All of athom's Comments + Replies

athom35

Less so once they've done enough RLHF

Answer by athom30

Populations got much bigger post-Industrial revolution, after which very few people were farmers. I'm pretty sure more people who have existed were non-farmers just from that growth, by a huge margin.

But I'm not sure whether or not that should carry over to ancestors. On one hand, you can only have so many ancestors at a time, and explosive industrial population growth doesn't change that. But smaller farming populations might mean more of my family tree crossing over itself, and so fewer unique farming ancestors?

2Linch
This is wrong, if we date the Industrial revolution to ~1750.  According to this article, the halfway point for "number of humans who have ever lived" is likely before 1200 CE. 
athom20

Update: the cards have all been claimed now (at least for this round)

1WilliamKiely
How do you know the cards have been claimed for this round? Did you get a message saying as much when you tried signing up?
1WilliamKiely
Thank you! Looks like they lasted about ~7 hours.
athom20

Thanks for the post!

The Zach Weinersmith quote you mentioned goes further, in a direction that might also be relevant:

"...bravery is not cross contextual... Conversely, recklessness *is* cross contextual. Unsafe sex correlates to drug abuse."

I'm pretty reckless in some ways, but need to build courage in other areas.Fostering courage where I need it, turning my recklessness into courage where it's helping me, and minimising it where it isn't, all seem like worthwhile things to try.

athom30

Best guess: because they've found the Haskell expertise they were after. That tweet is nearly two years old now, and I'm pretty sure Ed Kmett joined more recently than that.

athom20

Is there any data on how people feel like rationality has changed their lives? Somewhat separate to what we're doing as a community / what some of the most successful rationalists are up to, it seems worth trying to work out how engaging more with rationality changes things for people. I'm pretty sure my engagement with rationality has helped me become stronger; if it turned out not to help most people that would definitely change how I presented things.

I'm planning to write a sequence on all positive and negative effects the practice of rationality has had on my life, and I already have one post on pitfalls. Future posts will probably be about things like

  • forming realistic expectations
  • reading LW in a way that's less reality-masking
  • a list of all the low-hanging fruit I've found
  • a list of interventions I've tried
  • weird effects from learning some rationality techniques but not others
  • the benefits of diversifying one's sources of knowledge
  • re-learning how to interact with non-rationalist society

These wi... (read more)

5Mary Chernyshenko
I kind of view this as a process of sequential self-sorting. Some people go on and become obviously successful and develop a culture with norms, I think almost fully described by the early-to-middle LW proclaimed ideals. I am not among them and can't say for certain; I am only certain they keep diversifying. Other people trickle off into the other branch which keeps branching. I am among them. I keep running into a need to express thoughts according to virtuous rules which overshadows other needs most starkly, but I don't feel inclined to make more things (including immaterial). Some thoughts have been nesting in me for years and I don't expect them to leave soon.
Answer by athom140

Ordered chronologically. In retrospect, I've assumed some pretty weak evil forces here, and mostly gone for variations on a needle-in-a-haystack type theme. 

  1. Surgically implant the pen in myself
  2. Theseus-duplicate the pen, give one duplicate to the evil forces so they leave me alone
  3. Make a second, cooler-looking pen, ‘accidentally’ lose it to evil forces
  4. Cut a hole in a dictionary/similarly boringish book, put pen in there
  5. bury the pen somewhere random
  6. carve a hole in a tree, put pen in, wait for tree to regrow over it
  7. bury the pen, in a construction site, so
... (read more)
Answer by athom90

I'm glad they don't have to work....

1. Clothes might include a bobby pin in my hair, which I could use to pick the lock

2. Wait ten years to see if anyone opens the door

3. Get on the wifi, ask someone for help

4. Find other devices in the area, communicate with them (ask for help)

5. (coerce into opening)

6. Post video of myself in room on social media, create outrage campaign

7. (If door is electronically locked, and my phone's an android) hack the network (and open door)

8. (and hack a bunch of small devices, to ddos the building’s network)

9. (..., to ddos wha

... (read more)
2ryan_b
#34 is a reasonable argument for changing some of my personal carry habits.
athom10

Nice post! I have one thing to add about timing. Because Vitamin D is fat-soluble, there's slightly better uptake if you take it with a relatively fatty meal or with milk. I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes though; taking it in the morning (with a not-fatty meal) is still enough to fix my deficiency.

2ChristianKl
It's unclear to me that uptake is a measure that has to be optimized for. 
athom20

Weird question, but if your marker action is doing something with your hands, what do you do if you're holding something at the time?

2Neel Nanda
Huh. Somehow that has never come up before... My default reaction when holding my phone was to either put the phone down, or just to tap my fingers together