Paranoia can itself constitute being fucked over by an agent that can induce it while not being weakened by it, a la cults encouraging their members to broadly distrust the world leaving the cult as the only trusted source of information, or political players inciting purges that'll fall on their enemies.

Our tastes and desires actually change, as we learn about things like "How safe is it to eat raw pork in Germany?", and "How much sugar is good for my body right now?". That's why you can't tempt me with ice cream right now.

This is important. Food preferences have a cognitive component, they're not just stimulus-response, and the usual way I see evolved preferences talked about doesn't seem to recognize this nearly enough. (This is tangential to the original point about alignment failure — which just requires that preferences be godshatter-like enough, which it seems obvious that they are — but, like you say, matters for understanding ourselves.)

You can pay $50 to get access to the unconference

Link for this / the screenshotted page appears to be waypoint.lighthaven.space/solstice-season .

The Partiful link in the footnote links to Eventbrite.

none of this means Sam Altman shouldn’t be welcome at Lighthaven, and Holly clarifies that even she agrees on this

That is not my reading of the linked tweet (which just agrees that Lighthaven wasn't "dazzled"), and the opposite is my reading of this tweet and its replies.

it's not the kind of thing that is sated by BDSM.

I'm not sure this is true.

My model of the psychology of BDSM has a lot of overlap with Richard's, but I think there are other dynamics that are probably as important as 'renouncing antisocial desires' — in particular, something like 'blocks to perceiving aspects of vanilla sex/sexuality' (which can contribute to a desire for kink as nearest-unblocked-strategy). It makes sense to me that disembodiment could be correlated with such blocks.

I can also imagine other plausible-to-me ways that repression of embodiment (and by extension sexuality, but not because it's seen as antisocial) could contribute to BDSM-orientation, e.g. less integration of sexuality & more influence by developmental [not exactly noise, but things that would be less influential with more consciousness].

Every protein, including collagen, is broken down in the stomach into component amino acids. And that's why collagen supplements are a scam

I was curious about this, and to my surprise found a couple papers claiming that collagen supplements are incompletely broken down and peptides from them enter the blood and even have effects on the skin. I have no idea if those papers are actually good or if collagen supplements are real, but it's some indication that 'proteins are completely broken down into amino acids' is an oversimplification.

(And if it is an oversimplification, there's a takeaway like, yes rationalists should learn some science, but should also sometimes double-check before dismissing things based on their understanding.)

((though there are other issues with that passage, like collagen isn't essential or in any sense a "vitamin", and a vegan diet will contain zero of it, not 'technically enough if you eat lots of [something]'))

(ETA: also 'every protein is completely broken down' being the whole story is in some tension with food-protein allergies being a thing, and inconsistent with prion diseases being transmitted by food)

It could be incapacitation. Incapacitation and deterrence are both "affecting the other's behavior" in a sense, but the examples in the OP suggest you mean deterrence. (Meanwhile, PeteG's sibling comment seems to only be considering 'affecting behavior' to mean incapacitation.)

(... maybe you're reserving "punishment" to mean only deterrence and so saying, if A punishes B by killing them that's by definition done to affect B's behavior? I don't understand what's going on in this thread.)

The people of Omelas also can't take their own happiness seriously without the suffering child:

Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

The story emphasizes the avoidance of guilt:

One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. ... To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

My reading of this: The inhabitants need to avoid guilt, need to justify torturing the child to themselves and each other; and, while torturing the child doesn't materially do anything, to stop would be to admit that it was never necessary, which would invite guilt. It's a kind of terrible punishment-of-nonpunishers equilibrium.

The ones who walk away are the ones who recognize all of this and are no longer willing to participate in the collective illusion (hence, alone).

Importantly (though, I think, consistently with both this and the standard reading), The Wind's Twelve Quarters introduces "The Day Before the Revolution", a story about an anarchist revolutionary in the same world as The Dispossessed, with "This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas."

I like this interpretation, but 'criticism of [something like zero-sum] bias rationalized as utilitarianism' ≠ 'criticism of utilitarianism'.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   This feels really important to me, in a way that's much less like 'the good name of utilitarianism must be defended' than like 'zero-sum bias is a sneaky evil bastard, don't ever let it get away with hiding behind other names'.