RomanHauksson

Ultimately, rationalism should help people win. Scott Alexander claims that the surge of the price of Bitcoin was a test of that: > ...suppose God had decided, out of some sympathy for our project, to make winning as easy as possible for rationalists. He might have created the biggest investment...

I've been hearing murmurs about a recently formed philosophy called "Effective Accelerationism", described as:[1] > ...an ideology that draws from Nick Land's theories of accelerationism to advocate for the belief that artificial intelligence and LLMs will lead to a post-scarcity technological utopia. E/acc communities on Twitter were primarily fostered on...

One criticism of LessWrong as an intellectual community is that it reinvents ideas "in-house" that already exist in academia. What are some examples of this? I'd also be interested to see comments about whether you agree with this impression and what the examples tell us about how to improve the...

In this video, Dr. Rohin Francis introduces the term "mechanistic bias" to describe the phenomenon where people tend to believe that a medical treatment would work if it has a plausible sounding mechanism of action, even when a randomized control trial would likely fail to demonstrate its effectiveness. The human...

If you're organizing a social event, I strongly recommend that you structure it in a way that encourages small group discussions over large ones. What's the point of an interest-specific social club? To socialize, of course! With people who share a specific interest. I would argue this isn't as obvious...

Edit 2023-05-09: I recorded a presentation for EA Software Engineers about this post. In it, I demonstrate each of the tools and discuss some extra ones at the end, namely content blockers, userscripts, and alternative front-end websites. Isn't the internet such a magically useful tool? Thirty years ago, if you...

I propose the "2/3 rule" for multi-factor authentication: to access a system, a user must pass at least two out of three possible methods for authentication. Unlike standard multi-factor authentication, this strategy protects against both false positives (granting access to a hacker) and false negatives (denying access to a legitimate...