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I want to increase the probability of world survival. This I intend to do by choosing a career which has some impact on existential risk and by donating money to SIAI. I also believe that promoting cryonics decreases existential risk indirectly - if you expect to be around 1000 years from now, that tends to give a longer-term view on matters.
In response to
People who want to save the world
I want the world (i.e., civilization) to survive. I would choose a lower standard of living for myself and a lower probability of personal survival to increase the probability of global survival.
Except for rather minor exertions (such as devoting a minor fraction of my time and energy over a couple of years to making sure that my rather strange set of values had at least one advocate in the singularitarian conversation -- something I stopped doing about Apr 2009) I have not actually done anything for my civilization because I am so ridiculously disabled by chronic illness that with p=.95 I must allocate almost all of my resources into solving that bitch of a problem before I can be any significant use to myself or the world.
I meant "the list won't include a significant majority". (Possibly weak) evidence for this is the underfunding of organizations which actually appear to be trying to save the world (specifically GiveWell's charities and the SIAI).
I say possibly weak because this funding gap comes about as a result of people's behaviour, not their stated preference. So this could be seen as a failure of rationality rather than motivations. As mentioned on this site before, people lack a window on the back of their neck which allows you to read their volition, so it's difficult to distinguish between these two cases from the outside.
Also note the apparent lack of a thriving support community for people with these ambitions.
(Possibly weak) evidence for this is the underfunding of organizations which actually appear to be trying to save the world (specifically GiveWell's charities and the SIAI).
I'd say that the reason for the underfunding is more the fact that the organizations are rather unknown, not that most people wouldn't prefer saving the world. E.g. when walking to the university I almost daily meet Greenpeace and Amnesty representants harvesting new members but no-one representing SIAI or GiveWell. What are the latter two doing to make themselves more known to the public?
In response to
Mere Messiahs
John Perry was a New York City police officer who also happened to be an Extropian and transhumanist, which is how I come to know his name. John Perry was due to retire shortly and start his own law practice, when word came that a plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. He died when the north tower fell. I didn't know John Perry personally, so I cannot attest to this of direct knowledge; but very few Extropians believe in God, and I expect that Perry was likewise an atheist.
Don't know about the atheist part, but seems that the man was at least a cryonicist - found this on Alcor's webpage :
Two members of cryonics organizations were lost in the 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center towers. One was a policeman performing rescue operations.
In response to
How did you actually become more effective?
I bought David Allen's book Getting Things Done and started applying some of the things mentioned there.
More specifically: I stopped using my calendar as a todo-list ("Tuesday: do some school stuff"), now it only contains things that are bound to a certain date/time. Also defining my todo's better (not "do some school stuff" but "read p. 20-35 and make a short summary") has been helpful.
If I have a bigger project / cause of stress - at the moment my bachelor thesis would be a good example - I write down the next action I need to take regarding it. This usually helps a lot. As he states in the book: "There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought."
The cold showers thing that Kaj mentioned sounds very interesting, have to give it a try.
In response to
comment
by
on
Helsinki meetup on May 13, special guest star Patri Friedman (patrissimo)
I updated the wiki.
Thanks!
Does the Helsinki meetup group already have an e-mail list or another means of communication besides LW blog posts?
Nope. We should, though. Any suggestions?
In response to
comment
by
on
Helsinki meetup on May 13, special guest star Patri Friedman (patrissimo)
There's now a group in Google Groups called LW Helsinki, it's a closed group so you'll need to request a membership. I'll soon put a short description about this in the LW wiki together with the group's e-mail address. I'm not too familiar with Google Groups but I understood that it can basically be used as an e-mail list (probably with some fancy extra features). It also saves all sent messages for later viewing, i.e. new members on the e-mail list can easily catch up on past discussion.
Short summary for Helsinki LWers: click here and request a membership.
I updated the wiki. Does the Helsinki meetup group already have an e-mail list or another means of communication besides LW blog posts?
(Won't be attending this meetup but I'm joining the group later in summer when I'm moving to Finland.)
One obvious workaround might be to live elsewhere. (What are the advantages of living there in particular? Better networking opportunities, maybe? That would certainly be worth the cost -- but might it be more efficient to instead have someone whose full-time job was networking to be the one living there, as opposed to someone mostly focused on theoretical research.)
Splitting SIAI to separate geographic locations (polymaths in Cheapistan and some people doing networking in the Bay Area) would create costs in the sense that communication is more tedious with e-mails than face-to-face. I wouldn't want to split the working community either if I was working there (assuming that the community is good which I believe it is).
Your question about what the Bay Area benefits are, is a good one. Are there other benefits besides networking?
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
First a suggestion: I think it would make sense to change the topic to "Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010&2011)". I was confused whether I should post here or on the original "Welcome to Less Wrong!"
Then to the actual topic of my comment:
Hello!
I've been lurking a couple of months now, the rationality mini camp finally activated me to do something instead of just passively soaking up information. I wasn't selected, but I definitely do not regret applying for the camp.
Some info about myself, I grew up on the south coast of Finland and went to a Swedish-language school. Consequently I'm bilingual (Fin&Swe) and also acquired a strong interest in languages - besides the aforementioned I speak English, German, Russian and French. My other hobbies are skiing (both downhill and cross-country), travelling and car repairing.
LW was the biggest reason why I bought myself a Kindle - namely I wanted to read the sequences during commuting but carrying the laptop arround was too tiresome. Thanks to jb55 for making eBook-versions of them! I've made my way through around 80% of the sequences, although I'll have to reread at least the quantum mechanics one with pen and paper at hand.
My location is in France, 2 km from the Swiss city of Basel. I'm currently doing an exchange year in ETH Zurich, but the apartment prices in Zurich together with the fact that my fiancee studies in Basel led us to choose France instead. My main subject is operations research, in a nutshell statistics/mathematics flavoured with lots of simulating. I'm very interested in decision analysis and decision theory. The information about cognitive biases on LW has exceeded that what I learned on the university course about decision analysis, don't know though whether this tells more about the course or LW... Furthermore the self-development interest and striving (Tsuyoky Naritai!) is something I share with the community.
Looking forward to summer meetups in Southern Finland! (Might organize one myself once I've relocated to the area)
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By Richard Dawkins, quoting a former editor of New Scientist (here's at least one source). I don't think this quote contains any deep wisdom as such, but it made me laugh. Actually you could replace the word science with any other noun and it would still make grammatical sense.