All of AprilSR's Comments + Replies

I think it's obvious that you should not pursue 3D chess without investing serious effort in making sure that you play 3D chess correctly. I think there is something to be said for ignoring the shiny clever ideas and playing simple virtue ethics. 

But if a clever scheme is in fact better, and you have accounted for all of the problems inherent to clever schemery, of which there are very many, then... the burden of proof isn't literally insurmountable, you're just unlikely to end up surmounting it in practice.

(Unless it's 3D chess where the only thing you might end up wasting is your own time. That has a lower burden of proof. Though still probably don't waste all your time.)

Why do I have dozens of strong upvote and downvote strength, but no more agreement strength than before I began my strength training? Does EA not think agreement is importance?

While I would hate to besmirch the good name of the fewerstupidmistakesist community, I cannot help but feel that misunderstanding morality and decision theory enough to end up doing a murder is a stupider mistake than drawing a gun once a firefight has started, though perhaps not quite as stupid as beginning the fight in the first place.

Maybe it should have 1 in a billion priors, but that isn't very relevant. The question isn't actually decided by precisely how many bits of evidence you'd need to conclude it, it's trivial to come by strong evidence supporting the idea. 

looks like the first paragraph was accidentally put in the quote block, but isn't from ozy

That is such a bizarre claim to make but admittedly including Cosmism at all is really odd 

I could imagine something vaguely sorta like this being true but that isn't like, something I'd confidently predict is a common sort of altered mental state to fall into, having been in altered states somewhere around that cluster.

I'd suspect that like, maybe there's a component where they intuitively overestimate the dependence relative to other people, but probably it involves deliberate decisions to try to see things a certain way and stuff like that. (Though actually I have no idea what "strength of subjunctive dependence" really means, I think there are unsolved philosophical problems there.) 

Yeah, I haven't heard of this person, though it's possible someone I know knows them—that definitely sounds like the kind of person someone should be trying to check in on to me.

I think there are a lot of people out there who will be willing to tell the Ziz sympathetic side of the story. (I mean, I would if asked, though "X did little wrong" seems pretty insane for most people involved and especially for Ziz). Like, I think there's a certain sort of left anarchismish person who is just, going to be very inclined to take the broke crazy trans women's side a... (read more)

I think it is worth knowing that—I haven't heard of any examples of people who have been radicalizing in a Zizianish direction, lately, who are unaccounted for. I and people I know thought about it when we heard about the border patrol shootout, and the only person we came up with was Audere / Maximilian Snyder, who is now under arrest for the murder of Curtis Lind.

Seeing the one person you and your partner have been kind of worried about for a while... end up being the one who did a murder... it's, well, a hell of an observation to have to update on. Appa... (read more)

I am, and am friends with, many trans rationalists, and a bunch of them are lovely people, and also yes in fact the rationalist trans community does sorta tend to be fewer steps removed from the terribleness than other parts of the rationalist community.

I do not think this calls for judging people based on that one fact, it'd be kind of incredibly terrible overall if everyone who happened to know someone who did a terrible thing was shunned over it, and Ic seems to be making a relatively uncharitable read of Jessica Taylor there or something, but I can't a... (read more)

Teresa Youngblut, the other person with Ophelia at the shootout, is also known to be a Ziz fan (and in November filed a marriage application to @Audere, also a Ziz fan.) You can see most of this if you look through Jessica's Twitter.

Oh this sounds fun

I have not heard of any of these people yet

oh come on, you can't just be the kind of person who talks about the thing where sometimes people end up seeing way too many synchronicities, explicitly tell me to treat everything as an ARG clue and that if it seems referential it probably is, link a bunch of youtube videos about the time i helped write a statistics paper accusing someone of cheating at minecraft, and look directly at the readers while mention guessing a birthday when your ao3 account was registered on my birthday?

i am well aware by this point that if you look hard enough you're always bound to find something that seems slightly weird but jeez

I don't necessarily agree with every line in this post—I'd say I'm better off and still personally kinda like Olivia, though it's of course been rocky at times—but it does all basically look accurate to me. She stayed at my apartment for maybe a total of 1-2 months earlier this year, and I've talked to her a lot. I don't think she presented the JD Pressman thing as about "lying" to me, but she did generally mention him convincing people to keep her out of things.

There is a lot more I could say, and I am as always happy to answer dms and such, but I am some... (read more)

Yeah, I don't think it's correct to call it baseless per se, and I continue to have a lot of questions about the history of the rationality community which haven't really been addressed publicly, but I would very much not say that there's good reason to like, directly blame Michael for anything recent!

I'd already been incredibly paranoid about how closely they follow my online activities for years and years. I dunno if that counts as "conspiratorial", but to the extent it does it definitely made me less conspiratorial.

I think when I was at my most psychotic some completely deranged explanations for the "rationalists tend to be first borns" thing crossed my mind, which I guess maybe counts, but that was quickly rejected.

I have conspiratorial interpretations of things at times, which I sorta attribute to the fact that rationalists talk about conspiracies quite a lot and such?

Nope. I've never directly interacted with Vassar at all, and I haven't made any particular decisions at all due to his ideas. Like, I've become more familiar with his work as of the past several months, but it was one thing of many.

I spent a lot of time thinking about ontology and anthropics and religion and stuff... mostly I think the reason weird stuff happened to me at the same time as I learned more about Vassar is just that I started rethinking rather a lot of things at the same time, where "are Vassar's ideas worth considering?" was just one specific... (read more)

I want to say I have to an extent (for all three), though I guess there's been second-hand in person interactions which maybe counts. I dunno if there's any sort of central thesis I could summarize, but if you pointed me at like any more specific topics I could take a shot at translating. (Though I'd maybe prefer to avoid the topic for a little while.)

In general, I think an actual analysis of the ideas involved and their merits / drawbacks existing would've been a lot more helpful for me than just... people having a spooky reputation was.

...Yeah I'm well aware but probably useful context

It was historically a direct relationship, but afaik hasn't been very close in years.

Edit: Also, if the "Vassarites" are the type of group with "official stances", this is the first I've heard of it.

Not on LSD, I've done some emotional processing with others on MDMA but I don't know if I'd describe it as "targeted work to change beliefs", it was more stuff like "talk about my relationship with my family more openly than I'm usually able to."

I was introduced to belief reporting, but I didn't do very much of it and wasn't on drugs at the time.

I agree I am "more schizophrenic", that's obvious. (Edit: Though I'd argue I'm less paranoid, and beforehand was somewhat in denial about how much paranoia I did have.) I very clearly do not fit the diagnosis criteria. Even if you set aside the six months requirement, the only symptom I even arguably have is delusions and you need multiple.

Yeah, I'm not meaning to actively suggest taking psychedelics with any of them.

Some discussion of coverups can be found at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards.

I'd appreciate a rain check to think about the best way to approach things. I agree it's probably better for more details here to be common knowledge but I'm worried about it turning into just like, another unnuanced accusation? Vague worries about Vassarites being culty and bad did not help me, a grounded analysis of the precise details might have.

That's plausible. It was like a week and a half.

Edit: I do think the LSD was a contributing factor, but it's hard to separate effects of the drug from effects of the LSD making it easier for me to question ontological assumptions.

I don't love ranking people in terms of harmfulness but if you are going to do that instead of forming some more specific model then yeah I think there are very good reasons to hold this view. (Mostly because I think there's little reason to worry at all unusually much about anyone else Vassar-associated, though there could possibly be things I'm not aware of.)

No, I did not.

I have had LSD. I've taken like, 100μg maybe once, 50-75 a couple times, 25ish once or twice. No lasting consequences that I would personally consider severe, though other people would disagree I think? Like, from my perspective I have a couple weird long-shot hypotheses bouncing around my head that I haven't firmly disproven but which mostly have no impact on my behavior other than making me act slightly superstitious at times.

I had a serious psychotic episode, like, once, which didn't involve any actual attempts to induce it but did involve... (read more)

(I am happy to answer questions I just don't want to get into an argument.)

I don't actually want to litigate the details here, but I think describing me as "literally schizophrenic" is taking things a bit far.

In case it's a helpful data point: lines of reasoning sorta similar to the ones around the infohazard warning seemed to have interesting and intense psychological effects on me one time. It's hard to separate out from other factors, though, and I think it had something to do with the fact that lately I've been spending a lot of time learning to take ideas seriously on an emotional level instead of only an abstract one.

I mostly think it's too loose a heuristic and that you should dig into more details

Some of the probability questions (many worlds, simulation) are like... ontologically weird enough that I'm not entirely certain it makes sense to assign probabilities to them? It doesn't really feel like they pay rent in anticipated experience?

I'm not sure "speaking the truth even when it's uncomfortable" is the kind of skill it makes sense to describe yourself as "comfortable" with.

I think it's pretty good to keep it in mind that heliocentrism is literally speaking just a change in what coordinate system you use, but it is legitimately a much more convenient coordinate system.

Switch to neuroscience. I think we have an innate “sense of sociality” in our brainstem (or maybe hypothalamus), analogous to how (I claim) fear-of-heights is triggered by an innate brainstem “sense” that we’re standing over a precipice.

I think lately I've noticed how much written text triggers this for me varying a bit over time?

...Does that hold together as a potential explanation for why our universe is so young? Huh.

I think my ideal is to lean into weirdness in a way that doesn't rely on ignorance of normal conventions

For a while I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about specifically the versions of the idea where I couldn't easily tell how true they were... which I suppose I do think is the correct place to be paying attention to?

I think there is rather a lot of soap to be found... but it's very much not something you can find by taking official doctrine as an actual authority.

That does seem likely.

There's a complication where sometimes it's very difficult to get people not to interpret things as an instruction. "Confuse them" seems to work, I guess, but it does have drawbacks too.

I don't really think money is the only plausible explanation, here?

I think the game is sufficiently difficult.

I read this post several years ago, but I was... basically just trapped in a "finishing high school and then college" narrative at the time, it didn't really seem like I could use this idea to actually make any changes in my life... And then a few months ago, as I was finishing up my last semester of college, I sort of fell head first into Mythic Mode without understanding what I was doing very much at all.

And I'd say it made a lot of things better, definitely—the old narrative was a terrible one for me—but it was rocky in some ways, and... like, obviously... (read more)

To have a go at it:

Some people try to implement a decision-making strategy that's like, "I should focus mostly on System 1" or "I should focus mostly on System 2." But this isn't really the point. The goal is to develop an ability to judge which scenarios call for which types of mental activities, and to be able to combine System 1 and System 2 together fluidly as needed.

Thank you.

I, similarly, am pretty sure I had a lot of conformist-ish biases that prevented me from seriously considering lines of argument like this one.

Like, I'm certainly not entirely sure how strong this (and related) reasoning is, but it's definitely something one ought to seriously think about.

This post definitely resolved some confusions for me. There are still a whole lot of philosophical issues, but it's very nice to have a clearer model of what's going on with the initial naïve conception of value.