Aphyer was discussing "working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them", not specifically "poor" people. My experience of people working such hours, even on a low wage, is that they are proud of their work ethic and their ability to provide and that because of their hard work they have nice things and a path to retirement. They don't consider themselves poor - they are working hard precisely to not be poor. As a concrete example, people in the armed forces have to smile and bear it when their bosses send them into war zones, never mind lower level abuse like being yelled at and worked past the point of exhaustion and following deliberately stupid orders.
That said, your question prompted me to get some statistics regarding the consumption patterns of low income households. I found the US BLS expenditure by income decile, and looked at the lowest decile.
This is emphatically not the same thing as either "poor" or "working 60-hour weeks". People in this decile are not employed for 60hrs/week, because 60hrs/week for 40 weeks at federal minimum wage is $17,400 and puts someone in the second decile for income. Most of these people are retired or unemployed and spending down savings, which is why mean expenditure is $31,000/year vs mean income of $10,000/year. I welcome better data, I could not find it.
Those caveats aside, the bottom decile spent, on average (mean):
We're looking at ~10% spending on these categories. From experience and reading I expect some fraction of spending in other categories to be "luxury" in the sense of not being strictly required, perhaps ~10%. This is in no way a criticism. Small luxuries are cheap and worth it. Few people would agree to work ~20% fewer hours if it meant living in abject poverty.
I'm curious what answer you would give to your own questions.
Update: I'm now familiar with the term "demand avoidance". One recommendation for caregivers is "declarative language". On LessWrong we might call it "guess culture" or perhaps "tell culture". Aesthetically I dislike it, but it works for this child (in combination with other things, including your good advice of persuasion and positive reinforcement).
Oh, I remember and liked that comment! But I didn't remember your username. I have a bit more information about that now, but I'll write it there.
From the model in this article, I think the way this should work in the high-willpower case is that your planner gets credit aka willpower for accurate short-term predictions and that gives it credit for long-term predictions like "if I get good grades then I will get into a good college and then I will get a good job and then I will get status, power, sex, children, etc".
In your case it sounds like your planner was predicting "if I don't get good grades then I will be homeless" and this prediction was wrong, because your parents supported you. Also it was predicting "if I get a good job then it will be horrifying", which isn't true for most people. Perhaps it was mis-calibrated and overly prone to predicting doom? You mention depression in the linked comment. From the model in this article, someone's visceral processes will respond to a mis-calibrated planner by reducing its influence aka willpower.
I don't mean to pry. The broader point is that improving the planner should increase willpower, with some lag while the planner gets credit for its improved plans. The details of how to do that will be different for each person.
What should happen is that you occasionally fail to do homework and instead play video games. Then there are worse negative consequences as predicted. And then your verbal planner gets more credit and so you have more willpower.
Our conscious thought processes are all the ones we are conscious of. Some of them are verbal, in words, eg thinking about what you want to say before saying it. Some of them are nonverbal, like a conscious awareness of guilt.
Most people have some form of inner monologue, aka self-talk, but not all. It sounds like you may be one of those with limited or no self-talk. Whereas I might think, in words, "I should get up or I'll be late for work", perhaps you experience a rising sense of guilt.
To benefit from this article you'll need to translate it to fit your brain patterns.
It's looking like the values of humans are far, far simpler than a lot of evopsych literature and Yudkowsky.
I've missed this. Any particular link to get to me started reading about this update? Shard theory seems to imply complex values in individual humans. Though certainly less fragile than Yudkowsky proposed.
But I don't think these came about through training on synthetic thought-annotated texts.
I find this hypothetical about neural fireplaces curious, because the ambiguity exists in real fireplaces, speculative fiction is not needed. Please excuse any inaccuracies in this brief history of fireplaces:
The original fireplaces produced both heat and a decorative flame effect. With each new type of invention there was a question of what to do with our previous terms. We've ended up with "heaters" to refer to things that heat a room and "fireplace" to refer to things that have a decorative flame effect. Both of these things are slightly fuzzy natural categories in the sense of this post.
Except... maybe we should say that "decorative" is a privative adjective and so a "decorative fireplace" isn't really a fireplace? For the sake of the thought experiment, let's say that practical rural folk place a higher value on having a secondary heat source because it takes longer to restore electricity after a storm. Meanwhile snobby urbanites place a higher value on decorative flame effects because they value gaining status through conspicuous consumption.
I see that someone could say "well, it's not a real fireplace, is it?" in order to signal that they share the values of practical rural folks. If they're actually a snobby urbanite politician and they don't actually have those practical rural values then they are being deceptive. That would be a deception about values, not about heat sources.
If a practical rural person says "well, it's not a real fireplace, is it?", then that could indeed be a true signal of their values. But my guess is the more restrictive meaning of fireplace came first. The causal diagram is something like:
Not:
Because until practical rural folks have settled on a common meaning of "fireplace", they can't reliably use that meaning to signal their values to each other or to outsiders.
Except... maybe if it got caught up in the modern culture war there could be a flood of fireplace-related memes and then everyone would have very strong opinions about the best definition of "fireplace" a few months later for no real reason? Wow, that sure would suck for the CEO of Decorative Fireplaces Inc.
I saw the the EA Forum's policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don't need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:
You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.
I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It's important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.
It's because of that goal that I'm encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let's avoid that.
Should non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism, go under "Deist/Pantheist/etc" or "Atheist but spiritual"?
Some of the probability questions are awkward given the recent argument that (raw) probabilities are cursed and given that P("god") is higher in simulations and there is an explicit P(simulation). I weighted the probabilities by leverage in an unprincipled way.
It would be nice to have an "undefined" answer for some probability questions, eg the P(Cryonics) and P(Anti-Agathics) questions mostly gave me a divide-by-zero exception. I suppose the people who believe in epsilon probabilities have to suck it up as well. But there was an N/A exception given for the singularity, so maybe that could be a general note.