How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update.
People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement". Comments with additional details are welcome.
I didn't read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don't think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it's more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women.
Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.
A conversation I had in 2021
Them: Man I wish I could do X, it's so much more valuable then what I'm doing right now, but I can't.
Me: But could you though?
I'd forgotten this, but in 2023 they came up to thank me because they were doing X, were pleased with the choice, and assigned me some credit for it. I've heard other people spontaneously praise project X, without knowing I'd been involved in any way.
It's also very common for seeing someone at a conference to move them along the path of hiring me. Rarely from 0-> hired, but maybe from 0-> idea, or from "been meaning to"->hired, or something in the middle.
This post was hard for me to read. A few months after I wrote it I developed medical issues that are still ongoing and really sapped my ability to work. Right now I feel on the precipice of developing Large Scale Ambitions, and that I'd probably have taken the plunge to something bigger if I'd hadn't gotten so sick for so long.
On the other hand, I spent the past 2 years trying to dramatically reform Effective Altruism. I expected to quit in May but got sucked back in via my work with Timothy TL. I didn't think of this as ambitious, but looking ...
I think this is a useful concept that I use several times a year. I don't use the term Dark Forest I'm not sure how much that can be attributed to this post, but this post is the only relevant thing in the review so we'll go with that.
I also appreciate how easy to read and concise this post is. It gives me a vision of how my own writing could be shorter without losing impact.
I didn't keep good track of them, but this post led to me receiving many DMs that it had motivated someone to get tested. I also occasionally indirectly hear about people who got tested, so I think the total impact might be up to 100 people, of which maybe 1/3 had a deficiency (wide confidence intervals on both numbers). I'm very happy with that impact.
I do wish I'd created a better title. The current one is very generic, and breaks LW's "aim to inform not persuade" guideline.
My ultimate goal with this post was to use vegan advocacy as an especially legible example of a deepseated problem in effective altruism, which we could use to understand and eventually remove the problem at the root. As far as I know, the only person who has tried to use it as an example is me, and that work didn't have much visible effect either. I haven't seen anyone else reference this post while discussing a different problem. It's possible this happens out of sight (Lincoln Quirk implies this here), but if I'd achieved my goal it would be clearly visible.
I stand by what I said here: this post asks an important question but badly mangles the discussion. I don't believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she's clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications.
The conflation of "Duncan's ideal" and "the perfect ideal everyone has agreed to" is what I'm complaining about.
If Duncan had, e.g., included guidelines that were LW consensus but he disagreed with, then it would feel more like an attempt to codify the site's collective preferences rather than his in particular.
I'm very grateful I found Tristan and we were able to have this discussion.
My series on vegan nutrition epistemics generated a lot of friction and hostility. Tristan was one of very few vegan advocates I felt I learned things from, and the things I learned were valuable and beautiful. The frame of impractical reverence continues to come up and I'm glad I can recognize it now. I am also happy this primed me to recognize what I don't like about reverence as a frame, and refine my articulation of my own values.
I wish this had been called "Duncan's Guidelines for Discourse" or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they're not consensus. And while I support Duncan's right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can't make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me.
The use case is a lesswrong post people use to make decisions (which could be written by me, or you, but it's looking like @DirectedEvolution).
I love this detailed list. I've responded in-line to every one, but feel free to ask more questions, here or over email.
- Livestock vs. Wild Birds
The distinction between livestock and wild birds is significant. Livestock are in much closer contact with humans and are biologically closer as well. How granular of an analysis are you interested in here?
I care about wild birds to the extent they're spreading disease to livestock or serve as reservoirs.
I've also heard a wide number of mammals have been infected. I care about this to the extent it affe...
The current h5n1 strain already has one death https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/230/3/533/7758741
IIRC my serum iodine after 6 months of gargling and basically-cured hypothyroidism were within a 1% of pre-gargling levels.
After my last test but before getting the results I started forgetting to gargle, and was resistant to taking my medication in the morning. The test revealed this was correct- I didn't need meds anymore.
I've used iodine a bit to treat infections since then but now that I know water is about as good, I will stick to that unless I start craving iodine again or a test reveals my levels have slipped.
it looks like you're taking the total amount spent per employee as the take-home salary, which is incorrect. At a minimum that amount should include payroll taxes, health insurance, CA's ETT, and state and federal unemployment insurance tax. It can also include things things like education benefits, equipment, and 401k bonuses. Given the crudeness of the budget, I expect there's quite a bit being included under "etc".
I wanted a datapoint for Czynski's hypothesis that LW 2.0 killed the comment sections, so I checked how many comments your blogposts were getting in the first 3 months of 2017 (before LW 2.0 rebooted). There were 13 posts, and the comment counts were 0, 0, 2, 6, 9, 36, 0, 5, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2. (The 36 was a a political post in response to the US election, discussion of which I generally count as neutral or negative on LW, so I'd discount this.)
I'll try the same for Zvi. 13, 8, 3, 1, 3, 18, 2, 19, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 7, 7, 12, 4, 2, 61, 31, 79. That's more active (t...
There’s a lot here and if my existing writing didn’t answer your questions, I’m not optimistic another comment will help[1]. Instead, how about we find something to bet on? It’s difficult to identify something both cruxy and measurable, but here are two ideas:
I see a pattern of:
1. CEA takes some action with the best of intentions
2. It takes a few years for the toll to come out, but eventually there’s a negative consensus on it.
3. A representative of CEA agrees the negative consensus is deserved, but since it occurred under old leadership, doesn’t think any...
Seeing my statements reflected back is helpful, thank you.
I think Effective Altruism is upper case and has been for a long time, in part because it aggressively recruited people who wanted to follow[1]. In my ideal world it both has better leadership and needs less of it, because members are less dependent.
I think rationality does a decent job here. There are strong leaders of individual fiefdoms, and networks of respect and trust, but it's much more federated.
Which is noble and should be respected- the world needs more followers than leaders.
The desire for crowdfunding is less about avoiding bias[1] and more that this is only worth doing if people are listening, and small donors are much better evidence on that question than grants. If EV gave explicit instructions to donate to me it would be more like a grant than spontaneous small donors, although I in general agree people should be looking for opportunities they can beat GiveWell.
ETA: we were planning on waiting on this but since there's interest I might as well post the fundraiser now.
I'm fortunate to have both a long run
Maybe you just don't see the effects yet? It takes a long time for things to take effect, even internally in places you wouldn't have access to, and even longer for them to be externally visible. Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That's why I'm pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn't become apparent to you though.
I've repeatedly had interactions with ~leadership EA that asks me to assume ther...
This is a good point. In my ideal movement makes perfect sense to disagree with every leader and yet still be a central member of the group. LessWrong has basically pulled that off. EA somehow managed to be bad at having leaders (both in the sense that the closest things to leaders don't want to be closer, and that I don't respect them), while being the sort of thing that requires leaders.
If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more [...] If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she's making an impact.
First of all, thank you, love it when people suggest I receive money. Timothy and I have talked about fundraising for a continued podcast. I would strongly prefer most of the funding be crowdfunding, for the reason you say. If we did this it would almost certainly be through Manifund. Signing up for Patreon and noting this as the...
Reading this makes me feel really sad because I’d like to believe it, but I can’t, for all the reasons outlined in the OP.
I could get into more details, but it would be pretty costly for me for (I think) no benefit. The only reason I came back to EA criticism was that talking to Timothy feels wholesome and good, as opposed to the battery acid feeling I get from most discussions of EA.