The reason that the villagers didn't trust the boy that he didn't have a track record. One reason we don't trust people who are loudly proclaiming certain kinds of doom is that they don't have a track record of accurately predicting things (e.g. Heaven's Gate), and that's an inherently important aspect of the phenomenon this post is describing. If the child had accurately predicted wolves in the past, real world villagers would have paid attention to a 15% warning.
The post is suggesting that certain kinds of risks have low probability, and the predictors don't have a track record of success because it's impossible, but that they have other lines of evidence that can be used to justify their probability estimates. In the case of "nuclear war that hasn't happened despite the scares" the evidence is events like the Cuban missile crisis or Petrov Day. But in the parable, it isn't established that the child has good arguments to justify 5% or 15% wolf appearance rates.
It's very cool, especially as a side project. If I'd known it was created by someone here I would have been more careful about the tone of my comment.
I tried WriteHolo against an idea I had for a blog post and its recommendations were worse than useless. I think for non-fiction writing it's probably a non-starter. It couldn't even give me a concise summary of something readily available on Wikipedia (e.g. the availability heuristic), much less suggest creative connections that are at all coherent.
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can't even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn't lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
Being seen as impeding work and being in the way of money making is the quickest way out of the position where you can affect decision making. Erecting prohibitions would do that.
Disagree. A lot of times management would put someone in the position of writing policy as a matter of pure delegation, in which case they'd want a sensible policy that constrains the business in line with that business' unique risks. Writing too lax of a policy is worse than writing one that has some restrictions that make sense in the context of what they are actually building. Writing good policy will put you in a better position to write policy in the future.
That said, policy about general AI when the company isn't going to build general AI is not good. It's better to focus on realistic scenarios.
I didn't notice the author, nor the tags. My thought when the article asked for a prediction was that they grew up in a Jainist community of some kind, although I realized that Jainists may not have their own television shows, and the probability of someone from LessWrong having grown up in a Jainist community is probably less likely than that they grew up in a cult of some kind. But cults are even less likely to have their own television shows, I surmised, at which point I decided the point about television shows was probably rhetorical. That's when I decided the entire thing might be rhetorical, so it wasn't actually worth making a prediction.
I learned a similar trick from an old LW post. You focus on the static in your visual field. If it starts to resolve into random seeming images, that is the beginning of hypnogagia, and if it starts to resolve into even more concrete imagery you are very close to sleep. Try to keep focusing on it, eventually you will fall asleep. This generally works for me.
P.S.: sometimes children do parrot their parents to an alarming degree, e.g., about political positions they couldn't possibly have the context to truly understand.
It's much better for children to parrot the political positions of their parents than to select randomly from the total space of political opinions. The vast majority of possible-political-opinion-space is unaligned.
For language flashcards, you can have the front card be something like "Biblioteca" and the back card "Library [generated picture of a library]." This helps recall even though it's not part of the prompt-- it just seems to stick better in your memory.