Idea: "Ugh-field trades", where people trade away their obligations that they've developed ugh-fields for in exchange for other people's obligations. Both people get fresh non-ugh-fielded tasks. Works only in cases where the task can be done by somebody else, which won't be every time but might be often enough for this to work.
This is a lovely post and it really resonated with me. I've yet to really orient myself in the EA world, but "fix the normalization of child abuse" is something I have in my mind as a potential cause area. Really happy to hear you've gotten out, even if the permanent damage from sleep deprivation is still sad.
I just caught myself committing a bucket error.
I'm currently working on a text document full of equations that use variables with extremely long names. I'm in the process of simplifying it by renaming the variables. For complicated reasons, I have to do this by hand.
Just now, I noticed that there's a series of variables O1-O16, and another series of variables F17-F25. For technical reasons relating to the work I'm doing, I'm very confident that the name switch is arbitrary and that I can safely rename the F's to O's without changing the meaning of the equa...
It's funny that this came up on LessWrong around this time, as I've just recently been thinking about how to get vim-like behavior out of arbitrary text boxes. Except I also have the additional problem that I'm somewhat unsatisfied with vim. I've been trying to put together my own editor with an "API first" mentality, so that I might be able to, I don't know, eventually produce some kind of GTK widget that acts like my editor by default. Or something. And then maybe it'll be easy to make a variant of, say, Thunderbird, in which the email-editing text box i...
It seems like "agent X puts a particular dollar value on human life" might be ambiguous between "agent X acts as though human lives are worth exactly N dollars each" and "agent X's internal thoughts explicitly assign a dollar value of N to a human life". I wonder if that's causing some confusion surrounding this topic. (I didn't watch the linked video.)
If you think traffic RNG is bad in the Glitchless category, you should watch someone streaming any% attempts. The current WR has a three-mile damage boost glitch that skips the better part of the commute, saving 13 minutes, and the gal who got it had to grind over 14k attempts for it (about a dozen of them got similar boosts but died on impact).
Nice time. Here are some thoughts for possible additional timesaves:
If you manage to get all these in a run, then depending on the length of your commute I think you'll be able to gold this split by 5-10 more minutes.
This reminds me of something I thought of a while back, that I'd like to start doing again now that I've remembered it. Whenever I sense myself getting unfairly annoyed at someone (which happens a lot) I try to imagine that I'm watching a movie in which that person is the protagonist. I imagine that I know what their story and struggles are, and that I'm rooting for them every step of the way. Now that I'm getting into fiction writing, I might also try imagining that I'm writing them as a character, which has the same vibe as the other techniques. The one time I've actually tried this so far, it worked really well!
Re the second sentence: lol. Yeah, I bet you're right.
Your last paragraph is interesting to me. I don't think I can say that I've had the same experience, though I do think that some people have that effect on me. I can think of at least one person who I normally don't run out of gas when I'm talking to them. But I think other people actually amplify the problem. For example, I meet with three of my friends for a friendly debate on a weekly basis, and the things they say frequently run against the grain of my mind, and I often run out of gas while trying to figure out how to respond to them.
This very much matches my own experiences! Keeping something in the back of my mind has always been somewhere between difficult and impossible for me, and for that reason I set timers for all important events during the day (classes, interviews, meetings, etc). I also carry a pocket-sized notebook and a writing utensil with me wherever I go, in case I stumble on something that I have to deal with "later".
I have also found my attention drifting away in the middle of conversations, and I too have cultivated the skill of non-rudely admitting to it and a...
When somebody is advocating taking an action, I think it can be productive to ask "Is there a good reason to do that?" rather than "Why should we do that?" because the former phrasing explicitly allows for the possibility that there is no good reason, which I think makes it both intellectually easier to realize that and socially easier to say it.
To answer that question, it might help to consider when you even need to measure effort. Off the cuff, I'm not actually sure there are any (?). Maybe you're an employer and you need to measure how much effort your employees are putting in? But on second thought that's actually a classic case where you don't need to measure effort, and you only need to measure results.
(Disclaimer: I have never employed anybody.)
pain isn't the unit of effort, but for many things it's correlated with whatever that unit is.
I think this correlation only appears if you're choosing strategies well. If you're tasked with earning a lot of money to give to charity, and you generate a list of 100 possible strategies, then you should toss out all the strategies that don't lie on the pareto boundary of pain and success. (In other words, if strategy A is both less effective and more painful then strategy B, then you should never choose strategy A.) Pain will correlate with success in the rema...
It's been ten years. How are you enjoying life?
For what it's worth, I value you even though you're a stranger and even if your life is still going poorly. I often hear people saying how much better their life got after 30, after 40, after 50. Imagine how much larger the effect could be after cryosuspension!
I've been thinking of signing up for cryonics recently. The main hurdle is that it seems like it'll be kind of complicated, since at the moment I'm still on my parent's insurance, and I don't really know how all this stuff works. I've been worrying that the ugh field surrounding the task might end up being my cause of death by causing me to look on cryonics less favorably just because I subconsciously want to avoid even thinking about what a hassle it will be.
But then I realized that I can get around the problem by pre-committing to sign up for cryonics no...
Eliezer, you're definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it's not just you -- pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.
How do you know that the phrase "logical positivism" refers to the correct formulation of the idea, rather than an exaggerated version? I have no trouble at all believing that a group of people discovered the very important notion that untestable claims can be meaningless, and then accidentally went way overboard into believing that difficult-to-test claims are meaningless too.
There's evidence to be had in the fact that, though it's been known for a long time, it's not a big field of study with clear experts.
This is true. It's only a mild comfort to me, though, since I don't have too much faith in humanity's ability to conjure up fields of study for important problems. But I do have some faith.
From very light googling, it seems likely to happen over hundreds or thousands of years, which puts it pretty far down the list of x-risk worries IMO.
Also true. This makes me update away from "we might wake up dead tomorrow" and towards "t...
('overdue') presumes some knowledge of mechanism, which I don't have. Roughly speaking it's a 1 in 300,000 risk each year and not extinction level.
Am I misunderstanding, or is this an argument from ignorance? The article says we're overdue; that makes it sound like someone has an idea of what the mechanism is, and that person is saying that according to their model, we're overdue. Actually, come to think of it, "overdue" might not imply knowledge of a mechanism at all! Maybe we simply have good reason to believe that this has happened about every 300,000 y...
I'll just throw in my two cents here and say that I was somewhat surprised by how serious the Ben's post is. I was around for the Petrov Day celebration last year, and I also thought of it as just a fun little game. I can't remember if I screwed around with the button or not (I can't even remember if there was a button for me).
Then again, I do take Ben's point: a person does have a responsibility to notice when something that's being treated like a game is actually serious and important. Not that I think 24 hours of LW being down is necessarily "serious and important".
Overall, though, I'm not throwing much of a reputation hit (if any at all) into my mental books for you.
Yeah. This post could also serve, more or less verbatim, as a write-up of my own current thoughts on the matter. In particular, this section really nails it:
...As above, my claim is not that the photon disappears. That would indeed be a silly idea. My claim is that the very claim that a photon "exists" is meaningless. We have a map that makes predictions. The map contains a proton, and it contains that proton even outside any areas relevant to predictions, but why should I care? The map is for making predictions, not for ontology.
[...]
I don't suppose that. I
Thanks for pointing this out. I think the OP might have gotten their conclusion from this paragraph:
(Note that, in the web page that the OP links to, this very paragraph is quoted, but for some reason "energy" is substituted for "center-of-mass". Not sure what's going on there.)
In any case, this paragraph makes it sound like participants who inherited a wrong theory did do worse on tests of understanding (even though participants who inherited some theory did the same on average of those who inherited only data, which I guess implies that those who inherit...
Yeah, I just... stopped worrying about these kinds of things. (In my case, "these kinds of things" refer e.g. to very unlikely Everett branches, which I still consider more likely than gods.) You just can't win this game. There are million possible horror scenarios, each of them extremely unlikely, but each of them extremely horrifying, so you would just spend all your life thinking about them; [...]
I see. In that case, I think we're reacting differently to our situations due to being in different epistemic states. The uncertainty involved in Everett branc...
Aha, no, the mind reading part is just one of several cultures I'm mentioning. (Guess Culture, to be exact.) If I default to being an Asker but somebody else is a Guesser, I might have the following interaction with them:
Me: [looking at some cookies they just made] These look delicious! Would it be all right if I ate one?
Them: [obviously uncomfortable] Uhm... uh... I mean, I guess so...
Here, it's retroactively clear that, in their eyes, I've overstepped a boundary just by asking. But I usually can't tell in advance what things I'm allowed to ask and what t...
The Civ analogy makes sense, and I certainly wouldn't stop at disproving all actually-practiced religions (though at the moment I don't even feel equipped to do that).
Well, you cannot disprove such thing, because it is logically possible. (Obviously, "possible" does not automatically imply "it happened".) But unless you assume it is "simulations all the way up", there must be a universe that is not created by an external alien lifeform. Therefore, it is also logically possible that our universe is like that.
Are you sure it's logically possible in the stric...
Epistemic status: really shaky, but I think there's something here.
I naturally feel a lot of resistance to the way culture/norm differences are characterized in posts like Ask and Guess and Wait vs Interrupt Culture. I naturally want to give them little pet names, like:
I think this feeling is generated by various negative experiences I've had with people around me, who, no matter where I am, always seem to share b...
I wouldn't call the dead chieftain a god -- that would just be a word game.
But then, how did this improbably complicated mechanism come into existence? Humans were made by evolution, were gods too? But then again those gods are not the gods of religion; they are merely powerful aliens. But powerful aliens are neither creators of the universe, nor are they omniscient.
Wait wait! You say a god-like being created by evolution cannot be a creator of the universe. But that's only true if you constrain that particular instance of evolution to have occered in *thi...
Right. The 100 arguments the person gives aren't 100 parallel arguments in favor of them having good reasons to believe evolution is false, for exactly the reason you give. So my reasoning doesn't stop you from concluding that they have no good reason to disbelieve.
And, they are still 100 arguments in parallel that evolution is false, and my reasoning in the post correctly implies that you can't read five of them, see that they aren't good arguments, and conclude that evolution is true. (That conclusion requires a good argument in favor of evolution, not a bad one against it.)