Increase the delay on reward loops with your phone by activating developer settings and setting colorspaces to black and white and setting animation speeds to 2x or 5x. I tried going back to 2x after months with 5x and it felt palpably neurosis inducing.
You can play with this right now and simultaneously dissolve some negative judgements. Think about the function of psychics/fortune tellers in poor communities. What do you think is going on there phenomenologically when you turn off your epistemic rigor goggles? Also try it with prayer. What might you conclude about prayer if you were a detached alien? Confession is a pretty interesting one too. What game theoretic purpose might it be serving in a community of 150 people? I've found these types of exercises pretty valuable. Especially the less condescending I manage to be.
and suffering-focused EAs do less stuff that tends to lead to the destruction of the world.
In support of this, my system 1 reports that if it sees more intelligent people taking S-risk seriously it is less likely to nuke the planet if it gets the chance. (I'm not sure I endorse nuking the planet, just reporting emotional reaction).
X-risk is still plausibly worse in that we need to survive to reach as much of the universe as possible and eliminate suffering in other places.
Edit: Brian talks about this here: https://foundational-research.org/risks-of-astronomical-future-suffering/#Spread_of_wild_animals-2
Related: perverse ontological lock-in. Building things on top of ontological categories tends to cement them since we think we need them to continue getting value from the thing. But if the folk ontology doesn't carve reality at the joints there will be friction present in all the stories/predictions/expectations built up out of those ontological pieces along with an unwillingness to drop the folk ontology on the belief that you will lose all the value of the things you've built on top. One model of the punctuated equilibrium model of psychological development is periodic rebasing operations.
I think values are confusing because they aren't a natural kind. The first decomposition that made sense was 2 axes: stated/revealed and local/global
stated local values are optimized for positional goods, stated global values are optimized for alliance building, revealed local are optimized for basic needs/risk avoidance, revealed global barely exist and when they do are semi-random based on mimesis and other weak signals (humans are not automatically strategic etc.)
Trying to build a coherent picture out of various outputs of 4 semi independent processes d...
Time Braid and The Waves Arisen. Super fun reads, and also seem to put me in agenty mode better even than other rationalist fics. I haven't seen the naruto anime and I got on just fine with both.
As for why my model works this way: heavily influenced by the research on deliberate practice#Deliberate_practice). Essentially, it caused me to see expert performance as the combination of several core traits which are all predicated on perceptual skills. The first is generating the correct chunkings that mirror the causal structure in the domain in the first plac...
Ontology lock in. If you have nice stuff built on top of something you'll demand proof commensurate with the value of those things when someone questions the base layer even if those things built on top could be supported by alternative base layers. S1 is cautious about this, which is reasonable. Our environment is much safer for experimentation than it used to be.
This is why I like Naruto as a rationalist fanfic substrate: perceptual skills are explicitly upstream of action skills in the naruto universe. I think this mirrors the real universe and explains much of the valley of bad self-help. Action skills are pointless if you don't have the cues on when where and why to deploy them.
Another frame on the same concept: don't keep teaching people spells when their mana pool size sucks.
backslash escape special characters. Test Common knowledge)
done by adding the '\' in logic'\') without the quotes (otherwise it disappears)
Big five personality traits is likely the factor analysis most people have heard of. Worth reading the blurb here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis
Many many models can be thought of as folk factor analyses whereby people try to reduce a complex output variable to a human readable model of a few dominant input variables. Why care?
Additive linear models outperform or tie expert performance in the forecasting literature: http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1178&context=marketing_papers
Teaching factor analysis is basically ...
Strongly related to Sarah Constantin's research review on nootropics: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/nootropics/
If drugs work, please investigate the underlying integrity of your life/self care.
Ie: coffee is less like throwing water on the out of control fire that is your sleep schedule and more like putting your fingers in your ears and and facing the other way.
Having spent years thinking about this and having the opportunity to talk with open minded, intelligent, successful people in social groups, extended family etc. I concluded that most explicit discussion of the value of inquiring into values and methods (scope sensitivity and epistemological rigor being two of the major threads of what applied rationality looks like) just works incredibly rarely, and only then if there is strong existing interest.
Taking ideas seriously and trusting your own reasoning methods as a filter is a dangerous, high variance move ...
It goes up at least one important meta level: fraction of the community willing to take on the (potentially high in ambiguous cases) cost of punishing free riders has threshold effects IIRC that determine which attractor you sort in to. Part of my S1 sense that EA will not be able to accomplish much good on an absolute scale (even if much good is done at the margin) is that it does not cross this threshold.
I agree with overcoming the curiosity stopper very strongly. I think the generalized form of this is an extremely important primitive action type to have. The decomposition hammer is like brainstorming, it seems to get stronger the more you habitually use it.
I disagree with the 'problem solving frame' which I think is the key sticking point. Lots of branches of psychotherapy and schools of buddhism seem to have independently reinvented the idea that you are not going to get anywhere on your problem until you acknowledge the ways it is helping you get your needs met.
I'd recommend the second Harris podcast instead. They got bogged down on a side point in the first one as they mention. https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/meaning-and-chaos
This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that you have tacit beliefs installed by the path dependent process that is hugely religion influenced. It's useful to know about this. E.g. Nietzsche has useful insights for people who consider themselves non-christian but are still running the same OS. Etc.
Consider the difference between the frame of expected value/probability theory and the frame of bounded optimality/error minimization. Under the second frame the question becomes "how can I manipulate my environment such that I wind up in close proximity to the errors that I have a comparative advantage in spotting?"
After digesting for a few days my intuitive response is to add the handle 'virtue fatigue' to this concept cluster. Virtues are a means by which the commons are policed. When you have runaway virtue signaling this is essentially defecting against the commons. You get what you want from scrupulous people who take public virtues seriously in the short term, but create virtue fatigue in the long run as more and more gets piled on to this working behavioral modification channel. Eventually the channel fails. This might turn ugly.
Camaraderie is death spiral among anxious social group because a lot of people loudly object to such things. OMG you did not get their consent becomes an issue among people who are bad at exuding and reading non verbal signals about how welcome such things are.
Instead of submission and dominance I think an entirely different frame is helpful. Play fighting helps animals build the procedural knowledge for real fighting. In the same way that you would run or go to the gym with friends you might engage in playful status jostling with your friends so that when someone tries to actually knock your status down a peg it isn't a totally new reference class of experience and you just fire right back like you might with friends.
If durability is hard for a consumer to evaluate, then the manufacturer will push costs there in order to devote more optimization power to the dimensions that consumers actually evaluate. Manufacturers that don't do this will be left behind for two reasons. 1. They will appear worse in terms of the features that are visible and 2. Their competitors will have larger advertising budgets.
The general principle is similar to the idea of an Aether variable. Costs get pushed into harder to evaluate dimensions. The products available in the market are only 'desig...
Common limiting beliefs can be seen as particularly strong attractors along certain dimensions of mindspace that coping mechanisms use to winnow the affordance space down to something manageable without too much cognitive overhead. Regularities in behaviors that don't serve a direct purpose could also be seen as spandrels from our training data clustering things that don't necessarily map directly to causality. Ie you can get animals to do all sorts of wacky things with clicker training which then persist even if you start only rewarding a subset of the actions if the animal has no obvious way of unbundling the actions.
I've looked into housing prices for multi family complexes and they scale sublinearly with number of bedrooms. The biggest obstacle is that people aren't really willing to invest significant fractions of their income in them currently (because you don't want to have to gather 8 investors for an 8 unit, chaos/life happens). Ideally something like 3 people/couples who think they are relatively stable would take on responsibility for an 8 unit with a significant fraction of their income. This is a risk, but one of the top regrets of old people is becoming so...
Yeah, when I looked into cohousing this is what I concluded too. My husband and I ended up buying a house with 6 bedrooms and occupying two of them (then adding two more family members and building two more bedrooms.) None of our housemates would have bought in because they're not sure how long-term they want to be here, but they're happy to be renters and we're happy to own the building.
To us it's important that the arrangement be flexible; rather than a single big house we bought a house that had been divided into two apartments, so if we ever want to st...
Not all noble excuses are bad.
I think excuses in general are bad. They reinforce the narrative fallacy. All excuses collapse to I didn't care enough about the thing to take into account the factors affecting it. Including variance in factors you couldn't control. People don't like this frame because it makes them a lot more responsible for what happens to them. Note this should be deployed exclusively internally and not as an excuse to have less empathy for others. Everyone is doing the best they can. Note also that there is a distinction between respon...
This is excellent! Can this reasoning be improved by attempting to map the overlaps between x-risks more explicitly? The closest I can think of is some of turchin's work.