All of cata's Comments + Replies

2habryka
I reviewed it. It didn't trigger my "LLM generated content" vibes, though I also don't think it's an amazing essay.

There's another blogger, Nathan Tankus, who is also reporting accounts directly from his sources within the BFS. He wears his bias on his sleeve and goes wild with the hyperbole, but he is a prolific public intellectual of some sort so he may be accurately reporting the basic facts. He also did an interview on Odd Lots but it didn't really have anything new.

1Trevor Hill-Hand
I thought these were pretty... let's say "exciting"... reads, but I'd be interested to hear more people's opinion of this as a trustworthy source.

Correct me if I'm wrong but this looks substantially LLM-written.

I would be surprised if it were ethically important for you to donate that much. LW has made a pretty big difference to my life (e.g. my career, marriage, and a big chunk of my bank account are causally downstream of LW existing) and I estimated that there are probably something like $100m dollars worth of people for whom it was similarly impactful as me, and then a long tail of more people for whom it was somewhat less impactful, so I owed on the order of 1% of my net worth, such that if everyone like me who saw this fundraiser did the same then it would ... (read more)

3ashtree
Thank you for your advice, I donated $500. I expect to be a millionaire with high confidence (most situations where I am not are awful for humanity). "Owe" isn't how I would describe what I am doing; it's like any other donation to me. I want the best outcome for humanity.

Thanks for this elaboration. One reason I would be more hopeful than in the case of private airplanes (less so potable water) is that it seems like, while providing me a private airplane may mostly only benefit me and my family by making my life more leisurely, providing me or my children genetic enhancement may be very socially productive, at least improving our productivity and making us consume less healthcare resources. So it would seem possible to end up with an arrangement where it's socially financed and the surplus is shared.

It's interesting that y... (read more)

4Raphael Roche
Indeed, nature, and particularly biology, disregards our human considerations of fairness. The lottery of birth can appear as the greatest conceivable inequality. But in this matter, one must apply the Stoic doctrine that distinguishes between what depends on us and what does not. Morality concerns what depends on us, the choices that belong to the moral agents we are. If I present the lottery of birth in an egalitarian light, it is specifically in the sense that we, as humans, have little control over this lottery. Particularly regarding IQ at birth, regardless of our wealth, we were all, until now, almost on equal footing in our inability to considerably influence this biological fact imposed upon us (I discussed in my previous comments the differences I see between the author's proposal and education, but also between conventional medicine). If the author's project succeeds, IQ will become mainly a socially originated fact, like wealth. And inequality in wealth would then be accompanied by inequality in IQ, proportional or even exponential (if feedback mechanisms occur, considering that having a higher IQ might enable a wealthy individual to become even wealthier and thus access the latest innovations for further enhancement). We already struggle to establish social mechanisms to redistribute wealth and limit the growth of inequalities; I can hardly imagine what it would become if we also had to address inequalities in access to IQ-enhancing technologies in a short time. I fear that all this could lead to a chaotic or dystopian scenario, possibly resulting in a partition of the human species and/or a civilizational collapse. As for having a solution to ensure that this type of genetic engineering technology does not result in such a catastrophic outcome, I do not claim to have a miracle solution. As with other existential risks, what can be suggested is to try to slow down the trend (which is likely inevitable in the long term) instead of seeking to accelerat

Can you elaborate on why you think that genetic modification is more prone to creating inequality than other kinds of technology? You mentioned religious reasons in your original comment. Are there other reasons? On priors, I might expect it to follow a typical cost curve where it gets cheaper and more accessible over time, and where the most valuable modifications are subsidized for some people who can't afford them.

You are right. When I wrote my initial comment, I believed the argument was self-evident and did not require elaboration. However, "self-evidence" is not an objective concept, and I likely do not share the same socio-cultural environment as most users of this platform. Upon reading your comment and Ben Pace's, I realize that this apparent self-evidence is far from universally shared and requires further explanation. I have already expanded on my argument in my previous response, but here are the specific reasons why I think the author's project (and indeed... (read more)

To me, since LessWrong has a smart community that attracts people with high standards and integrity, by default if you (a median LW commenter) write your considered opinion about something, I take that very seriously and assume that it's much, much more likely to be useful than an LLM's opinion.

So if you post a comment that looks like an LLM wrote it, and you don't explain which parts were the LLM's opinion and which parts were your opinion, then that makes it difficult to use it. And if there's a norm of posting comments that are partly unmarked LLM opini... (read more)

1Haotian
Thank you for your comment. I will highlight specifically which parts are my opinion in the future. 

I have been to lots of conferences at lots of kinds of conference centers and Lighthaven seems very unusual:

  • The space has been extensively and well designed to be comfortable and well suited to the activities.
  • The food/drink/snack situation is dramatically superior.
  • The on-site accommodations are extremely convenient.

I think it's great that rationalist conferences have this extremely attractive space to use that actively makes people want to come, rather than if they were in like, a random hotel or office campus.

As for LW, I would say something sort of... (read more)

4Martin Randall
Thanks for explaining. I now understand you to mean that LessWrong and Lighthaven are dramatically superior to the alternatives, in several ways. You don't see other groups trying to max out the quality level in the same ways. Other projects may be similar in type, but they are dissimilar in results. To clarify on my own side, when I say that there are lots of similar projects to Lighthaven, I mean that many people have tried to make conference spaces that are comfortable and well-designed, with great food and convenient on-site accommodation. Similarly, when I say that there are lots of similar projects to LessWrong, I mean that there are many forums with a similar overall design and moderation approach. I wasn't trying to say that the end results are similar in terms of quality. These are matters of taste, anyway. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I would think to approach this by figuring something like the Shapley value of the involved parties, by answering the questions "for a given amount of funding, how many people would have been willing to provide this funding if necessary" and "given an amount of funding, how many people would have been willing and able to do the work of the Lightcone crew to produce similar output."

I don't know much about how Lightcone operates, but my instinct is that the people are difficult to replace, because I don't see many other very similar projects to Lighthaven an... (read more)

5Martin Randall
I don't understand. LessWrong is a discussion forum, there are many discussion forums. LightHaven is a conference center, there are many conference centers. There are lots of similar projects. I'm confident that Lightcone provides value, and plan to donate, but I don't understand this frame.

I was going to email but I assume others will want to know also so I'll just ask here. What is the best way to donate an amount big enough that it's stupid to pay a Stripe fee, e.g. $10k? Do you accept donations of appreciated assets like stock or cryptocurrency?

Yes, we have a brokerage account and a Coinbase account and can accept basically whatever crazy asset you want to give to us, including hard to value ones (and honestly, it sounds fun to go on an adventure to figure out how much a first edition MtG Black Lotus costs, how to sell it, and how to make sure you get an appropriate tax return, if that's the kind of asset you want to donate). 

We of course also accept bank transfers to avoid the Stripe fees.

But as a secondary point, I think today's models can already use bash tools reasonably well.

Perhaps that's true, I haven't seen a lot of examples of them trying. I did see Buck's anecdote which was a good illustration of doing a simple task competently (finding the IP address of an unknown machine on the local network).

I don't work in AI so maybe I don't know what parts of R&D might be most difficult for current SOTA models. But based on the fact that large-scale LLMs are sort of a new field that hasn't had that much labor applied to it yet, I would... (read more)

1Yonatan Cale
Your guesses on AI R&D are reasonable! Apparently this has been tested extensively, for example: https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1860061711849652378 [disclaimers: I have some association with the org that ran that (I write some code for them) but I don't speak for them, opinions are my own]   Also, Anthropic have a trigger in their RSP which is somewhat similar to what you're describing, I'll quote part of it:   Also, in Dario's interview, he spoke about AI being applied to programming.   My point is - lots of people have their eyes on this, it seems not to be solved yet, it takes more than connecting an LLM to bash. Still, I don't want to accelerate this.

I'm not confident but I am avoiding working on these tools because I think that "scaffolding overhang" in this field may well be most of the gap towards superintelligent autonomous agents.

If you imagine a o1-level entity with "perfect scaffolding", i.e. it can get any info on a computer into its context whenever it wants, and it can choose to invoke any computer functionality that a human could invoke, and it can store and retrieve knowledge for itself at will, and its training includes the use of those functionalities, it's not completely clear to me that... (read more)

1Yonatan Cale
I think a simple bash tool running as admin could do most of these:     Regarding I think this isn't a crux because the scaffolding I'd build wouldn't train the model. But as a secondary point, I think today's models can already use bash tools reasonably well.   This requires skill in ML R&D which I think is almost entirely not blocked by what I'd build, but I do think it might be reasonable to have my tool not work for ML R&D because of this concern. (would require it to be closed source and so on)   Thanks for raising concerns, I'm happy for more if you have them

I don't have a bunch of citations but I spend time in multiple rationalist social spaces and it seems to me that I would in fact be excluded from many of them if I stuck to sex-based pronouns, because as stated above there are many trans people in the community, of whom many hold to the consensus progressive norms on this. The EA Forum policy is not unrepresentative of the typical sentiment.

So I don't agree that the statements are misleading.

(I note that my typical habit is to use singular they for visibly NB/trans people, and I am not excluded for that. So it's not precisely a kind of compelled speech.)

I was playing this bot lately myself and one thing it made me wonder is, how much better would it be at beating me if it was trained against a model of me in particular, rather than how it actually was trained? I feel I have no idea.

2 data points: I have 15-20 years of experience at a variety of companies but no college and no FANG, currently semi-retired. Recruiters still spam me with many offers and my professional network wants to hire me at their small companies.

A friend of mine has ~2 years of experience as a web dev and some experience as a mechanical engineer + random personal projects, no college, and he worked hard to look for a software job and found absolutely nothing, with most companies never contacting him after an application.

5Viliam
I have 20 years of experience, and also keep getting spammed. I think that applying directly to companies is the worst possible approach. That already sets the playing field where many people are competing for one position. On top of that, many companies are not even serious about wanting to hire someone, they just keep the old announcement online because they forgot to take it down, or because who knows maybe one day a genius willing to work for peanuts will randomly appear, in which case I guess we would find some work for him. The lesson from You Are Not Hiring the Top 1% also applies here. Just like the best programmers get the job, and the worst programmers keep applying, getting rejected, and applying again (and therefore are overrepresented at the job market), also the best companies find people to fill the roles quickly, and the worst companies keep losing their employees and need to recruit new ones all the time (and therefore are overrepresented at the job announcements). In my experience, the best way to find a job is to be recommended by a friend who already works there. The second best way is to contact a job agency and let them find the job for you.

One and a half years later it seems like AI tools are able to sort of help humans with very rote programming work (e.g. changing or writing code to accomplish a simple goal, implementing versions of things that are well-known to the AI like a textbook algorithm or a browser form to enter data, answering documentation-like questions about a system) but aren't much help yet on the more skilled labor parts of software engineering.

It seems like Musk in 2018 dramatically underestimated the ability of OpenAI to compete with Google in the medium term.

3Lee.aao
Rather, they didn't foresee the possibility that Microsoft might want to invest. And they didn't consider that capped-for-profit was a path to billions of dollars.

Yes, it sounds that he put too much stock into Andrej's paper-counting argument, and then even left the board because he didn't want to be associated with a failing company?

Thanks for not only doing this but noting the accuracy of the unchecked transcript, it's always hard work to build a mental model of how good LLM tools are at what stuff.

I don't know whether this resembles your experience at all, but for me, skills translate pretty directly to moment-to-moment life satisfaction, because the most satisfying kind of experience is doing something that exercises my existing skills. I would say that only very recently (in my 30s) do I feel "capped out" on life satisfaction from skills (because I am already quite skilled at almost everything I spend all my time doing) and I have thereby begun spending more time trying to do more specific things in the world.

I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn't they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.

Why is it cheaper for individuals to install some amount of cheap solar power for themselves than for the grid to install it and then deliver it to them, with economies of scale in the construction and maintenance? Transmission cost?

2Douglas_Knight
To a first approximation, solar is legal for individual residences and illegal on a larger scale.
3jefftk
I'm not claiming here that it's currently cheaper, but that it will soon be cheaper in a lot of places. Only 47% of my bill is the actual power generation, and the non-generation charges total $0.18/kWh. That's still slightly more expensive than solar+batteries here, but with current cost trends that should flip in a year or two. Looking at their breakdown (footnote [1]) it seems to be mostly the cost of getting the electricity to the consumer. Since they're a monopoly, there's not much getting them to be efficient here, operating a high-uptime anything is expensive, and MA is an expensive place to do anything.
7JBlack
It's not cheaper in reality. Net metering is effectively a major subsidy that goes away pretty much everywhere that solar generation starts to make up a significant fraction of the supply. Electricity companies don't want to pay all that capital expense, so it makes sense for them to shift it onto consumers up until home solar generation starts approaching daytime demand. After that point, they can discontinue the net metering and push for "smart meters" that track usage by time of day and charge or pay variable amounts applicable for that particular time, and/or have separate "feed in" credits that are radically smaller per kWh than consumption charges (in practice often up to 85% less). With smart meters and cheaper home battery systems the incentives starts to shift toward wealthier solar enthusiasts buying batteries and selling excess power to the grid at peak times (or consuming it themselves), lowering peak demand at no additional capital or maintenance cost to the grid operators. In principle the endgame could involve no wholesale generators at all, just grid operators charging fees to net consumers and paying some nominal amount to net suppliers, but I expect it to not converge to anything as simple as that. Economies of scale will still favour larger-scale operations and local geographic and economic conditions will maintain a mixture of types and scales of generation, storage, distribution, and consumption. Regulation, contracts, and other conditions will also continue to vary greatly from place to place.

If you installed it in a preschool and it successfully killed all the pathogens there wouldn't be essentially no effect.

2Roko
Yes, certain places like preschools might benefit even from an isolated install. But that is kind of exceptional. The world isn't an efficient market, especially because people are kind of set in their ways and like to stick to the defaults unless there is strong social pressure to change.

Superficially, human minds look like they are way too diverse for that to cause human extinction by accident. If new ideas toast some specific human subgroup, other subgroups will not be equally affected.

6Nathan Helm-Burger
It would be a message customized deliberately for each human, and worked on gradually over years of subtle convincing arguments. That's how I understand the hypothetical. I think that an AI competent enough to manage this would have faster easier ways to accomplish the same effect, but I do agree that this would quite likely work.
2Shmi
That is indeed a bit of a defense. Though I suspect human minds have enough similarities that there are at least a few universal hacks.

Why do you feel so strongly about using so much eye contact in normal conversations? I sometimes make eye contact and sometimes don't and that seems fine.

I agree with your sentiment that being very uncomfortable with eye contact is probably an indication of some other psychological thing you could work on, but it sounds like you maybe feel more strongly about it than that.

I just thought it'd be a fun party

I played General Anderson and also wrote that note. My feeling is that this year seemed more "game-like" and less "ritual-like" than past years, but the "game" part suffered for the reasons I mentioned above, and the combination to me felt awkward. Choosing to emphasize either the "game" nature or the "ritual" nature seems to have some pros and cons. Since participating in the game inevitably made me curious about the choices involved, I will be interested to hear the LW team's opinion on this in the retrospective.

A new promising game was just released, Maxwell's Puzzling Demon. It looks like it goes deep with clever puzzles.

This post was difficult to take seriously when I read it but the "clown attack" idea very much stuck with me.

I think you should go to college if it sounds pleasant and fulfilling to go to one of the colleges you could go to (as Saul stated colleges have many fancy amenities) and you are OK with sacrificing:

  • The cost of the preparatory work you need to do to be admitted at that college.
  • The cost of the tuition itself.
  • 4+ years of your career and adult life.

in order to do something pleasant and fulfilling. You should also go to college if you don't have any plan to get a job you like without a college degree, but you do have a plan to do it with a college degree, sinc... (read more)

2Ben Pace
I think your counter-point to the chesterton's fence point is pretty good; however I think it's genuinely hard for many teenagers to understand what the choice is that they're making. I don't think I had much idea. I really like the option that someone (I think Saul) proposed where you go to college for one year, with a commitment to take a gap year for the second year, after which you actually know what you're choosing between.

Do you believe the result about priming people with a $1500 bill and a $150 bill? That pattern matches perfectly to an infinite list of priming research that failed to replicate, so by default I would assume it is probably wrong.

The one about people scoring better after harvest makes a lot more sense since, like, it's a real difference and not some priming thing, so I am not as skeptical about that.

1James Stephen Brown
I'd be interested in reading up on the replication problems with priming if you have any links. I wasn't on guard for this sort of research, so it seemed plausible to me. All of this goes against our general intuitions that people need to feel their poverty to get motivated for working, so I'm more likely to accept scientific research than assume it's wrong and that my intuitions are correct.

It kind of weirds me out that this post has such a high karma score. It's a fun read, and maybe it will help some Wikipedia admins get their house in order, but I don't like "we good guys are being wronged by the bad outsider" content on LessWrong. No offense to Trace who is a great writer and clearly worked hard putting all this together.

but I don't like "we good guys are being wronged by the bad outsider" content on LessWrong.

Gerard wasn't an outsider, and has interacted with many of us for 3 decades now; and even if he had been, he's certainly made himself a big part of the history of LessWrong by his work.

It seems like this is a place where "controversial" and "taboo" diverge in meaning. The politician would notice that the sentence was about a taboo topic and bounce off, but that's probably totally unconnected to whether or not it would be controversial among people who know anything about genetics or intelligence and are actually expressing a belief. For example, they would bounce off regardless of whether the number in the sentence was 1%, 50%, or 90%.

I thought the sequels were far better than the first book. But I have seen people with the opposite opinion.

How did you like your trip in the end?

3keltan
I’m messing around with a post about this. However: * overwhelmingly positive * with a few things I was a little icked about But I need to think about that more to understand if it’s a problem with me, or the thing that made me icked out And thanks for checking in. That’s very kind of you

It definitely depends. I think there are lots of people for which there are lots of domains of information for which they are highly trustworthy in realtime conversation. For example, if I am working as a programmer, and I talk to my smart, productive coworker and ask him some normal questions about the system he built recently, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibrated on what he knows. Or if I talk to my friend with a physics PhD and ask him some question like what makes there be friction, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibr... (read more)

I hope you don't feel dumb! What could be smarter than sitting around thinking up good ideas, writing about them, and getting a bunch of people to work together to figure out what to make of them? It seems like the most smart possible behavior!

It seems like the students think that eliminating the distractions wouldn't improve how much they learn in class. That sounds ridiculous to me, but public school classrooms are a weird environment that already aren't really set up well to teach anyone anything, so maybe it could be true. Is it credible?

It is credible that eliminating all preventable distractions (phones, earbuds, etc.) wouldn't improve learning much. As a teen, I bet you were distracted during class by all sorts of things contained entirely within your head. I know I was!

There's a somewhat stronger case that video games and social media have given students more things to be preoccupied about even if you make these things inaccessible during class. But I also think that just being a hormonal teen is often distracting enough to fill in any attention vacancies faster than the median lesson can. 

As a non-physicist I kind of had the idea that the reason I was taught Newtonian mechanics in high school was that it was assumed I wasn't going to have the time, motivation, or brainpower to learn some kind of fancy, real university version of it, so the alternate idea that it's useful for intuition-building of the concepts is novel and interesting to me.

1quiet_NaN
It is also useful for a lot of practical problems, where you can treat ℏ as being essentially zero and c0 as being essentially infinite. If you want to get anywhere with any practical problem (like calculating how long a car will take to come to a stop), half of the job is to know which approximations ("cheats") are okay to use. If you want to solve the fully generalized problem (for a car near the Planck units or something), you will find that you would need a theory of everything (that is quantum mechanics plus general relativity) to do so and we don't have that. 

Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it's very important, but my sense is that it's some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don't already know what it's supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don't like "I will go listen to it" as an answer.

So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don't get it yet.

3Ben Pace
I have also seen the culture of pianists being used to playing reams and reams of new music, and this being a signal of proficiency more so than amongst other instrumentalists (e.g. violinists or flautists). I think it is probably because the majority of a pianist’s career is spent in accompaniment rather than as a soloist or in an equal ensemble (there are ~no serious piano quartets), and so the quantity of music quickly consumable is a much more competitive asset. When I was at music school, there were professional accompanists and everyone was assigned one, pianists employed simply to go around and accompany all of the students in their performances, so they needed to be able to play a great deal of complicated music very quickly or on-sight. Personally, my primary goal with sheet music is to get off of it as soon as possible (i.e. learn the piece from memory). It is a qualitative reduction in the number of things my attention is on, and gives me much more cognitive space to focus on how to play the piece rather than what I’m playing next.

Why is it bad to have wealth inequality by age? Basically everyone gets to be every age, so there's nothing "unfair" about it.

8dr_s
Only if you believe this is a natural stationary progression. In practice, it very likely is not, and current 20 years old won't be as rich as current 80 years old if only they manage to survive 60 years.

I still don't get why you are even considering finishing the degree, even though you clearly tried to explain it to me. Taking eight college classes is a lot of work actually? "Why not" doesn't really seem to cover it. How is doing a "terrible" commute several times per week for two semesters and spending many hours per week a low cost?

You sort of imply that someone is judging you for not having the degree but you didn't give any examples of actually being judged.

If you really really want to prove to yourself that you can do it, or if you really want to learn more math (I agree that taking college courses seems like a fine way to learn more math) then I understand, but based on your post it's not clear to me.

4Zack_M_Davis
I think I'm judging that schoolwork that's sufficiently similar to the kind of intellectual work that I want to do anyway (or that I can otherwise get selfish benefit out of) gets its cost discounted. (It doesn't have to be exactly the same.) And that commuting on the train with a seat is 70% similar to library time. (I wouldn't even consider a car commute.) For the fall semester, I'd be looking at "Real Analysis II", "Probability Models", "Applied and Computational Linear Algebra", and (wait for it ...) "Queer Literatures and Media". That schedule actually seems ... pretty good? "Real Analysis II" with Prof. Schuster is the course I actually want to take, as a legitimate learning resource and challenge, but the other two math courses don't seem worthless and insulting. "Queer Literatures and Media" does seem worthless and insulting, but might present an opportunity to troll the professor, or fodder for my topic-relevant blog and unfinished novella about a young woman hating going to SFSU. As for judgement, I think I'm integrating a small judgement-density over a large support of time and Society. The immediate trigger for me even considering this might have been that people were arguing about school and Society on Twitter in way that brought up such rage and resentment in me. Somehow, I think I would be more at peace if I could criticize schooling from the position of "... and I have a math degree" rather than "... so I didn't finish." That peace definitely wouldn't be worth four semesters, but it might be worth two.

That just sounds great, thanks.

How's the childcare situation looking? Last I heard it wasn't clear and the organizers were seeing how much interest there was in it.

Launched a few days ago, the plan is:

  • Kids tickets are $50
  • There's daycare purchasable on-site from 10am to 7pm, for like $10/hour if you book ahead of time or $30/hour if you use it on-the-day
  • If you want connection to a nanny for outside of those hours we have a service that can help with that at $45/hour.

Happy to get feedback on this, still figuring out what exactly helps parents and how to set it up right.

2Ben Pace
Still working on setting it up, once I have the details I'll announce them (e.g. pricing and whatnot). I'm aiming to have childcare available in some form for the full 9-day LessOnline-to-Summer-Camp-to-Manifest period. I'm excited for folks to come with their full families.
Answer by cata80

This isn't quite what you asked for, but I did feel a related switch.

When I was a kid, I thought that probably people in positions of power were smart people working towards smart goals under difficult constraints that made their actions sometimes look foolish to me, who knew little. Then there was a specific moment in my early 20s, when the political topic of the day was the design of Obamacare, and so if you followed the news, you would see all the day-to-day arguments between legislators and policy analysts about what would go in the legislation and why... (read more)

2Brendan Long
To be fair, the one-in-a-million legislators who make it to the federal level probably are very good at politics. It's kind of unreasonable to hold them the the standard of knowing (and demonstrating their knowledge of) things about economics or healthcare when their job is to win popularity contests by saying transparently ridiculous things.

I am surprised by this, for example. Can you give examples of some of your controversial takes on any issues? I am wondering if you just do not have very controversial takes.

Controversial is obviously relative to the audience, but I have lots of opinionated beliefs that might make various audiences mad at me. Some different flavors include

  • I am roughly a total utilitarian, which involves lots of beliefs about what actions are moral that all kinds of people might strongly disagree with. For example, I don't agree that inequality is intrinsically bad.
  • I
... (read more)
3[anonymous]
Yeah this seems fair. In the past I have actively brought up political topics to discuss with my close circle of trust. If you discuss enough political topics you can easily end up hitting on this particular topic (IQ and group differences). I have distanced from people over similar topics though not this exact one. I can imagine the stakes being much higher once I am in a position of influence (which I aspire to be in). Multiple such experiences are part of what made me realise there are pros and cons to having even an innocent discussion with your closest friend. I am curious how you navigate this in discussions with people close to you. Most big ways of influencing the world route through acquiring approval of others. Maybe not 100 million people, but atleast 1000 people. Yes my point in bringing up that example was infohazardous information. And not just, say knowing DNA sequences of unreleased pathogens worse than covid, but lots of lower stakes information like knowledge of protocols and operating equipment, knowing how to procure cultures and equipment anonymously, knowing who knows what inside the biosecurity world, etc. Even one sufficiently agentic and trusted PhD going rogue can cause meaningful damage IMO. The resulting secrecy-focussed culture has implications for the personality traits of the senior people in the space, how big their circles of trust are, how they look at and treat other people, and so on. (I don't know as much as I'd like about what the implications are, but I know they're non-trivial.) Also, not everyone who is quite open in the biosecurity world should necessarily be as open as they are, that is a whole another discussion. It's not obvious to me anyone has sufficiently figured this stuff out to conclusively say that for biosecurity, openness policy X is Good and Y is Bad, end of discussion. Which is why I want to discuss it. I think this is generally true, UNTIL you hit one of the big red flags they have secretly written dow
Answer by cata50

I am 37 and I am a partially retired programmer after a ~20 year career. I basically try to maximize clarity while obeying normal politeness norms, prioritizing clarity and honesty over politeness where the topic is important (e.g. delivering actionable criticism or bad news.) I would say that during my career I received very strong evidence that this is an effective communication style for working well with others. For example, I have had numerous coworkers spontaneously tell me that they respected my straightforwardness, and seek out my feedback on what ... (read more)

1[anonymous]
Thank you for the reply. I’m confused by multiple things in your reply. I am surprised by this, for example. Can you give examples of some of your controversial takes on any issues? I am wondering if you just do not have very controversial takes. Maybe I should just offer some examples: I have offended people simply for stating allegiance to the wrong social group or religion. Stuff like correlation between IQ and ethnicity is a bit more controversial, but my takes are usually much more controversial than that. I often wonder if the world would be happier and safer today had the US wiped out USSR’s main cities post WW2 and established global hegemony (wipe out any nation that doesn’t submit, maintain nuclear monopoly). I have genuine respect and admiration for people like hitler or the unabomber, more than for a lot of the people I see around me. (I don’t believe spreading nazism or violent anarchoprimitivism leads to good outcomes for society, but conditional on you actually believing that, their actions were more effective than what 99% of us would have done in their shoes. And this I have respect for.) I feel uncomfortable posting this stuff knowing I can delete it any time because of reasons like - maybe someone here wants to help me but then reads this and has alarm bells in their head ringing. Anything more controversial than this I genuinely don’t wish to post even on an anonymous throwaway. I think I’m being wellcalibrated on this (don’t share opinions of that level of controversy with others), but it’s hard to be very sure because I’ve not gotten feedback from people. 1. Do you expect to ever become at all famous in your life? Either accidentally or because your theory of change explicitly routes through this. For example, it is IMO possible for some LWers to become a world expert in say nanotechnology or gene drives in less than 5 years of study , given how few people study such things relative to how important they are. I wonder if you are underest

Lucas Watson, who co-wrote Hanano Puzzle 2, just published an exceptional new game, I Wanna Lockpick, which I would put in your tier 1.

One thing which I really enjoyed about it is that it uses its mechanics to build interesting puzzles in all of the different puzzle categories above, and mixes them freely, so it feels like there is a nice variety of kinds of thinking involved.

Thanks, I didn't realize that this PC fan idea had made air purifiers so much better since I bought my Coway, so this post made me buy one of the Luggable kits. I'll share this info with others.

I disagree with the summarization suggestion for the same reason that I disagree with many of the items -- I don't have (much of) the problem they are trying to solve, so why would I expend effort to attack a problem I don't have?

The most obvious is "carrying extra batteries for my phone." My phone never runs out of battery; I should not carry batteries that I will never use. Similarly: I don't have a problem with losing things, such that I need extra. (If I had extra, I would plausibly give them away to save physical space!) I don't find myself wishing I ... (read more)

Are you really saying you think everything on this list is "obviously" beneficial? I probably only agree with half the stuff on the list. For example, I certainly disagree that I should "summarize things that I read" (?) or that I should have a "good mentor" by emailing people to request that they mentor me.

1ajc586
I personally don't find anything on the list disagreeable (including the summarization and mentoring items). Summarization is a pretty well established memory consolidation technique to improve long-term recall of information. The OP does not explicitly state this is the aim, but that was my assumption, and if so I think it is uncontroversial that that is beneficial. Regarding the mentoring, the item on the list was "you would have a good mentor" (which I agree with) and then underneath is "One way to do this is to email people" (which I also agree with in the sense that emailing is clearly one way to do this - I do not necessarily feel this is a good way or the best way, but the OP does not say it is, just that it is "one way"). I can see why you would disagree that you "should have a 'good mentor' by emailing people to request that they mentor me" (I also disagree that such an approach is close to optimal) but I do not think this is what the OP says.

I specifically think it's well within the human norm, i.e. that most of the things I read are written by a person who has done worse things, or who would do worse things given equal power. I have done worse things, in my opinion. There's just not a blog post about them right now.

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