The Best of LessWrong

When posts turn more than a year old, the LessWrong community reviews and votes on how well they have stood the test of time. These are the posts that have ranked the highest for all years since 2018 (when our annual tradition of choosing the least wrong of LessWrong began).

For the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 we also published physical books with the results of our annual vote, which you can buy and learn more about here.

13SebastianG

“The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Life” should be retitled “The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Earth since 1800.” Scott does three things, 1) he notices that happiness research is framing dependent, 2) he notices that happiness is a human level term, but not specific at the extremes, 3) he considers how this relates to deep seated divergences in moral intuitions becoming ever more apparent in our world. He hints at why moral divergence occurs with his examples. His extreme case of hedonic utilitarianism, converting the entire mass of the universe into nervous tissue experiencing raw euphoria, represents a ludicrous extension of the realm of the possible: wireheading, methadone, subverting factory farming. Each of these is dependent upon technology and modern economies, and presents real ethical questions. None of these were live issues for people hundreds of years ago. The tails of their rival moralities didn’t come apart – or at least not very often or in fundamental ways. Back then Jesuits and Confucians could meet in China and agree on something like the “nature of the prudent man.” But in the words of Lonergan that version of the prudent man, Prudent Man 1.0, is obsolete: “We do not trust the prudent man’s memory but keep files and records and develop systems of information retrieval. We do not trust the prudent man’s ingenuity but call in efficiency experts or set problems for operations research. We do not trust the prudent man’s judgment but employ computers to forecast demand,” and he goes on. For from the moment VisiCalc primed the world for a future of data aggregation, Prudent Man 1.0 has been hiding in the bathroom bewildered by modern business efficiency and moon landings. Let’s take Scott’s analogy of the Bay Area Transit system entirely literally, and ask the mathematical question: when do parallel lines come apart or converge? Recall Euclid’s Fifth Postulate, the one saying that parallel lines will never intersect. For almost a couple

26ryan_b

I think this post should be included in the best posts of 2018 collection. It does an excellent job of balancing several desirable qualities: it is very well written, being both clear and entertaining; it is informative and thorough; it is in the style of argument which is preferred on LessWrong, by which I mean makes use of both theory and intuition in the explanation. This post adds to the greater conversation by displaying rationality of the kind we are pursuing directed at a big societal problem. A specific example of what I mean that distinguishes this post from an overview that any motivated poster might write is the inclusion of Warren Smith's results; Smith is a mathematician from an unrelated field who has no published work on the subject. But he had work anyway, and it was good work which the author himself expanded on, and now we get to benefit from it through this post. This puts me very much in mind of the fact that this community was primarily founded by an autodidact who was deeply influenced by a physicist writing about probability theory. A word on one of our sacred taboos: in the beginning it was written that Politics is the Mindkiller, and so it was for years and years. I expect this is our most consistently and universally enforced taboo. Yet here we have a high-quality and very well received post about politics, and of the ~70 comments only one appears to have been mindkilled. This post has great value on the strength of being an example of how to address troubling territory successfully. I expect most readers didn't even consider that this was political territory. Even though it is a theory primer, it manages to be practical and actionable. Observe how the very method of scoring posts for the review, quadratic voting, is one that is discussed in the post. Practical implications for the management of the community weigh heavily in my consideration of what should be considered important conversation within the community. Carrying on from that

23Martin Sustrik

Author here. I still believe this article is a important addition to the discussion of inadequate equilibria. While Scott Alexander's Moloch post and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book are great for introduction and discussion of the topic, both of them fail, in my opinion, to convey the sheer complexity of the problem as it occurs in the real world. That, I think, results in readers thinking about the issue in simple malthusian or naive game-theoretic terms and eventually despairing about inescapability of suboptimal Nash equilibria. What I try to present is a world that is much more complex but also much less hopeless. Everything is an intricate mess of games played on different levels and interacting in complex and unpredictable ways. What, at the first glance, looks like a simple tragedy-of-the-commons problem is in fact a complex dynamic system with many inputs and many intertwined interests. To solve it, one may just have to step back a bit and consider other forces and mechanisms at play. One idea that is expressed in the article and that I often come back to is (my wording, but the idea is very much implicitly present in Ostrom's book): Another one that still feels important in the hindsight is the attaching of a price tag to a coordination failure ("this can be solved for $1M") which turns the semi-mystical work of Moloch into a boring old infrastructure project, very much like building a dam. This may have implications for Effective Altruism. Solving a coordination failure may often be the most efficient way to spend money in a specific area.

21Vanessa Kosoy

This essay provides some fascinating case studies and insights about coordination problems and their solutions, from a book by Elinor Ostrom. Coordination problems are a major theme in LessWrongian thinking (for good reasons) and the essay is a valuable addition to the discussion. I especially liked the 8 features of sustainable governance systems (although I wish we got a little more explanation for "nested enterprises"). However, I think that the dichotomy between "absolutism (bad)" and "organically grown institutions (good)" that the essay creates needs more nuance or more explanation. What is the difference between "organic" and "inorganic" institutions? All institutions "grew" somehow. The relevant questions are e.g. how democratic is the institution, whether the scope of the institution is the right scope for this problem, whether the stakeholders have skin in the game (feature 3) et cetera. The 8 features address some of that, but I wish it was more explicit. Also, It's notable that all examples focus on relatively small scale problems. While it makes perfect sense to start by studying small problems before trying to understand the big problems, it does make me wonder whether going to higher scales brings in qualitatively new issues and difficulties. Paying to officials with parcels in the tail end works for water conflicts, but what is the analogous approach to global warming or multinational arms races?

10Raemon

This a first pass review that's just sort of organizing my thinking about this post. This post makes a few different types of claims: * Hyperselected memes may be worse (generally) than weakly selected ones * Hyperselected memes may specifically be damaging our intelligence/social memetic software * People today are worse at negotiating complex conflicts from different filter bubbles * There's a particular set of memes (well represented in 1950s sci-fi) that was particularly important, and which are not as common nowadays. It has a question which is listed although not focused on too explicitly on its own terms: * What do you do if you want to have good ideas? (i.e. "drop out of college? read 1950s sci-fi in your formative years?") It prompts me to separately consider the questions: * What actually is the internet doing to us? It's surely doing something. * What sorts of cultures are valuable? What sorts of cultures can be stably maintained? What sorts of cultures cause good intellectual development? ... Re: the specific claim of "hypercompetition is destroying things", I think the situation is complicated by the "precambrian explosion" of stuff going on right now. Pop music is defeating classical music in relative terms, but, like, in absolute terms there's still a lot more classical music now than in 1400 [citation needed?]. I'd guess this is also true of for tribal FB comments vs letter-to-the-editor-type writings. * [claim by me] Absolute amounts of thoughtful discourse is probably still increasing My guess is that "listens carefully to arguments" has just always been rare, and that people have generally been dismissive of the outgroup, and now that's just more prominent. I'd also guess that there's more 1950s style sci-fi today than in 1950. But it might not be, say, driving national projects that required a critical mass of it. (And it might or might not be appearing on bestseller lists?) If so, the question is less "are things being destro

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