Hello all,

I am not new, but I read much more than I comment. I have not written any articles yet.
I've known LessWrong for maybe 10 years, but it didn't captivate me then. When I started reading SSC again at the beginning of the pandemic, I also came back to LessWrong and got captivated this time. I have subscribed to some authors and try to stay up to date on the curated list. I don't have the time/concentration to read everything I want, unfortunately. "The Engines of Cognition" is still lying around here wrapped up.

About me: I'm a Berlin freelance developer in my early 30s. I enjoy reading, educational and entertaining videos, board and PC games (cooperative, singleplayer and occasional competitive multiplayer).

Some stuff on LessWrong that I have enjoyed. Feel free to ask me for more links (on and off LessWrong):
* All of A Map that Reflects the Territory
* Bayeswatch by lsusr
* Theses on Sleep by guzey
* Cryonics signup guide by mingyuan
* Can you control the past by Joe Carlsmith

€: I'm also looking for a project from July onwards. Feel free to message me if you are looking for a developer.

Are there any efforts underway to move the content from Arbital to some platform that's, frankly, less buggy, unfinished, and inconvenient to use? Seems to me like a worthwhile thing to do if one wants people to actually read it, see Beware Trivial Inconveniences.

(Apologies if the above comes across as more caustic than it was meant to be, I'm still feeling my way around LessWrong's communication norms)

Feature request: I'd like to have options on /allPosts or the front page to filter out the posts I've already read or bookmarked.

"But -" said Professor McGonagall. She glanced at Mad-Eye Moody, who was nodding his approval, and at Severus, who was keeping his face decidedly blank. "Mr. Potter, you just stunned Mad-Eye Moody! The most famous Dark wizard hunter in the history of the Auror Office! That should've been impossible!"

Moody let out a dark chuckle. "What's your answer to that one, kid? I'm curious."

"Well..." Harry said. "First of all, Professor McGonagall, neither of us were fighting seriously."

"Neither of you?"

"Of course," Harry said. "In a serious fight, Mr. Moody would've dropped all my copies immediately without waiting for them to attack. And on my side, if it was actually necessary to take down the most famous Auror in the history of the office, I'd get Headmaster Dumbledore to do it for me.

and then

"You might say that Mr. Moody was testing me to see if I would try to fight him, or try to win. That is, whether I'd carry out the role of somebody fighting - use standard spells I already knew, even though I didn't expect the consequences of that action to be victory - or if I'd search through unusual plans until I found something that could win.

− HPMoR, Chapter 86

I wonder if there is some wisdom here related to AI alignment. Maybe the goal should be to get Terry Tao to do it.

I recently wanted to find some information about how-the-site-works (because I was trying to use the UI to do something^[1] and not getting the results I expected) and could not find any easy way to look up this kind of information. Information is distributed across many posts of varying ages, and I can only determine whether something is still accurate by finding more recent information that contradicts it. Old posts may have screenshots depicting an older version of the site, where even if the same functionality is still available now, it doesn't necessarily work quite the same. I think documentation of site features needs to be available in one place that is kept up to date, such as a wiki.

1. ^{^}

   I didn't understand until recently how to filter Latest Posts by tags. As it turns out, the "Add Tag Filter" button does not, by itself, filter anything: it only adds to the list of tags on which I can then apply a filter, and selecting a tag that is already on this list (which the menu by default invites me to do, offering a list of the core tags) does nothing (giving me the least possible information about what the feature is supposed to do). Hovering on a tag name, where I would have located the answer if I had paid close enough attention, brings up something that looks almost exactly like a non-interactable link preview but for one extra line of mostly low-contrast text, and after failing to notice this important distinction I went on a long detour around the site looking at old feature announcement posts.

I've just received 184.49€ from CFAR for Good Heart Week, while my profile says I only got 143 Good Heart Tokens, and those should correspond to 143$ -> 136€, and that's without PayPal fees for the transaction and currency conversion. What am I missing?

Attempting to edit my account preferences and submit gives me this error:

{"id":"users.email_already_taken","value":"xxxxx@xxxxx.com"}

and fails to save the account preferences.

Weird tiny bug related to Good Heart Week:

This was the lower hover tooltip (above the comments) from the current Zvi Covid post:

a) This still mentions Good Heart tokens.

b) The closing parenthesis is missing, but only while the number of votes is 1. I wonder how that happened?

But after refreshing the page, the hover tooltip now only displays "Votes", and no Good Heart tokens are mentioned anymore?_?

Anyone know of some good explainers about why the cost of childcare is so freaking high now? How is it that back in the 1800s, house wives would routinely raise 8-10 children each on average and nowadays people have trouble affording a single child?