Haven't read the entire post, but my thoughts on seeing the first image: Pretty sure this is priced into Anthropic / Redwood / OpenAI cluster of strategies where you use an aligned boxed (or 'mostly aligned) generative LLM-style AGI to help you figure out what to do next.

e/acc is not a coherent philosophy and treating it as one means you are fighting shadows.

Landian accelerationism at least is somewhat coherent. "e/acc" is a bundle of memes that support the self-interest of the people supporting and propagating it, both financially (VC money, dreams of making it big) and socially (the non-Beff e/acc vibe is one of optimism and hope and to do things -- to engage with the object level -- instead of just trying to steer social reality). A more charitable interpretation is that the philosophical roots of "e/acc" are founded upon a frustration with how bad things are, and a desire to improve things by yourself. This is a sentiment I share and empathize with.

I find the term "techno-optimism" to be a more accurate description of the latter, and perhaps "Beff Jezos philosophy" a more accurate description of what you have in your mind. And "e/acc" to mainly describe the community and its coordinated movements at steering the world towards outcomes that the people within the community perceive as benefiting them.

I use GreaterWrong as my front-end to interface with LessWrong, AlignmentForum, and the EA Forum. It is significantly less distracting and also doesn't make my ~decade old laptop scream in agony when multiple LW tabs are open on my browser.

The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation.

Yes, I believe that one can learn to entirely stop even considering certain potential actions as actions available to us. I don't really have a systematic solution for this right now aside from some form of Noticing practice (I believe a more refined version of this practice is called Naturalism but I don't have much experience with this form of practice).

What do you think antidepressants would be useful for?

In my experience I've gone months through a depressive episode while remaining externally functional and convincing myself (and the people around me) that I'm not going through a depressive episode. Another thing I've noticed is that with medication (whether anxiolytics, antidepressants or ADHD medication), I regularly underestimate the level at which I was 'blocked' by some mental issue that, after taking the medication, would not exist, and I would only realize it previously existed due to the (positive) changes in my behavior and cognition.

Essentially, I'm positing that you may be in a similar situation.

Have you considered antidepressants? I recommend trying them out to see if they help. In my experience, antidepressants can have non-trivial positive effects that can be hard-to-put-into-words, except you can notice the shift in how you think and behave and relate to things, and this shift is one that you might find beneficial.

I also think that slowing down and taking care of yourself can be good -- it can help build a generalized skill of noticing the things you didn't notice before that led to the breaking point you describe.

Here's an anecdote that might be interesting to you: There's a core mental shift I made over the past few months that I haven't tried to elicit and describe to others until now, but in essence it involves a sort of understanding that the sort of self-sacrifice that usually is involved in working as hard as possible leads to globally unwanted outcomes, not just locally unwanted outcomes. (Of course, we can talk about hypothetical isolated thought experiments and my feelings might change, but I'm talking about a holistic relating to the world here.)

Here's one argument for this, although I don't think this captures the entire source of my feelings about this: When parts of someone is in conflict, and they regularly are rejecting a part of them that wants something (creature comforts) to privilege the desires of another part of them that wants another thing (work more), I expect that their effectiveness in navigating and affecting reality is lowered in comparison to one where they take the time to integrate the desires and beliefs of the parts of them that are in conflict. In extreme circumstances, it makes sense for someone to 'override' other parts (which is how I model the flight-fight-fawn-freeze response, for example), but this seems unsustainable and potentially detrimental when it comes to navigating a reality where sense-making is extremely important.

This is a very interesting paper, thanks.

What was the requirement? Seems like this was a deliberate effect instead of a side effect.

which I know you object to

Buck, could you (or habryka) elaborate on this? What does Buck call the set of things that ARC theory and METR (formerly known as ARC evals) does, "AI control research"?

My understanding is that while Redwood clearly does control research, METR evals seem more of an attempt to demonstrate dangerous capabilities than help with control. I haven't wrapped my head around ARC's research philosophy and output to confidently state anything.

If you haven't read CEV, I strongly recommend doing so. It resolved some of my confusions about utopia that were unresolved even after reading the Fun Theory sequence.

Specifically, I had an aversion to the idea of being in a utopia because "what's the point, you'll have everything you want". The concrete pictures that Eliezer gestures at in the CEV document do engage with this confusion, and gesture at the idea that we can have a utopia where the AI does not simply make things easy for us, but perhaps just puts guardrails onto our reality, such that we don't die, for example, but we do have the option to struggle to do things by ourselves.

Yes, the Fun Theory sequence tries to communicate this point, but it didn't make sense to me until I could conceive of an ASI singleton that could actually simply not help us.