we might have and will do it for others). But maybe we wouldn’t have or as high-effort absent agreement.
But responding to the OP, rather than motivation coming from narrow endorsement of thesis, I think a bunch of the motivation flows more from a willingness/desire to promote Eliezer[1] content, as (i) such content is reliably very good, and (ii) Eliezer founded LW and his writings make up the core writings that define so much of site culture and norms. We’d likely do the same for another major contributor, e.g. Scott Alexander.
I updated from when I first commented thinking about what we’d do if Eliezer wrote something we felt less agreement over, and I think we’d do much the same. My current assessment is the book placements is something like ~”80-95%” neutral promotion of high-quality content the way we generally do, not because of endorsement, but maybe there’s a 5-20% it got extra effort/prioritization because we in fact endorse the message, but hard to say for sure.- ^
and Nate
LW2 had to narrow down in scope under the pressure of ever-shorter AI timelines
I wouldn’t say the scope was narrowed, in fact the admin team took a lot of actions to preserve the scope, but a lot of people have shown up for AI or are now heavily interested in AI, simply making that the dominant topic. But, I like to think that people don’t think of LW as merely an “AI website”.
It really does look dope
The Sixteen Kinds of Intimacy
Curated. The idea of using Futarchy and prediction markets to make decision markets was among the earliest ideas I recall learning when I found the LessWrong/Rationality cluster in 2012 (and they continue to feature in dath ilani fiction). It’s valuable then to have an explainer for fundamental challenges with prediction markets. I suggest looking at the comments and references, as there’s some debate here, but overall I’m glad to have this key topic explored critically.
Fwiw, it feels to me like we’re endorsing the message of the book with this placement. Changing the theme is much stronger than just a spotlight or curation, not to the mention that it’s pre-order promotion.
Curated. Simple straightforward explanations of notable concepts is among my favorite genre of posts. Just a really great service when a person, confused about something, goes on a quest to figure it out and then shares the result with others. Given how misleading the title of the theorem is, it’s valuable here to have it clarified. Something that is surprising, is given what this theorem actual says and how limited it is, that it’s the basic of much other work given what it purportedly states, but perhaps people are assuming that the spirit of it is valid and it’s saved by modifications that e.g. John Wentworth provides. It’d be neat to see more of analysis of that. It’d be sad if a lot of work cites this theorem because people believed the claim of the title without checking the proof really supports it. All in all, kudos for making progress on all this.
This may be the most misleading title and summary I have ever seen on a math paper. If by “making a model” one means the sort of thing people usually do when model-making—i.e. reconstruct a system’s variables/parameters/structure from some information about them—then Conant & Ashby’s claim is simply false. - John Wentworh
I think it might well be the case that non-native English speakers gained a benefit from LLMs that native-speakers didn’t, but I don’t think the fact there’s uneven impact means it’s wrong to disallow LLM assistance.
- At worst, we’re back in the pre-LLM situation, I guess facing the general unfairness that some peoplew grew up as native English speakers and others didn’t.
- Practically, LLMs, whether they’re generated the idea or just wording, produce writing that’s often enough a bad experience that I and others struggle to read it at all, we just bounce off, and you will likely get downvoted. By and large, “could write good prose with LLM help” is a very good filter for quality.
- Allowing LLM use for non-English speakers but disallowing it for other usage would be wholly impractical as a policy. Where would the line be? How long would moderators have to spend on essays trying to judge? (but in any case, the result text might be gramatically correct but still painful to read)
- already the moderation burden of vetting the massive uptick in (overwhelmingly low quality AI-assisted essays) is too high and we’re going to have to automate more of it.
It’s sad to me that that with where LLMs are currently at, non-native speakers don’t get to use a tool that helps them communicate more easily, but I don’t think there’s an alternative here that’s at all viable as policy for LessWrong.
(Well, one alternative is moderator’s don’t pre-filter and then (1) the posts we’re currently filtering out would just get downvoted very hard, (2) we’d lose a lot of readers.)
Curated. At first it seems a little odd to recommend lists of content in this day and age when for many or most purposes, you’ll go to your local shoggoth. This compilation is pretty good though. I think there’s something to be said for human works and “cleanliness” of the process that produced them, but also this list contains a number of resources that LLMs just aren’t making yet: some pretty neat visualizations, and e.g. lists of of lists (of lists). An approach I like is to take a reference work and load it into an LLM as context before getting tutoring on a topic. LLMs being able to surface diagrams and images from the text will make this even better.
Here are some of my favorites (though I haven’t look through them all):
Histography by Matan Stauber [interactive timeline]
Landmark Numbers by Miles Kodama [list]
Technology over the long run by Max Roser [chart]
EconGraphs [glossary]
I’m glad this exists and I think is worth taking a look for most people. Kudos!
When I say insurance, I don’t mean it narrowly in the financial sense. I mean it in the “I’ll keep being a part of the relationship even if for some reason you’re less able to deliver on your part of it”, in this case it could be the non-working spouse not leaving when the breadwinner stops winning bread, or whoever sticking around even when you are ill for a prolonged period and much less fun.
Promise to invest, promise to share resources, mutual insurance/commitment seem like other key elements.
Curated. A compliment I’ll give to post is that I’m sympathetic to its length being warranted – it covers and accomplishes a lot, and I could see it being hard to have the same effect with something shorter, akin to how the Meditations on Moloch essay couldn’t obviously be shorter. This too is a meditation, weaving many pieces together such that I think I get the nuanced picture Duncan is painting. At the cost of length, Duncan is very good at covering edge cases and caveats (a software engineer walks into a bar and orders −1 beers, infinity beers, etc). It’d be tedious if everoyne did this but I think it’s valuable that Duncan demonstrates making statements with precision and stemming off misunderstandings and misapplications. (I think “rule out wrong interpretations” being a topic of another of his posts. In in all, I recommend this post.
Now although I haven’t thought about it at length and I’m anxious my judgments are wrong, I do feel a need to purse my lips at the Zack Davis section.
Hopefully fixed now. Also when enabled on the frontpage should work there regardless.
Oh, very reasonable. I’ll have a think about how to solve that. So I can understand what you’re trying to do, why is it you want to refresh the page?