“I'm skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.”

Some people enjoy attending to their partner and find meaning in emotional labor. Housing’s a lot more expensive than gifts and dates. My partner and I go 50/50 on expenses and chores. Some people like having long-term relationships with emotional depth. You might want to try exploring out of your bubble, especially if you life in SF, and see what some normal people (ie non-rationalists) in long term relationships have to say about it.

I cancelled my OpenAI subscription due to this article and I let them know that's the reason why in their cancellation survey.

Unfortunately the level of physical restraint I’d need to stop biting is too costly to be worth it to me.

It actually did contain capsaicin IIRC. Sort of a bitter spicy mix. The other issue is it gets on things you touch, including food if you’re preparing or eating it by hand.

I’ve tried that, but it’s not enough to stop me. Makes my mouth taste disgusting for no benefit.

They are

My partner has ADHD. She and I talk about it often because I don’t, and understanding and coordinating with each other takes a lot of work.

Her environment is a strong influence on what tasks she considers and chooses. If she notices a weed in the garden walking from the car to the front door, she can get caught up for hours weeding before she makes it into the house. If she’s in her home office trying to work from home and notices something to tidy, same thing.

All the tasks her environment suggests to her seem important and urgent, because she’s not comparing them to some larger list of potential priorities that apply to different contexts - she’s always working on the top priority strictly with reference to the context she’s in at the moment.

She is much better than me at accomplishing tasks that her environment naturally suggests to her - cooking (inspired by recipes she finds on social media), cleaning, shopping, gardening, socializing, and making social plans in response to texts and notifications on her phone.

I am much better than her at constructing an organized list of global priorities and working through them systematically. However, I find it very difficult to be opportunistic, and I can be inflexible and distracted from the moment because I’m always thinking of the one main task I want to focus on.

I don’t think explore/exploit is quite the right frame in our relationship. I’m much more capable of “exploring” topics that require understanding complex abstract interconnections because I can force myself to keep coming back to them over and over again, whatever they are, in any environment, until I’ve understood them. By contrast she’s more capable of “exploiting” unpredictable opportunities as they arise. But the opportunities she and I are exposed to are constrained by our patterns of attention.

There is trust in the practical abilities. Right now it is low, but that will only go up.

Part of the learning curve for using existing AI is calibrating trust and verifying answers, conditional on use case. A hallmark of inexperienced AI users is taking its replies at face value, without checking.

I do expect that over time, AI will become more trustworthy for daily users. But that is compatible with the trust users place in it decreasing as they familiarize themselves with the technology and learn its limitations.

I’ve participated in several alternative communities over the course of my life, and all became mired in scandal. The first was my college, where tolerance of hard drug use by the administration resulted in multiple OD deaths in my time there. The second was in my 20s in an intentional living and festival culture, when a major community figure was accused by multiple women of drugging and raping them while unconscious. The third was the EA and rationality community, which of course has had one scandal after another for years.

My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing. Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people. Or the extent to which features correlated with the movement, like lifestyle experimentation, alternative spirituality or drug use, may be the central attractions for some, using rationality as a pretext. It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling - it’s condensation of crazy.

My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. Think of academia in STEM. Yes, the people and jobs are unusual. But the requirement for participants to repeatedly integrate into new departments at new universities repeatedly and work with many collaborators and a constant churn of new students from around the world makes for a melting pot culture where condensation of crazy is mitigated on a per capita basis.

In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons. There is probably no way to retain the niche alt community structure without the scandal. Individuals will have to choose whether or not they prioritize a low frequency of scandal, or having the community exist in its present form.

A question I ask when sizing up a community is “do these people seem likely to be much more scandal-prone than the average church, sports team or workplace?” I also ask this for people I am considering getting to know. I go with my intuition and choose how to engage accordingly.

We can do the same with living organisms. The human genome contains about 6.2 billion nucleotides. Since there are 4 nucleotides (A, T, G, C), we need two bits for each of them, and since there are 8 bits in a byte, that gives us around 1.55 GB of data.

In other words, all the information that controls the shape of your face, your bones, your organs and every single enzyme inside them – all of that takes less storage space than Microsoft Word™.

There are two ways to see this is incorrect.

1. DNA's ability to structure an organism is mediated through its chemical mileau. It is densely, dynamically regulated through a complex and dense mesh of proteins  and regulatory RNA and small signaling molecules at every timepoint in every organism throughout the life cycle. Disruption of that chemical mileau renders the organism nonviable. This is a separate issue from the fact that evolution overwhelmingly operates on DNA sequence.
2. The DNA in a particular organism/cell is one point in a very long series of complex inheretance chains going back 4.5 billion years. I'm comfortable rounding off the maximum complexity of the soma to the maximum possible complexity of the complete set of ancestral DNA sequences. But we can go further by noticing that an individual's DNA sequence is not just the combination of their direct ancestors -- the entire ancestral lineage at every step is sampled from a distribution of possible genomes that is produced from mechanisms impacting reproduction.

In a more mathematical sense, while it's true that, conditional on a specific non-stochastic function, the number of values in the output set is less than or equal to the number of values in the input set, if the function can vary freely then there is no such constraint.

The soma might be viewed as a stochastic function mapping DNA inputs to phenotypic outputs. The stochastic aspect gives a much larger number of theoretically possible outputs from the same input set. And the fact that the 'function' (soma) itself varies from organism to organism increases the number of phenotypes that can be generated from a given amount of DNA still further.

All these arguments also apply to technology. MS Word 'co-evolved' with Windows, with programming languages, with hardware, and this context must be taken into account when thinking about how complex a machine is.