All of Jonnston's Comments + Replies

I'm competent in basic video editing and am willing to help you out. Contrary to some of the other comments, I think that there's substantial value in converting the sequences as-is to YouTube videos considering the size of the platform. Plenty of people use YouTube who don't read blogs or listen to podcasts. You could take the project and run with it, constructing animations, diagrams, and visualizations. But even absent those potential enhancements, I support disseminating the message as widely as possible.

1Neil
Yep, "floating head" videos as they're called are actually quite popular. They are also by far the easiest way to start a channel and starting a channel is better than not having one at all.  I would also like to add animations, diagrams and visualizations, and find some other ways to make content much more engaging. Up until now most of my efforts were directed toward having the courage to publish this in the first place. Now, I can move on to actually getting down to the logistics! 

Perhaps agencies consistently overregulate. And when it comes to AI, overregulation is preferable to underregulation, whereas for most other fields the opposite is true.

2ChristianKl
If you look at environmental pollution we might today have pesticide limits that are overregulation and a lack of regulation on microplastics. 
8Logan Zoellner
Governments don't consistently over-regulate. They consistently regulate poorly.  For example cracking down on illegal skateboarding but not shoplifting or public consumption of drugs. In AI, the predictable outcome of this is lots of regulations about AI bias and basically nothing that actually helps notkilleveryone.

Every 6 months or so I do 2 to 3 weeks without caffeine the first several days are always terrible, but after that I return to my baseline pretty quickly.

Mrntally I don't feel much a difference whether I'm drinking coffee or not. Lifting is much tougher without energy drinks or pre-workout. Running is a little bit harder for the first half mile or so.

Overall it isn't too much a change for me. I guess it's relevant that I'm young and didn't start drinking caffeine until 3 or 4 years ago.

5Dalton Mabery
I've heard this is a good middle-ground between quitting coffee altogether and just keep drinking the same amount. I love coffee. It's a hobby for me. But there's been advice to delay drinking coffee about 90-120 minutes after waking up because it allows the chemical in the brain, adenosine, to be accepted by its receptors and wear off. When you drink caffeine right away, it blocks the adenosine receptors and they just float around until the caffeine wears off, and then bind to the receptors making you sleepy. This is often what causes the afternoon crash. I tried this for a week and enjoyed it. I woke up, worked out, and then had coffee instead of waking up, drinking coffee and then working out.

To put it as simply as possible, I think that indoctrinating yourself in rationality pushes you further away from the average person, which makes it more difficult to relate emotionally to them.

The vast majority of my major problems stem from my difficulty connecting to other people. Therefore even though I'm really interested in Rationality, and I've enjoyed studying it, I think it's done me net harm.

This won't be the case for everyone, but I think that many people would be better served spending their time doing something else if their goal is to improve their emotional well-being.

2nim
Thank you for explaining. What I hear in this is that rationality also works like an esoteric hobby, and for people who want more friendships built on commonalities, adding an uncommon use of time is counterproductive. I think I don't experience the same negative effects because my "it's good to interact cooperatively with people different from oneself" needs are met instead by some location-based volunteering hobbies. I live in an area with low enough population density that "vaguely competent and willing to show up and do stuff" buys one a lot of goodwill and quality time with others, which is a whole other social hack of its own :)
Answer by Jonnston*20

Yes and no.

On the yes side, I find rationality to be incredibly intellectually stimulating. Often I encounter a concept, framework, or abstraction that floors me and sets my mind on fire for days afterward. I think that sort of mental stimulation is really healthy.

In so far as rationality can be defined as "the study of correct thought", it's obviously a latchkey subject for anyone who enjoys thinking critically in any capacity. When doing intellectual work, I often find myself drawing on "Rationalist" concepts. This helps me organize and clarify my own th... (read more)

2ChristianKl
"Apply logic to your emotions" is not advice that I remember reading on LessWrong. CFAR-style rationality advice would be to apply Gendlin's Focusing.  It sounds to me like more of a problem of doubling down on existing tendencies than one of taking rationalist advice. 
1nim
This framing causes me to wonder whether I experience similar effects but attribute them to causes other than Rationality itself. Would you be willing/able to share some examples of harms you expect that you would not have experienced if you hadn't undertaken this study of correct thought?
Jonnston*210

My understanding of sanctions is that they're designed to provoke hardship and unrest inside of the target country.

In some sense, the people of a nation are at least partially collectively responsible for what that government does. This principle has been widely accepted, at least in the west, since the Nuremberg trials. If you subscribe to this widely held belief, then the Russian citizenry therefore bears some responsibility for the invasion via their consent to obey and support the existing regime.

A people have the moral obligation to overthrow a tyrann... (read more)

0Cmrde
Sanctions will not work this way, period. It is obvious if you think about it for a while. 1. Sanctions have been the main official justification for Putin's prolonged rule and his mistakes. They were the fuel and the proofs for his "The World Is Against Us" rhetorics. Now they enabled him to introduce some interesting laws, like 15 years of corrective labor colony for "spreading fakes about the special operation of liberating Ukraine from the Nazis" 2. People whose well-being has been affected by the war will not protest. It is always better to be poor than to serve 15 years of corrective labor colony. Period. And just in case, life in Russia is still much better than life in Ukraine, at least because war is on the Ukrainian territory. 3. There still were and probably will be people who protest and protested, not because of the money interests you've described but because of their genuine repulsion towards the war, especially this war. Well, many of them got or will get their punishments. Also, they'll be a good picture for a TV report on a Russian channel called "The Enemy is brainwashing our nation, this is exactly why we must focus on searching for traitors and disposing of them." That's how it all will end. 4. Nobody will start an armed protest on the same reason why there've been almost no slightly armed protests in Russia for the recent decades. In 1917 a revolution led to the establishment of a totalitarian state, nobody wants that to repeat. This is the reason why those sanctions aren't capable of giving a start to a revolution. If they do provoke something inside the target country, that's the unrest towards those stupid Westerners who interfere in things they don't understand. Sanctions might have an effect, though. If they manage to completely destabilise the Russian economy. But the costs for the whole world might be huge. In any case, that's to be left for another speculation And for god's sake, I'm not saying that sanctions should not be t
6Ege Erdil
While I think the post itself is written in a way that's uncharitable towards proponents of sanctions, if the only argument for them was the "collective guilt/responsibility" argument you give here, I would have to say that sanctions are indeed both ineffective and immoral. Western leaders have said again and again that they believe this is the war of the regime currently in control of the Russian government, and not of the Russian people. Boris Johnson went on television to say to the Russian people "I believe this war is not in your name" in Russian. That's flatly inconsistent with the idea that they bear some "partial responsibility" for failing to stand up to Putin's regime (what are they even supposed to do?) The post is correct about one thing: sanctions have a very poor empirical record of affecting regime change. Japan didn't undergo regime change because of US sanctions on it leading up to the Pacific War. Saddam wasn't toppled as a result of the crippling sanctions placed on Iraq throughout the 1990s. The regime in Iran is still as strong as ever, and shows no signs of being toppled by a popular revolution triggered by Western sanctions on the country. In contrast, I can't think of a single example in which sanctions led to regime change in a country. Maybe this is my lack of imagination - can you think of such a case? Better arguments have been offered in favor of sanctions. For example, the Biden administration said that one of the primary purposes of the sanctions they have placed on Russia is to hurt the Russian economy in order to undercut Russia's ability to project hard power, and sanctions can indeed be successful at doing this. Maybe it's just me, but I find this language of "collective responsibility" to be repugnant. You're responsible for something if you could have taken actions which had a substantial influence over whether it happened or not. Ordinary people simply don't have any such influence over the actions of their government. It's

I want to register my conviction that ROB can mitigate effectiveness by keeping you arbitrialy close to 50% success rate by selecting numbers arbitrarily close to one another.

1Tapatakt
Yes, or just arbitrarily big numbers.

You're right. I Misremembered, but i checked and it is true that a bounded montonic function of the reals can have only a countable number of discontinuities. So if ROB knows our algorithm, he can select one continuous interval for all of his values to come from.

Proof of the countable nature of discontinutes given here:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2793202/set-of-discontinuity-of-monotone-function-is-countable

Other posters have suggested using a function which increases montonically over the reals. My instinct is that for any such function, for any choice of epsilon, there is some delta such that n+delta does not provided a benefit of epsilon.

In my example i spoke of selecting n and n+1 as A and B. Instead let B be n+delta.

Recall that any monotnic increasing bounded function over the reals is continuous. Suppose we want to achieve a success rate with our guesses of 0.5+epsilon. ROB can select delta such that our performance is less than that. Then it follows t

... (read more)
6Measure
3Robert Kennedy
Thanks! I do not believe that "any monotonically increasing bounded function over the reals is continuous". For instance, choose some montonically increasing function bounded to (0,0.4) for x<-1, another function bounded to (0.45,0.55) for -1<x<1, and a third function bounded to (0.6,1) for x>1. I did not check the rest of the argument, sorry

ROB selects A and B. First suppose A < B. Suppose A is revealed. Further Suppose that some deterministic Algorithm R exists which takes in A, and produces the probability that A is smaller.

In round one the only input to the algorithm can be A alone. Furthermore since we have supposed that R is "better than 50%", we must see have R yield us that P( A smaller ) > 0.5. We can then easily extrapolate P( A bigger ) < 0.5.

Now suppose we have the opposite case, that A > B. Again the only input to our algorithm can be A for the first round. However we ... (read more)

1Robert Kennedy

I'm very interested to see the solution to this problem. I agree that "better than 50%" is a little vague, however even with the most generous interpretation I'm skeptical about the existence of such an algorithm, as long as we allow the nunbers to be arbitrarily selected.

Consider the following strategy. For N rounds of play, before round 1, let ROB arbitraily select a list of N numbers. For each round let ROB choose arbitrarily one member x of the set as A, remove that member from the list, and select B as x+1.

Clearly each round is independent since the s... (read more)

4Robert Kennedy
Could you explain why it's clearly impossible to produce an algorithm that gives better than 50% chance of success on the first round? I think I follow the rest of your argument.