If you know of any other recent public evaluations of our cost-effectiveness, post them in the comments! I tried to be thorough in listing everything I could find that takes any kind of stance on the value of donating to Lightcone.
[link removed]
Vitor
Karma: 860
Zurich, Switzerland—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
Zürich – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025
Domain: Farming Construction and Craftsmanship
Link: Simple off grid Cabin that anyone can build & afford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOXmfkXpkM (and many other builds on his channel)
Person: Dave Whipple
Background: Construction contractor, DIY living off-grid in Alaska and Michigan.
Why: He and his wife bootstrapped themselves building their own cabin, then house, sell at a profit, rinse and repeat a few times. There are many, many videos of people building their own cabins, etc. Dave’s are simple, clear, lucid, from a guy who’s done it many times and has skin in the game.
I agree that points 12 and 13 are at least mildly controversial. From the PoV of someone adopting these rules, it’d be enough if you changed the “will”s to “may”s.
By and large, the fewer points that are binding for the market creator, the easier it is to adopt the rules. I’m fine with a few big points being strongly binding (e.g. #15), and also fine with the more aspirational points where “Zvi’s best judgement” automatically gets replaced with “Vitor’s best judgement”. But I’d rather not commit to some minutiae I don’t really care about.
(It’s more about “attack surface” or maybe in this case we should say “decision surface” than actual strong disagreement with the points, if that makes sense?)
Very interesting read, thank you!
How did you end up doing this work? Did you deliberately seek it out? What are teachers, probation officers and so on (everyone who is not a guard) like? What drives them?
This kind of thing has existed (for example optimal hardware layout) for decades. It sounds a lot less impressive when you sub out “AI” for “algorithm”.
“for certain aspects of computer science, computer scientists are already worse than even naive sorting algorithms”. Yes, we know that machines have a bunch of advantages over humans. Calculation speed and huge, perfect memory being the most notable.
Where on earth are you pulling those predictions about GPT-5 and 6 from? I’d take the other side of that bet.
The original chart is misleading in more ways than one. Facebook, Netflix et al might be household names now, but this has more to do with their staying power and network effects than any sort of exceedingly fast adoption.
I also suspect that chatGPT has a bunch of inactive accounts, as it’s essentially a toy without an actual use-case for most people.
Recognise that almost all the Kolmogorov complexity of a particular simulacrum is dedicated to specifying the traits, not the valences. The traits — polite, politically liberal, racist, smart, deceitful — are these massively K-complex concepts, whereas each valence is a single floating point, or maybe even a single bit!
A bit of a side note, but I have to point out that Kolmogorov complexity in this context is basically a fake framework. There are many notions of complexity, and there’s nothing in your argument that requires Kolmogorov specifically.
It seems to me that you are attempting to write a timeless, prescriptive reference piece. Then a paragraph sneaks in that is heavily time and culture dependent.
I’m honestly not certain about the intended meaning. I think you intent mask wearing to be an example of a small and reasonable cost. As a non-american, I’m vaguely aware what costco is, but don’t know if there’s some connotation or reference to current events that I’m missing. And if I’m confused now, imagine someone reading this in 2030...
Without getting into the object-level discussion, I think such references have no place in the kind of post this is supposed to be, and should be cut or made more neutral.
You didn’t address the part of my comment that I’m actually more confident about. I regret adding that last sentence, consider it retracted for now (I currently don’t think I’m wrong, but I’ll have to think/observe some more, and perhaps find better words/framing to pinpoint what bothers me about rationalist discourse).
It’s analogous to a customer complaining “if Costco is going to require masks, then I’m boycotting Costco.” All else being equal, it would be nice for customers to not have to wear masks, and all else being equal, it would be nice to lower the barrier to communication such that more thoughts could be more easily included.
Just a small piece of feedback. This paragraph is very unclear, and it brushes on a political topic that tends to get heated and personal.
I think you intended to say that the norms you’re proposing are just the basic cost of entry to a space with higher levels of cooperation and value generation. But I can as easily read it as your norms being an arbitrary requirement that destroys value by forcing everyone to visibly incur pointless costs in the name of protecting against a bogeyman that is being way overblown.
This unintended double meaning seems apt to me: I mostly agree with the guidelines, but also feel that rationalists overemphasize this kind of thing and discount the costs being imposed. In particular, the guidelines are very bad for productive babbling / brainstorming, for intuitive knowledge transfer, and other less rigorous ways of communicating that I find really valuable in some situations.
One thing I’ve read somewhere is that people who sign but aren’t deaf, tend to use sign language in parallel with spoken language. That’s an entire parallel communications channel!
Relatedly, rationalists lean quite heavily towards explicit ask/tell culture. This is sometimes great, but often clunky: “are you asking for advice? I might have some helpful comments but I’m not sure if you actually want peoples’ opinions, or if you just wanted to vent.”
Combining these two things, I see possible norms evolving where spoken language is used for communicating complex thoughts, and signing is used for coordination, cohesion, making group decisions (which is often done implicitly in other communities). I think there’s a lot of potential upside here.
I think you’re confusing arrogance concerning the topic itself with communicating my insights arrogantly. I’m absolutely doing the latter, partly as a pushback to your overconfident claims, partly because better writing would require time and energy I don’t currently have. But the former? I don’t think so.
Re: the Turing test. My apologies, I was overly harsh as well. But none of these examples are remotely failing the Turing test. For starters, you can’t fail the test if you’re not aware you’re taking it. Should we call anyone misreading some text or getting a physics question wrong as “having failed the Turing test” from now on, in all contexts?
Funnily enough, the pendulum problem admits a bunch of answers, because “swinging like a pendulum” has multiple valid interpretations. Furthermore, a discerning judge shouldn’t just fail every entity that gets the physics wrong, nor pass every entity that get the physics right. We’re not learning anything here except that many people are apparently terrible at performing Turing tests, or don’t even understanding what the test is. That’s why I originally read your post as an insult, because it just doesn’t make sense to me how you’re using the term (so it’s reduced to a “clever” zinger)
fair enough, I can see that reading. But I didn’t mean to say I actually believe that, or that it’s a good thing. More like an instinctive reaction.
It’s just that certain types of life experiences put a small but noticeable barrier between you and other people. It was a point about alienation, and trying to drive home just how badly typical minding can fail. When I barely recognize my younger self from my current perspective, that’s a pretty strong example.
Hope that’s clearer.
What you said, exactly, was:
Just hope you at least briefly consider that I was exactly at your stage one day
which is what I was responding to. I know you’re not claiming that I’m 100% hackable, but yet you insist on drawing strong parallels between our states of mind, e.g., that being dismissive must stem from arrogance. That’s the typical-minding I’m objecting to. Also, being smart has nothing to do with it, perhaps you might go back and carefully re-read my original comment.
The Turing test doesn’t have a “reading comprehension” section, and I don’t particularly care if some commenters make up silly criteria for declaring someone as failing it. And humans aren’t supposed to have a 100% pass rate, btw, that’s just not in the nature of the test. It’s more of a thought experiment than a benchmark really.
Finally, it’s pretty hard to not take this the wrong way, as it’s clearly a contentless insult.
I read your original post and I understood your point perfectly well. But I have to insist that you’re typical-minding here. How do you know that you were exactly at my stage at some point? You don’t.
You’re trying to project your experiences to a 1-dimensional scale that every human falls on. Just because I dismiss a scenario, same as you did, does not imply that I have anywhere near the same reasons / mental state for asserting this. In essence, you’re presenting me with a fully general counterargument, and I’m not convinced.
So, are all rationalists 70% susceptible, all humans? specifically people who scoff at the possibility of it happening to them? what’s your prior here?
100 hours also seems to be a pretty large number. In the scenario in question, not only does a person need to be hacked at 100h, but they also need to decide to spend hour 2 after spending hour 1, and so on. If you put me in an isolated prison cell with nothing to do but to talk to this thing, I’m pretty sure I’d end up mindhacked. But that’s a completely different claim.
What I linked was a stance, an evaluation of your cost-effectiveness. You were explicitly asking for exactly that kind of thing.
But on 2nd thought, I retract the link I posted. There’s also quite a bit of sneering in there that distracts from the bits I consider important, which are these:
Running Less Wrong doesn’t (have to) cost 1.4M per year. It’s a website. Websites of this scale can be run at 1/10th the cost, or even 1/100th the cost if you’re frugal. Having extremely onerous community management practices is a choice you’re making.
If someone believes that a large part of your value is in hosting LW, and what you do outside this pales in importance (or may even be negative!), then there’s a bundling issue for that person. It’s impossible to donate to the upkeep of LW without donating to all that other stuff, correct?