FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who are flying in a few days early and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!
FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who've got a flight out a few days late and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!
The code to enter is 1112# ! If you're new to the space, come up to the 4th floor and I, Mattie, or Austin will help you get oriented :)
The idea of kill markets are of course not so new. One prominent example was the practice of paying bounties for Indian scalps which was practiced by various US government and white civilian entities during frontier conflicts against natives. They were not the first to adopt this practice but they were the ones to spread it across the continent. This incentivized wholesale extermination of native nations, and predation on innocents, rather than mere military submission, a common outcome of those frontier wars.
Reminded me of Ozy’s post “The Life Goals of Dead People”, where guilt/anxiety/trauma makes you choose to live smaller and reduce variance
https://open.substack.com/pub/thingofthings/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people?r=b9s5z&utm_medium=ios
1I did follow that turn, I just am confused by the examples you chose to illustrate it with. The first examples of Bell Labs and VC firms I agree match the claim, but not the subsequent ones.
I am imagining an accountability sink as a situation where the person held responsible has no power over the outcome, shielding a third party. So this is bad as in the airline example (Attendant held responsible by disgruntled passenger, although mostly powerless, this shields corporate structure, problem not resolved), and good as in the VC example (VC firm held responsible by investors for profits, although mostly powerless, this shields startup founders to take risks, problem resolved successfully).
And if this is the frame you're using, then I don't see how the ER doctor and ATC controller examples fit this mold?
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the structure of the essay, but I'm a bit confused by the second half of this essay — you begin to argue that there are benefits to designing accountability sinks correctly, but it seems like most of your subsequent examples to support this involve someone disobeying the formal process and taking responsibility!
- The ER doctor skips process, turns over triage, and takes responsibility. His actions are defended by people using out-of system reasoning.
- The ATC skips process, comes back, and takes responsibility. Her actions are defended by people using out-of system reasoning.
etc for Healthcare.gov, Boris Johnson, etc. They were operating in the context of accountability sinks which discouraged the thing they ultimately and rightly chose to do, within the system they would have been forgiven for just following the rules.
Likewise, the free market example given feels like the total opposite of an accountability sink! The person who has the problem is in fact the person who can solve it. The free market does have a classic accountability sink, in the form of externalities, but how it's framed here seems like a perfect everyday example of the buck stopping exactly where it should stop.
1Possibly, but then you have to consider you can spin up possibly arbitrarily many instances of the LLM as well, in which case you might expect the trend to go even faster, as now you’re scaling on 2 axes, and we know parallel compute scales exceptionally well.
Parallel years don’t trade off exactly with years in series, but “20 people given 8 years” might do much more than 160 given one, or 1 given 160, depending on the task.
I don't think this is a good reason: There might be some other way of highlighting its importance in light of recent events, but it's not core LW content.
2
What was the point about the carpet rods? You seemed like you were going somewhere interesting with that!