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All of sarahconstantin's Comments + Replies

Book Review: Affective Neuroscience
sarahconstantin40

This was the author's claim -- thanks for the counter-evidence!

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 02/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-27-2025

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin2-2

links 2/25/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-25-2025

 

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2Viliam
It seems like many people propose "generalization from their own example" as a model for the entire humanity. And it can be quite annoying when people around you agree on a model that doesn't fit you at all... and when you point it out, they dismiss it by saying that you are in a denial. Because they have examined their own minds deeply, and found out that it was true... yeah, possibly so, but that doesn't necessarily make it true about the others. * everyone likes whatever popular people around them like -- no I don't * if we legalize gay sex, everyone will want gay sex and families will fall apart -- no I don't feel tempted at all * people are only charitable to other people if they expect them to reciprocate -- no I often don't expect that ...probably many other examples like that.
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/21/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-21-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin22

links 02/19/2025

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

links 2/17/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-17-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 02/14/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-14-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

links 02/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-13-2025

 

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1MichaelDickens
Also, market movements are hard to detect. How much would Trump violating a court order decrease the total (time-discounted) future value of the US economy? Probably less than 5%? And what is the probability that he violates a court order? Maybe 40%? So the market should move <2%, and evidence about this potential event so far has come in slowly instead of at a single dramatic moment so this <2% drop could have been spread over multiple weeks.
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 2/4/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/02-04-2025

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin*20

links 02/03/25:

  • Jasmine Sun on the Tech Right
    • https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right
    • https://jasmi.news/p/arjun-ramani
    • I like this. she's not a theorizer! she's just Some Guy, actually expressing her thoughts on current events. do I agree with everything she says? maybe not.
    • But it's normal-ass blogging rather than inhibited silence or sloppy thoughts packaged as a Grand Narrative, and I think that's healthy. we need normal-ass blogging.
      • Scott Alexander is a normal-ass blogger who kept up a regular schedule and has a gift for puns and a fairly high appetite for books a
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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin50

links 1/31/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-31-2025

 

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4Mitchell_Porter
Kind of true, although the core of it is a system of 6 or 7 chakras which the author acknowledges (way down in the comments) was dominant in India "by 1500".  This made me curious about the credentials of Transcendental Meditation, the system espoused by David Lynch (RIP) and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Turns out their guru was a student of the head of one of the four big Vedic monasteries founded over 1000 years ago by the Kant of Hinduism (that's just my name for him), Adi Shankara. So at least in this case, there are no troubling Russian or British intermediaries. :-)  
What's Behind the SynBio Bust?
sarahconstantin20

there are lots of smaller, newer companies with varied business models, mostly "too early to tell" for sure if they have the potential to get huge, but I expect in principle many of them should be viable.

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin53

links 1/30/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-30-2025

 

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gwern2115

then I think it is also very questionable whether the AI that wins wars is the most "advanced" AI. / People like Dario whose bread-and-butter is model performance invariably over-index on model performance, especially on benchmarks. But practical value comes from things besides the model; what tasks you use it for and how effective you are at deploying it.

Dario is about the last AI CEO you should be making this criticism of. Claude has been notable for a while for the model which somehow winds up being the most useful and having the best 'vibes', even w... (read more)

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 01/29/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-29-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 01/27/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-27-2025

 

  • https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/where-the-wild-things-arent Agnes Callard is strange and unsettling here. I wonder what this is "really" about.
    • "Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other. But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experien
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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/24/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-24-2025

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

links 01/23/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-23-2025

 

  • https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/invitations  like so many visions, whether i'd actually like this or not depends on execution. AI-powered smart devices? no thank you. Interpretive "power tools" with lots of configurable options, that allow me to do a lot of media analysis and view embedding coordinates? i'd like that. AI tools to interface with bureaucracies, or to assemble a media diet based on custom preferences, or to resolve disputes, or to provide traditional govern
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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin60

links 1/21/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-21-2025

 

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4Viliam
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It's like people don't realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy "just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else". Here is what sometimes happens instead: * you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it's good and that the people who say it's bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead; * it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours; * it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot); * the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you. There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That's basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/17/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-17-2025

 

  • https://davekasten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-essay-meta Dave Kasten, known Washington Insider and Dangerous Professional, says that the way to increase the chance your ideas make it into policy is to write essays online.
    • interestingly I'm reading this just as I'm hearing other people discuss how fruitless it is to write publicly, because nobody will understand you and take action based on your words. I think it probably depends how you write and what concepts you're trying to g
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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/15/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-15-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

possibly-intrusive question: are you Russian? 

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2Viliam
haha no, Slovak (an interesting hypothesis though)
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/13/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-13-2025

  • https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-skyscrapers-became-glass-boxes
    • plain glass box skyscrapers were, in fact, more cost-effective for developers. it's not all about architectural tastes. architects in real life are very far from all-powerful.
      • in fact, I really think people should stop writing books/movies/etc about auteur architects; it only encourages more young people to go into architecture and become unemployed. I'm looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola
  • https://www.betonit.ai/
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1Viliam
Well, in context of dating (or OkCupid), I guess the idea is that sex is supposed to happen, sooner or later. And if there is no "lust at first sight", I guess that means swipe left. (I am not sure; I don't use dating apps.)
4Viliam
This is what seems to generally happen in post-communist countries, the difference is probably only in degree. You have a secret police, which is an organization that exists for decades and is full of amoral people cooperating to keep a rule over the country. Then the regime is over, and... Do you kill those people? Nope. Do you at least put them on some kind of blacklist, saying "these people should never be allowed to get into any position of power"? Aaah... there were some feeble attempts, but generally no. Well, guess what happens next. Many of those people get into the new positions of power (it's not like their skills are useless now, so they can e.g. join the non-secret police), and they know they have a network of former colleagues they can trust, who are also seeking positions of power. Together they can take over some institutions, the only question is which ones and how completely. In worst case, even large parts of the old institutions remain, only rebranded.
The AI Timelines Scam
sarahconstantin579

in retrospect, 6 years later:

wow, I was way too bearish about the "mundane" economic/practical impact of AI.

 "AI boosters", whatever their incentives, were straightforwardly directionally correct in 2019 that AI was drastically "underrated" and had tons of room to grow. Maybe "AGI" was the wrong way of describing it. Certainly, some people seem to be in an awful hurry to round down human capacities for thought to things machines can already do, and they make bad arguments along the way. But at the crudest level, yeah, "AI is more important than you th... (read more)

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8jessicata
I would totally agree they were directionally correct, I under-estimated AI progress. I think Paul Christiano got it about right. I'm not sure I agree about the use of hyperbolic words being "correct" here; surely, "hyperbolic" contradicts the straightforward meaning of "correct". Partially the state I was in around 2017 was, there are lots of people around me saying "AGI in 20 years", by which they mean a thing that shortly after FOOMs and eats the sun or something, and I thought this was wrong and a strange set of belief updates (which was not adequately justified, and where some discussions were suppressed because "maybe it shortens timelines"). And I stand by "no FOOM by 2037". The people I know these days who seem most thoughtful about the AI that's around and where it might go ("LLM whisperer" / cyborgism cluster) tend to think "AGI already, or soon" plus "no FOOM, at least for a long time". I think there is a bunch of semantic confusion around "AGI" that makes people's beliefs less clear, with "AGI is what makes us $100 billion" as a hilarious example of "obviously economically/politically motivated narratives about what AGI is". So, I don't see these people as validating "FOOM soon" even if they're validating "AGI soon", and the local rat-community thing I was objecting to was something that would imply "FOOM soon". (Although, to be clear, I was still under-estimating AI progress.)
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin20

links 1/8/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-08-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin70

links 1/7/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-07-2025

 

  • https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-notes the team behind Community Notes describes how they do it
    • it's people who were working on "Birdwatch" before Musk bought Twitter, and they use algorithms derived from PageRank.
    • these guys are not, even a little bit, "based." Yet the Twitter userbase loves Community Notes!
    • if you have a capable team that firmly believes in "fairness", in auditable, open, participatory processes that don't put a top-down thumb on the scale o
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6Viliam
Then it is quite sad that the neutral algorithm was introduced as the same time as Xitter started losing popularity. (At least, it seems that it loses popularity? Maybe that's just some bubble. I don't know what to trust anymore.) Could these things be related? It seems like the opposition against Xitter is mostly because Musk is hanging out with Trump recently. But hypothetically, it could be a combination of that and the fact that the Community Notes may be inconvenient for people who instead could have the content policed by members of their tribe. Sorry for getting political, but at least until recently it seemed like one political tribe practically owned all the "mainstream" parts of the internet; not necessarily most of the users, but most of the mods and admins. They didn't need to try finding a neutral ground, because instead, they could simply have it all. I have seen a few attempts to make a neutral place where both sides could discuss, and those usually didn't work well. The dominant tribe had no incentive to participate, if they could win the debate by avoiding the place and from outside declaring it to be full of horrible people who should be banned. You could only attract them by basically conceding to many of their demands (declaring their norms and taboos to be the rules of the group), which already made an equal debate impossible (stating your disagreement already meant breaking some of the rules), which made the debate kinda pointless (you could only make your point by diluting it to homeopathic levels, and then the other side yelled at you for a while, and then everyone congratulated themselves for being so tolerant and open-minded). I don't want to give specific examples, but instead I will point to how Scott Alexander's blog was handled e.g. by Wikipedia -- despite the fact that most of its readers (and Scott himself) actually belonged to the dominant tribe, the fact that dissent was allowed was enough for some admins to call him names. It i
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2025

 

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4Viliam
An idea: make LLM create a wiki version of Sci-Hub. Each paper is a separate link. There is one screen of an automatically generated summary, followed by referred and referring papers, all of them hyperlinks (with a preview window), and a short automatically generated explanation how specifically the papers are related. This might even be legal. For me, the last 1/3 is boring (no surprising development anymore, just battles that feel endless). But the descriptions of bullying seem quite realistic (triggering) to me.
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin110

links 1/3/2025: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-03-2025

 

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin*50

links 1/2/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-02-2025

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin70

links 12/30/24:

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4Viliam
Great! I liked: * Fake Experts * No Regrets * Ways To Fix Your Day * Change Your Life In 30 Days I guess I like lists. (Or maybe the ideas in their articles are not that good, so I'd rather have 30 ideas sketched than 1 idea written long.) Sounds almost like a glass half full / half empty distinction. It is almost impossible for propaganda to create something from scratch, but given that conflicts of interest exist almost everywhere, and you have all kinds of people almost everywhere (likely including someone who already supports your agenda), amplification of existing things seems sufficient. The lesson is for propagandists to look at what is already there and work with that, rather than start your own thing from scratch. It may be not exactly what you wanted, but if your goal is to create chaos, it is probably good enough. If you take a group of crazy people, give them money to buy a place for their community to meet, create for them a website to share their ideas (webhosting, technical support, proofreading, editing, photos - simply, if you make it appear professional without needing a shred of talent on work on their side), and then you buy for them web advertising and billboards, arrange the logistics of their meetings, provide catering... the thing will explode. And almost everyone around them will be paralyzed. As the article says, "Russian operatives behave as if they want to watch the world burn". Exactly this, they have a zero-sum approach. (It even seems to me, at least in my part of the world, that zero-sum perspective is a good predictor of how pro-Russian a person will be.) Russians only feel safe when the places around them are in ruins; they have no friends, only servants and enemies. But for that purpose, propaganda is sufficient.
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

links 11/20/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-20-2024

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin31

I don't want automatic messages; that seems too inhuman. I do want things like reminders to follow up with people I haven't talked to for a while, with context awareness for social appropriateness. like, i wouldn't know how to reach out to my roommate/best friend from college; we haven't talked in 16 years! but maybe the right app could keep that from happening in the first place, or create a new normalized type of social behavior that's "reaching out after a long time apart" or whatever.

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2Viliam
The description on the page you linked --- "augments the brain's ability to reason on a) who am I, b) who are you, and c) who are you to me, now and over time" -- leaves a lot to imagination. Sounds like a chatbot that will talk to you about your contacts? Maybe try finding out their birthday (on social networks, by online research, or maybe ask a mutual friend), and then set up a reminder. "Happy birthday, we haven't seen each other for a while, how are you?" Sounds to me like a socially appropriate thing (but I am not an expert). Also, spend 5 minutes by the clock writing a list of people you would like to stay in contact with. Now, I guess the question is how to set up a system that will let you store the data and provide the reminders. The easiest version would a spreadsheet where you enter the names and birthdays, and some system that will read it and prepare notifications for you. A more complicated version would allow you to write more data about the person (how do we know each other, what kinds of activities did we do together, when was the last time we talked), and group the people by categories. You could make an AI go through your e-mail archive and compile an initial report on the person. I would probably feel very uncomfortable doing this online, because it would feel like I am making reports on people, and the owner of the software will most likely sell the data to any third party. I would want this as a desktop application, maybe connected to a small phone app, to set up the reminders. But many people seem to prefer online solutions as more convenient, privacy be damned. (The phone reminders could be like: "Today, XY has a birthday; you have their phone number, e-mail, and Less Wrong account. You relationship status is: you have met a few times at a LW meetup. Topics you usually discuss: AI, kitten videos.")
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin100

links 12/18/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-18-2024

 

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2Viliam
Facebook already reminded me when my friends had birthdays, but recently I noticed that it also offers to write a congratulation comment for me, I just need to make a single click to send it. Now, Facebook has an obvious incentive to keep me returning to their page every day, so they are not going to fully automate this. The next necessary functionality would be to write automated replies. I think that could be achieved by LLMs, I just need some service to do it automatically. That way I could have a rich social life, without the need to interact with humans.
Sam Marks's Shortform
sarahconstantin70

why wouldn't you want regexes?

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7Sam Marks
Apparently fuzz tests that used regexes were an issue in practice for Benchify (the company that ran into this problem). From the blog post:
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin*60

links 12/16/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-16-2024

https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dg/teaching/lis2014/modules/ifc-1-volpano96.pdf the Volpano-Smith-Irvine security type system assigns security levels to variables (like "high" and "low" security). You can either use type checking or information theory inequalities to verify properties like "information can't flow from low to high security."

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

plausible...but surely walking isn't "consummatory"? And turning on the DBS doesn't cause "automatic/involuntary" walking movements.

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4Steven Byrnes
Yeah, the word “consummatory” isn’t great in general (see here), maybe I shouldn’t have used it. But I do think walking is an “innate behavior”, just as sneezing and laughing and flinching and swallowing are. E.g. decorticate rats can walk. As for human babies, they’re decorticate-ish in effect for the first months but still have a “walking / stepping reflex” from day 1 I think. There can be an innate behavior, but also voluntary cortex control over when and whether it starts—those aren’t contradictory, IMO. This is always true to some extent—e.g. I can voluntarily suppress a sneeze. Intuitively, yeah, I do feel like I have more voluntary control over walking than I do over sneezing or vomiting. (Swallowing is maybe the same category as walking?) I still want to say that all these “innate behaviors” (including walking) are orchestrated by the hypothalamus and brainstem, but that there’s also voluntary control coming via cortex→hypothalamus and/or cortex→brainstem motor-type output channels. I’m just chatting about my general beliefs.  :)  I don’t know much about walking in particular, and I haven’t read that particular paper (paywall & I don’t have easy access).
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin132

links 12/13/2024:

 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00695 Minimo, an RL agent for jointly learning both conjectures and proofs in Peano from "intrinsic motivation"

  • what is "intrinsic motivation" in RL?
    • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02298 intrinsic motivation mechanisms include:
      • reward shaping, i.e. comparing the expected value of two possible states, so that the agent gets an incremental "reward" when it moves to a state with higher expected value
      • rewards based on novelty rather than expected success, such as assigning more reward to visiting novel states, or assig
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6Steven Byrnes
I’ve long had a tentative rule-of-thumb that: * medial hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “tracking a state variable”; * lateral hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “turning on a behavior” (especially a “consummatory behavior”). (…apart from the mammillary areas way at the posterior end of the hypothalamus. They’re their own thing.) State variables are things like hunger, temperature, immune system status, fertility, horniness, etc. I don’t have a great proof of that, just some indirect suggestive evidence. (Orexin, contiguity between lateral hypothalamus and PAG, various specific examples of people studying particular hypothalamus neurons.) Anyway, it’s hard to prove directly because changing a state variable can lead to taking immediate actions. And it’s really just a rule of thumb; I’m sure there’s exceptions, and it’s not really a bright-line distinction anyway. The literature on the lateral hypothalamus is pretty bad. The main problem IIUC is that LH is “reticular”, i.e. when you look at it under the microscope you just see a giant mess of undifferentiated cells. That appearance is probably deceptive—appropriate stains can reveal nice little nuclei hiding inside the otherwise-undifferentiated mess. But I think only one or a few such hidden nuclei are known (the example I’m familiar with is “parvafox”).
Sapphire Shorts
sarahconstantin60

"Schizo" as an approving term, referring to strange, creative, nonconformist (and maybe but not necessarily clinically schizophrenic) is a much wider meme online. it's even a semi-mainstream scientific theory that schizophrenia persists in the human population because mild/subclinical versions of the trait are adaptive, possibly because they make people more creative. And, of course, there's a psychoanalytic/continental-philosophy tradition of calling lots of things psychosis very loosely, including good things. This isn't one guy's invention!

if you are li... (read more)

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sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin140

links 12/10/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-10-2024

  • https://hedy.org/hedy Hedy, an educational Python variant that works in multiple languages and has tutorials starting from zero
  • https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ Patrick McKenzie on "debanking"
    • tl;dr: yes, lots of legal businesses get debanked; no, he disagrees with some of the crypto advocates' characterization of the situation
    • in more detail:
      • you can lose bank account access, despite doing nothing unethical, for mundane business/credit-risk related reasons l
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2Viliam
Another interesting part from the "debanking" article:
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin40

it's an introspection/lived-experience/anecdotes from other people kind of thing, i don't have data, but yes i do believe this is true.

Reply1
sarahconstantin's Shortform
sarahconstantin434

"Most people succumb to peer pressure", https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/u3919iPfj

  • Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
  • It's not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
    • Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
    • You wouldn't assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a "perfect storm" of talent, training, and motivation.
    • I'm not sure anybody "just" innately lacks the m
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3Myron Hedderson
"Peer pressure" is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as "social consequences". Seems to me it's good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to "give in to peer pressure", and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you're doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, "people whose opinion I care about will be impressed" is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done. Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn't happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to. Even if I'm right about "is immune to peer pressure" not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may
5leogao
I won't claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I've been in.
5Nutrition Capsule
As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure - psychopaths. Psychopaths don't conform to peer pressure easily - or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I'd wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself - they just don't mind the consequences that much. This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist - psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others' feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well. What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I'd still say it's not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
8Garrett Baker
I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can't really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
4Garrett Baker
Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure. Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
1paragonal
Shouldn't this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there's value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it. My first thought here aren't autists but psychopaths.
6Vanessa Kosoy
I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You're imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person's core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It's approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don't "succumb to peer pressure", they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations. At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats: * Having "independent thinking" as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group's ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions. * Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
-4InquilineKea
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it's vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...
7localdeity
What is categorized as "peer pressure" here?  Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don't conform?  I'm guessing not.  But how about implicit threats?  What if you've heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don't conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined?  In any situation that you could call "peer pressure", I imagine there's always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion. The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be "Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?" and "Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?".  Which don't necessarily have the same answer.  It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be "conformist" are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
3Raemon
Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
Habryka's Shortform Feed
sarahconstantin2912

I agree, and I am a bit disturbed that it needs to be said.

At normal, non-EA organizations -- and not only particularly villainous ones, either! -- it is understood that you need to avoid sharing any information that reflects poorly on the organization, unless it's required by law or contract or something. The purpose of public-facing communications is to burnish the org's reputation. This is so obvious that they do not actually spell it out to employees.

Of COURSE any organization that has recently taken down unflattering information is doing it to maintain its reputation. 

I'm sorry, but this is how "our people" get taken for a ride. Be more cynical, including about people you like.

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What comes after Roam's renaissance?
sarahconstantin52

I'm still on Roam and using it every day. For me, it's not "a lot of work", it's what's necessary to keep track of my thoughts to the point that I feel like my mental workspace is clean. I've journaled a lot since I was a kid. I think better in writing. 

This is my permanent diary. I will probably have it for the rest of my life, if they keep supporting it. Twenty years from now, I'll want to know what I was doing today!

I also log literally all links of "general interest" in my browsing history in my public Roam. does anyone care? Probably not, but it ... (read more)

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sarahconstantin60

links 12/9/24

  • https://gasstationmanager.github.io/ai/2024/11/04/a-proposal.html
    • a proposal that tentatively makes a lot of sense to me, for making LLM-generated code more robust and trustworthy.
    • the goal: give a formal specification (in e.g. Lean) of what you want the code to do; let the AI generate both the code and a proof that it meets the specification.
    • as a means to this end, a crowdsourced website called "Code With Proofs: The Arena", like LeetCode, where "players" can compete to submit code + proofs to solve coding challenges. This provides a source of
... (read more)
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3Viliam
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero. I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author's solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then "repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back". (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or -10 pixels for turn, and it's not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes "repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back", and which point my daughter just says "I don't get it". (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great... but you get one or two moments of this per video.) In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman's Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it's going to be a Christmas present); the first 1/3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2/3 are Python. . I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically: * assholes * criminals * homeless * mentally i
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sarahconstantin80
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4Viliam
I guess it is difficult to promote the brand of Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor in the age of Defund The Police. Which is really unfortunate, because it seems like "defund the police" was actually what woke white people wanted. Black people were probably horrified by the idea of giving up and letting the crime grow exponentially at the places they live. Unfortunately, the woke do not care about the actual opinions of the people they speak for. A part of this is the natural "hype - disappointment" cycle. The 21st century is better, but we were promised that it would be 100x better, and it is only maybe 10x better, so now we feel that it sucks. What we would need, psychologically, is probably some disaster that would first threaten to destroy us, but then we would overcome it, and then feel happy that now the future is better than we expected. But we had covid, which kinda fits this pattern, except the popular reaction was opposite: instead of "thanks to the amazing science and technology of the 21st century, we have eradicated a pandemic in a year" the popular wisdom of the cool people became "it was never dangerous in the first place, the evil Americans just tried to scare us". Instead of admiring the mRNA vaccines, people seem outraged that we didn't let more people die naturally instead. Another thing is that people are bad at noticing gradual change. If you could teleport 10 or 20 years in the future, you would be shocked. But if you advance to the future one day at a time, it mostly feels like nothing happens. (Even the proverbial flying cars would be a huge disappointment if we at first got cars that can only fly 1 cm above the surface, and then every year they could get 1 cm higher.) Maybe the people who profit from the fraud want it that way, and lobby against the funding? Uhm, our experience in Eastern Europe is that police was never optimizing for us, and quite often against us.
The Dream Machine
sarahconstantin20

Funding individuals doesn't seem at all ruled out by our mission and I agree it's a good thing.

 IANAL and I don't know much about how that interacts with tax deductibility.

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sarahconstantin121

links 12/4/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-04-2024

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4Viliam
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence. I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback. But this wouldn't work at a workplace or any other larger group... unless you split people into "those who are safe" and "those who have a duty to make them feel safe", and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe. You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you "you can speak freely", you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don't feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.
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