I just listened to a podcast by Sam Harris called "Leaving the Church: A Conversation with Megan Phelps-Roper". It's a phenomenal depiction of the perspective of someone who was born in, but then left, the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church.

Most interesting is Megan's clear perspective on what it was like before she left, and many LWers will recognize concepts like there being no evidence that could have possibly convinced her that her worldview had been wrong, etc. Basically, many things EY warns of in the sequences, like motivated cognition, are things she went through, and she's great at articulating them.

I see people are highly upvoting the post, even correcting for the Bostrom's halo effect, so I'm updating a bit in the direction of you being right. I also see that you've followed Lachouette suggestion, and I like it.

I would be genuinely curious to see if it worked as intended in the end, might change the way in which I conduct job interviews a bit (I obviously realize that this is an irrelevant request that will probably not be met).

Best of luck with the recruiting.

Chomsky’s response to a given international event is one of the most predictable phenomena I can think of—even the comets and the tides throw more curveballs. One could easily replace him with a chatbot.

Scott Aaronson.

EDIT: to clarify, if you can predict what a famous personality is going to say on a given topic well enough to replace it with a chatbot, listening to said personality on that topic no longer has much value.

I liked this series a lot. Thanks for writing it.

But I couldn't resist this small math nitpick: "But if the chance that one person can save the world is one in a million, then there had better be a million people trying." -> That's a great quote, but we can be more precise:

If these probabilities were indeed independent (which they can't possibly be, but still), and a million people tried with a chance of 1 in a million each, then the chance P that the world is saved is only P=1-(999999/1000000)^1000000=63.2%. If we want the world to be saved with probability P, we need x people trying, where x =ln(1-P)/ln(0.999999). For instance, to achieve 99% (which isn't good enough), we need 4.6 million people; to get 99.99%, we need 9.2 million people, and so on.

Thanks for putting this together!

When I read the survey results, I noticed some weirdness in the percentages to the questions "Usage", "Draw", "Temporal Habits (Weekdays)" and "Temporal Habits (Weekends)": The answers sum to 100%, but the response counts don't sum to 23. These questions seem to have offered respondents to pick multiple answers, so imo the percentage values shouldn't be 'X% of responses are option Z' but instead 'X% of the 23 respondents picked this option'.

e.g. Usage updated with this change:

Academic studies 18 78%

Personal projects 21 91%

Deliberate practice (e.g. learning guitar) 4 17%

Work for an employer 5 22%

Chores, paperwork, or other necessities 17 74%

Other 1 4%

The response has been great: We now have 40 people tentatively signed up and can't accept more, unfortunately.

If you'd have wanted to sign up, please email John anyway! We may get back to you If someone can't come after all. It also gives us a better idea of how many people to expect next time!

Feedback: This post would benefit a lot from references to the relevant science, e.g. ego-depletion theory, the science of habits, the Systems 1 and 2 described e.g. in Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, and so on. And corresponding discussions on LW. Or even just from name-dropping them!

Right now this post sounds more idiosyncratic than its contents should be, right up to the title of the post.

Update: You could call this half right in retrospect. Fiscal policy is ineffective except when monetary policy is ineffective, and the Federal Reserve didn't print nearly enough money but the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression. We would not have been better off if the Federal Reserve had done nothing, thinking all their plans ineffective. There might be some kind of lesson here about EAs who fret about "What if we can't model anything?" whose despair seems kind of similar to Eliezer_2009's.

This sounds like an excellent idea if you can get good number of countries represented. Could you clarify a couple things?

• Is that €70 per night or for the whole weekend (and with 2 breakfasts)?
• How many participants can attend?
• How many are signed up already?

Suggestion: You could change the headline of this post to "European Community Weekend in Berlin" to make the international character of the event more immediately apparent.