I've been posting and commenting pretty frequently over the last few months, and I was curious about some stats. What started as a few GraphQL queries and some Python scripting turned into an interactive web app:

Enter a username, and it will give you some stats and a graph, broken down by post and comment karma. You can use the slider to adjust the date range, and the stats are automatically recalculated for the selected time period.

Another feature is the list of "Gems" - comments with at least a few votes that have the highest net karma score, i.e. comments that received strong upvotes from high-karma users, and few downvotes. I found that this often gives a better sense of a user's best comments than just looking at...

I've written up a rationality game which we played several times at our local LW chapter and had a lot of fun with. The idea is to put Aumann's agreement theorem into practice as a multi-player calibration game, in which players react to the probabilities which other players give (each holding some privileged evidence). If you get very involved, this implies reasoning not only about how well your friends are calibrated, but also how much your friends trust each other's calibration, and how much they trust each other's trust in each other.

You'll need a set of trivia questions to play. We used these. 

The write-up includes a helpful scoring table which we have not play-tested yet. We did a plain Bayes loss rather than an adjusted Bayes loss when we played, and calculated things on our phone calculators. This version should feel a lot better, because the numbers are easier to interpret and you get your score right away rather than calculating at the end.

I'm excited to share a special opportunity to create a systemic impact: a statewide approval voting ballot initiative in Missouri. This would affect all elections throughout the state including federal and presidential. Approval voting favors consensus candidates and a more accurate representation of the public's support. This is critical if we want a government to behave in our interests on policies that concern our well-being.

The organization leading this charge is Show Me Integrity, where I'm currently doing a fellowship and assisting with fundraising efforts. Show Me Integrity has successfully passed a ballot initiative before, showing their ability to succeed on this kind of scale. They also successfully ran the ballot initiative for approval voting in St. Louis.

Why is this important?

Approval voting is a method that allows voters...

Let's say you have a few million tabs open in your mobile Chrome browser, because you never close anything, but now your browser is getting slow and laggy. You want to stick the URLs of those tabs somewhere for safekeeping so that you can close them all.

There's a lot of advice on doing this on the Internet, most of which doesn't work.

Here's a method that does work. It's a bit of a hack, but gives good results:

• Enable developer tools on your Android phone: go to Settings -> About phone, scroll down to "Build number", and tap it repeatedly until it tells you you're a developer. (Seriously.)
• Enable USB debugging on your phone: go to Settings -> System -> Developer options and make sure the "USB debugging" slider is

For the purposes of this post, the anthropic shadow is the type of inference found in How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?.

"Anthropic principle! If the LHC had worked, it would have produced a black hole or strangelet or vacuum failure, and we wouldn't be here!"

In other words, since we are "blind" to situations in which we don't exist, we must adjust how we do bayesian updating. Although it has many bizarre conclusions, it is more intuitive than you think and quite useful!

There are many similar applications of anthropics, such as Nuclear close calls and Anthropic signature: strange anti-correlations.

This actually has implications for effective altruism. Since we are so early into humanity's existence, we can infer from the anthropic shadow that humans will probably soon die out....

A podcast interview (posted 2023-06-29) with noted AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter discusses his career and current views on AI.

Hofstadter has previously energetically criticized GPT-2/3 models (and deep learning and compute-heavy GOFAI). These criticisms were widely circulated & cited, and apparently many people found Hofstadter a convincing & trustworthy authority when he was negative on deep learning capabilities & prospects, and so I found his comments in this most recent discussion of considerable interest (via Edward Kmett).

Below I excerpt from the second half where he discusses DL progress & AI risk:

• • Q: ...Which ideas from GEB are most relevant today?

  • Douglas Hofstadter: ...In my book, I Am a Strange Loop, I tried to set forth what it is that really makes a self or a soul. I like to use the word "soul", not in the religious

This is my fifth attempt at writing this post. I’m starting to think that I’ve already spent way too much time on this topic, which I’m convinced is valuable, but maybe not so valuable as to spend 20 hours perpetually rewriting a post about it. So obviously my solution is to rewrite it again, but this time in bullet points. 

Here’s a tl;dr: There are some habits people can pick up that are very cheap, and may have positive effects, but these effects are too small to reliably notice consciously. Hence these habits are often neglected. In this post I argue to take some of these habits more seriously, and if they’re low-cost enough for you to implement, stick to them even absent of any feeling of them being useful.

• One

When trying to improve the world via philanthropy, there are compelling reasons to focus on nurturing individual talent rather than supporting larger organizations, especially those with nebulous and unquantifiable goals.

Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures is a prime example of this approach, providing grants to individual entrepreneurs and thinkers who aim to make a significant societal impact. When asked how his approach to philanthropy differs from the Effective Altruist approach, Cowen answers: 

I’m much more “person first.” I’m willing to consider, not any area—it ought to feel important—but I view it as more an investment in the person, and I have, I think, more faith that the person’s own understanding of what’s important will very often be better than mine. That would be the difference.

This model has been effective in...

[Thanks to Charlie Steiner, Richard Kennaway, and Said Achmiz for helpful discussion.]

[Epistemic status: my best guess after having read a lot about the topic, including all LW posts and comment sections with the consciousness tag]

There's a common pattern in online debates about consciousness. It looks something like this:

One person will try to communicate a belief or idea to someone else, but they cannot get through no matter how hard they try. Here's a made-up example:

"It's obvious that consciousness exists."

-Yes, it sure looks like the brain is doing a lot of non-parallel processing that involves several spatially distributed brain areas at once, so-

"I'm not just talking about the computational process. I mean qualia obviously exists."

-Define qualia.

"You can't define qualia; it's a primitive. But you know what I mean."

-I...