Extremely neophilic. Much of my content is on Quora (I was the Quora celebrity). I am also on forum.quantifiedself.com (people do not realize how alignment-relevant this is), rapamycin.news/latest, and crsociety.org
...People say the craziest things about me, because I'm a peculiar star...
Extreme bandwidth (some say I'm broader than anyone). Some think I have higher social bandwidth than anyone (probably not true, but in the direction of "smg").
I care about neuroscience (esp human intelligence enhancement) and reducing genetic inequality. The point of transhumanism is to transcend genetic limitations - to reduce the fraction of variance of outcome explained by genetics. I know loads of people in self-experimentation communities (people in our communities need to be less risk-averse if we have to make any difference in our probability of "making it"). When we are right at "the precipice", traditionalism cannot win (I am probably the least traditionalist person ever). I get along well with the unattached.
Slowing human compute loss from reducing microplastics/pollution/noise/rumination/aging rate are alignment-relevant (insofar as the most tractable way of "human enhancement" is to slow decline with age + make human thinking clearer). As is tFUS. I aim to do all I can to make biology keep up with technology. Reconfiguring reward functions to reward "wholesome/growthful/novel tasks over "the past" [you are aged when you think too much of the past].
Alignment through integrating all the diverse skillsets (including those who are not math/CS geniuses) and integrating all their compute + not making them waste time/attention on "dumb things" + making people smarter/more neuroplastic (this is a hard problem, but 40Hz-tACS [1] might do a little).
Unschooling is also alignment-relevant (most value is destroyed in deceptive alignment, and school breeds deceptive alignment). As is inverting "things that feel unfun".
Chaotic people may depend more on a sense of virtue than others, but it takes a lot to get people to trust a group of people/make themselves authentic when school has taken out much of their authenticity. Some people don't lose much or get much emotional damage from it (I've noticed it from several who dropped out of school for alignment), but some people get way more, and this is a way easier problem to solve than directly increasing human intelligence.
I like Dionysians. However, I had to cut back after accidentally destroying an opportunity (a friend having egged me onto being manic...)
Breadth/context produces unique compute value of its own
https://twitter.com/InquilineKea
facebook.com/simfish
I have a Twitter alt.
I trigger exponential growth trajectories in some. I helped seed the original Ivy League Psychedelics communities and am very good friends with Qualia Research Institute people (though I cannot try them much now, they do have a lot of experimental energy that can be further reconfigured towards tACS)
Main objectives: not get sad, not get worked out over dumb things, not making my life harder than it is now.
I really like https://www.lesswrong.com/users/bhauth. Zvi is smart too https://www.lesswrong.com/users/zvi?from=post_header
[1] there are negative examples too
It depends on how processed the PUFA is - many PUFAs in processed foods are highly heated up. Processing PUFAs in high heat is what causes peroxidizeable aldehydes/acrolein/9-HNE/advanced lipid peroxidation end-products (ALEs)/etc
But PUFAs in soybeans (or sunflower seeds w/o extra procesing) themselves are way less likely to be bad, and this is what the epidemiological evidence hints at.
For whatever reason, PUFAs are VERY strongly protective against heart disease (b/c they lower LDL) and insulin resistance. These are the leading causes of death on western populations, but this does not make PUFAs equally protective on all diseases, especially those who already have very low risk of death from heart disease/insulin resistance.
Fish oil (omega-3's) are also WAY more easily damaged/peroxided than even omega-6's. People usually don't fry food with omega-3's the way they do with omega-6's, but if they did, would we see the opposite association with omega-3's that we usually see? [note omega-3's still fail to increase lifespan as per ITP]
What I am concerned is if they change cell membrane composition long-term in a way that makes cell membranes more easily peroxidized (animals with more saturated lipid membranes live longer, though there are ways to fix the damage, as Gustavo Barja knows - Longevity and Evolution (Aging Issues, Health and Financial Alternatives) 1 )
Whether omega-6's convert into pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory metabolites of arachidonic acid (BOTH are possible) depends highly on one's D6D genotype.
more info I collected: https://www.crsociety.org/topic/18298-are-omega-6s-healthy-or-really-bad-or-does-it-depend-on-how-theyre-processed-and-d6d-genotype/#comment-45956
Does Germany have a lot of food/MP testing companies? Germany seems highly represented in analytical chemistry, as I saw from the SLAS2024 conference.. (for all those people who complain about "lack of innovation" in Europe, they're all underrating analytical chemistry). This conforms to stereotypes about Germans and precision..
(and the culture of Germany is WAY more amendable to eco-consciousness/environmental health than the culture of America)
It would be nice (even in fringe cases) to have one country/area dedicated to being microplastic/pollution free so that people could travel there and then test to see if they feel healthier there (people who have multiple chemical sensitivities often have life-defining levels of motivation for this). Like, this would be the very definition of a health-conscious resort/recovery/convalescence spa.. (people used to go to the mountains for this)
This documentary features Germans:
#sense-making
Isn't having boundaries also partly to do with full on consent (proactive and retroactive) with your implied preferences being unknown?
Consent is tricky because almost no one who isn't unschooled grows up consenting to anything. People grow used to consenting to things that make them feel unhappy because they don't know themselves well enough, and they trap themselves into structures that punish you for dropping out or for not opting into anything. In that sense, the system does not respect your own boundaries for your own self autonomy - your actions don't have the proper markov boundary from the rest of the system and thus you can't act as an independent agent. Some unschooled people have the most robust markov boundaries. The very structure of many school and work environments (one that penalizes work at home) is one that inherently creates power structures that cross people's boundaries, especially their energetic ones.
Even the state starts out by eroding some of the boundaries between person and state, without consent..
These people have stronger boundaries on ONE layer of abstraction - https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-art-of-not-being-governed?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2. This does not necessarily translate to better boundaries on the object level
https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1766509149297189274?t=ms8cmXL0em2zB4xdJyUblA&s=19 on mimetic boundaries
(Now that AI is creating new wealth very quickly, it becomes more possible for people to default not consent to all the mazes that everyone else seemingly "consents to"). Zvi's mazes post makes sense here
multiscale entropy
netlify/vercel/heroku/shinyapps/fleek (find cool associated apps!) + replit
github
modal/EC2/docker
Are exotic computing paradigms (ECPs) pro-alignment?
cf https://twitter.com/niplav_site/status/1760277413907382685
They are orthogonal to the "scale is all you need" people, and the "scale is all you need" thesis is the hardest for alignment/interpretability
some examples of alternatives: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PyChB935jjtmL5fbo/time-and-energy-costs-to-erase-a-bit, Normal Computing, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ngqFnDjCtWqQcSHXZ/safety-of-self-assembled-neuromorphic-hardware, computing-related thiel fellows (eg Thomas Sohmers, Tapa Ghosh)
[this is also how to get into neglectedness again, which EA adopted as a principle but recently forgot]
from Charles Rosenbauer:
This is neat, but this does little to nothing to optimize non-AI compute. Modern CPUs are insanely wasteful with transistors, plenty of room for multiple orders of magnitude of optimization there. This is only a fraction of the future of physics-optimized compute.
Have you seen smartairfilters.com?
I've noticed that every air purifier I used fails to reduce PM2.5 by much on highly polluted days or cities (for instance, the Aurea grouphouse in Berlin has a Dyson air purifier, but when I ran it to the max, it still barely reduced the Berlin PM2.5 from its value of 15-20 ug/m^3, even at medium distances from Berlin). I live in Boston where PM2.5 levels are usually low enough, and I still don't notice differences in PM [I use sqair's] but I run it all the time anyways because it still captures enough dust over the day
Using size-1 piksters makes you really aware of all the subtle noise that your hidden plaque is gives your mind (I noticed they cleared up plaque un-reachable by floss+waterpiks+electric toothbrushes.. the first step to alignment/a faithful computation is reducing unnecessary noise (you notice this easily on microdoses of weed/psychedelics)
It's a pareto-efficient improvement to give all alignment researchers piksters to eliminate this source of noise (align the aligners first - reducing unnecessary noise is always the first step to alignment [and near-term tFUS is also a means to reduce noise]). I know that one of the alignment offices had a lot of "freebies" that anyone could use - so piksters should be one of the useable freebies.
Related "As stated, one of the main things I make-believe is true is the overlighting intelligence with which I align myself. I speculate that I am in a co-creative relationship with an intelligence and will infinitely superior to my own. I observe that I exist within energetic patterns that flow like currents. I observe that when I act in alignment with these subtle energetic currents, all goes well, desires manifest, direction is clear, ease and smoothness are natural. I observe that I have developed a high degree of sensitivity to this energy, and that I’m able to make micro-corrections before any significant non-smoothness occurs.""