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I currently slightly prefer an but that's pending further thought and discussion.
missing thought in the footnotes
We knew they were experimenting with synthetic data. We didn't know they were succeeding.
Not sure whether to add these in, but a number of local Google calendars theoretically exist: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?cid=bayarearationality%40gmail.com&cid=f6qs8c387dhlounnbqg6lbv3b0%40group.calendar.google.com&cid=94j0drsqgj43nkekg8968b3uo4%40group.calendar.google.com&cid=8hq2d2indjps3vr64l96e9okt4%40group.calendar.google.com&cid=theberkeleyreach%40gmail.com
This includes Berkeley REACH (defunct), CFAR Public Events (defunct locally AFAIK), EA Events (superseded by Luma calendar?), LW Meetups (unknown but blank), and Rationalist/EA Social and Community Events (likewise)
Updated to reflect the new, less regular schedule (and change of weekday) since the half-year mark.
That's not what tribalism means.
I think at normal times (when it's not filled with MATS or a con) it's possible to rent coworking space at Lighthaven? I haven't actually tried myself.
Our New Orleans Rat group grows on tribalistic calls to action. “Donate to Global Health Initiatives,” “Do Art,” “Learn About AI.”
If you consider those tribalistic calls to action, I'm not sure any of you are doing evidence-based thinking in the first place. I suppose if the damage is already done, it will not make anything worse if your specific group engages in politics.
There is basically no method of engaging with politics worse than backing a national candidate. It has tiny impact even if successful, is the most aggressively tribalism-infected, and is incredibly hard to say anything novel.
If you must get involved in politics, it should be local, issue-based, and unaffiliated with LW or rationalism. It is far more effective to lobby on issues than for candidates, it is far more effective to support local candidates than national, and there is minimal upside and enormous downside to having any of your political efforts tied with the 'brand' of rationalism or LW.
The track record for attempts to turn tribalism into evidence-based thinking is very poor. The result, almost always, is to turn the evidence-based thinking into tribalism.
Permanently changed to Wednesdays, but forgot that was in the group description; now fixed. There is a Manifold-associated event, Taco Tuesdays, running in SF, and I decided I'd rather stop scheduling against it.
It would be nice to move this to a standalone website like the old Bay Rationality site. I've been considering that for months and dragging my feet about asking for funding to host it; I'd also like to contact whoever used to run it, check whether anything complicated brought it down, and maybe just yoink their codebase and update the content. I don't know who that was, though.
Whoops, fixed.
Someday the site will finish their API and document it, and I'll be able to automate this like I do everything else about posting meetups. But probably not this side of the Singulariy at current rates.
Facing away from the cars approaching works better IME.
Entirely separate from concerns about the site, I think your notion of the theme for a midsummer ritual is wrong.
If you look at midsummer rituals that have memetic fitness (traditions that lasted, or in neopaganism's case that stuck weirdly quickly), most of them are sunset rituals. Things that happen at night on the shortest nights of the year, and dwell on themes of darkness. Ghost stories, things like that.
Assuming, as I think we clearly should, that that's not a coincidence, a ritual that resonates for summer solstice should be aimed in a similar direction. It might have themes of fragility, or of near-misses personal and collective, mixed with recognition of things being good, of civilizational achievements or personal ones. (If at some point we invent the rationalist bar mitzvah it should probably be at midsummer, I feel, but I'm not sure why I think that given what I just said.)
The themes you mention of storing up energy for the winter, celebrating human accomplishment, etc., seem to me, based on my survey of existing rituals and holidays, much more appropriate for the Fall Equinox, the time of year where food is gathered and the cold days are encroaching. Competitions and skillshares, particularly, are my suggestions there, though the whole summer solstice that's developed the last few years would port across without changes other than dropping the amorphous sunset ritual.
I heard about this being planned earlier this year, and after about five minutes with Google Maps I concluded that it was an unsalvageably terrible idea. Unsalvageable because the core problem is Angel Island.
It takes a minimum of 75 minutes from central SF or 2h from the East Bay to travel, each way. And that's if the ferry schedule is convenient, which it will not be; the ferries are spread out far too infrequently to be able to attend conveniently. For those many who don't drive, it's technically public transit accessible, but double those times.
I have quibbles with the details (you're giving up the sunset!) but they are mostly uninmportant compared to the central problem that it is wildly inaccessible. If you go through with this plan next year, I'd estimate a maximum 'swolestice' attendance of 140 and I'd put the over/under at 80. This would mostly just be an event for the campers. Probably a pretty cool event for them, don't get me wrong, but it would be abandoning everyone else.
Rescheduled - skipped it on the 9th for the eclipse, and couldn't do the original plan for the 23rd (park bocce, probably coming in a future month)
But you can't change it for anyone else's view, which is the important thing.
Isn't this post describing the replication attempt?
You should try doing the next version as an adversarial collaboration.
Clarification:
"Steam" is one possible opposite of Slack. I sketch a speculative view of steam as a third 'cognitive currency' almost like probability and utility.
Are 'probability' and 'utility' meant to be the other two cognitive currencies? Or is it 'Slack', and if so which is the third?
This was fairly untested but went very well!
I'll do a better writeup as a Meetup In a Box later, but this is how it went:
For each set, 10m writing things down, then ?20m? discussing, then next set
List a few things that went very well this year. (3-5)
List a few things that went very badly this year. (3-5)
If you were to 80/20 your last year, which 20% gave the 80% you valued most?
If someone looked at your actions for the last year, what would they think your priorities were?
What did you intend your priorities to be?
Do you want to make any of the revealed priorities official intentions for next year? Do you want to drop any of the intended priorities which you ended up not following up on?
What habits did you pick up? What goals (revealed or intentional) did those habits serve?
What habits got in the way? What did you fail to get due to them?
What's the most important unfulfilled goal for the last year? How can you change for the next try?
What did you learn last year?
What lessons do you hope to learn this year?
What things are you curious about, that you expect to learn more about this year?
- this one might be worth writing down and storing for next year
We ended up combining sets 3 and 4 because 3 sets is the right amount. I had a whiteboard and wrote short versions of the questions on the whiteboard as a reminder everyone could look at, and later on emailed everyone the questions so they could refer to the list. Doing at least one of those things is probably important.
Is there a graph of solar efficiency (fraction of energy kept in light -> electricity conversion) for solar tech that's deployed at scale? https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html exists for research models but I'm unsure of any for industrial-scale.
No, I said what I meant. And not just what I meant, but what many other people reading but not commenting here are saying; rather than count I'll simply say 'at least a dozen'. This response, like all her other responses, are making her sound more and more like a grifter, not an honest dealer, with every statement made. The fact that when called to defend her actions she can't manage anything that resembles honest argument more than it does dishonest persuasion is a serious flaw; if it doesn't indicate that she has something to hide, it indicates that she is incapable of being a 'good citizen' even when she's in the right.
My primary update from every comment Kat makes is that this is a situation that calls for Conflict Theory, not Mistake Theory.
Rescheduled to the end of the month because I am sick again. Guess maybe I should have worn a mask to the airport in travel season.
It's amazing how everything you say trying to defend yourself make you sound even more like a grifter.
Six weeks, once, with significant counterpressure exerted against her doing so is confirmation of the original claim, not counterevidence.
This post seems wildly over-charitable toward Nonlinear and their claims. Several things you note as refuted by Nonlinear aren't, e.g. "they were not able to live apart from the family unit while they worked with them" which even given the reply by Nonlinear is accurate (uncertain) is still true and obviously and unambiguously so.
Also, you fail to acknowledge that basically everything about Nonlinear's replies indicates an utterly toxic and abusive work environment and a staff of people who are seriously disconnected from reality and consumed in high-simulacra-level nonsense. The attempt to refute the claims made against them managed to be far more damning than the claims themselves. And the claims weren't minimal, either!
Dodging questions like this and living in the world where they go well is something you can do approximately once in your life before you stop living in reality and are in an entirely-imaginary dream world. Twice if you're lucky and neither of the hypotheticals were particularly certain.
A number of Manifold markets under https://manifold.markets/browse?topic=pandemic, looks like most are trading around 10% chance of anything happening outside China.
Possible new pandemic? China's concealing evidence again, looks like the smart money is against 'new virus' but thinks it's drug-resistant pneumonia, specifically resistant to the drugs that are safe for small children.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/28/chinese-hospitals-pandemic-outbreak-pneumonia/
The LessWrong user who acted as a sounding board over lunch is welcome to be credited if they want to be, or may wish to avoid association with this catastrophe waiting to happen.
I don't think I added anything but encouragement, but that was me. TBH if it's a catastrophe that's an interesting result itself. I wonder if it happens every time
Updated to reflect the new, more regular schedule starting beginning of the year
Interesting. Strikes me as the logical extension of Choices are Bad in some senses.
Censorship always prevents debates. The number of things which are explicitly banned from discussion may technically be small, but the chilling effect is huge. And the fact that ideas and symbols are banned is - correctly! - taken as evidence that they can't be beaten by argument, that people are afraid of the ideas. Also, naturally, the opposite side never has to practice their arguments, so they look like weak debaters because they are.
I tried being more polite many times over the last months on Discord. All it got was dismissal, because anxietybrain is anxietybrain.
In what sense is that a nitpick or something that doesn't affect the message? It's a substantial drag on the message, data that only supports the conclusion if you already have a prior that the conclusion is true.
This got deleted from 'The Dictatorship Problem', which is catastrophically anxietybrained, so here's the comment:
This is based in anxiety, not logic or facts. It's an extraordinarily weak argument.
There's no evidence presented here which suggests rich Western countries are backsliding. Even the examples in Germany don't have anything worse than the US GOP produced ca. 2010. (And Germany is, due to their heavy censorship, worse at resisting fascist ideology than anyone with free speech, because you can't actually have those arguments in public.) If you want to present this case, take all those statistics and do economic breakdowns, e.g. by deciles of per-capita GDP. I expect you'll find that, for example, the Freedom House numbers show a substantial drop in 'Free' in the 40%-70% range and essentially no drop in 80%-100%.
Of the seven points given for the US, all are a mix of maximally-anxious interpretation and facts presented misleadingly. These are all arguments where the bottom line ("Be Afraid") has been written first; none of this is reasonable unbiased inference.
The case that mild fascism could be pretty bad is basically valid, I guess, but without the actual reason to believe that's likely, it's irrelevant, so it's mostly just misleading to dwell on it.
Going back to the US points, because this is where the underlying anxiety prior is most visible:
1. because of Biden's unpopularity, if the election were held again tomorrow, Biden would most likely lose. Biden won the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, by only half a percent in 2020, and both polls and favorability ratings show he has lost popularity since then;
Interpretation, not fact. We're still in early enough stages that the reality of Biden is being compared to an idealized version of Trump - the race isn't in full swing yet and won't be for a while. Check back in October when we see how the primary is shaping up and people are starting to pay attention.
2. the House, Senate, and Electoral College all have biased maps that will let Republicans win a governing trifecta, even with a minority of the popular vote;
This has been true for a while. Also, in assessing the consequences, it's assuming that Trump will win, which is correlated but far from guaranteed.
3. two-thirds of Republican congressmen voted to overturn the election immediately after January 6th, and most of Trump's primary opponents strongly support his actions, so even if Trump has a heart attack tomorrow, many in the party would still be hostile to democracy;
Premise is a fact, conclusion is interpretation, and not at all a reliable one. Trumpism isn't HYDRA - if the popular populist figurehead is cut off, there is no reason to believe another will take his place. That usually doesn't work.
4. there have been waves of Republican retirements in the House and Senate during 2018 and 2022, so that many of the Trump-skeptical congressmen in office during his first term have been replaced by far-right radicals and Trump loyalists;
I guess this one is basically true.
5. most of the "adults in the room" during Trump's first term were fired or resigned, and Trump plans to fill their roles with new staff, loyal to his own vision;
Probably true, and therefore it is unlikely he will be able to achieve much of anything.
6. if elected to a second term, Trump has said he will use "Schedule F" to purge the non-partisan professional civil service, law enforcement, and the American military, and replace them with Trumpists who won't resist attempts to end democracy;
Ditto, only stronger. And that assumes he carries out this promise and that he's successful in that, neither of which is terribly likely.
7. if re-elected, Trump plans to withdraw the US from NATO and end the post-WWII policy of an American "nuclear umbrella", which will likely trigger a Chinese invasion of a now-defenseless Taiwan; global nuclear proliferation; and general, worldwide instability not seen since 1945.
Premise is almost a fact, conclusion is wild interpretation. Trump has said he plans to do that. Will he do that? Possible. Will it trigger an invasion of Taiwan if he does? Possible. Will it trigger nuclear proliferation if he does? Sure, probably, but I'm not too concerned, it won't move fast enough to catch up to AI. Will it trigger worldwide instability? Not fucking likely. (Also, really, The Daily Beast? You couldn't find a source more credible or less biased than that?)
Or, in short:
But what is less well-known is that:
False things are rarely well-known.
Explaining is good, but doesn't remove the need to downvote.
Or just remove the flag. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?
Then again, that could be said for... pretty much every decision the moderation and design team has made since LW 2.0 began.
The 'new user' flag being applied to old users with low karma is condescending as fuck.
I'm not a new user. I'm an old user who has spent most of my recent time on LW telling people things they don't want to hear.
Well, most of the time I've actually spent posting weekly meetups, but other than that.
since it selects from a huge pool of people in large part for the ability to come up with cool ideas and takes
No, it just selects for the ability to be viral on demand. Which is anticorrelated with truth.
You really have no intellectual integrity at all, do you?
That's still shifting to a claim about social reality and therefore not the same thing.
Version 1 is probably not the same content, since it is mostly about the speaker, and in any case preserves most of the insultingness. Version 2 is making it entirely about the speaker and therefore definitely different, losing the important content. Version 3 is very obviously definitely not the same content and I don't know why you bothered including it. (Best guess: you were following the guideline of naming 3 things rather than 1. If so, there is a usual lesson when that guideline fails.)
Shifting to sharing the speaker's experience is materially different. The content of the statement was a truth claim - making it a claim about an individual's experience changes it from being about reality to being about social reality, which is not the same thing. It is important to be able to make truth claims directly about other people's statements, because truth claims are the building blocks of real models of the world.
If it's really a skill issue, why hasn't anyone done that? If it can be written in a non-insulting way, demonstrate! I submit that you cannot.
Owing people a good-faith effort to probe at cruxes is not a result of anything in this conversation. It is universal.
I do not think that is the usual result.