LessWrong team member / moderator. I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Thanks for doing this!
I'm not sure if there'd be enough data for it to be interesting, but, a thought I had looking over the "most popular songs" is you might want to somehow count "across cities" as opposed to "multiple times within a city" (NYC I think has the most stable repertoir and I'm guessing some songs are showing up at the top due to consistency, which, maybe is correct, but I'd at least be interested in the other numbers)
I'll leave a Generic Smolstice I made here too I guess. (This was specifically designed to be done outside, and has some random opinionated aesthetic takes and wasn't trying to feature the most popular highlights)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15D8SP-XslTv7OhwZPoxkbigscqMtC0B_jeo1-2lULFE/edit?tab=t.0
Prelude: Bold Orion
Epitaph: The Road to Wisdom
Can you DM me the email you used to pay?
The deal is, there's another event here (Vision Weekend by Foresight Institute) on Sunday, that has agreed that people who purchase rooms at Lighthaven can hang out (although if you want to go to all the talks you should get a ticket for that). So, I expect there to be a fair amount of Solsticers around, but not organized in an official capacity.
Mostly this has only been a sidequest I periodically mull over in the background. (I expect to someday focus more explicitly on it, although it might be more in the form of making sure someone else is tackling the problem intelligently).
But, I did previously pose this as a kind of open question re What are important UI-shaped problems that Lightcone could tackle? and JargonBot Beta Test (this notably didn't really work, I have hopes of trying again with a different tack). Thane Ruthenis replied with some ideas that were in this space (about making it easier to move between representations-of-a-problem)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t46PYSvHHtJLxmrxn/what-are-important-ui-shaped-problems-that-lightcone-could
I think of many Wentworth posts as relevant background:
My personal work so far has been building a mix of exobrain tools that are more, like, for rapid prototyping of complex prompts in general. (This has mostly been a side project I'm not primarily focused on atm)
FYI, normally when I'm thinking about this, it's through the lens "how do we help the researchers working on illegible problems", moreso than "how do we communicate illegibleness?".
This post happened to ask the question "can AI advisers help with the latter" so I was replying about that, but, for completeness, normally when I think about this problem I resolve it as "what narrow capabilities can we build that are helpful 'to the workflow' of people solving illegible problems, that aren't particularly bad from a capabilities standpoint".
Yeah it's definitely one of the obvious things to do. I have not tried hard to do it because it's just kind of logistically difficult. I'll take this moment to think through why it feels hard. Some thoughts:
Looking at that, some ideas do come to mind for how to deal with that, but, it's a more expensive option than a lot of other options.
I think this doesn't feel like quite the right classifier. I do think the people giving said advice have worked with noncentral singers, and, like, I do meanwhile think most of the advice is good, just, pointed at a less important part of the problem.
I think the folk-singer style advice has mapped roughly to what I'd expect from camp counselors.
Some advice from more of a religious-tradition have been:
I was resistant to #2 for awhile because my association of this was catholic mass where a pipe organ plays the melody in a way that feels... kinda boring/lame to me? But, recently, while experimenting with the Suno music AI make covers of Solstice songs, I noticed it inserting melodies that felt like a good mix of "musically interesting" and "probably helpful", and I've felt better about it.
Re "can AI advisors help?"
A major thread of my thoughts these days is "can we make AI more philosophically competent relative their own overall capability growth?". I'm not sure if it's doable because the things you'd need to be good at philosophy are pretty central capabilities-ish-things. (i.e. ability to reason precisely, notice confusion, convert confusion into useful questions, etc)
Curious if you have any thoughts on that.
I agree there's a lot of bad signs, but, I think it is kind of the case that their current releases just aren't that dangerous and if I never thought they were going to be come more dangerous, I don't know that I'd be that worked up about the current thing.