All of Sinclair Chen's Comments + Replies

It would be so cool if the ea / rat extended universe bought a castle. You'd be able to host events like this. Acquiring the real estate would actually be very cheap, castles are literally being given away for free. (though maintenance might suck idk)

btw whytham abbey doesn't count because it's not even a castle

is reciprocity.io still up? did it move? link seems dead. I wanted to link to it in my substack article about manifold.love

... is it still hosted out of someone's laptop? i'd be willing to help people get it onto better infra.

I wonder if this has more to do with how taxing it is to display 100s or 1000s of elements under modern unoptimized web dev practices. In particular GitHub's commits page used to rerender the entire page on scroll. It is easy to program things arbitrarily badly and many an engineer would prefer just displaying fewer things rather than do it the better-quality but harder way.

what's the deal with bird flu? do you think it's gonna blow up

this is too harsh. love is a good feeling actually. it is something that many people deeply and truly want.

it is good to create mental frameworks around common human desires which are congruent with a philosophy of truthseeking.

interesting. what if she has her memories and some abstract theory of what she is, and that theory is about as accurate as anyone else's theory, but her experiences are not very vivid at all. she's just going through the motions running on autopilot all the time - like when people get in a kind of trance while driving.

You are definitely right about tradeoff of my direct sensory experience vs other things my brain could be doing like calculation or imagination. I hope with practice or clever tool use I will get better at something like doing multiple modes at once, task switching faster between modes, or having a more accurate yet more compressed integrated gestalt self.

tbh, my hidden motivation for writing this is that I find it grating when people say we shouldn't care how we treat AI because it isn't conscious. this logic rests on the assumption that consciousness == moral value.

if tomorrow you found out that your mom has stopped experiencing the internal felt sense of "I", would you stop loving her? would you grieve as if she were dead or comatose?

I kinda feel like I literally have more subjective experience after experiencing ego death/rebirth. I suspect that humans vary quite a lot in how often they are conscious, and to what degree. And if you believe, as I do, that consciousness is ultimately algorithmic in nature (like, in the "surfing uncertainty" predictive processing view, that it is a human-modeling thing which models itself to transmit prediction-actions) it would not be crazy for it to be a kind of mental motion which sometimes we do more or less of, and which some people lack entirely.

I ... (read more)

Uh, there are minds. I think you and I both agree on this. Not really sure what the "what if no one existed" thought experiment is supposed to gesture at. I am very happy that I exist and that I experience things. I agree that if I didn't exist then I wouldn't care about things

I think your method double counts the utility. In the absurd case, if I care about you and you care about me, and I care about you caring about me caring about you... then two people who like each other enough have infinite value. unless the repeating sum converges. How likely is the... (read more)

we completely dominate dogs. society treat them well because enough humans love dogs.

I do think that cooperation between people is the origin of religion, and its moral rulesets which create tiny little societies that can hunt stags. 

I definitely think that if I was not conscious then I would not coherently want things. But that conscious minds are the only things that can truly care, does not mean that conscious minds are the only things we should terminally care about.

The close circle composition isn't enough to justify Singerian altruism from egoist assumptions, because of the value falloff. With each degree of connection, I love the stranger less.

I didn't use the word "ethics" in my comment, so are you making a definitional statement, to distinguish between [universal value system] and [subjective value system] or just authoritatively saying that I'm wrong?

Are you claiming moral realism? I don't really believe that. If "ethics" is global, why should I care about "ethics"? Sorry if that sounds callous, I do actually care about the world, just trying to pin down what you mean.

Musk met with Iran ambassador. maybe the market thinks they cut a deal?

why do people equate conciousness & sentience with moral patienthood? your close circle is not more conscious or more sentient than people far away, but you care about your close circle more anyways. unless you are SBF or ghandi

you can get more of this from twitter btw

I just ran a party where everyone was required to wear earplugs. I think this did effectively cap the max size of groups at 5 people, past which people tend to split into mini conversations. People say the initial silence feels a bit odd though. I'm definitely going to try this more

I am convinced if only the Cult of Reason had not chopped off the head of Lavoisier, France woulda industrialized first. They got to clockwork and machining first! (Unless you count the antikythera mechanism of the Ancient Greeks.) Also it's really sad how France has treated - and continues to treat - its colonies. Compared to the British they were much worse at building infrastructure and and setting up institutions. This is why no one takes French seriously. Except Japan.

lol at the guy in the video being nostalgic for the Islamic Golden Age while saying French speakers have no science. they did and they squandard it, just like Arabic speakers.

After the Norman conquest of England, "beef", derived from the French word for cow, started to refer to the meat of the cow in the context of a meal. This is because the nobles spoke French. You see the same etymological distinction in pork/pig, venison/deer, and mutton/sheep.
The addition of new words from foreign languages into English continues to happen all the time still. This happens by default. (I should note that sometimes when populations which speak different languages live side by side they form a more simplified combination language called a pid... (read more)

Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure,  much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them.

I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use.
Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, al... (read more)

this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don't like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).

One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards - the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can't read people's body language from across t... (read more)

I think a restaurant where you paid for time, if the food was nothing special, would quickly turn into a coworking space. Maybe it would be more open-office and more amenable to creative, conversational, interpersonal work rather than laptop work. You probably want it to be a cafe - or at least look like a cafe from the outside in signage / branding; you may want architectural sound dampening like a denny's booth. You could sell pre-packaged food and sodas - it isn't what they're here for. Or you could even sell or rent activities like coloring books, simple social tabletop games, small toys, lockpicking practice locks, tiny marshmallow candle smore sets, and so on.

I think the concept of true love is too confused to be worth rescuing. There's a fairytale conception of it being idyllic and perfect. There's the romcom conception of it happening with strangers in unexpected circumstances. And there's many many people's personal experience of romance, which they are motivated to describe as true or not true depending on whether they want to keep the relationship or move past it.

Perhaps the definition which you give the phrase is what the meaning ought to be from the plain meaning of the words individually, but it won't b... (read more)

That those with a lot of money live better than those with less money is what gives money value in the first place. And in this particular scenario the worst off aren't counterfactually harmed and in fact have quite a lot to gain in the medium term.

On the object level, I know someone who was able to get GLP-1 agonists for much cheaper by buying something meant for animal use off a sketchy website. Compounding pharmacies are also producing semaglutide for cheaper.

is anyone in this community working on nanotech? with renewed interest in chip fabrication in geopolitics and investment in "deep tech" in the vc world i think now is a good time to revisit the possibility of creating micro and nano scale tools that are capable of manufacturing.

like ASML's most recent machine is very big, so will the next one have to be even bigger? how would they transport it if it doesn't fit on roads? seems like the approach of just stacking more mirrors and more parts will hit limits eventually. "Moore's Second Law" says the cost of se... (read more)

2D is a limit. but there's also more design language built around 2D UIs. I still think there's a ton of unexplored design space around "tabletop games" that make use of modern web flows.

I agree shared presence is important. I also think it's unsolved. VR isn't fidelous enough to transmit sufficient social information and it's still very inaccessible due to price & physical discomfort

New startup idea: cell-based / cultured saffron. Saffron is one of the most expensive substances by mass. Most pricey substances are precious metals that are valuable for signalling value or rare elements used in industry. On the other hand saffron is bought and directly consumed by millions(?) of poor people - they just use small amounts because the spice is very strong. Unlike lab-grown diamonds, lab-grown saffron will not face less demand due to lower signalling value.
The current way saffron is cultivated is they grow these whole fields of flowers, harv... (read more)

lactose intolerence is treatable with probiotics, and has been since 1950. they cost $40 on amazon.
works for me at least.

Conglomerates like Unilever use shadow prices to allocate resources internally between their separate businesses. And sales teams are often compensated via commission, which is kind of market-ish.

I'm a secular person who also is less certain near-term AI doom. While I do think the eschaton of becoming grabby aliens is both true and spiritually meaningful, I don't predict it to happen soon, so I'd also appreciate the inclusion of more parochial near-term future ideas and technology.

Sheet music is good.
Charging money is good actually.

let people into your heart, let words hurt you. own the hurt, cry if you must. own the unsavory thoughts. own the ugly feelings. fix the actually bad. uplift the actually good. 

emerge a bit stronger, able to handle one thing more.

My literal interpretation of Zack:

The secret lore of the Rationalist movement is that some specific kinds of criticism make Rationalists hate you, such as criticizing someone for being too friendly to racists.
The secret truth of rationality is that all "criticism" is at least neutral and possibly good for a perfectly rational agent, including criticizing the agent for being too friendly to racists. 

My thoughts

- Reputation is real, but less real than you think or hope. And reputation is asymmetrically fact-favored - just speak the truth and keep being ... (read more)

Good stories rank well on google, social media, & word of mouth; drawing in more customers and prospective employees. The market of ideas is reflexive. If more people pay attention to a field / framework / method / company, more progress is made.

(There's also sampling bias. You are more likely to hear the fun stories than the numbers from your friends, twitter feed, etc)

Diet

Ok. Well I don't think there's a robust nutrition engineering either. Except maybe whatever the gym bros are cooking up (iirc mostly macronutrients, some supplements, and don't take certain research chemicals that will kill you). There is a lot of incredible engineering in making food tasty and cheap though.

Skipping showering is easy actually.

Caveat: people differ in body odor based on genetics, hormones, and armpit microbiome. I personally am privileged to not smell bad, therefore I don't shower until my skin or hair starts to feel icky (a few days).

I used to get dandruff a lot even back when I was showering daily. I saw r/HaircareScience saying sulfates and other chemicals in typical shampoos dry out the scalp and make it overcorrect by producing more oil. this matches my experience. Shampoo is like coffee; it creates dependency. Later, when I stopped showe... (read more)

(Splitting into multiple comments)

401k

• Yes, the employee matching is "free money." But transferring my money out of this to do a Roth IRA rollover was really annoying and I may have accidentally done it wrong and now I need to talk to a CPA.  All this work for just for a matched $6000. Bureaucracy, friction, and poor UI are bad because it makes my adhd brain procrastinating on actually investing. (Incidentally this is also a reason to be wary of crypto as an investment - annoying to get on/off chain)
• Retirement accounts are also often not able to invest

Whatever you use, remember to backup your vault regularly. A cautionary tale:

I lost access to my bitwarden vault containing a private key to a few thousand $ worth of crypto, after changing my master password to something that I was then not able to recall perfectly.  And bitwarden's website / extension start to rate limit you client-side after failed attempts. So instead, after a lot of research I was able to find the bitwarden hashfile on my computer where chrome stores data for its extensions. I then downloaded hashcat and tried to do a dictionary ... (read more)

A list of things that "everyone knows you should do" that I have gained value from NOT doing:

- health things recommended by "experts" that few people do and are therefore not lindy
  - drink lots of water - diminishing marginal returns. if you have to get to pee at night you may be drinking too much
  - sunglasses - outdoor light improves your eyesight and makes you more alert. 
  - diet stuff. eating a lot of vegetables, eating no vegetables, cutting salt, cutting fat, cutting carbs - nutrition is not solved, your body is a complex system... (read more)

I see smart ppl often try to abstract, generalize, mathify, in arguments that are actually emotion/vibes issues. I do this too.
The neurotypical finds this MEAN. but the real problem is that the math is wrong

after thinking and researching for not-long, I think there may be nonzero prior art in gift economics, blockchain reputation systems (belief in people); public goods funding (like quadratic funding); and viewpoints.xyz or vTaiwan (polling platform that k-means "coalitions" and rewards people who "build bridges"). It in general feels like the kind of math problem that the RadicalXChange people would be interested in.

I am not impressed with the current versions of these technologies that are actually "in production."
I think the field is still very experimental. I think its so pre-paradigm that art / philosophy / anthropology / "traditional-ways-of-knowing" are probably ahead of us on this

woah I didn't even know lw team was working on a "pre 2024 review" feature using prediction markets probabilities integrated into the UI. super cool!

what would the math for aggregating different "believing in"s across people in an incentive aligned, accurate way look like?

This reminds me of the observation that most things on the internet are written by insane people - empirically for most forms of media, including user-produced media, a few exceptional users contribute a supermajority of the output. And to be this exceptional you are likely to differ from the population in a lot of other ways as well.

yes, I'd recommend play money isolated to the game itself

Each player has certain information on the distribution because they know their own role. The game would become a mixed game that depends on how much you care about the market payout vs winning, like mafia members would have an incentive to throw if they cared more about the money. I think this would be tricky to balance. The spectator version can mostly use existing rules (such as mafia members knowing for certain who the other members are). This also means that of you do figure out the balance, the game would be more novel and interesting

Concrete steps towards removing language barriers:
- promote idea that letting languages die is good actually
- improve translation speed, offline-capability, and UI
- create great products that take advantage of auto-translating non-english internets, social media, or traditional media
- accelerate capabilities of LLMs

Concrete steps towards free banking
- Fintech startup that issues VISA cards backed by your liquid investment portfolio, that autosells to pay for things
- Write code for crypto projects

More pie in the sky
- Design new social media that is fun and meaningful rather than divisive or draining
- Create the one true religion
- Stop tipping

Decision theory didn't take off because it's "law thinking" but better decisionmaking in practice needs "rule thinking". And the mathematical formalisms early on actually weren't very complete or meaningful? 

There were and are market-economics-knowing people who tried very hard to get the world to a better place. They're called developmental economists. Turns out that stuff is actually pretty hard, but people are making progress.

People should be more curious about what the heck is going on with trans people on a physical, biological, level. I think this is could be a good citizen science research project for y'all since gender dysphoria afflicts a lot of us in this community, and knowledge leads to better detection and treatment. Many trans-women especially do a ton of research/experimentation themselves. Or so I hear. I actually haven't received any mad-science google docs of research from any trans person yet. What's up with that? Who's working on this?

Where I'd start maybe:

- ht... (read more)

Zach's post is not vibe-neutral because nothing is vibe-neutral. There's a subtextual claim that: 1. when people criticize your arguments you should take it as a gift 2. when you criticise other people's opinions you should present it as a gift. 3. when "debating" be chill, as if you are at the grocery store check-out

I think this is a good strategy, and that (2) actually can succeed at at quelling bad emotional reaction. If you present an argument as an attack, or prematurely apologize for attacking, it will be felt like an attack. If you just present it w... (read more)