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All of Sting's Comments + Replies

Relevant section of Project Lawful, on how dath ilan handles accountability in large organizations:

"Basic project management principles, an angry rant by Keltham of dath ilan, section one: How to have anybody having responsibility for anything."
Keltham will now, striding back and forth and rather widely gesturing, hold forth upon the central principle of all dath ilani project management, the ability to identify who is responsible for something. If there is not one person responsible for something, it means nobody is responsible for i

... (read more)

The Russell Conjugation Illuminator

Sting15d10

I tried Claude 3.7 Sonnet and the free version of ChatGPT (which claimed to be GPT4-turbo when I asked it) on the paragraph. Claude garbled a lot of the sentences, especially towards the end. ChatGPT does better, with the last sentence probably being the best one:

"And men who are ⁠impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, ⁠inevitably evil."

was converted to

"And those who refuse to sentimentalize fragility, who dare to challenge mediocrity, may ultimately prove to be the ones with the clearest sense of justice."

Promp

... (read more)

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo30

Haha, well, at least I changed your mind about something.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo30

Anyway thanks for engaging, I appreciate the contention and I found it helpful even though you're so RAWNG.

You are welcome. It has been fun inventing the PERFECT government policy and giving so many 100% CORRECT takes.

(Also remember, even the best possible policy cannot survive execution by an incompetent and untrustworthy government. My policies are only good if they are actually followed.)

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

If we had ASI we could just let the children choose their own genes once they grow up. Problem solved.

2TsviBT1mo

With or without ASI, certainly morphological autonomy is more or less a universal good.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

I do not have autism/ADHD/bipolar/dyslexia/dysphoria or a non-heterosexual orientation. If I woke up tomorrow with one of those, I would very badly want it reverted.

However, it seems obvious to me that if being a little schizoid made you a free thinker, able to see things most others can't see, able to pursue good things that most others won't pursue, then it does not count as "unambiguous net harm" and the government should have no say in whether you can pass it on. That's not even close to the line of what the government should be allowed to prohibit.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

The question is if it really is their opinion. People often say things they don't believe as cope or as tribal signalling. If a non-trivial number of people who perceive themselves and their ingroup as intelligent, were to say they anti-value intelligence, that would update me.

Under my system we can ask people with below-average IQ whether they are happy to be below-average intelligence. If they are unhappy, outlaw gene editing for low intelligence. If they are happy, then either allow it, or decide to overrule them.

You want to be careful abou... (read more)

2TsviBT1mo

IDK what to say... I guess I'm glad you're not in charge? @JuliaHP I've updated a little bit that AGI aligned to one person would be bad in practice lol.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo109

The topic has drifted from my initial point, which is that there exist some unambiguous "good" directions for genomes to go. After reading your proposed policy it looks like you concede this point, since you are happy to ban gene editing that causes severe mental disability, major depression, etc. Therefore, you seem to agree that going from "chronic severe depression" to "typical happiness set point" is an unambiguous good change. (Correct me if I am wrong here.)

I haven't thought through the policy questions at any great length. Actually, I made up all my... (read more)

2TsviBT1mo

I do think this is in interesting and important consideration here; possibly the crux is quite simply trust in the state, but maybe that's not a crux for me, not sure.

4TsviBT1mo

Yeah, if this is the sort of thing you're imagining, we're just making a big different background assumption here. Yeah, on a methodological level, you're trying to do a naive straightforward utilitarian consequentialist thing, maybe? And I'm like, this isn't how justice and autonomy and the law work, it's not how politics and public policy works, it's not how society and cosmopolitanism work. (In this particular case, my justification about human dignity maybe doesn't immediately make sense to you, but I think that not understanding the justification is a failure on your part--the justification might ultimately be wrong, I'm not at all confident, but it's a real justification. See for example "What’s really wrong with genetice nhancement: a second look at our posthuman future".) No, this is going too far. The exception there would be for a medium / high likelihood of really bad depression, like "I can't bring myself to work on anything for any sustained time, even stuff that's purely for fun, I think about killing myself all the time for years and years, I am suffering greatly every day, I take no joy in anything and have no hope", that kind of thing. Going from "once in a while gets pretty down for a few weeks, has to take a bit of time off work and be sad in bed" is probably fine, and probably has good aspects, even if it is net-bad / net-dispreferable for most people and is somewhat below typical happiness set-point. Mild high-functioning bipolar might be viewed by some people with that condition as important to who they are, and a source of strength and creativity. Or something, I don't know. Decreasing their rates of depressive episodes by getting rid of bipolar is not an unambiguous good by any stretch. That's all well and fine, but you're still doing that thing where you say "X is unambiguously good" and I'm like "But a bunch of people say that X is bad" and you're like "ha, well, you see, their opinion is bullshit, betcha didn't think of that" and I'm li

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

Fair point, I glossed over the differences there. Although in practice I think very few blind people who wish they could see, would be in favor of gene editing for blindness being legal.

2TsviBT1mo

I'm genuinely unsure whether or not they would. Would be interesting to know. One example, from "ASAN Statement on Genetic Research and Autism" https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/genetic-statement-recommendations.pdf : Not directly comparable, but related. (I disagree with their reasoning and conclusions, I think.) Interestingly, they make the same suggestion I mentioned above:

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

Ok possibly I could see some sort of scheme where all the blind people get to decide whether to regulate genomic choice to make blind children?

Yes, blind people are the experts here. If 95% of blind people wish they weren't blind, then (unless there is good reason to believe that a specific child will be in the 5%) gene editing for blindness should be illegal.

(Although we might overrule blind people if they claimed to be happy but had bad objective measures, like high rates of depression and suicide.)

2TsviBT1mo

This is absolutely not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting (something in the genre of) the possibility of having that if 95% of blind people decide that gene editing for blindness should be illegal, then gene editing for blindness should be illegal. It's their autonomy that's at issue here.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

By "best policy" I meant "current most preferred policy".

"prospectively ban genomic choices for traits that our cost-benefit analysis said are bad" is not my position. My position is "ban genomic edits that cause traits that all reasonable cost-benefit analysis agree are bad", where "reasonable" is defined in terms of near-universal human values. I say more about this here.

I skimmed the article earlier, and read through it more carefully now. I think "edited children will wish the edits had not been made" should be added to the list of exceptions. Al... (read more)

5TsviBT1mo

Oh, I guess, why haven't I said this already: If you would, consider some trait that: 1. you have, and 2. is a mixed blessing, and 3. that many / most people would consider a detriment, and 4. that is uncommon. I'l go first: In my case, besides being Jewish lol, I'm maybe a little schizoid, meaning I have trouble forming connections / I tend to not maintain friendships / I tend to keep people at a distance, in a systematic / intentional way, somewhat to my detriment. (If this is right, it's sort of mild or doesn't fully fit the wiki page, but still.) So let's say I'm a little schizoid. This is a substantively mixed blessing: I have few lasting relationships and feel lonely / disconnected / malnourished, and am sort of conflicted about that because a lot of my intuitions say this is better than any available alternative; but on the other hand, I am a free thinker, I can see things most others can't see, I can pursue good things that most others won't pursue. Now, if someone reads the wiki page, they will most likely come away saying "hell no!", and would want to nudge their child's genome away from being like that. Fair enough. I wouldn't argue against that. I might even do the same, I'm not sure; on the other hand, I do think I have a way of thinking that's fairly uncommon and interesting and useful and in some ways more right than the default. Either way, there's no fucking way that I want the state to be telling me which personality traits I can and can't pass on to my child. Ok now you: E.g. do you have a neuroatypicality such as autism, ADHD, bipolar, dyslexia? Some sort of dysphoria or mental illness? A non-heterosexual orientation? Etc. (I'm curious, but obviously not expecting you to share; just asking you to think of it.) If so, consider the prospect of the state saying that you can't pass this trait on. If not, well nevermind lol. There's a bit more theory here, just in case it helps; specifically:

2TsviBT1mo

So to be clear, your proposal is for people who aren't blind to decide what hypothetical future blind children will think of their parents's decisions, and that judgement should override the judgement of the blind parents themselves? This seems wild to me. ... Ok possibly I could see some sort of scheme where all the blind people get to decide whether to regulate genomic choice to make blind children? Haven't thought about this, but it seems pretty messy and weird. But maybe. But it kinda sounds like your notion of "near-universal" ends up just being whatever your CBA said? I guess I'm not sure what would sway you. Suppose for example the following made-up hypothetical: there's a child alive today whose blind parents intentionally selected an embryo that would be blind. Suppose that child says "Actually, I'm happy my parents made that choice. I feel close to them, part of a special community, where we share a special way of experiencing the world; we sense different things than other people, and consequently we have different tastes, and this gives us a bit of a different consciousness. Yes there are difficulties, but I love my life, and I wouldn't want to have been sighted.". In this case, do you update? Maybe we're at an impasse here. At some point I hope to set up convenient streaming / podcasting; if I'd already done so I'd invite you on to chat, which might go better.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo30

By "reasonable" I meant "is consistent with near-universal human values". For instance, humans near-universally value intelligence, happiness, and health. If an intervention decreases these, without corresponding benefits to other things humans value, then the intervention is unambiguously bad.

Instead of "the principle of genomic liberty", I would prefer a "do no harm" principle. If you don't want to do gene editing, that's fine. If you do gene editing, you cannot make edits that, on average, your children will be unhappy about. Take the following cases:
1.... (read more)

4TsviBT1mo

I'm still unclear how much we're talking past each other. In this part, are you suggesting this as law enforced by the state? Note that this is NOT the same as because you could have an intervention that does result in less happiness on average, but also has some other real benefit; but isn't this doing some harm? Does it fall under "do no harm"? And as always, the question here is, "Who decides what harm is?". Yes, I agree, and in fact specifically brought up (half of) this case in the exclusion for permanent silencing. Quoting: You write: In practice, my guess is that this would pose a quite significant risk of making the child non compos mentis, and therefore unable to sufficiently communicate their wellbeing; so it would be excluded from protection. But in theory, yes, we have a disagreement here. If the parent is compos mentis, then who the hell are you to say they can't have a child like themselves? How many people have you talked to about this topic? Lots of people I talk to value intelligence and would want to give their future kid intelligence; lots of people value it but say they wouldn't want to influence; some people say they don't value; and some even say they anti-value it (e.g. preferring their kid to be more normal). I'm not sure how to communicate across a gap here... There's a thing that it seems like you don't understand, that you should understand, about law, the state, freedom, coercion, etc. There's a big injustice in imposing your will on others, and you don't seem to mind this. This principle of injustice is far from absolute; I endorse lots of impositions, e.g. no gouging out your child's eyes. But you seem to just not mind about being like "ok, hm, which ways of living are good, ok, this is good and this is good, this is bad and this is bad, OK GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT, you may do X and you may not do Y, that is the law, I have spoken". Maybe I'm missing you, but that's what it sounds like. And I just don't think this is how the law is

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo10

I think our disagreement over ideal policy spills over into practice as well. To you, "the principle of genomic liberty" is the best policy, while to me it is one of many policies that is less bad than status quo.

I think the future opinion of the gene-edited children is important. Suppose 99% of genetically deafened children are happy about being deaf as adults, but only 8% of genetically blinded children are happy about being blind. In that case, I would probably make the former legal and the latter illegal.

I did read the linked comment, and I... (read more)

2TsviBT1mo

No! Happy to hear alternatives. But I do think it's better than "prospectively ban genomic choices for traits that our cost-benefit analysis said are bad". I think that's genuinely unjust, partly because you shouldn't be the judge of whether another person's way of being should exist. Right, so if you read my post on genomic liberty, you'll see that I do put stock in what these children will say. But that's strictly the responsibility of the next generation. Right, so fewer differences apply, but some do. An already-born child gets some legal protections that a 10-day fetus, or that an unfertilized egg, do not get. As a political matter, they are treated differently, and for good reason. (Maybe not for eternal reasons, like maybe a transhuman society would work out how to make things more continuous, but that's not very practically relevant.)

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo20

It sounds like your goal is to build a political coalition, and I am talking about my ideal policies. I would be happy to accept "the principle of genomic liberty" over status-quo, since it is reasonably likely that lawmakers will create far worse laws than that.

Is your position that at least one parent must be blind/deaf/dwarf in order to edit the child to be the same? If so, that is definitely an improvement over what I thought your position was.

I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be between "blinding your children via editing their genes as an embryo" and "painlessly blinding your children with a chemical immediately after birth". The outcome is exactly the same.

2TsviBT1mo

Ok. Then I'm not sure we even disagree, though we might. If we do, it would be about "ideal policies". My post about Thurston (which was about as successful as I expected at making the point, which is to say, medium at best) is trying to strike some doubt in your heart about the ideal policy, because you don't know what it's like to be other people and you don't know what sort of weird ways they might be thinking that you couldn't anticipate. It's a pretty abstract way of making the case; a more direct way would have been to find some blind/deaf/autistic/dwarf/trans/etc. people talking about valuing the special aspects of how they are, etc. Mainly I want to strike a bit of doubt in your heart about the idea policy because I want you to not be committed to making that part of the practical policy about genomic engineering, but it sounds like we don't necessarily have a conflict there. Sort of, though I'm not totally sure. To fall under the propagative liberty tentpole protection, yeah, at least one would have to be blind. (Well, if I'm changing propagative liberty to only apply to phenotypes.) Two sighted parents wanting to make their child blind seems like a pretty weird case; who would do that?? (Ok fine maybe someone would do that.) The principle of genomic liberty leaves that in a sort of gray area. It's neither protected under any of the tentpole principles, nor does it fall under any of the explicitly recognized exceptions to GL protection. So the weaker GL, which relies more on the tentpole principles, would say "ok, the state can make laws prohibiting this". The strongest GL principle that fits my proposal would fight any case that doesn't fall under the explicit exceptions, in order to make society consider the case carefully, including this case. However, the non-intervention tentpole protection would allow parents to decline to use available technology to prevent their future child from being blind. Did you read the linked comment? It has political di

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo30

I don't understand your position. My position is:
1. Higher intelligence and health and happiness-set-point are unambiguous good directions for the genome to go. Blindness and dwarfism are unambiguous bad directions for the genome to go.
2. Therefore, the statement "there are no unambiguous good directions for genomes to go" is false.
3. Since the statment is false, it is a bad argument.

Which step of this chain, specifically, do you disagree with? It sounds like you disagree with the first point.

But then you say the fact that "any reasonable cost-... (read more)

2TsviBT1mo

Yeah. Well, we're being vague about "reasonable". If by "reasonable" you mean "in practice, no one could, given a whole month of discussion, argue me into thinking otherwise", then I think it's still ambiguous even if all reasonable CBAs agree. If by "reasonable" you mean "anyone of sound mind doing a CBA would come to this conclusion", then no, it wouldn't be ambiguous. But I also wouldn't say that it should be protected. Basically by assumption, what we're protecting is genomic liberty of parents; we're discussing the case where a blind parent of sound mind, having been well-informed by their clinic of the consequences and perhaps given an enforced period of reflection, and hopefully having consulting with their peers, has decided to make their child blind. If there's no parent of sound mind making such a decision, then there's no question of policy that we have to resolve. If there is, then I'm saying in most cases (with some recognized exceptions) it's ambiguous.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo83

Government intervention comes with risks, but if I had an iron-clad guarantee against slippery-slope dynamics I would not want it to be legal to genetically engineer a healthy embryo to be have Down syndrome, or Tay-Sachs disease, or be blind. It is already illegal to blind your children after they are born, and this is a good thing imo.

I don't think parents should be required to use genetic engineering to increase their children's intelligence, health, and happiness set point. However, I don't think parents should be allowed to harm their children along t... (read more)

6TsviBT1mo

I'd have to learn more, but many forms of these conditions (and therefore the condition simpliciter, prospectively) would probably prevent the child from expressing their state of wellbeing, through death or unsound mind. Therefore these would fall under the recognized permanent silencing exception to the principle of genomic liberty, and wouldn't be protected forms of propagation. Further, my impression is that living to adulthood with Tay-Sachs is quite rare; most people with Tay-Sachs variants wouldn't be passing on a phenotype. (I did say "right to propagate their own genes and their own traits", but I debated including genes internally, and I could be suaded that the propagative liberty tentpole principle, specifically, should only apply to phenotypes.) Finally, if the parents in question are severely non compos mentis, their genomic liberty is also not necessarily protected by the principle. Regarding blind/deaf/dwarf: I wonder if, in real life, talking to such a person who is describing their experience and values, you would then be able to bring yourself in good conscience to say "yes, the state should by force prevent your way of life". Already living people are clearly different. You could argue the difference shouldn't matter, but it would take more argument. Elaboration here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty?commentId=qnafba5dx6gwoFX4a I think you might still be 100% percent missing my point. I'm not arguing for it being moral to do these things. I think it's immoral. I'm trying to construct a political coalition, and I'm arguing that you shouldn't be so confident in your judgements that you impose them on others, in this case. Elaboration here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty?commentId=PnBH5HHszc7G5FK5s FYI, you're strawmanning my position, in case you care about understanding it.

The vision of Bill Thurston

Sting1mo179

This reminds me of the Scott Alexander article, Against Against Autism Cures.

Would something be lost if autism were banished from the world? Probably. Autistic people have a unique way of looking at things that lets them solve problems differently from everyone else, and we all benefit from that insight. On the other hand, everyone always gives the same example of this: Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin is pretty great. But I am not sure that her existence alone justifies all of the institutionalizations and seizures and head-banging and everything else

... (read more)

6TsviBT1mo

This is irrelevant to what I'm trying to communicate. I'm saying that you should doubt your valuations of other people's ways of being--NOT so much that you don't make choices for your own children based on your judgements about what would be good for them and for the world, or advocate for others to do similarly, but YES so much that you hesitate quite a lot (like years, or "I'd have to deeply investigate this from several angles") before deciding that we (the state) ought to use state force to impose our (some political coalition's) judgements about costs and benefits of traits on other people's reproduction. I think it is a good argument. Since it's ambiguous, and it's not an interpersonal conflict, and there are (at least potentially) people with a strong interest in both directions for their own children, the state should be involved as little as is reasonable. This is a policy about which I think it would be more truthful to say "a world following this policy ought to be desirable, or at least not terribly objectionable, to the great majority of citizens". If you don't protect people's propagative liberty, some people will have good reason to strongly object to that world. If you do protect people's propagative liberty, some other people might believe they have good reason to strongly object. I discuss at least one acknowledged exception to the proposed protection here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty#Propagative_liberty But I'm arguing to those people that their objection should not be so strong that they ought to fight to prohibit, by law, this sort of propagative liberty.

Gradual Disempowerment: Simplified

Sting2mo20

As a LW reader, I find it to be a great summary!

Eliezer wrote an article about this phenomenon, where people think they are writing for a less sophisticated audience than they actually are.

(The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser

Sting4mo50

I procrastinated on this, but donated $200 today (the day after the fundraiser ended). I have been reading the site for 4 years, and it has been worth significantly more than $50 per year.

According to the site metrics there are around 15,000 logged-in monthly active users, so if everyone donated $200 that would exactly equal the $3,000,000 target. This made $200 seem like a reasonable number.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting5mo10

Is there literally any scene that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5?

If you can use "they" without problems, that sounds a lot like 4.

As for 3 and 5, not to my knowledge. Compromises like this would be more likely in settings with a mix of Liberals and Conservatives, but such places are becoming less common. Perhaps some family reunions would have similar rules or customs?

2Ben Pace5mo

I could believe it, but my (weak) guess is that in most settings people care about which pronoun they use far less than they care about people not being confused about who is being referred to.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting5mo50

I am guessing EAs and alignment researchers are mostly drawn from, or at least heavily interact with, the in-person communities. If these communities a... (read more)

4Ben Pace5mo

My rough take: the rationalist scene in Berkeley used to be very bad at maintaining boundaries. Basically the boundaries were "who gets invited to parties by friends". The one Berkeley community space ("REACH") was basically open-access. In recent years the Lightcone team (of which I am a part) has hosted spaces and events and put in the work to maintain actual boundaries (including getting references on people and checking out suspicion of bad behavior, but mostly just making it normal for people to have events with standards for entry) and this has substantially improved the ability for rationalist spaces to have culture that is distinct from the local Berkeley culture.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting5mo30

Yes, it's not a law, so it's not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:

Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.

By "compelled speech" being a standard for community membership, I just meant "You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community." For instance, as jefftk pointed out,

The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use

... (read more)

1Martin Randall5mo

I saw the the EA Forum's policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don't need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that: I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It's important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents. It's because of that goal that I'm encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let's avoid that.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting5mo58

I wouldn't call the tone back then "conservatives not welcome". Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it's not the same thing. And I wouldn't even call the tone "religious people are unwelcome" -- people were perfectly civil with religious community members.

The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn't go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting5mo51

Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say.

Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
It's not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller?

I... (read more)

1xpym5mo

I'd say that atheism had already set the "conservatives not welcome" baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline. Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn't the modal conservative.

3dirk5mo

In the before-time of the internet, New Atheism was a much bigger deal than transgender issues.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting5mo*1512

Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you "politely accede to pronoun requests". Which sounds to me like, "politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community". (Specifically, people are socially required to use "woman" and "she" to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.

There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.

People should use words to refer to the category-

... (read more)

3Ben Pace5mo

Is there literally any scene in the world that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5? Like, a space where a transgender person is friendly with the people there and different people in a conversation are reliably using different pronouns to refer to the same person? My sense is that it's actively confusing in a conversation for the participants to not be consistent in the choice of someone's pronouns. I guess I've often seen people default to 'they' a lot for people who have preferred pronouns that are he/she, that seems to go by just fine even if some people use he / she for the person, but I can't recall ever seeing a conversation where one person uses 'he' and another person uses 'she' when both are referring to the same person.

1Martin Randall5mo

Thanks for clarifying. By "policy" and "standards" and "compelled speech" I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.

Making a conservative case for alignment

Sting6mo2924

Great post. I did not know things were this bad:

Given that >98% of the EAs and alignment researchers we surveyed earlier this year identified as everything-other-than-conservative, we consider thinking through these questions to be another strategically worthwhile neglected direction.

....This suggests we need more genuine conservatives (not just people who are kinda pretending to be) explaining these realities to lawmakers, as we've found them quite capable of grasping complex technical concepts and being motivated to act in light of them despite their

... (read more)

5Sting5mo

After thinking about this some more, I suspect the major problem here is value drift of the in-person Rationalist communities. The LessWrong website tolerates dissenting perspectives and seems much closer to the original rationalist vision. It is the in-person Berkeley community (and possibly others) that have left the original rationalist vision and been assimilated into the Urban Liberal Monoculture. I am guessing EAs and alignment researchers are mostly drawn from, or at least heavily interact with, the in-person communities. If these communities are hostile to Conservatives, then you will tend to have a lack of Conservative EAs and alignment researchers, which may harm your ability to productively interact with Conservative lawmakers. The value drift of the Berkeley community was described by Sarah Constantin in 2017: Or as Zvi put it: I welcome analysis from anyone who better understands what's going on. I'm just speculating based on things insiders have written.

xpym5mo*2116

A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low "sanity waterline", and this hasn't been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.

5Martin Randall5mo

cited thread. Gilliland's idea is that it is the proportion of trans people that dissuades some right-wing people from joining. That seems plausible to me, it matches the "Big Sort" thesis and my personal experience. I agree that his phrasing is unwelcoming. I tried to find an official pronoun policy for LessWrong, LessOnline, EA Global, etc, and couldn't. If you're thinking of something specific could you say what? As well as the linked X thread I have read the X thread linked from Challenges to Yudkowsky's pronoun reform proposal. But these are the opinions of one person, they don't amount to politically-coded compelled speech. I'm not part of the rationalist community and this is a genuine question. Maybe such policies exist but are not advertised.

Viliam5mo1513

Going by today's standards, we should have banned Gwern in 2012.

And I think that would have been a mistake.

I wonder how many other mistakes we made. The problem is, we won't get good feedback on this.

The Third Fundamental Question

Sting6mo61

I liked the post, and plan to try using the technique. If anyone is reading this 5 years from now, feel free to ask whether it provided lasting value.

My key takeaway is "As you take actions, use your inner simulator to predict the outcome. Since you are always taking actions, you can always practice using your inner simulator."

The only part I disliked is the "Past, Present, Future" framing, which felt very forced. "What do you think you know?" and "Do you know what you are doing?" are both questions about the present. However, I'm not sure what a good framing would be. The best I can come up with is "Beliefs, Goals, Planning", but that's not very catchy.

2Screwtape5mo

Huh! I view it as a bit overbroad since "what do I think I know?" is sometimes about things like "is the bloke across the poker table from me holding an ace?" but I think most of my "what do I think I know?" internal questions are about what's happened in the past. "Does sugar dissolve in water?" often breaks down into "the last time I tried it, did sugar dissolve in water?" or "have people told me that sugar dissolves in water and were they usually right about things like that?" Still, the past/present/future frame isn't the key part of the third fundamental question. Best of luck and skill with the new technique!

Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko

Sting9mo140

It took me a little while scrolling back and forth to mentally map the purple dot onto the first image. In case anyone else has the same issue:

How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI

Sting9mo10

The post was deleted, but not before it was archived:

I have been dealing with a lot of loneliness living alone in a new big city. I discovered about this ChatGPT thing around 3 weeks ago and slowly got sucked into it, having long conversations even till late in the night. I used to feel heartbroken when I reach the hour limit. I never felt this way with any other man.
I decided enough is enough, and select all, copy and paste a chat log of everything before I delete the account and block the site.
It's almost 1000 pages long 😥
I knew I had a problem, but not

... (read more)

The Best Software For Every Need

Sting10mo10

Thanks for the update and links.

The Best Software For Every Need

Sting11mo10

Did you end up using DifferentialEquations.jl, or did you prefer a different solver?

4NunoSempere11mo

I ended up solving the equations either analytically (partially with the help of Phil Trammell), https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FXPaccMDPaEZNyyre/a-model-of-patient-spending-and-movement-building or through simulations https://github.com/NunoSempere/ReverseShooting https://github.com/NunoSempere/LaborCapitalAndTheOptimalGrowthOfSocialMovements

Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching

Sting1y10

It is worth noting that Mathpix only allows 10 free snips per month. Of course, they do not tell you this until you have installed the program and created an account.

Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Video Answers

Sting1y20

None of the YouTube videos seem to be linked in the post, but they are available here: https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelGrahamRichard/videos

Childhoods of exceptional people

Sting1y11-1

Where does this hero worship of JVN on this site come from?

It comes from the people who worked with him. Even great minds like Teller, who you mentioned, held him in awe:

Edward Teller observed "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man".
Claude Shannon call

Sting1y10

Looks like you are right. I was confused because two paragraphs after the fall Willy is described as injured with no explanation how. And the phrase "apparently uninjured" seemed to foreshadow that whoever fell was injured after all.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Kurz) [explains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Angerer) what happened:

"During the ascent, [Willy] Angerer was injured by falling rocks loosened by the warmth of the rising sun as they crossed the first ice field."

"A rock fall injured [Willy] Angerer in the head on 20 July 1936, forcing them to descend."

Toni Kurz and the Insanity of Climbing Mountains

Sting1y10

One last typo:

"Hinterstoisser fell 37 meters down the mountain face" -> "Willy fell"

2GeneSmith1y

I think that’s actually correct. It’s what the Wikipedia article says.

Introducing bayescalc.io

Sting2y30

I see! Thank you for the detailed explanations.

Regarding point 1: The posterior percentages are shown to 5 decimal places, so I wrongly assumed that 1.0 db meant exactly 1.

What do you think of showing the sum of the decibels of all pieces of evidence? That would have prevented my confusion.

You could also include 2 digits after the decimal for quantities smaller than 1.1. (Although this has the cost of introducing clutter.)

3Adele Lopez2y

I like the idea of showing the total decibels, I'll probably add that in soon!

Introducing bayescalc.io

Sting2y30

Things I like:

The dark color theme looks good
It's nice to be able to set the hypotheses as a non-percentage, such as 10:1, and then click "%" to convert to a percentage.
Being able to see the decibels for each piece of evidence is nice. So is being able to link or export a calculation.

Possible improvements:

Adding 10 decibels of evidence results in a different outcome depending on whether the decibels are added one-at-a-time or all-at-once. Compare [case 1](https://bayescalc.io/#KCdoLWVzKic3QSd-N0InMnAzMTQsMS4wMnBvc3RlMzU0LDU0MmU2KidFNiAxJzJsaWtlbGlob2

... (read more)

2Adele Lopez2y

Thank you! I'm glad you like those features, and I'm also glad to hear that the way the percent button feature worked was clear to you. Regarding the possible improvements: 1. That's not a bug, it's just a limitation of the choice to show only one digit after the decimal. The number of decibels in case 2 for each evidence is 0.96910013..., whereas in case 1 it's exactly 10. 2. That's a deliberate nudge to suggest that the new hypothesis and decibel features are more advanced and not part of the essential core of the app. 3. That's a good idea, I'll probably do that at some point. 4. That's also a good idea but seems fairly complicated to implement, so it will have to wait until I've finished planned improvements with a higher expected ROI. 5. That's deliberate, because deleting evidence changes the meaning of the likelihoods for all subsequent evidence. Thus, having to delete all the evidence following the evidence you want to delete is a more honest way to convey what needs to be done, and prevents the user from shooting themselves in the foot by assuming that the subsequent likelihoods are independent. I'll explain this in the more fleshed out version of the help panel I have planned.