All of RationalElf's Comments + Replies

(Idk why I'm replying to this 2 years later). I forgave him for what I think are pretty normal reasons to forgive someone. A combination (1) of he's been a good friend in many respects over the years and so has a bunch of "credit" and I wanted to find a path to our relationship continuing, (2) nothing like that ever happened again so I believe it was really aberrant and unlucky or he took it really seriously and changed, (3) like I said above it wasn't that harmful to me and seemed less harmful than a lot of stuff a lot of other people do so it seemed like... (read more)

I mean humans with strong AGIs under their control might function as if they don't need sleep, might become immortal, will probably build up superhuman protections from assasination, etc

I'm glad this helped you, and think it's cool you wrote up this recommendation, and I wish people did more of that sort of thing.

I felt very disappointed by this show. It fell into a lot of anime tropes I find cringey and misleading, but worse, I felt like the characters acted very irrationally and uncarefully, and in my opinion aren't good role models of rationality. 

E.g to pick a few early not-very-spoilery points, they don't optimize their first deliberate de-stoning, and even though it's known that when stone people break they die, they choose to ... (read more)

Thank you, this is very interesting and it seems like you did a valuable public service in compiling it

  • The motivations of OpenAI or some other actor to murder a whistleblower are unlikely. The most plausible to me is that they want to send a warning to other potential whistleblowers, but this isn't very compelling

What do you think of the motive that he was counterfactually going to testify in a very damaging way, or that he had very damaging evidecne/data that was deleted? 

My sense is that we do see multi-century (including spanning the Industrial Revolution) persistence of wealth, though I don't trust it much because I don't think it accounts for genetic effects. E.g. here 

Not sure if a single anecdote is worth anything at all, but I am a woman, and I experienced what is legally and culturally considered rape at least twice (arguably 3x), and it really didn't bother me very much (though I think different versions, e.g. more violent ones or one perpetrated by people I looked up to, would have been much more damaging). One of the people who technically raped me (it was a very drunken screwup with, I believe, no malevolent intent) is still a friend of mine. I feel scared about people finding this out about our friendship, mostl... (read more)

-1Nacruno96
I am a bit surprised about one of them still being a friend of yours. Do you in a sense forgive him because I don't know it wasn't too painful or him being not aware of what he was doing? My intuition was kind of the amount of trauma might be about the amount of pain. If it's really painful one can of cause get very traumatised as you also point out, it would have been diferent if it would have been very violent

Hm, I disagree! I think I share some of your skepticism, in that the fact that a very large fraction of survey users with long-term personality changes report that those changes were positive doesn't cause me to be confident that I'd believe they were positive, or that a smarter, wiser version of me and others would believe that they're positive, or that the average member of society would believe they're positive, etc. 

However, "almost useless" seems too strong to me; for me at least, it was still a meaningful update to know that people believed ther... (read more)

>in the case of Krebs and Johansen (2013, 2015), it is ~13% reporting lifetime psychedelic use, while in the ACS readers survey it is ~100%.

Just to be clear to casual readers, this wasn't the whole ACX Readers Survey, I just only looked at the subset that filled out my psychedelic survey and seemed to have actually done psychedelics (i.e. the conclusion "all ACX readers do psychedelics" would be very incorrect). I don't know what fraction of ACX readers have done psychedelics. 

1zehsilva
To avoid such misunderstanding I edited the original comment with "subsample of ACX readers survey considered in this report (...)"

I have those for the people that put them in, but didn't use them. If someone else was keen to do specifical analyses and explained why they'd be interesting, I'd definitely consider asking Scott for permission to share the data or trying to do the analysis myself.