Have you heard the argument before that single votes can't ever matter because there'd be a recount anyway?

I basically agree with Thomas' assessment. I think the post is likely the funniest thing I've ever done' the jokes are cerebral, sharp, and meaningfully facilitated the local conversation. Many people told me that the humor helped clarify or exposed certain arguments in a useful way.

Other than Eliezer posts, I think this might well be the best April Fools' project in terms of being on the forefront of humor + AI Safety pedagogical value. 

Downsides include that it didn't get significant media or public attention, and the humor was the central point rather than a vehicle for making novel arguments. But my not-very-confident self-assessment is that the post + website is probably still worthy of being among the ~50 best LessWrong posts of 2024.

I'll think about it! I don't personally like writing blogposts of well-known concepts unless I have a novel angle or a clear model for why the existing material is inadequate, but maybe!

Other people reading this who have a novel angle are of course free to take these projects on, of course.

Extension: Which obvious-in-retrospect-and-to-other-people ideas am I currently missing? Are there conceptual technologies that you've noticed that I (Linch) in my conversations or internet comments appear to have missed?

Yep! Or donations below a certain amount won't do anything since planning a shipment of antimalarial nets, or hiring a new AI Safety researcher, is lumpy.

Sometimes people say that a single vote can't ever affect the outcome of an election, because "there will be recounts." I think stuff like that (and near variants) aren't really things people can say if they fully understand IVT on an intuitive level.

There are a number of implicit concepts I have in my head that seem so obvious that I don't even bother verbalizing them. At least, until it's brought to my attention other people don't share these concepts.

It didn't feel like a big revelation at the time I learned the concept, just a formalization of something that's extremely obvious. And yet other people don't have those intuitions, so perhaps this is pretty non-obvious in reality.

Here’s a short, non-exhaustive list:

• Intermediate Value Theorem
• Net Present Value
• Differentiable functions are locally linear
• Theory of mind
• Grice’s maxims

If you have not heard any of these ideas before, I highly recommend you look them up! Most *likely*, they will seem obvious to you. You might already know those concepts by a different name, or they’re already integrated enough into your worldview without a definitive name.

However, many people appear to lack some of these concepts, and it’s possible you’re one of them.

As a test: for every idea in the above list, can you think of a nontrivial real example of a dispute where one or both parties in an intellectual disagreement likely failed to model this concept? If not, you might be missing something about each idea!

oops! For some reason I brain-farted and thought it was a different constant I wasn't familiar with.

I wonder if he'd just memorised the first couple dozen digits of something like Chaitin's constant or e or pi like you or whatever and just started somewhere in the middle of his memorised substri

Yeah that's what I suggested people try if they want a near-perfect external source of randomness.

Yeah I suspect a distilled/pruned neural-net could do really well against the existing strategies, I dunno what the latest state of the field is. I also don't have a very good sense of recent progress in computer/ML optimizations so maybe there are other tricks I'm discounting.