romeostevensit

Thanks for doing some sensitivity analysis. It's often number one on my list of frustrating things not included in a model.

Replying toMy journey to the microwave alternate timeline

romeostevensit2d

My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

This feels like a throwback to the LW of yore in an excellent way. Bravo.

romeostevensit2d

two useful things:

putting things in the new larger context windows, like the books of authors you respect and having the viewpoints discuss things back and forth between several authors. Helps avoid the powerpoint slop attractor.

learning to prompt better via the dual use of practicing good business writing techniques. Easy to do via the above by putting a couple business writing books in context and then prompting the model to give you exercises that it then grades you on.

romeostevensit8dQuick Take

I recently found out that a lifetime of dairy consumption is likely to only kill about 1 cow on expectation. This was about 6-8x off what I naively guessed. This made me curious and I did some napkin math with Gemini:

https://imgur.com/a/dyAWdUs

and fish are horrendous: https://imgur.com/a/EpwcWAm

Replying to'Inventing the Renaissance' Review

romeostevensit8d

'Inventing the Renaissance' Review

I recently found out that one of the reasons it took Darwinism so long to emerge given animal husbandry was that many people had a similar idea, but the universe was considered to be too young for it to lead to anything but minor variation. It was shortly after cosmological times were pushed way way back that the idea took on more steam.

Replying toBasics of How Not to Die

romeostevensit11d

Basics of How Not to Die

I think it's pretty reasonable that people discount the 3-5 years exercise adds at the end of life. But the quality of life boost is not reasonable to discount.

Replying toDisagreement Comes From the Dark World

romeostevensit16d

Disagreement Comes From the Dark World

Aumann's agreement is pragmatically wrong. For bounded levels of compute you can't necessarily converge on the meta level of evidence convergence procedures.

Replying toDating Roundup #11: Going Too Meta

romeostevensit20d*

Dating Roundup #11: Going Too Meta

I've thought a lot of the past dating roundups had good advice, but one based primarily on twitter discourse, as this one is, is very bad. Many of these takes reek of mental illness and should not be updated on IMO.

-1

Replying toHow Could I Have Learned That Faster?

romeostevensit21d

How Could I Have Learned That Faster?

faster is often the wrong dimension for me to focus on. Though good optimization does lead to speed, it often feels like a result rather than a direct optimization target. I think something closer to how could I have learned that more easily, more completely. What was extraneous in retrospect? Were there any signs that I could have noticed earlier? What could I have included earlier that was obviously helpful?

One dynamic these questions reveal is often subtle bike-shedding: focusing on those areas that gave quick hits of sense of progress rather than what moves the needle on the original goal the most. A shorthand I have for this is 'decision leverage', as in how will what I am doing currently connect to something I do differently in the future?

More generally, the four pedagogical interventions with the largest effect size AFAIK are

deliberate practice

elaboration of context (connection to other areas of knowledge)

frequent low stakes quizzing

teaching the material to others

romeostevensit22dQuick Take

we identify seven epistemic fault lines, divergences in grounding, parsing, experience, motivation, causal reasoning, metacognition, and value. We call the resulting condition Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19466

This may crisp up some intuitions about specific ways slop feels bad.

probabilistic sanctioning as the simplest way of distributing the duty (enforcement costs).

prior art for Eliezer's cooperation-punishment theorem from Planecrash?

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/16/8/083016/meta

Towards a Categorization of Adlerian Excuses

romeostevensit

2mo

[Author's note: LLMs were used to generate and sort examples into their requisite categories, as well as find and summarize relevant papers, and extensive assistance with editing]

Context: Alfred Adler (1870–1937) split from Freud by asserting that human psychology is teleological (goal-oriented) rather than causal (drive-based). He argued that neuroses and "excuses" are not passive symptoms of past trauma, but active, creative tools used by the psyche to safeguard self-esteem. This post attempts to formalize Adler’s concept of "Safeguarding Tendencies" into categories, not by the semantic content of excuses, but by their mechanical function in managing the distance between the Ego and Reality.

Abstract: When a life task threatens to reveal inadequacy, people initiate... (read 1687 more words →)

Categorizing Selection Effects

romeostevensit

2mo

[Author's note: LLMs were used to generate and sort many individual examples into their requisite categories, as well as find and summarize relevant papers, and extensive assistance with editing]

The earliest recording of a selection effect is likely the story of Diagoras regarding the "Votive Tablets." When shown paintings of sailors who had prayed to Poseidon and survived shipwrecks, implying that prayer saves lives, Diagoras asked: “Where are the pictures of those who prayed, and were then drowned?”

Selection effects are sometimes considered the most pernicious class of error in data science and policy-making because they do not merely obscure the truth, they often invert it. They create "phantom patterns" where the exact opposite... (read 1212 more words →)

One of the most important things I've learned from therapy and contemplative practice for pragmatic interactions is that people will usually dig their heels in if they detect you have a bottom line written first. This effect is so strong that it activates even when people agree with you on the bottom line (but they have any level of conflict about it). I think this is one of the overwhelming considerations for why Eliezer gets the results he does. It cuts against another effect public intellectuals are subject to, which is that the easiest way to get popular is to become 'The X Guy' where X is a particular thing that the public has room in their heads for. But if you're the X guy people also associate you with a particular bottom line, so good luck getting any truth finding interactions. Instead, you wind up as a piece that gets moved around the board for conflict/spectacle purposes.

•••

Had a facepalm moment the other day. Realized that to-do items were split between two reference classes, unambiguous tasks and ambiguous tasks. Unambiguous tasks have some combination of known next action, known time envelope, known what 'finished' looks like concretely, while ambiguous tasks have below threshold levels of some or all of these. Realized life can be as simple as notating ambiguous items with a capital A, at which point its default next action is to disambiguate the above.

Is there a broader term or cluster of concepts within which is situated the idea that human values are often downstream of decisions, not upstream, in that the person with the correct values will simply be selected based on what decisions they are expected to make (ie election of a CEO by shareholders). This seems like a crucial understanding in AI acceleration.

We seem to be closing in on needing a lesswrong crypto autopsy autopsy. Continued failure of first principles reasoning bc blinded by speculative frenzies that happen to accompany it.

Time Efficient Resistance Training

romeostevensit

Previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RydETq379eoWqBFvj/updates-and-reflections-on-optimal-exercise-after-nearly-a

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bZ2w99pEAeAbKnKqo/optimal-exercise

I figured it would be useful to summarize how I train when I go for time efficiency these days, based on my understanding of the relevant meta-analyses on exercise selection and parameters. The primary time savers are supersets and lowered rest times. A routine like this is not totally optimized for max hypertrophy or anything, but is very very time efficient, and would still likely cause large gains for relatively untrained people. A lot of why I exercise these days, besides maintenance, is energy levels and injury prevention.

With supersets, you spend the time resting one group of muscles by doing an exercise for a different group of muscles. This is well... (read 766 more words →)

Several dozen people now presumably have Lumina in their mouths. Can we not simply crowdsource some assays of their saliva? I would chip money in to this. Key questions around ethanol levels, aldehyde levels, antibacterial levels, and whether the organism itself stays colonized at useful levels.

Not a new point but perennially worth noting: subcultures persist via failure. That is to say that subcultures that succeed obviate themselves. This is concretely noticeable in ways that, coming in as an outsider, a subculture about X will have a bunch of mysterious self sabotage behavior that actually keeps ¬X persistent.

•••

Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the Brain

romeostevensit

Epistemic status: very shallow google scholar dive. Intended mostly as trailheads for people to follow up on on their own.

previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h6kChrecznGD4ikqv/increasing-iq-is-trivial

I don't know to what degree this will wind up being a constraint. But given that many of the things that help in this domain have independent lines of evidence for benefit it seems worth collecting.

Food:

dark chocolate, beets, blueberries, fish, eggs. I've had good effects with strong hibiscus and mint tea (both vasodilators).

Exercise:

Regular cardio, stretching/yoga, going for daily walks.

Learning:

Meditation, math, music, enjoyable hobbies with a learning component.

Light therapy:

Unknown effect size, but increasingly cheap to test over the last few years. I was able to get Too Many lumens for under $50. Sun... (read more)

Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion

Kaj_Sotala

Kaj_Sotala, romeostevensit

Kaj_Sotala

I just started thinking about what I would write to someone who disagreed with me on the claim "Rationalists would be better off if they were more spiritual/religious", and for this I'd need to define what I mean by "spiritual".

Here are some things that I would classify under "spirituality":

Rationalist Solstices (based on what I've read about them, not actually having been in one)
Meditation, especially the kind that shows you new things about the way your mind works
Some forms of therapy, especially ones that help you notice blindspots or significantly reframe your experience or relationship to yourself or the world (e.g. parts work where you first shift to perceiving yourself as being made

... (read 8571 more words →)

The Handbook of Rationality (2021, MIT press) is now open access

romeostevensit

Of particular interest here is section 4.1 on subjective accounts of probability and section 8.4 which explicitly addresses Knightian uncertainty and its challenges for Bayesian accounts.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5525/The-Handbook-of-Rationality

My guess for why I was wrong about US housing

romeostevensit

Edit/update: this is receiving more upvotes and I think it is worth explicitly pointing out that while housing is up 60% over this time frame, the Sp500 is up 90+%, so this is not intended as a full on refutation of all the points made in the original post.

A few years ago I wrote a post highlighting what I felt were underappreciated considerations in home buying, most of which cut against the standard advice of homes as a major part of your investment portfolio. It garnered a lot of argument, most of which, I felt, boiled down to reference class forecasting over which mean housing would regress to for price trajectory: a... (read 208 more words →)

110

Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade

romeostevensit

Previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bZ2w99pEAeAbKnKqo/optimal-exercise

Firstly, do the basic epistemics hold up? As far as I know, yes. The basic idea that lifting twice a week and doing cardio twice a week add up to a calorie expenditure that get you the vast majority of exercise benefits compared to extreme athletes holds up, especially when you take reverse causality adjustments into effect (survivorship bias on the genetic gifts of the extreme). Nothing I've encountered since has cast much doubt on this main takeaway.

What updates have I had, then, both in personal experience and in giving training advice to others as well as any research that has come out since then?

A greater emphasis on injury prevention, as the

... (read 515 more words →)

213

Idea: an app for calculating Shapley values that creates an intuitive set of questions from which to calibrate people's estimates for the inputs, and then shows you sensitivity analysis so that you understand what the most impactful inputs are. I think this could popularize Shapley values if the results were intuitive and graphically pretty. I'm imagining this in the same vein that the quizzes financial advisors give helps render legible the otherwise difficult for most concepts of risk tolerance and utility wrt money being a function that varies wrt both money and time.

Some EA adjacent person made a bare bones calc: http://shapleyvalue.com/

Exploring Tacit Linked Premises with GPT

romeostevensit

I've been thinking about tacit linked premises on and off for the last few years in the context of arguments about AI and longtermism. They have seemed difficult to reason about without carefully going over individual arguments with a fine toothed comb because I hadn't come up with a good search strategy. Since I wanted a test case for using chatgpt for research, I decided to try working on this particular search problem. I was able to develop a list of related key terms, a list of textbooks rich in thought experiments and generate a list of some key examples.

Prompt: related terms for tacit linked premises
keyterms:
tacit linked premises
dependent premises
presuppositions
background belief
implicit premises
hidden assumption

Prompt:... (read 745 more words →)

Buddhist Psychotechnology for Withstanding Apocalypse Stress

romeostevensit

I could try writing the well cited and argued version of this post, but that would result in procrastination and get stuck in drafts, so you get the stream of consciousness version instead. Happy to answer clarifying questions in the comments. This post is written not on the thesis that it will help all or even most of the people who read it (though it aims to not be actively harmful to those it doesn't help) but that it might be helpful pointers for some or encourage a productive line of thinking.

Reading the transcript of Eliezer's crypto interview, I experienced a physical sensation I've had a few times before, like a cold... (read 1317 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade

The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)

My guess for why I was wrong about US housing

How to Lurk Less (and benefit others while benefiting yourself)

romeostevensit

romeostevensit

Towards a Categorization of Adlerian Excuses

Categorizing Selection Effects

Time Efficient Resistance Training

Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the Brain

Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion

The Handbook of Rationality (2021, MIT press) is now open access

My guess for why I was wrong about US housing

romeostevensit

Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade

The Hard Work of Translation (Buddhism)

My guess for why I was wrong about US housing

How to Lurk Less (and benefit others while benefiting yourself)

romeostevensit

romeostevensit

Towards a Categorization of Adlerian Excuses

Categorizing Selection Effects

Time Efficient Resistance Training

Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the Brain

Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion

The Handbook of Rationality (2021, MIT press) is now open access

My guess for why I was wrong about US housing