LESSWRONG
LW

All of Blacknsilver's Comments + Replies

1kromem
It's not propaganda. OP clearly believes strongly in the sentiments discussed in the post, and its mostly a timeline of personal response to outside events than a piece meant to misinform or sway others regarding those events. And while you do you in terms of your mental health, people who want to actually be "less wrong" in life would be wise to seek out and surround themselves by ideas different from their own. Yes, LW has a certain broad bias, and so ironically for most people here I suspect it serves this role "less well" than it could in helping most of its users be less wrong. But particularly if you disagree with the prevailing views of the community, that makes it an excellent place to spend your time in listening, even it if can create a somewhat toxic environment for partaking in discussions and debate. It can be a rarity to find spaces where people you disagree with take time to write out well written and clearly thought out pieces on their thoughts and perspectives. At least in my own lived experiences, many of my best insights and ideas were the result of strongly disagreeing with something I read and pursuing the train of thought resulting from that exposure. Sycophantic agreement can give a bit of a dopamine kick, but I tend to find it next to worthless for advancing my own thinking. Give me an articulate and intelligent "no-person" any day over a "yes-person." Also, very few topics are actually binaries even if our brains tend towards categorizing them as such. Data doesn't tend to truly map to only one axis, and it typically even mapped to a single axis it falls along a spectrum. It's possible to disagree about the spectrum of a single axis of a topic while finding insight and agreement about a different axis. Taking what works and leaving what doesn't is probably the most useful skill one can develop in information analysis.
2Tobes
I'd appreciate seeing the post that you mentioned, and part of me does worry that you are right. Part of me worries that this is all just a form of group mental illness. That I am have been sucked into a group that was brought together through a pathological obsession with groundless abstract prediction and a sad-childhood-memories-induced intuition that narratives about the safety of powerful actors are usually untrustworthy. That fears about AI are an extreme shadow of these underlying group beliefs and values. That we are just endlessly group-reinforcing our mental-ill-health-backed doomy predictions about future powerful entities. I put weight on this part of me having some or all of the truth. But I have other parts that tell me that these ideas just all make sense. In fact, the more grounded, calm and in touch with my thoughts and feelings I am - the more I think/feel that acknowledging AI risk is the healthiest thing that I do.
2DPiepgrass
I can't recall another time when someone shared their personal feelings and experiences and someone else declared it "propaganda and alarmism". I haven't seen "zero-risker" types do the same, but I would be curious to hear the tale and, if they share it, I don't think anyone one will call it "propaganda and killeveryoneism".
7Gurkenglas
Sure, he's trying to cause alarm via alleged excerpts from his life. Surely society should have some way to move to a state of alarm iff that's appropriate, do you see a better protocol than this one?
We might be missing some key feature of AI takeoff; it'll probably seem like "we could've seen this coming"
Blacknsilver30

The main thing I've been wrong about so far has been my initial assumption that some giga-autist on 4chan would create the first AGI after spending 16 hours a day in his basement for months and months. Unfortunately, turns out all it takes to get an intelligent AI is lots of computing power. Makes sense since the entire rest of existence only cares about power as opposed to "magical human creativity" but the reality of the situation still saddens me.  

  As far as the big question: AI safety. Here's my perspective on how things will happen. 

&... (read more)

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Open Thread Spring 2024
Blacknsilver86

Post upvotes are at the bottom but user comment upvotes are at the top of each comment. Sometimes I'll read a very long comment and then have to scroll aaaaall the way back up to upvote it. Is there some reason for this that I'm missing or is it just an oversight?

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5habryka
Post upvotes are both at the bottom and top, but repeating them for comments at the bottom looks a lot too cluttered. Having them at the top is IMO more important since you want to be able to tell how good something is before you read it.
"How could I have thought that faster?"
Blacknsilver5-9

Isn't this a normal thing all humans do? "What did I intend, what actually happened, where can I Improve?" along with a quick cost-benefit analysis.

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quetzal_rainbow297

I think difference between what you are describing and what is meant here is captured in this comment:

There's a phenomenon where a gambler places their money on 32, and then the roulette wheel comes up 23, and they say "I'm such a fool; I should have bet 23".

More useful would be to say "I'm such a fool; I should have noticed that the EV of this gamble is negative." Now at least you aren't asking for magic lottery powers.

Even more useful would be to say "I'm such a fool; I had three chances to notice that this bet was bad: when my partner was trying to expl

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My Clients, The Liars
Blacknsilver31

Any recommendations for other places where lawyers write about their daily experiences?

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4frontier64
You can probably walk into a random law office and ask the attorney to tell you war stories. There’s a lot of supply for that and very little demand.
6ymeskhout
Baby, I'm the only one you need. The closest author I found would be the The Secret Barrister from the UK.
If you weren't such an idiot...
Blacknsilver62

Probably >90% of people I know are aware that exercise, sleep and food are important. The reason they don't do them or do them poorly is not a lack of knowledge, it's a lack of dopamine or motivation or whatever you wanna call it.

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Self-administered EMDR without a therapist is very useful for a lot of things!
Blacknsilver20

I was just reading about EMDR in "The Body Keeps the Score" and thinking how nice it'd be if my psychiatrist wasn't stuck in the 19th century. I will try this out on my own and edit (or maybe reply) later on with my thoughts and experiences.

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Open Thread With Experimental Feature: Reactions
Blacknsilver27

I think the "Support" icon looks like a garbage bin and I find that hilarious.

Reply4
Writing this post as rationality case study
Blacknsilver-2-4

I think this is a trap a lot of blog-posters and similar fall into. You're not motivated by writing itself being fun, you're motivated by the desire for attention. The former you can control, the latter you cannot.   
The boring answer would be "keep writing, 10% of the posts get 90% of the views, maybe you'll get lucky next time". This is kind of true but also kind of gambler's fallacy.  

If I were you, I'd decide on a specific number of further posts to write and if nothing gets any traction, I'd simply stop and move on to something else. I don't know if that's possible for you, maybe your addiction is more debilitating. But those are my 2c.

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3Ben Amitay
I'm not sure if it is on purpose or just going along with the spirit of the post, but your comment seem to me more insulting than it have to be in order to deliver your explicit message. "The desire for attention" is not how I think about it, but it may very well be the case. If the reference to addiction is based serious and based on the data I have - please let me know.
An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem
Blacknsilver20

I would consider myself smarter than at least 95% of people and I couldn't complete the egg problem even with a piece of paper, much less without. I think Eliezer massively overestimates the ability of the average person to do mental math.

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2Elias
Well, intelligence doesn't equate skills. It's probably easier to aquire skills (like mental maths) with high intelligence, but no matter the intelligence, you still need to learn it. P(easy learning | high intelligence) may be higher than P(easy learning | not high intelligence) for a given subject (f.e. mental math), but P(mental math) is not dependent on the ease of learning [P(mental math | no easy learning) would be low] but rather on actually learning/training it: P(mental math | no learning) is pretty low. So people who learn mental math may have different speeds or difficulty doing so, however I would guess that it is more dependent on educational context, curiosity, or need(,...), rather than ease of learning. But, if your self-assessment is correct, and my mentioned assumptions are as well, you should be able to remedy the predicament relatively easily ;)