I in fact don’t use Google very much these days, and don’t particularly recommend that anyone else do so, either.
(If by “google” you meant “search engines in general”, then that’s a bit different, of course. But then, the analogy here would be to something like “carefully select which LLM products you use, try to minimize their use, avoid the popular ones, and otherwise take all possible steps to ensure that LLMs affect what you see and do as little as possible”.)
The most important thing is “There is a small number of individuals who are paying attention, who you can argue with, and if you don’t like what they’re doing, I encourage you to write blogposts or comments complaining about it. And if your arguments make sense to me/us, we might change our mind. If they don’t make sense, but there seems to be some consensus that the arguments are true, we might lose the Mandate of Heaven or something.”
There’s not, like, anything necessarily wrong with this, on its own terms, but… this is definitely not what “being held accountable” is.
It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.
This particular sort of comment doesn’t particularly move me.
All this really means is that you’ll just do with this whatever you feel like doing. Which, again, is not necessarily “wrong”, and really it’s the default scenario for, like… websites, in general… I just really would like to emphasize that “being held accountable” has approximately nothing to do with anything that you’re describing.
As far as the specifics go… well, the bad effect here is that instead of the site being a way for me to read the ideas and commentary of people whose thoughts and writings I find interesting, it becomes just another purveyor of AI “extruded writing product”. I really don’t know why I’d want more of that than there already is, all over the internet. I mean… it’s a bad thing. Pretty straightforwardly. If you don’t think so then I don’t know what to tell you.
All I can say is that this sort of thing drastically reduces my interest in participating here. But then, my participation level has already been fairly low for a while, so… maybe that doesn’t matter very much, either. On the other hand, I don’t think that I’m the only one who has this opinion of LLM outputs.
Do you not use LLMs daily?
Not even once.
In general, I think Gwern’s suggested LLM policy seems roughly right to me.
First of all, even taking what Gwern says there at face value, how many of the posts here that are written “with AI involvement” would you say actually are checked, edited, etc., in the rigorous way which Gwern describes? Realistically?
Secondly, when Gwern says that he is “fine with use of AI in general to make us better writers and thinkers” and that he is “still excited about this”, you should understand that he is talking about stuff like this and this, and not about stuff like “instead of thinking about things, refining my ideas, and writing them down, I just asked a LLM to write a post for me”.
Approximately zero percent of the people who read Gwern’s comment will think of the former sort of idea (it takes a Gwern to think of such things, and those are in very limited supply), rather than the latter.
The policy of “encourage the use of AI for writing posts/comments here, and provide tools to easily generate more AI-written crap” doesn’t lead to more of the sort of thing that Gwern describes at the above links. It leads to a deluge of un-checked crap.
I welcome being held accountable for this going wrong in various ways.
It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.
Also: by what means can you be “held accountable”?
If this is true, then it’s a damning indictment of Less Wrong and the authors who post here, and is an excellent reason not to read anything written here.
Well, let’s see. Calibri is a humanist sans; Gill Sans is technically also humanist, but more more geometric in design. Geometric sans fonts tend to be less readable when used for body text.
Gill Sans has a lower x-height than Calibri. That (obviously) is the cause of all the “the new font looks smaller” comments.
(A side-by-side comparison of the fonts, for anyone curious, although note that this is Gill Sans MT Pro, not Gill Sans Nova, so the weight [i.e., stroke thickness] will be a bit different than the version that LW now uses.)
Now, as far as font rendering goes… I just looked at the site on my Windows box (adjusting the font stack CSS value to see Gill Sans Nova again, since I see you guys tweaked it to give Calibri priority)… yikes. Yeah, that’s not rendering well at all. Definitely more blurry than Calibri. Maybe something to do with the hinting, I don’t know. (Not really surprising, since Calibri was designed from the beginning to look good on Windows.) And I’ve got a hi-DPI monitor on my Windows machine…
Interestingly, the older version of Gill Sans (seen in the demo on my wiki, linked above) doesn’t have this problem; it renders crisply on Windows. (Note that this is not the flawed, broken-kerning version of the font that comes with Macs!)
I also notice that the comment font size is set to… 15.08px. Seems weird? Bumping it up to 16px improves things a bit, although it’s still not amazing.
If you can switch to the older (but not broken) version of Gill Sans, that’d be my recommendation.
If you can’t… then one option might be to check out one of the many similar fonts to see if perhaps one of them renders better on Windows while still having matching metrics.
I am confident the average user experience would become worse if you just replaced the comment font with the body font)
Yeah, I agree with that, but that’s because of a post body font that wasn’t chosen for suitability for comments also. If you pick, to begin with, a font that works for both, then it’ll work for both.
… of course, if you don’t think that any of the GW themes’ fonts work for both, then never mind, I guess. (But, uh, frankly I find that to be a strange view. But no accounting for taste, etc., so I certainly can’t say it’s wrong, exactly.)
You definitely would not want the comment font be the same as the post font.
This… seems straightforwardly false? Every one of GreaterWrong’s eight themes uses a single font for both posts and comments, and it doesn’t cause any problems. (And it’s a different font for each theme!)
What is a “deontic mesh”? I am not familiar with this term; do you have a link that explains it?
The bullet-biting here is just “‘real numbers’ are fake”. That makes most of the questions you cite moot.
“Real numbers don’t exist” seems like a good solution to me.
So it’s like… the negation of the diagonal supposedly is there, but… not at any specific place?
Why should this be a problem? On this view, there is no “the diagonal”; there are only diagonals of particular tables for particular values of n, which each have their own negations.
history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?
I concur with @johnswentworth’s comment; I read approximately as far as he did, and came to the same conclusion. I would also like to see the “~1.5 good and important points” listed!
Would you mind posting that information here? I am also interested (as, I’m sure, are others).
Meta: OP and some replies occasionally misspell the example billionaire’s surname as “Arnalt”; it’s actually “Arnault”, with a ‘u’.
Uh-huh, and what about the people who aren’t front-end developers, either, but only “advocates”, “experts” (but not the kind that write code), etc.?
To help with projects like “an open-source screen reader”, it is not necessary to be able to write C++ (or whatever) code. You can also:
file well-written and well-documented bug reports, including testing with various setups, detailed replication steps, etc.
survey alternate software options, cataloguing which of them correctly handle the relevant test cases, and how
find people who do have the relevant expertise and may be willing to contribute code, and connect them with the maintainers
contribute funding to the project and/or help to convince other people to contribute funding
other (i.e., “reach out to the maintainer(s) to ask them what would help get the bug fixed, then do that”)
If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/experts/etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.
I’m just going to link the comment I wrote the last time you mentioned that Rethink Priorities report. That report continues to be of very little use in supporting such arguments as you present here.