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Edwin Evans
2014530
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Interested in big picture considerations and thoughtful action.

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3ektimo's Shortform
1y
19
Make More Grayspaces
Edwin Evans1mo50

@Duncan Sabien (Inactive): given the updated totals @habryka mentioned does this increase your sense of LessWrong being a great place for co-thinking? 

(Current totals are 42/39 and 16/11.)

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[Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
Edwin Evans3mo10

The guidelines above say "Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...". But I don't see this displayed on user profiles. Is "Norm Enforcing" or "Reign of Terror" displayed anywhere? Also I don't think "Easy Going" really captures the "I Don't Put Finger on Scales" position. 

If the author's policy is displayed somewhere and I just didn't find it then this seems good enough to me as a Reader.  I hope there is a solution that can make authors both like Eliezer and Wei happy. It will be nice to make Commenters happy also and I've thought less about that.

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[Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
Edwin Evans3mo10

Brainstorming: I wonder if it will be possible to have a subtle indicator at the bottom of the comment section for when comments have been silently modified by the author (such as a ban triggered). I think this may still be unfair to party 1, so perhaps there could instead be badges in prominent author profiles that indicate whether they fall into the "gardener" or "equal scales" position (plus perhaps a setting for users that is off by default but will allow them to see a note for when an article has silent moderations/restrictions by author) or a way for authors to display that they haven't made any silent edits/restrictions?

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[Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
Edwin Evans3mo172

Here's my understanding of the situation. The interested parties are: 

  1. Prominent authors: Contribute the most value to the forum and influence over the forum's long term trajectory. They will move to other platforms if they think it will be better for their messages.
  2. Readers: Don't want to see low quality comments that are hard to filter out (though I think when there are a lot of comments, comment karma helps a lot and I'm a lot more concerned about prominent authors leaving than about needing to skim over comments)
  3. Prominent authors concerned with fairness: Authors like Wei who have equally or more valuable content and will prefer a forum that shows that the writer is allowing non-biased commenting from readers even if the reader (like me)  needs to be willing to do a little more work to see this.
  4. Suspected negative value commenters: Think their comments are valuable and being suppressed due to author bias
  5. Intelligent automated systems: Should probably just get everything since they have unlimited patience for reading low quality, annotated comments
  6. Forum developers: Their time is super valuable

Does this sound about right?

[Update: The guidelines above say "Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...". But I don't see this displayed on user profiles. Is the information recorded but not displayed? (I'm looking at Eliezer's profile. If it's displayed somewhere then this seems good enough to me.)]

Reply21
Our Reality: A Simulation Run by a Paperclip Maximizer
Edwin Evans4mo*10

Perhaps in most of the simulations, they help by sharing what they've learned. giving brain enhancements, etc, but those ones quickly reach philosophical dead ends, so we find ourselves in one of the ones which doesn't get help and takes longer doing exploration. 

(This seems more plausible to me than using the simulations for "mapping the spectrum of rival resource‑grabbers" since I think we're not smart enough to come up with novel ASIs that they haven't already seen or thought of.)

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Our Reality: A Simulation Run by a Paperclip Maximizer
Edwin Evans4mo10

Why do you think they haven't talked to us?

Creating zillions of universes doing bad philosophy (or at least presumably worse than they could do if the simulators shared their knowledge) doesn't seem like a good way to try to solve philosophy.

Even if they prefer to wait and narrow down a brute force search to ASIs that the surviving civilizations create (like in jaan's video), it seems like it would be worth not keeping us in the dark so that we don't just create ASIs like they've already seen before from similarly less informed civilizations.

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ektimo's Shortform
Edwin Evans8mo30

I'm not sure how yours is creepy? Is it in the idea that all the worst universes also exist?

Yes, and also just that I find it a little creepy/alien to imagine a young child that could be that good at math.

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ektimo's Shortform
Edwin Evans8mo30

Care to explain? Is the Servant God an ASI and the true makers the humans that built it? Why did the makers hide their deeds?

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ektimo's Shortform
Edwin Evans8mo30

Thanks for the riff!

Note, I wasn't sure how to convey it but in the version I wrote, I didn't mean it as a world where people have god-like powers. The only change intended was that it was a world where it was normal for six-year-olds to be able to think about multiple universes and understand what counts as advanced math for us, like Group Theory. There were a couple things I was thinking about:

  1. I was musing on a possible solution to the measure problem that our universe is an actual hypothetical/mathematical object and there a finite number of actual hypotheticals such that having a copy of a universe would make no more sense than having a copy of a number. (The mathematical object only needs to be as real as we are within it.)
  2. I was also asking if it would be possible to have a world where it was normal for six-year-olds to be that much better at math (and presumably get better as they grow up) in the same way that a six-year-old is that much better at conceptual math than a chimpanzee. Would it have to be creepy or could  they still be relatable? (The girl was smiling because she knew she was being silly.)

Disclaimer: I'm not a Group Theorist and the LLM I asked said it would take ten plus years if ever for me to be able to derive the order of the Fischer–Griess monster group from first principles (but it's normal that the child could do this).

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ektimo's Shortform
Edwin Evans8mo180

Prompt: write a micro play that is both disturbing and comforting
--

Title: "The Silly Child"

Scene: A mother is putting to bed her six-year-old child 

CHILD: Mommy, how many universes are there?

MOTHER: As many as are possible.

CHILD (smiling): Can we make another one?

MOTHER (smiling): Sure. And while we're at it, let's delete the number 374? I've never liked that one. 

CHILD (excited): Oh! And let's make a new Fischer-Griess group element too! Can we do that Mommy?

MOTHER (bops nose) That's enough stalling. You need to get your sleep. Sweet dreams, little one. (kisses forehead)


End

Reply2
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8A small improvement to Wikipedia page on Pareto Efficiency
10mo
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3ektimo's Shortform
1y
19
10Who does the artwork for LessWrong?
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1
16 Minute Intro to Evolutionary Psychology
15y
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