Predicting the future is hard, so it’s no surprise that we occasionally miss important developments.

However, several times recently, in the contexts of Covid forecasting and AI progress, I noticed that I missed some crucial feature of a development I was interested in getting right, and it felt to me like I could’ve seen it coming if only I had tried a little harder. (Some others probably did better, but I could imagine that I wasn't the only one who got things wrong.)

Maybe this is hindsight bias, but if there’s something to it, I want to distill the nature of the mistake.

First, here are the examples that prompted me to take notice:

Predicting the course of the Covid pandemic:

• I didn’t foresee the contribution from sociological factors (e.g., “people not wanting

It was a remarkably quiet announcement. We now have Alpha Fold 3, it does a much improved job predicting all of life’s molecules and their interactions. It feels like everyone including me then shrugged and went back to thinking about other things. No cool new toy for most of us to personally play with, no existential risk impact, no big trades to make, ho hum.

But yes, when we look back at this week, I expect what we remember will be Alpha Fold 3.

Unless it turns out that it is Sophon, a Chinese technique to potentially make it harder to fine tune an open model in ways the developer wants to prevent. I do not expect this to get the job done that needs doing, but...

Somerville historically had a zoning ordinance limiting housing units to at most four unrelated people:

any number of persons related by blood, marriage, adoption, or foster care agreement and up to three (3) additional unrelated persons living together as a single housekeeping unit

This is something I'd been unhappy about for years, and was enthusiastic about the "4 unrelated is outdated" campaign to change it in in 2018. So I'm very happy that after a request for a variance the city council instead ended up removing the restriction.

The actual change was in November, so I'm a bit late on this!

I also think there was an oversight, where the removal didn't include changing the text in section 7-153 which says "All schools shall be responsible for publicizing to their students the limitations of the city's zoning ordinance which limits occupancy to not...

The curious tale of how I mistook my dyslexia for stupidity - and talked, sang, and drew my way out of it. 

Sometimes I tell people I’m dyslexic and they don’t believe me. I love to read, I can mostly write without error, and I’m fluent in more than one language.

Also, I don’t actually technically know if I’m dyslectic cause I was never diagnosed. Instead I thought I was pretty dumb but if I worked really hard no one would notice. Later I felt inordinately angry about why anyone could possibly care about the exact order of letters when the gist is perfectly clear even if if if I right liike tis.

I mean, clear to me anyway.

I was 25 before it dawned on me that all the tricks...

A Festival of Writers Who are Wrong on the Internet^[1]

LessOnline is a festival celebrating truth-seeking, optimization, and blogging. It's an opportunity to meet people you've only ever known by their LessWrong username or Substack handle.

We're running a rationalist conference!

The ticket cost is $400 minus your LW karma in cents.

Confirmed attendees include Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Katja Grace, and Alexander Wales.

Less.Online

Go through to Less.Online to learn about who's attending, venue, location, housing, relation to Manifest, and more.

We'll post more updates about this event over the coming weeks as it all comes together.

If LessOnline is an awesome rationalist event,
I desire to believe that LessOnline is an awesome rationalist event;

If LessOnline is not an awesome rationalist event,
I desire to believe that LessOnline is not an awesome rationalist event;

Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

      —Litany of Rationalist Event Organizing

1. ^{^}

   But Striving to be Less So

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you're new to the community, you can start reading the Highlights from the Sequences, a collection of posts about the core ideas of LessWrong.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

1. If you find that you’re reluctant to permanently give up on to-do list items, “deprioritize” them instead

I hate the idea of deciding that something on my to-do list isn’t that important, and then deleting it off my to-do list without actually doing it. Because once it’s off my to-do list, then quite possibly I’ll never think about it again. And what if it’s actually worth doing? Or what if my priorities will change such that it will be worth doing at some point in the future? Gahh!

On the other hand, if I never delete anything off my to-do list, it will grow to infinity.

The solution I’ve settled on is a priority-categorized to-do list, using a kanban-style online tool (e.g. Trello). The left couple columns (“lists”) are very active—i.e., to-do list...