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All of Nicholas Weininger's Comments + Replies

How to choose what to work on
Nicholas Weininger10

Nice post. It prompts two questions, which you may or may not be the right person to answer:

  1. How do you find good obsessions? Is it "just" a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas in the way that you became obsessed with progress studies and with Fieldbook?
  2. On your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the "middle-competence trap" (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you
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1yc
1. Maybe for everyone it would be different. It might be hard to have a standard formula to find obsessions. Sometimes it may come naturally through life events/observations/experiences. If no such experience exists yet, or one seems to be interested in multiple things, I have received an advice to try different things, and see what you would like (I agree with it). Now that I think about it, it would also be fun to survey people and ask them how they got their passion/do what they do (and to derive some standard formula/common elements if possible)! 2. I think maybe we can approach with " the best of one's ability", and when we reach that, the rest may depend a lot on luck and other things too. Maybe through time, we could get better eventually, or maybe some observations/insights accidentally happened, and we found a breakthrough point, with the right accumulation of previous experience/knowledge.
The Dictatorship Problem
Nicholas Weininger206

Trump's appointed SCOTUS judges are indeed willing to rule against him and to uphold a coherent legal theory of democracy under the rule of law, which agree or disagree is clearly not equivalent to "whatever my side wants it gets". The same sadly cannot be said of his lower court judges, notably Aileen Cannon, whose presence on the bench in his home district drastically decreases the otherwise high likelihood of his being convicted and imprisoned for having obviously, self-confessedly committed serious crimes. Cannon is exactly the sort of lawless, toadyin... (read more)

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7the gears to ascension
I appreciate this because it focuses on the mechanistic process of inter-human communication that actually implements the patterns we're discussing. I feel like if this conversation is to continue usefully it probably should move towards precise mechanistic description, I'd be interested in a v2 of a post like this that taboos most names of organizational patterns and instead uses mechanistic descriptions. examples of words that I'd rather see as an expanded definition in most of the document (mentioning the name need not be forbidden, just don't use the name at length): fascism; authoritarianism; democracy (!); [far] right, left. also, every "will", "typically", "often" should ideally be cited. Without these refinements this is already a great doc, but it needs to be a high quality argument about a fraught topic. I write this already in agreement with the title thesis, but I also agree that OP isn't sufficiently verified evidence to be convincing to someone who doesn't already have an epistemic state that makes this a small update.
6xiann
That is one example, but wouldn't we typically assume there is some worst example of judicial malpractice at any given time, even in a healthy democracy? If we begin to see a wave of openly partisan right or left-wing judgements, that would be a cause for concern, particularly if they overwhelm the ability of the supreme court to overrule. The recent dueling rulings over mifepristone was an example of this (both the original ruling and the reactive ruling), but it is again a single example so far. I actually think the more likely scenario then a fascistic backslide is a civil conflict or split between red & blue America, which would significantly destabilize global geopolitics by weakening American hegemony. The military leans conservative but not overwhelmingly, so if put under pressure individual battalions may pledge loyalty to either side in a conflict. However, even this I would say is low-probability because of the partisan geography of America; red & blue areas intermingle and do not form a coherent front like the north & south did in the Civil War.
Recursive Middle Manager Hell
Nicholas Weininger482

I used to be a middle manager at Google, and I observed mazedom manifesting there in two main ways:

  1. If you try to make your organization productive by focusing your time on intensively coaching the people under you to be better at their jobs, this will make your org productive but will not result in your career advancement. This is because nobody at the level above you will be able to tell that the productivity increase is due to your efforts-- your reports' testimony to this effect will not provide appropriate social proof because they are by definition

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Let’s think about slowing down AI
Nicholas Weininger96

It seems very odd to have a discussion of arms race dynamics that is purely theoretical exploration of possible payoff matrices, and does not include a historically informed discussion of what seems like the obviously most analogous case, namely nuclear weapons research during the Second World War.

US nuclear researchers famously (IIRC, pls correct me if wrong!) thought there was a nontrivial chance their research would lead to human extinction, not just because nuclear war might do so but because e.g. a nuclear test explosion might ignite the atmosphere. T... (read more)

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