Quick version of conversations I keep having, might be worth a top level effortpost.
whistleblower protections at large firms, dating, project management and internal company politics--- all userbases with underserved opinions about transparency. Manifold could pivot to this but have a lot of other stuff they could do instead.
Think about slack admins are confused about how to prevent some usergroups from @channel and discord admins aren't.
(sorry for pontificating when you asked for an actual envelope or napkin) upside is an externality, Ziani incidentally benefits but the signal to other young grad students that maybe career suicide is a slightly more viable risk seems like the source of impact. Agree that this subfield isn't super important, but we should look for related opportunities in subfields we care more about.
I don't know if designing a whistleblower prize is a good nerdsnipe / econ puzzle, in that it may be a really bad goosechase (since generating false positives through incentives imposes name-clearing costs on innocent people, and either you can design your way out of this problem or you can't).
I think the lesswrong/forummagnum takes on recsys are carrying the torch of RSS "you own your information diet" and so on -- I'm wondering if we can have something like "use lightcone/CEA software to ingest substack comments, translates activity or likes into karma, and arranges/prioritizes them according to the user's moderation philosophy".
This does not cash out to more CCing/ingesting of substack RSS to lesswrong overall, the set of substack posts I would want to view in this way would be private from others, and I'm not necessarily interested in confabulating the cross-platform "karma" translations with more votes or trying to make it go both ways.
In terms of the parts where the books overlap, I didn't notice anything substantial. If anything the sequel is less, cuz there wasn't enough detail to get into tricks like the equivalent bet test.
I'm halfway through how to measure anything: cybersecurity, which doesn't have a lot of specifics to cybersecurity and mostly reviews the first book. I never finished the first one, and it was about four years ago that I read the parts that I did.
I think for top of the funnel EA recruiting it remains the best and most underrated book. Basically anyone worried about any kind of problem will do better if they read it, and most people in memetically adaptive / commonsensical activist or philanthropic mindsets probably aren't measuring enough.
However, the material is incredibly basic for someone who's been hanging out with EAs or on LessWrong for even a little bit. You've already absorbed so much of it from the water supply.
one may be net better than the other, I just think the expected error washes out all of one's reasoning so individuals shouldn't be confident they're right.
There's a somewhat niche CS subtopic that a friend wants to learn, I'm really well positioned to teach her. More discussion on the manifold bounty:
A trans woman told me
I get to have all these talkative blowhard traits and no one will punish me for it cuz I'm a girl. This is one major reason detrans would make my life worse. Society is so cruel to men, it sucks so much for them
And another trans woman had told me almost the exact same thing a couple months ago.
My take is that roles have upsides and downsides, and that you'll do a bad job if you try to say one role is better or worse than another on net or say that a role is more downside than upside. Also, there are versions of "women talk too much" as a stereotype in many subcultures, but I don't have a good inside view about it.
the author re-reading one year+ out:
I haven't been working on this stuff except a little on the side for most of the last year, but still get excited here and there. I returned to this post because I might have another post about module systems in software design, package management, and estimational programming written up in the not too distant future.
Overall, this remains a super underrated area.