Precognition

It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.

That really is a nice quote, though.

An extreme example is high-frequency trading, in which responding to a market change milliseconds ahead of others can be crucial to making money. A decade ago, Spread Networks spent $300 million laying a fibre optic cable in a straight line between Chicago and New Jersey, cutting through mountains, purely to shave 3 milliseconds off the transit time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys

Curated. I think this was a good distillation/overview of a good rationalist skill.

Thanks for this lovely post Jason.

Fundamentally, I think that the reason it is difficult to consistently pay attention to the present is that doing so means accepting things as they are, and generally that is very difficult for humans to do, since we are often attached to certain comfortable beliefs about the world, and we are willing to ignore what is actually happening in order to maintain these comfortable beliefs. Of course this doesn't serve us in the long term, but as you point out, we still do it.

So in terms of the means to consistently pay attention to the present, I would put "drop attachments" at the top of the list.

This could be a great seed for a short story. The protagonist can supposedly see the future but actually they're just really really good at seeing the present and making wise bets. 

Regarding 2 and 3: that's the main practical perk of reading LessWrong, or as I'm inclined to call it now, SoonerRight.

Thanks everyone!

I started preparing in January. Bought my first ever car to avoid public transit, and bought emergency food and masks etc too. By the time China closed down Wuhan, I thought it was high double digits that a pandemic was inevitable. By the time the Diamond Princess happened and so many people on the ship got infected, it seemed likely that it was airborne (and the fact that SARS spread that way was an extra data point). I encouraged my SO to fly over because I didn't think we'd be able to meet that year otherwise. (She ended up coming, but we were about a week too late for cohabitation, and she had to return.)

That being said, it's still too early to stop wearing masks in most of the world. In most of the US, too, if that's your metric. Even if prevalence is low where you are right now, depending on how many people are no longer (as) susceptible, you can still get huge numbers again. More than half of your states have less than 50% of the population vaccinated. Not to mention the variants that are much better at spreading compared to the baseline (which was relatively high to start with), which have an even higher herd immunity threshold.

As for me, I'm in Belgium, and I am still double masking. We're starting to see another increase. Both the first and second derivatives are positive. But the government says it's okay to do basically everything again so people are essentially acting as if COVID doesn't exist. I haven't even eaten in a restaurant since March last year.

Any list of independent thinkers who are worth following? I'm thinking about Zvi, Scott Alexander. Who else?

Referencing Leo Szilard is amusing for this topic as his moment of genius insight, that the atomic nucleus can be split to generate enormous explosions, is one of those few ideas so genuinely beyond the then current paradigm (1930’s) that it seems like real precognition.  

Allegedly he spent a significant fraction of every day sitting in a hotel bathtub in rumination, and he lived permanently in hotels for decades. I assume that is how he developed that depth of thinking. 

are now slow to realize/admit that we can stop wearing them.

I'd like to offer a "precognition" rebuttal to this. If you value life at the typical $10M, one microcovid = $0.01 [LW(p) · GW(p)], then wearing a mask "costs" $0.01. But if you value life at eg. 1000x that amount, then wearing a mask costs $10, a bad price to pay. Applying "2. Listen to other independent thinkers.", my read [LW · GW] on it is that the consensus opinion of experts is that the singularity is quite plausible, and that this would imply wildly longer lifespans. Putting those two things together, it seems reasonable to value life wildly more than is typical, and that you seem to be valuing it at in saying that we shouldn't wear masks indoors anymore.

It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.

To be fair, it is still necessary to model/predict the future to make good decisions that have consequences in the future.  As this post says, your prediction will be better than others if your data is more up-to-date and from better sources.

 

(Self-review.) My comment that we could stop wearing masks was glib; I didn't foresee the Delta, Omicron, etc. waves. But I think the general point stands.

I was taking covid precautions in late February 2020, about three weeks ahead of official “lockdown” measures—but only because I was tuned in to the people who were six weeks ahead.

But who do you listen to, and how do you find them? Is it just a matter of reading anything with a lot of votes on LW?

3. Distinguish independent thinkers from crackpots. 

Hey now, crackpots are independent thinkers! (Otherwise I agree)

$10M is a roughly standard value that the US government uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States.

1000x, the short answer is "the singularity seems pretty plausible, and given how powerful a singularity would be, assuming we get the alignment problem right, I'd think we'd live really, really, really, long lives". I go into some more detail in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AL6jdmpcxESxQTpfQ/is-driving-worth-the-risk [LW · GW], although that post is still very hand-wavy.