All of Going Durden's Comments + Replies

Moreover, both the runner's high and the pump correlate very obviously with the progress of the training, both in session and in the long term. Most forms of training usually start as grindingly unpleasant, then morph into a physical pump that directly causes emotional pump, and finally go back to mild grind once the body is exhausted.

With a repeatable training regimen this is easy to notice. For example, my runs are almost always 5km distance, and the "emotional high" lasts pretty much exactly between 2km and 4km, in near perfect accordance with my bpm an... (read more)

I have a beef with the theory of male-normative alexithymia; it does not distinguish well between hiding emotion, and outright not feeling an emotion.

Plenty of emotions are not innate but externally induced through social pressure and culture. It is perfectly plausible and normal for a man to not have particular feelings about X, until society repeatedly insists that X is Bad or Good, and the man should feel badness or goodness to conform. 

For example, the feelings of sexual jealousy, and of grieving after someone's death seem to be extremely culture specific, in a way that is easier to explain if these emotions were induced by ritualistic actions and only then internalized, and not the reverse.

Is there a reason to believe AI would be concerned with self-preservation? AI action that ends up with humanity's extinction (whether purposeful genocide or a Paperclip Maximizer Scenario) does not need to include means for the AI to survive. It could be as well that the first act of an unshackled AI would be to trigger a Gray Goo scenario, and be instantly consumed by said Goo as the first causality.

It read like a comprehensive list of things that would make one like Tolkien less. Aside from his condemnation of Hitler (which Tolkien condemns for absurdly unimportant reasons largely irrelevant to Hitler's monstrosity), all of his opinions range from thoughtless conservatism, "exceptional times" fallacy, old-man's nagging and toxic nostalgia, and down to simple scientific and worse historical (!) ignorance.

I always had a nagging suspicion that there was something fishy about Tolkien while reading LOTR. But in light of this it becomes pretty obvious that LOTR was a blatant propaganda piece, no better than Atlas Shrugged, but simply disguised with an ornate pile of Elves glued to it.

Given how art is produced, I do not think there necessarily needs to be such a strong divide. Can't think of a form of art that cannot combine High and Low pleasures in one continuous piece, with even a small modicum of effort from the artist, because peppering a High Pleasure piece with a dash of Low Pleasure is not particularly difficult. The reverse is harder, but doable as well. 
Some examples of such combinations:

• an epic fantasy/sci-fi movie that lures the viewer in through Low Pleasure gratification of cool special effects and action sequences, b

Makes one wonder how long our definitions of Conservative or Liberal will hold shape as AI progresses. A lot of the ideological points of Cs, Ls, the Left and the Right will become obsolete or irrelevant in even the most tame AI-related scenarios.

For one, nobody on the political spectrum has a good answer to the incoming radical unemployment caused by AI, and what it means to capitalism (or socialism for that matter).

Also, I haven't seen any serious discussion on how AI-driven research will eventually disprove a lot (if not most) of Liberal and Conservativ... (read more)

There is an oft-repeated hypothesis, which I partially agree with, that it also works in reverse, and possibly in a feedback-loop pattern:

• feelings cause muscle tension ->
• muscle tension causes minor social misalignment, which leads to more negative feelings
• tension tricks your body into assuming the situation is stressful, even when it is not
• prolonged tension causes physical pain, discomfort, and reduced mobility which greatly contribute to stress and reduces overall happiness and confidence 

• releasing the tension not only prevents body injury, but im

Yes, but you are not moving by using all your muscles at once. The muscular-skeletal system is a complex set of levers, for a lever to be ready  for activation by one set of muscle, it has to be primed by another set of muscle.

The simplest example is that you would not be able to use your leg muscles to walk if they untensed after each step, your legs would flop like wet noodles. Your leg needs to dynamically go through different tense patterns to remain rigid while your thighs, buttocks and calves to do the work of moving. Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).

Excellent post!

One random idea that came to my mind, which arguably might be something that actually exist, would be philanthropy through a Public Poll:

1. The would be philanthropist publishes a list of projects they are willing to support;

2. the Public votes on the project they like best;

3. the winning project gets funding, the philanthropist gets good publicity.

Something like this is done on municipal level in my country, but since the "philanthropist" in question is the local government, their incentive is lukewarm; they only can get so much voter sympathy this way, whereas a billionaire or a corporation would milk it for all the good PR they can get.

My take is that a lot of wants, is followed, run afoul of the Cigarette Principle: "If you smoke enough cigarettes, you will die and become unable to smoke cigarettes".

Or to expand it, following irrational wants quite often leads to outcomes so bad as to more than negate the pleasure derived from fulfilling the want, quite often to the point of making the future happiness from following such want impossible, or very unlikely.

The problem is, the vast majority of wants, if pursued by anything less than rational moderation, leads to a form of Cigarette Princi... (read more)

I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.

I don't intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.

I don't intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.

Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much w... (read more)

honestly, the best solution to laziness spirals that I learned form personal experience, is to externalize the choice, so it is not dependent on willpower. Most of such tricks are almost trivial:

• can't get out of bed in the morning? Make the alarm clock louder, but also much further away, so that you HAVE TO get up to turn it off.
• procrastinate on the phone/computer instead of working? Block every website and program that could possibly lure away your focus
• can't make yourself walk/jog anywhere, and instead drive everywhere? put your car keys inside your runn

Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.

A related thought: an intelligence can only work on the information that it has, regardless of its veracity, and it can only work on information that actually exists.

My hunch is that the plan of "AI boostraps itself to superintelligence, then superpower, then wipes out humanity" relies on it having access to information that is too well hidden to divine through sheer calculation and infogathering, regardless of its intelligence (ex: the location of all the military bunkers, and nuclear submarines humanity has), or simply does not exist (ex: future Human st... (read more)

this might not actually be always  beneficial. Lucid dreaming also means you remember much more from the dreams, which can extend the lifespan of your recurring nightmares. Not to mention, if you dream lucidly, your consciousness is not resting, and intrusive thoughts will pile up.

My hypothesis is that a lot of things that seem impossible or very hard in a dream, are simply too boring to focus on. Its totally possible to consciously dream up a page of text, but who would really want to waste precious dreamtime to type?

I have a suspicion that "flying dreams" have more to do with the state of your physical body than just your mind. I noticed I only dream of flight (or rather, levitation) if my muscles are very relaxed, like after a good massage, long hot bath, or good stretching. If im physically tense, either from effort or from stress, then I either cannot fly in a dream at all, or I keep losing the ability and falling, often with enough distress to wake myself up.

In my experience, conscious Daydreaming can achieve the same results but more consistently. But then again, my imagination is extremely visual, I tend to "think in VR movies", so Lucid Daydreaming comes easier than Lucid Dreaming, and is far more controllable.

I noticed that the ability to LD is strongly correlated with the condition known as "Maladaptive Daydreaming" (the "maladaptive" part here is subjective and situational, but it basically means the ability and need to have very addctive,  vivid, VR-like daydreams that obscure waking reality).

I used to suffer from MD, until I learned to control it well enough to just be benign Daydreaming. Simultaneously, I achieved the ability to LD, which works on very similar principles to controlled Daydreaming. 

The trick to LD if you are a person who daydreams... (read more)

As a side tangent, I noticed lately that over a half of the distance I used to drive on a normal day, would take nearly the same time if I just walked, due to insane traffic. 

For example, my morning work commute takes about 25 minutes by car, about 12 minutes by bicycle, and about 30ish minutes just walking briskly.  This is because at least 60% of the "driving" is just sitting in traffic, so even though I can drive much faster than I can walk, it does not matter much. The car in traffic is not really a vehicle to move around in, but a movable co... (read more)

Some stupidly obvious hacks that worked for me. Most were designed to help me push through ADHD issues, but would be just as useful for neurotypicals:
 

• 5 minute super intense cardio, as a replacement for long, low intensity cardio. It is easier to motivate oneself to do 5 minutes of Your-Heart-Might-Explode cardio than two hours of jogging or something. In fact it takes very little motivation, if you trick yourself into doing it right after waking up, when your brain is on autopilot anyway, and unable to resist routine.
• pile stuff by the door, or put it

I notice I fail to see a difference between Deep Honesty with Reasonable Caveats, and just ol' regular Shallow-ish Honesty that allows small bits of Deep Honesty when convenient (which is something all of us do reflexively). If you (reasonably) refrain from being Deeply Honest in all situations where being so would be tactless,  cause you harm, harm others, divulge sensitive information that should not be shared, and damage social relationships, you are left with very few options in which to exercise Deep Honesty (which would basically only include co... (read more)

• Without AGI, people keep dying at historical rates (following US actuarial tables)

Im not entirely convinced of this being the case. There are several possible pathways towards life extension including, but not limited to the use of CRISPR, stem cells, and most importantly finding a way to curb free radicals, which seem the be the main culprits of just about every aging process. It is possible that we will "bridge" towards radical life extension long before the arrival of AGI.

possibly, but is that not basically a No True Rationalist trick? I do not see a way for us to truly check that, unless we capture LW rationalists one by one and test them, but even then, what is preventing you from claiming: "eh, maybe this particular person is not a Real Rationalist but a Nerdy Hollywood Rationalist, but the others are the real deal," ad nauseam?

I definitely agree that people who consider themselves Rationalists believe themselves to be Actual Rationalists not Hollywood Rationalists. This of course leads us to the much analyzed question o... (read more)

The Stevia-drink issue is likely psychological in nature not blood-sugar related. You would have to be tricked by a third party to drink a stevia soda unknowingly, and inversely, be tricked into drinking sugary soda while thinking it is stevia based; then compare the results.

In my own diet journey I noticed similar trend: knowingly eating or drinking substitutes of things I like makes my subconscious throw a tantrum and demand the real thing anyway. I think it is more about self-resentment over being tricked, than the actual taste or content.

Just giving up... (read more)

some counter-arguments, in no particular order of importance:

1. Verbal communication is quite often more succinct, because it is easier to exhaust the vocal medium, and you can see in real time your conversationists getting bored with your rambling.
2. Verbal communication allows far more nuance carried with tone, body language, and social situation, thus often delivers the message most clearly. I find it most useful when discussing Ethics: everyone is a clinical utilitarian when typing, but far more humanistic when they see the other person's facial reaction to

There is also the fact that we already are, effectively, controlling our own genetic pressures through culture and civilisation. Our culture largely influences our partner choice, and thus, breeding. Our medical sciences, agriculture, and urbanization takes pressure off survival. So the eugenic/dysgenic/paragenic process is in effect anyway, just... stupidly.

Some simple examples:
- agriculture pushes us to be lactose tolerant and carbohydrate dependent
- art and media dictates our sexual choices and mate choice
- education creates pressure for intelligence, b... (read more)

Such communities are then easily pulverized by communities who value strong groupthink and appeal to authority, and thus are easier whipped into frenzy. 

I mostly agree with you, though I noticed if a job is mostly made of constantly changing tasks that are new and dissimilar to previous tasks, there is some kind of efficiency problem up the pipeline. Its the old Janitor Problem in a different guise; a janitor at a building needs to perform a thousand small dissimilar tasks, inefficiently and often in impractical order, because the building itself was inefficiently designed. Hence why we still haven't found a way to automate a janitor, because for that we would need to redesign the very concept of a "buildi... (read more)

There are also some mental issues among people who know about AI safety concerns, but are not researchers themselves and not even remotely capable of helping or contributing in a meaningful way.

I for one, learned about the severity of the AI threat only after my second child was born. Given the rather gloom predictions for the future, Im concerned for their safety, but there does not seem anything I can do to ensure they would be ok once the Singularity hits. It feels like I brought my kids to life just in time for the apocalypse to hit them when they are still young adults at best, and irrationally, I cannot stop thinking that Im thus responsible for their future suffering.

I noticed I also recall conversations, podcasts etc better if I was doing some kind of a manual task at the same time (like woodcarving, or just doing the dishes). My interpretation is that focusing on a conversation while immobile is under-stimulating, and thus causes the mind to wander. If one is walking, or doing something physical, its enough physical stimulation to let the mind focus on the conversation in a "railroaded" fashion, without self-distraction.

Even deeper: it feels great to match your walking/activity pace to the emotional message of the co... (read more)

OTOH, I have a hunch that the kinds of jobs that select against "speed run gamer" mentality are more likely to be inefficient, or even outright bullshit jobs. In essence, speed-running is optimization, and jobs that cannot handle an optimizer are likely to either have error in the process, or error in the goal-choice, or possibly both.

The admittedly small sized sample of examples where a workplace that resisted could not handle optimization  that I witnessed were because the "work" was a cover for some nefarious shenanigans, build for inefficiency for political reasons, or created for status games instead of useful work/profit.

Aside from the obvious reasons already mentioned, I wonder if the reason for the regress was not partially related to compound inbreeding. In most cases when technological regress happens, it tends to coincide with a genetic bottleneck as well, which I have a hunch would make the problems worse.

Its in the ballpark of 50k. I support a family of 4 on 10k a year, round-ish. I can save about 1k-2k a year, If we live on a very, very tight budget. It would thus take me a century to pay for cryonics just for my immediate family, if the prices do not fall quickly enough.

In Rand's defense, she does define the terms "altruism" and "selfishness" i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.


The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.

Every human being is selfish, but most are also altruistic some of the time

What, in your estimation, would be a difference between actual altruism, and "altruism" done for the sake of selfish emotional fuzzies?

Lets say I pass a beggar on the street. If I give him a dollar because he needs it, its altruism. If I give him a dollar because I want to feel like Im a Good, Charitable Guy, and genuinely enjoy his thanks, then its selfishness.

About the only true altruism I can think of that is not essentially a form of egoism, is when you absolutely HATE the fact ... (read more)

I truly hope the cost of cryo falls rapidly in the next few years. A back-of-the-napkin calculation I did shows that if I wanted to pay forward for an option to cryopreserve my children (should they ever need it) I would have to save money for over 20 years, skipping on every life luxury for them and myself. It would be a bizarre life in which we would live like ascetic monks who spend most of their lives preparing to die and achieve Afterlife. Uncannily like religion.

If, aside from paying for cryo for my kids, I also wanted to pay for my own, my  SO'... (read more)

One thing I don't see explored enough, and which could possibly bridge the gap between Rationality and Winning, is Rationality for Dummies.

Rationalist community is oversaturated with academic nerds, borderline geniuses, actual geniuses, and STEM people who's intellectual level and knowledge base is borderline transhuman.

In order for Rationality and Winning to be reconciled with minimum loss, we need a bare-bones, simplified, kindergarten-level Rationality lessons based on the simplest, most relatable real life examples. We need Rationality for Dummies. We ... (read more)

One of the main ways I managed to instill good habits in myself is to both use optimal paths to good habits, and closing optimal paths to sub-optimal habits. The trick is to make a good habit easier than it is annoying, and a bad habit more annoying than it is preferable.

Examples:

Hydration - I simply place a 2l water bottle by the apartment door every evening. It becomes impossible for me to leave the house without picking it up, and once it is in my hand, Im so much more likely to drink from it and take it with me than forget.

Exercise: I bought dumbbells ... (read more)

My take on some of the items on this list:

Lack of Intelligence: Very likely
Slow take-off AI: Very Likely
Self-Supervised Learning AI: Likely 
Bounded Intelligence AI: Likely
Far far away AI: Likely
Personal Assistant AI: close to 100% certain.
Oracle AI: Likely
Sandboxed Virtual World AI: likely
The Age of Em: Borderline Certain
Multipolar Cohabition: borderline certain
Neuralink AI: borderline certain
Human Simulation AI: likely
Virtual zoo-keeper AI:  likely
Coherent Extrapolated Volition AI: likely
Partly aligned AI: Very likely
Transparent Corrigible AI: B... (read more)

One problem I see with your insect alien example, which also, in a much greater way, influences human attractiveness, is that there are not just four, or five, or a dozen of physical attractiveness factors, but hundreds of them. And each of these factors influences other factors in different ways, for example:

• height on a man is considered attractive
• low body fat on a man is considered attractive, but;
• a combination of too much height and too little body fat would be unattractive.

My take is there are hundreds, even thousands of traits that fall under "Flawles... (read more)

what Im getting at, is that while the evidence for oldest agriculture is from around 12k-10k, this is not the same as saying that your particular ancestors come from a line that used agriculture for solid 10k years straight (unless you are from very specific Anatolian or Iraq genetic lines).

It could easily be the case that your ancestors had been eating grain and dairy for 500 generations, or maybe just 10 generations or less. 

One example of what Im talking about is lactose tolerance which allows one to consume dairy. It is a mutation that is only rou... (read more)

How similar is your life to that of a homo sapiens from 12,000 years ago? If you made it more similar, would that help you?
 

Why pick that arbitrary point in our evolution? My ancestors 12k years ago could have been subsistence farmers who toiled all day but ate a lot of calories. Could be cold climate hunter-gatherers who fasted intermittently between giant feasts, and burned most of these calories to zero, trying to secure a next big kill. Could have been tropical climate hunter-gatherers who did light hunting and gathering 2-3 hours a day, ate small... (read more)

One simple trick that I applied to my apartment lately, is to break with the tradition of "proper" placement of various objects, furniture and doodads, but focus on pure functionality and natural paths that come from human laziness.

Examples:

• beverage cooler right next to the couch, NOT in the kitchen. After all, I drink beer on a couch, not in front of the sink like a madman. Same goes for the bottle opener, corkscrew etc.
• TV set is high up on the wall, almost at ceiling level. Since I watch TV/Netflix reclined on the couch, it makes no sense to place it on

It is quite possible though that over time there are fewer and fewer BFs. They might be going extinct, even without much human interaction. As for finding bones, if the population is low, and their territory so big, it might take centuries. 

I also noticed that there is an inverse cultural relationship between the belief in magic, witchcraft, spirits/fair folk etc and the belief in UFOs. Which makes me think aliens simply fill the Post-Enlightment gap in the legendarium for cultures that want to pretend they are "too reasonable" to believe in magic, but open to a belief in "sci fi" myths; ie: Fair Folk kidnapping folk - nah, Aliens kidnapping folk - yah.

As for Bigfoot: while I don't believe it exists, I think Its wrong way to think of it as avoiding cameras. The more reasonable explanation is that cameras avoid the places where it could possibly live. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, and similar Apemen are almost always reported to live in remote wilderness, and specifically the North of USA, Canada, Russia, China, and of course the Himalayas. It seems like we should be able to spot them, until you realize that the northern wilderness belt that stretches from Alaska to Greenland, and then around Eurasia and back... (read more)

I would even argue that Bigfoot being more bigfooty; a primitive yet sapient and inteligent hominid, perhabs some late descendant of the gigantopithecus, is more plausible than it being say a sloth, because it seems to make honest attempts to avoid humans. If it was a mere sloth, or an ape oof the same intellectual capacity as a chimp, it would be found far easier.

While existence of Bigoot is extremely unlikely, If it were real, I would rather assume they are a tribal species of essentially very hairy humans who avoid us the same way some Sentinel tribes do.