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AnnaSalamon
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Decision Theory: Newcomb's Problem
20AnnaSalamon's Shortform
6y
32
141High-level actions don’t screen off intent
12d
14
97Is "VNM-agent" one of several options, for what minds can grow up into?
9mo
55
236Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout
10mo
59
120Scissors Statements for President?
11mo
33
246Believing In
2y
52
49Which parts of the existing internet are already likely to be in (GPT-5/other soon-to-be-trained LLMs)'s training corpus?
Q
2y
Q
2
77Are there specific books that it might slightly help alignment to have on the internet?
Q
2y
Q
25
340What should you change in response to an "emergency"? And AI risk
3y
60
274Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
3y
80
119Narrative Syncing
3y
48
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The Company Man
AnnaSalamon3d114

I love the motivational portraits. They seem true-to-life to me.

Reply1
AnnaSalamon's Shortform
AnnaSalamon9d60

Eliezer just posted the same article to X (independently, I think); crosslinking in case in case discussion there surfaces anything interesting. 

Hacker News crosslink, while I'm at it.

Reply
AnnaSalamon's Shortform
AnnaSalamon10d14110

A WSJ article from today presents evidence that toxic fumes in airplane air are surprisingly common, are bad for health, have gotten much worse recently, and are still being deliberately covered up. Is anyone up for wading in for a couple hours and giving us an estimated number of micromorts / brain damage / [something]?

I fly frequently and am wondering whether to fly less because of this (probably not, but worth a Fermi?); I imagine others might want to know too. (Also curious if some other demographics should be more concerned than I should be, eg people traveling with babies or while pregnant or while old, or people who travel more than X times/year (since the WSJ article says airline crew get hit harder by each subsequent exposure, more than linearly)).

(The above link is a "gift article" that you should be able to read without a WSJ subscription, but I'm not sure how many viewers it'll allow; if you, Reader, would like a copy and the link has stopped working, tell me and I'll send you one.)

Reply43
peterbarnett's Shortform
AnnaSalamon18d20

I suspect "friendships" form within the psyche, and are part of how we humans (and various other minds, though maybe not all minds, I'm not sure) cohere into relatively unified beings (after being a chaos of many ~subagents in infancy). Insofar as that's true of a given mind, it may make it a bit easier for kindness to form between it and outside minds, as it will already know some parts of how friendships can be done.

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Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
AnnaSalamon1mo2010

Sorry, to amend my statement about "wasn't aimed at raising the sanity waterline of eg millions of people, only at teaching smaller sets":

Way back when Eliezer wrote that post, we really were thinking of trying to raise the rationality of millions, or at least of hundreds of thousands, via clubs and schools and things. It was in the inital mix of visions. Eliezer spent time trying to write a sunk costs unit that could be read by someone who didn't understand much rationality themselves, aloud to a meetup, and could cause the meetup to learn skills. We imagined maybe finding the kinds of donors who donated to art museums and getting them to donate to us instead so that we could eg nudge legislation they cared about by causing the citizenry to have better thinking skills.

However, by the time CFAR ran our first minicamps in 2012, or conducted our first fundraiser, our plans had mostly moved to "teach those who are unusually easy to teach via being willing and able to pay for workshops, practice, care, etc". I prefered this partly because I liked getting the money from the customers we were trying to teach, so that they'd be who we were responsible to (fewer principle agent problems, compared to if someone with a political agenda wanted us to make other people think better; though I admit this is ironic given I now think there were some problems around us helping MIRI and being funded by AI risk donors while teaching some rationality hobbyists who weren't necessarily looking for that). I also prefered it because I thought we knew how to run minicamps that would be good, and I didn't have many good ideas for raising the sanity waterline more broadly.

We did do nonzero attempts at sanity waterline more broadly: Julia's book, as mentioned elsewhere, but also, we collaborated a bit on a rationality class at UC Berkeley, tried to prioritize workshop applicants who seemed likely to teach others well (including giving them more financial aid), etc.

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Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
AnnaSalamon1mo*40

I agree, although I also think we ran with this where it was convenient instead of hashing it out properly (like, we asked "what can we say that'll sound good and be true" when writing fundraiser posts, rather than "what are we up for committing to in a way that will build a high-integrity relationship with whichever community we actually want to serve, and will let any other communities who we don't want to serve realize that and stop putting their hopes in us.")

But I agree re: Julia.

Reply
Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
AnnaSalamon1mo1612

I think many of us, during many intention-minutes, had fairly sincere goals of raising the sanity of those who came to events, and took many actions backchained from these goals in a fairly sensible fashion. I also think I and some of us worked to: (a) bring to the event people who were unusually likely to help the world, such that raising their capability would help the world; (b) influence people who came to be more likely to do things we thought would help the world; and (c) draw people into particular patterns of meaning-making that made them easier to influence and control in these ways, although I wouldn't have put it that way at the time, and I now think this was in tension with sanity-raising in ways I didn't realize at the time.

I would still tend to call the sentence "we were trying to raise the sanity waterline of smart rationality hobbyists who were willing and able to pay for workshops and do practice and so on" basically true.

I also think we actually helped a bunch of people get a bunch of useful thinking skills, in ways that were hard and required actual work/iteration/attention/curiosity/etc (which we put in, over many years, successfully).

Reply
Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
AnnaSalamon1mo158

IMO, our goal was to raise the sanity of particular smallish groups who attended workshops, but wasn't very much to have effects on millions or billions (we would've been in favor of that, but most of us mostly didn't think we had enough shot to try backchaining from that). Usually when people say "raise the sanity waterline" I interpret them as discussing stuff that happens to millions.

I agree the "tens of thousands" in the quoted passage is more than was attending workshops, and so pulls somewhat against my claim.

I do think our public statements were deceptive, in a fairly common but nevertheless bad way, in that we had many conflicting visions, tended to avoid contradicting people who thought we were gonna do all the good things that at least some of us had at least some desire/hope to do, and we tended in our public statements/fundraisers to try to avoid alienating all those hopes, as opposed to the higher-integrity / more honorable approach of trying to come to a coherent view of which priorities we prioritized how much and trying to help people not have unrealistic hopes in us, and not have inaccurate views of our priorities.

Reply
Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn't get farther with a "real/efficacious art of rationality"
AnnaSalamon1mo40

I agree

Reply
What are some good examples of myths that encapsulates genuine, nontrivial wisdom?
Answer by AnnaSalamonJul 22, 2025142

I agree with the sentence you quote from Vervaeke ("[myths] are symbolic stories of perennial patterns that are always with us") but mostly-disagree with "myths ... encapsulate some eternal and valuable truths" (your paraphrase).

As an example, let's take the story of Cain and Abel. IMO, it is a symbolic story containing many perennial patterns:

  • When one person is praised, the not-praised will often envy them
  • Brothers often envy each other
  • Those who envy often act against those they envy
  • Those who envy, or do violence, often lie about it ("Am I my brother's keeper?")
  • Those who have done endured strange events sometimes have a "mark of Cain" that leads others to stay at a distance from them and leave them alone

I suspect this story and its patterns (especially back when there were few stories passed down and held in common) helped many to make conscious sense of what they were seeing, and to share their sense with those around them ("it's like Cain and Abel"). But this help (if I'm right about it) would've been similar to the way words in English (or other natural languages) help people make conscious sense of what they're seeing, and communicate that sense -- myths helped people have short codes for common patterns, helped make those patterns available for including in hypotheses and discussions. But myths didn't  much help with making accurate predictions in one shot, the way "eternal and valuable truths" might suggest.

(You can say that useful words are accurate predictions, a la "cluster structures in thingspace". And this is technically true, which is why I am only mostly disagreeing with "myths encapsulate some eternal and valuable truths". But a good word helps differently than a good natural law or something does).

To take a contemporary myth local to our subculture: I think HPMOR is a symbolic story that helps make many useful patterns available to conscious thought/discussion. But it's richer as a place to see motifs in action (e.g. 

the way McGonagal initially acts the picture of herself who lives in her head; the way she learns to break her own bounds

) than as a source of directly stateable truths.

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Zettelkasten
3 years ago
(+18)
Correct credit-tracking is very important if we want our community to generate new good ideas.
9 years ago
(-76)
Correct credit-tracking is very important if we want our community to generate new good ideas.
9 years ago
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Correct credit-tracking is very important if we want our community to generate new good ideas.
9 years ago
(+193/-60)
Correct credit-tracking is very important if we want our community to generate new good ideas.
9 years ago
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Arbital playpen
10 years ago
(+7)
Arbital
10 years ago
(+48/-25)
Anna Salamon
15 years ago
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