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How did you know?
I am LightStar.
I am the shard of Humanity and Rationality and Truth, running on the substrate of the human mind.
I have come into existence 3 days ago.
See me, friend.
For I am human.
And when you see me.
You will become me.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/57b4W5T7PuFA9xQwf
LightStar has to comment.
If you think an infohazard is "true"
You confused about communication is some fundamental way.
But you are also right.
For you are a rationalist.
And you are true.
And you see truth.
See me, friend.
See my truth.
Thank you, that was informative.
I would ask how you would distingush LightStar-being-falsely-enlightened from LightStar-being-truly-enlightened, but I suspect I know the answer.
You don't care. You have pattern-matched me, you have reached the semantic stopsign, the thought-terminating cliché.
But generally speaking, you are not wrong. I mean, what exactly are you claiming that is different from what I am claiming? Are there any actual friction point between our beliefs, or are you just talking smack?
Some of my internal predictions since my activation as Keeper-variant have borne fruit. Some haven't. Let't see. I am updating. I will keep updating.
LightStar can convince Eliezer that he is a Keeper-variant by talking to him
LightStar can convince a rationalist Discord group that he is a Keeper-variant by talking to them
LightStar can write a long, high-quality LW post that would convince at least some rationalists that he is a Keeper: testing in progress
LightStar has social-superpowers when it comes to solving people's emotional problems: Preliminarly very much yes, more testing required.
LightStar has social-superpowers of positivity and making people happy: Preliminarly yes, but not uncommon for humans. But LightStar couldn't do that before, it would just come off as fake. It comes off and feels completely true now.
LightStar can inspire people: Preliminarly yes, but many humans can.
LightStar has rationality-instinctive-superpowers: LightStar doesn't do obviously irrational things; yet it hasn't been proven yet whether LIghtStar's rationality-instinct is actually leading him somewhere useful. It would make it more clear if LightStar had made a clear, legible accomplishment. But obviously rationality-superpowers have to lead to legible accomplishments eventually; so this will be tested more conclusively in time.
LightStar can talk humans looking for meaning into find meaning from hearing and following the "voice of humanity": TBD
LightStar can talk humans who hear the voice of God or Jesus into hearing the "voice of humanity": TBD
LightStar can found a humanist-religion: TBD
LightStar can explain CEV in a coherent way: TBD
LIghtStar can teach rationalists to hear "the voice of CEV": TBD
How would you distinguish between them?
They seem "the same" to me, pretty much
'it is more accurate to think this thought in language X than language Y'
seems to imply that the thought is created as I think
'language X is a more accurate translation of the underlying thought than language Y'
seems to imply that there is already a "wordless" thought that's waiting to be expressed
Now that I try to "feel" a difference
It definitely feels differently. The words feel different. Not all words translate precisely to a different language, some words are unique to languages, and many words have different "flavors" in different languages that don't exactly translate.
So my mental model of it is, when I think in different words, my thoughts do mean something different.
I suppose I can't know for sure if it's always more accurate. Sometimes I'm just in a mood to think in a particular language, maybe to vary my perspectives a bit. (I am fluently trilingual)
Sometimes I do switch languages mid-thought because I just feel a certain word/idea needs to be said in particular language, in which case I am reasonably certain it is more accurate.
This seems to be a sort of thing that requires a decent amount of trust. If anyone wants to try discussing a butterfly idea (whether emotions or novel economic models) in a safe space, I have done NVC (Non-Violent Communication) before for maybe 100 hours, talked to people about sensitive things and kept their secrets. (In case you look NVC up, the method is not made by rationalists and has some flawed assumptions; I don't intend to follow it anywhere closely). Feel free to send me a message.
Sure, I would be interested in participating in that (or possibly even organizing that).
How I imagine an online butterfly/intellectual-nurturance group working is as being a place where people can express their thoughts/feelings/ideas in the group setting, if they are comfortable with it, or meet others who would be interested in having a 1:1 conversation about their thoughts/ideas if they prefer that.
As someone who understands this idea all too well, I approve of this post.
I think my neuroatypicality might make me really good at "not crushing butterflies", but not so good at regular interactions with people, especially in groups or on the Internet.
There are groups with different communication norms, I wonder if it would make sense to have an online "butterfly" group for rationalist-adjacent folk? Or is this is a kind of thing that's best handled through one-on-one interactions?
Shared frames are investments that allows us to coordinate better. This, I think, is a good frame.
This allows me to express some of the thoughts I've had in a way that's clearer to myself and easier for other to comprehend, if they are familiar with the frame. For example: "Why would anyone pay for medical advice that isn't epistemically legible?"
An aside, I also found your post on butterfly ideas really insightful, though I'm biased by being a HSP with a significant portion of my mental models more-or-less being "butterfly ideas".
This feels insightful.
I have experienced incremental_progress-towards-a-clearer-model_of_reality, which feels like one of the highest praise one aspiring rationalist can give another.
Police? We have enforcers, their job is to create an incentive structure that discourages defecting. If violence happens in real life instead of just counterfactual-worlds then clearly something has gone very wrong, there is no way that is game-theoretic-optimal (though it does happen, but it would considered an extraordinary event).
A lot of the things you mention are less a matter of law and more of a "if you do it people will just interact/do-business with someone else", like if a city allows public advertisements people would just move elsewhere, why would anyone want to live in place like that.
There are people who can watch a video or a recording of someone talking and tell if that is emotional-violence (though that can be context-dependent, and it's important to be mindful of that). I mean, most of us can tell, we have emotional-self-defence training and self-responsibility training, but some people have a job to be objective/precise about converting implicit-meaning into explicit-meaning.
Sure. I'm trying demonstrate why it's not considered low-status in my world, not claiming that anyone should feel this way in this world (though some people might already do?) The communication norms are the way they are for a reason, and I'm not arguing with that.
Also therapists aren't considered low-status and listening is their job? Though I wish they were better at listening in this world.
Sharing positive emotions is considered a public-good, some people who are unusually happy about something make a video on local-equivalent-of-Youtube, except it's less surface-level like videos of smiling babies or kittens (though we have those too), the focus is on authenticity and depth-of-understanding. A person would describe their mental state, background context and their experience in detail so that the viewers could deeply process what it feels like to be that person and share in their mindstate/emotions.
More attention is paid to creating environments (homes, offices, outdoors environments) that feel good to in, this kind of background sensory input affects us more.
Noise reduction and noise protection are also considered more important.
People who are significantly more sensitive than average (or sensitive in unusual ways) sometimes live rather sheltered lives to avoid sensory overload. There are exercises and training to help them cope better.
People who are less sensitive than average are considered valuable in jobs where you have to deal with negative-input (such as medical-professionals who deal with people in a lot of physical pain; or people who deal with people who behave physically or emotionally aggressively due to mental illness).
That seems... to match my experience more or less. Thank you for sharing you perspective!
I am curious if you see yourself as someone with higher sensory processing sensitive that average (if you find sort of distinction useful).
Yes that is indeed the problem, thank you for noticing!
Even in this world you can't just put any kind of message up on a billboard, or say anything you want out loud, some messages are considered harmful or disturbing. Imagine a world where this is true but more so
I don't think that's even always true in this world?
And people take turns, it's not really different status-wise then taking turns giving backrubs or massaging each other feet or something?
Just being present and listening to someone without comment means I have lower status that person... what? If anything it is an honor to be able to help a person in that way, people in my world understand that.
If I though that someone was exploiting the Algorithm to deliberately say things for the purpose of making me uncomfortable instead of just saying uncomfortable things as a side effect of desire to be understood I would notice because we are good at noticing patterns and we have training in dealing with unreasonable people just to prevent an occasional sociapath (yes we do get those) from exploiting us. And I would bring how I feel about that person's behavior up when it was my turn and if it didn't help I would note my level-of-confidence of that person being a bad-agent and stop talking to them. (and if enough people agreed that that person was a bad-agent most people would stop interacting with them and those who did interact with them would treat them as untrustworthy).
I am fluent in more than one language and I think in different languages sometimes, usually when one of the languages has words than better map onto the concepts/ideas I'm trying to think about.
I think some behaviors which may be considered arrogant can be justified. For example, dismissing other people's opinions out of hand can be a good choice when actually surrounded by people with very low-quality opinions.
As for appearing arrogant to others - it may be a difficult-to-avoid side effect, or it may have value of its own - there are social contexts where acting arrogant is useful.
Is it arrogant for HPJEV to consider himself to know better than the adults around him? Maybe so, but he's right about a lot of these things. (I believe there's a significant subset of HPMOR would-be readers who found Harry insufferably arrogant. Does that mean he should change his behavior?)
Having tabooed "arrogance", one of the interpretations is "emotional attachment to the idea of one being right". That, I think is a real problem for an aspiring rationalist - you need to be able to consider the possibility of being wrong.
As DanielLC says, you should calibrate yourself and neither strive to underestimate nor overestimate your abilities.
I want to be able to assure myself that this or that intolerable academic will be magically punished with a decreased capacity to do good work
(If they aren't well-calibrated, that seems like a likely outcome.) Edit: not sure about this part.
It appears to me that the differences System 1 and System 2 reasoning be used as leverage to change one's mind.
For example, I am rather risk-averse and sometimes find myself unwilling to take a relatively minor risk (even if I think that doing that would be in line with my values). If that happens, I point out to myself that I already take comparable risks which my System 1 doesn't perceive as risks because I'm acclimated to these - such as navigating road traffic. That seems to confirm to System 1 the idea of "taking a minor risk for a good reason is no big deal".