Mistakes repository

Nissa Seru

This is a repository for major, life-altering mistakes that you or others have made. Detailed accounts of specific mistakes are welcome, and so are mentions of general classes of mistakes that people often make. If similar repositories already exist (inside or outside of LW), links are greatly appreciated.

The purpose of this repository is to collect information about serious misjudgements and mistakes in order to help people avoid similar mistakes. (I am posting this repository because I'm trying to conduct a premortem on my life and figure out what catastrophic risks may screw me over in the near or far future.)

On the contrary: most people in the world are ignorant, useless wastes of your time. One SHOULD cut them out of influencing you and taking up your attention. If you can choose to optimize yourself for interacting with the average mathematician or interacting with the average person, you should choose the mathematician.

But in any case: who said anything about cutting off? What exactly are you picturing here? Some sort of outfit that renders one invisible to anyone but bronies? That's not how clothing works, except in extreme examples.

But "people who should be ignored" and "people who don't care how you look" are hardly identical sets. If anything, they're more likely to be opposed than overlapping. The sort of people you want to deal with are usually those with enough merit to have choices in who they interact with, and thus they're naturally more picky.

6wedrifid13y

Most people in the world would be wastes of time due to the opportunity cost spending time with them would represent. "Useless" seems inaccurate, even without considering ways to stab people to death with their bones.

5Crux13y

Are you sure you're not being a bit judgmental? Are you positive you're upholding proper value subjectivism when making this statement? What exactly are these people ignorant of, and why does it matter? What purpose are they useless for, and who's utility function contains this purpose? What are you optimizing for socially, and why do you suggest we do the same? You may say I'm being pedantic, but I don't think so. There are pitfalls everywhere on this subject. Although you might be correct, you shouldn't discount the possibility that you believe that statement only because you makes you feel like you're really awesome. If you changed your mind, you would lose a belief that makes you feel really superior, etc. Using terminology like "wizards" and "muggles" makes me think you've really gone off the deep end here. Besides believing this statement being a good way to feel superior, it's also a good way to shield oneself from social rejection. As a fundamental fact about how typical human hardware works, we can up-regulate or down-regulate how much we care about success with certain classes of people. If you think someone is really awesome, you feel more enjoyment when they accept you, and more pain when they reject you. If you think they're an idiot, you feel less of both. People like us tend to make a strong effort to match up our beliefs with reality, but most fundamentally our motivation system rewards us when we change our beliefs so we feel more enjoyment or less pain, not when the map becomes more matched up with the territory. Sometimes feeling better aligns well with updating to truer beliefs, but sometimes it doesn't. In this area, few things are more common than people grasping as straws trying to figure out why all the people who reject them are just idiots. Less pain that way. So here we are. You made a statement that contains a lot of unpacked information that if unpacked may demonstrate that you're being unfair, and at the same time I've identified tw

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Mistakes repository

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Mistakes repository

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