Writing algorithms that are 50 lines of code seems like one definition of fluency, and one that is probably relevant in compilers/backend, but this also rings a little hollow to me, in terms of the pragmatics of real software engineering.
In my experience, most software engineering is using libraries, not language features; how would you describe fluency over libraries? Is "glue code" like command-line flags or CRUD web app routing subject to this? Should that code also "just flow"? In my experience truly powerful developers are able to do this, but even ma...
A talented developer can fluently translate a high level description of an algorithm into code in a language or ecosystem they are familiar with.
Could you say a little bit more about what "fluency" is in this context? It's doing all the work in this section but I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to communicate.
California is not capable of extracting tax revenue from companies like Google in any meaningful way, so we shouldn't expect them to be capable of taking stronger, less directly self-benefiting action. If they can't get Google to pay them, they can't get Google to stop AI.
What is California's great track record in this space? They have caused "May cause cancer in California" to be printed many times. We shouldn't expect them to save us.
In general, committing to any stance as a personal constant (making it a "part of your identity") is antithetical to truthseeking. It certainly imposes a constraint on truthseeking that makes the problem harder.
But, if you share that stance with someone else, you won't tend to see it. You'll just see the correctness of your own stance. Being able to correctly reason around this is a hard-mode problem.
While you can speak about specific spectra of stances (vegan-carnist, and others), in reality, there are multiple spectra in play at any given tim...
I think the critical difference is that while marital rape might not be a legal crime, and might not be seen as wrong by people who aren't subjected to it, it's obviously wrong for the person suffering it, and obviously identifiable as coercive and abusive even to the perpetrator.
The spectrum then becomes (recognized as wrong x feels wrong) -> (not recognized as wrong -> feels wrong) -> (recognized as wrong x doesn't feel wrong) -> (not recognized as wrong x doesn't feel wrong).
I think people are only talking about quadrant 3 when s...
The firearm use is a weird thing to point out. The usual explanation I see here is that social programming directed towards women drives them to value appearance more highly and use methods that are not as disfiguring, which means no firearms, but also no trains, bridges, high buildings, and so on.
Control is not a constant, and ability to effectively control depends on the social context. The state itself has acted as a counterweight to parental control for hundreds of years, and capital also acts as a counterweight -- if you don't want to live the way your parents want you to live or marry who they want you to marry, you can run away to the city and live free, which is easier if there are strong laws preventing you from being hunted down and honor-killed and jobs waiting for you in the urban center. Control was arguably at all-time lows in the late...
You're quite welcome.
I honestly have no idea. It might be in Expect Resistance somewhere, which if not directly about this topic, is generally about it.
I may have been (edit: was probably) thinking about The Promise of Defeat, by Moxie Marlinspike, anarchist cyrptographer sailor extraordinaire and the author of the Signal protocol (and the original Signal app, though he's no longer with the project).
Imagine what it was like for those of us who were talking about transhumanism, AI alignment, morphological freedom, cryonics, nootropics, keto diets, kettlebells, etc., in 2010, not 2023.
Welcome to the bleeding edge. It's not an easy life.
The most important thing to do is to learn to trust your research and the truth over what the tribe says. This can be very hard. I eventually sold most of my bitcoin after all my friends and family spent the summer of 2012 or so screaming at me that it was a bubble, a scam, etc., which seemed confirmed when th...
Read anarchists. Anarchists have had no hope since 1936 and still have never stopped fighting. I'm pretty sure there's a CrimethInc. essay on exactly this topic.
I'm not saying it's bad to do these things.
I'm saying that if you're doing them as a distraction from inner pain, you're basically drunk.
How is this falsifiable?
Can you point to five people who have done this, but still have a different orientation from you?
The problem isn't that access to emotion is ableist. I think that suggestion is itself ableist, neurodiverse people have complete access to their emotions, their emotional reactions to certain things might simply be different.
The problem is that no matter what you do, if you come to a conclusion different from OP, you are simply still "disembodied." You just need to "do more work." This is a way of counting the hits and excusing the misses. "Embodiment" is not "being in touch with your emotions," it is acting in the manner prescribed.
What is ab...
Lots of ink, but lots to think about. I'm thankful for this post fwiw.
The "no technical meaning" could maybe be an indicator of sarcasm. But you're right that there was no way for you to know I wasn't just misapplying the term in the same way as the OP.
I don't think this relates to group polarization per se but I take your point.
I didn't mean "triggered" to mean extremely so, someone can be mildly triggered and again, I apologize for (in my perception, based on your comment) doing that. I think you did the right thing.
It does strike me as a rather fully general counterargument, written in a deliberately obfuscatory/"woo" style. The focus on "listening to your body" seems like an obfuscation, it's an appeal to something deliberately put beyond measurement. This does seem like it could apply to anything anyone cares about (you're a Red Sox fan? You're addicted to the suffering, your body is telling you to stop, land on Earth and get sober!). If you have any reasons to disagree, that's coming from a place of addiction and you need to stop caring and presu...
I completely agree and I think that levying the charges "disembodied" against anything on the opposite side of the mental dichotomy of "woo" is a weasel-word for the ableist slur of "autistic." I'm sorry this wasn't more clear, but I thought that sentence was fairly dripping as is. I've written about this before as it applies to this topic, which is not to excuse the harm I've done if I've triggered you, but to show that I've precommitted to this stance on this issue.
It was always a Cthulhu LARP. Remember that one thing?
Groups polarize over time. One of the ways to signal group membership is to react explosively to the things you're supposed to react explosively to. This is why as politics in the US have polarized, everyone has grown more breathless and everything is ${OUTGROUP}ist. You gain ${KARMA} by being more breathless and emotional. You can only stop this with explicit effort, but if you do that, you look dissociated, disembodied, autistic, and the social pressure against that is stronger than ...
I don’t know what’s up with the 80% category
Interestingly I've had the same issue, though I'm also not as well calibrated at the lower levels as you are, I also have a noticable calibration dip at around 80%.
You're ignoring an important aspect. Humans directly cause the suffering of farmed animals. It could be more important to eliminate the rape and murder humans directly inflict on farmed animals prior to optimizing the wild ecosystem. For example, there could be other negative utility from social technologies/institutions around industrialized animal rape and murder. I see the Holocaust as one such example of what those who rape and murder nonhumans will eventually (and inevitably) do to humans.
This is my personal experience. I maintained this schedule all throughout grad school. Eventually, though, I just got a prescription for Adderall and that worked much better.
Caffeine has a steep tolerance curve, and you will rapidly experience diminishing returns if you exclusively use caffeine. This means you are using caffeine to address your caffeine dependency and get you to baseline, rather than to push yourself above baseline. For this reason, you must cycle caffeine with other stimulants (or tolerance breaks) for it to remain effective. You also mus...
There are really no drugs that work the way you describe. Rohypnol or any other benzo will just knock you out, GHB gets you high, etc..
As long as you get the dosage right, there is very little risk in consuming drugs. You can also order testing kits that will verify that the substance you expect is in the mixture you've ordered. However, the economics of online drug marketplaces strongly disincentivize and harshly punish anyone "stomping" on the product, so they tend to be very safe.
It is also safe to order from them. In the best case, your drugs are...
There are depressingly many Washington think tanks who produce whitepapers on "winnable" nuclear exchanges with Russia and China. It does indeed depend on what you mean by surviving. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
The problem is not what the enemy will do, it's what the enemy can do.
Why? He has nukes. The end. No one is ever invading Russia. It is just impossible. NATO is not going to invade Russia.
Russia has nukes with aging delivery mechanisms that are outpaced more and more each year. If NATO missile defense can change the calculus such that retaliation from a first strike seems survivable, MAD is gone and Russia is vulnerable. If NATO cyber capabilities could Stuxnet the Russian arsenal, MAD is gone and Russia is vulnerable.
It isn't as simple as "He has nukes, the end."
He has said that he will keep on trying to recreate the Russian empire, which now includes several NATO states.
Where has he said this? How directly?
Well, then it's reasonable to assume that Putin's desired end state is not complete annexation of Ukraine. However, even if Ukraine is an Austria/Finland-type neutral party, outside the Russian bloc but also outside of the American bloc, Putin's security goals are achieved. The minimum criteria for Putin's ideological goals being achieved seems like internal autonomy for Donetsk and Lugansk, the maximum would be the annexation of those areas to Russia in the style of Crimea. So annexation is unnecessary ideologically and strategically, and seems unlikely as a goal.
What is the appropriate way to relate to emotions? How could the sequences have avoided disembodiment? The person who originally used that term seems to think that anything like the sequences would be similarly "disembodied," which makes me think that this issue is less about the inappropriate way the sequences relate to emotion, and more about the hubris of attempting to self-improve in ways other than those described in The Tao of Fully Feeling.
I'm already familiar, at least at that level, with dissociation, derealization, and depersonalization. That said, the claim made in the OP, and in the article Kaj Sota links echoing the same viewpoint, seems to be less that there are emotions dealt with in unhealthy ways within the sequences, and more that there are no emotions at all in the sequences, that rationalism is a project to replace all intuitive/automatic/uncontrolled processing with explicit/intentional/controlled processing.
Personally I think the construct actually being discussed seems more l...
I've been trying to think of this too. It seemed like Putin already had everything he could have wanted with a frozen conflict in Ukraine, preventing it from joining NATO. This is what I've come up with:
One aim I could imagine having in Putin's shoes, that seems better achieved by slow telegraphing of war over Ukraine followed by actual war (vs by a frozen conflict), is gathering information about how the West is likely to respond to any other such wars/similar he might be tempted by.
(I know nothing of geopolitics, so please don't update from my thinking so. I got this idea from this essay)
So if the sequences are unemotional, they're disembodied, but if they are emotional, they're also disembodied?
Edit: In hindsight I'm conflating the article Kaj Sota links and the OP's tweets about the sequences keeping emotion "at an arm's length." I don't really agree that the sequences keep emotions at an arm's length, but sure, if this is not the same thing as being "disembodied," they might still be emotional and disembodied.
That said, what is the test that tells us something is not disembodied? Is any attempt to improve one's life through reason on it...
I think the problem is less in the "vibes" and more in the kind of person that is attracted to rationalism for rationalism's sake. Ironically, this is also something discussed in the sequences. I once introduced the sequences to the anarchists I did activism with in college, and while some of them rejected most of it out of hand because it seemed politically unorthodox, some found real value in it and were able to use it to improve their lives or work in various ways. I've met many people since who were not "rationalists" or part of the "rationalist ...
The tone of the early sequences seems almost desperate.
Disassociating emotions is one of the standards ways people deal with being desperate. That's a way for people to get disembodied.
I think you're on-target both about covid and in general, about risk analysis vs. a safety heuristic. There are even degrees of this; even a motorcyclist who drove safely and practiced all reasonable safety precautions would be heckled by someone if they were to crash through no fault of their own, die, and leave behind their family behind. "What did they think would happen?" You could even say that the common victim-blaming tropes are reinforcing a norm that puts safety permanently out of reach, so that they are always "morally blameworthy" or in other wo...
Maybe Zvi thinks people think:
>In addition, any mention of them, or any encouragement, would lead people to be less eager to get vaccinated or take other preventative measures, and we can’t have that.
This is very similar to the Faucian notion of saying whatever, true or untrue, leads the public to take the actions he wants them to take, as was the case with masks, and we could find out is the case with something else in the future; we can't know when we're being lied to in order for the greater good to be served.
But personally, I think you can explain s...
I personally don't feel "fluent" programming this way, and maybe it is my own perfectionism, but this and the other replies, while certainly understandable and defensible, ring a little more hollow than I would like. I think going down below the level of "just know what APIs broadly exist" and actually being fluent at that lower level is usually necessary for the true 10-100x devs I've seen to work at that level. Usually this is achieved by building lots and lots of practical, deployable systems, but this just means it is implicitly taught through experien... (read more)