Very Spicy Take

Epistemic Note: Many highly respected community members with substantially greater decision making experience (and Lesswrong karma) presumably disagree strongly with my conclusion.

FYI I wish to register my weak disapproval of this opening. A la Scott Alexander’s “Against Bravery Debates”, I think it is actively distracting and a little mind-killing to open by making a claim about status and popularity of a position even if it's accurate.

I think in this case it would be reasonable to say something like “the implications of this argument being true involve substantial reallocation of status and power, so please be conscious of that and let’s all try to assess the evidence accurately and avoid overheating”. This is different from something like “I know lots of people will disagree with me on this but I’m going to say it”.

I’m not saying this was an easy post to write, but I think the standard to aim for is not having openings like this.

Perhaps, but “seven years from now my reputation in my industry will drop markedly on the basis of this decision” seems to me like a normal human thing that happens all the time.

Not OP, but I take the claim to be "endorsing getting into bed with companies on-track to make billions of dollars profiting from risking the extinction of humanity in order to nudge them a bit, is in retrospect an obviously doomed strategy, and yet many self-identified effective altruists trusted their leadership to have secret good reasons for doing so and followed them in supporting the companies (e.g. working there for years including in capabilities roles and also helping advertise the company jobs). now that a new consensus is forming that it indeed was obviously a bad strategy, it is also time to have evaluated the leadership's decision as bad at the time of making the decision and impose costs on them accordingly, including loss of respect and power".

So no, not disincentivizing making positive EV bets, but updating about the quality of decision-making that has happened in the past.

The first two reasons that come to my mind are (1) other instruments have much more career incentive to do so (in that there are many more jobs for classical violinists or violin ensembles than for classical guitarists), and (2) it’s possible to have a much more successful career as a guitarist knowing only chord positions and not having a more detailed understanding of the fretboard, than it is with other instruments where a knowledge of how to play complicated melodies is required.

I have also seen the culture of pianists being used to playing reams and reams of new music, and this being a signal of proficiency more so than amongst other instrumentalists (e.g. violinists or flautists). I think it is probably because the majority of a pianist’s career is spent in accompaniment rather than as a soloist or in an equal ensemble (there are ~no serious piano quartets), and so the quantity of music quickly consumable is a much more competitive asset. When I was at music school, there were professional accompanists and everyone was assigned one, pianists employed simply to go around and accompany all of the students in their performances, so they needed to be able to play a great deal of complicated music very quickly or on-sight.

Personally, my primary goal with sheet music is to get off of it as soon as possible (i.e. learn the piece from memory). It is a qualitative reduction in the number of things my attention is on, and gives me much more cognitive space to focus on how to play the piece rather than what I’m playing next.

I do want to +1 that there is a lot of variation in right-hand-position space. For fingerpicking, my training has always been to pluck from the knuckles, which are the strongest and biggest joints in the finger, and never from the joints nearer the fingertips, which are much weaker and tire faster; nor to hook one’s fingers under the string but to simply push past the string. (In case thats helpful.) Might take some time to adjust to any new playing pattern.

As with exercising any part of your body, there’s a difference between tiring your hands out (which is healthy) and hurting them (which is painful and damaging). There should be no sharp pain.

In a recent post, members of the Roam community praised the “lack of new features”, or “it still looks like 2020” as a feature, not a bug[6]. It seems that Roam found its true believers, and not just those who once purchased a Believer plan and canceled it. Roam's community may have shrunk, but it remains strong.

Strong evaporative cooling of group beliefs vibes.

We are currently at 270 attendees for LessOnline! It's gonna be a busy weekend. 

Also (if you haven't seen) lots of new great writers confirmed attending including Scott Sumner, Agnes Callard, and Patrick McKenzie.

Seems to me like there'll be a lot of options for how much stuff you want to do. I'm expecting someone to run a really fun and educational trading class for a cohort of people, I expect there'll be a few meetups, there's over 100 people with tickets for Summer Camp to hang out with, and I think there'll be like 20-30 people living on-site. 

I think if you wanted to work like 2 or 3 days that week you could, and if you wanted to keep socializing and doing activities then you could do that too.

It might be a good on the current margin to have a norm of publicly listing any non-disclosure agreements you have signed (e.g. on one's LW profile), and the rough scope of them, so that other people can model what information you're committed to not sharing, and highlight if it is related to anything beyond the details of technical research being done (e.g. if it is about social relationships or conflicts or criticism).

I have added the one NDA that I have signed to my profile.