Like pimgd, $3900 is a lot of money for me. Even if I'd get a discount to the CFAR workshop for being an EA, I might do just as well to continue studying materials from past CFAR workshops as I come across them, rather than attending a workshop in person.

I feel like I don't deserve a scholarship to CFAR, since I'm a fraud and a bad person (yes, I know, impostor syndrome). When people have bragged about getting scholarships to CFAR, though, I've felt sad, since I feel like I would have been honored, rather than proud, to accept such charity, if I were in their position. I guess that I'm not really as keen on donating to CFAR anymore for similar reasons--why donate to CFAR rather than spending money on myself, if I value (say) fitness gear that will help me live longer more than saving up for CFAR, and saving up for CFAR for myself more than helping someone whose personality rubs me the wrong way attend a workshop?

Um, thank you very much for entertaining my unkind rant. <3

I have a rationalist/rationalist-adjacent friend who would love a book recommendation on how to be good at dating and relationships. Their specific scenario is that they already have a stable relationship, but they're relatively new to having relationships in general, and are looking for lots of general advice.

Since the sanity waterline here is pretty high, I though I'd ask if anyone had any recommendations or not. If not, I'll just point them to this LW post, though having a bit more material to read through might suit them well.

Thanks!

Agreed. If you're not willing to say "Nope, you crossed the line. See you next time, I'll decide when that is, goodbye" (or similar) and leave (cut them off to whatever degree is needed to stop the harmful behavior), then you need to not give them an opportunity to start again.

Yes, that's important. You actually have assert boundaries and simply communicating them might not be enough. At the same time it's very valuable to go through the experience of asserting those boundaries. Parental relationships do have a strong effect on the human psychological system.

Some random thoughts:

My parent always had a number of narcissistic traits, but was never a full-blown narcissist.

Narcissism is one of the "Cluster B" personality disorders. Other disorders have some similarities and some differences. (I don't even know if they are clearly separated in the territory. The psychological definitions keep changing.) So if there seems to be a serious issue, but it only partially fits the definition of narcissism, and partially it doesn't, maybe it is something else. My quick uneducated guess would be borderline personality disorder.

If you are not sure what to do, maybe it would be better to not burn the bridges, only build clear fences. (You can still burn the bridges later if you decide to, but maybe with good fences it will not be necessary.) For example, move to your own place, and visit your parent once in a month, for an hour or two. Also decide which parts of your life you don't want to share with them, and simply don't talk about it. Maybe find a topic that is not painful for you, and always switch to that one (e.g. talk about work, or news, or latest science; don't talk about your health and relationships). Maybe this will work.

Complicating factor

Uhm, I think your decision should not be influenced by this. Solve your personal problems first, optimize the world later. (Having your personal problems unsolved will also harm your world-optimizing abilities.)

In the spirit of asking personally important questions of LessWrong, here goes. Please be gentle with me.

Related:

Discussion post by another user on being raised by narcissists

r/RaisedByNarcissists

My parent always had a number of narcissistic traits, but was never a full-blown narcissist. They (singular) supported me financially and always seemed to legitimately care about how well I was doing academically and professionally. However, they had a habit of lowering my status by verbally critiquing my actions, and sometimes made odd demands of me, such as demanding that I share some of my passwords with them, or demanding that they be present every time I go to the doctor (I'm 25).

Right now, I think that I'm either going to severely limit contact with my parent, or cut contact completely. I think that cutting contact completely is likely to be more pleasant and easier on me, but I'm really not sure about that yet. I've had a few family members tell me that I'm obligated to keep in touch with my parent. Since LW is my in-group, and since I share lots of values with the kind of people who tend to post here, I'd prefer to get advice here, rather than elsewhere. Specifically, I'm not sure if I have a familial obligation to remain in contact with my parent, given that they've only been somewhat emotionally abusive to me; it's probable that they don't even realize/ are incapable of realizing that I find their treatment of me to be hurtful. Do you think that I have any such obligation?

Complicating factor: if maintaining a good relationship with my parent might slightly increase the amount I expect to be able to donate to effective charities at the cost of (in expectation) making me less happy, does this change my obligations?

Taken. Thanks for putting in the effort to do the surveys. I noticed that the question on IQ calibration asked about "the probability that the IQ you gave earlier in the survey is greater than the IQ of over 50% of survey respondents", and I wondered if you meant to ask instead about (the probability that the IQ given earlier is greater than the reported IQ of over 50% of survey respondents). I recall that people tended to report absurdly high IQs in earlier surveys.

After reading this, I stuck a note saying "Be a vampire" to the front of my computer (which is my main source of procrastination).

Also, this post reminds me of the fact that being a hard sciences student is one of the things which helps me keep 'leveling up' on a regular basis, which is strong motivation to get me to do my coursework.

I think that, for almost all values of "you", you do more good by having children and bringing them up well than by expending resources to preserve and finally resurrect yourself.

If you care about having children, why not do both?

A billion frozen "average Joes" cost a billion times as much to maintain as just one

That's not nearly true.

The values of physical constants are regularly outside of the expected interval by 3+ standard deviations. This goes on for decades.

Moral of the story: Visualize the ways you could be way off. Use outside views. Increase your error bars.

Does this refer to literature values of physical constants, or the values of physical constants as guessed at by participants of psych studies?

I'm not convinced. The amount of saved lives, QALYs, or whatever you are counting that the US government welfare program gets per dollar is (or seems to be to me) quite a bit less than the amount that, say, the AMF could get with that money. I don't know how many dollars per QALY US government welfare manages to get, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were on the order of $1000-$10000 per QALY. And that's not even counting the fact that even if the US goverment had that bit more money from you not being a tax lawyer, that money would not all go to welfare and other such efficient (relative to what else the government spends money on) projects. I would imagine a fair portion would go to, say, bombing Syria, or hiring an extra parking-meter enforcer, or such inefficent stuff, that get an even worse $/QALY result.

And that is still not to mention the fact that some of that money would go to, say, funding the NSA to spy on your phone calls and read your email, or to the TSA to harass, strip-search, and detain you, which are net negatives.

And even that is not counting that MIRI may end up having a QALY/$ result far, far higher than anything the AMF or whoever could ever hope of possibly getting.

I'm not saying you're flat-out wrong, and it is something to take into consideration when figuring out the altruistic impact of your job, but taking into account these objections, it seems highly unlikely that the marginal dollar from the government goes far enough to weigh very heavily in ones analysis.