When I was a kid and 9/11 happened, some people online were talking about the effect on the stock market. My mom told me that the stock exchange was down the street from the WTC and not damaged, so I thought the people on the Internet were all wrong.

warns not to give it too much credit – if you ask how to ‘fix the error’ and the error is the timeout, it’s going to try and remove the timeout. I would counter that no, that’s exactly the point.

I think you misunderstand. In the AI Scientist paper, they said that it was "clever" in choosing to remove the timeout. What I meant in writing that: I think that's very not clever. Still dangerous.

I'm still a little confused. The idea that "the better you can do something yourself, the less valuable it is to do it yourself" is pretty paradoxical. But isn't "the better you can do something yourself, the less downside is there in doing it yourself instead of outsourcing" exactly what you'd expect?

Hmmm? How does this support the point that "the better you can do something yourself, the less valuable it is to do it yourself."

In Chinese, the words for "to let someone do something" and "to make someone do something" are the same, 让 (ràng). My partner often makes this confusion. This one it did not get even after several promptings, up until I asked about the specific word.

Then I asked why both a Swede and a Dane I know say "increased with 20%" instead of "increased by 20%." It guessed that it had something to do with prepositions, but did not volunteer the preposition in question. (Google Translate answered this; "increased by 20%" translates to "ökade med 20%," and "med" commonly translates to "with.")


But then I made up a story based on my favorite cognate*, and it nailed it.



So, 2/4.


* Yes, this is a true cognate. The German word "Gift" meaning "poison" allegedly descends from euphemistic uses of the English meaning of "gift" 

More discussion here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gW34iJsyXKHLYptby/ai-capabilities-vs-ai-products

You're probably safe so long as you restrict distribution to the minimum group with an interest. There is conditional  privilege if the sender has a shared interest with the recipient. It can be lost through overpublication, malice, or reliance on rumors.

A possible solution against libel is to provide an unspecific accusation, something like "I say that X is seriously a bad person and should be avoided, but I refuse to provide any more details; you have to either trust my judgment, or take the risk

FYI, this doesn't actually work. https://www.virginiadefamationlawyer.com/implied-undisclosed-facts-as-basis-for-defamation-claim/

It does not take luck to find someone who can help you stare into the abyss. Anyone can do it. 

It's pretty simple: Get a life coach.

That is, helping people identify, face, and reason through difficult decisions is a core part of what life coaches do. And about all the questions that Ben cobbled together at the end (maybe not "best argument for" — I don't like that one) can be found in a single place: coaching training. All are commonly used by coaches in routine work.

And there are a lot more tools than the handful than the ones Ben found. These questions are examples of a handful of techniques: eliciting alternatives, countering short-term emotion and status-quo bias, checking congruence with dentity. (Many of these have catchy names like "visioning" or less-catchy names like "identity coaching," but I can't find my coach manual right now which has them listed.)

* Noticing flinching or discongruent emotions ("I heard your voice slow when you mentioned your partner, and I'm wondering if there's something behind it")

* Finding unaddressed issues ("Tell me about your last hour. What caused you stress?")

* Helping you elicit and rank your values, and then check the congruence of each choice with your values
* Helping you access your intuition ("Close your eyes and breathe. Now, one day you wake up and everything's changed / put yourself into the shoes of yourself in 10 years and tell me the first thing you see ")

* Many techniques to address negative emotions around such a decision ("If you abandon this path, what does it mean about you? Now suppose a friend did it; what would you think about them?")

* Many techniques to actually make the decision ("If you made this change, what could go wrong? Now, let's take the first thing you said. Tell me 3 ways you could get more information about how likely that is to happen?")

This also implies that, if you want to be able to do it to yourself, you can pick up a coaching book ("Co-Active Coaching" is my favorite, but I've also heard recommended "The Coaching Habit") and try it, although I think it takes a lot of practice doing it on others before you can reliably turn it inward, as it is quite difficult to simultaneously focus on the concrete problem (what the coachee does) and on evaluating and guiding the thinking and feeling (what the coach does).

There have been a number of posts like this about questions to help guide rationalists through tough decisions or emotions. I think the rationality community has a lot to learn from coaching, which in some ways is all about helping people elevate their rationality to solve problems in their own life. I gave a talk on it in 2016; maybe I should write something on it.

Context: I completed coach training in 2017. The vast majority of my work is no longer in "pure" life coaching, but the skills influence me in daily life.