This reminded me of a bug I spent weeks figuring out, at the beginning of my career. Not sure if something like this would qualify, and I do not have the code anyway.

I wrote a relatively simple code that called a C library produced at the same company. Other people have used the same library for years without any issues. My code worked correctly on my local machine; worked correctly during the testing; and when deployed to the production server, it worked correctly... for about an hour... and then it stopped working.

I had no idea what to do about this. I was an inexperienced junior programmer; I didn't have a direct access to the production machine and there was nothing in the logs; and I could not reproduce the bug locally and neither could the tester. No one else had any problem using the library, and I couldn't see anything wrong in my code.

About a month later, I figured out...

...that at some moment, the library generated a temporary file, in the system temporary directory...

...the temporary file had a name generated randomly...

...the library even checked for the (astronomically unlikely) possibility that a file with given name might already exist, in which case it would generate another random name and check again (up to 100 times, and then it would give up, because potentially infinite loops were not allowed by our strict security policy).

Can you guess the problem now?

If anyone wants to reproduce this in Python and collect the reward, feel free to do so.

I agree with some of your premises:

• sometimes people have a common interest
• sometimes they coordinate well about the common interest
• and sometimes they don't
• so the group that coordinates well typical wins over the group that does not

But the discussions about class struggle typically imply more things, such as:

• most interests are so much correlated, that is makes sense to talk about clearly defined groups of people being in an eternal conflict against each other (as opposed to different coalitions for different interests)
• it is all a zero-sum game (unless "our side" wins, and then it suddenly becomes a huge win for everyone)

There is a war, and to choose to ignore it is to roll over and die.

By a similar logic, one should join an organized crime group, because there is crime, and to choose to ignore it is to roll over and die.

(Or, imagine the same argument, except for a race war.)

editing the whole thing is so much extra work after I already did all the work figuring out what I think.

typically I don't want to spend the marginal time.

Yeah. Similar here, only I am aware of this in advance, so I often simply write nothing, because I am a bit of perfectionist here, don't want to publish something unfinished, and know that finishing just isn't worth it.

I wonder whether AI editors could help us with this.

Human reasoning about mathematics can be implemented in physics, yes.

All of mathematics can be encoded as just taking some premises (observations) which use ELEMENT OF, AND, NOT, and FORALL, and figuring out which other observations are guaranteed if we have observed all the premises.

This sounds like first-order logic. Which, I think, cannot even define natural numbers unambiguously.

Also, I think you stretched the meaning of "observation" beyond its usual limits.

Maybe; I am not familiar with details. But if something similar worked, it might work again, that's good news.

I am imagining something similar to the EA Hotel, but for scientists. Selected scientists (not sure by what criteria) could get a free accommodation and some unconditional basic income on top of that, for 5 or 10 years, with the possibility of extension determined by a review 1 year before the end. They would live next to other scientists, so would have opportunities to debate. In an ideal case, there would be a university nearby, where they could offer lectures to students.

Depending on the type of science, research can be expensive (a physicist needing a particle accelerator) or cheap (a mathematician needing a pen and paper). I am imagining the cheap side here, where UBI would solve most of the problem, and remove the need to ask for grants constantly.

That said, grant money is nice, the only downside is that it takes the scientists' time and attention. So maybe the science accelerator could hire people who would handle the bureaucracy as a full-time job. I imagine, probably too naively, that a scientist would just provide an abstract of their work, and the specialist would keep spamming the institutions. Similarly, a scientist would provide a paper, and the specialist would keep spamming the journals. (Or, if the project gets large enough, perhaps it could have a journal of its own.)

The general principle, yes. Not sure if there was an article specifically about the rationalist community.

(Duncan Sabien has announced that he likely won't post on LessWrong anymore. [...] I feel like LessWrong is losing a lot here: Sabien is clearly a top rationality writer.)

I think that Duncan writing on his own blog and we linking the good posts from LW may be the best solution for both sides. (Duncan approves of being linked.)