LessWrong 2.0 Reader

This is the canonical More Dakka post, but it doesn't include the origin.

Quoting the TV Tropes page on More Dakka:

The trope namer is Warhammer 40,000, where it is the Ork onomatopoeia for machine gun firing, and their general term for rapid fire capacity: "dakka-dakka-dakka-dakka...".

Here's a color version of the image on the page, that honestly conveys the heuristic to me quite effectively. It's very stupid, but man it's good to just go more dakka when marginal effort is continuing to improve things.

The CNS contains dozens of "feedback loops". Any intervention that drastically alters the equilibrium point of several of those loops is generally a bad idea unless you are doing it to get out of some dire situation, e.g., seizures. That's my recollection of Huberman's main objection put into my words (because I dont recall his words).

Also, melatonin is expensive to measure quantitatively, so the amount tends to vary a lot from what is on the label. In particular, there are reputational consequences and possible legal consequences to a brand's having been found to have less than the label says, so brands tend to err on the side of putting too much melatonin in per pill, which ends up often being manyfold more than the label says.

yeah, that comic summarize it all!

As a side note, I wonder how many would get their PhD degree if the requirement was to publish 3-4 papers (2 single author and 1-2 co-author) were the main result (where it's applicable) needed to have p<0.01? Perhaps the paper publishing frenzy would slow down a little bit if the monograph came into fashion again?

I agree that morality and consensus are in principle not the same -- Nazis or any evil society is an easy counterexample.
(One could argue Nazis did not have the consensus of the entire world, but you can then just imagine a fully evil population.)

But for one, simply rejecting civilization and consensus based on "you have no rigorous definition of them and also look at Genghis Khan/Nazis this proves that governments are evil" is like, basically, putting the burden of proof on the side that is arguing for civilization and common sense morality, which is suspicious.

I'm open to alternatives, but just saying "governments can be evil therefor I reject it, full stop" is not that helpful for discourse. Like what do you wanna do, just abolish civilization?

So consider a handwavy view of morality and of what a "good civilization" looks like. Let's assume common sense morality is correct, and that mostly everyone understands what this means: "don't steal, don't hurt people, leave people alone unless they're doing bad things, don't be a sex pervert, etc.". And assume most people agree with this and want to live by this. Then when you have consensus, meaning most people are observing and agreeing that civilization (or practically speaking, the area or community over which they have a decent amount of influence), is abiding by "common sense morality", then everything is basically moral and fine.

(I also want to point out that caring too much on pinpointing what morality means exactly and how to put it into words, distracts from solving practical problems where it's extremely obvious what is morally going wrong, but where you have to sort out the "implementation details".)

recommend against supplementing melatonin

why?

i searched Andrew Huberman melatonin and found this, though it looks like it may be an AI generated summary.

Despite being "into" AI safety for a while, I haven't picked a side. I do believe it's extremely important and deserves more attention and I believe that AI actually could kill everyone in less 5 years.

But any effort spent on pinning down one's "p(doom)" is not spent usefully on things like: how to actually make AI safe, how AI works, how to approach this problem as a civilization/community, how to think about this problem. And, as was my intention with this article, "how to think about things in general, and how to make philosophical progress".

Are Eliezer and Nate right that continuing the AI program will almost certainly lead to extinction or something approximately as disastrous as extinction?

A lot of people e.g. Andrew Huberman (who recommends many supplements for cognitive enhancement and other ends) recommend against supplementing melatonin except to treat insomnia that has failed to respond to many other interventions.

I think you've re-invented Communism. The reason we don't implement it is that in practice it's much worse for everyone, including poor people.

It's also important to consider the selection pressure keeping intelligence low, namely, the fact that most animals chronically have trouble getting enough calories, combined with the high caloric needs of neural tissue.

It is no coincidence that human intelligence didn't start rising much till humans were reliably getting meat in their diet and they started to routinely cook their food, which makes whatever calories are in food easier to digest, allowing the human gut to get smaller, which in turn reduced the caloric demands of the gut (which needs to be kept alive 24 hours a day even on a day when the person finds no food to eat).