I have very mixed feelings about GlowFic which are a direct result of trying to read PlaneCrash.
Pro: they are a joy for the author, and gets an author to write many hundreds of thousands of words effortlessly, which is great when you want more words from an author.
Con: the format is anti-conducive to narrative density. The joy is in creating any words, which is great for the author, but bad for audiences. Readers want a high engagement-per-word ratio.
For context, my two favorite works are HPMOR and Worth The Candle, of 660K and 1.6M words. I spent 16...
I've been notified that this post was nominated as a finalist for the Less Wrong 2023 Review! This is fantastic news, and I'm deeply honored! As part of the notification I was encouraged to write a self-review, with some example prompts like "Do you still endorse this?" and "What further work do you think should be done exploring the ideas here?”
Fiction is pretty Out Of Distribution for Less Wrong posts. I almost didn’t post it, because what is the point? I mean that literally... what IS the point of fiction on Less Wrong? Most often it’s to help demonstra...
My answer is going to be unsatisfying - entirely vibes. While there are still significant sections of the populace that have left-over affection for anything that looks like the Civil Rights movement due to how valorized that movement is and how much change it affected, this is seriously waning. The non-effectiveness of movements that just copy the aesthetics are slowly making them look more like cargo-cults that copy the form but without an understanding of the substance that made them successful.
As more people dismiss protestors as performance without su...
AI is Immersed Mindset On Demand
At The Bayesian Conspiracy we recently spoke with Zoe about pop-up cities and goal-focused group houses (episode coming next week). One of the great things about these settings is that being immersed in your work keeps you in a mental frame where related self-propagating thought patterns are kept alive in your brain and stay processing in the background all the time.
Much of our brain power is ambient. It takes a while to shut down thought patterns that have been oscillating for a while and recruit those neurons into new patt...
I had a quasi-romantic relationship with a fictional character that lived in my head during my worst year, in college. I could sometimes even "see" him. I knew he wasn't real. It did help me out during the darkest times. Probably woulda been even better to be able to have chat conversations that were run by an AI. And I did outgrow that in a few months, when life got better.
So, basically, this sounds great and I love this perspective. Thank you.
Asimov’s Science Fiction has published one of my stories! "Red Legacy," on page 48 of the current issue. Details on how to get it at my blog if you're interested. I think it's a rational story, but I'm interested in opinions if anyone here ends up reading it.
Taught early in high school: How to do sex, in real life. Not STI education, not pregnancy/fertility, not how to be safe, or the biology of penises and vagines. How to go into sex and do it so that it's fun and feels good, how to listen to your body and your partner, maybe how to attract the opposite sex, and so on. Dunno about elsewhere, but in the US guys get all their sex education from porn, and girls used to get none at all. (now... also porn?) Porn is fun, but it's Kabuki Sex, and it only vaguely relates to real-life sex. It'd be like giving a 16-yea...
Every single episode seems to have the deep underlying message of "Humans are fucked up, on a fundamental level. This is what it means to be human, and it cannot be changed. Let us revel in it." Sometimes it's melancholy, sometimes it's straight-up sad-as-hell, but there's never a feeling of "things can get better." It's always of "these problems are too large to change, nothing can be done but to embrace and accept it." It is the loss of all hope that makes me want to just give up on everything and crawl into a dark corner for the rest of the day.
Hm. Denver meetup isn't showing up on the map on the front page. Is this the write place to mention that? Should someone else be messaged? Thanks,
Wanted to mention that the Denver Area meet-up next week is basically new. It's the second of a soon-to-be regular event that TheStevenator is starting up from scratch (mad props to him!). He just moved here and I believe there's no connection to the previous sporadic ones. Sounds like the goal is for these to become regular monthly meets. I'm looking forward to them. :)
2 hours per day seems like way too much. I work out 3x per week, 1 hour each time. (Though I did start 4x per week, 1 hour each, when I was initially losing weight). Just make sure to keep it high intensity. When I'm tempted to slack off I ask myself if I'm here to kill some time by moving around, or if I'm here to achieve a damn objective as efficiently as I can so I can get back to doing other things. If after an hour is up I'm physically capable of continuing for another hour, I obviously was just wasting my time.
Planet Money is fantastic, I never miss it. Savage Love is equally fantastic, and on a topic too many people neglect because they don't think there's much to learn.
Welcome to Night Vale is quirky and fun. Plus quite popular, so gives you something to talk about with other geeks you run into at random.
Has anyone posted about Seth Dickinson yet? I don't keep up on the open threads as much as I'd like, but my google-fu says no.
Last year I was blown away by a short story by Seth Dickinson called A Plant (Whose Name is Destroyed). Recently I went and checked out Seth Dickinson's other works. I've read over half of them now, and I gotta say - I STRONGLY recommend this author. Many of his works have a very strong transhumanist message, and some could be called rationalist. I'm kinda surprised I haven't already heard his name brought up on LessWrong, or SlateS...
200 years from now, you probably wouldn't even want to read any of Eliezer's books (or whoever your favorite author is right now). I'm fairly convinced all fiction is contemporary and fades in relevance in a matter of decades. But would a promise today of another Eliezer work in the future motivate you to sign up for cryo?
Not much has been said cuz there ain't much to say about things that don't exist. Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn't even advanced rationality - it's reductionism 101. I believe there was a Intelligence Squared debate on it just a few days ago that rehashed all the same old ground if you'd like a refresher. Here we go.
Giving a prior of .5 is ridiculous. Something for which you have no evidence and which breaks several known laws of physics should begin with a seriously tiny prior. You're being heavily influenced by social traditions.
Ever since my brother joined the Military I've thought that could be a potentially good way to push cryonics. The Military is already well-known for forcing technological change, but it's less known that the Military's effort to reduce loss of fighting men to Syphilis (as well as other STIs) was a major contributor to the social acceptance of condoms, which had previously been shunned. The social changes resulting from that campaign are often cited as a precursor to the sexual revolution.
People don't seem to care that much when an old person dies of natura...
Not terribly expensive. The recovery is painful. But the pain is temporary, and the improvements are amazing. It was a major turning point in my life, and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who is considered a good candidate (consult your specialist)
Interestingly, I've been using card and online banking for so long that I seem to have internalized "money is the number stored in the bank's computer/my mental register". Recently I came into a steady flow of cash (long story), and I didn't want to go to the bank every damn week to deposit it, so I started paying for groceries and restaurants with that cash. It felt like giving away play money and getting real goods and services in exchange. "You mean I can give you some colored paper slips, and you'll just give me $100 worth of groceries? It doesn't reduce the money I have in the bank? And I'm not going to jail for this?" It was weird.
Because I think it's one of the three major relationship models. Pure Monogamy is traditional, and Polyamory is the reaction against it, but Monogamish is how a lot of relationships actually work (while operating under the cloak of monogamy). It's like a worldwide religion survey allowing only "Christian" and "Muslim", and lumping Hinduism under "Other". There's another major option here that should be broken out.
I don't think I was frightened in the same way that other people say they are - I certainly wouldn't rate this worse than death. It was more of that fear of doing something in public for the first time where you know you could screw it up badly and there's no way to undo the mistake.
A podcast is a very different animal. You're in a private room, there's no one there watching you as you do it, you have all the time you need to correct mistakes and edit them out later. It's nothing like public speaking. :)
Expecting Short Inferential Distances may be a good idea, since it encapsulates the reason there are so many words/posts in the sequences.
I thought Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable is an amazing post, one of the most memorable, and it'd be a shame not to include it.
Likewise, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes was an incredibly intuitive way to explain that an AI doesn't have to hate you for it to destroy the world, it simply has to not have your values.
I think a much more interesting take on Milgram is one presented by Radio Lab in which it's put forth that people were particularly likely to obey due to the spirit of scientific exceptionalism during that era. Science had won WWII, science was responsible for our prosperity and was making life better for everyone on earth, and they were helping that cause. It was idealism and optimism that prompted people to go beyond their own bounds in the pursuit of the greater good, rather than cynicism and obedience.
Also of note was that everyone who continued all th...
I'm upping my vote for this in the year-end review based on the latest Zizian murder. :/ https://twitter.com/LexerLux/status/1882438198296744130#
I don't think this is a good reason: There might be some other way of highlighting its importance in light of recent events, but it's not core LW content.