Raemon comments on Highlights and Prizes from the 2021 Review Phase

[Raemon]

I had written this previously in The Review Phase comment threads, but to make it easier for people to see the individual reviews I gave prizes to:

This comment is incomplete, and I will likely edit some of the prizes slightly. But, I’d fallen behind on awarding prizes for reviews and I want to highlight Yes, the Lightcone team will give you money for reviewing stuff. So, I wanted to ship this rough version for now to give a sense of what sort of reviews I found valuable.

Thanks to the large number of people who’ve stepped up to review so far. (I’d still be excited for EffortReview that explore the details of some of the higher ranked posts)

Next round of prize announcements:

• $200 to Nostalgebraist for this review of Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute. I think I didn’t really get the underlying point of the post until I read this.

• $200 to AllAmericanBreakfast for both his review and followup comment on Core Pathways of Aging.

• $200 to Akash for his review of ARC’s first technical report: Eliciting Latent Knowledge, breaking out a lot of details about how ELK affected Akash and people in his cohort, and ways he thinks ELK could be improved.

• $150 to Alex Altair’s review of Taboo Outside View.

• $150 to Yoav Ravid for their review of What do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean? I really liked that they did a mini-distillation of the older good comments about the post.

• $150 to la3orn for their self-review of EfficientZero: How It Works, in particular for grading their conclusions and predictions.

• $100 to A Ray’s review of Coase’s “Nature of the Firm” on Polyamory for explaining something subtly off about

• $100 to A Ray for his review of Politics is way too meta

• $100 to A Ray for his review of Cryonics Signup Guide #1: Overview

• $100 to Leon Lang for his fairly detailed review of Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization.

• $100 to Valentine for his self review of Creating a Truly Formidable Art.

• $100 to Zach Davis for his self-review of Feature Selection, in particular for situating it more clearly in the context of his other work, and previous work it was building on.

• $100 to Dragon God for his review of EfficientZero: How It Works, which dug into some details and found a potential error.

• $100 to Vanessay Kosoy for their self-review of Infra-Bayesianism. I appreciated her laying out what developments had progressed in the intervening year.

• $100 to Neel Nanda for his self-review of Intentionally Making Close Friends

• $100 to Steven Byrnes review of Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens model explained

• $100 to Turntrout for his self-review of Lessons I’ve Learned From Self-Teaching. I love that he had some data on how his attempts had faired.

• $100 to Adam Shimi for for his review of Biology-Inspired AGI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works. I found this particularly valuable for breaking out some of the mistakes Eliezer is pointing out in a fairly distilled fashion. (I personally had trouble actually taking away the points from the post itself)

• $100 to Vaniver for his review of ARC’s first technical report: Eliciting Latent Knowledge.

• $100 to la3orn for their review of Coordination Schemes are Capital Investments.

• $100 to Rafael Harth for their review of [Book review] Gödel, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer

• $100 to MondSemmel for his review of Where did the 5 micron number come from? Nowhere good?

• $100 to Logan Strohl for their self-review of Catching the Spark. I like that Logan brought a lot more experience to bear on an earlier topic, including noticing a place where their original frame was maybe 50% wrong.

• $100 to Daniel Kokotajlo for his self review of What 2026 looks like.

• $75 to Alex Flint for his self-review of Agency in Conway’s Game of Life. I appreciated the link to the Game of Life community where people were researching a question Alex had posted. (My impression is they were working on that independent of Alex’s work)

• $75 to Adam Shimi for his review of What Multipolar Failure Looks Like, and Robust Agent-Agnostic Processes.

• $75 to Rafael Hart’s review of Dear Self: We Need to Talk About Social Media. I particularly was interested in the articulation of how “vibe” comes across in posts, and why that matters. I did feel a bit surprised that Rafael found the particular vibe in Elizabeth’s piece and not in many other LessWrong pieces (maybe he did, and just noticed it here?), but I found it a helpful frame for thinking about what value I get from posts.

• $100 to Leon Lang for their review of the Telephone Theorem.

Honorable Mentions:

These reviews didn’t go into much detail, but added at least a couple new arguments or frames that I found useful, and each get $50

• Zach Stein-Perlman for their review of Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute. I appreciated him laying out the specific reasoning for how it improved his thinking.

• Adam Jermyn for their review of Your Cheerful Price.

• gears to ascension for their review of Your Cheerful Price.

• AllAmericanBreakfast for their review of Oliver Sipple. I particularly liked the evidence-evaluation investigation of “on one hand, it’d be weird to have two unrelated phenomena happening at the same time, so maybe the story just checks out. On the other hand, the two phenomena are only promotedto our attention because of

• Daniel Koko for his self-review of Birds, Brains, Planes and AI.

• Darmani for their self-review of Leaky Delegation: You Are Not A Commodity, with details about which of their attempts at employing their own advice hadn’t worked out

• Eli Tyre for his self-review of How do we prepare for the final crunch time?

• John Wentworth on Highlights from the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

• Double’s review of Against Neutrality About Creating Happy Lives.

• Alex Altair for his review of Lessons I’ve Learned From Self Teaching.

• Valentine for his review of Gravity Turn

• Daniel Kokotajlo for his review of Comments on Carlsmith’s “Is power-seeking AI an existential risk?”

• Daniel Kokotaljo for his review of Fixing The Good Regulator Theorem

• A Ray for his review of Rationalism Before the Sequences. Reading the review got me thinking more about the value of good bibiographies.

• Coafos for his review of Social Behavior Curves, Equilibria and Radicalism

• Coafos for his review of Curing Insanity with Malaria.

• Srdjan Miletic for his review of https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​gziZACDg6EBpGZbJe/​​almost-everyone-should-be-less-afraid-of-lawsuits?commentId=i6B94ofbtKBdKridn

• Akash for his review of How To Get Into Independent Research On Alignment/​Agency

• Unnamed for for their review of Taboo Outside View

• Srdjan Miletic for their review of Almost everyone should be less afraid of lawsuits

• iceman’s review of Unnatural Categories are Optimized for Deception. I didn’t feel like I learned new things from it exactly, but I do appreciate iceman laying out his reasoning, what he found valuable, and some specific reasoning that he may have done better because of it.

[Raemon]

More more round of prize updates:

• @DragonGod another $100 for his review of Selection Theorems

• @Alex Flint $50 for his review of Soares, Tallinn, and Yudkowsky discuss AGI cognition

• Alex Flint $100 for his review of Grokking the Intentional Stance

I’m hopefully sending the prizes to our accountants today, and they should be resolved within a week or so

[Raemon]

Oh, also meant to give a $200 prize to @Akash for his review of PR is Corrosive, Reputation is not (along with the full post he wrote, inspired by it. I’m thinking of this as roughly $100 for the review itself and another $100 for the post)