Open & Welcome Thread - November 2019

Weren't the countermeasures kind of very basic, though? Like they weren't exactly the type of illegibly sophisticated egregores that trads like to worship? Isn't Tall_poppy_syndrome basically instinctive?

Upvoted. I'm pretty mystified and am very curious about the answers myself.

Have any of these people said why they have made that choice?

I don't use twitter, but one possibility might be that it actually isn't a discussion forum. It's a place for drive-by firing off of thoughts. For a prominent person, the function of a tweet is to say, "This is what I am thinking about at the moment," so as to invite conversation elsewhere with the people they already know and find worth while talking to. This is far less time-consuming than an actual discussion forum, where it's expected that a post will be of a more substantial length and that you will participate in subsequent discussion.

I predict from this hypothesis that Eliezer makes hardly any replies on Twitter to replies to his tweets.

Simplest answer: twitter is where everyone else is, which makes it the simplest and easiest way to interact conversationally with potentially anyone on earth without an intro or in-person meeting.

In addition, twitter enables easy one-to-many communication for celebrities who want to spread memes, and brevity is the soul of wit.

Twitter does a few things I can't do with other platforms.

1. I can quickly search through all of someone's thoughts on a particular subjects, and all of people's thoughts on those thoughts, and peoples thoughts on those thoughts, etc.

2. I can comment on someone else's specific thought on a subject, and start a conversation thread on it.

3. I can subscribe to someone's thoughts, without them needing to write essays, etc. It provides a very low friction way to share thoughts.

4. I can build off of my previous thoughts, creating an interconnected web of all my thoughts on a topic. The link is not to a whole "essay" but to the individual thought from that essay that's relevant.

One way to think of twitter is a vast web of interconnected individual ideas. The character limit forces people to segment their tweets by thought, allowing for this to happen.

Twitter's usefulness mostly comes from the celebrities being there. The initial reason the celebrities were attracted probably had to do with the char limit, its pretext, that they are not expected to read too much and that they are not expected to write too much.

You'll see on reddit - at least, back when these things were being determined - a lot of celebrities, when they did AMAs, seemed to feel obligated to respond to every comment with a comment of similar length. Sometimes they wouldn't wait and see which comments were getting the most votes and answer those, they'd just start with the first one that hit their mailbox and work down the list until they ran out of time. My guess is, non internet-native extroverts really needed a platform that would advise them about what's expected and reasonable.

But I think, now that we're all learning that we must moderate our consumption, the celebrities (and most other people) remain on twitter mainly because the celebrities were there in the first place. I don't think we need the char limit any more. I think maybe we're ready for the training wheels to come off.

But there's another reason redditlikes don't really work for a general audience. Mainly specifics about how voting tends to work. There is no accommodation of subjectivity. Everyone sees the same vote ranking even though different people have different interests and standards. The problem is partially mitigated by separating people into different subreddits, but eventually, general subreddits like /r/worldnews, /r/technology, /r/science or even /r/futurism will grow large enough and diverse enough that people wont be able to stand being around each other again. Every demographic other than the largest, most vote-happy one will have to leave. I really want everyone to be able to join together in the same conversation, but when the top-ranked comments always turn out to be "[outgroup lies]" or "[childish inanity]", that can't happen. The outgroup wants to see their lies, and the children want to see their inanity, and I think they should be able to, but good adults need to be able to hear each other too, or else they'll just move to GoodAdultSite and then the outgroup wont be able to find refutations of their lies even when they look for them, and the children will not receive the advice they need even when they call out for it.

(I have some ideas as to how to build a redditlike that might solve this. If anyone's interested, speak up.)

My general sense is that I see a lot of interesting people go to Twitter when they are committed to being on the outside of most elite institutions, but still want conversation. And Twitter gives a lot of control in who you see, and makes engaging those people in conversation very low cost. I think there's a valuable contrarian cluster on there.

(Meta note: the commenting guidelines aren't showing up on mobile - it just says "habryka's commenting guidelines".)

Possible benefits (or attractions) of Twitter:

• Short term length.
• Short/variable post length. (I'm just going to write/read one tweet...)
• No voting.
• People who are there.
• Difficult to find things, unless directed there/but not too difficult. (Diaspora contained.)
• Lots to find, different bubbles. (Lots of things.)
• Pathologies. Perhaps drama = entertainment. (If you could be more specific, what pathologies?)
• More modes of use and engagement. (Not all of which are freestanding - consider link posts.)
• The format. (Reblogging navigation, also see Longer notes)
• Word of mouth (or a digital equivalent).
• Perhaps it's used in place of/in addition to Facebook.
• More casual content, and mixtures.
• Visuals
• Speed

Shooting in the dark:

• Features for filtering? (Having discussions with who you want/with the number of people you want.)
• The font + text size?
• average post length (acts like bullet points) + cute avatars
• lack of censorship?
• Everyone's there for the memes/low expectations about when content comes out.
• Everyone's there, not because of one thing, but because the medium is malleable.
• Something to do with governance

Longer notes:

• The best way to handle content of mixed length isn't clear - by length (and quality). Some short form content here seems like posts, with the downsides of not being able to view it as a post, and less engagement.

• Rather than discussions taking place in places, it's based around someone making a comment (in the set of all their comments sorted by time) and someone responding. The format is very different - if I want to read EY's Twitter posts/similar stuff, I know where to go. Celebrities might be there for the less serious entertainment, or because it's where everybody is, or for a lot of different reasons all of which are also there or conveniently linked to.

• If intellectual engagement requires focus, mixing it with stuff that requires less focus might make it easier for people to engage, or enable different levels of engagement.

It's nice to meet you too! :)

Welcome! Thank you for your posts!

Email me at buck@intelligence.org with some more info about you and I might be able to give you some ideas (and we can maybe talk about things you could do for ai alignment more generally)

I can vouch that this person is highly skilled in a few areas of computer science.

I found a Q&A with one of the authors on the book's website. It describes what they were hoping to accomplish, who the audience of the new book is, and summarizes some of the theoretic advancements.

Interesting! I’ll take a look.

Related discussion: https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10213221225461126

This really makes me wish you could upvote/downvote sequences, and see new ones on the front page.

Welcome!

I find I have very little energy for debating religion nowadays. It could just be because I don't know all that much about religion and don't want to bother to learn. But I think it might just be that the truth of claims of religion aren't really why people keep going to church, and arguing against those claims wont really have that much of an effect for people. Some relevant stuff was writ in Scott's recent article about new atheism https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

My impression right now, personally, is that the strongest anchors of peoples' religions are probably

• Grounding of morality. Some people don't see a way to build a shared morality on a purely secular worldview. It's not obvious that we even can (I believe we can, with a lot of talking and a bit of evolutionary psych, but have we, yet? Has that book been written?)
• Community. You can't argue someone out of wanting to be a part of a community of people who agree about what is good and bad. The best you can do is invite them to an effective altruist meet and try to make sure they have a good time, and then if they do, if you can make sure they understand that there are alternatives, other communities out there ready to embrace them, then maybe the prospect of leaving their spiritual community can become thinkable for them.

I'll read.

And as long as it needs to be ...

I'll read it.

Are you asking for a justification for averaging independent estimates to achieve an estimate with lower errors? "Blended estimate" isn't a specific term of art, but the general idea here is so common that I'm not sure _what_ the most common term for it is.

And the theoretical justification -- under assumptions of independent and Normal errors -- is at the post, where the author demonstrates that there's a lower error from the weighted average (and that their choice of weights minimizes the error). Am I missing something here?

Copied from my answer here [LW(p) · GW(p)].

• Take melatonin at the appropriate time and dose. It's cheap and legal in the U.S., but most products have way too much. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ most insomnia drugs are not much more effective than this.
• Avoid light at night, especially blue light. Light inhibits natural melatonin production, which interferes with your circadian rhythms.
  • If you can't darken your room completely, you can use a sleep mask instead. Get the kind with cups (like opaque swim goggles) instead of the kind that puts pressure on your eyes.
  • Use f.lux on your personal devices to reduce blue light after sunset or use one of the similar built-in features of your OS. Windows 10 has the new "Night Light" setting, macOS and iOS have "night shift" mode. Newer Samsung phones have a "blue light filter" setting. These options vary in quality and may have configurable intensity. More intense is more effective and it's surprising how much you get used to it.
• Falling asleep is a common failure mode of certain types of meditation practice. You can use this to your advantage when suffering from insomnia in bed. Even beginners fail to meditate this way accidentally, so it's not particularly difficult to do on purpose. Focus your attention on the sensation of breathing or on the ringing in your ears. When you notice you are lost in thought, refocus your attention. But when you notice the dreaming arise without directed effort, dive in and let them take you. It works for me anyway. If not, at least you got your meditation in today. [...]
• Track your sleep quality.
  • You can get smartphone apps that purport to do this using the phone's sensors. Some fitness trackers or smartwatches also have this function built in or available as an app. Accuracy varies.
  • You may have sleep apnea. Talk to your doctor about doing a sleep study to diagnose possible issues and treatments. Some people do much better on a CPAP, but there are many other treatment options.
• Avoid eating late at night. This can cause indigestion, which can keep you awake.
  • if you suffer from heartburn, sleep on your left side to contain it better, because your esophagus attaches to your stomach on the right side (unless you're one of those rare people with backwards internal organs).
• Exercise regularly. I'm not sure why this helps, but it seems to. Perhaps mental fatigue doesn't always line up with physical fatigue unless you actually make some effort physically during the day.

People say reading something boring does it, but for me it's about cognitive overhead. Something that'll make some part of the brain go "I'm too tired for this shit actually, if you wanna read this we've got to sleep a bit first, you do want to read this ergo we are going to sleep now"

0.3 mg melatonin an hour before I want to be asleep works, my only trouble is actually planning in advance.

Try reading something boring. It works for me.

just because "I don't want to see more of this" doesn't mean it's up to me to influence whether anyone else can see it.

I feel like this proves more than you want. For example, is it up to you to influence whether someone sees more of something, just because you want to see more of it?

Similarly, it's also helpful to get a reason for up votes, but enforcing that a reason be given can reduce the amount of information-aggregation that will occur, on some margins. What justifies an asymmetry between how we aggregate positive information and how we aggregate negative information? Or would you also argue that up votes should come with reasons?