All of FiftyTwo's Comments + Replies

This is tangential to the main point so I don't want to go too deep into it. But since you raise it, that link doesn't show evidence of the original claim Trump made in the State of the Union, which I as referencing. Which was specifically: “Eight million dollars — for making mice transgender. This is real.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/transcript-president-donald-trumps-2025-state-of-the-union-address)

The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specif... (read more)

Cases of genuine reform and improvement of processes, both in government and the private sector, tend to take the form of upfront investment of resources to overhaul systems, deploy new infrastructure, train staff, etc. which then lead to efficiency savings in the long run. 

(Sticking to Eastern Europe, Estonia's "e-government" programme involved significant upfront spending but radically simplified and reduced the costs of large parts of their government, as well as enabling growth of private businesses. Or for US examples look at the roll out of the ... (read more)

It's not just a question of "where would we need reform?" or "what kind of reform would work" but "what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?" 

Most of the time when people talk about "government waste" what they actually mean is "government spending money on things I disapprove of". When right wing lawmakers talk about money wasted on apocryphal transgender mice, they aren't asking about how many transgender mice were generated per dollar, but the existence of the supposed project. Or one of the most frequently cited examples... (read more)

The issue in Eastern Europe being described seems to more fit the "rule of law" vs "rule by law" phenomeon, often used when describing authoritarian regimes, and particularly China. Where the law exists as a tool for the state to deploy at its discretion, not a consistently applied set of rules that limits them. 

Generally the solution to this is not fewer laws, as that also leaves the authorities with great discretion, but to have strong counterbalancing institutions like an independent judiciary, press, opposition parties, etc. that will force them to act within the law. 

I think there's also a strong preference towards Wizard over King power (at least in this cultural space) because being seen as actively seeking power over others is considered threatening. Saying you want to tell people what to do because you think you know better than them how to get things done is going to make people defensive and wary. 

The main reason I haven't been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you're describing is that it seems to me like there's an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel, 

The post inspired a similar thought in me as well. There's a reason that people in any complex field have a wariness of anyone coming in thinking that they've discovered a new way to do everything better from first principles. And modern culture tends to valorize disruptors and innovators more than people who grind away slowly on incremental imp... (read more)

On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn't typically make civilization stronger

I don't think this is true, at least when generalizing "King" to "manager". One of the major ways societies develop is by getting better at coordination and resource management. Not every manager in e.g. Costco is a king, in the sense of having singular total authority, but they are all making decisions about the allocation of resources that are conveyed to those below them in the heirarchy, that adds together to a complex supply chain network that can achieve material prosperity that farmers alone couldn't manage.

I have a somewhat similar feeling of having become less ambitious and agentic over time. Part of the issue is that a lot of the cool weird stuff I tried when I was younger didn't really work out, so the expected value is low. And my current life status makes me more risk averse. 

Or to use your analogy, if the last 10 times the wizard has tried something clever, 9 times the result was some useless green goop, and 1 time a smoking crater where your castle used to be. Then its entirely rational to reallocate funds away from the wizard towards hiring more... (read more)

To give a counter example: If one part of my body has been hijacked by a virus and is producing viral cells, I would want all the other parts of my body to fight back against that infection, rather than leave that part alone. Similarly when you talk about conflicts within organizations of societies, you should want people to take sides in a dispute between managers if one of them is embezzling or committing crimes. 

So I think your model is beneficial for some forms of conflict but not others. You could perhaps draw a line for action at "things that threaten the viability of the whole setup" But the delineation of that would become its own controversy

The setting for Planecrash is called "Glowlarion" sometimes and is shared with a lot of other glowfics, and makes some systematic changes from the original Paizo canon, mostly in terms of making it more similar to real life history of the same period, more internally coherent and with the gods and metaphysics being more impactful. 

There's a brief outline of some of the changes here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZGaV1suMeHrDlsYovZbG4c4tdMVgdq0HzgRX0HUGYkU/edit?tab=t.0 

These are the two oldest non-crossover threads I can find: https://www.gl... (read more)

Was rereading a bunch of early 2010s LW recently, prompted by getting a reply on one of my old comments, and its definitely weird. But the flavor of weird feels different somehow? A lot more earnest and direct, and with people more willing to make silly jokes and tangents. 

There were also more top level posts along the lines of "Here's this new rationality technique I've been trying, what do people think?" It feels less, high context, I guess? A lot of current discussion is people immersed in some wider meta debate with long established sides and real world stakes to it. 

I imagine that kind of posting wouldn't work particularly well these days given that the environment around it has changed. 

I feel like you're conflating two different levels, the discourse in wider global society and within a specific community. 

I doubt you'd find anyone here who would disagree that actions by big companies that obscure the truth are bad. But they're not the ones arguing on these forums or reading this post. Vegans have a significant presence in EA spaces so should be contributing to those productively and promoting good epistemic norms. What the lobbying team of Big Meat Co. does has no impact on that. 

Also in general I'm leery of any argument of the form "the other side does as bad or worse so its okay for us to do so" given history. 

I somewhat agree with this but I think its an uncharitable framing of the point, since virtue signalling is generally used for insincerity. My impression is that the vegans I've spoken with are mostly acting sincerely based on their moral premises, but those are not ones I share. If you sincerely believe that a vast atrocity is taking place that society is ignoring then a strident emotional reaction is understandable. 

I've definitely noticed a shift in the time I've been involved or aware of EA. In the early 2010s it was mostly focused on global poverty and the general idea of evidence based charity, and veganism was peripheral. Now it seems like a lot of groups are mainly about veganism, and very resistant to people who think otherwise. And as veganism is a minority position that is going to put off people who would otherwise be interested in EA

You still run into the alignment problem of ensuring that the upgraded version of you aligns with your values, or some extension of them. If my uploaded transhuman self decides to turn the world into paperclips that's just as bad as if a non-human AGI does. 

Never really got anywhere. Its long enough ago that I don't really remember why, but think I generally found it unengaging. Have periodically tried to teach myself programming through different methods since then but none have stuck. This probably speaks to the difficulty of learning new skills when you have limited time/energy resources, and no specific motivation, more than anything else. (Have had similar difficulties with language learning, but got past them due to short term practical benefits, and devoting specific time to the task). 

It mixes the personal and professional level

Possibly reflective of a wider issue in EA/rationalist spaces where the two are often not very clearly delineated. In that sense EA is more like hobby/fandom communities than professional ones. 

Saying that people would be better off taking more risks under a particular model elides the question of why they don't take those risks to begin with, and how we can change that. If its desirable to do so. 

The psychological impact of a loss of x is generally higher than that of a corresponding gain. So if I know I will feel worse from losing $10 than I will feel good from gaining $100, then its entirely rational in my utility function to not take a 50/50 bet between those two outcomes.  Maybe I would be better off overall if I didn't over weight losses, but utility functions aren't easily rewritable by humans. The closest you could come is some kind of exposure therapy to losses. 

Also, we have a huge amount of mental architecture devoted to understanding and remembering spatial relationships of objects (for obvious evolutionary reasons). Using that as a metaphor for purely abstract things allows us to take advantage of that mental architecture to make other tasks easier.

A very structured version of this would be something like a memory palace where you assign ideas to specific locations in a place, but I think we are doing the same thing often when we talk about ideas in spatial relationships, and build loose mental models of them as existing in spatial relationship to one another (or at least I do). 

I think the core thing here is same-sidedness.

The converse of this is that the maximally charitable approach can be harmful when the interlocutor is fundamentally not on the same side as you, in trying to honestly discuss a topic and arrive at truth. I've seen people tie themselves in knots when trying to apply the principle of charity, when the most parsimonious explanation is that the other side is not engaging in good faith, and shouldn't be treated as such. 

It's taken me a long time to internalise this, because my instinct is to take what people s... (read more)

Thanks. This is the kind of content I originally came to LW for a decade ago, but seems to have become less popular

You might find Origins Of Political Order interesting. Emphasis on how the principle agent problem is one of the central issues of governance and how without strong mechanisms systems tend to descend into corruption

Is there any way of reverse engineering from these pictures what existing images were used to generate them? Would be interesting to see how much similarity there is. 

So we just need to get two superpowers who currently feel they are in a zero sum competition with each other to stop trying to advance in an area that gives them a potentially infinite advantage? Seems a very classic case of the kind of coordination problems that are difficult to solve, with high rewards for defecting.

We have, partially managed to do this for nuclear and biological weapons. But only with a massive oversight infrastructure that doesn't exist for AI. And relying on physical evidence and materials control that doesn't exist for AI. It's not i... (read more)

A more charitable interpretation of the same evidence would be that as a public health professional Dr Fauci has a lot of experience with the difficulties of communicating complex and messages and the political tradeoffs that are necessary for effective action. And has judged based on that experience what is most effective to say. Do you have data he doesn't? Or a reason to think his experience in his speciality is inapplicable?

Earth does have the global infrastructure

It does? What do you mean? The only thing I can think of is the UN, and recent events don't make it very likely they'd engage in coordinated action on anything.

It should not take long, given these pieces and a moderate amount of iteration, to create an agentic system capable of long-term decision-making

That is, to put it mildly, a pretty strong claim, and one I don't think the rest of your post really justifies. Without which it's still just listing a theoretical thing to worry about

If you're an otherwise healthy young person who has tested positive, what's the best thing you can do to prevent getting long covid? Seems like there's research saying that exercising too early can make it worse, but other articles saying good things about exercise, and I'm not sure how to evaluate it.  

My greatest legacy

I'd be curious what you think now after many years to see the effects of things in practice

Great to see everyone. Is there somewhere we can sign up for future events in London?

Characterising the reaction to Cummings as about being about people overreacting to a small violation of the rules is misleading. The issue wasn't the initial rule violation, it was that the initial denial and lack of even token punishment was symbolic of a wider issue in the Johnson government with corruption and cronyism. Caring about hypocrisy and corruption among leaders is entirely rational as it is indicative of how they will make other decisions in the future. 

Yeah I like a lot of EY's stuff (otherwise I wouldn't be here) but he does have a habit of treating his own preferences as universal, or failing to appreciate when there might be good reasons that the seemingly obvious solution doesn't work, as is common with people commenting on areas outside their expertise

I think its unfair to say "everyone in Europe lost their minds" when the EU health agency was very loudly saying things were fine. It would be more accurate to say a couple of specific countries medical regulators and some politicians went crazy. 

Obviously that's still bad, but when looking at systemic failures like this it is important to identify the actual source of the problem. Which seem to be due to idiosyncratic political issues in teh countries involved. Blaming the wrong people undermines the ones who have been doing a good job

How would you differentiate this from someone just asking for additional evidence because they think you've made a false statement? E.g. If Alice tells Bob the earth is flat, its reasonable for him to ask for additional evidence, and doing so doesn't imply he's playing status games. But could equally reasonably be replied to by saying that Bob is only disagreeing because he thinks Alice isn't high status enough to make cosmological claims.

Like, who has the authority to say "thou shalt not try things that might fail"? As long as you're not conning anybody out of resources, your failure doesn't pick anybody else's pocket.

What about altruistic reasons for asking? If my friend is planning to quit their job and become a famous musician I would probably attempt strongly to dissuade them, even if it wouldn't directly affect me.

If however I thought they were likely to succeed (e.g. have made money selling music on bandcamp and performing, in talks with a record company, etc.) I probably wouldn't dissuade them.

I feel like after reading this I have a much better insight into how Eliezer thinks than I did before, even having read most of his published work.

I think his model of other people is off though.

Specifically, he uses ideas of comparative status to explain other people not challenging conventional wisdom, or trying new things a lot. Which feels like it could be a fully general argument for any observed behaviour (e.g. it could equally well explain a habit of disproportionately challenging experts, as being in conflict with them puts you at their level a... (read more)

Hello! Just rediscovered this thread. The website doesn't seem to be up anymore. How did it go in the end? Where are you at with learning mandarin?

Since you seem to be sincere in asking for reasons:

"Whore" is considered an unpleasant word by many people. That combined with the overall tone may have made people think your intention was trollish

You seem to deeply misunderstand the dynamics that lead to ssex eduation being the way it is. There is no plausible transition from the way the world exists at present to one where retired sex workers were employed in the school system to teach sex education.

• a) Because the majority still have moral objections to sex work and it is illegal in many p

Maybe he's secretly a creationist, its unlikely but it would be more interesting/controversial than he standard internet contrarian ideas.

Might be worth including the Amazon.co.uk and other store links.

http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/2x5c9k/spoilers_111_hyakuju_montauk_meaning/

I want to say no purely because of my default suspicion of anyone offering me a free vacation.

In general collecting data is cheap and we're getting better at sorting and using it, so bias towards collecting data

Also focus on developing skills in areas unlikely to be automated anytime soon

Personally I was surprised so amny cis people strongly identified with their gender

[tpical mind etc...]

All hail!

Do you have any plans for changes?

I've managed to partly transmute my "I want to buy that now" impulse into sending a sample to my kindle. Then if I never get past the first few pages I've not actually spent any money, if I reach the end of the sample and still want to continue I know I'm likely to keep going .

I find I often pickup mindsets and patterns of thought from from reading fiction or first person non-fiction. E.g. I'm a non-sociopath, but I noticed thought patterns more simlar when reading "Confessions of a Sociopath"

I figure this may be a useful way to hack myself towards positive behaviours. Can anyone reccomend fiction that would encourage high productivity mindsets?