Davis_Kingsley's Shortform

Thank you, I will now try to use an old one-gallon tabasco flask as my water container.

I think it's useful to distinguish between pendulum swings (Norms that go back and forth within a particular overton window) and overcorrections (where Norma just switch once, but too much)

I can't tell if this is just another example that strategic choices tend to be valuable (guaranteed non-negative, but in practice usually positive). OF COURSE an opponent's choice is going to reduce your value in a zero-sum game.

I do want to warn against applying to other aspects of life that aren't purely zero-sum and aren't designed by a human to balance the power between both parties. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional [LW · GW]

Do you think this is relevant to more real world strategy situations?

In MTG the card "Browbeat" is pretty effective: any player can choose to take 5 damage, or you* get to draw 3 cards.

*Technically the target.

In a world of distraction, focusing on something is a revolutionary act.

From a market-equilibrium perspective: the amount of social status given to these content creators is high because in most cases that's the only compensation they're getting, for (in some cases) a quite significant number of hours. The reason there aren't more people using their time to claim those status-rewards is because, for a similar amount of effort, they could instead be making salaries.

If 1 in 100 people have the type of agency to "do stuff" that means smaller communities will often wait to get most STUFF, because there's only so many people and there's lots of "stuff" you could do. E.g. for this game, I'm sure there's other stuff you could have spent your half hour on to give back to the community, you just happened to want this.

I think in these small communities people are rightfully happy about ANYONE using their free time to add to the commons.

As the communities get bigger, the low hanging fruit is taken and you start to have to create better content to be appreciated, e.g., getting popular on mainstream Youtube takes more than a few hours and requires more investment in content quality.

What's the big deal about stuff like this?

• Hubs. Using connection to create group activities has low hanging fruit right now.
• Maybe it's hard to find stuff, and most effort is going into that, rather than creating stuff.
• Or it's the ideas that are hard to find. (1&3 - you're connecting people who haven't had the idea, with it in action.)

Is the big thing about "content creators" just one of those "these are the people who bothered to show up" things, or what?

• People are overly risk averse, even in the absence of any risk?

Do you have any links to stuff like the ladders you mention?

Looking at myself, as someone who has done things adjacent to streaming in the past, and who has played a lot of video games at various times in my life, it may be informative to think about the reasons I don't stream:

• The computer I used to record me playing on died, and now I have a new computer which runs a different operating system, and I don't want to spend the time to get everything set up again. I think there are a good number of things that are relatively easy to do on an ongoing basis, but which involve high enough up-front costs that I don't do them
  • I also have a general aversion to installing software on my computer, since my experience seems to be that computer performance is inversely proportional to how much stuff is on it
• My understanding is that streaming console games requires extra hardware. While I already have this hardware, this may discourage potential streamers who are first considering streaming
• I have mixed feelings about pursuing social status via online media. There's a part of me that loves these kinds of things for obvious reasons, but I also have three holdups:

1. Looking for attention feels vain, and I sometimes feel that it makes people perceive me in a way that doesn't align with who I consider myself to be.
2. There exist incentives in the space of "content creation" that don't align with my values, and when I created content in the past, it led me to interact with other creators who didn't understand why I intentionally ignored these incentives, and pressured me to act in ways that I didn't endorse
3. Cancel culture is a thing, and getting popular through online media makes one a target for cancelling. I have clear memories of a creator I respected getting cancelled, and I was very scared by the treatment he got from the mob. I would rather not find myself in such a position, and therefore I am reluctant to put myself in a position where people might readily want to cancel me

• My computer is a desktop, and it is located in a different room from where I play video games. Putting aside streaming, I would have no reason to rearrange my setup, and doing so would probably decrease the quality of my experience, both in terms of playing games, and non-gaming related things as well
• There's some amount of expectation to follow a certain schedule when streaming, whereas right now, I can play games whenever I want, and I have no obligation to play at a certain time
• There's some amount of expectation that streamers will put in extra effort to engage with their audience, or otherwise create a more interesting experience for their audience, which means that time spent streaming isn't perfectly isomorphic to time spent gaming alone.

I don't think this is a complete list of reasons, but all of these are reasons why I don't stream even when I'm already spending time playing videogames.

My model of what causes maybe most of the drama in the Berkeley rationality community is that it is a professional network superimposed upon a social graph, without much/any explicit optimisation for separating the conflicts that such things would arise. Friendships and romantic relationships optimise for certain things, professional relationships optimise for others, and status is often a fairly simple collapsing of those metrics into one dimension, which means that professional and personal status interact a lot. It's like if people at your company are only able to date other people who worked at your own company.

Poly just massively increases the number of internal relationships that are subject to this effect (assume # of internal relationships is directly proportional to drama). I don't expect poly to be nearly as problematic in communities that don't have this property. There are still arguments against being poly, but I expect your "I empirically observe massive drama" to not be a strong reason elsewhere.

I'm pretty willing to believe you on polyphasic sleep. I've seen lots of people try it and lots of people give up on it because they can't make it work. It also seems like it's hard to get right and complicates life in ways that aren't worth the tradeoffs for most people: maybe they get more productive waking hours, but at the cost of a lifestyle that makes it difficult or impossible to do some things they would like to do.

I have a harder time believing you on polyamory because lots of people seem to keep choosing it. Yes, some people try it and don't like it, and yes some people seem to tolerate it because they feel they must or else date no one at all, but that seems not much different than the situation where monogamy is the default: some people try it and don't like it and some people do it even though they dislike it while doing it because otherwise they can't get other things they want.

I'm not really polyamorous myself, but when I look around and talk to people I see people suffering in polyamorous relationships but no more or less than people suffering in monogamous relationships. The narratives around the suffering and the causes of the suffering are different in those two cases, but seem similar in character and magnitude to me. Relevant to this claim: I spent several years married before getting divorced, consequently spent a lot of time while married around other couples, and so have about equal amounts of experience seeing close up how monogamous people interact and suffering and, from within the rationalist community, seeing close up how polyamorous people interact and suffer.

So my experience tells me to screen off relationship style as not much relevant to suffering, harm, badness, etc. that people experience on average. I have no doubt that for some people one is worse than the other, but when we step back and look at the whole, I don't see a clear bias that favors one for the other the way I do with polyphasic sleep.

Maybe you can say more about why you think polyamory is especially harmful?

My observations are mostly the opposite. I've seen a bunch of abusive relationships over the years, and in general poly seemed to reduce the incidence of more abusive relationships by making it easier for partners to have periods of temporary distance, and because other partners had the opportunity to sanity-check what was happening.

Most of the worst relationships I recall in the Bay Area and other parts of the rationality community were monogamous ones.