While the framing of treating lack of social grace as a virtue captures something true, it's too incomplete and imo can't support its strong conclusion. The way I would put it is that you have correctly observed that, whatever the benefits of social grace are, it comes at a cost, and sometimes this cost is not worth paying. So in a discussion, if you decline to pay the cost of social grace, you can afford to buy other virtues instead.^[1]

For example, it is socially graceful not to tell the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes that he wears no clothes. Whereas someone who lacks social grace is more likely to tell the emperor the truth.

But first of all, I disagree with the frame that lack of social grace is itself a virtue. In the case of the emperor, for example, the virtues are rather legibility and non-deception, traded off against whichever virtues the socially graceful response would've gotten.

And secondly, often the virtues you can buy with social grace are worth far more than whatever you could gain by declining to be socially graceful. For example, when discussing politics with someone of an opposing ideology, you could decline to be socially graceful and tell your interlocutor to their face that you hate them and everything they stand for. This would be virtuously legible and non-deceptive, at the cost of immediately ending the conversation and thus forfeiting any chance of e.g. gains from trade, coming to a compromise, etc.

One way I've seen this cost manifest on LW is that some authors complain that there's a style of commenting here that makes it unenjoyable to post here as an author. As a result, those authors are incentivized to post less, or to post elsewhere.^[2]

And as a final aside, I'm skeptical of treating Feynman as socially graceless. Maybe he was less deferential towards authority figures, but if he had told nothing but the truth to all the authority figures (who likely included some naked emperors) throughout his life, his career would've presumably ended long before he could've gotten his Nobel Prize. And b), IIRC the man's physics lectures are just really fun to watch, and I'm pretty confident that a sufficiently socially graceless person would not make for a good teacher. For example, it is socially graceful not to belittle fledgling students as intellectual inferiors, even though they in some ways are just that.

1. ^{^}

   Related: I wrote this comment and this follow-up where I wished that Brevity was considered a rationalist virtue. Because if there's no counterbalancing virtue to trade off against other virtues like legibility and truth-seeking, then supposedly virtuous discussions are incentivized to become arbitrarily long.

2. ^{^}

   The moderation log of users banned by other users is a decent proxy for the question of which authors have considered which commenters to be too costly to interact with, whether due to lack of social grace of something else.

Law question: would such a promise among businesses, rather than an agreement mandated by / negotiated with governments, run afoul of laws related to monopolies, collusion, price gouging, or similar?

I like Yudkowsky's toy example of tasking an AGI to copy a single strawberry, on a molecular level, without destroying the world as a side-effect.

You're making a very generous offer of your time and expertise here. However, to me your post still feels way, way more confusing than it should be.

Suggestions & feedback:

• Title: "Get your math consultations here!" -> "I'm offering free math consultations for programmers!" or similar.
  • Or something else entirely. I'm particularly confused how your title (math consultations) leads into the rest of the post (debuggers and programming).
• First paragraph: As your first sentence, mention your actual, concrete offer (something like "You screenshare as you do your daily tinkering, I watch for algorithmic or theoretical squiggles that cost you compute or accuracy or maintainability." from your original post, though ideally with much less jargon). Also your target audience: math people? Programmers? AI safety people? Others?
• "click the free https://calendly.com/gurkenglas/consultation link" -> What you mean is: "click this link for my free consultations". What I read is a dark pattern à la: "this link is free, but the consultations are paid". Suggested phrasing: something like "you can book a free consultation with me at this link"
• Overall writing quality
  • Assuming all your users would be as happy as the commenters you mentioned, it seems to me like the writing quality of these posts of yours might be several levels below your skill as a programmer and teacher. In which case it's no wonder that you don't get more uptake.
  • Suggestion 1: feed the post into an LLM and ask it for writing feedback.
  • Suggestion 2: imagine you're a LW user in your target audience, whoever that is, and you're seeing the post "Get your math consultations here!" in the LW homepage feed, written by an unknown author. Do people in your target audience understand what your post is about, enough to click on the post if they would benefit from it? Then once they click and read the first paragraph, do they understand what it's about and click on the link if they would benefit from it? Etc.

Are you saying that the 1 aligned mind design in the space of all potential mind designs is an easier target than the subspace composed of mind designs that does not destroy the world?

I didn't mean that there's only one aligned mind design, merely that almost all (99.999999...%) conceivable mind designs are unaligned by default, so the only way to survive is if the first AGI is designed to be aligned, there's no hope that a random AGI just happens to be aligned. And since we're heading for the latter scenario, it would be very surprising to me if we managed to design a partially aligned AGI and lose that way.

No, because the you who can ask (the persons in power) is themselves misaligned with the 1 alignment target that perfectly captures all our preferences.

I expect the people in power are worrying about this way more than they worry about the overwhelming difficulty of building an aligned AGI in the first place. (Case in point: the manufactured AI race with China.) As a result I expect they'll succeed at building a by-default-unaligned AGI and driving themselves and us to extinction. So I'm not worried about instead ending up in a dystopia ruled by some government or AI lab owner.

Have donated $400. I appreciate the site and its team for all it's done over the years. I'm not optimistic about the future wrt to AI (I'm firmly on the AGI doom side), but I nonetheless think that LW made a positive contribution on the topic.

Anecdote: In 2014 I was on a LW Community Weekend retreat in Berlin which Habryka either organized or did a whole bunch of rationality-themed presentations in. My main impression of him was that he was the most agentic person in the room by far. Based on that experience I fully expected him to eventually accomplish some arbitrary impressive thing, though it still took me by surprise to see him specifically move to the US and eventually become the new admin/site owner of LW.

Recommendation: make the "Last updated" timestamp on these pages way more prominent, e.g. by moving them to the top below the page title. (Like what most news websites nowadays do for SEO, or like where timestamps are located on LW posts.) Otherwise absolutely no-one will know that you do this, or that these resources are not outdated but are actually up-to-date.

The current timestamp location is so unusual that I only noticed it by accident, and was in fact about to write a comment suggesting you add a timestamp at all.

The frustrating thing is that in some ways this is exactly right (humanity is okay at resolving problems iff we get frequent feedback) and in other ways exactly wrong (one major argument for AI doom is that you can't learn from the feedback of having destroyed the world).

The implication is that you absolutely can't take Altman at his bare word, especially when it comes to any statement he makes that, if true, would result in OpenAI getting more resources. Thus you need to a) apply some interpretative filter to everything Altman says, and b) listen to other people instead who don't have a public track record of manipulation like Altman.

My current model is that ML experiments are bottlenecked not on software-engineer hours, but on compute. See Ilya Sutskever's claim here

That claim is from 2017. Does Ilya even still endorse it?