Quick note about the Beth Thomas story: from what I got from some quick research, the therapy regimen she was put through wasn't just controversial, it was absolutely harrowing and unsafe, and Beth was one of only two (!!) patients that reported being happy with it. Among the controversies, was the death of 10-yo Candace Newmaker during a "rebirthing" exercise.

I think it's tempting to find a narrative in there, like maybe the attachment therapy was only good for extreme cases and was harmful to people who only needed compassion and verbal therapy, but I think the simpler explanation is that these people had no idea what they were doing, Beth just got lucky, and the average child sexual abuse survivor would have been traumatized by attachment therapy.

I don't think there's a grand lesson here. Helping child abuse survivors is hard.

Hijacking your comment to say this: 3-4 days ago my Curated LessWrong RSS feed blew up with 20 or so posts, most of which don't reach the quality bar I usually expect from curated posts. Any idea why that happened?

I mean I guess on some level it's on me for not just marking them all as read and moving on, but still, when you've got "read all the emails in my inbox" syndrome it's a mildly disruptive experience.

Quick note: you should add alt text to the images so people with screen readers can get the same reading experience from that blog.

One aspect of this I'm curious about is the role of propaganda, and especially russian-bot-style propaganda.

Under the belief cascade model, the goal may not be to make arguments that persuade people, so much as it is to occupy the space, to create a shared reality of "Everyone who comments under this Youtube video agrees that X". That shared reality discourages people from posting contrary opinions, and creates the appearance of unanimity.

I wonder if sociologists have ever tried to test how susceptible propaganda is to cascade dynamics.

No, I think it's a fair question. Show me a non-trivial project coded end-to-end by an AI agent, and I'll believe these claims.

Off-topic, but what the heck is "The Tyranny of the Marginal Spice Jar"?

(according to claude)

I wish people would stop saying this. We shouldn't normalize relying on AI to have opinions for us. These days they can even link their sources! Just look at the sources.

I mean I guess the alternative is that people use Claude without checking and just don't mention it, so I guess I don't have a solution. But at least it would be considered embarrassing in that scenario. We should stay aware that there are better practices that don't require much more effort.

Likewise, Ev put in some innate drives related to novelty and aesthetics, with the idea that people would wind up exploring their local environment. Very sensible! But Ev would probably be surprised that her design is now leading to people “exploring” open-world video game environments while cooped up inside.

I think it's not obvious that Ev's design is failing to work as intended here.

Video games are a form of training. Some games can get pretty wireheady (Cookie Clicker), but many of the most popular, most discussed, most played games are games that exercise some parts of your brain in useful ways. The best-selling game of all times is Minecraft.

Moreover, I wouldn't be surprised if people who played Breath of the Wild were statistically more likely to go hiking afterward.

First, I could have just gone and talked to Oliver earlier.

I'd say you're underrating that option.

Part of it is domain-specific: a lot of developers start off with very little agency, and get "try to do the thing yourself before asking to the teacher how to do the thing" drilled into them; it's easy to overcorrect to "never ask for help". Learning to ask for help faster is a valuable senior developer skill.

On a more general level, "asking for help faster" is a disgustingly common answer to the question "how could I have found the solution sooner?". Life isn't an exam, you don't get points off for talking to people. (And using ChatGPT, StackOverflow, etc.)

I recommend Thinking Physics and Baba is You as sources of puzzles to start grinding on this

Mhh. Interesting. I haven't played Baba Is You in a while. It has enough puzzles that I think you could actually practice some skills with it.

I might try your routine, though I'm a bit skeptical of it.

Yeah, it seems a little weird to me that the post includes Eliezer's claim uncritically. "I totally train myself to improve on the spot, all the time" seems like a bold claim for someone who's admitted to having unusually low willpower?