Are you sure precommitment is a useful strategy here? Generally the use of precommitments is only worthwhile when the other actors behave in a rational manner (in the strictly economic sense), consider your precommitment credible, and are not willing to pay the cost of you following through on your precommitment.

While I'm in no position to comment on how rational your parents are, it's likely that the cost of you being upset with them is a price they're willing to pay for what they may conceptualize as "keeping you safe", "good parenting" or whatever their claimed good intentions were. As a result no amount of precommitment will let you win that situation, and we all know that rationalists should win.

The optimal solution is probably the one where your parents no longer feel that they should listen to your phone calls or use physical coercion in the first place. I couldn't say exactly how you go about achieving this without knowing more about your parents' intentions. However you should be able to figure out what their goal was and explain to them how they can achieve it without using force or eavesdropping on you.

I think we’re using different definitions of virtue. Whereas I’m using the definition of virtue as a a good or useful quality of a thing, you’re taking it to mean a behavior showing high moral standards. I don’t think anyone would argue that the 12 virtues of rationality are moral, but it is still a reasonable use of English to describe them as virtues.

Just to be clear: The argument I am asserting is that ChrisHallquist is not in any way suggesting that we should rename rationality as effective altruism.

I hope this makes my previous comment clearer :)

This is an example of why I suspect "effective altruism" may be better branding for a movement than "rationalism".

I'm fairly certain ChrisHallquist isn't suggesting we re-brand rationality 'effective altruism', otherwise I'd agree with you.

As far as I can tell he was talking about the kinds of virtues people associate with those brands (notably 'being effective' for EA and 'truth-seeking' for rationalism) and suggesting that the branding of EA is better because the virtue associated with it is always virtuous when it comes to actually doing things, whereas truth-seeking leads to (as he says) analysis paralysis.

TLDR: I managed to fix my terrible sleep pattern by creating the right habits.

I've been there, up until a month ago actually.

I've tried a whole slew of things to fix my sleeping pattern over the past couple of years. F.lux, conservative use of melatonin, and cutting down on caffeine all helped but none of them really fixed the problem.

What I found was that I'd often stay up late in order to get more done, and it would feel like I was getting more done (where in actual fact I was just gaining more hours now in exchange for losing more hours in the future). Alongside this my pattern was so hectic that any attempt to sleep at a "normal" time was thwarted by a lack of tiredness, I could use melatonin to 'reset' this, but it'd rarely stay that way.

The first thing that helped was sitting down and working out hour by hour how much time I actually have in a week; this prevented me from thinking I could gain more time by staying up later. The second thing was forming good habits around my sleep. Habit's typically follow a trigger-routine-reward pattern and require fairly quick feedback. As a result building a habit where the routine is sleeping for eight hours is quite hard.

Instead I appended two patterns either side of the time I wished to sleep, the first with the goal of making it easier for me to sleep, and the second with the goal of making it easier for me to get up.

The pre-sleep pattern followed:

Cue: 'Hey it's 10:30pm'

Routine:Turning off technology->Reading->Meditation

Reward: Mug of hot-chocolate

While the post-sleep pattern followed:

Cue: Alarm goes off,

Routine: Get out of bed.

Reward: Breakfast.

Since doing this I've been awake at 8 am every morning with little trouble, and the existence of those habits has made easy to add other habits into my routine. Breakfast, for example, is now a cue to go out running on days when I don't have lectures (this is very surprising for me, I've received several comments along the lines of "Who are you and what have you done with the real you" since I began doing this).

I hope you find this useful.

Fixed it. I don't think I've ever consciously registered that adsorb != absorb, so thanks for that.

Good point, thanks, fixed it.

Thanks for the pointers; I'll make the changes you've proposed and move it to main at some point over the next day.

Look up one or two sequences or other posts for which this could be a follow-up.

I'm having trouble finding an appropriate post, did you have a particular one in mind?

As far as I can tell killing/not-killing a person isn't the same not-making/make a person. I think this becomes more apparent if you consider the universe as timeless.

This is the thought experiment that comes to mind. It's worth noting that all that follows depends heavily on how one calculates things.

Comparing the universes where we choose to make Jon to the one where we choose not to:

• Universe A: Jon made; Jon lives a fulfilling life with global net utility of 2u.
• Universe A': Jon not-made; Jon doesn't exist in this universe so the amount of utility he has is undefined.

Comparing the universes where we choose to kill an already made Jon to the one where we choose not to:

• Universe B: Jon not killed; Jon lives a fulfilling life with global net utility of 2u.
• Universe B': Jon killed; Jon's life is cut short, his life has a global net utility of u.

The marginal utility for Jon in Universe B vs B' is easy to calculate, (2u - u) gives a total marginal utility (i.e. gain in utility) from choosing to not kill Jon over killing him of u.

However the marginal utility for Jon in Universe A vs A' is undefined (in the same sense 1/0 is undefined). As Jon doesn't exist in universe A' it is impossible to assign a value to Utility_Jon_A', as a result our marginal (Utility_Jon_A - Utility_Jon_A') is equal to (u - [an undefined value]). As such our marginal utility lost or gained by choosing between universes A and A' is undefined.

It follows from this that the marginal utility between any universe and A' is undefined. In other words our rules for deciding which universe is better for Jon break down in this case.

I myself (probably) don't have a preference for creating universes where I exist over ones where I don't. However I'm sure that I don't want this current existence of me to terminate.

So personally I choose maximise the utility of people who already exist over creating more people.

Eliezer explains here why bringing people into existence isn't all that great even if someone existing over not existing has a defined(and positive) marginal utility.

As far as I know there's no single sure-fire way of making sure that asking them won't put them in a position where refusal will gain them negative utility (for example, their utility function could penalize refusing requests as a matter of course) . However general strategies could include:

• Not asking in-front of others, particularly members of their social group. (Thus refusal won't impact upon their reputation.)

• Conditioning the request on it being convenient for them (i.e. using phrasing such as "If you've got some free time would you mind...")

• Don't give the impression that their help is make or break for your goals (i.e. don't say "As you're the only person I know who can do [such&such], could you do [so&so] for me?")

• If possible do something nice for them in return, it need not be full reciprocation but it's much harder to resent someone who gave you tea and biscuits, even if you were doing a favor for them at the time.

Of course there's no substitute for good judgement.