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May I strongly recommend that you try to become a Dark Lord instead? 

I mean, literally. Stage some small bloody civil war with expected body count of several millions, become dictator, provide everyone free insurance coverage for cryonics, it will be sure more ethical than 10% of chance of killing literally everyone from the perspective of most of ethical systems I know.

In my experience, Americans are actually eager to talk to strangers and make friends with them if and only if they have some good reason to be where they are and talk to those people besides making friends with people.

A corollary of this is that if anyone at an [X] gathering is asked “So, what got you into [X]?” and answers “I heard there’s a great community around [X]”, then that person needs to be given the cold shoulder and made to feel unwelcome, because otherwise the bubble of deniability is pierced and the lemon spiral will set in, ruining it for everyone else.

However, this is pretty harsh, and I’m not confident enough in this chain of reasoning to actually “gatekeep” people like this in practice. Does this ring true to you?

I'm generally not a fan of increasing the amount of illegible selection effects.

On the privacy side, can lesswrong guarantee that, if I never click or Recommended, then recombee will never see an (even anonymized) trace of what I browse on lesswrong?

That doesn't seem like "consistently and catastrophically," it seems like "far too often, but with thankfully fairly limited local consequences."

I realized I hadn't given feedback on the actual results of the recommendation algorithm. Rating the recommendations I've gotten (from -10 to 10, 10 is best):

• My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia [LW · GW]: 3
• An Introduction to AI Sandbagging [LW · GW]: 3
• Improving Dictionary Learning with Gated Sparse Autoencoders [LW · GW]: 2
• [April Fools' Day] Introducing Open Asteroid Impact [LW · GW]: -6
• LLMs seem (relatively) safe [LW · GW]: -3
• The first future and the best future [LW · GW]: -2
• Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries? [LW · GW]: 5
• "Why I Write" by George Orwell (1946) [LW · GW]: -3
• My Clients, The Liars [LW · GW]: -4
• 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology [LW · GW]: -2
• Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection [LW · GW]: 4
• Ambitious Altruistic Software Engineering Efforts: Opportunities and Benefits [LW · GW]: 6

Big +1 to that. Part of why I support (some kinds of) AI regulation is that I think they'll reduce the risk of totalitarianism, not increase it.

So, it sounds like you'd be in favor of a 1-year pause or slowdown then, but not a 10-year?

(Also, I object to your side-swipe at longtermism. Longtermism according to wikipedia is "Longtermism is the ethical view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time." "A key moral priority" doesn't mean "the only thing that has substantial moral value." If you had instead dunked on classic utilitarianism, I would have agreed.)

sure -- i agree that's why i said "something adjacent to" because it had enough overlap in properties. I think my comment completely stands with a different word choice, I'm just not sure what word choice would do a better job.

I mean to some extent, Dawkins isn't a historian of science, presentism, yadda yadda but from what I've seen he's right here. Not that Wallace is somehow worse, given that of all the people out there he was certainly closer than the rest. That's about it

I would highly recommend getting someone else to debug your subconscious for you.  At least it worked for me.  I don’t think it would be possible for me to have debugged myself.
 

My first therapist was highly directive.  He’d say stuff like “Try noticing when you think X, and asking yourself what happened immediately before that.  Report back next week.” And listing agenda items and drawing diagrams on a whiteboard.  As an engineer, I loved it.  My second therapist was more in the “providing supportive comments while I talk about my life” school.  I don’t think that helped much, at least subjectively from the inside.

Here‘s a possibly instructive anecdote about my first therapist.  Near the end of a session, I feel like my mind has been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction.  It’s a sensation I’ve never had before.  So I say, “Wow, my mind feels like it’s been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction.  How do you do that?”  He says, “Do you want me to explain?”  And I say, “Does it still work if I know what you’re doing?”  And he says, “Possibly not, but it’s important you feel I’m trustworthy, so I’ll explain if you want.”  So I say “Why mess with success?  Keep doing the thing. I trust you.”  That’s an example of a debugging procedure you can’t do to yourself.