All of Ruby's Comments + Replies

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Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hi... (read more)

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4tailcalled3d
I think if I hover my cursor over text that has been reacted to, I should see the react.
2the gears to ascension5d

Sorry, I meant that it was a mistake on our part. Was not user error! Check out the latest Open Thread to see the experiment there.

I'm trying to come up with a new icon for "not a crux" and also introduce a corresponding "is a crux" icon.

A crux is something upon which your beliefs hinge and would go one way or another. So how about?

 

branching Icon 1849037
Divorce Icon 3535860
crossroad right Icon 2623479

Do any of these seem like a good icon? Out of them, which do you most prefer?

Or I could go outright for a hinge:
hinge Icon 4205389

(this post had "inline reacts" enabled by mistake, but we're not rolling that out broadly yet,  so I switch it to regular reacts)

4Zack_M_Davis10d
It wasn't a mistake; I was curious to see what it did. (And since I didn't see any comments between when I logged out on Sunday and came back to the site today to see this, I still don't know what "inline" reacts are.) If the team made a mistake by exposing a menu option that you didn't actually want people to use, that's understandable, but you shouldn't call it user error when you don't know that it wasn't completely intentional on the user's part.

Welcome! Shortform (see the user menu) is a good way to get started, otherwise the AI open thread.

But have you considered "that was nice, here, have a paperclip!"

Curated. I like this post taking LessWrong back to its roots of trying to get us humans to reason better and believe truth things. I think we need that now as much as we did in 2009, and I fear that my own beliefs have become ossified through identity and social commitment, etc. LessWrong now talks a lot of about AI, and AI is increasingly a political topic (this post is a little political in a way I don't want to put front and center but I'll curate anyway), which means recalling the ways our minds get stuck and exploring ways to ask ourselves questions in ways where the answer could come back different.

1bc4026bd4aaa5b7fe14d
Thank you. I don't think it's possible to review this book without talking a bit about politics, given that so many of the techniques were forged and refined via political canvassing, but I also don't think that's the main takeaway, and I hope this introduced some good ideas to the community.
3toothpaste16d
Won't the goal of getting humans to reason better necessarily turn political at a certain point? After all, if there is one side of an issue that is decidedly better from some ethical perspective we have accepted, won't the rationalist have to advocate that side? Won't refraining from taking political action then be unethical? This line of reasoning might need a little bit of reinforcement to be properly convincing, but it's just to make the point that it seems to me that since political action is action, having a space cover rationality and ethics and not politics would be stifling a (very consequential) part of the discussion. I'm not here very frequently, I just really like political theory and have seen around the site that you guys try to not discuss it too much. Not very common to find a good place to discuss it, as one would expect. But I'd love to find one!

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My feeling is this is optimistic. There are people who will fire off a lot of words without having read carefully, so the prior isn't that strong that there's good faith, and unfortunately, I don't think the downvote response is always clear enough to make it feel ok to an author to leave unresponded to. Especially if a comment is lengthy, not as many people will read and downvote it.

Actually if you first +1 to apply it yourself, you can then hover and then downvote it. But it will only show up if you hover.

1mruwnik15d
But there is no way to downvote a reaction? E.g. if you add the paperclip reaction, then all I can do is bump it by one and/or later remove my reaction, but there is no way to influence your one? So reactions are strictly additive? 

Very valid concern. We had the same thing with "side comments". So far seems ok. We'd definitely pay data lot of attention to this when designing.

Oh yeah, recycle is maybe a good different symbol for it! Wasn't happy with it either.

Yeah, we've also been thinking about "in-line" / "select-text" reacts too.

5David Hornbein18d
I'm strongly against letting anyone insert anything into the middle of someone else's post/comment. Nothing should grab the microphone away from the author until they've finished speaking. When Medium added the feature that let readers highlight an author's text, I found it incredibly disruptive and never read anything on Medium ever again. If LW implemented inline reader commentary in a way that was similarly distracting, that would probably be sufficient to drive me away from here, too.

My partner and I put some effort into benefits from polygenic screening, but alas weren't able to make it work. 

Quick details: we had IVF embryos created and screened for a monogenic disease, (1) this didn't leave us with enough embryos to choose anything, (2) our embryos were created and stored by UCSF clinic, and any screening would have required transferring to another clinic which would have been time consuming and expensive. Unfortunately two rounds of IVF implantation were unsuccessful, so notwithstanding the monogenic disease risk (unclear how ... (read more)

2GeneSmith18d
Hi Ruby, Sorry to hear your IVF process didn't work out. UCSF was in the top 59% of clinics nationwide in 2020 and the top 38% in 2019, so while the clinic you chose may not have been the best, you at least didn't pick a bad clinic. Your experience is unfortunately fairly common among IVF patients. Most parents using the procedure are just hoping for at least one child through the process, and many don't have enough embryos to even consider polygenic screening. I really hope someone does a clinical trial of embryo splitting soon. There's a roughly 50% chance of success using the process in animals. I bet with research we could get it up to 80-90%, which would make it viable for increasing live birth rates among parents who don't have many embryos. That's the type of procedure which would have improved the odds of success for parents like yourselves.

Curated. This post is a feat of scholarship, well-written, and practical on a high impact topic. Thank you for not just doing the research, but writing it up for everyone else's benefit too. As someone who's personally tried for polygenic screening for IQ, etc., I wish I'd had access to this guide last year.

2GeneSmith18d
Sorry I couldn't get it out earlier! I meant to release this in June of last year but the research project into which IVF clinics are best turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I anticipated.

First things first, I'm pro experiments so would be down to experiment with stuff in this area.

Beyond that, seems to depend on a couple of things:

  • The details of what inviting viewers to LW would look like.
  • What the LessWrong team thinks is the best use of our time.

The Details Matter

LessWrong currently has about 2,000 logged in users per day.  And to 20-100 new users each day (comparing the wide range including peaks recently). If the numbers of viewers wouldn't change that much, perhaps +10%, it wouldn't be a big deal. On the other hand, if Rational An... (read more)

Use case I was imagining is in a conversation, someone attempting to summarize the other.

8Nathan Helm-Burger18d
I have some concern on enabling an easy-to-use feature that lazily encourages antisocial behavior, which could, if all the users of it were carefully being pro-social in their use of it, have a good use. Like... we want to keep some friction on antisocial behaviors since those can easily downward-spiral. For some things, it's better to just have the person have to write it out, which also inherently makes it easier for them to add more nuance to what they are saying and why.

Yeah, the current name isn't perfect given the system also has two-axis voting. I might rename it.

Idea: we "highlight" or otherwise visually indicate reacts from the author of a post.

Perhaps helping with the mixed stuff, we might prototype "inline reacts" where you select text and your react only applies to that.

521111

Some reactions seem tonally unpleasant:

I agree. See my response to Razied that I think they might have value, and it's interesting to see how they get used in practice. I think there's a world where people abuse them to be mean, and a world where they're used more judiciously. The ability to downvote reacts should also help here, I hope.
 

 I think a top level grouping like this could make sense:

I was imagining something like that too.

There should be a Bikeshed emoji, for comments like this one

:laugh-react:

Reacts are a big enough change that we wouldn't decide to keep them without a lot of testing and getting a sense of their effects.

I agree that some of these are a bit harsh or cold and can be used in a mean way. At first I was thinking to not include them, but I decided that since this is an experiment, I'd include them and see how they get used in practice.

"Not planning to respond" was requested by Wei Dai among others because he disliked when people just left conversations. 

"I already addressed this" is intended for authors who put a lot of effort into a post and then have people and raise objections to think that were already addressed (which is pretty frustrating for the aut... (read more)

Oops! Will fix those links. Welcome!

2Raemon19d
(Just fixed them)

I've seen this and will write up some thoughts / start participating in conversation in the next day or two.

Clustering of Reacts (differing ontologies)

*Reacts that require high karma to be allowed to use, possibly moderator only

The top level categories are roughly ordered by how interested I am in them for LessWrong

  • Reacts that make sense as conversation between two people have a conversation
    • I will reply later
    • you changed my mind
    • not a crux for me / this doesn’t update me
    • do you have examples?
    • I think you didn’t read me carefully
    • I have seen this
    • I would bet on this at {1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 10:1} odds
    • what’s your concrete prediction?
    • what’s different between worlds where this
... (read more)
2Garrett Baker23d
All of the conversation between two people reacts you listed seem good for viewers of the conversation to also be able to react with.

I think of Reacts as being more like little mini pre-made comments that fill the niche of things that seem too minor to be worth the trouble of typing up as a regular comment. Either it’s something like “I really liked this” where it feels like it’d be cluttered for a lot of people to write this most of the time[1], or also that writing it as a comment invites one to more discussion or obligates to say more on the topic when all they wanted to do was say “I found this confusing” and not get sucked into a bigger thing.

There’s also a thing in that having par... (read more)

Might make this a post later, but here a few of my current thoughts (will post as separate comments due to length).

8Ruby23d
CLUSTERING OF REACTS (DIFFERING ONTOLOGIES) *Reacts that require high karma to be allowed to use, possibly moderator only The top level categories are roughly ordered by how interested I am in them for LessWrong * Reacts that make sense as conversation between two people have a conversation * I will reply later * you changed my mind * not a crux for me / this doesn’t update me * do you have examples? * I think you didn’t read me carefully * I have seen this * I would bet on this at {1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 10:1} odds * what’s your concrete prediction? * what’s different between worlds where this is true vs false? * taboo your words * you didn’t understand me/this is a strawman* * Doesn’t feel relevant to me * Reacts that make sense as conversation between author and reader * I already addressed that (useful for post authors when people didn’t read it) * Reactions that makes sense from readers/audience * agree (public) * disagree (public) * roll to disbelieve * I defy the data * Seems true based on private information * You should try to pass the other person’s ITT * Feedback to the comment/post author * This is 101 content in 301 space* * Poorly formatted * Doesn’t address prior discussion * unhelpfully aggressive* * missing LW basics (e.g. Sequences) * Politics is the mindkiller* * This is a strawman (of something being described) * This seems tribal/political* * Assessment/judgment of the content (particularly epistemic) * locally invalid * premises seem false * correct conclusion, bad reasoning * false conclusion because false premises, but valid reasoning * Reacts that are funny / culture-y * I now have additional questions * this was your father’s rock * The AI does not love you or hate you, but you are made of atoms it can be used for other things * skeptical Eliezer react * horrified Eliezer react * Reacts that express how content affected a
3Ruby23d
I think of Reacts as being more like little mini pre-made comments that fill the niche of things that seem too minor to be worth the trouble of typing up as a regular comment. Either it’s something like “I really liked this” where it feels like it’d be cluttered for a lot of people to write this most of the time[1], or also that writing it as a comment invites one to more discussion or obligates to say more on the topic when all they wanted to do was say “I found this confusing” and not get sucked into a bigger thing. There’s also a thing in that having particular Reacts means the site is offering you affordance to say that thing, normalizing it. Which seems good. 1. ^  What actually happens if that if one person writes this, the next person will upvote that comment as a kind of pseudo-react, in a way.

Curated. Goodhart's Law is an old core concept for LessWrong, and I love when someone(s) come along and add more resolution and rigor to our understanding, and all the more so when they start pointing to how this has practical implications. Would be very cool if this leads to articulation of disagreements between people that allow for progress in the discussion there, e.g. John vs Paul, Jan, etc.

And extra bonus points for exercises at the end too. All in all, good stuff, looking forward to seeing more – especially the results as your vary more of the assumptions (e.g. independence) to line up more with scenarios we anticipate in, e.g. Alignment scenarios.

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