All of jenn's Comments + Replies

I put four questions into the survey that formed a loop.

what omg this is the coolest thing ever. kudos!

...and of course the comfiest things of all are tri blend t shirts, which contain a mix of both polyester and rayon. you can multi track drift poisons!

While true, bamboo rayon also isn't the best for human health or the environment, so it really is a pick your poison kind of deal. Here's a short write up from Patagonia about why they don't use it in their products, and of course a lot of Patagonia's things are polyester or polyester blends. (The terms viscose and rayon are generally interchangeable.)

It doesn't seem obvious to me which is worse between wearing polyester and bamboo rayon, health wise, but I do personally find rayon much more comfy.

1. you'll know if you actually clicked through to the reading 😏
2. no, i meant this metaphorically! srinivasan is fairly outgroup, so it's interesting to see her engage with hanson's tweets.

this is lovely and so sweet <3

I wrote up my much less seriously considered tests at https://jenn.site/2024/12/llm-creativity/ in part due to this post.

LLMs for creative work seems to be an area that you're poking at a lot these days and I always enjoy seeing what you get up to with it :]

Waterloo, Ontario
December 14th, 6:00pm.
Event link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/LBZGbJRnsuqGP7Mnh/waterloo-solstice-2024

i think i agree that this does justified harm, but maybe for some subgroups or communities the justified harm is worth the benefits of such an event? our local rationality community has developed to a point where i think people are comfortable talking about "controversial" statements with their real faces on because the vibes are one where any attempt at cancellation instead of dialogue will be met with eyerolls and social exclusion but like, you know, it took a pretty long time and sustained effort for us to get here. (and maybe im wrong and there are peo... (read more)

I have a fun crowd where half the people who showed up already read the entire thing in their own time as it came out, that was helpful :p

I'm interested if you're still adding folks. I run local rationality meetups, this seems like a potentially interesting way to find readings/topics for meetups (e.g. "find me three readings with three different angles on applied rationality", "what could be some good readings to juxtapose with burdens by scott alexander", etc.)

happened to run this two days in a row, first at my regular meetup and then at a normal board games night. i was expecting it to be a pretty serious workshop exercise for some reason, but it turned out to be very fun!

in the rat meetup people were very aware about the 1/3 chance that the group was trying to deceive them. actually, at some point one person was like "i know you're trying to help me, but i'm going to be dumb and dissent anyways", and then did so.

at the board game night most people seemed to feel like it was very rude to bring collusion up as a... (read more)

how would you go about doing that?

thanks for the suggestions! and huh, I did not know this about textbooks, I think that makes it more viable as a partitioned book club feature.

That's it! Thank you.

I'm trying to remember the name of a blog. The only things I remember about it is that it's at least a tiny bit linked to this community, and that there is some sort of automatic decaying endorsement feature. Like, there was a subheading indicating the likely percentage of claims the author no longer endorses based on the age of the post. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

thanks for writing this! can you say a little bit more about the process of writing notes on a scribe? I've been interested in getting one, but my understanding is that e-ink displays are good for mostly static displays, and writing notes on it requires it to update in real-time and will drain the battery fairly quickly? my own e-reader is from like, 2018, so idk if there's been significant updates. how often do you need to charge them when you're using them?

your points about taking the time to think through problems and how you can do this across many contexts is definitely what i was going for subtextually. so, thanks for ruining all of my delicate subtlety, adam :p

standing on others' shoulders is definitely a reasonable play as well, although this is not something that works great for me as a Canadian - international shipping is expensive and domestic supply of any recommended product isn't guaranteed.

counterpoint: I run a weekly meetup in a mid-size Canadian city and I think it's going swimmingly. It is not trivial to provide value but it is also not insurmountably difficult: I got funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund to buy a day off me per week for running meetups and content planning, and that's enough for me to create programming that people really like, in addition to occasional larger events like day trips and cottage weekends. 8-12 people show up to standard meetups, I'd say around 70% are regulars who show up ~weekly and then you have a long... (read more)

heh, thanks, I was going to make a joke about memorizing the top 10 astrology signs but then I didn't think it was funny enough to actually complete

leaving out obvious things like religious garb/religious symbols in jewlery, engagement rings/wedding bands, various pride flag colours and meanings etc:

• semicolon tattoos: indicates that someone is struggling with or has overcome severe mental health challenges such as suicidal depression. You see them fairly often if you look for them. i've heard that butterflies and a few other tattoos mean similar things, but you'll run into false positives with any more generic tattoos.
• claddagh rings: learned about this while jewelry shopping recently; it's a ring that

Thanks for writing this piece; I think your argument is an interesting one.

One observation I've made is that MIRI, despite its first-mover advantage in AI safety, no longer leads the conversation in a substantial way. I do attribute this somewhat to their lack of significant publications in the AI field since the mid-2010s, and their diminished reputation within the field itself. I feel like this serves as one data point that supports your claim.

I feel like you've done a good job laying out potential failure modes of the current strategy, but it's not a sl... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up! We tried this out in our group today and it went pretty well :-)

Detailed feedback:

Because our venue didn't have internet I ended up designing and printing out question sheets for us to use (google docs link). Being able to compare so many responses easily, we were able to partner up first and find disagreements second, which I think was overall a better experience for complete beginners. The takes that you were most polarized on with any random person weren't actually that likely to be the ones that you feel the most strongly ab... (read more)

The question is rather, what qualities do EAs want themselves and the EA movement to have a reputation for?

Yes, I think this is a pretty central question. To cross the streams a little, I did talk about this a bit more in the EA Forums comments section: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oTr4ExwpvhjrSgFi/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-hours-in-non-ea?commentId=KNCg8LHn7sPpQPcR2

I get a sense that the org is probably between 15 and 50 years old

Yep, close to the top end of that.

It's probably been through a bunch of CEOs, or whatever equivalent it has, in that time. Those CEOs probably weren't selected on the basis of "who will pick the best successor to themselves". Why has no one decided "we can help people better like this, even if that means breaking some (implicit?) promises we've made" and then oops, no one really trusts them any more?

That's a really great observation. Samaritans has chosen to elide this problem simply by havi... (read more)

[reputation and popularity] probably have overlapping causes and effects, but they're not the same.

I'm inclined to think that this is a distinction without a difference, but I'm open to having my mind changed on this. Can you expand on this point further? I'm struggling to model what an organization that has a good reputation but is unpopular, or vice versa, might look like.

If EA as a whole is unpopular, that's also going to cause problems for well-reputed EA orgs.

Yes, I think that's the important part, even though you're right that we can't do much about individual orgs choosing to associate itself with EA branding.

I share your sense that EAs should be thinking about reputation a lot more. A lot of the current thinking has also been very reactive/defensive, and I think that's due both to external factors and to the fact that the community doesn't realize how valuable an actually good reputation can be - thought Nathan is right that it's not literally priceless. Still, I'd love to see the discourse develop in a more proactive position.

Thanks for your super thought out response! I agree with all of it, especially the final paragraph about making EA more human-compatible. Also, I really love this passage:

We can absolutely continue our borg-like utilitarianism and coldhearted cost-benefit analysis while projecting hospitality, building reputation, conserving slack, and promoting inter-institutional cooperation!

Yes. You get me :')

I don't think the answer is super mysterious; a lot of people are in the field for the fuzzies and it weirds them out that there's some weirdos that seem to be in the field, but missing "heart".

It is definitely a serious problem because it gates a lot of resources that could otherwise come to EA, but I think this might be a case where the cure could be worse than the disease if we're not careful - how much funding needs to be dangled before you're willing to risk EA's assimilation into the current nonprofit industrial complex?

The meeting rooms are in the basement! If you come in through the main entrance, do a U turn to the left of the vestibule and go down the stairs. It'll be the first door to your right

Sort of related, everything studies wrote this essay in 2017 and now "wamb" is a term that my friends and I use all the time.

https://everythingstudies.com/2017/11/07/the-nerd-as-the-norm/

i'm a tag wrangler for the archiveofourown, so if you're interested in learning more about human-assisted organizational structures, feel free to slide into my dms (although I might take a while to respond).

here's an explainer put out by wired on what i and other volunteers do: https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/

i don't think it's a stretch to say that ao3 has the best tagging system on the internet from a user perspective, but you don't get a system that good unless y... (read more)

Instrumentally, upgrading your class seems like a powerful intervention, so it is really surprising when someone allegedly trying to "optimize their life" is selectively ignorant about this. Moving to a higher class would probably have more impact that all meditation and modafinil combined.

I think it depends on what exactly you're optimizing your life for. Generally, being surrounded by people who are not in your class is very unpleasant, so you find the class that you belong to and settle in there.

Isusr mentioned previously, for example, that intellect

So this is a write-up of discussion points brought up at a meetup, it's not intended to be a comprehensive overview about every single thing about social class.

That being said, we did go into Marxist theory a little, but mostly to talk about how it's now pretty common to be wealthy without owning any productive capital, whether or not actors and athletes can be said to own any productive capital, and the new kerfuffle surrounding California's new bill to allow college athletes to earn an income.