For the last month, @RobertM and I have been exploring the possible use of recommender systems on LessWrong. Today we launched our first site-wide experiment in that direction. 

(In the course of our efforts, we also hit upon a frontpage refactor that we reckon is pretty good: tabs instead of a clutter of different sections. For now, only for logged-in users. Logged-out users see the "Latest" tab, which is the same-as-usual list of posts.)

Why algorithmic recommendations?

A core value of LessWrong is to be timeless and not news-driven. However, the central algorithm by which attention allocation happens on the site is the Hacker News algorithm^[1], which basically only shows you things that were posted recently, and creates a strong incentive for discussion to always be...

(Half-baked work-in-progress. There might be a “version 2” of this post at some point, with fewer mistakes, and more neuroscience details, and nice illustrations and pedagogy etc. But it’s fun to chat and see if anyone has thoughts.)

1. Background

There’s a neuroscience problem that’s had me stumped since almost the very beginning of when I became interested in neuroscience at all (as a lens into AGI safety) back in 2019. But I think I might finally have “a foot in the door” towards a solution!

What is this problem? As described in my post Symbol Grounding and Human Social Instincts, I believe the following:

• (1) We can divide the brain into a “Learning Subsystem” (cortex, striatum, amygdala, cerebellum and a few other areas) on the one hand, and a “Steering Subsystem”

By A [Editor: This article is reprinted from Extropy #5, Winter 1990. Extropy was published by The Extropy Institute]

Call to Arms

Down with the law of gravity!

By what right does it counter my will? I have not pledged my allegiance to the law of gravity; I have learned to live under its force as one learns to live under a tyrant. Whatever gravity's benefits, I want the freedom to deny its iron hand. Yet gravity reigns despite my complaints. "No gravitation without representation!" I shout. "Down with the law of gravity!"

Down with all of nature's laws!

Gravity, the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces - together they conspire to destroy human intelligence. Their evil leader? Entropy. Throw out the Four Forces! Down with Entropy!

Down with every limitation!

I call for...

With my electronic harp mandolin project I've been enjoying working with analog and embedded audio hardware. And a few weeks ago, after reading about Ugo Conti's whistle-controlled synth I wrote to him, he gave me a call, and we had a really interesting conversation. And my existing combination of hardware for my whistle synth [1] is bulky and expensive. Which has me excited about a new project: I'd like to make an embedded version.

Yesterday I got started on the first component: getting audio into the microcontroller. I want to start with a standard dynamic mic, so I can keep using the same mic for talkbox and whistle synth, so it should take standard balanced audio on XLR as input. In a full version this would need an XLR port, but for now I...

Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.

There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks arise if AIs take their own actions at the expense of human interests.

Governments are poor stewards for both types of risk. Misuse regulation is like the regulation of any other technology. There are reasonable rules that the government might set, but omission bias and incentives to protect small but well organized groups at the expense of everyone else will lead to lots of costly ones too. Misalignment regulation is not in the Overton window for any government. Governments do not have strong incentives...

The history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.

But if your goal is to achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research, then you should probably draw inspiration from the opposite: "singular" discoveries, i.e. discoveries which nobody else was anywhere close to figuring out. After all, if someone else would have figured it out shortly after anyways, then the discovery probably wasn't very counterfactually impactful.

Alas, nobody seems to have made a list of highly counterfactual scientific discoveries, to complement wikipedia's list of multiple discoveries.

To...

Crosspost from my blog.  

If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you’ll find a great deal of people expressing contrarian views. If you hang out in the circles that I do, you’ll probably have heard of Yudkowsky say that dieting doesn’t really work, Guzey say that sleep is overrated, Hanson argue that medicine doesn’t improve health, various people argue for the lab leak, others argue for hereditarianism, Caplan argue that mental illness is mostly just aberrant preferences and education doesn’t work, and various other people expressing contrarian views. Often, very smart people—like Robin Hanson—will write long posts defending these views, other people will have criticisms, and it will all be such a tangled mess that you don’t really know what to think about them.

For...