khafra

The "move slow and fix things" side that developers really need to be listening to right now is Daniel J. Bernstein, Colin Percival, and the handful of other people who build services that mostly don't get hacked.

I didn't intend to fully contradict what you said, but to make a stronger case, and address similar remarks by others--you made the best comment along those lines, regardless of your balance and nuance.

What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.

In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.

So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.

Slate Star Codex's review of The Secret of Our Success, arguing specifically in favor of strong Chesterton's Fences, was voted #5 in the 2019 Best of LessWrong review. SSC's review of Seeing Like a State, presenting a similar argument and directly naming Chesterton, was a notable 2017 hit. "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" also argues in favor of maintaining traditional bright lines, hit 700 karma on LW, and is included in the "Best Essays of LessWrong" collection. "Schelling Fences versus Marginal Thinking" is a 2019 hit following these.

I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.

Per Indiana House Bill No. 246, pi equals 4. Whether AI models do things their creators and users had no means of predicting or controlling is an empirical question, and the answer is "yes, they do."

Indeed, the bound of O(n log n) on integer multiplication was broken by 2^-182 in the results, and that improvement has already been improved, step by step, all the way to 2^-15 (unpublished and unverified, so far). It's hard not to hold the original limit break causally responsible for the rest of it, though. If someone clocked a particle doing 299,792,500m/s, and it wasn't due to instrument error, that would justifiably be regarded as a giant leap in understanding.

Why would any chatbot provider attack Wikipedia *legally*? Captcha is fully solved, and agents are fully capable of acting as editors, pushing any agenda desired by the user.

Why assume attribution will be easy? It's historically been more of an art than a science, and APT trackers say the rise of AI tools is already making it much harder, by homogenizing tactics, tools, and procedures. If OpenAI's next Highly Persistent Internal Model hacks some DPRK endpoints and carries out the attack on important infrastructure from there, the upstream won't shut off OpenAI's network--they might even request its "help" in "defending," and give them extra access.

Maybe better for a train; the benefit is that when you unfold your bike for the last mile, you just put your work into partial transparency and navigate using the external cameras.

The species would survive the end of faber-Bosch, yes; in some diminished form.

But the species would not survive, if for some reason we needed to voluntarily stop using faber-Bosch in order to do so—it would take some kind of supernatural event to convince everyone, and even then some countries would probably keep doing it.

That's why that was the least important objection, independent from the second, and only intended to address the "magic" claim, by showing that microscopic self-replicators already exist.

By analogy, consider how you might respond if someone claimed that there's no possible danger from pocket-sized projectile launchers, because they would require some magic means of propulsion that didn't depend on a taut string attached to a long, flexible arm:

You could reply that atlatls can launch projectiles without using a taut string. Atlatls are not pocket-sized, but they are sufficient to establish that projectiles can be non-magically launched without a full bow. You could then go on to describe a sling, or derringer; and these would not be invalidated by your initial objection to the "magic" part.