All of FiftyTwo's Comments + Replies
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.
Oh, the type of weirdness has definitely changed a lot. But I'm just contending that the level of deviancy is a lot lower these days.
You go to a LW meetup now and there's a lot of wealthy, well-scrubbed/dressed AI researchers (they even lift) and academics and executives and bright-eyed Stanford undergrads sniffing for an internship or YC application fodder. One famous wealthy guy is manic, because he's hypomanic & bipolar is overrepresented among entrepreneurs; don't worry, he'll be fine, until after the meetup when he disappears for a few months. Nob...
1I 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.
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1I 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
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).
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...
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...
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?
If you convince the CCP, the US government, and not that many other players that this is really serious, it becomes very difficult to source chips elsewhere.
The CCP and the US government both make their policy decisions based on whatever (a weirdly-sampled subset of) their experts tell them.
Those experts update primarily on their colleagues.
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
You're completely right. If you don't believe it, this post isn't really trying to update you. This is more to serve as a coordination mechanism for the people who do think the rest isn't very difficult (which I am assuming is a not-small-number).
Note that I also don't think the actions advocated by the post are suboptimal even if you only place 3-7 years at 30% probability.
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.
Good programmers who are a pain to work with are much less successful than average programmers who are pleasant to work with. Increasing technical competency has diminishing returns. So I'd focus on doing things that gets you more experience of working with people, the business development internship may do that depending on the details. Also things like working in a bar or restaurant.
Note that this is distinct from the standard advice on developing social skills. Being good at talking to strangers and going to parties is good. But working well with ...
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
1I 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...
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
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?
[Meta] I often see threads like this where people recommend things that require a very high level of conscientiousness or planning ability to start with, (e.g. if you are tired in the mornings get out of bed immediately and do x, requirs you to be capable of forcing yourself to do x when you are tired.)
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)