Is this an ad?

When I look at the pointy-shaped shoes in shop, I wonder: does anyone actually have feet like that?

Or are people just suffering in the name of fashion? Or do they buy shoes a few numbers larger and keep the pointy end empty?

Just a silly idea: If many people start using LLMs, and as a result of that learn to better translate their intuitions into explicit descriptions... perhaps this could help us solve alignment.

I mean, a problem with alignment is that we have some ideas of good, but can't make them explicit. But maybe the reason is that in the past, we had no incentive to become good at expressing our ideas explicitly... but instead we had an incentive to bullshit. However, when everyone will use LLMs to do things, that will create an incentive to be good at expressing your ideas, so that the LLM can implement them more properly.

I find it interesting and unfortunate that there aren't more economically left-wing thinkers influenced by Yudkowsky/LW thinking about AGI.

Maybe it's just my bubble -- and I really do not want to offend anyone, only to report honestly on what I observe around me -- understanding economics seems right-wing coded. More precisely, when I talk to right-wing people about economics, there is a mix of descriptive and normative, but when I talk to left-wing people about economics, it is normative only: what should be done, in their opinion, often ignoring the second-order effects. Describing the economics as it is, seems like expressing approval; and approving of capitalism is right-wing.

Basically, if you made a YouTube video containing zero opinion on how things should be, only explaining the basic things about supply and demand (like, how scarcity makes things more expensive in a free market) and similar stuff, people listening to the video would label you as right-wing. Many of those who identify as left-wing would even dismiss the video as right-wing propaganda.

So, if my understanding is correct, this seems like a problem the left wing needs to solve internally. There is not much we can do as rationalists when someone makes not understanding something a signal of loyalty.

Perhaps it wasn't obvious previously.

I suspect the usual dynamics at companies is that when others start doing something, you better start doing it too, or it will seem like negligence. For example, if you are a company lawyer, and other companies have NDAs, you better prepare one for your company, too. Because the risks are asymmetric -- if you do the same thing everyone else does, and something bad happens, well that's the cost of doing business; but if you do something different from everyone else, and something bad happens, that makes you seem incompetent.

I think most of the result will depend on interpreting what "good judgment" means. I mean, almost everyone believes that their judgment is good, and many of them are wrong.

If we focus only on acceptance and immediacy, we may ignore historically conditioned patterns that are causing harm to ourselves and others. I’ve worked with a number of spiritual practitioners who are able to generate very spacious states of mind but who avoid dealing with basic human concerns like work and relationship.

Reminds me of Freud's "love and work" as the fundamentals of mental health.

As children, we were basically powerless in the face of the adults around us. We couldn’t simply leave and navigate the world by ourselves. And, our parents had their own issues, issues that came across in their relationships with us. [...] his parents rewarded him disproportionately for demonstrating his independence.

This is called "racket" in transactional analysis. The idea is that as children we need our parents' attention, but our parents may be selective about our emotional expression; reward some of them with their attention, and ignore the others. To get more attention we learn to convert the unrewarded emotions to the rewarded ones. And the habit often stays long after we stop being dependent on our parents, because we are not consciously aware that this is what we are doing.

For example, as a child I was often ignored or rebuked when I expressed happiness, but received compassion when I expressed sadness. So I learned to convert happiness into sadness... for example, by finding some flaw that ruined what otherwise could have been a fully positive experience, and then making that flaw the central point of the story -- that made it a story that I could share with my parents and feel accepted. Nothing is perfect, so one can always find a flaw, but of course this habit reduced the amount of joy I felt in my life, and probably made me a less enjoyable person to be around.

It might seem that happiness shouldn't be a problem in this sense. Why should it matter if people important to me do not reward my happiness with their attention; happiness is already its own reward, shouldn't that be enough to reinforce it? -- The problem was that my parents judged my expressions of happiness as "silly", and I have unconsciously accepted that judgement. So it took some courage to learn to enjoy the "silly" feelings.

Sometimes you want/need other people to help you, and if you display less suffering, they may assume that it's not serious, and therefore won't help you. This can be a problem for people who do not display suffering in neurotypical or culturally expected ways.

Sometimes there are situations where you are not allowed to say "no", and then "I can't, can't anymore!!!" becomes the next best thing. Or sometimes people just suck at saying "no".

Weird. I think I remember seeing a different version. Not sure how that happened...

...maybe some of my ad-blocking programs interacted with the website's CSS in a bad way?

Uhm, if that's the case, I apologize for spreading misinformation.

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Off topic, but Jesus, in the comment section: people [...] go to better schools [...] to increase their IQs [...] Not like anyone is born with a 170

I don't read newspapers, so I don't have much data. Perhaps I notice the bad things more, because I do not have the good things to balance it with? (Kinda like if neither you nor your friends have a dog, so the typical moment when you notice a dog is when some stranger's dog threatens you. So your model of a dog is that dogs attack strangers, and you miss all the nice moments when they play or relax, which is what their owners see.)

I was interviewed by a journalist twice in my life; both time the journalist wrote totally made up things unrelated to what I said; and I suspect that the story was already written long before they talked to me, they just wanted a name to attach to their fictional person.

Once I participated in a small peaceful protest (imagine a group of less than ten people standing on a street with banners for 30 minutes, then going home), and a TV commented on it while showing videos of looting (that happened a few months before, on the opposite side of the country, in a situation related neither to our cause nor our organization). When we called them by phone to complain, they just laughed at us, said that there were tiny letters saying that the videos were "illustrations" so it's legally okay, and if we have any complaints we are supposed to address them to their well-paid legal department. (We didn't do anything about it.)

A few years ago (I don't remember when exactly) there were "scientific" articles approximately every month about how theory of relativity was experimentally debunked; people shared them on Hacker News and social networks. And always a few weeks later there was a blog post somewhere explaining now it was just a mistake in calculation, because someone forgot to use a proper relativistic equation somewhere. Of course, these blog posts were not shared so much. -- Later, I guess, this topic went out of fashion. (Perhaps because the newspapers switched to stronger clickbait?)

My very first blog post was a response to a popular journalist, basically just a long list of factual mistakes he made in a popular article. (And I mean factual mistakes in a very literal sense, like how many countries were members of a specific organization, what year the organization started, etc. That is, not something that could be explained by different people having a different political opinion.)

Uhm, Gamergate. A situation where a bunch of nerds complains about the way journalists report on their hobby, and the journalists decide to go nuclear on them: holding ranks, posting absurd fabrications, refusing to even mention the talking points of the other side, then doubling down repeatedly until the topic gets debated at UN.

Which reminds me of how journalists treated James Damore. The "original memo" that practically all newspapers referred to was actually heaving redacted (all links to scientific papers removed). They even changed font to random sizes to have it appear unhinged.

...all these things considered, why should I even read newspapers?