Rachel Shu

Literacy is Decreasing Among the Intellectual Class

I actually think that it is both predictable and also a merit to our society that doctors are dumber than they used to be. Following Whitehead’s precept that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them”, we’d ideally at once broaden the pool of potentially qualified medical practitioners and reduce the difficulty of succeeding at their profession.

If, in the future, any Homer Simpson can safely suture your wounds and chemotherapize your cancers, would you insist they had the reading skills of a medical student of the 1860s?

Replying toLiteracy is Decreasing Among the Intellectual Class

Literacy is Decreasing Among the Intellectual Class

I’ll grant that the quotations from the centennial Etiquette are simply horrendous, but apart from its prose defects it should be noted that we currently live in a society in which the concept of ‘good breeding’ has no proper equivalent (big loss imo), social skill is defined more by charm than class (mixed bag), and business etiquette has been elevated to a minimal cross-cultural norm of tolerance and non-offensiveness (big win). So we should in general expect a modern treatment of manners to be vaguer, and more people to read other sorts of books for social advice.

Replying toDominance: The Standard Everyday Solution To Akrasia

Dominance: The Standard Everyday Solution To Akrasia

The opposite is also frequently true, perhaps even for the very same people: being in a position of authority is also a reliable fix for akrasia. Common examples: “I have a kid now, my family relies on me”, “my community is depending on me”, “my employees need me to make the best decision for the company”.

Even in the example given, almost every officer in the military has both superiors and direct reports.

Rachel Shu3moQuick Take

There are two types of bad scientific theories:

not wrong, but unnecessarily complicated for use in describing the phenomena it wants to describe, like the geocentric model.
actually wrong, like the emission theory of vision (the idea that we see by shooting rays from our eyes).

I don't think it's that useful to call them both false. Geocentrism is outdated in the same sense that woodblock printing is outdated: highly inefficient at the task it's meant to do relative to better tools.

Ooh, one way that you could have it is that the human is actually solving problems by programming a bot to solve them, a bit like in Shenzhen I/O, and the bot starts to meet lookalike bots, that act according to the code you've written, but with an opposing goal? And they're on the other side of the mirror so you can only change your own bot's behavior

I'd never heard of it! But it does seem like current-me minds dying because it means there is no more experiencing afterwards of any sort, not the dying itself, I think I personally wouldn't mind clone-teleportation. O Death, where is your sting?

That does seem exactly like the sort of thing that I was gesturing at with the education section, neat

I just co-wrote some highly novel metaphysics with my good buddy Claude, what could possibly go wrong?

Interesting! Is there a way to limit the player's agency such that, within the rules of the game, the mirroring mechanic would be effectively true?

AI Psychosis, with Tim Hua and Adele Lopez

3mo

Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rules and watch what happens. (Spoiler: probably nothing good, but at least you didn't have to topple a government to find out.)

I think video games, especially multiplayer online games, are doing the same thing for metaphysics. Except video games are actually fun and don't require you to follow Elon Musk's Twitter shenanigans to augur the future state of your... (read 4449 more words →)

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On Dwarkesh’s podcast, Nick Lane says that “(the reason for) Large genomes. To have a multicellular organism where effectively you’re deriving from a single cell, that restricts the chances of effectively all the cells having a fight. … So you start with a single cell and you develop, so there’s less genetic fighting going on between the cells than there would be if they come together.”

Has anyone made the formal connection between this and acausal trade? For all I know this is exactly where the insight comes from, but if not, someone should fill in the gap.

Austin Chen

Austin Chen, Rachel Shu, Tim Hua, Adele Lopez

4mo

Join Tim Hua and Adele Lopez to discuss their findings on AI psychosis and the ‘spiral personality’ archetype that emerges within chatbots.

Doors at 7, talk at 7:30 followed by Q+A

Introducing the Mox Guest Program

Austin Chen

Austin Chen, poconder, Rachel Shu

4mo

TL;DR: Mox, a community space and incubator in San Francisco, is offering 2x/month complimentary access to members of AI safety orgs, and other causes we admire.

Current partners of the Mox Guest Program include:

and a few other private partners.

What we’re offering

We’re looking to partner with aligned orgs, to make it easy for their staff to drop by when they’re in SF. This works especially well for:

People who work elsewhere but occasionally visit SF and want a place to work
Those who have offices but want access to a community space on evenings and weekends
Anyone looking to exchange ideas with other folks working on AI safety

While in the space, guest... (read 481 more words →)

The putative method by which leucovorin (folinic acid) might be a cure for some subtype of autism is that folate receptor autoantibodies (FRAAs) block normal sources of folate reaching the brain, causing a form of Cerebral Folate Deficiency (CFD). It's claimed that folinic acid is an atypical source of folate which can still reach the brain in someone with those antibodies. On this theory, that subtype of autism is an autoimmune disease.

No conclusive evidence links vaccinations to autoimmune diseases, but conditional on folinic acid working, we should maybe look more closely at what would cause the autoimmune disorder, and update positively on some version of the vaccine theory?

Post-Manifest coworking at Mox

Pre-LessOnline coworking at Mox

Rachel Shu, Austin Chen

9mo

Mox (https://moxsf.com) is fully open to the public in the leadup to LessOnline and after Manifest! Wanted to check out Mox? Need a place to cowork from after Manifest? Now's your chance, come meet other people who are in town for Manifest!

Mox is a new coworking space for do-gooders, such as AI & AI safety startups, EA projects, indie researchers, and other "cool people". We are looking for new members: moxsf.com/apply ! Mox is a project of Manifund.

Rachel Shu, Austin Chen

9mo

Mox (https://moxsf.com) is fully open to the public in the leadup to LessOnline! Wanted to check out Mox? Need a place to cowork from before LessOnline starts? Now's your chance, come meet other people who are in town for LessOnline!

Preliminary thoughts on MPOX 1b:

Most recent WHO report: https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/multi-country-outbreak-of-mpox--external-situation-report-35--12-august-2024

Released every other week so next one due in a day or two.

Agree with medical consensus that lockdown-qualifying global pandemic still seems unlikely, but I am concerned enough. I'm guessing <10% chance of global pandemic, <1% chance the median LessWronger gets infected, including tail risk (as in I don't think that even 10% of Westerners get infected even if it becomes a global pandemic.) Nonsexual transmission is more likely this time around than 2022 but sex parties still seem like a key locus. If you intend to go to sex parties in the next 3-4 months you should get the Jynneos vaccine soon, as... (read more)

Rachel Shu's Shortform

Memetics as an analogy and its implicit connotations

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Higher-effort summer solstice: What if we used AI (i.e., Angel Island)?

(Standalone, but mostly written to be referenced by a future post on sandboxing frameworks and ideologies.)

Humans are bad at sandboxing Fake Frameworks, and thinking with them tends to create side effects. That is to say, when we make analogies, we transfer more characteristics than the comparison justifies, and bundle in assumptions that are undeserved.

Memetics (the analogy between ideas and genes) is such a framework, so I want to point out some of the assumptions that this particular analogy from ideas to genetics might unconsciously crystallize. Daniel Filan writes that meme theory "considers the setting where memes mutate, reproduce, and are under selection pressure." I think this is a good characterization of memetics.... (read 842 more words →)

Being hella lost as rationality practice

As the title probably already indicates, this post contains community content rather than rationality content. Alternate, sillier version of this post here.

Motivation

I've been a co-organizer of the Bay Area Rationalist Summer Solstice for the past few years, and I've been thinking about how to make it a more meaningful and engaging experience, like what we have with Winter Solstice. The last few Summer Solstices, which I'd describe as mostly being big picnics, have been fun, but fairly low-effort, low-significance, and I think that's a missed opportunity.

Here's a few things that I'd like more of in Summer Solstice, non-exhaustive:

A sense of a temporary alternate world created around a shared purpose.
Time to connect with

... (read 807 more words →)

Crypto loves impact markets: Notes from Schelling Point Bogotá

I've had the privilege of knowing where I was only in the sense of "within this quadrangle of an insufficiently detailed map, with impassable terrain not well indicated" several times. Usually by choice. More often while alone than prudence would dictate. I think they've been pretty good informal exercises in applied Bayesian reasoning.

For illustration, I'll use the conditions I faced as the first person on a particular backpacking trail since the snow melted. Much of this trail had been washed out during the winter. This was in the High Sierras in California, so the putative trail was mostly over a mix of smooth granite surfaces, talus slopes (loose rocks and boulders), and... (read 538 more words →)