All of Jarred Filmer's Comments + Replies

Your description is beautiful in the sense that you use the word :) thank you for sharing

"pain and pain receptor spread across and through animal bodies basically is like a currency for the evolutionary perspective... so species can pay for survival with more pain(receptors)"

I found this interesting to mull on, an interesting property of pleasure and pain is acting as a universal measure of value, making trade-offs easier

I love "divine carrot" as a term! I think a lot about what it would mean to totally replace stick as motivation, like societies getting off of "burning coal indoors for warmth" maybe humans can "get off burning suffering for motivation"

Ha, maybe! Seems like while we're here though we might as well be working out way down the list of "ideas that might change everything". People report trying a lot of things and then hitting on something that works (like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical-miracle)

Ha, thank you! It slipped my mind, I've just added it :)

Thank you for writing this, I found it really valuable!

Noted, thank you for the feedback

Amazing work, this is really important meta problem

From memory the first part was something Richard Bartlett tweeted, the second was my addendum 😄.

Glad you liked them 😊

I've been thinking about this notion a great deal thanks so much for posting! I also have an intuition towards that which is good being non-arbitrary, akin to pi or gravity.

This gives me hope on how AGI might play out, but I'm aware we can't be certain this is the case until we have a proven theory of value a la the symetry theory of valence, and maybe even then we couldn't be sure any sufficiently capable mind would be exposed to the same dynamics humans are.

re the first question I assumed it was asking "what are you symathetic to" rather than "what is", more than any particular view I'm dubious of anyone who's feels 100% confident in their view on the nature of conciousness 

Thank you, I thought so too 😊

And yeah, case clinics have given me a lot of value. If something like it is emerging naturally amoung your friends, then they sound like great friends!

If you do try to expressly instantiate a case clinic with the steps I'd be curious to hear how it goes. I've been surprised at the effect setting an explicit format can have on how it feels to be in a group. Something about creating common knowledge on where we're all supposed to be directing our attention (and with what intention), can be really powerful. Thinking about it now I suppose this is how DnD works 😄

ha don't worry it basically is 😄, it's just that (for me at least) the notion I could put effort into making strong 1-1 connections with people and forming intimate small groups online wasn't really something that occurred to me to do before I started reading about microsolidarity.

May also be worth noting that the microsolidarity framework is about a bunch of other stuff beyond just crews and case clinics, notably dynamics that come into play once you try to take a bunch of crews and form a larger group of ~150 or so people out of them.

I agree with the content of your comment but the framing gives me a sense of bad faith, and makes me uncomfortable.

If I put a lot of time into a post-mortem detailing how an 8 year project I put a lot into went wrong, and then the top comment was someone summing up what I'd done in an uncharitable paragraph saying things like "making stuff up" and "no shit sherlock" I'd feel like I'd tried to do a good thing for the discourse at large and was defected against.

To echo others, thank you for putting your time and effort into this, I found it coherent and valuable. As an international rat/EA who's only context for Leverage was Zoe's post, this fleshed out my understanding of what you were trying to do in a helpful way and gave me a lot to chew on regarding my own thoughts on ideological communities.

Regarding: "Why do people seem to hate us?"

After reading Zoe's post I had a very negative view of Leverage and Geoff, after some introspection here is my best guess as to why.

Growing up religious, I'm very aware that my ... (read more)

It gave me an emotional intuition for what more progress along the "distance from violence" scale might look like. If we don't even have to pull the trigger anymore and can be assured no unintended casualties, maybe it's more pressure towards the equilibrium of the state relying on violence to govern, and then to suppress the dissent that violence generates with more violence.

I see two independent ideas in this post

Insidious Inception

• People communicate thoughts into each others minds
• This can be direct *"I do not want to date you"*
• Or indirect *"Sorry I'm too busy this week" with no effort to find a different time*
• Saying A to indirectly communicate B can:
  • Obscure an intention that would be obvious were B said directly
  • Make it harder to refute B, because the idea that A -> B needs to first be established
  • Delicately communicate B without indirectly implying something that would have been implied had you said it directly

Core thought... (read more)

Wait hold on, I thought this was a feature of QV that made it well suited to funding public goods 😄? (The more individuals each find the same thing beneficial, the more it must be a "public good" and thus underfunded)

Thanks for your reply :) as in many things, QRI lays out my position on this better than I'm able to 😅

https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/a-primer-on-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence

Love it! I've been thinking a lot recently about the role of hedonics in generally intelligent systems. afaik we don't currently try to induce reward or punishment in any artifically intelligent system we try to build, we simply re-jig it until it produces the output we want. It might be that "re-jigging" does induce a hedonic state, but I see no reason assume it.

I can't imagine how a meta optimiser might "create from scratch" a state which is intrinsically rewarding or adversive. In our own case I feel evolution must have recruited some property of the un... (read more)

At what age did you start trusting them do things like only crossing at approved intersections?

Out of curiosity, does all of the difference between the value of a child drowning in front of you and a child drowning far away come from uncertainty?

I enjoyed this take https://www.roote.co/wisdom-age

Agree or disagree: "There may be a pattern wherein rationalist types form an insular group to create and apply novel theories of cognition to themselves, and it gets really weird and intense leading to a rash of psychological breaks."

I empathise with the feeling of slipperyness in the OP, I feel comfortable attributing that to the subject matter rather than malice.

If I had an experience that matched zoe's to the degree jessicata's did (superficially or otherwise) I'd feel compelled to post it. I found it helpful in the question of whether "insular rationalist group gets weird and experiences rash of psychotic breaks" is a community problem, or just a problem with stray dude.

Thanks for sharing, I'm about to move into a season of more time for hobby code and this seems like good advice to keep in mind

I've never seen that feeling described quite that way, I like it!

Out of curiousity, how do you feel about the proclaimed self evidence of "the cognito", "I think therefore I am"?

You're quite welcome 🙂

For existence it's "I think therefore I am", just seems like an unavoidable axiom of experience. It feels like wherever I look I'm staring at it.

For conciousness I listened to an 80k hours podcast with David Chalmers on The Hard Problem and ever since then it's been self evident there's something that it's like to be me. It felt like something that had to be factored out of my experience and pointed at for me to see. But it seems as self evident as existing.

For wellbeing and suffering it took some extreme moments for me to start thin... (read more)

I greatly enjoyed this, thanks for writing it. I matched it to one of the questions in my own personal pantheon of mysteries.

What does it mean for a belief to be self-evident?

It seems self evidently true that I exist, that I am conscious, suffering is bad, wellbeing is good, and the next moment of experience will be the nesesary consequence of this moment.

I can point to the raw justification for these facts in my experience, and I just assume that other people have similar justifications embedded within their subjective perspective. But it's still an intellectual mystery to me why "it's self evident" feels like a satisfying justification. As you say maybe that too is self evident ad infinitum

Are the cross overs with the book "The Mind Illuminated" here coincidence? If not very excited to see a mash up of two of my favorite texts!!

Thank you for taking the time to write this, I enjoyed reading it and it made me think some interesting thoughts :)

I'm very open to the idea that I've seen something that wasn't there and or wasn't intended 😄, let me see if I can spesifically find what made me feel that way.

Okay, so I have that reaction to paragraphs like this:

White fragility is a sort of defensiveness that takes the form of a variety of strategies that white people deploy when we are confronted with how we participate in and perpetuate racism_S. Whites use these strategies to deflect or avoid such a confrontation and to defend a comfortable, privileged vantage point from which race is “not an issue” (

(edited to tone down a little)

This was quite painful to read, and I see the dynamic of these ideas as problematic.

First, possibly the most painful idea for any human to entertain: "A large part of your core identity is inherently very bad in ways you can't see"

and then second: "The pain and fear you feel in response to this news is a sign of inherent weakness (fragility) and further proves your guilt"

and lastly: "I'm not *trying* to make you feel bad, suppress that pain and take off your silly sack cloth and ashes"

"You are inherently bad" -> "Your pain ... (read more)

That tweet on Australia might be a little misleading. The vaccination board's official statement as far as I read is that an under 40 year old is more likley to die of an AZ vaccine than covid given the current covid prevalance and death rate in Australia, which is virtually non-existant. They released a pdf to this effect weighting the risks and their plan is to have everyone under 40 vaccinated on pfizer by the end of the year.

Betting that there won't be an outbreak before then is still likley the wrong risk to be taking, but it's less dumb than just say... (read more)

This is my great hope also. 

There is a compelling narrative to be told around coordination as the super power of humanity that uses the examples of language, printed word and the internet (which are really bundles of smaller technological steps analogous to say zero knowledge proofs in crypto) as positive examples of social technology making things better.

As an enterprising EA in my 20ies I feel the pull of this narrative when thinking about how I might spend my professional efforts, but it remains to be seen if it will survive deeper thought whatever cheap tests I can think to run.

I see landmark as entering into a symbiotic relationship with a parasitic set of memes. It's a life changing experience for a lot of people, but Landmark wants to grow and it'll attempt to drain your resources (money, volunteering time, and social capital) to do so.

I had a coworker who was obsessed with landmark, and eventually wore some of us down to attend the intro night. I too was impressed at how psychoactive the environment was, and it seemed to be really helping people! But I felt concerned for many of the same reasons as OP.

There's a lot of paralle... (read more)

Thank you very much for taking the time to write this. Scott Alexander and Glen Wyel are two of my intellectual hero's, they've both done a lot for my thinking in economics, coordination, and just how to go about a dialectic intellectual life in general.

So I was also dismayed (to an extent I honestly found surprising) when they couldn't seem to find a good faith generative dialogue. If these two can't then what hope is there for the average Red vs Blue tribe member?

This post have me a lot of context though, so thanks again 😊

Is stock in a managed vanguard index fund cheating 😅? I guess that's assuming vanguard will last to manage it and that there's no socialist style economic reform that makes owning companies less valuable.

Government bonds maybe?

Huh, you are correct that was indeed my intention 😄 no idea how I managed that.

Is stock in a managed vanguard index fund cheating 😅? I guess that's assuming vanguard will last to manage it and that there's no socialist style economic reform that makes owning companies less valuable.

Government bonds maybe?

This is a nice metaphor in general for top down vs bottom up networks with some natural horizontal separation, I like it. Does this appear in the literature or is this just something you think about?

I find this sentiment a little confusing, as it seems to me the subjective experience of suffering is the ultimate bedrock of any idea that understands suffering as bad? If I had no personal experience of suffering or wellbeing I can't imagine how something like utilitarianism might move me.

Or are you saying while yes ultimately an abstract understanding of suffering rests on a subjective experience of it, pumping the understanding of the subjective experience won't lead to more understanding of it in the abstract in the way EA needs to?

Made me laugh out loud twice, I enjoyed this post 😊

Technology that "factors stance space" as pol.is tries to do and finds consensus excites me!

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the ability of modern western countries to cohere / find consensus is a bottlenecked lever in progress. Finding pareto optimal sources of agreement may be a good way to help this.

Aw, she did have a friend all along!

"Performative effort is not effort at all"

I've seen people sacrafice a lot to gain the appearance effort. It looked legitimately painful and I think it was.

To me to shows a willingness to endure physical and emotional pain rather than the mental pain of grappling with uncertainty. All they can do is signal that they do care on some level