LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Funny is jot the only adjective this anecdote deserves. Thanks for sharing this great wisdom/reminder!

"the addicted mind will find a way to rationalize continued use at all costs" 

Alan Carr wrote a series of books:  "The easy way to quit X". I picked up one since I figured he had found a process to cure addictive behaviors if he could write across so many categories.  I highly recommend it. The main points are:

1. Give you 200 pages explaining why you don't actually enjoy X. Not that it's making your life worse but gives you momentary pleasure, you do not enjoy it. 
   1. I assume it's hypnotizing you into an emotional revulsion to the activity, and then giving you reasons with which to remind yourself that you don't like it.
2. Decide you will never do/consume X again. You don't like it remember? You will never even think if you should X, you've decided permanently.  
   1. If every day you decided not to X, you'd be draining will power till one day you'd give in. So make an irreversible decision and be done with it.

It's a process easily transferable to any other activity.

If we don't get a song like that, take comfort that GLaDoS's songs from the Portal soundtrack are basically the same idea.

Very cool. I bet janus [LW · GW] would dig this.

When I watched "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" in theaters last year, the animations were amazing but I left two hours later with a headache. Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting older, but it was just too much for my brain.

Checking about 2 years after my initial post, it looks like $TSLA has fallen by more than 50%: it looks like the split-adjusted price in early April 2022 was around $330 or $340, and today it's around $145.

Eyeballing the chart, it looks like it's always been lower than that in the subsequent period, and was down to around $185 at the 12 month mark that was initially the target of the competition. That last bit is the bit that was least clear to me at the time: it seemed high probability that Tesla stock would have to fall at some point, but I expressed uncertainty about when because I thought there was a fair probability the market could stay irrational for a longer period.

The visual techniques of TV—cuts, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—all activate the orient response.

Anecdote, but this form of rapid cutting is most assuredly alive and well. I saw a promotional ad for an upcoming MLB baseball game on TBS. In a mere 25 seconds, I counted over 35 different cuts, cuts between players, cuts between people in the studio, cut after cut after cut. It was strangely exhausting.

Personalization is easy to achieve while keeping the algorithm transparent. Just rank your own viewed/commented posts by most frequent tags, then score past posts based on the tags and pick a quantile based on the mixed upvotes/tags score, possibly with a slider parameter that allows you to adjust which of the two things you want to matter most.

Our sensible Chesterton fences

His biased priors

Their inflexible ideological commitments

In addition to epistemic priors, there are also ontological priors and teleological priors to cross compare, each with their own problems. On top of which, people are even worse at comparing non epistemic priors than they are at comparing epistemic priors. As such, attempts to point out that these are an issue will be seen as a battle tactic: move the argument from a domain in which they have the upper hand (from their perspective) to unfamiliar territory in which you'll have an advantage, and resisted.

You may share the experience I've had that most attempts at discussion don't go anywhere. We mostly repeat our cached knowledge at each other. If two people who are earnestly trying to grok each other's positions drill down for long enough they'll get to a bit of ontology comparison, where it turns out they have different intuitions because they are using different conceptual metaphors for different moving parts of their model. But this takes so long that by the time it happens only a few bits of information get exchanged before one or both parties are too tired to continue. The workaround seems to be that if two people have a working relationship then, over time, they can accrue enough bits to get to real cruxes, and this can occasionally suggest novel research directions.

My main theory of change is therefore to find potentially productive pairings of people faster, and create the conditions under which they can speedrun getting to useful cruxes. Unfortunately, Eli Tyre tried this theory of change and reported that it mostly didn't work, after a bunch of good faith efforts from a bunch of people. I'm not sure what's next. I personally believe more progress could be made if people were trained in consciousness of abstraction (per Korzybski), but this is a sufficiently difficult ask as to fail people's priors on how much effort to spend on novel skills with unclear payoffs. And a theory of change that has a curiosity stopper that halts on "other people should do this thing that they clearly aren't going to do" is also not very useful.

Proofreading comment: 

Please change "folks" to "focus"