“The Goddess of Cancer created you; once you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”
Succinctly demonstrates how often people goodhart on length or other irrelevant criteria like effort moralisation. A culture for appreciating posts for the practical value they add to you specifically, would incentivise writers to pay more attention to whether they are optimising for expected usefwlness or just signalling.
“A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
That’s particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you’re doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you’re solving.”
Some selected comments or posts I’ve written
Taxonomy of cheats, multiplex case analysis, worst-case alignment
“You never make decisions, you only ever decide between strategies”
My take on deference
Dumb
Quick reasons for bubbliness
Against blind updates
The Expert’s Paradox, and the Funder’s Paradox
Isthmus patterns
Jabber loop
Paradox of Expert Opinion
Rampant obvious errors
Arbital—Absorbing barrier
“Decoy prestige”
“prestige gradient”
Braindump and recommendations on coordination and institutional decision-making
Social epistemology braindump (I no longer endorse most of this, but it has patterns)
Other posts I like
The Goddess of Everything Else—Scott Alexander
“The Goddess of Cancer created you; once you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”
A Forum post can be short—Lizka
Succinctly demonstrates how often people goodhart on length or other irrelevant criteria like effort moralisation. A culture for appreciating posts for the practical value they add to you specifically, would incentivise writers to pay more attention to whether they are optimising for expected usefwlness or just signalling.
Changing the world through slack & hobbies—Steven Byrnes
Unsurprisingly, there’s a theme to what kind of posts I like. Posts that are about de-Goodharting ourselves.
Also ht Eliezer and Alex Lawsen for posts on the same thing.
Hero Licensing—Eliezer Yudkowsky
Stop apologising, just do the thing. People might ridicule you for believing in yourself, but just do the thing.
A Sketch of Good Communication—Ben Pace
Highlights the danger of deferring if you’re trying to be an Explorer in an epistemic community.
Holding a Program in One’s Head—Paul Graham
“A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
That’s particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you’re doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you’re solving.”