LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I had an initial impulse to simply downvote the post based on ideological misalignment even without properly reading it, caught myself in the process of thinking about it, and made myself read the post first. As a result I strongly downvoted it based on its quality. 

Most of it is low effor propaganda pamphlet. Vibes based word salad instead of clear reasoning. Thesises mostly without justifications. And where there is some, it's so comically weak that there is not much to have a productive discussion about, like the idea that the existence of instrumental values somehow disproves orthogonality thesis or the fact that all our values are the product of evolution must make us care about evolution instead of our values.

Most of blame of course goes to original author, Nick Land, not the @lumpenspace [LW · GW], who simply has reposted the ideas. But I think low effort reposting of poor reasoning also shouldn't be rewarded and I'd like to see less of it on this site. 

A better post about Land's ideas on Orthogonality would present his reasoning in a clear way, some possible arguments and counterarguments, steelmans and ideological turing tests. At least it would put the ideas in proper context instead starting with proclamations how "neoreaction and dark enlightment are totally not fashist, though maybe racists but who even cares about that in this day and age, am I right?".

And such a better post already exists. Written more than ten ears ago and now is considered to be classics of Less Wrong. So what does this worse version even contribute to the discourse?

Yes. The product I bought identifies itself as "Sceletium tortuosum".

I've only tried 1 brand/product, and haven't seen any outstanding sources on it either, so I can't offer much guidance there. 

I can anecdotally note that the effects seem quite strong for a legal substance at 0.5g, that it has short term effects + potentially also weaker long term effects (made me more relaxed? hard to say) (comparable to MDMA used in trauma therapy)

Human content isn't easy to distinguish from non-human content.

A start of one critique is:

It simply means Darwinian processes have no limits that matter to us.

Not true! Roughly speaking, we can in principle just decide to not do that. A body can in principle have an immune system that doesn't lose to infection; there could in principle be a world government that picks the lightcone's destiny. The arguments about novel understanding implying novel values might be partly right, but they don't really cut against Mateusz's point.

Teaching rationality the shallow way -- nope; knowing about biases can hurt people [LW · GW]

Teaching rationality the deep way -- nope; reason as a memetic immune disorder [LW · GW]

:(

Perhaps there should be some "pre-rationality" lessons. Something stabilizing you need to learn first, so that learning about rationality does not make you crazy.

There are some materials that already seem to point in that direction: adding up to normality [? · GW], ethical injunctions [? · GW]. Perhaps the CFAR workshops should start with focusing on these things, in a serious way (like, spend at least one day only debating this, check that the participants understood the lesson, and maybe kick out those who didn't?).

Because, although some people get damaged by learning about rationality, it seems to me that many people don't (some of them only because they don't change in any significant way, but some of them internalize the lessons in a good way). If we could predict who would end up which way, that could allow us to reduce the damage, while still delivering the value.

Of course this only applies to the workshops; online communication is a different questions. But seems to me that the bad things mostly happen offline.

Why is it the case that a majority of Zizians that we hear about in the news is trans/nb/queer? (If this is representative of Zizians in general, why is it true of Zizians in general?)

TBF it is fairly striking reading about early Soviet history how many of the Old Bolshevik intelligentsia would have fit right in this community but the whole "Putin is a secret cosmist" crowd is... unhinged.

I believe the opposite - that the drives identified by Steve Omohundro as instrumental goals for any sufficiently advanced AI (like self-preservation, efficiency, resource acquisition) are really the only terminal goals that matter.

Even if this is ~technically true, if your [essence of self that you want to preserve] involves something like [effectively ensuring that X happens], this is at least behaviorally equivalent to having a terminal goal that is not instrumental in the sense that instrumental convergence is not going to universally produce it in the limit.

@PhilGoetz [LW · GW]'s Reason as memetic immune disorder [LW · GW] seems relevant here. It has been noted many times that engineers are disproportionately involved in terrorism, in ways that the mere usefulness of their engineering skills can't explain.

For emergency response, new ALERT. Personally  think the forecasting/horizon scanning part of Sentinel is good, the emergency response negative in expectation. What does it mean for funders idk, would donate conditionally on the funds being restricted to the horizon scanning part.