Pedantry is a virtue

Incredible story of a prophet who convinced her people to kill off their cattle, eventually resulting in a famine that killed 75% of the Xhosa people: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqaw...

If ur research is public & free anyone could argue with u or crit u & write about it (in theory) on their Substack. A much more impressive feat than a small num of academics who likely share ur biases & have maybe argued w u privately but would never publicly bc it would lower ur reputation a bit.

It 'aint science if it 'aint public & free. Not to say private research (including "science" behind paywalls) isn't useful, but imo its much less trustworthy & much less useful than public & free research.

h/t Simon Pepin Lehalleur

the correct answer is N*d^2-d(d+1)/2

Given positive integers d and N with N≥d, consider the algebraic set S of tuples of real matrices A_1,...,A_N of size d*d whose product A_1*...*A_N is 0. What is the dimension of S?

LLMs will help with many things, but one thing our society seems pretty scared about allowing automated access to is medical knowledge. Already getting such info out of Claude for example is very difficult. Therefore one of the few things it will be valuable for you to teach yourself is medicine.

(The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser — LessWrong TLDR: LessWrong + Lighthaven need about $3M for the next 12 months. Donate here, or send me an email, DM or signal message (+1 510 944 3235), or comm…

Consider donating to Lightcone! www.lesswrong.com/posts/5n2ZQc...

Doing focusing therapy with Claude

eg I've heard really good things about Little Women, but haven't watched it yet.

I think this may just be an effect of your audience itself being mostly male, so the movies they get most immersed into are male movies, and if you asked a bunch of girls they'd say more feminine-coded movies.

The Big Short

questions around the physics of those things are important for determining this, but I'm imagining something much more Age of Em like than Eternity in Six Hours like

The economics of the things which are left scarce. Feasibly those things will be energy, compute, social prestige, physical distance, information/entropy, and what others do with their (de facto) property (eg in our world that could be reprinting copyrighted books, or 3d printing weapons).

Claude 3.5.1 Sonnet is very funny sometimes

Is China’s LVA Surgery a legitimate treatment for Alzheimer’s? 47% chance. https://x.com/chenkojira/status/1859658593588613336 This market will resolve YES if, by December 31, 2025, at least one independent, peer-reviewed study corroborates the efficacy of deep ...

Claims. Here's the market to track: manifold.markets/Mactuary/is-...

x.com/chenkojira/s...

Anything that can be a market, should be a market!

It can be difficult to come up with resolution criteria & give enough context to traders. Nevermind the stress of a resolution when potentially >$100k is on the line!

Whats an example? Usually someone bringing up neuroscience decreases credibility in their claims for me—usually!

Made a lesswrong starterpack. reply if you use lesswrong and want to be put in it, or if there's anyone else I've not added that should be added!

go.bsky.app/EkcDcjA

Very interesting that it basically hasn't changed other than equality zeroing out, and care getting dramatically lower.

I think this matches my intuition for how my morals have changed over time too.

Left: My 6-factor morality from yourmorals.org from >3 years ago

Right: My 6-factor morality now

Sounds fun to me!

I should be added

I would normally be scared of how left bluesky is, but I'm not going to miss out on a real federated social media site taking off!

eg

Idk if its just how I talk to it or what, but I talk to it the way I do because I find it makes it more smart & reflective. The ladder makes sense of the former observation.

One thing I notice about Claude 3.5.1 Sonnet is that they often try to read my opinion about a subject, mirror that opinion, and rasp philosophically about it.