That's actually not (that much of) a crux for me (who also thinks it's mildly manipulative, but, below the threshold where I feel compelled to push hard for changing it).

Curated.

I do sure wish this question had easier answers, but I appreciate this post laying out a lot of the evidence.

I do have some qualms about the post, in that while it's pretty thorough on the evidence re: seed oils, it sort of handwavily assumes some other nutrition stuff about processed foods that (I'm willing to bet) also have highly mixed/confusing evidence bases. But, still thought the good parts of the post were good enough to be worth curating.

I'm trying to decide whether to rename this post "Metastrategy Workshop." Fractal Strategy happened to make sense for the skillset I had put together at the time but I don't know that it's what I'm going to stick with.

One thing to remember is I (mostly) am advocating playing each game only once, and doing a variety of games/puzzles/activities, many of which should just be "real-world" activities, as well as plenty of deliberate Day Job stuff. Some of them should focus on resource management, and some of that should be "games" that have quick feedback loops, but it sounds like you're imagining it being more focused on the goodhartable versions of that than I think it is.

(also, I think multiplayer games where all the information is known is somewhat an antidote to these particular failure modes? even when all the information is known, there's still uncertainty about how the pieces combine together, and there's some kind of brute-reality-fact about 'well, the other players figured it out better than you')

Curated. (In particular recommending people click through and read the full Scott Alexander post)

I've been tracking the Rootclaim debate from the sidelines and finding it quite an interesting example of high-profile rationality. 

I have a friend who's been following the debate quite closely and finding that each debater, while flawed, had interesting points that were worth careful thought. My impression is a few people I know shifted from basically assuming Covid was probably a lab-leak, to being much less certain.

In general, I quite like people explicitly making public bets, and following them up with in-depth debate.

What would a "qualia-first-calibration" app would look like?

Or, maybe: "metadata-first calibration"

The thing with putting probabilities on things is that often, the probabilities are made up. And the final probability throws away a lot of information about where it actually came from.

I'm experimenting with primarily focusing on "what are all the little-metadata-flags associated with this prediction?". I think some of this is about "feelings you have" and some of it is about "what do you actually know about this topic?"

The sort of app I'm imagining would help me identify whatever indicators are most useful to me. Ideally it has a bunch of users, and types of indicators that have been useful to lots of users can promoted as things to think about when you make predictions.

Braindump of possible prompts:

– is there a "reference class" you can compare it to?

– for each probability bucket, how do you feel? (including 'confident'/'unconfident' as well as things like 'anxious', 'sad', etc)

– what overall feelings do you have looking at the question?

– what felt senses do you experience as you mull over the question ("my back tingles", "I feel the Color Red")

...

My first thought here is to have various tags you can re-use, but, another option is to just do totally unstructured text-dump and somehow do factor analysis on word patterns later?

lol at the approval/agreement ratio here. It does seem like this is a post that surely gets something wrong.

I think I have a different overall take than Ben here, but, the frame I think makes sense here is to be like: "Deontological injuctions are guardrails. There are hypothetical situations (and, some real situations) where it's correct to override them, but the guardrail should have some weight and for more important guardrails, you need a clearer reasoning for why avoiding it actually helps."

I don't know what I think about this in the case of a country passing laws. Countries aren't exactly agents. Passing novel laws is different than following existing laws. But, I observe:

• it's really hard to be confident about longterm consequences of things. Consequentialism just isn't actually compute-efficient enough to be what you use most of the time for making decisions. (This includes but isn't limited to "you're contemplating crazy sounding actions for strange sounding reasons", although I think has a similar generator)
• it matters just not what you-in-particular-in-a-vacuum do, in one particular timeslice. It matters how complicated the world is to reason about. If everyone is doing pure consequentialism all the time, you have to model the way each person is going to interpret consequences with their own special-snowflake worldview. Having to model "well, Alice and Bob and Charlie and 1000s of other people might decide to steal from me, or from my friends, if the benefits were high enough and they thought they could get away with it" adds a tremendous amount of overhead.
   

You should be looking for moral reasoning that makes you simple to reason about, and that perform well in most cases. That's a lot of what deontology is for.

There's a skill of "quickly operationalizing a prediction, about a question that is cruxy for your decisionmaking."

And, it's dramatically better to be very fluent at this skill, rather than "merely pretty okay at it."

Fluency means you can actually use it day-to-day to help with whatever work is important to you. Day-to-day usage means you can actually get calibrated re: predictions in whatever domains you care about. Calibration means that your intuitions will be good, and _you'll know they're good_.

Fluency means you can do it _while you're in the middle of your thought process_, and then return to your thought process, rather than awkwardly bolting it on at the end.

I find this useful at multiple levels-of-strategy. i.e. for big picture 6 month planning, as well as for "what do I do in the next hour."

I'm working on this as a full blogpost but figured I would start getting pieces of it out here for now.

A lot of this skill is building off on CFAR's "inner simulator" framing. Andrew Critch recently framed this to me as "using your System 2 (conscious, deliberate intelligence) to generate questions for your System 1 (fast intuition) to answer." (Whereas previously, he'd known System 1 was good at answering some types of questions, but he thought of it as responsible for both "asking" and "answering" those questions)

But, I feel like combining this with "quickly operationalize cruxy Fatebook predictions" makes it more of a power tool for me. (Also, now that I have this mindset, even when I can't be bothered to make a Fatebook prediction, I have a better overall handle on how to quickly query my intuitions)

I've been working on this skill for years and it only really clicked together last week. It required a bunch of interlocking pieces that all require separate fluency:

1. Having three different formats for Fatebook (the main website, the slack integration, and the chrome extension), so, pretty much wherever I'm thinking-in-text, I'll be able to quickly use it.

2. The skill of "generating lots of 'plans'", such that I always have at least two plausibly good ideas on what to do next.

3. Identifying an actual crux for what would make me switch to one of my backup plans.

4. Operationalizing an observation I could make that'd convince me of one of these cruxes.

I feel sort of empathetically sad that there wasn’t a way to make it work, but that all makes sense.

Living at a group house seems really important for my psychological well-being, though I imagine if I was living with a partner AND kids that’d be a big enough reroll on social circumstances I don’t know what to expect.