Wednesday yes, sorry.
Trying this again I think the question sets need a little work.
But Doctor, I am Kaufman!
EDIT: Oh wait, he linked this joke himself. I feel less clever now.
As usual after Solstice, I had an urge to write about Solstice, in this case a speech I may someday give.
Tried to leave this as a review comment, which is blocked:
Even with the benefit of hindsight proving that Trump could and would get reelected, this still looks just as badly-constructed as it did at the time. This was an argument based in fear and rationalization, not a clear-eyed prediction of the future. The bottom line was written first.
Editing Essays into Solstice Speeches: Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help
Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help
I don't have much understanding of current AI discussions and it's possible those are somewhat better/less advanced a case of rot.
Those same psychological reasons indicate that anything which is actual dissent will be interpreted as incivility. This has happened here and is happening as we speak. It was one of the significant causes of SBF. It's significantly responsible for the rise of woo among rationalists, though my sense is that that's started to recede (years later). It's why EA as a movement seems to be mostly useless at this point and coasting on g...
I still prefer the ones I see there to what I see on LW. Lower quantity higher value.
Currently no great alternatives exist because LW killed them. The quality of the comment section on SSC and most other rationalist blogs I was following got much worse when LW was rebooted (and killed several of them), and initially it looked like LW was an improvement, but over time the structural flaws killed it.
I still see much better comments on individual blogs - Zvi, Sarah Constantin, Elizabeth vN, etc. - than on LessWrong. Some community Discords are pretty good, though they are small walled gardens; rationalist Tumblr has, surprisingly, gotten acti...
I see much more value in Lighthaven than in the rest of the activity of Lightcone.
I wish Lightcone would split into two (or even three) organizations, as I would unequivocally endorse donating to Lighthaven and recommend it to others, vs. LessWrong where I'm not at all confident it's net positive over blogs and Substacks, and the grantmaking infastructure and other meta which is highly uncertain and probably highly replaceable.
All of the analysis of the impact of new LessWrong is misleading at best; it is assuming that volume on LessWrong is good in itself...
Hm, I was going to say I'd like LW distinguished from lighthaven so I could give more to LW.
The things you note about encouraging groupthink are good points. They should be addressed.
But the average quality of discussion here cannot be matched anywhere else. Non-voting comment systems like X and Slate Star Codex are too disorganized to consistently find the real in-depth discussions. Subreddits do not have the quality of community to make the comment voting work well. (They either have too few experts to sustain a conversation, or too many novices voting o...
That was true this week, but the first time I attended (the 12th) I believe it wasn't, I arrived at what I think was 6:20-6:25 and found everything had already started.
Based on my prior experience running meetups, a 15m gap between 'doors open' and starting the discussion is too short. 30m is the practical minimum; I prefer 45-60m because I optimize for low barrier to entry (as a means of being welcoming).
I also find this to be a significant barrier in participating myself, as targeting a fifteen-minute window for arrival is usually beyond my planning abilities unless I have something else with a hard end time within the previous half-hour.
The amount of empty space where the audience understands what's going on and nothing new or exciting is happening is much, much higher in 60s-70s film and TV. Pacing is an art, and that art has improved drastically in the last half-century.
Standards, also, were lower, though I'm more confident in this for television. In the 90s, to get kids to be interested in a science show you needed Bill Nye. In the 60s, doing ordinary high-school science projects with no showmanship whatsoever was wildly popular because it was on television and this was inherently novel and fascinating. (This show actually existed.)
A man who is always asking 'Is what I do worth while?' and 'Am I the right person to do it?' will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.
-- G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise
There's a point to be made here about why 'unconditional love' is unsatisfying to the extent the description as 'unconditional' is accurate.
...Oh, my mistake, it looked like they were posted a lot later than that and the ~skipped one made that look confirmed. Usually-a-week ahead is plenty of time and I'm sorry I said anything.
Could you please announce these further in advance? Especially given the reading required beforehand it's inconvenient and honestly seems a little inconsiderate.
That's a fascinating approach to characterization. What do you do, have the actors all read the appendix before they start rehearsals?
This is apparently from a play, Man and Superman, which I have never previously heard of, let alone read or seen. I suspect that, much like Oscar Wilde's plays, it is at least as much a vehicle for witty epigrams as it is an actual performance or plot.
The quote is from an appendix that consists entirely of epigrams that are attributed to one of the characters in the play - it's not actually part of the play as performed. (Shaw was tired of "smart" characters in plays that don't actually do anything to show that they're smart so he wrote it to justify the character's asserted intelligence.)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw, epigram
(Inspired by part of Superintelligences will not spare Earth sunlight)
For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.
-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, demonstrating the Virtue of The Void
The most potent way to sacrifice your life has always been to do so one day at a time.
-- BoneyM, Divided Loyalties
I currently slightly prefer an but that's pending further thought and discussion.
missing thought in the footnotes
We knew they were experimenting with synthetic data. We didn't know they were succeeding.
Not sure whether to add these in, but a number of local Google calendars theoretically exist: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?cid=bayarearationality%40gmail.com&cid=f6qs8c387dhlounnbqg6lbv3b0%40group.calendar.google.com&cid=94j0drsqgj43nkekg8968b3uo4%40group.calendar.google.com&cid=8hq2d2indjps3vr64l96e9okt4%40group.calendar.google.com&cid=theberkeleyreach%40gmail.com
This includes Berkeley REACH (defunct), CFAR Public Events (defunct locally AFAIK), EA Events (superseded by Luma calendar?), LW Meetups (unknown but blank), and Ra...
Updated to reflect the new, less regular schedule (and change of weekday) since the half-year mark.
That's not what tribalism means.
I think at normal times (when it's not filled with MATS or a con) it's possible to rent coworking space at Lighthaven? I haven't actually tried myself.
Our New Orleans Rat group grows on tribalistic calls to action. “Donate to Global Health Initiatives,” “Do Art,” “Learn About AI.”
If you consider those tribalistic calls to action, I'm not sure any of you are doing evidence-based thinking in the first place. I suppose if the damage is already done, it will not make anything worse if your specific group engages in politics.
There is basically no method of engaging with politics worse than backing a national candidate. It has tiny impact even if successful, is the most aggressively tribalism-infected, and is incredibly hard to say anything novel.
If you must get involved in politics, it should be local, issue-based, and unaffiliated with LW or rationalism. It is far more effective to lobby on issues than for candidates, it is far more effective to support local candidates than national, and there is minimal upside and enormous downside to having any of your political efforts tied with the 'brand' of rationalism or LW.
The track record for attempts to turn tribalism into evidence-based thinking is very poor. The result, almost always, is to turn the evidence-based thinking into tribalism.
Permanently changed to Wednesdays, but forgot that was in the group description; now fixed. There is a Manifold-associated event, Taco Tuesdays, running in SF, and I decided I'd rather stop scheduling against it.
It would be nice to move this to a standalone website like the old Bay Rationality site. I've been considering that for months and dragging my feet about asking for funding to host it; I'd also like to contact whoever used to run it, check whether anything complicated brought it down, and maybe just yoink their codebase and update the content. I don't know who that was, though.
Whoops, fixed.
Someday the site will finish their API and document it, and I'll be able to automate this like I do everything else about posting meetups. But probably not this side of the Singulariy at current rates.
Facing away from the cars approaching works better IME.
Entirely separate from concerns about the site, I think your notion of the theme for a midsummer ritual is wrong.
If you look at midsummer rituals that have memetic fitness (traditions that lasted, or in neopaganism's case that stuck weirdly quickly), most of them are sunset rituals. Things that happen at night on the shortest nights of the year, and dwell on themes of darkness. Ghost stories, things like that.
Assuming, as I think we clearly should, that that's not a coincidence, a ritual that resonates for summer solstice should be aimed in a similar direc...
I heard about this being planned earlier this year, and after about five minutes with Google Maps I concluded that it was an unsalvageably terrible idea. Unsalvageable because the core problem is Angel Island.
It takes a minimum of 75 minutes from central SF or 2h from the East Bay to travel, each way. And that's if the ferry schedule is convenient, which it will not be; the ferries are spread out far too infrequently to be able to attend conveniently. For those many who don't drive, it's technically public transit accessible, but double those times.
I have ...
Rescheduled - skipped it on the 9th for the eclipse, and couldn't do the original plan for the 23rd (park bocce, probably coming in a future month)
But you can't change it for anyone else's view, which is the important thing.
Isn't this post describing the replication attempt?
You should try doing the next version as an adversarial collaboration.
Clarification:
"Steam" is one possible opposite of Slack. I sketch a speculative view of steam as a third 'cognitive currency' almost like probability and utility.
Are 'probability' and 'utility' meant to be the other two cognitive currencies? Or is it 'Slack', and if so which is the third?
This was fairly untested but went very well!
I'll do a better writeup as a Meetup In a Box later, but this is how it went:
For each set, 10m writing things down, then ?20m? discussing, then next set
List a few things that went very well this year. (3-5)
List a few things that went very badly this year. (3-5)
If you were to 80/20 your last year, which 20% gave the 80% you valued most?
If someone looked at your actions for the last year, what would they think your priorities were?
What did you intend your priorities to be?
...Do you want to make a
Is there a graph of solar efficiency (fraction of energy kept in light -> electricity conversion) for solar tech that's deployed at scale? https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html exists for research models but I'm unsure of any for industrial-scale.
Rescheduled to the end of the month because I am sick again. Guess maybe I should have worn a mask to the airport in travel season.
Imo this comment is lowering the quality of the discourse. Like, if I steelman and expand what you're saying, it seems like you're trying to say something like "this response is pinging a deceptiveness-heuristic that I can't quite put my finger on". That phrasing adds information, and would prompt other commenters to evaluate and either add evidence of deceptiveness, or tell you you're false-positiving, or something like that. But your actual phrasing doesn't do that, it's basically name calling.
So, mod note: I strong-downvoted your comment and decided to leave it at that. Consider yourself frowned at.
Six weeks, once, with significant counterpressure exerted against her doing so is confirmation of the original claim, not counterevidence.
Thank you for your response. That seems a tendentious reading to me, but I'm happy to leave it at that.
EDIT: Actually, given the level of support the above comment is getting, I'd appreciate elaboration from someone. The straightforward reading of "They were not able to live apart from the family unit while they worked with them" is that during the whole duration of working with the family unit, they were required to live in the same location. Are people honestly claiming that that sentence remains true as written if she spent fully a third of her time working for them living apart from them? I don't see where people are coming from on this at all.