Yeah, I feel very seen in this moment.  I spent a long time polishing this blog post and while i think some of that was well-spent, some of it was just neurotically changing words around while being concerned about how it would be received. 

I guess it feels harder in writing than in speech because in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.

Yeah I was having a really rough time trying to find a good synthesis.  I think I arrived at my current setup because my default behaviors are pretty good if and only if I'm not freaking out about how I'm coming across; I think this is broadly typical but definitely not universal.

Agreed that there is an important difference between trying to force a specific micro-scale interaction to go well (no! bad!) vs trying to set up rules in such a way that interactions go well for you in general.

Ultimately the reason so much of this post is autobiographical is that while I suspect the mechanism of social anxiety that I posit is generally correct, the method by which I am resolving it is probably somewhat specific to me.  

I have different challenges than other people, and so different kinds of explicit goals might work for me than you, in terms of threading the needle between "resolves anxiety by giving me explicit internal standards by which I can judge my behavior" versus "enables me to function happily as a social being without an unacceptable probability of unpleasant blowback."

I think the important thing is to have standards of behavior for yourself that are fundamentally objective (ish) and totally under your control.  I don't necessarily know what that looks like in your case, though.

Yeah.  Rejection sucks, social humiliation sucks.

I do agree with you about exposure therapy; I think it's important in the sense that it gets you reps on this stuff, I just don't think it necessarily functions alone without conscious reordering of your goals away from "control others' internal state"

I saw several people at LessOnline concerned explicitly about their social phobia about trying to ensure they were never boring anyone, and I don't think that is solvable without explicitly abandoning "never bore anyone" as a goal (an alternative goal structure might be "ensure I am always giving adequate space in the conversation", which is fine because that is a goal you can easily implement and verify.)

IMPORTANT CHANGE: I'm moving this to May 4th because April 13th is on Passover and Jewish people can't eat pizza on Passover.

oh wait you mean the email invite.  Yeah, that's a great point, i'll kick that off again.

sorry, didn't see this previously!  No, we actually still have those roughly weekly.  We post them on the discord at https://discord.gg/m2xJcuC937

Primarily people come to this on the discord, so I just have this on lw for visibility

Hey people! Sorry, due to uber related issues going to be a few minutes late. Shouldn't be more than 10 though.

So this all makes sense and I appreciate you all writing it!  Just a couple notes:

(1) I think it makes sense to put a sum of money into hedging against disaster e.g. with either short term treasuries, commodities, or gold.  Futures in which AGI is delayed by a big war or similar disaster are futures where your tech investments will perform poorly (and depending on your p(doom) + views on anthropics, they are disproportionately futures you can expect to experience as a living human).

(2)  I would caution against either shorting or investing in cryptocurrency as a long-term AI play; as patio11 in his Bits About Money has discussed (most recently in A review of Number Go Up, on crypto shenanigans (bitsaboutmoney.com) ), cryptocurrency is absolutely rife with market manipulation and other skullduggery; shorting it can therefore easily result in losing your shirt even in a situation where cryptocurrencies otherwise ought to be cratering.