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Plausible theory.
In the scenario where a breakthrough leads to a coordination takeoff, what implications do you think that would have for alignment/AI safety research?
Is this feature likely to be released in the near future?
I personally have a post sitting in drafts that is far too long to rely on footnotes, as it would break the reading experience. Sidenotes would be ideal for these kinds of posts, but it would be almost as good if you had an option to put them at the end of a paragraph in a little box or something, as that would translate well to the mobile reading experience.
Agree, I am also confused about this as a bystander.
It wasn't announced on the list this year, so I'm not sure what the situation is. If I were to guess, I'd say the person who set things up last year didn't respond to email requests for information about this year's plans.
If you want to take the initiative to organize the Manchester meetup, you are welcome to do so.
Update: At 11:30 we are moving to foundation coffee on Whitworth Street
(Disclaimer: This is a brief low effort reply because I've spent a large amount of time on this topic with very little to show for it, but I also don't want to ignore questions which people have a reasonable expectation of getting a response.)
- UK immigration law is almost seamless if 1) you are just wanting to visit to get a taste of living here 2) are willing to visit for less than 6 months per year and are wealthy/willing to tolerate being in the defacto legal grey area of remote work on a tourist visa.
- Immigration to the UK is about as straightforward as immigrating to any other developed country in general. There are also specific circumstances when it becomes a lot easier that are likely to apply to a lot of people in this community (e.g. tech founders, tech workers on the occupational shortage list).
- There are rationalists/EAs and ACX fans here. I used to organise the meetups and I know of 30-50 people here and in the surrounding area, and there were 9 people present at the first ACX 2021 meetup.
- However, the number of people in Manchester who are in paid roles at rationalist/ea orgs is, to my knowledge, zero. The general takeaway is that due to the large surrounding population (something like 11m within a 60 minute travel radius) there is naturally quite a few fans, but due to factors such as sub-critical mass and lack of institutional support from the community, there is no hardcore scene present here.
- While there are not hardcore scenes locally, such scenes do exist in places which are close by American geographic standards (e.g. London had ~150 at its ACX meetup and is only 2h30m away by train).
If you don't write a seperate post about it, you could reply to this comment with the results. (i have nothing further to add at this time.)
I think the question becomes much more social than technical. It's not about how to design the UI, it's about evolving cultural norms. I would say it's both, it's getting users to want to do something and having the UI make it easy for them to do it.
(As a side note, for some reason people have become more reluctant in the past decade to rebel against interfaces and the implicit messages sent by its design choices. Like, until about last year you could not get people to use Discord as a tool for serious work, even though it was better than Slack, simply because it was associated with gamers.)
I suppose a good starting point there would be to have a post talk in more detail about why this would be a good thing I think that would make sense as a next step.
From there, maybe the next step would be if you started to see post authors do things like making pledges or holding office hours. I think the first question that needs to be explored here is why they are not already doing something like this already. I've only ever made a single post to LessWrong, and to me sticking around in the comment section seemed like the obvious thing to do. I didn't do it out of a sense of duty, it just didn't make sense to me to spend all that time writing a post and not hang around afterwards to talk about it. (One serious possibility is that most people who write posts are a lot more introverted than I am, so instead of seeing it as a reward for their efforts, they view answering questions as a necessary evil.)
I think those things would be a step in the right direction, but I'd be surprised if they turned out to be sufficient. Remember, LessWrong already notifies the subset of the userbase most likely to reply (i.e. users who have already replied) when there are new comments, but those users choose to ignore them after ~2 weeks.
For things to actually change, I predict that we'd first need a widespread perception that this behaviour is a problem, then have various UI nudges put in place. The only way you'd get the desired behaviour change without that consensus is if the UI went beyond nudging and aggressively pushed it as the default.
I think points 2 and 3 are correct, but the thing I wanted to convey was that without strong explicit preferences for things to be different, it's unlikely that the necessary changes would be made.
I think that while 1 is often true in general, it is not true in this specific case. We already have the positive sum solution (notifications) which allows anyone to continue discussions for as long as they like without having to manually check for new replies, and this clearly isn't enough to unstick the norm of avoiding comment sections once a post is a few weeks old. This implies it would require a more drastic change, which likely involves making tradeoffs that will negatively impact people who are satisfied with the current homepage.
I don't think it's completely to blame, but I suspect that the way the LessWrong homepage is set up encourages this cultural norm. LessWrong 2.0 has paid some attention to the need to revisit content, but the homepage is still much closer to Reddit (where discussions die out quickly) than a forum (where they don't).
My reason for thinking the website is not completely to blame is that it seems to reflect the revealed preferences of the users. If there was a strong (and conscious) preference for long running discussions, people would work around it via the notification system. There would also be frequent calls from users to change the homepage to a forum-first design, rather than making tweaks to the Reddit-based one to nudge people towards long running discussion. That's not what we see, which would indicate that being able to have long running discussions on LessWrong is a minority preference.
I don't think there are any important caveats, and I also wouldn't expect there to be. The reason I wouldn't is that if the best things in life weren't cheap, it would mean that the best things in life are the things that require lots of highly skilled labour that can't be amortised across a large number of people.
When things are expensive and highly desired, market forces incentivise people to put a lot of effort into making those things less expensive, so the only things that tend to remain that way are:
A) Things where there are hard constraints on how much effort needs to be put into creating them.
B) Things that derive a large part of their perceived value from being produced in a way that requires lots of bespoke highly skilled labour.
Things that are B are not the best things in life almost by definition, and so few tangible products in the modern world are A (as opposed to say, human relationships) that they are unlikely to coincide with the best things in life.
To clarify, I was thinking more about the overall effect of the weather on people. You are not indoors all the time, nor can you cover every square inch of your body with warm clothing. At least from my point of view, being outdoors in 20F wind in a winter coat is worse than 85F in shorts + t-shirt. I'm not disputing that air conditioning is more technologically complex than a fireplace, I just don't think it's a major factor.
Ah, that makes more sense. I think if you'd posted this last year I would have assumed you were making an individual case, but the recent interest in moving the hub away from Berkeley made me think otherwise.
From what I understand, the case for Boston is as follows:
A. Similar good things
- Boston has similar urban amenities of the SFBA (colleges, medicine, airport).
- Boston tolerates the rationalist kind of weirdness (queer and poly).
- Boston has lots of the activity groups rationalists enjoy (contra dance, kink).
- Boston has enough rationalists that it's possible to run weekly events and for people to have their own little friendship groups.
- Boston has plenty of buildings that are suitable for large grouphouses.
- Tech salaries in Boston are only 10-20% less than the SFBA.
B. Similar bad things
- Boston has a very high cost of living ($2800/month for a 2 bed that's 30 minutes from downtown).
- Boston is within the US, so is at the mercy of US federal politics (i.e. revolution risk).
- Boston is within the US, so it has similarly insane healthcare costs.
- Boston has NIMBY housing policies that are unlikely to change.
C. Large/important improvements
- Boston has far less risk of earthquakes and wildfires.
- Boston has better non-car transport options. (Although it's unclear how it compares to NYC and how much worse it is than the best cities internationally.)
D. Small/minor improvements
- Boston is much less dependant on the software industry than the SFBA. (I'm unsure if this is important for rationalists, as most of them are software engineers so the main benefit for them is less social homogeneity in their non-rationalist friend groups.)
- Boston has a lot more elite schools per capita.
- Boston's architecture is similar to Europe.
- Boston skews younger than the SFBA (likely due to its elite universities).
- Boston has 4 distinct seasons.
E. Large drawbacks
- Boston has the same sky-high cost of living as the SFBA, but only a fraction of the startup scene.
- Boston has very cold winters.
F. Small drawbacks
- Boston has summers that are hot, humid and swarming with mosquitoes.
- Boston still has it's Puritan cultural prudishness.
- Boston has below average food culture. (Again, probably Puritan influence.)
G. Other differences
- Boston has the blunt communication style you find in Northeastern US cities.
I can see why some individuals would be better off in Boston, but looking at the bigger picture I can't see how this would be a suitable replacement for Berkeley. It has most of the downsides that people mention (e.g. cost of living, opposition to new housing) when they complain about Berkeley, but can't offer the rebuttal of "yes, but our institutions are already here".
If someone can spell out the case for moving the main rationalist hub from Berkeley to Boston, I'd like to hear it, but from my perspective it seems like relocating to Boston would be squandering this one-time opportunity to put the hub in the global maxima.
Fixed, thanks.
What about homeschooling? Many people within the community plan to homeschool their children, yet a quick google search indicates that homeschooling is illegal in all of Germany and you will be arrested if you attempt to do so.
Here's my incredibly detailed pitch for Manchester, UK.
If anyone has feedback, you can reply here or comment on the article itself.
I've given this a strong downvote, but I'm writing a comment so the OP and passerby aren't confused why a long comment that provides relevant answers is (currently) sitting at -3 karma:
- Repeating the false but popular assertion that smart people can't outperform indexes without insider knowledge/huge amounts of luck.
- Conflating whether it's moral to invest in China with whether it is profitable.
- The suggestion that the asker should look into selling moonshine/other contraband. (This isn't a moral complaint, it's just bad advice. Starting a manufacturing business isn't a remotely suitable replacement for stock investing + the risk adjusted returns of such a business are very poor.)
I agree, but I also think there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem there too. Leaders fear that enforcing order will result in a mutiny, but if that fear is based on an accurate perception of what will happen, telling leadership to grow a pair is not going to fix it.
Thinking about my own experiences of seeing these bottlenecks in action, I don't think either is a subset of the other. It seems more like there's a ton of situations where the only way forward is for a few people to grow a spine and have the tough conversations, and an adjacent set of problems that need centralised competent leadership to solve, but it's in short supply for the usual economic reasons plus things like "rationalists won't defer authority to anyone they don't personally worship unless bribed with a salary".
As food for thought on the last line, here's my comment from a previous post on moral mazes:
It was meant to include Canada (because I suspect it still applies to them and I was unsure if they were included in Moral Mazes) but not Mexico or any countries south of Mexico which are technically in North America. This was not clear in retrospect and I have edited my comment in light of that.
Fortunately or unfortunately, this problem seems much worse in America compared to other western countries. Unfortunately, because most of the audience lives and works there. Fortunately, because it means large organisations aren't destined to become hellholes. By no means are they absent, but when I researched this they seemed far less intense.
Have you looked into the workings of large organisations outside of the US or Canada?
As George Carlin says, some people need practical advice. I didn't know how to go about providing what such a person would need, on that level. How would you go about doing that?
The solution is probably not a book. Many books have been written on escaping the rat race that could be downloaded for free in the next 5 minutes, yet people don't, and if some do in reaction to this comment they probably won't get very far.
Problems that are this big and resistant to being solved are not waiting for some lone genius to find the 100,000 word combination that will drive a stake right through the middle. What this problem needs most is lots of smart but unexceptional people hacking away at the edges. It needs wikis. It needs offline workshops. It needs case studies from people like you so it feels like a real option to people like you.
Then there's the social and financial infrastructure part of the problem. Things such as:
- Finding useful things for people to do outside of salaried work that don't feel like sitting at the kids table. (See: every volunteer role outside of open source.)
- Establishing intellectual networks outside of the high cost of living/rat race cities. (Not necessarily out of cities in general.)
- Developing things that make it cheaper to maintain a comfortable standard of living at a lower level of income.
- Finding ways to increase productivity on household tasks so it becomes economically practical to do them yourself rather than outsource them.
I've been following your whole series on moral mazes. I felt the rest of them were important because they explained why "working for the man" was bad in explicit terms, but this one was a pleasant surprise. Until about halfway through this post, I was under the impression you were articulating the dangers of moral mazes in the abstract while carefully ignoring any implications it would have for your own career on Wall Street. The point I realised you'd actually quit was a jaw-dropping moment, given that I already knew you weren't staying in that situation because you had a good use for the money.
My only complaint about this post would be that the intellectually detached way that it's written and lack of object-level game plans will prevent it from feeling like a real option to a lot of readers. Most people know that something is wrong with these systems, but when the rubber meets the road, they default to the familiar script the same way you did. Intellectual understanding of a problem is necessary for a certain kind of person to take action, but it isn't sufficient, and in some cases it can leave people dangerously unprepared for reality the same way that learning karate does for a street-fight.
Often what needs reviewing is less like "author made an unsubstantiated claim or logical error" and more like "is the entire worldview that generated the post, and the connections the post made to the rest of the world, reasonable?
I agree with this, but given that these posts were popular because lots of people thought they were true and important, deeming the entire worldview of the author flawed would also imply the worldview of the community was flawed as well. It's certainly possible that the community's entire worldview is flawed, but even if you believe that to be true, it would be very difficult to explain in a way that people would find believable.
Those numbers look pretty good in percentage terms. I hadn't thought about it from that angle and I'm surprised they're that high.
FWIW, my original perception that there was a shortage was based on the ratio between the quantity of reviews and the quantity of new posts that have been written since the start of the review period. In theory, the latter takes a lot more effort than the former, so it would be unexpected if more people do the higher effort thing automatically and less people do the lower effort thing despite explicit calls to action and $2000 in prize money.
I'm not surprised to learn that is the case.
This is my understanding of how karma maps to social prestige:
- People with existing social prestige will be given more karma for a post or a comment than if it was written by someone unknown to the community.
- Posts with more karma tend to be more interesting, which helps boost the author's prestige because more people will click on a post with higher karma.
- Comments with high karma are viewed as more important.
- Comments with higher karma than other comments in the same thread are viewed as the correct opinion.
- Virtually nobody looks at how much karma you've got to figure out how seriously to take your opinions. This is probably because by the time you have accumulated enough for it to mean something, regulars will already associate your username with good content.
The shortage of reviews is both puzzling and concerning, but one explanation for it is that the expected financial return of writing reviews for the prize money is not high enough to motivate the average LessWrong user, and the expected social prestige for commenting on old things is lower per unit of effort than writing new things. (It's certainly true for me, I find commenting way easier than posting but I've never got any social recognition from it, whereas my single LW post introduced me to about 50 people.)
Another potential reason is that it's pretty hard to "review" the submissions. Like most essays on LessWrong, they state one or two big ideas and then spend the vast majority of the words on explaining the ideas and connecting them to other things we know. This insight density is what makes them interesting, but it also makes it very hard to evaluate the theories within them. If you can't examine the evidence that's behind a theory, you have to either assume it or challenge the theory as a whole, which is what usually happens in the comments section after it's first published. If true, this means that you're not really asking for reviews, but lengthy comments that can say something that wouldn't have been said last year.
I find this theory intuitively plausible, and I expect it will be very important if it's true. Having said that, you didn't provide any evidence for this theory, and I can't think of a good way to validate it using what I currently know.
Do you have any evidence that people could use to check this independently?
One possibility is that
1. The DMV is especially bad, because people don't have to tolerate using it on a weekly basis.
2. The USPS isn't especially good, but it's hard to notice because American delivery companies aren't much better by comparison.
I've already given this an upvote, but I'm also leaving a comment because I think LessWrong has a shortage of this kind of content. I think broad personal overviews are particularly important because a lot of useful information you can get from "comparing notes" is hard to turn into standalone essays.
Yesterday I noticed that some of what I'd attributed to cultural differences in communication strength between myself and the LessWrong audience was actually due to differences in when I would choose to verbalise something. I originally thought this was me opting to state my positions clearly instead of couching them in false uncertainty so they would sound less abrasive, but yesterday I left some comments where I found myself wanting to use vocabulary that was a significantly more "nuanced" than it used to be (example) and yet I didn't feel like I was being insincere.
I don't think this is a case of learning from my youthful hubris or assimilating into rationalist culture, as I still endorse both the opinion and the tone it was expressed in. The real difference seems to be the *stage* at which I voiced my opinion. In the old comment, I was discussing a topic I had spent a lot of time thinking about and researching, and came to the conclusion that the community was making insane decisions because they were the default option. Whereas in yesterday's set of comments, I had a few strong points, but I hadn't reached a strong conclusion overall before I entered the discussion.
I think this raises an important problem with our discussion norms. If you've figured out that the community has made a big mistake, you are at a disadvantage if you've managed to "read ahead of the class" because effective persuasion requires you to emulate ignorance of information more than a few inferential steps ahead of the audience.
I like this post a lot, but the example debates that seem like intractable aesthetic disagreements seem to be missing a 2 key ideas that are preventing resolution:
1. Shared verbal acknowledgement that regardless of the aesthetic considerations, the status quo is not working. If you're debating the merits of "everyone pitch in" vs "specialise and outsource" and you've failed to recognise that people are generally not clearing up after themselves or funnelling money towards the problem, your first order of business shouldn't be to get into a long-winded philosophical debate over aesthetics.
2. Overlooking resource constraints and avoiding fuzzy quantification. In the case of clean code vs quick hacks, unless you are writing the code just for fun, what each person prefers is much less relevant than the business-world constraints you are under. If you are under extreme time pressure and the thing must be done, the choice is quick hacks or death. If you are trying to "scale up" but there are no impending deadlines, whether a piece of code should be written cleanly depends on how reliant you expect to be on that code in future, how clearly you understand the problem it is solving, how much longer it will take to do things properly and the opportunity cost of that time. While you won't have precise answers to these things, they will be a lot more tractable than reconciling aesthetic disagreements.
For what it's worth, I think that post made the right tradeoff. There will probably be some people who will have glossed over it due to lack of examples, but in that case I think it was an acceptable price to pay.
What I'm referring to is when the community does this by default, not when the author has explicitly weighed up the pros and cons. Not wanting to get into an issue is okay in isolation, but when everyone does this it impedes the flow of information in ways that make it even more difficult to avoid talking past each other.
I don't disagree with that, but I do think one reason we find it difficult to form good models and coordinate is that there's an insane norm of only ever talking about issues in abstract terms like X and Y. Maybe the issue in question here is super sensitive, since I have no idea what you are talking about, but "raising awareness of general patterms" often seems to be used as a (mostly subconscious) justification for avoiding the object level because it might make someone important look bad.
Ah.
My first reaction was thinking of a few scenarios that were analogous to the original framing, one example being "if it takes you years to coordinate the local removal of [obvious abuser], why do you think you will be able to coordinate safe AI development on a global scale?"
This isn't a pet issue of mine, but I suspect it is important to be able to say things like this. I guess my overall view is that crystallising this pattern might be putting ducttape over a more structural problem.
I have no trouble believing that this is common thing to hear if you're in a position of power, but what about situations where this is correct? After all, if it was never correct, people would never find it persuasive.
Are there any heuristics you use to figure out when this is likely to be true?
I'm reading this again now because I remember liking it and wanted to link it in something I'm writing, however:
Yes, some countries printed too much money and very bad things happened, but no countries printed too much money because they wanted more inflation. That’s not a thing.
That is absolutely a thing that some governments do. Even if we disregard hyperinflation, when a government's tax brackets, spending commitments and sovereign debt are denominated in nominal currency and it needs more money for stuff, the political cost of high inflation is sometimes less than it would be to raise taxes, cut spending or default on bonds.
(Site meta: it would be useful if there was a way to get a notification for this kind of mention)
Some thoughts about specific points:
the whole point of this sequence is to go "Yo, guys, it seems like we should actually be able to be good at this?"
This is true for the sequence overall, but this post and some others you've written elsewhere follow the pattern of "we don't seem to be able to do the thing, therefore this thing is really hard and we shouldn't beat ourselves up about not being able to do it" that seems to come from a hard-coded mindset rather than a balanced evaluation of how much change is possible, how things could be changed and whether it was important enough to be worth the effort.
I think the mindset of "things are hard, everyone is doing the best we can" can be very damaging, as it reduces our collective agency by passively addressing the desire for change in a way that takes the wind out of its sails.
There is a risk that if you try earnestly to look at the evidence and change your mind, but your partner is just pushing their agenda, and you don't have some skills re: "resilience to social pressure", then you may be sort of just ceding ground in a political fight without even successfully improving truthseeking.
Resilience to social pressure is part of it, but there also seems to be a lot of people who lack the skill to evaluate evidence in a way that doesn't bottom out at "my friends think this is true" or "the prestigious in-group people say this is true".
It seems like having some kind of mutally-trustable-procedure for mutual "disarmament" would be helpful.
A good starting point for this would be listing out both positions in a way that orders claims separately, ranked by importance, and separating the evidence for each into 1) externally verifiable 2) circumstantial 3) non-verifiable personal experience 4) intuition.
if one person says "this UI looks good" and another person says "this UI looks bad", there's an aspect of that that doesn't lend itself well to "debate"
I've had design arguments like this (some of them even about LW), but my takeaway from them was not that this can't be debated, but that:
1) People usually believe that design is almost completely subjective
2) Being able to crux on design requires solving 1 first
3) Attempts to solve 1 are seen as the thin end of the wedge
4) If you figure out how to test something they assumed couldn't be tested, they feel threatened by it rather than see it as a chance to prove they were right.
5) The question "which design is better" contains at least 10 cruxable components which need to be unpacked.
6) If the other person doesn't know how to unpack the question, they will see your attempts as a less funny version of proving that 1 = 2.
7) People seem to think they can bury their heads in the sand and the debate will magically go away.
Arguments about design have a lot of overlap with debates about religion, but if you're trying to debate "does God exist?" on face value rather than questions like "given the scientific facts we can personally verify, what is the probability that God exists?" and "regardless of God's existence, which religious teachings should we follow anyway?" then it is unlikely to make progress.
I strongly support this suggestion.
a) that you don't think disagreements take a long time for the reasons discussed in the post
Disagreements aren't always trivial to resolve, but you've been actively debating an issue for a month and zero progress has been made, either the resolution process is broken or someone is doing something besides putting maximum effort into resolving the disagreement.
b) that rationalists should easily be able to avoid the traps of disagreements being lengthy and difficult if only they "did it right".
Maybe people who call themselves rationalists "should" be able to, but that doesn't seem to be what happens in practice. Then again, if you've ever watched a group of them spend 30 minutes debating something that can be googled, you have to wonder what else they might be missing.
I'm concerned you'll be missing ways to actually solve disagreements in more cases by dismissing the problem as other people's fault.
It's true that if you are quick to blame others, you can fail to diagnose the real source of the problem. However, the reverse is also true. If the problem is that you or others aren't putting in enough effort, but you've already ruled it out on principle, you will also fail to diagnose it.
Something about this comment feels slightly off.
I'm not surprised that the comment feels off, it felt off to write it. Saying something that's outside the Overton window that doesn't sound like clever contrarianism feels wrong. (Which may also explains why people rarely leave comments like that in good faith.)
I'm glad this post was written, but I don't think it's true in the sense that things have to be this way, even without new software to augment our abilities.
It's true that 99% of people cannot resolve disagreements in any real sense, but it's a mistake to assume that because Yudkowsky couldn't resolve a months long debate with Hanson and the LessWrong team can't resolve their disagreements that they're inherently intractable.
If the Yud vs Hanson debate was basically Eliezer making solid arguments and Hanson responding with interesting contrarian points because he sees being an interesting contrarian as the purpose of debating, then their inability to resolve their debate tells you little about how easy the agreement would be to resolve.
If the LessWrong team is made up entirely of conflict-avoidant people who don't ground their beliefs in falsifiable predictions (this is my impression, having spoken to all of them individually), then the fact that their disagreements don't resolve after a year of discussion shouldn't be all that surprising.
The bottleneck is the dysfunctional resolution process, not the absolute difficulty of resolving the disagreement.
I deliberately avoided giving a citation because I don't remember which paper I read that confirmed it, so searching for one that backs up a cached memory to appear more rigorous would be bad epistemic practice.
Instead, my confidence that this is true rests on several pieces of circumstantial evidence:
- My experience for it working this way for other drugs.
- The SSC survey where the majority of people reported not becoming dependant on other stimulants at therapeutic doses over the long term.
- The fact that coffee has become universal to workplace culture (metis knowledge)
- The fact that even if coffee gave you a focus boost that nets to 0, being able to borrow energy from the 2/3rd of the day you aren't working into the 1/3 that you are would still boost net productivity.
- The fact that I used to believe that I was being clever by never using caffeine because of the idea that there is no free lunch and changed my mind a few years ago.
- Other things I can't recall right now but I know I could recall them if I sat down for several hours trying to remember them. (How could I possibly know this? it happens on a regular basis)
I don't necessarily expect you to believe it, but it occurred to me that the implicit choice between:
A. showing you the watertight meta-analysis that I've spent a week going over with a fine-tooth comb .
B. saying nothing at all and likely leaving you with no responses because everyone else assumes a response needs to do A to be worth giving.
...is one of the reasons why LessWrong is a terrible place to find practical knowledge.
I'd be happy to bet on it being true at at least 4 to 1 odds, although you will have to devise an objective test that can be judged true or false on the original question rather than the proxy question. Then again, even saying I'm willing to bet doesn't mean much as a bet of $100 still wouldn't be worth your time to organise on a financial basis. This makes the bet less likely and therefore boosts the credibility of an argument with a costly signal that's actually far less costly than it appears. (This is currently an open problem.)
Yes. When it comes to tolerance of stimulant drugs, there is such thing as a free lunch.
While you will get some tolerance, and ceasing use will give you some withdrawal effects, tolerance will eventually plateau unless you are taking far more than you should be. After tolerance is accounted for, using caffeine will still give you a higher baseline of productivity than taking nothing at all.
I don't get any value out of content-free comments, but a sentence or two explaining what someone liked about my post gives me better feedback than an anonymous upvote. And even if it's just a phatic "Good post!", just knowing who said it can be quite useful.
I'd like to second this and say my experience has also been completely different.
There are some conversations that make sense to have 1v1, and most of the value I've gained from writing things has been when someone contacts me in private.
It does seem that while LessWrong doesn't actively discourage it, the site's UX makes it quite inconvenient to have those interactions.
Squeezing everyone into college-dorm-style housing would certainly reduce living costs, but people who want that can already do it. Most don't.
You're right that dorm-style housing is an existing option, and most people don't want to in them for obvious reasons. However:
- There isn't going to be a one-size-fits all solution to high housing costs, but that's okay. Housing isn't an all or nothing problem, progress can be made on the margin. If you come up with something that gets on the front page of Hacker News and receives 500 comments saying it's the worst idea ever, but just 50 people find it works for their unique circumstances and save $200/month over the next 3 years because of it, you'll have made the problem $360,000 smaller.
- While I would never want to live in a PodShare, hundreds of Californians seem to think paying $1200/month to sleep in an open-plan room with 20 strangers is better than their current alternatives. The fact that this is true should indicate some *very* low hanging fruit here.
Your solution is... a bunk bed with cabinets built in?
You could call it a loft bed for adults, but that doesn't tell you why anyone would want one.
It's not so much a loft bed as a system designed from first principles around the specific constraints of a freelancer aged 20-30 renting a small room (or half of a large one) inside a grouphouse. Considerations such as:
- Privacy
- Having somewhere for your clothes and suitcase
- Having a secure place to store valuables and sensitive documents
- Having somewhere to dry your towel
- Having a romantic partner be able to stay the night
- Being able to have sex without waking up the whole house
- Low ceilings
- Being able to have sex without one of you hitting their head on the ceiling
- Not having to crouch when walking under the bed if you're 6ft2
- Having a work-space that helps you to be productive
- Having no control over the location of sockets or lights
- Not being able to change the landlord's curtains
- Not being able to put any holes in the wall
- Being able to bring the system with you when you move and having it fit in your new room
- Being able to build the system yourself
- Without knowing the exact dimensions of the room beforehand
- With cheap and commonly available materials
- With only handyman-level skills and a few basic power tools
- Being able to cut the wood and do most of the assembly outside/in a garage
- Being able to get the components through a bedroom doorway
- Being able to assemble them like an IKEA flatpack and have everything fit together correctly
- Having it look neat and precise enough that people don't assume you made it yourself
(Thoughts translated from private message)
As I've said before, if political solutions were viable then this would have been solved 5+ years ago.
Addressing the problem will require an approach that doesn't assume you can build more housing in the expensive metro areas with good jobs. While that doesn't leave many options, I can think of at least 3 that are somewhat practical:
1. Find ways to increase the quality of the average grouphouse so more people want to live in them.
2. Coordinate groups of people to move from NIMBY cities with 10/10 jobs and 10/10 house prices to YIMBY cities with 8/10 jobs but 3/10 house prices.
3. Find ways to reduce the overall cost of living that don't require someone to expend much effort per $ saved, reduce their quality of life or shift negative externalities onto someone else's balance sheet.
The project I've been running (Kernel) has been doing some research on this, and we've found potential solutions in all 3 areas. To give one example, if you found a way to increase the efficiency of a grouphouse bedroom so everything that would usually take 150ft2 can be done in 75ft2 without throwing important considerations under the bus, someone would only need to rent half as much room to maintain the same quality of life.