The Best of LessWrong

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The Best of LessWrong
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31Orpheus16

I read this post for the first time in 2022, and I came back to it at least twice. What I found helpful * The proposed solution: I actually do come back to the “honor” frame sometimes. I have little Rob Bensinger and Anna Salamon shoulder models that remind me to act with integrity and honor. And these shoulder models are especially helpful when I’m noticing (unhelpful) concerns about social status. * A crisp and community-endorsed statement of the problem: It was nice to be like “oh yeah, this thing I’m experiencing is that thing that Anna Salamon calls PR.” And to be honest, it was probably helpful tobe like “oh yeah this thing I’m experiencing is that thing that Anna Salamon, the legendary wise rationalist calls PR.” Sort of ironic, I suppose. But I wouldn’t be surprised if young/new rationalists benefit a lot from seeing some high-status or high-wisdom rationalist write a post that describes a problem they experience. * Note that I think this also applies to many posts in Replacing Guilt & The Sequences. To have Eliezer Yudkowsky describe a problem you face not only helps you see it; it also helps you be like ah yes, that’s a real/important problem that smart/legitimate people face. * The post “aged well.” It seems extremely relevant right now (Jan 2023), both for collectives and for individuals. The EA community is dealing with a lot of debate around PR right now. Also, more anecdotally, the Bay Area AI safety scene has quite a strange Status Hierarchy Thing going on, and I think this is a significant barrier to progress. (One might even say that “feeling afraid to speak openly due to vague social pressures” is a relatively central problem crippling the world at scale, as well as our community.) * The post is so short! What could have been improved * The PR frame. “PR” seems like a term that applies to organizations but not individuals. I think Anna could have pretty easily thrown in some more synonyms/near-synonyms that help people relate more

28Valentine

I thought I'd add a few quick notes as the author. As I reread this, a few things jump out for me: * I enjoy its writing style. Its clarity is probably part of why it was nominated. * I'd now say this post is making a couple of distinct claims: * External forces can shape what we want to do. (I.e., there are lotuses.) * It's possible to notice this in real time. (I.e., you can notice the taste of lotuses.) * It's good to do so. Otherwise we find our wanting aligned with others' goals regardless of how they relate to our own. * If you notice this, you'll find yourself wanting to spit out lotuses that you can tell pull you away from your goals. * I still basically agree with the content. * I think the emotional undertone is a little confused, says the version of me about 19 months later. That last point is probably the most interesting to meta-reviewers, so I'll say a little about that here. The basic emotional backdrop I brought in writing this was something like, "Look out, you could get hijacked! Better watch out!" And then luckily there's this thing you can be aware of, to defend yourself against one more form of psychic/emotional attack. Right? I think this is kind of nuts. It's a popular form of nuts, but it's still nuts. Looking at the Duolingo example I gave, it doesn't address the question of why those achievements counted as a lotus structure for me. There are tons of things others find have lotus nature that I don't (e.g., gambling). And vice versa: my mother (who's an avid Duolingo user) couldn't care less about those achievements. So what gives? I have a guess, but I think that's outside the purview of the purpose of these reviews. I'll just note that "We're in a worldwide memetic war zone where everyone is out to get us by hijacking our minds!" is (a) not the hypothesis to default to and (b) if true is itself a questionable meme that seems engineered to stimulate fight-or-flight type reactions that do, indeed, hijack clarity

10Raemon

Partial Self Review: There's an obvious set of followup work to be done here, which is to ask "Okay, this post was vague poetry meant to roughly illustrate a point. But, how many words do you actually precisely have?" What are the in-depth models that let you predict precisely how much nuance you have to work with? Less obvious to me is whether this post should become a longer, more rigorous post, or whether it should stay it's short, poetic self, and have those questions get explored in a different post with different goals. Also less obvious to me is how the LessWrong Review should relate to short, poetic posts. I think it's quite important that this post be clearly labeled as poetry, and also, that we consider the work "unfinished" until there is a some kind of post that delves more deeply into these questions. But, for example, I think Babble last year was more like poetry than like a clear model, and it was nonetheless valuable and good to be part of the Best Of book. So, I'm thinking about this post from two lenses. 1. What are simple net-improvements I can make to this post, without sacrificing it's overall aim of being short/accessible/poetic? 2. Sketch out the research/theory agenda I'd want to see for the more detailed version. I did just look over the post, and notice that the poetry... wasn't especially good. There is mild cleverness in having the sections get shorter as they discuss larger coordination-groups. But I think I probably could write a post that was differently poetic. Or, find ways of making a short/accessible version that doesn't bother being poetic but is is nonetheless clear. I'm worried about every post having to be a rigorous, fully caveated explanation. That might be the right standard for the review, but not obviously. Some points that should be made somewhere, whether editing the OP or in a followup: 1. Yes, you can invest in processes that help you reach more people, more reliably. But those tools are effortful to build

15A Ray

I read this sequence and then went through the whole thing. Without this sequence I'd probably still be procrastinating / putting it off. I think everything else I could write in review is less important than how directly this impacted me. Still, a review: (of the whole sequence, not just this post) First off, it signposts well what it is and who it's for. I really appreciate when posts do that, and this clearly gives the top level focus and whats in/out. This sequence is "How to do a thing" - a pretty big thing, with a lot of steps and branches, but a single thing with a clear goal. The post is addressing a real need in the community (and it was a personal need for me as well) -- which I think are the best kinds of "how to do a thing" posts. It was detailed and informative while still keeping the individual points brief and organized. It specifically calls out decision points and options, how much they matter, what the choices are, and information relevant to choosing. This is a huge energy-saver in terms of actually getting people to do this process. When I went through it, it was accurate, and I ran into the decision points and choices as expected. Extra appreciation for the first post which also includes a concrete call to action for a smaller/achievable-right-now thing for people to do (sign a declaration of intent to be cryopreserved). Which I did! I also think that a "thing you can do right now" is a great feature to have in "how to do a thing" posts. I'm in the USA, so I don't have much evaluation or feedback on how valuable this is to non-USA folks. I really do appreciate that a bunch of extra information was added for non-USA cases, and it's organized such that it's easy to read/skim past if not needed. I know that this caused me personally to sign up for cryonics, and I hope others as well. Inasmuch as the authors goal was for more people in our community to sign up for cryonics -- I think that's a great goal and I think they succeeded.

43Max H

My wife completed two cycles of IVF this year, and we had the sequence data from the preimplantation genetic testing on the resulting embryos analyzed for polygenic factors by the unnamed startup mentioned in this post. I can personally confirm that the practical advice in this post is generally excellent. The basic IVF + testing process is pretty straightforward (if expensive), but navigating the medical bureaucracy can be a hassle once you want to do anything unusual (like using a non-default PGT provider), and many clinics aren't going to help you with anything to do with polygenic screening, even if they are open to it in principle. So knowing exactly what you want and what you need to ask for is key. Since this post was written, there have been lots of other developments and related posts in this general area: * Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible * Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together * Gameto Announces World’s First Live Birth Using Fertilo Procedure that Matures Eggs Outside the Body * Overview of strong human intelligence amplification methods: Genomic approaches And probably many others I am forgetting. But if you're a prospective parent looking for practical advice on how to navigate the IVF process and take advantage of the latest in genetic screening technology, this post is still the best place to start that I know of. Some of the things in the list above are more speculative, but the technology for selection is basically ready and practical now, and the effect size doesn't have to be very large for it to beat the status quo of having an embryologist eyeball it. I think this post is a slam dunk for a +9 and a spot in the LW canon, both for its object-level information and its exemplary embodiment of the virtue of empiricism and instrumental rationality. The rest of this review details my own experience with IVF in the U.S. in 2024. ---------------------------------------- This section of the orig

33DanielFilan

I think this post, as promised in the epistemic status, errs on the side of simplistic poetry. I see its core contribution as saying that the more people you want to communicate to, the less you can communicate to them, because the marginal people aren't willing to put in work to understand you, and because it's harder to talk to marginal people who are far away and can't ask clarifying questions or see your facial expressions or hear your tone of voice. The numbers attached (e.g. 'five' and 'thousands of people') seem to not be super precise. That being said: the numbers are the easiest thing to take away from this post. The title includes the words 'about five' but not the words 'simplifed poetry'. And I'm just not sure about the numbers. The best part of the post is the initial part, which does a calculation and links to a paper to support an order-of-magnitude calculation on how many words you can communicate to people. But as the paragraphs go on, the justifications get less airtight, until it's basically an assertion. I think I understand stylistically why this was done, but at the end of the day that's the trade-off that was made. So a reader of this post has to ask themselves: Why is the number about five? Is this 'about' meaning that you have a factor of 2 wiggle-room? 10? 100? How do I know that this kicks in once I hit thousands of people, rather than hundreds or millions? If I want to communicate to billions of people, does that go down much? These questions are left unanswered in the post. That would be fine if they were answered somewhere else that was linked, but they aren't. As such, the discerning reader should only believe the conclusion (to the extent they can make it out) if they trust Ray Arnold, the author. I think plausibly people should trust Ray on this, at least people who know him. But much of the readership of this post doesn't know him and has no reason to trust him on this one. Overall: this post has a true and important core that c

26Screwtape

Figuring out the edge cases about honesty and truth seem important to me, both as a matter of personal aesthetics and as a matter for LessWrong to pay attention to. One of the things people have used to describe what makes LessWrong special is that it's a community focused on truth-seeking, which makes "what is truth anyway and how do we talk about it" a worthwhile topic of conversation. This article talks about it, in a way that's clear. (The positive example negative example pattern is a good approach to a topic that can really suffer from illusion of transparency.) Like Eliezer's Meta-Honesty post, the approach suggested does rely on some fast verbal footwork, though the footwork need not be as fast as Meta-Honesty. Passing the Onion Test consistently requires the same kind of comparison to alternate worlds as glomarization, which is a bit of a strike against it but that's hardly unique to the Onion Test. I don't know if people still wind up feeling mislead? For instance, I can imagine someone saying "I usually keep my financial state private" and having their conversation partners walk away with wildly different ideas of how they're doing. Is it so bad they don't want to talk about it? Is it so good they don't want to brag? If I thought it was the former and offered to cover their share of dinner repeatedly, I might be annoyed if it turns out to be the latter. I don't particularly hold myself to the Onion Test, but it did provide another angle on the subject that I appreciated. Nobody has yet used it this way around me, but I could also see Onion Test declared in a similar manner to Crocker's Rules, an opt-in social norm that might be recognized by others if it got popular enough. I'm not sure it's worth the limited conceptual slots a community can have for those, but I wouldn't feel the slot was wasted if Onion Tests made it that far. This might be weird, but I really appreciate people having the conversations about what they think is honest and in what way

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