All of TeaTieAndHat's Comments + Replies

Thanks for this post, I found it very useful.

While I agree with you that these things should go without saying, I think I’m not so surprised that they don’t actually go without saying? 
In particular, I often notice that most of these things don’t seem to go without saying even for myself? There is obviously a good way of doing things, but (I assume ultimately because of something like a low opinion of one’s own competence, warranted or not), noticing that we’re doing something else instead is hard, and carefully tracking one’s impact is also hard. It ... (read more)

My decision process was much dumber: 1. Try to spend less time on LW, and move to close the page after having reflexively opened it, deliberately not opening this post. 2. See Daystar’s comment on the frontpage and go "wait, that’s pretty important for me too". 3. Give ten bucks, because I don’t have $1,000 lying around.

So, basically, I’m making a mostly useless comment but thanks for reminding me to donate :-)

I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:

• To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what th

Interesting. This specific form of ‘reward’ also works well for me (and I also hadn’t conceptualised it as such), but when people talk about rewarding yourself as an incentive for doing something, it’s usually stuff like ‘give yourself a slice of cake if you’ve had a productive workday’ or whatever, and in those cases, my brain is always going ‘wait! I can have the cake anyway, even though I didn’t do what I planned! It’s right here, I can just eat it!’. I’m not sure why it happens, or why watching videos when exercising works better, but I assume it’s what Seth meant?

Thanks! I knew of Alexander, but you reminded me that I’ve been procrastinating on tackling the 1,200+ pages of A Pattern Language for a few months, and I’ve now started reading it :-)

I’m being slightly off-topic here, but how does one "makes it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations"? More broadly, the topic of designing spaces where people can think better/do cooler stuff/etc. is fascinating, but I don’t know where to learn more than the very basics of it. Do you know good books, articles, etc. on these questions, by any chance?

Apparently, he co-founded the channel. But of course he might have had his voiced faked just for this video, as some suggested in the comments to it.

The very real possibility that it’s not in fact Stephen Fry’s voice is as frightening to me as to anyone else, but Stephen Fry doing AI Safety is still really nice to listen to (and at the very least I know he’s legitimately affiliated with that YT channel, which means that Stephen Fry is somewhat into AI safety, which is awesome)

"Have you met non-serious people who long to be serious? People like that seem very rare to me."
… Hmmm… kinda? Like, you’re probably right that it’s few people, and in specific circumstances, but I know some people who are doing something they don’t like, or who are doing something they like but struggling with motivation or whatever for other reasons, and certainly seem to wish they were more serious (or people who did in fact change careers or whatever and are now basically as serious as Mastroianni wants them to be, when they weren’t at all before). But those are basically people who were always inclined to be serious but were prevented from doing so by their circumstances, so you have a point, of course.

Yes, he’s definitely a polemicist, and not a researcher or an expert. By training, he’s a urologist with an MBA or two, and most of what he writes definitely sounds very oversimplified/simplistic. 

Well, I did the thing where I actually go find this guy’s main book (2017, so not his latest) on archive.org and read it. The style is weird, with a lot of "she says this, Google says AGI will be fine, some other guy says it won’t", and I’m not 100% confident what Alexandre himself believes as far as the details are concerned. 
But it seems really obvious that his view is at least something like "AI will be super-duper powerful, the idea that perhaps we might not build it does not cross my mind, so we will have AGI eventually, then we’d better have it ... (read more)

I don’t know Alexandre’s ideas very well, but here’s what I understand: you know how people who don’t like rationalists say they’re just using a veneer of rationality to hide right-wing libertarian beliefs? Well, that’s exactly what Alexandre in fact very openly does, complete with some very embarrassing opinions on the differences in IQ between different parts of the world, that strengthen his position as quite an unsavoury character (the potential reputational harms that would arise as a result of having a caricature of a rationalist be a prominent polit... (read more)

I agree with those who are surprised that you are offended by this relatively innocuous part of the social script. However, it is also a useful lesson for me personally: my social skills aren’t great, so, even more than others, I usually drift along social situations by saying, more or less "ow, I’d hate that if I were you", "whoa, I find that thing you just said really interesting!", and then the conversation stalls because I don’t say anything else, or I add in my own anecdote and then it stalls, or the other person acknowledges that I said I was here fo... (read more)

Yeah, I know that, that it’s just that you decided to approach the problem from that angle. And, on the one hand, it was more interesting that way, but on the other hand I was a bit surprised, basically, by what that framing ended up bringing forward vs leaving in the background — re-reading my comment, I still agree with the facts of what I said, but my tone was a bit harsher than I’d wanted.

In fact it’s very interesting: I’m still not surprised that governments don’t do it the way you suggest they should, because people in the bottom 99% want to be treat... (read more)

In many ways, that’s an odd framing of the question(s) at hand: governments don’t just blindly try to maximise their tax revenue/the state’s productive capacity (although maybe they should do more of that?), and to some extent there are good reasons why they don’t (the very many citizens who are never going to make it into the top 1% — because that’s what one percent means — certainly prefer it if the tradeoff is a little more in their favour, and for mostly good reasons), etc. 
Yours is a political opinion I agree with — it means that governments shou... (read more)

"As there were no showers, on the last day of the project you could literally smell all the hard work I had put in.": that’s the point where I’d consider dragging out the history nerds. This, for instance, could have been useful :-)

I’m probably typical-minding a bit here, but: you say you have had mental health issues in the past (which, based on how you describe them, sound at least superficially similar to my own), and that you feel like you’ve outlived yourself. Which, although it is a feeling I recognise, is still a surprising thing to say: even a high P(doom) only tells you that your life might soon have to stop, not that it already has! My wild-ass guess would be that, in addition to maybe having something to prove intellectually and psychologically, you feel lost, with the abi... (read more)

"They obviously wouldn’t do what I’m about to say, but this system is equivalent to one where they set a very affordable base tuition, and then add a “wealth-based surcharge” to charge their rich students extra money. And if you don’t fill out the form and tell them how much your parents make, you get the maximum possible surcharge.": uh, my uni does just that, actually? They’re government-funded, so tuition used to be a few hundreds of euros per year, but a decade or so ago they decided that now it’s going to be tiered by income, with tuition ranging from... (read more)

Fellow not-at-all-a-data-scientist-but-wait-actually-that-sounds-fun here! I don’t know more about it than you do, but I’m glad you asked, since I hope to also benefit from the answers you’ll get :-)

Really interesting! I particularly liked the part on reading out loud: even though I’d heard it used to be more common (and that there’s even a French 19th c. novelist who had set up a specific ‘shouting room’ in his garden for shouting his texts out loud and see if they sounded good), but I’d never actually noticed it had so many advantages. Maybe I should do it more. Heck, it might even help me stay focused more easily on what I read?

Hmm. No, but only because what you describe’s a massive oversimplification of what was actually going on? (Not a historian, though). In the 1400’s in W Europe, there was: kings gaining power over their feudal lords, hence less infighting between local lords. That does give more time for pleasure, or at least more opportunities to have fancy houses instead of fortresses. There also had been the crusades a couple of centuries before, allowing to bring knowledge from eg. Ancient Greece that had only been preserved in the middle East: that brings new forms of ... (read more)

I can’t say I’m surprised you’d see things that way, certainly (though I am mildly surprised how much I see them similarly: I’m still too young for kids!). But that must feel… not great.

Really interesting! I agree on the importance of some things becoming more or less socially acceptable and how it influences behaviours, for good or for evil (why on Earth did being very anxious become so okay?). In my case, maybe part of my concern was more specific to me: as a good, routine-abiding autistic person, I used to be extremely scrupulous, in addition to having akrasia issues, so on balance it worked fine. But now it feels as though akrasia and anxiety are more okay, while I get more signals telling me that I shouldn’t be so scrupulous, and that may be why I notice that I’m less able to control my akrasia than before. (All of this is of course pretty speculative).

I’m not 100% sure the relevant lesson is to avoid sociology (or some other social sciences) entirely. The way I see it, it’s about as reliable as psychology if there had never been anything like a replication crisis: loads of nonsense at the very core of the field, and that everyone seems to think is gospel, but with a few good insights and useful approaches hidden in it—okay, maybe sociology has significantly more people who have been made actually crazy by politics, though. Then, either you avoid it entirely, or you engage with it knowing that you’re on ... (read more)

Interesting, and very well written. Because you have access to particularly funny examples, you show very well how much politics is an empty status game.
 

I should probably point out that five years ago, I was a high school student in France, felt more or less the way you do, and went on to study political science at college (I don’t even need to say which college I’m talking about, do I?). It is a deep truth that politics is very unserious for most people, and that is perhaps most true for first-year political science students (or, god forbid, the sor... (read more)

Free markets aren’t ‘great’ in some absolute sense, they’re just more or less efficient? They’re the best way we know of of making sure that bad ideas fail and good ones thrive. But when you’re managing a business, I don’t think your chief concern is that the ideas less beneficial to society as a whole should fail, even if they’re the ideas your livelihood relies on? Of course, market-like mechanisms could have their place inside a company—say, if you have two R&D teams coming up with competing products to see which one the market likes more. But even ... (read more)

Just me following up with myself wrt what the post made me think about: it’s as if there are two ways of being anxious, one where you feel sort of frazzled and hectic all the time (‘I need to do more of that stuff, and do it better, or something bad will happen’), and one where you just retreat to safety (‘There’s nothing I can do that wouldn’t come with an exceedingly high risk of something bad happening’). It’s quite clear that the former could lead someone to being an overachiever and doing masses of great stuff (while still, unfortunately, feeling like... (read more)

Really interesting! (and, just as everyone said: kudos to you for having written an interesting post while anxious and depressed :-) ).

But I notice it makes me confused. I used to be depressed (although I should probably say ‘used to be in a depressive episode’, these things never 100% go away, do they?), then my depression got better, but there still was/is weird stuff going on with my mental health. No longer being glued to my bed by despair, I called it anxiety rather than depression, but now I’m not so sure anymore?

Of course, my depression clearly look... (read more)

Beyond just the historical part, there’s a lot of literature on how different features of a democratic system can be suited to different contexts or achieve different goals. To focus on complex negotiations between people with clearly different preferences, I assume a political scientist would point you toward consociationalism, but many other concepts could also be relevant.

Really interesting! In fact, I love how LW has a lot of posts in the same vein: written by people who – presumably – aren’t in fact specialists of their topic, and who engage little with the literature on the subject, but who nonetheless manage to have an interesting thing to say, and say it differently – often better – from how someone actually in the field would have said it.

I’ve only taken a few introductory political science courses in college, but in those classes, we learn that: 

• ‘Democracy’ originally referred to Athenes-style direct democracy,

I agree. Another way to say that is that if there’s competition for the good you want (because it’s in some way or other in limited supply—seats in the subway, shares in a specific company, pieces of candy of the flavor you like, …— and you win the competition too easily, you have to check you aren’t being screwed. But if the good is mass-produced to the point where you‘re not clearly competing with others for it, then there’s no reason to wonder why others are letting you win?

Not sure this was the right structure for this post? The point you’re trying to make ("If someone’s trading with you and you can’t think why it would be in their interest to do that, it’s probably not a good trade for you"?) is interesting, and it’s the kind of argument where examples are welcome, but in this case, there’s something with giving just examples and no explanation of them that doesn’t quite work, and allows us to misunderstand the point/not pinpoint exactly what’s being said?

Interesting: my first thought was something like "yes, but it doesn’t solve the problem of when you really don’t ever want to do that thing at all", but it seems that when that happens, it’s either that you shouldn’t even have tried putting that thing on your to-do list in the first place, or, more commonly, that your procrastination has turned into a seething hatred for your tasks and for how bad you are at getting them done. That method sounds like a good way to avoid building up the latter. 
 

Might be a little more difficult if you happen to have a crappy executive function and a find routines helpful to not forget some tasks, though?

I agree, as most people here probably do. But it always seems weird to me to see that sort of things being framed as "X is disinforming people by optimizing for clicks", or generally, "X is doing a bad thing"—which you kinda did, though not too much. Some people, and disproportionately the ones who think deeply enough to notice that sort of things, are quite aware that this is what they’re doing. But most are just not thinking enough about it? Thinking hard about what one does is pretty uncommon, after all. But then, the point I just made is obvious: it’s ... (read more)

Really interesting! It seems written for STEM majors, somewhat more obviously so than the average LW post, to the point that I wasn’t sure I’d finish it when I started reading, but it turned out to be interesting enough that I didn‘t mind having to bridge the extra inferential distance by recalling to memory as much as I could of my high-school physics. Thanks.

May I also recommend a certain famous paper by Aron et al. (1998)? The authors came up with a questionnaire specifically for ‘the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness’. So, a bunch of questions which make for lively, interesting conversation, while allowing you to learn about the other person—though I’m sure the way the press referred to it as ‘questions that lead to love’ was more than a little overblown.

Thanks, that’s not how I would have though of it on my own, I learnt a lot :-) Marrying a witness is crazy (I assume they didn’t go through with it, but, huh… was the witness okay with the idea of getting married, or just what the …)

Interesting! But, when they’re trying to hoodwink you into parroting their talking points, it could be either because they see you as untrustworthy, part of the court system, or because they genuinely think the way to get off the hook is to have their attorney declare that actually they’re 100% innocent because of some convoluted story, the way it happens in movies, and they don‘t think that all the way through. That latter point is definitely a lot of what you describe, but would you say they trust you, or do they also lie because they see you as untrustworthy?

[quick opinion, late at night, likely wrong]: the reason why parasocial relationships are usually seen as bad is more or less that they’re shallower than normal relationship, and are relationships with the curated persona of the actually successful person behind, not with the actual person. That makes it super easy to just project what we want them to be on our parasocial friends, to be friends with an idea in our head, or with something we see as "ourselves but better". On the other hand, those are mostly reasons to avoid having only or almost only paraso... (read more)

I think a lot of what you wrote boils down to "it’s hard to both set and respect boundaries if you’re too insecure", which should probably be / is kinda supposed to be "Not Being a Jerk 101" or something we learn as children, but I guess a reminder is always welcome—I certainly could have used it sometimes myself. 

The way I see it is that "boundaries" are about the fact that you can’t decide how others feel, or make them feel in a certain way. If someone comes up to you saying that blue is their favourite colour, you know it wouldn’t make any sense to... (read more)

Really interesting quote, thanks for sharing it! 

Well-written post. Really looking forward to the next ones.

I agree. Hooray for hyphens! We want more hyphens to-day!

I think it’s because with the words in -ly you know they’re supposed to refer to the noun? With a "stern looking man", you might have doubts whether the guy is stern-looking or both "stern" and "looking" at something, because stern is an adjective. A sternly looking man can’t both be sternly and be looking.

Quite cool! Reminded me of a video taken from an old TV show where they had an archeologist against one of those pyramidiots (real word) whose favourite pastime is ‘discovering’ that sort of spurious coincidences and writing books about it. The archeologist made the same argument you did, that if you’re trying to find any two things that match among a set of a million things, you’ll find a lot of matches. Or, as he put it "you can find anything if you’re just looking for anything you fancy". He handled it rather well: before going into the studio, he had t... (read more)

True!

In my (limited) experience, in college, social relationships become more complex, which will likely put more strain on the social cognition capacity of an autistic person. Not to mention that ASD shares a lot of symptoms with ADHD, including executive function issues, which can make studying somewhat more difficult. But I’m not sure to what extent it’s something that people here already do, or what one would need to do about it.

On the other hand, I suspect it’s quite possible to be too keenly aware of your mental health issues: if you’re on social med... (read more)

Really interesting, very useful to make sense of part of my behaviour and other people’s, but I’m not sure we should assume people just are either people pleasers or arrogant? I see both kinds of behaviour in myself, depending mostly on what I am having difficulty with. (Or is it just that I feel like I’m too arrogant while in fact acting like a people-pleaser?)

Upvoted because it really makes me think, and I can relate with it a lot. The other day, I was wondering about executive function (the psychology concept that encompasses Eliezer’s ‘executive nature’ but also things like mustering the ability to focus on your homework for more than five seconds). Not sure if it is relevant, but executive function seems to include "emotional regulation", so there’s probably some psychology research on the question of how panic can reduce our ability to get things done, even beyond actual panic disorders.

Good point, thanks! I read that too quickly as something more like "just edit more" than "writing without editing isn’t a good way to practice", so I kind of misinterpreted it.