All of Firinn's Comments + Replies
Huh, yeah, this is basically the opposite of how things work for me?
I get into spirals a lot. I can have a positive spiral: I sleep well, get out of bed feeling rested, start the day with a small easy task, get a feeling of accomplishment, feel more confident about starting a bigger task, eventually get into flow, have a very productive day, by 7pm I'm satisfied and decide to start cooking dinner, so I'm ready to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and have another great day tomorrow.
I also get into negative spirals: I wake up feeling tired because I had a ni...
1I'm surprised you decided not to prioritise exercise!
I realised reading this comment that when I ask myself, "How have I become more hardworking?" I don't think about exercise at all. But if I asked myself the mirror question - "How have I become less hardworking?" - I think about the time when I accidentally stopped exercising (because I moved further away from a dojo and couldn't handle the public transit - and then, some years later, because of confining myself to my apartment during the pandemic) and it was basically like taking a sledgehammer to my me...
Okay, I'm not opposed to the project of inventing fun games with no one winner - I mean, I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons - but I think games with one winner are awesome. I like the discipline imposed by them.
I'm not sure I can put into words what I mean by discipline; it's related to the nameless virtue. But, for example, sometimes in a computer game I find myself thinking, "wow this game is badly designed; it'd be more fun and realistic if it rewarded a good balance of archers and spearmen and cavalry, but I'm pretty sure the archer unit is so cheap and hi...
I think answering "how should you behave when you're sharing resources with people with different values?" is one of the projects of contractarian ethics, which is why I'm a fan.
A known problem in contractarian ethics is how people with more altruistic preferences can get screwed over by egalitarian procedures that give everyone's preferences equal weight (like simple majority votes). For example, imagine the options in the poll were "A: give one ice cream to everyone" and "B: give two ice creams, only to the people whose names begin with consonants". If S...
OK, "top level post on the biology of sexual dimorphism in primates" added to my todo list (though it might be a while since I'm working on another sequence). Now that I know you're a bacteria person, this makes more sense! I'm a human evolution person, so you wrote it very differently to how I would've. (If you'd like an introductory textbook, I always recommend Laland and Brown's Sense and Nonsense.) I don't know as much about the very earliest origins in bacteria, so that was super interesting to read about!
The stuff about adding a third sex remin...
it appears there is no heart react on LessWrong, which is sad because I want to give this comment a lil <3
7Well, yes. The correct response to noticing "it's really convenient to believe X, so I might be biased towards X" isn't to immediately believe not-X. It's to be extra careful to use evidence and good reasoning to figure out whether you believe X or not-X.
I'm the kind of person who seems to do really badly in typical office environments. I also found that while working on my attempt at a startup, I was very easily able to regularly put in 16-hour days and wasn't really bothered by it at all. But then my startup attempt totally failed, so maybe I wasn't actually doing very good work?
Regardless, what works for me is basically all based on lots of tested self-knowledge.
For example, I like making my environment hyper-comfy. I do better work in my pyjamas, on my laptop in bed, with a mug of coffee in hand. I als...
If I could work extremely hard doing things I don't like, without any burnouts, eat only healthy food without binge eating spirals, honestly enjoy doing exercises, have only meaningful rest without exausting my will power and generally be fully intellectually and emotionally consistent, completely subjugating my urges to my values... but ONLY by being really mean and cruel and careless to myself...
Man, that would suck! That would be a really inconvenient world! That would be a world where I'm forced to choose either "I don't want to be mean to myself, even...
yep, fair! Do you think the point would come across better if Alice was nice? (I wasn't sure I could make Alice nice without an extra few thousand words, but maybe someone more skilful could.)
I think a lot of us have voices in our heads that are meaner than Alice, so if you think Alice is going to cause burnout, I think we need a response that is better than Bob's (and better than "I'm just going to reject all assholes out of hand", because I can't use that on myself!)
I think antivaxxers could plausibly pose a higher infection risk because they're unusually likely to hang out with other unvaccinated people, or to do other bad decisionmaking. Someone who's unvaccinated because they're scared of needles might still make good decisions otherwise - like they might stay home if they're feeling a sniffle, or test themselves for COVID if their housemate is sick.
Also, you want to exclude unvaccinated people because they pose an infection risk, so you already wanted to exclude anyone who posts "I hate vaccines" on Facebook. You'...
What would you think about a solution like "if you're not vaccinated and you loudly say so then we'll ban you, but otherwise you'll get away with it"?
I can see how it'd be negative to filter out "unvaccinated and honest about it", creating selection for "unvaccinated and willing to lie about it"; you don't like liars. But I also think I'm more willing to accept someone who's quietly unvaccinated because they're very scared of needles (but who also basically agrees that vaccines are good, and is sort of ashamed about being unvaccinated), and less will...
Corner brackets are pretty! I usually just connect every word with a hyphen if they're intended to be read together, eg. "In this definitely-not-silly example sentence, the potentially-ambiguous bits are all hyphen-connected".
This is a very tiny thing, but I really don't like using "Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave/Dan, Eve/Erin, Frank" as the generic characters in parables/dialogues/problems. Why are we alternating binary genders?? Even leaving aside nonbinary inclusivity, it's literally just clearer and easier to write if I've got a he, a she, and a zie (rather than it being ambiguous whether "she" refers to Alice or Carol). I'm not always consistent with it, but generally my imaginary characters are more like Alice, Bob, Charlie, Delilah, Ethan, Fern, etc, and Charlie and Fern use ge...
Yep, I think my university called these "special topics" or "selected topics" papers sometimes. As in, a paper called "Special Topics In X" would just be "we got three really good researchers who happen to study different areas of X, we asked them each to spend one-third of the year teaching you about their favourite research, and then we test you on those three areas at the end of the year". Downside is that you don't necessarily get the optimal three topics that you wanted to learn about, upside is you get to learn from great researchers.
oh, great, I'm glad someone is doing this! Will you collect some data about how your students respond, and write up what you feel worked well or badly? Are you aware of any existing syllabi that you took inspiration from? It'd be great if people doing this sort of thing could learn from one another!
Hmm, does your response change if they're housemates or something like that?
I agree there'd be no controversy about Alice deciding not to hire Bob because he doesn't meet her standards, and I think there'd be little controversy over some org deciding to hire Bob over Alice because he's more likeable. But, if it makes the post work better for you, you can totally pretend that instead of talking about membership in "the rationalist community", they're talking about "membership in the Greater Springfield Rationalist Book Club that meets on Tuesdays in Alice and Bob's group house". I think Alice kicking Bob out of that would be much more contentious and controversial!
yes, definitely!
(I wrote way too much in this comment while waiting for my lentils to finish simmering; I apologise!)
I don't think it's necessarily intended to be bad or excessively stylized, but it's intended to be rude for sure. I didn't want to write a preachy thing!
Three kinda main reasons that I made Alice suck, deliberately:
Firstly, later in my sequence I want to talk about ways that Alice could achieve her goals better.
Secondly, I kind of want to be able to sit with the awkward dissonant feeling of, "huh, Alice is rude and mean and making me feel bad and maybe she ...
If you mean this literally, it's a pretty extraordinary claim! Like, if Alice is really doing important AI Safety work and/or donating large amounts of money, she's plausibly saving multiple lives every year. Is the impact of being rude worse than killing multiple people per year?
(Note, I'm not saying in this comment that Alice should talk the way she does, or that Alice's conversation techniques are effective or socially acceptable. I'm saying it's extraordinary to claim that the toxic experience of Alice's friends is equivalently bad to "any good she can...
Absolutely not.
I definitely have a mini Alice voice inside my head. I also have a mini Bob voice inside my head. They fight, like, all the time. I'd love help in resolving their fights!
If Bob isn't reflectively consistent, their utility functions could currently be the same in some sense, right? (They might agree on what Bob's utility function should be - Bob would happily press a button that makes him want to donate 30%, he just doesn't currently want to do that and doesn't think he has access to such a button.)
Huh, interesting! I definitely count myself as agreeing with Alice in some regards - like, I think I should work harder than I currently do, and I think it's bad that I don't, and I've definitely done some amount to increase my capacity, and I'm really interested in finding more ways to increase my capacity. But I don't feel super indignant about being told that I should donate more or work harder - though I might feel pretty indignant if Alice is being mean about it! I'd describe my emotions as being closer to anxiety, and a very urgent sense of curiosity...
I think if someone wasn't indignant about Alice's ideas, but did just disagree with Alice and think she was wrong, we might see lots of comments that look something like: "Hmm, I think there's actually a 80% probability that I can't be any more ethical than I currently am, even if I did try to self-improve or self-modify. I ran a test where I tried contributing 5% more of my time while simultaneously starting therapy and increasing the amount of social support that I felt okay asking for, and in my journal I noted an increase in my sleep needs, which I tho...
I think if someone wasn’t indignant about Alice’s ideas, but did just disagree with Alice and think she was wrong, we might see lots of comments that look something like: …
The disagreement isn’t with Alice’s ideas, it’s with Alice’s claims to have any right to impose her judgment on people who aren’t interested in hearing it. What you describe here is instead an acceptance of Alice’s premises. I’m pointing out that it’s possible to disagree with those premises entirely.
I agree that “using evidence, building models, remembering that 0 and 1 aren’t probab...
What specifically would you expect to not go well? What bad things will happen if Bob greatly ups his efforts? Why will they happen?
Are there things we could do to mitigate those bad things? How could we lower the probability of the bad things happening? If you don't think any risk reduction or mitigation is possible at all, how certain are you about that?
Can we test this?
Do you think it's worthwhile to have really precise, careful, detailed models of this aspect of the world?
Hm, my background here is just an undergrad degree and a lot of independent reasoning, but I think you're massively undervaluing the whole "different reproductive success victory-conditions cause different adaptations" thing. I don't think it's fair at all to dismiss the entire thing as a Red Pill thing; many of the implications can be pretty feminist!
I don't think it matters that much that Bateman's original research is pretty weak. There's a whole body of research you're waving away there, and a lot of the more recent stuff is much much stronger research...
1You doubt that it would work very well if Alice nags everyone to be more altruistic. I'm curious how confident you are that this doesn't work and whether you'd propose any better techniques that might work better?
For myself, I notice that being nagged to be more altruistic is unpleasant and uncomfortable. So I might be biased to conclude that it doesn't work, because I'm motivated to believe it doesn't work so that I can conveniently conclude that nobody should nag me; so I want to be very careful and explicit in how I reason and consider evidence here. (I...
Word of God, as the creator of both Alice and Bob: Bob really does claim to be an EA, want to belong to EA communities, say he's a utilitarian, claim to be a rationalist, call himself a member of the rationalist community, etc. Alice isn't lying or wrong about any of that. (You can get all "death of the author" and analyse the text as though Bob isn't a rationalist/EA if you really want, but I think that would make for a less productive discussion with other commenters.)
Speaking for myself personally, I'd definitely prefer that people came and said "hey we...
Word of God, as the creator of both Alice and Bob: …
Fair enough, but this is new information, not included in the post. So, all responses prior to you posting this explanatory comment can’t have taken it into account. (Perhaps you might make an addendum to the post, with this clarification? It significantly changes the context of the conversation!)
However, there is then the problem that if we assume what you’ve just added to be true, then the depicted conversation is rather odd. Why isn’t Alice focusing on these claims of Bob’s? After all, they’re the r...
I don't think anyone would dispute that Alice is being extremely rude! Indeed she is deliberately written that way (though I think people aren't reading it quite the way I wrote it because I intended them to be housemates or close friends, so Alice would legitimately know some amount about Bob's goals and values.)
I think a real conversation involving a real Bob would definitely involve lots more thoughtful pauses that gave him time to think. Luckily it's not a real conversation, just a blog post trying to stay within a reasonable word limit. :(
Alice is not...
Alice is, indeed, a fictional character - but clearly some people exist who are extremely ethical. There's people who go around donating 50%, giving kidneys to strangers, volunteering to get diseases in human challenge trials, working on important things rather than their dream career, thinking about altruism in the shower, etc.
Where do you think is the optimal realistic point on the spectrum between Alice and Bob?
Do you think it's definitely true that Bob would be doing it already if he could? Or do you think there exist some people who could but don't wa...
This seems like you understood my intent; I'm glad we communicated! Though I think Bob seeing a therapist is totally an action that Alice would support, if he thinks that's the best test of her ideas - and importantly if he thinks the test genuinely could go either way.
I'm sorry I don't have time to respond to all of this, but I think you might enjoy Money: The Unit Of Caring: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring
(Sorry, not sure how to make neat-looking links on mobile.)
Hmm, this isn't really what I'm trying to get across when I use the phrase "least convenient possible world". I'm not talking about being isekaid into an actually different world; I'm just talking about operating under uncertainty, and isolating cruxes. Alice is suggesting that Bob - this universe's Bob - really might be harmed more by rest-more advice than by work-harder advice, really might find it easier to change himself than he predicts, etc. He doesn't know for certain what's true (ie "which universe he's in") until he tries.
Let's use an easier examp...
Hmm, I don't know how this got started, but once it got started, there's a really obvious mechanism for continuing and reinforcing it; if you're gay and you want to meet other gay people, and you've heard there's gay people at the opera, then now you want to join the opera. Also if you're really homophobic and want to avoid gay people, then you'll avoid the opera, which might then make it safer for gay people.
I could randomly start a rumour that gay people really love aikido, and if I was sufficiently successful at getting everyone to believe it, then mayb...
Hmm, I think I could be persuaded into putting it on the EA Forum, but I'm mildly against it:
- It is literally about rationality, in the sense that it's about the cognitive biases and false justifications and motivated reasoning that cause people to conclude that they don't want to be any more ethical than they currently are; you can apply the point to other ethical systems if you want, like, Bob could just as easily be a religious person justifying why he can't be bothered to do any pilgrimages this year while Alice is a hotshot missionary or somethin
I have enough integrity to not pretend to believe in CDT just so I can take your money, but I will note that I'm pretty sure the linked Aaronson oracle is deterministic, so if you're using the linked one then someone could just ask me to give them a script for a series of keys to press that gets a less-than-50% correct rate from the linked oracle over 100 key presses, and they could test the script. Then they could take your money and split it with me.
Of course, if you're not actually using the linked oracle and secretly you have a more sophisticated oracle which you would use in the actual bet, then you shouldn't be concerned. This isn't free will, this could probably be bruteforced.
I disagree that we're confusing multiple issues; my central point is that these things are deeply related. They form a pattern - a culture - which makes bike theft and rape not comparable in the way the OP wants them to be comparable.
You might not think that 4 through 6 count as 'victim-blaming', but they all contribute to the overall effect on the victim. Whether your advice is helpful or harmful can depend on a lot of factors - including whether a victim is being met with suspicion or doubt, whether a victim feels humiliated, and whether a victim f...
I disagree that we're confusing multiple issues; my central point is that these things are deeply related.
This is what I'm talking about. It's ok to say that these issues are related to each other, but it'll remain useful to retain the ability to discuss and evaluate individual components. Otherwise:
A: "It's ok to offer victims advice on how to reduce their risk."
B: "No because the advice gets packaged with doubt over whether the victim really is a victim."
A: "Ok but I'm not saying we should doubt victim's stories, I'm only talking about advice on how to r...
If people were forced to bet on their beliefs, I think most people would be forced to admit that they do understand this on some level; when you say “try buying this different bike lock” the expected outcome is that the victim is somewhat more likely to go shopping and buy that bike lock, whereas when you say “try wearing less revealing clothing” the expected outcome is that the victim feels crushed and traumatised and stops listening to you.
This analogy is inaccurate.
The analogue of “try wearing less revealing clothing”, in the bike situation, would be...
...Admittedly, I'm not sure the percentage it reports is always accurate; here's a screenshot of it saying 0% while it clearly has correct guesses in the history (and indeed, a >50% record in recent history). I'm not sure if that percentage is possibly reporting something different to what I'm expecting it to track?
I'm surprised you're willing to bet money on Aaronson oracles; I've played around with them a bit and I can generally get them down to only predicting me around 30-40% correctly. (The one in my open browser tab is currently sitting at 37% but I've got it down to 25% before on shorter runs).
I use relatively simple techniques:
- deliberately creating patterns that don't feel random to humans (like long strings of one answer) - I initially did this because I hypothesized that it might have hard-coded in some facts about how humans fail at generating randomness,
If you can come up with some way to test this, then I will bet large-to-me amounts of money that people make up "my thing got stolen" at vastly higher rates than they make up rape. Like, telling your teacher/employer that you were late because your bike was stolen seems like an excuse you can get away with making once per few months. Getting a friend to borrow your bike so you can bum $50 off your parents for a new bike seems like something teenagers regularly attempt - like, I literally saw this sort of scam run by the other kids in high school and discus...
There is a vast difference in how compassionately this advice comes across precisely because bike theft is not something that people engage in very much actual victim-blaming about.
If I have had my bike stolen, I basically expect that people will be sympathetic about it. People will suggest making a police report, while also commiserating with me about the very low likelihood of the thief being caught and punished. Housemates might lend me a bike if I need to go places. If I'm late to class because I had to walk, I expect my professor will say someth...
I feel like we're confusing multiple issues here, so I'll try to break them into discrete pieces:
- What is victim-blaming and why it is bad
- How prevalent victim-blaming is, and whether it varies depending on the offense
- What is the appropriate time to offer advice to a victim of an offense
- How often allegations from a victim are met with suspicion or doubt, and whether it varies depending on the offense
- How much reporting a given offense is discouraged, either formally or informally
- How humiliating being a victim is, and how much that varies depending on the offe
I have never heard anyone claim “oh, so-and-so’s bike wasn’t really stolen, they just made that up for attention” or “you shouldn’t prosecute bike thieves because false bike-theft allegations can really hurt people” or “if you’ve ever had your bike stolen then some people just won’t want to date you anymore” or anything else that would make me scared to tell someone that my bike had been stolen.
Of course you haven’t, because those things don’t happen / aren’t true. Nobody makes up “my bike was stolen” for attention; false bike-theft allegations can’t hu...
I'm not a physics student, but I absolutely feel I should have been able to generate more than one hypothesis here! I have definitely enjoyed watching science videos that talk about really cool ceramics that get used in building spacecraft, which can be glowing red-hot and nevertheless safe to touch because of how non-conductive they are. So it's not like I wasn't aware of the possibility that some materials have weird properties here. It's just that I generated a single hypothesis - the instructor flipped the plate around - and was super-satisfied with be...
....I'm a little mindblown by reading this, honestly, because I read 'Fake Explanations' when I was like eleven years old, and I really felt like it changed the way I thought and was extremely influential on me at that early point in my life, and I kept telling people this story, and also I never thought of this, and now I am strongly negatively updating against my own success at internalising the lessons here.
I guess the lesson from this is that the correct answer isn't "it's really obvious that the instructor flipped the plate around and the studen...
I strongly disagree, and I'm curious why you think this? I have known a number of rationalists who got into SSC/ACX more than LessWrong or rather than LessWrong, and I've found them to generally be extremely sidetracked into constantly debating social justice issues / nerdsniped by interesting politics - often to the point where I would strongly prefer not to attend meetups that are marketed as "Lesswrong + ACX" rather than just "LessWrong", because I don't want to be exposed to that.
I got into LW in high school, and looking back, the most useful thing I got out of LW was "just do stuff".
Humans are pretty bad at predicting, in advance, what is going to work well and what they're going to enjoy or excel at. We need empirical evidence. So just go take that internship, do that volunteering, found that student society, email that academic to ask to discuss their paper, enter that competition, sign up for those extra classes, etc. Have a sense that more is possible, and that you will genuinely be an awesomer person if you are Doing St...
1Overwatch is a hero shooter where every player has a different role and different abilities. As an experiment maybe a year ago, I once asked the best monkey player I knew at the time (4200 elo on a 0-5000 scale) to 1v1 the worst Bastion player I knew (under 1000 elo). In the neutral, the Bastion player consistently won despite the yawning chasm between their ratings. This is because monkey is a tank designed to take space and counter snipers and isolate squishy targets from their healers, and is not a character designed to 1v1 a Bastion. If you are missing...
Changing the number of players is a pretty popular option in Overwatch custom games and content; people love "can six bronze players beat three grandmasters?" videos.
We easily have the option to change many aspects of the game - for instance, we can let the weaker team deal 150% damage or give the stronger team longer cooldowns - but in my experience it isn't popular. People learn split-second gut-level reactions and habits for certain things, and part of being a "good player" is knowing instinctively whether you can tank a certain shot when you peek it or...
You may find this source interesting: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23148
I remember reading that some hunter-gatherers have diet breadth entirely set by the calorie per hour return rate: take the calories and time expended to acquire the food (eg effort to chase prey) against the calorie density of the food to get the caloric return rate, and compare that to the average expected calories per hour of continuing to look for some other food. Humans will include every food in their diet for which making an effort to go after that food h...
I have a nightmare disorder which can absolutely ruin my week, but I wouldn't really call myself "literally brain damaged".