Stupid Questions October 2020

What you might be missing is time. Things don't really "sit still" in spacetime - everything is always moving through time, but things that are moving fast through space are moving slower through time - it's like you have just one speed, but you can point it "out of time" and "into space."

When you travel through a curved spacetime, "sitting still" still means moving forward in the time direction. It's not like the curvature due to gravity creates a potential well that you "fall down." It's more like you're one of those stunt motorcyclists driving around the inside of a steel cage, constantly whizzing forward in a locally straight line, but changing what direction you're pointing due to the curvature of space.

This seems like a great question to me and I'm bummed I can't answer it. But here's a toy model that might help a bit.

Take a 2-dimensional spacetime shaped like the surface of a vertical cylinder, with space being the 1-dimensional equatorial circles, and time going vertically. Some of the straight lines in this space are slanted lines just going around and around the cylinder forever, and objects following those as world lines would sort of appear to oscillate around a point traveling along an exact vertical world line.

Anyway that model's only 2-dimensional, and the bigger problem is it's not the right type of geometry (it's Riemannian not Lorentzian). Also the cylinder is flat, not curved. But maybe it still helps.

The geodesics aren't lines in space, but in space-time. For the ball to fall through the Earth and back to its starting point takes about 5000 seconds, during which time light goes about 1.5 billion km. So a graph in space-time will be a sine wave whose period is 1.5 billion km and whose amplitude is 6400 km, a ratio of about 250000 to 1. The graph has very low curvature everywhere.

It is the same for the Earth's orbit round the Sun. It is not the spatial path of the orbit that is a geodesic, but the helical path it traces out in space-time. In one revolution it travels one year into the future, equivalent to a distance of a light-year. As a handy way of visualising this, the ratio of a light-year to an AU (astronomical unit, the radius of the Earth's orbit) is about the same as a mile to an inch. So in space-time the orbit can be visualised as a helix formed by wrapping a piece of string around a cylinder two inches thick and a mile long, which makes just a single turn over that distance. The curvature of this path is much lower than the spatial curvature of the orbital path.

Imagine a 2D plane where x is space and y is time. Let's say the Earth is stationary at x=0, so its trajectory is the y axis, and the metric of spacetime is "curved" near it.

We can represent the metric visually by sprinkling a bunch of sand near the y axis. Then lines of inertial movement ("geodesics") can be understood in two ways:

1. Given a pair of points, a geodesic is the line between them with the least sand (this represents the line being shortest according to the metric).

2. Given a starting point and velocity vector, keep moving so as to keep equal amounts of sand on your nearby left vs. nearby right - in other words, curve toward more sand.

Surprisingly, these two views are equivalent! For example, consider the geodesic from (1,0) to (1,1). It will bulge slightly away from the y axis, to avoid sand, and so at each point it will be curving toward more sand.

Now we can answer your original question. Place an object at (1,0) with velocity vector (0,1) (zero spatial velocity) and let it go. It will keep moving in the positive y direction, but curve toward the y axis where there's more sand, and eventually cross it at an angle. Then it will curve back by symmetry, and so on, oscillating back and forth in the x coordinate while moving forward in time.

Can that really be a shortest line between two points? Why not. Say the object makes one full oscillation, traveling from (1,0) to (-1,1) to (1,2). If you try to "straighten" the line by pulling on the endpoints, the midpoint will be pulled toward the y axis and catch more sand. So it might well be a local minimum.

Perhaps, it's not you who is missing something.

80k has changed the general plan that they push (People took "earning to give" too seriously). This post here is probably the article that you're looking for with regards to "what should I do now?"

I am the same as you, and unfortunately I have yet to find an efficient method for that. Still, what I'm doing is having a friend whose ideas are (or rather whose ideology is) against mines so that it forces me to ponder over my own beliefs. The fiercer the debate, the more contradictions that arise. 

One would have to compete with the existing parties, which in e.g. the US is basically hopeless. There are countries where smaller parties have more of a chance, but even there it's a huge amount of work, and LW types are generally not the kind who would enjoy or excel at politics. Also LW users have a variety of political positions rather than having any unified ideology.

If one does want to have political influence, supporting or joining an existing party lets you leverage their existing resources while allowing you to specialize in the politics-things that you are good at, without needing to recreate everything from scratch. 

This question has a weird implication of mutuality.  What I think you mean to ask is "should some LW members support other LW members financially?".  

My answer is "yes, if the donors think that's a good use of their financial resources."

Related questions you didn't ask, but should have:

• Should LW support or encourage individuals to ask for or provide financial support?  No.
• Should LW members ask for such support in DMs to other members? No.
• Should LW members post their circumstances in hope for financial support? No.
• Should LW be in any way involved in financial transfers between members? No.

After reading your followup, I have a few other rephrasings to propose:

• Is LW a good place to ask for money for my services or software?  No.  For registered or generally recognized charities, some amount of solicitation is tolerated, especially as a side-note to a relevant post.
• Does anyone on LW want to sponsor my project?  Probably not, but maybe.  If your project is rationality-related, describing it and the benefits to the community of it's existence is just fine.  If you mention that you're seeking sponsorship, you might get someone interested in collaborating or donating.  You may well get valuable feedback, even without funding.  Note that if this is transparently a plea for bucks, you'll get downvoted out of existence.
• Is LW better than Kickstarter or Patreon as a way to fund my hobby or startup?  No.
• Should I really think about my business model (or lifestyle income model) if this avenue of revenue is important to me?  Yes.

It would help to be more specific about what you mean. There are many different kinds of financial support and there are different things you could mean with "should". 

Both CFAR and MIRI get supported by donations that partly come from LW members. 

Why would they? Considering that LW readers are mostly rich Americans, they don't seem particularly needy. 

I bookmarked https://www.lesswrong.com/allPosts [? · GW] 

I was subscribed to the RSS feed of all posts, but that was a bit overwhelming; so I'm now subscribed to the feed of "posts with 30 or more karma" that they provide, but I'm now finding that LW is much less interesting or useful to me - which I could have predicted, given that I'd already noticed that the karma of a post often turned out a bad indicator of how useful/interesting it would be to me. The posts I found to be the best were most often in the 5-15 karma range - but alas, there's no feed for that.

Now I'm thinking about just unsubscribing from the RSS feed and setting LW as my homepage.

The term "life expectancy" usually refers to something that's not a prediction. It's constructed from the past year's results of many age groups. See https://www.britannica.com/science/life-expectancy.

There's no observed exponential technological progress if you measure our ability to increase life expectancy.

Whether technology will actually increase or decrease life expectancy depends a lot on the assumptions that you put into your models.