All of keltan's Comments + Replies

Sex is fun and awesome. Though it doesn’t feel fun and awesome to have sex all day everyday. You could probably do transhuman meth and make sex fun all the time. But a Pleasure Cube/Super Happy scenario makes me sad.

I’m also wondering who you’re talking about when you say “most people” here? I have the opposite model of most people.

I have spent weeks where pretty much all I did was:
-- have sex with my partner, hours per day
-- watch anime with my partner
-- eat food and ambiently hang with my partner

No work. Not much seeing other people. Of course given the amount of sex mundane situations were quite sexually charged. I'm not actually sure if it gets old on any human timeline. You also improve at having fun together. However this was not very good for our practical. But post singularity I probably wont need to worry about practical goals. 

In general I think you underestimate the s... (read more)

//This Comment contains references to self harm.

This idea is a little crazy, but... You could use a TAP that punishes you every time you open the app.

Trigger: I just clicked the Twitter Icon

Action: Bite my arm until it hurts

Biting is an example, But you could also:

  • Have your phone auto-play fingernails on a chalkboard sound
  • Slap yourself
  • Punch your knee
  • Just have the action be closing the app immediately
  • Flick yourself in the nose

I'd recommend reading the Hammer Time Sequence post on TAPS. Specifically, the part about setting a Yoda Timer and practicing it for 5 minutes.

For those who live alone, one option for the phone password is to make it an Antimeme.

  1. Randomly generate a long random string
  2. Mix in some novel Unicode characters that you’ll have to remember the names of so that you can google

Write it down somewhere inconvenient

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It seems to link to many things. And might be a bit too much for just a comment. But here are some key concepts from mostly psych that I think link to why sleeping on a problem makes it easier.

  • Hebb's Law
  • Learning is assumed to take place over a 24hr span
  • Chunking
  • The Multi-component Model of Working Memory
  • Mice developing 'Maze Neurons' when learning a maze
  • People who are woken mid-sleep and self report dreaming about a problem they've tried to solve, do better the next day than people who are woken and don't report d
... (read more)

Hard agree. I think sleeping on a problem is underrated. But even though I think that, I still fall into the failure of "I don't get it. I must be dumb or something".

1CstineSublime
I'd love to know the mechanics of "sleep on it" are and why it appears to work. Do you have any theories or hunches about what is happening on a cognitive level?
2quetzal_rainbow
The irony of situation is that I sleep on problems often... when they are closed-ended, not problems in topical-learning.

While many of the review requirements aren’t applicable to this writing. It doesn’t lessen the impact it has.

This is a horror I would like to avoid. I think Sci-fi of this sort helps to prevent that future. This is something my non-technical Mother could understand. Something I could show people to explain the worst.

I will think of this post as the future goes on. I am desperately trying to make this story one that we look back on and laugh at. “What silly worries” we’ll say. “How naive.”

A LW LLM I would like is a "What post was the one where Eliezer talks about logic or maybe algebra or something? I think it might have been in Plane Crash but idk?"

Sometime I hit a roadblock in my thinking because I'm trying to remember a specific LW post that talks about a skill I'm currently trying to practice. It's quite flow breaking to try and search the normal way. Current LLMs aren't up to the task and Hallucinate LW posts every time I do it.

2metachirality
Highly Advanced Epistemology 101?

Closer to the first one. I find when writing to think my mind has two modes. Very system 1 and system 2. If I’ve been going for a while on a side branch system 1 takes over. The writing becomes less about thinking and more about the act of writing. This leads to me making a hypothesis and saying “idk why that is”. That triggers the alias, which points out to me that I’m not really ‘thinking’. I then switch to “How could I test if this is true?”

I appreciate the 25% reframing. That’s something I wish I’d thought faster.

Trigger: I see a %# Action: Switch it in my head

This isn’t an extremely useful technique. What it really does for me is break me out of undirected thinking with my writing and get me to actively start thinking things like “ok, but why would this be happening?”

I think 75% of the time it’s not helpful. Sometimes unhelpful when breaking a flow.

I’m working on thinking things faster. Though, it’s not a skill I’d say I have yet.

However, it’s pretty low cost for any payoff at all.

2CstineSublime
25% of the time it being helpful sounds pretty good to me. Just to be clear, when you say "undirected thinking" do you mean thinking that is not pertinent to your intention or goal with a writing session or a piece of writing; or is it knowing that you want to write something but wandering aimlessly because you're not sure what that thing is? Or am I well off the mark on both?

In my Obsidian.md vault I use the note aliases to point out to myself when I've said something that indicates that I Am Confused. I've progressively added and pruned this over a year. Here are the "Confusion Phrases" that I currently use.


aliases: I am confused, I don't understand, This is confusing, This is very confusing, I am quite confused, Wait what, I don't know where I fucked up, I Feel Confused, I notice I am Confused, I'm confused, I don't get it, I just don't get it, How am I meant to, How do I understand this, That's surprising, I'm not sure I un... (read more)

1Viliam
Upvoted for the song.
2CstineSublime
How often do these things become "un-confused" - like for every 20 of these, how many do you have an "ah-ha" or a "now I see" moment of clear resolution? Following on, do you find that you're able to find a way to think of that faster - i.e. that you can see what cognitive processes cause you to be confused and how you could have resolved that quicker?

Much appreciated!

I'll:

  • Correct that typo
  • Add a section back in to hopefully make it less confusing

I decided to create this tag for two reasons:

  1. The concept of LLM Psychology is interesting and exciting to me
  2. I have progressively seen more people referring to a type of research as LLM Psychology. I think having a place specifically for it on LW is useful.

If you reply to this comment with posts you think fit under this tag, I'll read them and decide if they seem like they should be here. I'm currently quite fuzzy on what really belongs in this tag. Clarification on what you think LLM Psych is would be much appreciated.

1Knight Lee
Maybe see if the posts under the Chain of Thought Alignment tag can fit, since that may be the closest tag to AI Psychology before the AI Psychology tag existed. The overlap is small, so I agree that AI Psychology should be a new tag. Maybe my post Reduce AI Self-Allegiance by saying "he" instead of "I" fits? Edit: more Chain of Thought Alignment posts which fit AI Psychology: the case for CoT unfaithfulness is overstated Language Agents Reduce the Risk of Existential Catastrophe The Translucent Thoughts Hypotheses and Their Implications
6ryan_greenblatt
I think this tag should be called "AI Psychology" or "Model Psychology" as LLM is a bit of an arbitrary and non-generalizable term. (E.g., suppose 99% of compute in training was RL, should it still be called an LLM?)

My timelines have now updated to something closer to fast takeoff. In a world like this, how valuable is educating the general public? Claude claims science started worrying about the climate in the 50s/60s. It wasn't until 2010s that we saw meaningful action beginning to take place. Do we have the time to educate?

To be clear, this is more of a question than an opinion that I hold. I am working to form an opinion.

3nc
The fight for human flourishing doesn't end at the initiation of takeoff [echo many points from Seth Herd here]. More generally, it's very possible to win the fight and lose the war, and a broader base of people who are invested in AI issues will improve the situation.   (I also don't think this is an accurate simplification of the climate movement or its successes/failures. But that's tangential to the point I'd like to make.)
4ChristianKl
What do you mean with "meaningful action" regarding climate in the 2010s? If you look at solar energy, panel prices go down largely in a straight (on a logarithmic scale) since 1975 with a short pause between 2005 to 2010. German pro-solar policy started in the 1990 and the biggest change in 2011 was the new five-year plan of th CCP which was probably driven more by economic justifications. There are few people who currently think we should do whatever is possible to reduce temperature rise. Doing so would mean to have a plan for geoengineering. Climate activist often use climate as a justification to push for anticapitalist policies that they independently believe.
6Logan Riggs
In my experience, most of the general public will verbally agree that AI X-risk is a big deal, but then go about their day (cause reasonably, they have no power). There's no obvious social role/action to do in response to that. For climate, people understand that they should recycle, not keep the water running, and if there's a way to donate to clean the ocean on a Mr. Beast video, then some will even donate (sadly, none of these are very effective for solving the climate problem though! Gotta avoid that for our case). Having a clear call-to-action seems relevant. For example, educating the public about AI taking jobs for the purpose of building support for UBI. It's then clear what to communicate and the call-to-action. I'd be curious to hear what you think an ask should be?  Alternatively, you could argue that generally informing folks on a wide scale about the risks involved will then allow general public to do what they believe is locally best. This could involve a documentary or realistic movie.

In reference to o3 right? Comparing it to just before the 2020 pandemic started?

As in “Something large is about to happen and we are unprepared”?

It's funny, you're right. But I intuitively read it as "it's January 2020—GPT-3 is not yet released, but it will be in a couple of months. Get ready."

2020 is firmly in my head as the year the scaling revolution started, and only secondarily as the year the COVID-19 pandemic started.

I really loved Dr Stone. Excited to read this review and hear what other Rationalists think of it. I was kinda desperate for more Anime/Manga that teaches or inspires a love of science. Here are my recommendations:

  • Science Fell in Love so I tried to Prove it (Anime, Focuses on a computer science lab, a whole bunch of statistics)
  • Cells at work (Anime, more for kids, but tried to teach you about cells in the human body.)
  • The Manga Guide to _____ Series (Manga, I've read most of the statistics book. Though it's from 2004 and about frequentest stats. I have l
... (read more)
3dr_s
It's not about science as a whole, but Assassination Classroom features one of the most beautiful uses of actual, genuine, 100% correctly represented math in fiction I've ever seen. Spoilers:

Still working my way through this post. But this section gets me excited!

If the Receiver or Giver has high enough skills in one area, they can probably compensate for the other having lower skills, although there's probably some minimum threshold needed for each.

It conjures the image of a future occupation. A conduit. Someone skilled at giving and receiving. Brought in specifically to speed up this type of knowledge pass over between two people.

4Raemon
Well to be honest in the future there is probably mostly an AI tool that just beams wisdom directly into your brain or something.

I may be an outlier here. But if I thought I was going to be assassinated, I would think of:

  • JFK -MLK
  • James A. Garfield
  • Lincoln
  • Franz Ferdinand 

And from these I'd think "Hu, better buy a bullet proof vest".

I would unfortunately not think about 'Being Suicided', unless I had an expectation that it would occur in this way.

4avturchin
One way of not being suicide is not live alone. Stay with 4 friends. 

I liked this post and will find use for it in the work I do.

In my experience, repeating a name out loud, or doing some other visible memory trick. Is a good way to signal trying to remember names. Then, if later you forget you are more easily forgiven.

Omg. Oops! I completely forgot about custom instructions and memory! I’ll run some more trials with those off. Thank you very much for pointing this out.

Hu. That is extremely useful. Thank you. 

I've got a lot of singing out of AVM. While my current method works well for this, I find it more challenging than eliciting harmful outputs.

1Daya Chowdry
Did you use any specific prompt in memory or custom instructions?

I’m not entirely sure why, but I find it trivial to get GPT-4o to output harmful content in advanced voice mode (AVM), given that it doesn’t have a direct content filter on it e.g. NSFW.

In the span of 30 minutes it gave me 1) instructions to make a pipe bomb to attach to a car. And 2) Instructions on how to leak a virus into the public without detection (avoiding saying more on this).

I have a theory as to why it might be easy for me specifically. But I would like to know if this is the experience that others have with AVM?

2dirk
I haven't tried harmful outputs, but FWIW I've tried getting it to sing a few times and found that pretty difficult.

Thought: Confidently saying “(X) has no Manhattan Project”. Is forgetting how secret the Manhattan Project was.

Which was not terribly secret. The details of the Project were indeed super-secret, to the point where most of the politicians hadn't known anything, but despite the massive global-scale censorship & secrecy, many had observed the signs of a major project of some sort and some got as far as a nuclear bomb specifically. Also, commercial satellites with meter resolution did not exist which could quantify major facilities or new cities like Los Alamos or Hanford (but overflights, and then satellites, now exist and have helped reveal later top-secret nucl... (read more)

6Seth Herd
Before the internet? I think the idea is that there would be clues, particularly talented engineers not doing public work. Of course, I don't know who's carefully tracking that for Chinese scientists. Scientists did guess the Manhattan project existed because several top physicists had ceased publishing. I don't know if that made it to the relevant governments. That would be vastly easier to do with the internet - if anyone is bothering.
Answer by keltan100

If I’ll probably see them again, I don’t miss people. I thought people saying they miss you were just being overly polite.

I asked for further details on the 10th point and Claude listed a bunch of stuff I’ve absolutely never heard of. I’d say it’s probably related to meditation if I had to guess. Here’s that.

Claude Let me break down Time Perception Management into its deeper components, as this is one of the most subtle yet powerful micro-skills...

  1. Understanding Psychological Time vs Clock Time
  • How different mental states alter time perception
    • Flow states can make hours feel like minutes
    • Anxiety can make minutes feel like hours
  • Learning to intentionally shift betwee
... (read more)

I recently saw a tweet that asked GPT, what micro skills a person should master. I asked Claude a similar question, though had preloaded the conversation with “things a modern day Aristotle would teach a 24yo student”.

I think this is probably a valuable exercise to undertake yourself. I’m providing my prompt, and Claude’s response as an ‘appetiser’ to get you interested in this task.

Prompt Wonderful. Now Let's think less utilized by society. What are some more niche micro skills that you would want a person who you are tutoring to have. And this is give

... (read more)
1CstineSublime
I'm curious why you opted for Aristotle (albeit "modern") as the prompt pre-load? Most of those responses seem not directly tethered to Aristotelian concepts/books or even what he directly posits as being the most important skills and faculties of human cognition. For example, cold reading, I don't recall anything of the sort anywhere in any Aristotle I've read.  While we're not sure Aristotle himself designed the layout of the corpus, we do know that in the Nicomachean Ethics lists the faculties of "whereby the soul attains Truth": Techne (Τεχνε) - which refers to conventional ways of achieving goals, i.e. without deliberation  Episteme (Επιστήμε) - which is apodeiktike or the faculty of arguing from proofs Phronesis (Φρονέσις) - confusingly translated as "practical wisdom" this refers to the ability to deliberate to attain goals by means of deliberation. Excellence in phronesis is translated by the latinate word 'Prudence'. Sofia (Σοφια) - often translated as 'wisdom' - Aristotle calls this the investigation of causes. Nous (Νους ) - which refers to the archai - or the 'first principles' According to Diogenes Laertius, the corpus (at least as it has come to us) divides into the practical books and the theoretical - the practical itself would be subdivided between the books on Techne (say Rhetoric and Poetics), and Phronesis (Ethics and Politics), the theoretical is then covered in works like the Metaphysics (which is probably not even a cohesive book, but a hodge-podge), Categories etc. etc.  This would appear to me to be a better guide for the timeless education in Aristotelian tradition and how we should guide a modern adaptation.
1keltan
I asked for further details on the 10th point and Claude listed a bunch of stuff I’ve absolutely never heard of. I’d say it’s probably related to meditation if I had to guess. Here’s that. — 1. Understanding Psychological Time vs Clock Time * How different mental states alter time perception * Flow states can make hours feel like minutes * Anxiety can make minutes feel like hours * Learning to intentionally shift between time perspectives * When to use event-based time vs clock-based time * How to enter "timeless" states for creative work * Reading your internal clock * Understanding your natural rhythms * Recognizing when time perception is distorted by emotions 1. Managing Time Horizons * Developing multiple concurrent time frames * Thinking in day/month/year/decade simultaneously * Balancing immediate tasks with long-term vision * Time horizon switching * When to zoom out to years * When to zoom in to minutes * How to maintain strategic clarity while handling tactics * Future-self continuity * Techniques for making future consequences feel real * Building strong mental connections to your future self 1. Chronotype Optimization * Understanding your natural energy patterns * Peak creative hours * Peak analytical hours * Recovery periods * Designing your life around your chronotype * When to schedule different types of work * How to handle obligations that fight your natural rhythm * Seasonal adjustments * Adapting to changing daylight * Modifying routines for different seasons 1. Timeline Compression and Expansion Techniques * How to make time feel longer when needed * Breaking experiences into smaller chunks * Increasing novelty to slow perceived time * Using attention to expand moments * How to make time feel shorter when beneficial * Chunking similar tasks * Creating flow states * Using routine to speed through necessary tasks 1. Personal Tempo Awareness * U

Professional filmmaker and animator here. I’m willing to donate some of my time (~10-20h) to help create visuals for this project (Should you be in need of that). Happy to send through examples of work if DMed.

Also, what did you shoot on? Netflix used to have a list of camera requirements. I’m not sure if they still hold to them.

5Michaël Trazzi
Thanks for the offer! DMed you. We shot with: - Camera A (wide shot):  FX3 - Camera B, C: FX30 From what I have read online, the FX30 is not "Netflix-approved" but it won't matter (for distribution) because "it only applies to Netflix produced productions and was really just based on some tech specs to they could market their 4k original content." (link). Basically, if the film has not been commissioned by Netflix, you do not have to satisfy these requirements. (link) And even for Netflix originals (which won't be the case here), they're actually more flexible on their camera requirements for nonfiction work such as documentaries (they used to have a 80% on camera-approved threshold which they removed). For our particular documentary, which is primarily interview-based in controlled lighting conditions, the FX30 and FX3 produce virtually identical image quality.
Answer by keltan10

I imagine a character (Alice) is constantly used as the rational actor in scenarios. We make Alice a likeable character, give her a personality, a series of events and decisions that lead her to the present.

Then, when the user has been around for a sufficient amount of time. Alice starts to slip. She makes mistakes that harm others, perhaps she has disputes with ‘Stupidus’, Maybe she just begins to say untrue things.

How long will it take a user to pry themself out of the rose tinted glasses, and update on Alice?

I took a university class that based the names of the Veritasium video. Drew and Gun. They rhyme with system 1&2.

I really loved Dr Stone. It gave me the feeling that the science as magic sequences gave me. A deep appreciation for reality and the power it brings an individual to understand it deeply. I really hope to have more rationalists watch it in future.

I also recommend “Science fell in love, so I tried to prove it” for stats nerds. And “My Hero Academia” as the main character embodies “Tsuyoku Naritai!”

If I had sufficient funds. I would consider if it would be beneficial to invade a few subreddits, and offer $1000 to whoever can make the most viral meme that subtly teaches basic concepts of AI Doom.

This thought stems from a comment on “The Best Lay Argument is not a Simple English Yud Essay”. I have more thoughts, but not much time. If my reasoning is unclear I apologise.

Yep! If I think about those 10 people, 5 are having, or I expect to have large impact on the future. As for ages, all the people I thought of except one were over 20. There was one 14yo who is just naturally super high G.

I like what you’re doing trying to do here. I think this is important work.

I’m a bit confused at what you mean by Layperson though? These are good for the ‘every day’ above average intelligence ‘switched on’ type of individual.

But that is not what I image a Layperson as. I interact regularly with ~100 people. (For context, I am a Drama Teacher and Trivia Host)

I thought about how many I predict could understand these examples, given 20 seconds of their attention. I thought of 10 people. The other 90% would fall into a few other categories that all end with them not being more knowledgeable after coming across the text.

But am I confused? Was that 90% not the target audience?

4J Bostock
Yeah, I agree we need improvement. I don't know how many people it's important to reach, but I am willing to believe you that this will hit maybe 10%. I expect the 10% to be people with above-average impact on the future, but I don't know what %age of people is enough. 90% is an extremely ambitious goal. I would be surprised if 90% of the population can be reliably convinced by logical arguments in general.

I was recently ease-dropping on a loud phone conversation. A man, maybe late 40s? Had been cheated on. He was angry. He was arguing with his girlfriend.

I noticed that all he argued the way people argue in movies. “Put yourself in my shoes”, “No, you listen to me!”, “I thought you would be the one!”. It hurt to listen to someone in pain.

A few weeks later, I was in a heated discussion with some Non-Rationalist friends. Long story short, I failed to output correct emotional signals, which was making them upset. I noticed the same thing in them. Copying the wa... (read more)

Took Metamucil in water in glass form for about a year. Lost a lot of weight. Was great 98% of the time. However, sometimes I wouldn’t drink enough water. Would absolutely not recommend that experience.

2Brendan Long
I've had the same experience a few times and can confirm that it's not great. At this point I drink a whole glass of water when I take it, and I usually take it with a meal (my theory is that this might mix it up more so even if there's not enough water, it won't be one solid clump).

Recipe Recommendation: I freeze these in small containers. When done right, it’s breakfast for an entire month. Just take one out of the freezer and put in the fridge every morning. That way you’ll always have an unfrozen one.

  • Rolled oats (bulk) Some come with fruit chunks
  • Clusters of crunchy whatever
  • Blue Berries
  • Raspberries
  • Banana
  • Coca powder (a little)
  • Peanut Butter (a lot)
  • Apple juice (maybe 1inch max)
  • cover with soy milk (Oestrogen thing isn’t true. It’s plant oestrogen. Cows milk has animal oestrogen)
  • Sprinkle cinnamon

Freeze Highly recommended. Takes a while to prep 30 of them. But makes life pretty damn good.

That matches with what my psychiatrist told me. I find it surprising how large the variation between individuals can be with these meds.

I have met people who can drink an espresso before bed and it actually helps their sleep. But I find those people to be rare. I see much more variance in amphetamines. My mental data set isn’t large enough to make any sold predictions. But I am unable to point to a clear “most people's sleep is (X)ed by amphetamines”.

1Morpheus
One confounder: depression/mania. Recently (the last ~two weeks) I have been having bad sleep (waking up 3-7 am and not feeling sleepy anymore (usually I sleep from midnight to 9). My current best guess is that the problem is that my life has been going too well recently, leading to a self-sustaining equilibrium where I have little sleep and mania. Reduced my medication today (~55mg instead of 70mg) which seems to have helped with the mania. I had another day with slight mania 1 month ago when sleeping little in order to travel to a conference, so in the future I'll probably reduce my medication dose on such days. Took a friend describing his symptoms on too much medication for me to realize what is going on.

This seems like it will be useful for me in the future.

I’ve been wondering for a while how the long half life of ADHD meds impact sleep. Any data on that?

4Morpheus
There is probably a lot of variation between people regarding that. In my family meds across the board improved people's sleep (by making people less sleepy during the day, so more active and less naps). When I reduced my medication from 70mg to 50mg for a month to test whether I still needed the full dose, the thing that was annoying the most was my sleep (waking up at night and not falling asleep again increased. Falling asleep initially was maybe slightly easier). Taking it too late in the afternoon is really bad for my sleep, though.

I’d say that’s a good guess given the information I provided.

I think I did a good job in this particular circumstance as coming off as confused or curious. That was my aim, and I placed a lot of focus there. However, I haven’t listened back to the audio recordings of the conversation. It’s likely my previous comment is heavily bias.

Unfortunately, I think the average person doesn’t understand misunderstanding. I think it can be taken as…

  • You’re too dumb to understand
  • You’re being purposely ignorant
  • You’re making fun of them I’ll give an example:

— I was recently in a conversation with a non-rationalist. I organised it because I wanted to talk about negative opinions they had on me. We talked a lot about certain scenarios.

In one scenario, I had seemingly rejected the suggestion that we all go bowling. I had said out loud “I hate bowling”. When what I meant was “I hate bowling, but I’... (read more)

3leogao
It is unfortunately impossible for me to know exactly what happened during this interaction. I will say that the specific tone you use matters a huge amount - for example, if you ask to understand why someone is upset about your actions, the exact same words will be much better received if you do it in a tone of contrition and wanting to improve, and it will be received very poorly if you do it in a tone that implies the other person is being unreasonable in being upset. From the very limited information I have, my guess is you probably often say things in a tone that's not interpreted the way you intended.

Not what I’d expect of reddit. Do you have particular subreddits in mind? I’d personally like to spend my time in places like the ones you described.

Idk if people around the world have those cardboard “Recycle your phone” boxes. That take phones and recycle their components. But I’ve rummaged through a certain one ~5 different times and found 2 completely functional and reset iPhones.

Surely there’s something better we can do with these than disassembling them?

2gwern
Sounds like that would encourage theft.

By “NSFW” do you mean pornography? Or are you also including Gore?

I’m messing around with a post about this. However:

  • overwhelmingly positive
  • with a few things I was a little icked about But I need to think about that more to understand if it’s a problem with me, or the thing that made me icked out

And thanks for checking in. That’s very kind of you

Just returned to Aus from US. One of the most annoying things while travelling was lack of public bathrooms. I could believe that some restaurants just didn’t have a bathroom. I was surprised at how few bathrooms lighthaven seemed to have. Though didn’t go into any of the sleeping areas. Even a place like Disneyland, or a mall. Here is AUS, if I go to a mall I expect to have bathrooms every ~hundred meters. I expect them to be clearly marked, easy to navigate towards and extremely rarely out of order. I can’t imagine needed to pay to use something like a bathroom. Though I did see cafes charging for cups of water. Charging for that type of thing in public places feels like a mistake to me.

FYI Lighthaven isn't super representative – most of the bathrooms are in private rooms because it was a hotel designed for people being in private rooms, and it's expensive to build more (both because it costs money, and because each bathroom is one fewer breakout room, which we also wanted in many contexts).

Unfortunately, I tend to treat any non-independent science related media as brain poison. It tends to be much more hype or misunderstanding than value. Which is a shame, because there is so much interesting and true science that can be minded for content.

2Garrett Baker
I do the same for the most part. The way this comes up is mostly by my attempts to verify claims Wikipedia makes.

That first point made me laugh. It’s exactly the type of mistake I expected to make, and I still didn’t see it coming.

I appreciate all this safety advice and will update my decision making based on that.

Geez, the weed thing surprises me. I hadn’t planned to smoke any until after the event. But I think I’ll avoid that now. I’m already struggling with motivation from jet lag. I don’t want to increase that feeling.

3frankybegs
The weed thing is not true. It can sap your motivation acutely, and perhaps even have a more sustained (if definitely temporary) effect. But it certainly doesn't ruin your life by instantly "knocking your motivational system off balance".
3the gears to ascension
It's a relatively chemically safe drug, but is easily habit forming and knocks you out of a productive space if used more than once every 3 to 6 months, imo. your reasoning seems reasonable. have fun with the trip!

Hmmm, I think I’m mostly bad at those things. I’ll play it safe.

And thanks for the good idea! I’ve added a session at 3pm on the Sunday.

From Newcastle, Australia to Berkeley, San Francisco. I arrived yesterday for Less.online. I’ve had a bit of culture shock, a big helping of being increasingly scared, and quite a few questions. I’ll start with those. Feel free to skip them.

These questions are based on warnings I’ve gotten from local non-rationalists. Idk if they’re scared because of the media they consume or because of actual stats. I’m asking these because they feel untrue.

  1. Is it ok to be outside after dark?
  2. Will I really get ‘rolled’ mid day in Oakland?
  3. Are there gangs walking around
... (read more)
5cata
How did you like your trip in the end?
3Viliam
Please don't ask on Manifold, you might incentivize creating one.

Have fun! I won't be going. Some random notes:

  • berkeley, san francisco is like saying maitland, newcastle
  • re: #1: yeah I don't feel unsafe outside after dark in the bay. If a homeless person walks by, I'll just say hi and ask if they have any urgent unmet needs. even just acknowledging them as a person is a nice gesture, though. many will try to engage much more than you have time or interest for; it's okay to just walk away from the convo.
  • had to look up what "getting rolled" is. yeah, it's possible, but not that hard to avoid. if an area seems very poor, th
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7Screwtape
I think go ahead and ask people to sign things. I've done it before and it went great, and the resulting book is a great memento. You've got a good conversation starter right there with asking them their favourite sequences post. Welcome to the US!

Re safety, I don't know about Oakland but some parts of SF are genuinely the most dangerous feeling places I've ever been to after dark (because normally I wouldn't go somewhere, but SF feels very fine until it isn't). If I am travelling to places in SF after dark I'll check how dodgy the street entrances are. 

I would bet hard cash that "I’m sure I’ll be at least in the bottom 5% for intelligence at Less Online. I won’t be surprised or hurt if I’ve got the least Gs of people there" is wrong.  

But okay, let's just go with your fears and assume for sake of argument that you're right...  Last year,  Aella did a live polling event at Manifest where she asked us to, in general, first predict how we relatively compared to the crowd on any N, then define actual buckets of values and arrange ourselves by those buckets.  

(So, e.g., "predict how recent... (read more)

4Austin Chen
Welcome to the US; excited for your time at LessOnline (and maybe Manifest too?) And re: 19., we're working on it![1] 1. ^ (Sorry, that was a lie too.)
6Nisan
Re: safety, it depends on exactly where you are, your skill in assessing strangers' intentions from a distance, and probably the way you carry yourself. Speaking of which, I'd be interested in playing some improv games with you at less.online, if you want to do that!

Hi! Thank you very much for taking the time to write such a considered response to my ramble of a comment.

Your first question is a hard one to express in text. Instead, I’ll try hard to write a list of requirements for a situation to generate that feeling for me. Then you might be able to image a scenario that meets the requirements and get a similar feeling?

Requirements:

  • I must deeply care about the core idea of the subject. For example, I deeply care about animals not coming to harm, or about the world being destroyed by ASI.
  • I must disagree with the wa
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2tomdlal
Thanks for explaining more.  I sympathise with your feelings around veganism - I too feel a bit awkward saying the V word in some contexts. Some of those feelings are probably down to an internalised veganphobia that I can't shake off despite having been vegan for 4 years. I'm not sure how relevant the vegan/animal rights analogy is to AI safety. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Pause is already a popular idea, veganism is not. That probably gives pause advocates some leeway to be bit more annoying. When trying to change the world, you need to make a trade-off between annoyingness/publicity and obscurity/respectability. On one extreme, you never mention your issue unless asked. No one listens to you. On the other extreme, you scream your issue into people's faces in Times Square whilst covered in your own faeces and stream everything on YouTube. No one takes you seriously. There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of the two. All of the activities that PauseAI engages in are seen by the public as acceptable forms of protest. Although, of course, the details can always be improved, so I appreciate your thoughts. My hunch is that we're probably at around about the right level of annoyingness. (although my personal preference to avoid being seen as weird may bias me against adopting more annoying tactics - even if they have higher expected value).
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