"an easy lever might be a guide to obvious failure modes of supplements and medications"
I desire to see more things like this.. Especially if they're presented not as a list of "gotchas", but as specifics of a general moving-parts model of how naive models/strategies operate in a complex space. Should be lots of base rates being thrown around.
A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting, and phasing treatments out if they don’t justify the mental load
This part has been a historical blocker to me using luck/exploration based medicine. If one...
I wanna offer feedback on the READING.
at "Off the cuff I’d give something like 10%, 3%, 1% for these respectively (conditioned on the previous premises) which multiplies to .003%", the verbal version doubled back to remind what the referents for each percentage we're, then read the sentence again.
that was PERFECT. high value add. made sure the actual point was gotten across, when it would have been very easy to just mentally tune out numerical information.
In TEAM, the therapist takes on a different role: instead of trying to convince the patient to change his or her thoughts, the therapist tries to find reasons that the patient should not change.
I recognize this model! The book "Immunity to Change" goes into great detail on a similar process.
Applying that specifically in a therapeutic context, to clear the path for treatment to really work, is SO BRIILLIANT!
I see it as morally wrong to create a AGI at our current human development
This.. this statement really bugs me. It seems floating. What does it being morally right or wrong cash out to in terms of anticipations? Being morally wrong wouldn't stop it from happening! It wouldn't stop AI from having terrible effects if pursued unsafely!
I wish you luck but don't see an easy entry point. I've been struggling to create one for a while. Reading Rationality A-Z all the way through has historically worked to some degree, but very inefficiently.
scalable decentralized currency/contract/communication systems
Oh? Do say more
Mostly scalable blockchain systems at this point, I have some writing on the problem hosted at gigascaling.net.
THIS. THIS IS THE REASON FOR THE HOLIDAY --
..."Anyways. The reasons I wouldn't expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I'm explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves. First, that I'm constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things. In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, more usual for myself
So... what I'm getting is that prediction markets will be just as annoying but necessary to police for insider trading as the stock market? Alas.
Not exactly. You do want people who have insider knowledge to contribute (say, Lsusr friend, who knows him well and has a better guess if he would post). But you don't want people abusing their influence (rather than knowledge) to buy and then tip things away from what the rest of the market thinks will happen, or trying to make sure something does happen just because they bet on it already.
This... is that experiment?
I also want to know the answer to this question
When you say that consciousness is vague and people look to cues from others for how to interpret it, I think you're onto something very important.
Some parenting books treat that as trivially true for kids. It's a bit the basis of CBT. And yet I have an intuitive sense that its implications are critically under-explored. It feels like a nagging intensity in my perceived environment that i reflexively try to focus my eyes on and rising unease when i can't.
Is that the same or different to your reasoning? When that criticality is communicated, what happens next?
Thank you lightcone team for continuing to make these happen. I expect I owe several of you a free gratitude coffee.
Epistemic Status: groping around at an event idea I hope others are interested in
I don't know how to communicate this yet, but there's a ritual I want to do with friends this summer. The following describes some inspirations and gestures toward the general aesthestic.
uncomfortable squirm
In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.
I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.
but pain is not the unit of effort.
dying for the cause is not a success.
not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person
who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought
In my culture there's a meta-tradition ...
I think you're raising reasonable points, fairly gently. I think the overall issue is important, and was in my mind as I planned and wrote this. I get that, given that this post was high karma and curated, and has at least one comment saying we should scale Vavilov day immediately, it felt important to you to note the pitfalls (even if I already pushed against the universalization). But I don't have a way to respond to this in LW comments that doesn't feel like justifying my personal choices, and I'm not interested in doing that.
Potential alter...
epistemic status: felt sense poetry
Think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind.
We often dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. It's an important goal. It's not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, tied to this pale blue dot. Sol III, Terra, the world that birthed us. And when we do leave, we will take much of it with us. Some of it we will take intentionally, because we're sentimental like that. But some we will take in...
I don't remember reading anything like that. If I had to make a wild guess of where to find that topic I'd assume it was part of the Luminosity sequence.
I read through your proposal, and I don't understand how all your suggestions are covered. Can you run through which of your proposed elements
you see as corresponding to which elements in the current setup?
Polar opposite opinion on the truth buttons.
Agree / Disagree is not a relevant axis of quality on Lesswrong.
True / False is so relevant, when a comment contains explicit or implicit claims about reality to fact check.
I tentatively infer that the use case you're thinking of is some kind of Quick Poll, where someone shares subjective anecdata and others can quickly chime in with whether their anecdata is alike or in contrast of that example. This would be an incredibly valuable tool; I really want to have that. What I don't want is to have that tool in the place of a quality control system.
if i had to redesign the system right now based on these thoughts, I'd go for 3 sections of feedback.
First, reactions: Skepticism, Enthusiasm, Surprise, Empathy, Ugh, Wrath
Second, upvote/downvote.
Third, rubric breakdown. this is collapsed by default, if you voted Strong in either direction then it automatically opens.
*-possible alternative: out of bounds?
Agree it's overwhelming.
Agree it'll get better if limited to relevant contexts and polished up.
Agree the axes are difficult to distinguish from one another. True speech, truth-seeking speech, precisely specified speech, and accurately aimed speech are all distinctly important! buuuut they're strongly correlated so the distinctions are usually only useful to point out on the extreme ends of the quality spectrum, or on very short comments.
There's an axis? reaction? that is not quite muddled or conflict-seeking or missing the point or false, nor does it warra...
I interpreted it as "vibing with this" or "mood". Feeling a moment of connection with another human being through their words, either because it matches your own experience or because they painted a foreign vista vivid enough to inhabit.
I am getting rectangle boxes for both Enthusiasm and Skepticism.
uh, something got lost in translation because I can't make sense of what you're saying
i wish for a modern nomadic tribe
imagine a group that was intelligent, rational enough they could rapidly adjust to new circumstances like (snap) *that*. they carry what they need in with them, wherever they go, and have the science of bootstrapping from the ground up down to an art form.
imagine they had a burning man ethos of 'leave no trace', or even left the place behind them better than it was found. imagine they stealth into a settled community like brownies to turn leather scraps into shoes.
imagine a culture of intentionality: rapid prototyping and testing of norms, thoughtul adoption with an eye to the long term.
i wish. now what?
I love this idea, and I'm glad you shared it
dropping some predictions in my shortform for safekeeping
------------------------------------------
country invades another this year 20%
total covid cases in california < 7.4mil by end 2022 90%
total covid deaths in california < 110,000 by end 2022 93%
https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/
Dow Jones closes year between 17k and 42k 90%
Dow Jones does not exceed 17k and 42k bounds during year 85%
NASDAQ closes year between 8k and 17k 90%
NASDAQ does not exceed 8k and 17k bounds during year 88%
S&P 500 closes year between 3.5k and 6k 90%
S&P 500 does n...
Wow, I really love that this has been updated and appendix'd. It's really nice to see how this has grown with community feedback and gotten polished this from a rough concept.
Creating common knowledge on how 'cultures' of communication can differ seems really valuable for a community focused on cooperatively finding truth.
I like this, in the sense that it's provoking fascinating thoughts and makes me want to talk with the author about it further. As a communication of a particular concept? I'm kinda having a hard time following what the intent is.
I think the vast majority of my altruistic impact is through donations, I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset.
I agree, but I think what you are doing is a fairly noncentral example of "working in advertising". You are helping to add good constraints on a probably-bad process.
this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can't totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
Third funding model: You pay with contributed labor value
Consider how amazon turk employs people to work on small problems for small payments.
Google maps engages users to answer questions and write reviews for places they have been, for free. What if instead, occasional contributions to updating the map was the price for using it?
What if more online resources worked on a torrent-ish model where those accessing it contribute to hosting it for others? Wouldn't that be grand?
Correct. Though the latter depends on what someone means by "never be fixed"; trauma is always going to leave a mark but it does not have to remain debilitating nor defining.
We were forced to 'play outside' for hours most days and even longer on weekends. I was not even allowed to bring a book outside though sometimes I would hide them outside at night and find them the next day.
Oh stars, this gives me flashbacks. Being forced outside was the worst.
Amazingly my mom made fun of her children for being weirdos.
My mom was also a bigger bully than I ever encountered at school or in the neighborhood, figuratively and literally. It looms even larger in my head, because I had to give a damn about what the person in charge of my life t...
also signing Dath Illan's nonverbal language, because why would you only make use of the visual modality when you happen to have access to a pen and writing surface?
Intuitive and non-intuitive findings of systems theory, like what adding a second queue does or increasing the variability of a flow rate or changing the size of a buffer.
Because rationality is not just winning! Its about winning systematically rather than by fluke, about narrowing the diff between reality and your model of it such that the forecasted wins you aim for correspond to actual wins.
Overall agreed that metacognitive is better branding. I like rationality as in-community jargon for the thing that cognition should aim for.
fwiw I don't think rationality has much connotation of agency, except for what it's achieved by dint of association with us.
I don't expect these to go longer than 1.5 hours, though it's possible people want to hang out on the line.
I do kind of see it as being the responsible action, I just do not think this is the same thing as it being the right or even reasonable action.
It's trying to be "responsible" despite not actually having the kind of control over the situation that makes things your responsibility.
Decentralized Networks Thoughts
Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and Dat
Networking can be demonstrated with people as an anology, and it usually works except for how the speeds are magnitudes off and people naturally handle errors more gracefully.
And the way we currently structure internet applications is analogous to, like, a command economy. All the locus of decision exists in one spot, in a server. It may delegate, but it doesn't ever truly *co*-ordinate. And there's no way that's computationally efficient. The internet allows to access a distant computer with our own...
You could try to start your own ring, there's templates for it on that page, or I could put you down to invite in for the second meeting. (provided we're not full up then)
This is what I wanted Jester's Court to be. An iterated kickstarter for trust and competence, of self and of others.
Didn't have words for it.
anatomy of a summer solstice talk. comments?
anatomy of a solstice talk
- Dig your roots deep, and spread your leaves wide
- We sometimes associate summer with passion, with fire and flash. As we celebrate today, I say lean into this. Let's have fun. Let's have passionate joy. Let's dive head-first into the gut sense of living at its best. Not to stoke burning hot coals of determination, just to enjoy it. Take in the warmth and light for its own sake. Life is not just abstractly good and important, it's viscerally so.
Pretty good theme. Have fun, be wild. I co...
Have you considered the possibility that people do not list first-order effects to individuals because huge swaths of the political establishment do not actually care about people they don't know?
The water they swim, the air they breathe: Bringing up how something affects the outgroup's feefees is not "obvious" or "direct", it's bringing up Nth-order civil breakdown effects in the most vague and indirect way possible, with figuring out all the critical details left as an exercise for the listener.
We live in a society; aka we have a tenuous contract to be c...
Have you considered the possibility that people do not list first-order effects to individuals because huge swaths of the political establishment do not actually care about people they don't know?
I think this fails to explain why even when the people talking are directly affected (such as with the UBI example, which would affect everyone) we don’t see as much focus on the direct effects of the policy.
This leads me to believe it could somewhat be the opposite of what you suggested. If I say that UBI would give people money, and so it’s good, people may s...
Someone suggested to me recently that, against all appearances and expectations, the Trump Administration not buying enough mRNA vaccine for everyone right off the bat was actually the right call. We knew other vaccines were on the way which had way less exacting distribution conditions and/or were single-dose.
I suspect that proposition is Off in some important way, like the doses weren't enough even to hold out for a switch out, and am curious what thoughts you all have about it.
That's a possibility, sure, but not an overriding one.
Consider the case that your happy price is $5. It's worth it to you to do for free if your friend wants a cake, as it is a small cost for the sake of a friend. How you balance the costs and benefits of maintaining a relationship is up to you.
Y hates baking, and out of typical-minding expected it to be more like $40 when she asked. She can, at that point, just ask you to do her a personal favor on the scale of $5. How scrupulously you follow up on favours and IOUs is also up to you.
How do politics actually happen? I have so few gears in my model. I don't like trying to figure out the object level of what's going on through layers of other people's interpretations and commentary. I want there to be eyes on the ground collecting what's newsworthy from a Gearsy or EA perspective, and for I might as well give it a try it myself. Ground up, by skimming meeting agendas and possibly video feeds to figure out play by play what powerful people are spending their time on.
Of the US Gov, I want to know
...What Congress is up to -
What the Senat
I'd be interested in doing an exchange of this sort! I'm here. I do tedious data entry work. What kinda somethings are you thinking?
OOF.
Had a similar realization recently. It sucks. I was really lucky¹ to have access to competent e... (read more)