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In addition to the ~$15,000 I've donated so far this drive, I'm matching the next 5 donations of (exactly) $1001 this fundraiser. It's unlikely I'll donate this money anytime soon without the matching, so I'm hoping my decision is counterfactual enough for the donation-matching skeptics out there :)
To the stars!
Author, ladies and gentlemen of the comments: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/
Selenium add-on for Firefox definitely sound more fun than waking up every 1.9 hours.
Thanks very much for writing and posting this.
Eliezer posted a Facebook status about the fundraiser needing more support, so I was going to donate $1000... but then I saw I would get a PrettyRational print if I donated $1500, so here we are :)
Hmm, that's a good point. I can see how this might seem like a romantic/Marxist/anti-elite sentiment.
When I read it, I was thinking almost exclusively in terms of existential risk, the connection being that the end of the world (by, for instance, Unfriendly AI) won't be brought about by a cruel mad scientist, but more likely by normal people trying to make economic and scientific advances without concern for the potential consequences.
Sorry if the quote doesn't communicate that very clearly.
“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself…but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men.”
—George Bernanos
I require a lower standard of living than most people with middle class incomes, so I don't anticipate a problem in making my donation goals.
This extremely generous matching offer came at a fortuitous time for me, since I just succeeded at my master plan of becoming an effective altruist in Silicon Valley and doing earn-to-give for MIRI. $10,000 from me as well.
Awesome! I'm an appacademy grad and I definitely wanna make it. I may also be able to bring 1-4 people from my AppAcademy Dungeons and Dragons group :D
I took the survey.
I realized while answering one of the questions that the comments that I make for free karma are one of my main interactions with the LW website.
The moral tension of what Celestia was doing was well done. I found myself getting excited at how awesome everything was, and then muttering aloud about the "creeping horror" that was coming. I also loved the parallels to the AI-boxing experiments, except the Princess can argue people into boxing themselves.
Thanks very much for writing this! In lieu of anything specifically useful, I leave you with a small proportion of the warm fuzzies you provided to me :)
Just donated $500 (with the Singularity credit card, so it's really more like $505 ^_^).
Hi! I'm in town from Tucson for the week, and I'm super interested in meeting some new LessWrongers. Unfortunately, I'm busy right at 7; if I drop in later, at 8:30 or 9:00, will people still be there?
Note, this one will go from 7 until 9 before I have to leave.
Also note, if you're trying to find us, I'll have an evolution textbook (red cover like this: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Douglas-J-Futuyma/dp/0878931872) and a stripey fedora.
I'm 550 pages into a genetics textbook that I'm reading on my own, which is something I never would have imagined doing two months ago. I've been experiencing success with TDT for habit formation (implementing flossing, fluoride rinsing, sunscreen, running, and taking pills) and using the pomodoro method to chunk my time. I also achieved my goal of creating a piece of fanart for HPMoR (can be watched/read on youtube). Tomorrow or Wednesday I'm going to receive my piracetam + CDPCholine + pyritinol (the nootropics I found recommended as a solid beginner stack). Tomorrow I'm meeting with a researcher to discuss a volunteer position in her genetics lab.
My success with all this has been crucially dependent on finding and recognizing cached beliefs and identities, like "I can't get a cameo in HPMoR, my poetry isn't good enough!" or "I'm a linguist!" or "Drugs are bad!" It's intimidating how many of these I've found and how many more I probably still have to get to.
I think "super awesome" is a pretty high bar, honestly. Also, not sure who you're asking about, but personally I'm more epistemologically skilled than all get out (though I'm no programmer).
I have no idea whether Berkeley or Tucson is better for being a PC.
I'm pretty sure this time works fine. I'll let you know if that changes.
Me and an interested friend (both in Tucson) are planning to make the trip down (up?) for this meeting. If there's anyone else who might be up for the carpool/road trip... hit me up.
My changes in fashion have been wildly successful. Hanging out with two separate friend groups the week after mini-camp, I was complimented repeatedly on how snazzy my new look was and how I was suddenly fashionable. They asked what happened and I said "I went to San Francisco!"
Even better evidence: I went to a bar with a friend last week, wearing a blazer, black slacks, nice shoes, and a decent T-shirt. We got stopped by the bouncer, and he said they had a strict dress code: no athletic shorts, no plain white t-shirts, etc. (basically my friend's entire outfit). He said "This guy's dressed to the core, and you're violating the whole dress code!"
I'm maintaining my habit of studying Calculus on my own using Khan Academy videos, and have a no-money graph up on Beeminder. I've logged about 20 hours, in addition to Precalc videos (so probably over 25 hours), and with no calculus training prior to two weeks ago, I got a 53/100 on a Calc 1 final exam. So, not perfect yet, but certainly astonishing progress in my mind.
This week I went into a complete slump triggered by a hangover on Monday and a difficult piece of schoolwork with a flexible due date (creating a syllabus). I'm still procrastinating on creating the syllabus.
"zombie mode" -- I love this description! Mostly because it reminds me of Professor Quirrell, but still, it definitely describes how I feel when I'm in a procrastination/akrasia/depression cycle. I also have StayFocusd, which I find useful for automatically logging the amount of time I spend doing things I don't care about. It doesn't forcibly stop me from wandering (since it's simple enough to disable), but just knowing that I'm eating up my "leisure time" is enough to keep me doing things that are at least pseudo-productive.
Hello, fellow minicampers, this is Ethan! Hello to everyone else too :)
Monday night a few of us went blues dancing, and rather than being all awkward like I've done in the past, I used Critch's smile association method and ended up really enjoying myself!
And I spent the 14-16 hour drive from San Francisco back to Tucson with excellent posture (based on Luke and Cat's recommendation that it made me look fantastic), smiling and thinking something like "Yeah, I'm a badass," every time I thought of my posture to make a positive association with posture and with self-modification.
Just started using remember the milk, and I made a list of priorities / medium and short term goals using freemind.
Said by Quirrell, but appropriate to the question of EY publishing the name of the hero: "it is clear he does not wish the fact announced, and has reasons enough for silence. "
Seeming sure of who the spies are is a strong strategy -- but it's equally strong whether you're resistance or a spy. Accurate Bayesian reasoning is only a strong strategy for the resistance, since spies don't want the truth to come out. Spies want to lie either way, but it's much easier to lie in a finger-pointing contest than in a discussion of evidence and probability updating.
Using explicit Bayesian reasoning is less likely to lead your teammates into bad judgments of the kind I touched on (stemming from over/under-confidence), and it gives your teammates evidence that you are resistance.
Or, depending on how the interrogation went, ScrimQuirMort.
Yeah, I neglected to make sure next weekend would actually work for me... I was just thinking, "This is far out in the future," but I have plans as well. Yay, good first impressions. :-/
I'll reschedule this for Friday the 2nd, and in the mean time I'll check out the recommendations from ojspires.
I'm a beginning experimental linguist currently enrolled in a frequentist statistics course in my PhD program. I need to be able to use statistical methods to show that my experiments are valid and show real effects.
Could I successfully use Bayesian statistical analysis in lieu of ANOVAs and p-levels in real theoretical work? I have other reasons to want to drop this statistics class (like taking a different class that interests me more), so if learning frequentist statistics in this class is really going to be less useful than learning Bayesian methods on my own, I would love to know that.
Any input, particularly from someone with experience in academics, would be greatly appreciated.
Goodhart's law seems very applicable to natural selection: the Blind Idiot God wants creatures to have higher fitness (G), and so creates targets that are correlated with fitness in the ancestral habitat (e.g., pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance (G*)). Once you get creatures that are self-aware (us), they figure out G-star, and start optimizing for that instead of G.
I definitely teared up reading this. It really makes me desire local rationalist friends to share this real and moving idea with.
Having read only a portion of the book so far (thanks for the pdf cousin_it and Alicorn!), I've noticed that the techniques and strategies Schelling goes over are applicable to my struggles with akrasia.
I'm sure it's been said before on lesswrong that when there's a conflict between immediate and delayed gratification, you can think of yourself as two agents: one rational, one emotional; one thinking in the present, one able to plan future moves and regret mistakes. These agents are obviously having a conflict, and I often find Rational Me (RM) losing ground to Irrational Me (IM) in situations that this book describes perfectly.
Say RM wants to work, and IM wants to watch TV online. If RM settles on "some" TV, IM can exploit the vagueness and non-natural settling point, and watch an entire season of a show. The two most stable negotiating points seem to be "no TV" and "unlimited amounts of TV".
Other techniques people use to avoid akrasia map really well with Schelling's conflict strategies, like breaking up commitments into small chunks ("fifteen minutes of work, then I can have a small reward") and forming a commitment with a third party to force your hand (like using stickk.com or working with friends or classmates).
Yeah, that optionality is effectively what I'm doing right now, using OKCupid. I don't see myself checking out polyamory groups any time soon, just because I'm much less sexual than my cached idea of a poly person is and the whole idea still makes me feel somewhat awkward.
I've also found proposing a poly relationship is a nice alternative to dumping someone. I just stopped seeing a girl who I would be happy to be date, just not to the exclusion of everyone else (due to availability and pacing differences between us). If she had been amenable to poly, that would have been great, but the mutual break-up went very smoothly.
This article had a big impact on me! I had never even considered the idea that mono vs. poly was a setting you could change, and I discovered that I didn't have nearly as much of an attachment to monogamy as I had thought.
One problem I'm having is getting started with polyamory in practice. I'm worried that adding another constraint on top of other requirements (i.e. women interested in men, around my age, in Tucson, looking for a romantic relationship, who are rational) will make it hard or impossible to find someone. Any tips?
I've been lurking on here for a long time, and just now registered to get a free karma point for taking the survey.