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I think it's wrong to call this a criticism of the rationality community. The people who designed systems like market auctions for spectrum aren't member of the rationalist community.
When I'm thinking about an institution in our movement that advocates knowledge gathering through formal methods without attempts at openness no one come to mind.
You could call GiveWell an organisation that uses formal methods for knowledge gathering but they are also an institution that releases recordings of their board meetings to the public. Actions like that are a costly signal for valuing legibility.
CFAR doesn't teach people to reason with formal systems. That's not what they teach.
Large parts of BDSM are about experiencing emotions that are commonly seen in a negative way in a positive way by setting a specific context. At the same time BDSM is not about repressing emotions at all.
There are plenty of different ways to interact with emotions and changing the context of how you relate to them. If you try it, don't know what you are doing and do it wrong, there's a lot of potential to mess things up.
I like focusing/IDC/belief reporting because they are techniques for dealing with emotions in a way where the risk of messing up important self-regulation processes is lower then with certain other techniques.
If you want control over emotions that's comparable to your control about breathing, the Grinberg method has guided ways to learn it. At the same time there are reasons against going into that community. One problem that they have as a community is for example that they aren't good at respecting personal boundaries.
There was a trend on the old LW that people were pushed to post in Discussion instead of Main and later in Open Threads instead of discussion because they wanted lower expected effort.
Adding features like curated shortform might mean more content that could be posted as proper post instead ends up in shortform.
It seems to me like it would make more sense if people who write valuable shortform content that's well received then write a proper post about the content then if the shortform version gets more exposure.
I'm not a member of the organizational team of LWCW but I attended regularly and frequently talked with some organizers.
The number of attendees is limited given the judged capacity of the venue. Some people who applied got turned down. The idea isn't that people who didn't apply visit while people who did apply and got rejected stay away.
Which paper in the scientific literature are you referring to?
The article treats highly autocratic leaders like Robert Moses, Mao and Stalin who had no desire to implement the recommendations from domain experts because they thought they knew better and who did their as being in the same reference of technocrats as people who push to make decisions on well-researched evidence-based models.
If that's what you need to argue to attack contemporary technocrats your case is very weak.
While I think the information provided by comments like this are very valuable to improve the text, I feel it's more effective to send a message then to leave a comment for this. People apart from the author likely don't profit much from reading it.
In the end they do care about the fact that people buy, but the fact that marketers care about metrics like open rates suggest that it's useful for them to have more information.
A lot of emails are send out as a form of content marketing where the goal of the company is to create a trusted relationship which can be later monetized. In those cases it's not easy to measure the effects of an email on sales months down the road.
The fact that the marketing platforms have a spam score doesn't mean that the spam score accurately captures the spamminess when it comes to how annoying the email is to customers.
I think because of marketing and branding reasons that's not a valid move for the companies that produce most email clients.
Judging a person as being misleading implies to me that I have a less accurate model of the world if I take what they say at face value.
Plenty of self-censorship isn't of that quality. My model might be less accurate then the counterfactual model where the other person shared all the information towards which they have access, but it doesn't get worse through the communication.
There are words like 'guarded' that you can use for people who self center a lot.
One of the major problem with getting marketing emails is that we lack good feedback mechanisms to incentivize companies whom we do give our emails because we do want to get some information not to spam us with other information that we don't want to receive.
At the moment we have two options to punish companies who abuse the relationship. We can click on “mark as spam" or we can unsubscribe.
The first version is a punishment as it means that more emails of the company end up in spam folders. Unfortunately, the company usually doesn't know the specific email for which it is punished and thus can't effectively improve their behavior.
Unsubscription does work as a specific punishment but we can only use it we we want to stop getting all emails from the company.
We could have a better system:
- A plugin that let's us rate the emails we are getting on a 5 point scale.
- Once we rate a few emails we can have a machine learning algorithm that predicts our rating and allows us to filter out emails with predicted scores that are under a specified threshold
- The company that provides the plugin for free can sell access to the scoring data to email marketers who care about whether customers welcome their messages.
Okay, they might a a different muscles but that makes the quadriceps have six parts while most people think it has four part.
A normal programmer is working productively in the sense most people see "working productively". The proverbial 10x programmer on the other hand is much more productive even with the same number of productive working hours.
The thesis of deep work is that there's much higher payoff to increasing quality of your work then quantity for a knowledge works.
One of the assumptions you seem to be making is that the time not spend working is not productively used. Creative ideas often come when there's a bit of distance to the work while showering. Working 100 hours per week means that this distance is never really achieved and the benefits that get produced when your brain can process the problem in the background while your conscious mind doesn't interfere don't materialize.
I think I remember from a YCombinator source that they would tell founder who tried to work 100 hours, that they need to get better about prioritizing and not try use working that much as the solution to their challenges.
It's easier to discover that you are working at the wrong thing when you have breaks in between that give you distance that allows reflection.
Not, necessarily. Not every productive hour is made equally. If you trade part of your creativity for more productive hours then might not be a worthwhile trade.
This might seem like a nitpick but it matters. The idea of chasing productive hours leads to bad ideas like the Uberman sleep schedule that do sound seductive to rationalists.
It's a reasoning error to equate "Is X possible to do" with " Is X possible to do without paying any price".
I find it very unlikely that it's useful for a design of warplanes to think about how c constrains their design space and think about how the opponents are constrained by c. It's too far away from practical considerations.
This approach seems to assume that can create the message that you want to send from a blank slate. Plenty of times you can't communicate what you want to communicate because what you want to communicate isn't really true and it's easy for the other party to see that.
Thinkers and artists care about intellectual output. They don't care about the numbers of hours they work.
Google purposefully doesn't let people sleep at their office which is a policy that prevents people from working 100 hours per week.
I read quite a while ago originally about the planetary boundaries idea maybe through the TED talk. I got the page of the Stockholm Resilience Center because it's the top Google hit for "planetary boundaries".
I just looked it up, and "Organic"-labeled things apparently do already mandate organic fertilizers (which should be N-neutral on net?). So there's at least that.
That makes it even more perplexing. Why doesn't some organic food company have a budget to push the meme into public consciousness?
Humans are very bad at making random decisions and the policy that you advocate has little to do with randomly buying stocks.
There's zero sum competition between traders (actually it's a bit negative sum, given that trading fees are involved). Some of those traders are hedge funds which complex computer models and highly payed analysts. Those hedge funds can make some money by taking the opposing trade from dumb market participants.
If you believe you have better knowledge about what the price of a stock should be then the hedge funds because you have private information/insights, then you might profit from entering the market. If you think you have worse information then them, you are likely on average losing money to them.
It's worth noting that purely random decisions might be a bit better then index funds as index funds have to buy a lot of stock in predictable times four times each year and there needs to be a market maker that sells them the stocks and that can make a little bit of profit for being the market maker.
I do consider anatomy an important topic that's very neglected. It's a topic where people can publish papers that seem to rediscover muscles that were known 100 years ago.
This interview transcript provides expert opinions on interesting questions. There's a cost to be payed by publishing controversial opinions but if we would limit LessWrong by stopping to post any opinions that could cause users to become outraged, that would reduce the value of it.
In the proposed platform all messages have the same money attached. There's no way to sort by money attached.
That seems to be an argument that if the program works on my machine it should also work elsewhere. In reality there's often some weird quirk that means that the abstrations that the program uses don't generalize everywhere the same way.
One difference is that different types of pain come with slightly different qualia. This allows communication that's in contact with what's felt in the moment which isn't there in ideas of maturity where maturity is about following rules that certain things shouldn't be spoken.
The idea of "work" is a cultural construct. If you want to move past the cultural connotations you would need to define what you are talking about.
It's worth noting that deep work talks about the ability of humans to perform deep work. A lot of useful work isn't deep work in the sense Cal Newport uses the term. If I remember right he sees large parts of management as not being about Deep Work.
We do know that some people do suffer burn out from work stress. It seems that higher workload in Japan does result in higher burnout rates then in countries with lower workload.
Where do you see the huge incentives? Most of high status work isn't payed by the hour.
To me that idea seems politically feasible in US states with democratic majorities. If you put it on the ballot in California I imagine that it would pass.
I found Taber's radical honesty workshops very useful for a framing of how to deal with telling the truth.
According to him telling the truth is usually about choosing pain now instead of pain in the future. However not all kinds of pain are equal. A person who practices yoga has to be able to tell the pain from stretching from the pain of hurting their joints. In the same way a person who speaks in a radical honest way should be aware of the pain that the statement produces and be able to distinguish whether it's healthy or isn't.
Courage is only valuable when it comes with the wisdom to know when the pain you are exposing yourself is healthy and when it isn't. The teenager who expresses courage to signal courage to his friends without any sense of whether the risk he takes is worth it isn't mature.
Building up thick emotional walls and telling "the truth" without any consideration of the effects of the act of communication doesn't lead to honest conversation in the radical honesty sense. As it turns out, it also doesn't have much to do with real courage as it's still avoiding the conversations that are actually difficult.
That sounds to me like the belief "I'm not lovable" causes you trouble and it would make sense to get rid of it. Transform Yourself provides one framework of how to go about it. The Lefkoe method would be a different one.
To me contacting people much higher status then you is a different process then rationalists contacting fellow rationalists.
If you observe your thoughts a lot you might discover that certain thoughts you have are often followed by you taking actions afterwards.
Thoughts might mean certain internal dialog. For some people thoughts are also very visual.
Having more awareness then the general public is a very low bar. The general public doesn't know about it at all.
I would be surprised if that's the case. I remember talking with someone who did lobbying for the German energy sector. When I asked him about Thorium-Moltan-Salt reactors he didn't know what I was talking about.
It seems to me that lobbyists generally aren't the kind of people who are up to date with futuristic tech solutions. They are rather occupied with the technologies that the companies that they lobby for actually develop.
It feels to me like it will produce weird social dynamics.
If people can freely set their price for receiving messages, setting a high price would be a signal for being high status. That produces weird signaling interactions in a community like ours.
There's plenty of literature on how people value an interaction less if they are payed for the interaction.
I don't feel like getting spam from people in the rationality community is a problem that I'm having and don't feel a need to discourage people from sending me messages.
CFAR T-Shirts and Effective Altruism T-Shirt seems to be the closest for people who want to signal rational tribe allegiance.
It feels to me unwise to use the term Sociopaths in this way because it means that you lose the ability to distinguish clinical sociopaths from people who aren't.
Distinguishing clinical sociopaths from people that aren't is important because interaction with them is fundamentally different. Techniques for dealing with grief that were taught to prisoners helped reduce recidivism rates for the average prisoner but increased it for sociopaths.
From her post:
In a study of West Point students, average inter-rater agreement on the Subject-Object Interview was 63%, and students developed from stage 2 to stage 3 and from stage 3 to stage 4 over their years in school.
Are you calling those 63% strong inter-rater reliablity or are you referring to other studies?
Communication is only possible when you agree on the meaning of signs in the messages you exchange. You need human language regardless whether you have neural i/o channels or use sound waves to communicate.
While some humans do use gestures while they communicate to add more bandwidth there seems to be little pressure to go for more bandwidth by evolving a system of more elaborate gestures when you are able to speak with another person.
The part of language that's about thinking to how abstract words relate to meaning seems to be more import than adding more i/o.
There's little evidence for the stockholm syndrome effect in general. I wonder whether there's evidence that being born in a family does something.
How exactly do you implement using GPT-2 for autocompletion? This usage is new to me.
I think we are talking about $10B/year. Which is according to Scoot roughly the total yearly private philanthropy budget.
That feels outside of the reach of startup funding. Funding research and PR is likely the more promising route.
Great information. You convinced my that it's likely possible to learn it for many people.
I'm guessing that Kaj is talking about something very different from the frame of "find repressed memories."
The issue isn't what Kaj intends to talk about but the space of possible ways of readers, reading Kaj's post.
It's possible that someone would read the post and take the lesson that they should seek for the repressed memories from it.
When leading techniques like Focusing or IFS you don't normally tell the person you are leading things like "The part is only going to relax once you've witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role".
The sentence can be understood as a suggestion to seek for traumatic memories that might be the cause. It also contains a limiting belief in that it implies that the only way to deal with the issue is to go consciously through memories.
Writing communication has the problem that the space of possible interpretation from readers is often much larger then in 1-on-1 communication. There the risk of someone doing the wrong thing after reading the post and not just doing a lot of Focusing/IDC.
Suggestion about how behavior is due to repressed memories can something be problematic. In psychological history, plenty of false memories have been created by pressuring people to remember events that lead to present problems.
I don't oppose going down that road in principle, but it's good to be careful and ideally do it with a skilled person who directs the process.
Wiggling your ears is a nice concrete version of a) movement most people's bodies are capable of and b) one that most people feel like is impossible.
Do you have a source for that claim that most people's bodies are capable of it? If so, is their any good way to learn it?
Politicians in our time do take the public opinion on issues into account by looking at poll data. I don't think we need more poll-driven politics and I find principle-driven politicians to be valuable even if they represent the principles they believe in instead of of trying to act according to how the majority of the people think.
What percentage of professors of philosophy do you consider to be good at philosophy?
An AGI that can reason about it's own capabilities to decide how to spend resources might be more capable then one that can't reason about itself because it know better how to approach solving a given problem. It's plausible that a sufficiently complex neural net finds that this is a useful sub-feature and implements it.
I wouldn't expect Google translate to suddenly develop self consciousness but self consciousness is a tool that helps humans to reason better. Self consciousness allows us to reflect about our own action and think about how we should best approach a given problem.
An AGI that can reason about it's own capabilities to decide how to spend resources might be more capable then one that can't reason about itself because it know better how to approach solving a given problem. It's plausible that a sufficiently complex neural net finds that this is a useful subfeature and implements it.
Can you add a link to the product that fulfills the criteria?
Whether or not you get multiple-occupancy vehicles depends on market economics and not what a city planner who wants low traffic desires.
Poor people might go for multiple-occupancy vehicles but I would expect that richer people do want to get faster to their destination.
Getting faster to the destination however isn't the only thing worth consuming. You also want to spend the time in the vehicle well.
It might be that a smart startup figures out how to have multiple-occupancy vehicles that provide a desirable experience of social interaction between the passengers but in the absence of that you can do a lot more for the experience in custom designed vehicles.
You might get a new haircut on your way to work, exercise in a driving gym, get a massage, take a shower or engage in a variety of different experiences that are enabled by specialized vehicles.
The more specialized vehicles you have, the more often you will have vehicles that drive empty to their destination.