Will LessWrong do something for April Fool's day this year?
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resolved Sep 9
Resolved
YES

Must be LessWrong themselves, not just some people on LessWrong.

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Alright, the fact that the announcement was tagged as a LW team announcement is good enough for me. I'm sure their choice to post it on April 1st was not coincidental, so it counts.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZSRAoaW4ErMdxdeEm/a-confession-about-the-lesswrong-team

Posted by moderators. Contains funny and factually untrue things.

So I obviously have a large profit motive because I was the first dude to see Isaac post that he thinks this resolves no, but I'll point out that he seems to have already dismissed this post below as having been just a thing Ruby did and is now mainly thinking about the debate feature.

predictedYES

@Joshua I think when my someone posts something on behalf of $SITE in an official capacity this is equivalent to $SITE posting it, which is "doing something for April Fool". The word "something" is broad.

I'm too deep in motivated reasoning to really assess the question myself, I'm mainly just betting on how high Isaac's bar for "doing something" is.

Like, surely just Ruby posting a comment on someone else's post saying "We the less wrong team are actually language models haha jk" would not count. And clearly the entire team coming together and changing everyone's posts to binary for one day would count.

This is somewhere in between those two, and I think it's closer to the first example. But again, I'm deeeeeep in motivated reasoning lol.

predictedYES

@Joshua For what it's worth, I had sold out of the market and only bought back in when it crashed.

predictedNO

Understandable. Gotta say I'm not looking forward to the next few days of debating what counts as an april fool's prank determining my league standing 😂

"April fool! It was not an April fool!"
Does it being a meta April Fool count?

Looks to me like this resolves NO? Ruby did some things for April Fools, and they happen to be a member of the LW team, but the LW team themselves did not do anything particularly special for April fools. (Since the debate feature is a real feature, and Ruby just chose to announce it in a funny way on April 1st.)

Open to counterarguments.

@IsaacKing Best counterargument I can think of is that announcing a site feature is a LW team decision, not a personal decision, and choosing to release it on April 1st was an April Fool's joke by the team, even if the feature was real.

@IsaacKing The debate feature is tagged as "LW Team Announcements".

@Akzzz123 Right, but does it count as an April Fool's joke if the feature is something they actually though was a normal useful feature?

Was the rest of the team involved in it? Or was it just a second personal thing that Ruby did like the other post, and she wanted to tag this one as team announcements?

predictedNO

Involved in the decision do to a funny post, I mean. Presumably the rest of the team was involved in the work of the real feature creation, but my reading here is that it was Ruby alone who wanted to do some april fools silliness on top of that.

predictedYES

@IsaacKing The resolution criteria don't specify that it has to be a joke. I think the debate between fake LLMs was intended to be funny, but that doesn't seem relevant to the market.

@MartinRandall It needs to be something for April Fool's day, not just *on" April Fool's day.

predictedYES

@IsaacKing It fooled some people and was posted on April 1st. Is the NO claim that this was a coincidence and it might have been posted on March 31st if it had been coded sooner? Or that it was an accident that some people were fooled? I don't understand the distinctions here.

predictedYES

@IsaacKing To be clear, subjective market, resolve it however you think best, no wrong answer.

predictedNO

Yeah without knowing the lesswrong team's full intentions for developing the debate feature this is inherently very vibes based

This question was made in January 2023, so "this year" refers to April 2023.

Post by the moderators:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZSRAoaW4ErMdxdeEm/a-confession-about-the-lesswrong-team

New "debate" feature:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kXiAGRWFquXFMi68Y/new-lw-feature-debates

Market resolves YES. Bit of a delay noticing due to the incorrect close date.

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