Trying to become stronger.
hath
Karma: 1,255
Next April Fools, Lightcone will allow remaining Good Heart Tokens to be exchanged for longer-lifespan; when AGI finally gets around to making us grey goo, each token spent will buy a nanosecond of extra life.
Also, you can’t measure your Heart’s purity, so there’s no point trying to protect that value. Simple utility functions are so much easier to carry out. For guidance, look at the everyday rock; no messy values like “lack of boredom” or “happiness”.
Oh. Oops.
Prom tickets at my high school are $85. Luckily, you can buy them now, before they go up in price to $100. If you donate $150 to St. Judes, you get a ticket for free; as far as I know, buying a normal ticket does not involve donating to charity. Normally, I’d be in favor of just supply-and-demanding it, by raising prices until you have peak attendance, but something tells me that the purpose of a high school is not to extract profits from their students. Maybe this is just preparing us for college.
Also, I guess it’s worth enabling karma change notifications for today only. Trust, but verify. Edit: looking at all the karma change as a result of this already, I really hope they plan to revert it.
Yeah; my participation in this scheme was predicated on “Lightcone is occupied by smart people who 100% knew that this would be a result of today’s April Fool’s Day; therefore, playing along with the game is okay. Also, they can afford whatever comes as a consequence of today’s thing, provided nobody actually writes a bot (something I very briefly considered before deciding it’d be too much).”
It’s done. They’re all strong upvoted. I keep hearing this voice, though:
“Any who disrespect the omniscient idols by misusing their knowledge for sordid financial gain will, after their death, be sent to the bottom-most layer of Hell, where venomous worms will gnaw at their organs from the inside forever, never to know rest or surcease from pain.” —Scott Alexander, Idol Words
Sure. I’ll strong upvote the first 20 or so on your page.
Wait, did people actually subscribe to the LessWrong Substack?
The link to “a dire spot” links to this post itself.
I really enjoyed this.
A book I highly enjoyed on the topic was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which was Neil Postman mourning the death of rational discourse from TV in the year 1985. Very highly reccomend.
Wargaming was used to great effect in history classes+electives at a private middle school I went to; will write a post with more details sometime. Wargames were probably the closet that those kids had ever gotten to a truly open-ended challenge, and there were some very outside-the-box tactics employed. Definitely a better teaching tool than everything else used in high school/middle school.
I want to write a full post on this sometime, but at at my high school there’s a pretty sharp division between social groups of whether to wear masks or not. The Asian kids driven by their parents to get good grades, the theatre kids, the nerds, and the emo kids mainly wear masks (as our local Blue Tribe representatives), while the majority of the other social groups (Red Tribe, athletic kids (which make up greater than 25% of students), everyone else who isn’t strongly in one of the above groups) don’t wear their masks.
In Virginia, the mask mandate was lifted only a couple weeks ago, and so we’ve seen more people stop wearing their masks over time. The first couple days after the mandate was lifted, everyone was still wearing masks due to peer pressure, but at this point around 60% of the students are still masked and 75% of the teachers are, give or take 20% for both estimates.
At the magnet school that I spend half my time at (Academies of Loudoun), the tribal differences are even more pronounced. The kids in the technical education program have the most variance, as the students in the more “low-status” pathways (not to be confused with income) like welding/construction/car repair mainly don’t wear their masks, but the ones that seem more Blue Tribe (filmmaking, graphic design, graphic communcation (read:fashion)) are more mask-reliant. The kids in the computer science/general science pathways almost exclusively wear masks, even now.
Reasons: The science pathways are more predominately Asians driven by their parents, and Blue Tribe. When the mask mandate was first lifted, I overheard one girl say that her parents had told her to wear a mask regardless (it was implied she’d be wearing it anyway), and separately someone in my class said something along the lines of “most people here are still wearing their masks, because we follow the science”.
As for me personally, I started by wearing it 24⁄7 out of peer pressure, but now don’t bother for classes at my local high school or at Academies. I’m the only person in my Academies class not to.
Anyway, long story short, I’d be surprised if more than 25% of students were still wearing masks when school starts next year (barring any substantial COVID wave before then), and think that the chances of the linked prediction are maaaaybe 4%? I haven’t done much forecasting in general, so may be miscalibrated.
I recall there being a Zvi post with a ton of “related to:” prerequisites at the beginning; does anyone remember which that was? It’s relevant to a post I’m trying to write.
This might have been what you were looking for: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D4hHASaZuLCW92gMy/is-success-the-enemy-of-freedom-full https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wGFS2sZhKAihSg6k/success-buys-freedom Or Aella’s recent substack post, “On Microfame and Staying Tender”
Teaching 1984
Before we are allowed to start reading, we must listen to a PowerPoint in which the book is explained. The plot, the main character, the context, the terms, the setting; none of these are allowed to be discovered ourselves. The context I’ll grant her, but she could have explained the relevant history in five minutes. Instead we must be told what it is that we are supposed to understand from the book, as we cannot be trusted to pick up on the terms by ourselves. I understand that some of it might be confusing for students to read if they aren’t familiar with the book already, but 1984′s hobby of introducing new terms and settings (worldbuilding) isn’t an art highschoolers are incapable of understanding. People here have read The Hunger Games, or Divergent, or whatever other YA fiction is popular these days. They understand it, even when it talks about things that don’t exist in our life (District 13, the factions).
We are instructed to take notes as we read. It’s implied that these things will be on tests, that we will be asked to define the Newspeak terms and the plot elements. I imagine that that’s how they teach Newspeak to children in Oceania, too. Just because we read something in a class doesn’t mean that everything has to be memorized; when you ask students to remember what happens in books, and to recite the themes when prompted, you get SparkNotes, which serves as the answer key for this class. The teacher intends for you to understand the underlying themes. You’re supposed to understand the application of the concepts, and not just the pages of the textbook it was on. Yet, teachers optimize for what can be easily tested.
She begins to read the first chapter aloud. She pauses, at times, to explain the implications of what we read. “What do you notice about the names of the four Ministries?”, she asks. “They’re too nice?” a student responds. At least there’s student participation. She could have just lectured for the whole class.
But, then again, it could be that much worse. I mock how we start the book, but we’re doing a game for the entire grade to try to get us to understand 1984. People will get to roleplay as Thought Police, or Party members, or proles. When I asked the teacher, one-on-one, whether I’d enjoy the game, she said I would. Do I trust that? Somewhat. So, they’re trying.
There’s a post waiting to be written about the simulations/wargames that we played at my old school as part of history class. I think that those types of wargames are enjoyable, and that they teach more than whatever else the teacher would do. Yet, I fear that if word came down from the School Board, telling teachers that wargames are the new way to teach, more effective than anything else, it wouldn’t end well. From where I sit at the bottom of the authority food chain, I’ve seen dozens of well-intentioned interventions and regulations meant to help students learn, and almost none of them have any of the effect than the regulators expected. Part of this is due to teacher incompetence/apathy; part of this is due to simply miscommunicated intentions.
The saddest thing about this is that these students, these people with the potential to be legitimately creative and do so much more than they’re asked to do here, are being taught to see 1984 as their English textbook, in the sense that they must regard 1984 as the source for the questions on the test, and little else. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had to write essays on symbolism or themes. We’ve done this for Lord of the Flies and Macbeth so far this year. It’s horrible.
Get us out of here.
Good post. I don’t know how else to say it, but this+AlphaCode is probably the most worrying evidence for “the future re: AGI” that I’ve seen so far.
Strong upvoted this comment because it led me to finally reading Friendship Is Optimal; would strong upvote twice if I could now that I see who posted the comment.
...I actually didn’t see this until now. Huh.