I've seen a lot of pushback against dishonesty in the EA and LW communities (this post and this post), and some promotion of radical honesty, but I don't think I've ever seen a steelman of lying. I recently spoke with a rationalist friend about this, and it seems that some...
Epistemic Status: Wisdom gleaned from years of meditation. There are many ways we could create societal collapse. Creating an engineered pandemic, triggering a nuclear catastrophe, developing a computer virus to permanently crash the global economy etc. Now you may be thinking about trying out one of these. Most value is...
I wonder what you think of the super-setting weights vs. HIIT trade-off?
I've gone full circle on this - I used to prefer HIIT, then I switched to hypertrophy-style weight training (mainly after watching "exercise science youtube, RP etc."), now I've gone back to HIIT for most workouts. A typical workout will look like a 21-15-9 progression of 5 or 6 exercises, e.g. weighted squats, pull-ups, burpees, lunges, kettlebell swings, press-ups, leg raises, box jumps, or (relatively light) deadlifts or olympic lifts for 15-25 mins. My heart rate usually stays above 140, and hits VO2 max at some point.
To me, HIIT feels way better, and more time efficient. Hypertrophy training (even with supersets, which are definitely better) still feels a bit more like a chore, and I never get a "buzz".
I don't have good enough theory of mind to know which is best to recommend to others, though.
There's a world of difference between "let's just continue doing this research project on something obscure with no theory of impact because penicillin" and "this is more likely than not to become irrelevant in 18 months time, but if it works, it will be a game-changer".
Robustness and generalizability are subcomponents of the expected value of your work/research. If you think that these are neglected, and that your field is too focused on the "impact" components of EV, i.e. there are too many moon shots, please clarify that, but your analogy fails to make this argument.
As it is, I suspect that optimizing for robust generalizability is a sure-fire way of ensuring that most people become "very general helpers", which seems like a very harmful thing to promote.
Despite finishing your comment in a way that I hope we can all just try to ignore... you make an interesting point. The Pollywog example works well, if accurate. If wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world, it follows that wild animal pleasure could easily the best thing in the world, and it might be a huge opportunity to do good in the world if we can identify species for which this is true. This seems like one of the only ways to make the world net-positive, if we do choose to maintain biological life.
But, tragically, I think that's a difficult case to make for most animals. Omnizoid addresses... (read more)
If you'll forgive diving into the linguistics here, English is atypical in that we have a distinctive present perfect.
In French, the present perfect - type construction (passé composé) has subsumed the past simple, which is now reserved for literate or archaic uses, so you use that for any past experience. But you can use something close to our future perfect with a similar sense: (I will have finished my degree by March/ "J'aurai terminé mon diplôme d'ici mars"). In Chinese (and other Sino languages), there's a present-perfect type construction, albeit used less consistently (e.g. have been to... quguo 去过）, but it's very awkward to use future perfect-style constructions: “I just want to... (read more)
I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.
Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.
It seems... (read more)
I explained why I think tracing back personal history is impractical.
Your separate method to spot check my model is just a simplified version of the same model.
Well, you can stick your own numbers into the model and see what you get - a few tweaks in the estimates puts farmer ancestors higher, as would assuming more prehistoric lineage collapses.
For example, if you think that almost everyone who had offspring from 2000BC-1200AD was your ancestor, then you get more farmer ancestors. I initially put it closer to 40% (assuming little to no Sub-Saharan or Native American ancestry, and a more gradual spread throughout Eurasia), but the model is sensitive to these estimates.
From a "Eurasia-centric" perspective, my sense is that personal ancestry doesn't make a major difference except for pockets like Siberia and Iceland, perhaps. It's noticeably different for people with some New World or Sub-Saharan ancestry, and wildly different if you're pure-blooded Aboriginal Australian.
Sorry, just read this response.
On the intuition question, my intuition was probably the other way because most of human history was non-farming, and because the vast majority of farmers (those born in the last millennium) weren't my ancestors.
I updated my model to account for an error - it's now a bit closer. 7.8 billion non-farmers to 6.4 billion farmers, and 4.9 billion exclusive farmers, but I still basically stand by the logic.
To respond to your question, why I didn't pick a fixed number of personal ancestors:
We have fewer recent ancestors, assuming 16 generations, we'd have around 20k to 50k ancestors at 1600. (2^16 - inbreeding). If we want to count these ancestors... (read more)
Ah, interesting. His Guerre des intelligences does seem more obviously accelerationist, but his latest book gives slightly different vibes, so perhaps his views are changing.
But my sense is that he actually seems kind of typical of the polémiste tradition in French intellectual culture, where it's more about arguing with flair and elegance than developing consistent arguments. So it might be difficult to find a consistent ideology behind his combination of accelerationism, a somewhat pessimistic transhumanism, and moderate AI fear.
I've seen a lot of pushback against dishonesty in the EA and LW communities (this post and this post), and some promotion of radical honesty, but I don't think I've ever seen a steelman of lying. I recently spoke with a rationalist friend about this, and it seems that some of the most basic arguments for lying seem to be simply skipped over. Although they may seem a little tongue-in-cheek, and I, of course, see the value of honesty in virtue ethics/ game theory contexts, I think arguments against lying tend to simply ignore these fairly obvious and rational reasons to lie.
So, as someone with a history of lying (mainly as a... (read 664 more words →)
Epistemic Status: Wisdom gleaned from years of meditation.
There are many ways we could create societal collapse.
Creating an engineered pandemic, triggering a nuclear catastrophe, developing a computer virus to permanently crash the global economy etc.
Now you may be thinking about trying out one of these. Most value is in the far future and, in a collapse scenario, we would probably be more likely to sustain moral progress than technological progress (because 'moral infrastructure' is more likely to stay intact than technological and global trade infrastructure). Creating a moderate collapse scenario, with a high level of depopulation, will definitely give us more time and probably more societal wisdom to focus on getting past the... (read 457 more words →)
I definitely appreciate these scenarios, but it's worth looking at where things don't seem to fit, because people will often use these details to dismiss them.
In particular, this section seems to clash with my understanding of conflict logistics and incentives.
As far as I can tell, it's 1) practically unfeasible and 2) misaligned with both... (read more)