Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: 2018 Review: Voting Results! , published by Ben Pace on the AI Alignment Forum.
The votes are in!
59 of the 430 eligible voters participated, evaluating 75 posts. Meanwhile, 39 users submitted a total of 120 reviews, with most posts getting at least one review.
Thanks a ton to everyone who put in time to think about the posts - nominators, reviewers and voters alike. Several reviews substantially changed my mind about many topics and ideas, and I was quite grateful for the authors participating in the process. I'll mention Zack_M_Davis, Vanessa Kosoy, and Daniel Filan as great people who wrote the most upvoted reviews.
In the coming months, the LessWrong team will write further analyses of the vote data, and use the information to form a sequence and a book of the best writing on LessWrong from 2018.
Below are the results of the vote, followed by a discussion of how reliable the result is and plans for the future.
Top 15 posts
Embedded Agents by Abram Demski and Scott Garrabrant
The Rocket Alignment Problem by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Arguments about fast takeoff by Paul Christiano
The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge by Ben Pace
Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation by Abram Demski
Anti-social Punishment by Martin Sustrik
The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life by Scott Alexander
Babble by alkjash
The Loudest Alarm Is Probably False by orthonormal
The Intelligent Social Web by Valentine
Prediction Markets: When Do They Work? by Zvi
Coherence arguments do not imply goal-directed behavior by Rohin Shah
Is Science Slowing Down? by Scott Alexander
A voting theory primer for rationalists by Jameson Quinn and Robustness to Scale by Scott Garrabrant
Top 15 posts not about AI
Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization by Eliezer Yudkowsky
The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge by Ben Pace
Anti-social Punishment by Martin Sustrik
The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life by Scott Alexander
Babble by alkjash
The Loudest Alarm Is Probably False by Orthonormal
The Intelligent Social Web by Valentine
Prediction Markets: When Do They Work? by Zvi
Is Science Slowing Down? by Scott Alexander
A voting theory primer for rationalists by Jameson Quinn
Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking by Eliezer Yudkowsky
A Sketch of Good Communication by Ben Pace
A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy by Scott Alexander
Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough. by Academian
Varieties Of Argumentative Experience by Scott Alexander
Top 10 posts about AI
(The vote included 20 posts about AI.)
Embedded Agents by Abram Demski and Scott Garrabrant
The Rocket Alignment Problem by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Arguments about fast takeoff by Paul Christiano
Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation by Abram Demski
Coherence arguments do not imply goal-directed behavior by Rohin Shah
Robustness to Scale by Scott Garrabrant
Paul's research agenda FAQ by zhukeepa
An Untrollable Mathematician Illustrated by Abram Demski
Specification gaming examples in AI by Vika
2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by Larks
The Complete Results
Click Here If You Would Like A More Comprehensive Vote Data Spreadsheet
To help users see the spread of the vote data, we've included swarmplot visualizations.
For space reasons, only votes with weights between -10 and 16 are plotted. This covers 99.4% of votes.
Gridlines are spaced 2 points apart.
Concrete illustration: The plot immediately below has 18 votes ranging in strength from -3 to 12.
# Post Title Total Vote Spread
1 Embedded Agents 209
(One outlier vote of +17 is not shown)
2 The Rocket Alignment Problem 183
3 Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization 133
4 Arguments about fast takeoff 98
5 The C...
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