All of Elizabeth's Comments + Replies
It looks like you're right that he didn't receive much funding via networks or sending churches. The podcast describes initial support coming from "friends and family", in ways that sound more like a friends and family round of start-up funding than normal tithes.
I'm still under the impression that he received initial endorsements, blessings, and mentorship from people who should have known better.
In practice, newly planted churches[1] are cults of personality (neutral valence) around the planting team, or sometimes just the lead pastor[2]. "developing a theme which highlights the vision and philosophy of ministry" and "establishing a clear church identity related to the theme and vision" is inevitably[3] about selling yourself as a brand.
It's possible to be a non-narcissist and pass this checklist, including the vision part. But it's a lot easier if you have a high opinion of yourself, few doubts, don't care about harming others, an...
Last week I got nerdsniped with the question of why established evangelical leaders had a habit of taking charismatic narcissists and giving them support to found their own churches[1]. I expected this to be a whole saga that would teach lessons on how selecting for one set of good things secretly traded off against others. Then I found this checklist on churchplanting.com. It’s basically “tell me you’re a charismatic narcissist who will prioritize growth above virtue without telling me you’re a…“. And not charismatic in the sense of asking reasonabl...
From Auren. Note we had just been talking about church planting, and Auren has no way to reset state. We'd also previously talked about my taste in stand-up comics.
My biggest outstanding question is "why did church network leaders give resources to a dude who had never/barely been to church to start his own?" There were probably subtler warning signs but surely they shouldn't have been necessary once you encountered that fact and the fact that he was proud of it. If anyone has insight or sources on this I'd love to chat.
Sometimes people deliberately fill their environment with yes-men and drive out critics. Pointing out what they're doing doesn't help, because they're doing it on purpose. However there are ways well intentioned people end up driving out critics unintentionally, and those are worth talking about.
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church (podcast) is about a guy who definitely drove out critics deliberately. Mark Driscoll fired people, led his church to shun them, and rearranged the legal structure of the church to consolidate power. It worked, and his power wa...
PSA: If you are older than ~30 you may have only received 1 dose of MMR vaccine (which includes measles), and should consider a second one. I have not done the EV math on this.
in 1989 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) all shifted from recommending 1 dose of the MMR vaccine to 2, with the second dose coming between 4-6 years old, because of outbreaks in adults who received only 1 dose. This means almost everyone who was 7 or older in 1...
Recently Timothy TL and I published a podcast on OpenPhil and GoodVentures. As part of this, we contacted 16 people and organizations asking for comment. They were given access to the full recording as well as a searching transcript.
- Responded with small correction- 2
- Responded with medium size correction- 1
- Responded with long correction- 2
- Asked for more time- 2 (counted in other categories as well)
- We offered one week to tell us if they were going to respond, an additional week to give a response that would be included in the recording, and longer for someth
Justis upped the clarity of my writing by 10% with his constant reminders to clarify what I mean by "this", "that", and "things".
1"I told you so" is correct if you told someone something, they ignore it, and you were right.
I had a good time at LessOnline last year and expect to have a good time this year, but if Cremieux somehow ruins it for me, Eukaryote is absolutely entitled to tell me "I told you so".
2I was pointing at the capacity to form a dependence on it, especially without realizing the extent, rather than decision making per-se.
The plan was to build up some back catalog and then decide. Right now it looks like we're only going to do two more episodes so it doesn't seem worth setting up.
2Thank you, I'm going to investigate this.
I write shorter sentences thanks to the editing work of LW editor @JustisMills and the book Several Short Sentences About Writing.
I liked this post a lot more than I expected to, but I'm disappointed the only examples of lying are a combination of people who have no right to the information and people who are better off for you lying (in a way that gives them truer beliefs than if you'd told the literal truth).
The hard cases are much more interesting. What about lying to my landlord about renting a room on airbnb? What about saying your class will make people millionaires for the low low price of $1,000 (hey, it could happen)? What about hiding the rats from the health inspector?
I would love to hear more about yc (and especially how you think it changed over time)
4 months ago I shared that I was taking sublingual vitamins and would test their effect on my nutrition in 2025. This ended up being an unusually good time to test because my stomach was struggling and my doctor took me off almost all vitamins, so the sublinguals were my major non-food source (and I've been good at extracting vitamins from food). I now have the "after" test results. I will announce results in 8 days- but before then, you can bet on Manifold. Will I judge my nutrition results to have been noticeably improved over the previous results?...
Hank Green on the worst things about no longer having cancer:
- During cancer you have a team of high status people actively working for your benefit. Suddenly, they are gone.
- You are not actually done.
- The cancer could return.
- you have to monitor for the cancer's return, so every weird thing your body does now feels threatening. This will never entirely go away.
- You have made a bunch of cancer friends, some of whom are doing much worse than you.
- The cancer and the treatment both leave a permanent mark on your body,
- including permanent disability.
- your you has gone
- Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I'm skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it's hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Assuming arguendo this is true: if you care primarily about sex, hiring sex workers is orders of magnitude more efficient than marriage. Therefor the existence of a given marriage is evidence both sides get something out of it besides sex.
female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.
That's the stereotype, but men are the ones who die sooner if divorced, which suggests they're getting a lot out of marriage.
ETA: looked it up, divorced women die sooner as well, but the effect is smaller despite divorce having a bigger financial impact on women.
But did it inspire them to try to stop CelestAI or to start her? I guess you might need some more drinks for that one...
12I tried to invite Iceman to LessOnline, but I suspect he no longer checks the old email associated with that account. If anyone knows up to date contact info, I’d appreciate you intro-ing us or just letting him know we’d love to have him join.
follow up: if you would disagree-vote with a react but not karma downvote, you can use the opposite react.
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1While we're at it, can it be >99% to match <1%?
1As a follow up on my previous poll: If you've worked closely with someone who used stimulants sometimes but not always, how did stimulants affect their ability to update? Please reply with emojis <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement".
Comments with additional details are welcome.
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1(Mods: Consider having these number thingies sorted separately from other reacts, and by the number thingy rather than by # of votes.)
(Oh number thingy = percentage)
6Sorry, I missed this too. The first-pass transcript was indeed done by AI. I went over it probably dozens of times, but I guess not enough.
Can you share data on the size of PauseAI protests over time?
Yeah the SF protests have been about constant (25-40) in attendance, but we have more locations now and have put a lot more infrastructure in place
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1Note that at time of donation, Altman was co-chair of the board but 2 years away from becoming CEO.
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2Reasoning through a new example:
There's no google maps and no internet to help with finding a hotel. You haven't chosen a destination city yet.
You could work out how to choose hotels and facilitate the group identifying the kind of hotel it wants. They're both robustly useful.
You could start picking out hotels in cities at random. Somehow my intuition is that doing this when you don't know the city is still marginally useful (you might choose that city. Obviously more useful the smaller the set of possible cities), but nonzero useful.
OTOH...
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1One possible reason: bouncing off early > putting in a lot of effort and realizing you'll still never get traction > being kicked out. Giving people false hope hurts them.
I don't think you should never help out a new person, but I reserve it for people with very specific flaws in otherwise great posts.
oh not at all, I think I'm failing on both fronts
1...We're looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to "represent one consistent thing". It's not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases "overall metabolic rate" or "stress". It's not an accident that those hormones' signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason
How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update.
People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement". Comments with additional details are welcome.
1155421Just pushes the trust problem down a level. Lots of recruiting firms advertise positions that don't exist so that they have resumes "just in case"
I didn't read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don't think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it's more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women.
Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.
I loved the old mealsquares but have been very disappointed in version 2.0. They're similar to Tend bars, nutritionally dense but not filling.
are you correcting for the year the test was taken? The SAT grading has shifted dramatically over time.
A conversation I had in 2021
Them: Man I wish I could do X, it's so much more valuable then what I'm doing right now, but I can't.
Me: But could you though?
I'd forgotten this, but in 2023 they came up to thank me because they were doing X, were pleased with the choice, and assigned me some credit for it. I've heard other people spontaneously praise project X, without knowing I'd been involved in any way.
It's also very common for seeing someone at a conference to move them along the path of hiring me. Rarely from 0-> hired, but maybe from 0-> idea, or from "been meaning to"->hired, or something in the middle.
short answer: no. Possibly because of hepcidin.
I'm having trouble parsing but I think the first point is about the mutation rate in humans? I don't expect that to be informative about flu virus except as a floor.
This post was hard for me to read. A few months after I wrote it I developed medical issues that are still ongoing and really sapped my ability to work. Right now I feel on the precipice of developing Large Scale Ambitions, and that I'd probably have taken the plunge to something bigger if I'd hadn't gotten so sick for so long.
On the other hand, I spent the past 2 years trying to dramatically reform Effective Altruism. I expected to quit in May but got sucked back in via my work with Timothy TL. I didn't think of this as ambitious, but looking ...
Thank you for the explanation.
Is there a reason you deflected when I originally asked about AI assistance? To me that's a much bigger deal than the AI assistance itself.
I think this is a useful concept that I use several times a year. I don't use the term Dark Forest I'm not sure how much that can be attributed to this post, but this post is the only relevant thing in the review so we'll go with that.
I also appreciate how easy to read and concise this post is. It gives me a vision of how my own writing could be shorter without losing impact.
I didn't keep good track of them, but this post led to me receiving many DMs that it had motivated someone to get tested. I also occasionally indirectly hear about people who got tested, so I think the total impact might be up to 100 people, of which maybe 1/3 had a deficiency (wide confidence intervals on both numbers). I'm very happy with that impact.
I do wish I'd created a better title. The current one is very generic, and breaks LW's "aim to inform not persuade" guideline.
My ultimate goal with this post was to use vegan advocacy as an especially legible example of a deepseated problem in effective altruism, which we could use to understand and eventually remove the problem at the root. As far as I know, the only person who has tried to use it as an example is me, and that work didn't have much visible effect either. I haven't seen anyone else reference this post while discussing a different problem. It's possible this happens out of sight (Lincoln Quirk implies this here), but if I'd achieved my goal it would be clearly visible.
This theory feels insufficient to me, or like it's missing a step. It makes sense to me for people to pay when their preferred porn is undersupplied, but incest porn is now abundant. You need a more specific reason incest fans will pay even when they don't have to.
Additionally, "but you're my stepdad" isn't equivalent to a couple of foot shots. Lots of people are (or at least were) turned off by incest.