Open & Welcome Thread - March 2020

Proofreading-or-Editing Matchmaking Thread

Do you have a post, question or comment that you're planning to write to LessWrong? Would you like to have a fresh set of eyes look over it before you do, for some brief feedback or maybe more detailed editing suggestions? Alternatively, would you like to help people feel more comfortable posting, and are willing to spend a few minutes reading something and giving feedback? Or maybe you have experience giving editing advice, or want to try it out? This is a thread for both sides of that graph to meet up.

How to do this:

• If you have a comment / post / question that you'd like to run by someone, leave a brief comment here, giving the topic, title, wordcount, and a concrete date that you'd plan to publish by (e.g. "I'd like to publish this in the next 24 hours" or "I plan to publish this next Saturday"), and whether you'd appreciate proofreading or editing (both is fine, but often people are looking for one more than the other, so mention that). 
• If you'd like to proofread the post/question/comment, then reply with "I am willing to proofread this by <date>." or "I am willing to edit this by <date>."
• At this point, the author should send a PM to the user with a link to a google doc with their post/question/comment in it.
• Proofreaders+Editors are also welcome to write comments announcing that they're interested in reading people's stuff, and that you can just reach out to them directly by PM.

Happy matchmaking!

Note: Remember, you don't need anyone's permission to publish your ideas on LessWrong, and you're not expected to get something proofread, this is just for those who want it.

Due to the principle of comparative advantage, a country can be rich while being bad at a lot of things (i.e., having an absolute disadvantage in them). This is why richer countries can be worse (even much worse) at handling the coronavirus than some poorer countries. I suspect not realizing or understanding this may have contributed to complacency / insufficient alarm in a lot of people at the beginning of the current pandemic.

Hi all!

I've been reading SSC for years, and took the plunge to read the sequences last year. It shifted a lot of my previous beliefs, and though I have a strong aversion to group identity, I suppose I'm an "aspiring rationalist" now!

About me: I work in Kelowna, BC. I've written for Quillette and Areo in the past, but my current writing output is confined to Letter (including this conversation on metarationality). I will probably do effortposts here eventually, but for now I'm mostly scanning for coronavirus information.

Any rationalists or effective altruists in BC, message me!

Hello Less Wrong. Greetings from Kelowna, in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. I came here from Australia just a few weeks ago in order to meet, and hopefully to help, a young transhumanist I knew online. There is a blog of the journey here.

I could only ever afford a brief visit, and the coronavirus shutdown will probably send me back to Australia even sooner than I had planned. Despite having given myself to the struggle in every way that I could, I have been unable so far, to forge a lasting connection between her, and any element of the local academic or startup communities. People meet her and say, clearly she's very bright, but the lasting connection has not yet been made.

I first talked to her seven years ago, and back then she was fine, but while in school she was handed over to psychiatrists, followed by years of mental distress and physical ill health. I strongly suspect that this handover was a major cause of what later went wrong, along with a neglectful home environment. And that world is where she still dwells.

We just went for an evening walk, and she talked of ideas for achieving physical immortality and a benign universe, and I was reminded again of my wish that someone from the futurist or tech world, someone with middle-class means or greater, would 'adopt' her or sponsor her or otherwise take her in. That would give her a real chance to heal and reach her potential.

I fear that I have not done her, or her situation, or its urgency, sufficient justice, out of a desire not to get subtle details wrong. She's only twenty, and she's extraordinary. I have the melancholy privilege of being the first to visit her world, but I hope there will be others soon, and that together we can uplift her to a better existence.

It seems that our current COVID-19 discourse is very much focused on the developed world. It seems that high temperatures are not as protective as hoped for and temperatures are going to go down in South America and South Africa (the South of the continent) in the next months. Those countries have a lot less slack to deal with crisis.

When people in those countries start buying up all food in preparation for quaranteen it already increases food prices a lot. Many people will starve. Others will riot to get food to live. We could end up with a handful of failed states by the end of the year.

A while ago ago I asked LW [LW · GW] about their take on Aubrey's prediction (forecasting a massive and sudden shift in public awareness on the feasibility of anti-aging technology) and about how, if it is accurate, one could make money out of knowing that.

I got several answers on the first question (summary: people aren't buying it) but none on the second. Is there any way to bet on this? I know very little about pubic trading, but it feels like such a big event ought to affect the stock market somehow. Am I wrong, or is it too difficult to estimate how?

Hi everyone, I'm from Italy. I've discovered this site searching for zettelkasten guides, but I've got curious and started reading sequences when I saw it was mentioned by Anders Sandberg.

I'm studying law, but I am also fond of philosophy and literature.

A question about romantic relationships: Let's say currently I think that a girl needs to have a certain level of smartness in order for me to date her long-term/marry her. Suppose I then start dating a girl and decide that actually, being smart isn't as important as I thought because the girl makes up for it in other ways (e.g. being very pretty/pleasant/submissive). I think this kind of change of mind is legitimate in some cases (e.g. because I got better at figuring out what I value in a woman) and illegitimate in other cases (e.g. because the girl I'm dating managed to seduce me and mess up my introspection). My question is, is this distinction real, and if so, is there any way for me to tell which situation I am in (legitimate vs illegitimate change of mind) once I've already begun dating the girl?

This problem arises because I think dating is important for introspecting about what I want, i.e. there is a point after which I can no longer obtain new information about my preferences via thinking alone. The problem is that dating is also potentially a values-corrupting process, i.e. dating someone who doesn't meet certain criteria I think I might have means that I can get trapped in a relationship.

I'm also curious to hear if people think this isn't a big problem (and if so, why).

I saw there is a Coronavirus tag now. Is there some way to use this tag to not see any post related to the topic? Because I only managed to go to the page with only these posts, and I think pretty much all the value of such a tag is in filtering. I mean, if I want to see many posts with coronavirus news or advice, I can just look at the front page, I don't need a tag.

I like the divider dots that have appeared in the edit options