The fact that the people involved apparently find it uniquely difficult to talk about is a pretty good indication that Leverage != CFAR/MIRI in terms of cultishness/harms etc.
I'm sure it'll be fine :-)
I'm not involved in this in any way, but from the comments I've seen of yours in these threads you've shown great honesty and openness with everything.
FYI - Geoff will be talking about the history of Leverage and related topics on Twitch tomorrow (Saturday, October 23rd 2021) starting at 10am PT (USA West Coast Time). Apparently Anna Salamon will be joining the discussion as well.
Geoff's Tweet
Text from the Tweet (for those who don't use Twitter):
"Hey folks — I'm going live on Twitch, starting this Saturday. Join me, 10am-1pm PT:
twitch.tv/geoffanders
This first stream will be on the topic of the history of my research institute, Leverage Research, and the Rationality community, with @AnnaWSalamon as a guest."
Unfortunately for me, there is apparently no video recording available on Twitch for this stream? (There are two short clips, but not the full broadcast.)
If anyone has a link to it, if you could include it here, that'd be great. !
Yep. I hope this isn’t bad to do, but I am doing it.
FYI - Geoff will be talking about the history of Leverage and related topics on Twitch tomorrow (Saturday, October 23rd 2021) starting at 10am PT (USA West Coast Time). Apparently Anna Salamon will be joining the discussion as well.
Geoff's Tweet
Text from the Tweet (for those who don't use Twitter):
"Hey folks — I'm going live on Twitch, starting this Saturday. Join me, 10am-1pm PT:
twitch.tv/geoffanders
This first stream will be on the topic of the history of my research institute, Leverage Research, and the Rationality community, with @AnnaWSalamon as a guest."
I have to say, your extreme/rigid opposition to any form of whatever you're currently defining as 'illegal drugs' reminds me of religious people who have similarly rigid and uncompromising views on things.
Ironically, this also seems to me to be antithetical to rationality...
I agree with the intent of your comment mingyuan, but perhaps the reason for the asymmetry in activity on this post is simply due to the fact that there are an order of magnitude (or several orders of magnitude?) more people with some/any experience and interaction with CFAR/MIRI (especially CFAR) compared to Leverage?
I think some of it has got to be that it's somehow easier to talk about CFAR/MIRI, rather than a sheer number of people thing. I think Leverage is somehow unusually hard to talk about, such that maybe we should figure out how to be extraordinarily kind/compassionate/gentle to anyone attempting it, or something.
I would agree with you there.
I wouldn't agree that describing an experience as 'meaningful' is antithetical to rationality, though.
In my personal and anecdotal experience, for the people who have a positive experience with psychedelics it really is more your 'a' option.
Psychedelics are less about 'thinking random thoughts that seem meaningful' and more about what you describe there - reflecting on their actual life and perspectives with a fresh/clear/different perspective.
How does someone thinking that they had a meaningful experience make them less rational?
Look, all experiences take place in the mind, in a very real way that's not just a clever conversational trick.
So whatever your most meaningful and spiritually significant moment, it's going to be "in your head."
But on a set of very reasonable priors, we would expect your most meaningful and spiritually significant head-moment to be correlated with and causally linked to some kind of unusual thing happening outside your head. An activity, an interaction with other people, a novel observation.
Sometimes, a therapist says a few words, and a person has a...
Most of the wildly successful people that exist in the western world today display current, or displayed prior, 'willingness to violate drug laws'.
Can someone please clarify what is meant in this conext by 'Vassar's group', or the term 'Vassarites' used by others?
My intution previously was that Michael Vassar had no formal 'group' or insitution of any kind, and it was just more like 'a cluster of friends who hung out together a lot', but this comment makes it seem like something more official.
While "Vassar's group" is informal, it's more than just a cluster of friends; it's a social scene with lots of shared concepts, terminology, and outlook (although of course not every member holds every view and members sometimes disagree about the concepts, etc etc). In this way, the structure is similar to social scenes like "the AI safety community" or "wokeness" or "the startup scene" that coordinate in part on the basis of shared ideology even in the absence of institutional coordination, albeit much smaller. There is no formal institution governing th...
There's also these 2 podcasts which cover quite a variety of topics, for anyone who's interested:
You've Got Mel - With Michael Vassar
Jim Rutt Show - Michael Vassar on Passive-Aggressive Revolution
In refernce to point 1, how would you define 'illegal drugs' (as defined by which country/state)?
My understanding is that if you applied that rule (people that have used or currently use 'illegal drugs' are not 'good enough' to be in the community) it would rule out at least ~90% of the humans I've ever interacted with.
Correct - but they are low-risk for those factors (addiction and/or overdose).
Indeed.
Travelling by boat/ship, and transporting things by boat/ship, is 'Lindy', as are bicycles.
I haven't seen/heard anything particularly impressive from him either, but perhaps his 'best work' just isn't written down anywhere?
I agree, and think it's important to 'stay grounded' in the 'normal world' if you're involved in any sort of intense organization or endeavor.
You've made some great suggestions.
I would also suggest that having a spouse who preferably isn't too involved, or involved at all, and maybe even some kids, is another commonality among people who find it easier to avoid going too far down these rabbit holes. Also, having a family is positive in countless other ways, and what I consider part of the 'good life' for most people.
Psilocybin-based psychedelics are indeed considered low-risk both in terms of addiction and overdose. This chart sums things up nicely, and is a good thing to 'pin on your mental fridge':
You want to stay as close as possible to the bottom left corner of that graph!
This graph shows death and addiction potential but it doesn't say anything about sanity
Haha - you've clearly thought about the mechanism more than I have!!
Very interesting (and entertaining) - thanks.
Somehow (don't ask me how...) humanity developed a much stronger shared identity and the dominant 'affiliation' most people have is to all of humanity.
I think it's obvious this would change just about everything else...
Hopefully we actually get there in reality one day.
It's all about the basics. If you can get the basics right, you're highly likely to win life (within the constraints of your own personal limits).
Eat simple healthy food. Move your body substantially sometimes. Sleep. Maintain a close-knit group of family and friends.
If you do these things you will already be ahead of 99% of humanity, including many people who spend far more effort (and money) optimising some particular aspect of their lives (e.g. expensive workout gear or 'superfoods').
The best investments in knowledge are mental models that can be applied across domains (some of which were mentioned in the post) and unchanging/permanent/durable knowledge like that in the STEM fields. This provides both leverage (from the cross-disciplinary latticework of mental models) and allows compounding to work as your knowledge compounds over the years.
That means learning the broadest applicable skills you’d apply throughout your life first.
Another example: when learning a new language focus on the list of 100 or 1000 or whatever most commonly used words - this enables you to get started understanding the gist of basic conversations quickly, which then enables a positive feedback loop of compounding as you speak more in the new language, gain confidence, pick up new words in those conversations etc.
Extending this - focus learning (especially in early life) on permanent, unchanging knowledge like math,...
Apparently it's a third option - most don't actually exist!
https://www.mashable.com/2017/11/17/china-binhai-library
Oh, that's a bit disappointing. I'll put that in the "just for aesthetics" bucket, then. To me, that makes this feel less like "rationalist art", though I'm not sure how fair that is.
On the positive side - there is a sizeable cluster of alternative schools in and around Berlin - including forest schools, free/democratic schools, Montessori/Waldorf etc.
One idea that comes to mind is that the surface-level information sources (e.g. news articles) are often *'correct' *on a basic level, but really more like 'yes, but it's complicated' on a deeper level.
The best illustration of this is if you've ever seen a surface-level description of something you know about at a deep level, and you realise how wrong it is, or at least how much nuance it's missing. The next step is to realise that it's like that with everything - i.e. all the things you're not an expert on.
This source gives the conviction rate a range of 83.3% to 97.7% depending on the level of court and the type of charge.
While the current events portal on Wikipedia has already been mentioned, I prefer the much more concise annual summary pages which I check monthly. The page gets updated quickly with any major events that happen in the world.
Common sense implies that they must be at least partially effective at reducing transmission of various diseases, in the same way that wearing gloves does (i.e. a barrier is created which partially blocks movement of potentially harmful particles).