LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I wish there were a clear unifying place for all commentary on this topic. I could create a wiki page I suppose.

Update: a friend convinced me that I really should separate my intuitions about locating patterns that are exactly myself from my intuitions about the moral value of ensuring I don't contribute to a decrease in realityfluid of the mindlike experiences I morally value, in which case the reason that I selfishly value causal history is actually that it's an overwhelmingly predictive proxy for where my self-pattern gets instantiated, and my moral values - an overwhelmingly larger portion of what I care about - care immensely about avoiding waste, because it appears to me to be by far the largest impact any agent can have on what the future is made of.

Also, I now think that eating is a form of incremental uploading.

Why is nobody in San Francisco pretty? Hormones make you pretty but dumb (pretty faces don't usually pay rent in SF). Why is nobody in Los Angeles smart? Hormones make you pretty but dumb. (Sincere apologies to all residents of SF & LA.)

Some other possibilities:

• Pretty people self-select towards interests and occupations that reward beauty. If you're pretty, you're more likely to be popular in high school, which interferes with the dedication necessary to become a great programmer.

• A big reason people are prettier in LA is they put significant effort into their appearance -- hair, makeup, orthodontics, weight loss, etc.

Then why didn't evolution give women big muscles? I think because if you are in the same strength range as men then you are much more plausibly murderable. It is hard for a male to say that he killed a female in self-defense in unarmed combat. No reason historically to conscript women into battle. Their weakness protects them. (Maybe someone else has a better explanation.)

Perhaps hunter/gatherer tribes had gender-based specialization of labor. If men are handling the hunting and tribe defense which requires the big muscles, there's less need for women to pay the big-muscle metabolic cost.

Can I check that I've understood it.

Roughly, the essay urges one to be conscious of each passing thought, to see it and kind of head it off at the tracks - "feeling angry?" "don't!". But the comment argues this is against what CBT says about feeling our feelings.

What about Sam Harris' practise of meditation which seems focused on seeing and noticing thoughts, turning attention back on itself. I had a period last night of sort of "intense consciousness" where I felt very focused on the fact I was conscious. It. wasn't super pleasant, but it was profound. I can see why one would want to focus on that but also why it might be a bad idea.

Maybe it's the other way around, and it's the Chinese elite who was unusually and stubbornly conservative on this, trusting the wisdom of their ancestors over foreign devilry (would be a pretty Confucian thing to do). The Greeks realised the Earth was round from things like seeing sails appear over the horizon. Any sailing peoples thinking about this would have noticed sooner or later.

Kind of a long shot, but did Polynesian people have ideas on this, for example?

Poetry and practicality

I was staring up at the moon a few days ago and thought about how deeply I loved my family, and wished to one day start my own (I'm just over 18 now). It was a nice moment.

Then, I whipped out my laptop and felt constrained to get back to work; i.e. read papers for my AI governance course, write up LW posts, and trade emails with EA France. (These I believe to be my best shots at increasing everyone's odds of survival).

It felt almost like sacrilege to wrench myself away from the moon and my wonder. Like I was ruining a moment of poetry and stillwatered peace by slamming against reality and its mundane things again.

But... The reason I wrenched myself away is directly downstream from the spirit that animated me in the first place. Whether I feel the poetry now that I felt then is irrelevant: it's still there, and its value and truth persist. Pulling away from the moon was evidence I cared about my musings enough to act on them.

The poetic is not a separate magisterium from the practical; rather the practical is a particular facet of the poetic. Feeling "something to protect" in my bones naturally extends to acting it out. In other words, poetry doesn't just stop. Feel no guilt in pulling away. Because, you're not.

Thanks. And i appreciate that LessWrong is a space where mods feel empowered to do this, since it’s the right call.

Networking, Relationship building, both professional and personal, I'm sure there are overlaps. And echoing another request: Sales

I think this is a persuasive case that commitment devices aren't good for you. I'm very interested in how common this is, and if there's a way you could reframe commit devices to avoid this psychological reaction to them. One idea is to focus on incentive alignment that avoids the far end of the spectrum. With Beeminder in particular, you could set a low pledge cap and then focus on the positive reinforcement of keeping your graph pretty by keeping the datapoints on the right side of the red line.

All the smart trans girls I know were also smart prior to HRT.