This is only true if you restrict "nobility" to Great Britain and if you only count "nobles" those who are considered such in our current day. This is a confusion of the current British noble title (specifically members of "Peerage of Great Britain") with "land owning rentier class that existed before the industrial revolution". For our discussion, we need to look at the second one.

I do not have specific numbers of UK, but quoting for Europe from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobility#Europe):
"The countries with the highest proportion of nobles were Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (15% of an 18th-century population of 800,000^{[citation needed]}), Castile (probably 10%), Spain (722,000 in 1768 which was 7–8% of the entire population) and other countries with lower percentages, such as Russia in 1760 with 500,000–600,000 nobles (2–3% of the entire population), and pre-revolutionary France where there were no more than 300,000 prior to 1789, which was 1% of the population (although some scholars believe this figure is an overestimate). In 1718 Sweden had between 10,000 and 15,000 nobles, which was 0.5% of the population. In Germany it was 0.01%.^[46]

In the Kingdom of Hungary nobles made up 5% of the population.^[47] All the nobles in 18th-century Europe numbered perhaps 3–4 million out of a total of 170–190 million inhabitants.^[48][49] By contrast, in 1707, when England and Scotland united into Great Britain, there were only 168 English peers, and 154 Scottish ones, though their immediate families were recognised as noble."

Based on above, I think expecting 1% to be landed rentier is a conservative estimate for 18th century for whole Europe. Even if we go with one tenth of this, expecting 0.1% of the population to retain this (which would imply that their population dropped while all other classes increased dramatically), would mean about 68 thousand people in the UK, and over 700 000 in whole Europe.

AND they are expected to live off from rents of land. I doubt that living of land rents is true for the majority of the 1500 current British nobles you referred to.

Not fully. Most of the nobility is gone. Only like 0.01% remains maybe what could be called "rentier", or even less compared to what had been before.

You lost me at "Bywayeans generally save up enough to move out of their parents' houses around age 9". Likely you will lose most people at "ancap".

But these are only minor things, and I can imagine that it would be possible to pull up some plausible explanation or just to revise one or the other, and keep the core message. I think the main issue with your description Byway are in these:

"...even though Bywayeans are smarter than Earthlings..."

"Bywayeans have a lot of energy..."

"...they love working and innovating..."

These imply that they are already better then us, and would run the world better even in the structure we have on our real Earth.

The message of Dath Ilan is that they and us are the same people, with the same genetic heritage, hence intelligence and vices. But they can still do better, just by having better institutions/methods for cooperation, hence, we can get better too! If you give special power to the inhabitants of your alternate Earth, it may explain why are not stuck in the same mire as we are, and imply we cannot learn from their success.

Thanks. Some of these seem to be good ideas indeed.

Isn't it an issue though that in a lot of these cases you/your colleagues have large direct impact on the outcome, and knowing the prediction itself can change your/their behaviour? E.g., if you have 90% public prediction that Adam will complete task X and 10% that Bob will complete Y, their knowledge of these can impact how they approach their work. Maybe Bob will .

That being said, it can still be an effective productivity tool, but it no longer directly measures the outcome of the stated prediction. Instead, it will become a reflective statement ("The probability of Bob completing Y provided he knows this prediction is 10%").

Of course they are not literally the same, but in the context of the particular article we are commenting on, both Aldi, Lidl and Walmart are large bureaucratic organizations (specialized in retail). They all benefit vastly from economics of scale and to increase output they have to create new stores and hire more people to run them (and increase the throughput of their supply chain).

According to wikipedia, Aldi has ~ 273 000, Lidl has ~376 000 employees.

These are not local mom & pop stores, and scale similarly as Walmart, even if not concentrating on broadness of selection.

I see that A Deepness in the Sky is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, but was written later. Does it make any impact which one I read first? Deepness seems to be more interesting to me, but I generally I prefer to read things in the suggested order.

"A team of 3 top research ML engineers with fine-tuning access to GPT-4o (including SFT and RL), $10 million in compute, and 1 year of time could use GPT-4o to surpass typical naive MTurk performance at ARC-AGI on the test set while using less than $100 per problem at runtime (as denominated by GPT-4o API costs)."

But doing so would tune that GPT-4o to be less good at other tasks, wouldn't it? Isn't this way of solving just Goodharting the metric and actually pushing the LLM away from being "General Intelligence"?

That being said, this is a great job you have done just over a week. Thank you for your contribution for science.

Children spending 300 hours per year learning math, on their own time and via well-designed engaging video-game-like apps (with eg AI tutors, video lectures, collaborating with parents to dispense rewards for performance instead of punishments for visible non-compliance, and results measured via standardized tests), at the fastest possible rate for them (or even one of 5 different paces where fewer than 10% are mistakenly placed into the wrong category) would probably result in vastly superior results among every demographic than the current paradigm of ~30-person classrooms.

This sounds great. 

Googling "math tutor ai" already gives a bunch of competing suggestions. I wonder how well they work though.

Thank you for sharing. For me your original talk is more convincing, and your Death Star strike plan is the one I would be more willing to follow rather than movie one.

I suppose this is an area where one can have a strong conviction on how things ought to be done, assuming other smart people think the same way, but in reality the way they think about it is closer to the base rate, so communication towards them should be as such.