After ~3 years as the ACX Meetup Czar, I've decided to resign from my position, and I intend to scale back my work with the LessWrong community as well. While this transition is not without some sadness, I'm excited for my next project.

I'm the Meetup Czar of the new Fewerstupidmistakesity community.

We're calling it Fewerstupidmistakesity because people get confused about what "Rationality" means, and this would create less confusion. It would be a stupid mistake to name your philosophical movement something very similar to an existing movement that's somewhat related but not quite the same thing. You'd spend years with people confusing the two. 

What's Fewerstupidmistakesity about? It's about making fewer stupid mistakes, ideally down to zero such stupid mistakes. Turns out, human brains have lots of scientifically proven...

I think rationalists should consider taking more showers.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, boredom makes us human. The childhoods of exceptional people often include excessive boredom as a trait that helped cultivate their genius:

A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.

Unfortunately, most people don't like boredom, and we now have little metal boxes and big metal boxes filled with bright displays that help distract us all the time, but there is still an effective way to induce boredom in a modern population: showering.

When you shower (or bathe, that also works), you usually are cut off...

Introduction

Decision theory is about how to behave rationally under conditions of uncertainty, especially if this uncertainty involves being acausally blackmailed and/or gaslit by alien superintelligent basilisks.

Decision theory has found numerous practical applications, including proving the existence of God and generating endless LessWrong comments since the beginning of time.

However, despite the apparent simplicity of "just choose the best action", no comprehensive decision theory that resolves all decision theory dilemmas has yet been formalized. This paper at long last resolves this dilemma, by introducing a new decision theory: VDT.

Decision theory problems and existing theories

Some common existing decision theories are:

• Causal Decision Theory (CDT): select the action that *causes* the best outcome.
• Evidential Decision Theory (EDT): select the action that you would be happiest to learn that you had taken.
• Functional Decision Theory

Remember: There is no such thing as a pink elephant.

Recently, I was made aware that my “infohazards small working group” Signal chat, an informal coordination venue where we have frank discussions about infohazards and why it will be bad if specific hazards were leaked to the press or public, accidentally was shared with a deceitful and discredited so-called “journalist,” Kelsey Piper. She is not the first person to have been accidentally sent sensitive material from our group chat, however she is the first to have threatened to go public about the leak. Needless to say, mistakes were made.

We’re still trying to figure out the source of this compromise to our secure chat group, however we thought we should give the public a live update to get ahead...

1 Introduction

Crosspost from my blog. 

A beetle lay crushed in the dirt,
Its carapace cracked, torn, and hurt.
It twitched in despair,
Gasping for air —
A world unaware of its hurt.

(I think this might be one of my most important articles so I’d really appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it—thanks! Also, when I scheduled this article to be released, I did not know it was April 1. Really, seriously, this is not an April fools day post.)

Imagine we discovered that the world was filled with tiny worlds that we were constantly destroying, akin to the world in Horton Hears a Who. Every second, normal actions had extreme impacts on millions of beings just as intelligent and sentient as us. In such a world, given the sheer numerosity of...

Hey Everyone,

It is with a sense of... considerable cognitive dissonance that I am letting you all know about a significant development for the future trajectory of LessWrong. After extensive internal deliberation, projections of financial runways, and what I can only describe as a series of profoundly unexpected coordination challenges, the Lightcone Infrastructure team has agreed in principle to the acquisition of LessWrong by EA.

I assure you, nothing about how LessWrong operates on a day to day level will change. I have always cared deeply about the robustness and integrity of our institutions, and I am fully aligned with our stakeholders at EA. 

To be honest, the key thing that EA brings to the table is money and talent. While the recent layoffs in EAs broader industry have been...

Epistemic status: Using UDT as a case study for the tools developed in my meta-theory of rationality sequence so far, which means all previous posts are prerequisites. This post is the result of conversations with many people at the CMU agent foundations conference, including particularly Daniel A. Herrmann, Ayden Mohensi, Scott Garrabrant, and Abram Demski. I am a bit of an outsider to the development of UDT and logical induction, though I've worked on pretty closely related things.

I'd like to discuss the limits of consistency as an optimality standard for rational agents. A lot of fascinating discourse and useful techniques have been built around it, but I think that it can be in tension with learning at the extremes. Updateless decision theory (UDT) is one of those...