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I prefer to keep plans private but I'm making big progress on meditation and mental re-wiring. Am working on a way to publicly demonstrate. Public plans just stress me out. I recently set two pretty ambitious goals. I figured I could use psychedelics to turbo-charge progress. The meditation one is coming along FAST.
The other goal is honestly blocked a bit on being super out of shape. Multiple rounds of covid really destroyed my cardio and energy levels. Need to rebuild those before a big push on goal 2.
Im with several other commentators. People know what unconditional love is. Many people have it for their family members, most commonly for their children but often for others. They want that. Sadly this sort of love is rare beyond family.
I felt some amount of unconditional towards my dad. He was really not a great parent to me. He hit me for fun, was ashamed of me, etc. But we did have some good times. When he was dying of cancer I was still a good son. Was quite supportive. Not out of duty, I just didnt want him to suffer any more than needed. I felt genuinely love. I would have done a lot of costly things for him if he asked. My mom and uncle were giving him intrusive treatment than he wanted. Though it hadnt gotten too out of hand yet (except for the fact it burned all my moms money). But I very seriously told him during visits if he said the word Id call my lawyers and make sure he didn't get medically tortured. This would have cost me a lot of money and time but he was my dad! How can a son let his father down like that. He died before legal issues came to a head but I was in his camp. I didnt care how many people got mad at me.
Does anyone have high quality analysis of how effective machines are for strength training and building muscles. Not free weights specifically machines. Im not the pickiest on how one operationalizes 'work'. More interested in the quality of the analysis. But some questions:
-- Do users get hurt frequently? Are the injuries chronic? (This is the most important question)
-- Do people who use them consistently gain muscle
-- Can you gain a 'lot' of muscle and strength liek you can with free weights. Or people cap out quickly if they are fit
-- Does strength from free weight carry over to other things. To barbells? To bodyweight calisthenics? To sports?
As I said im not the pickiest. Id rather have a great analysis of 'carryover to curling' than a meh quality analysis that covered all of my questions.
Im not particularly against pivotal acts. It seems plausible to me someone will take one. Would not exactly shock me if Sam Altman himself planned to take one to prevent dangerous AGI. He is intelligent and therefore isnt going to openly talk about considering them. But I dont have any serious objection to them being taken if people are reasonable about it.
A rather large fraction of the total words in this document are dedicated to safety warnings. I do not see how its possible to deny I seem quite focus on some sense of safety. I focused on the safety issues I think are genuinely the most pressing (addiction risks, trauma). I genuinely do not think that drug purity issues are the main risk of taking this advice. Certainly not for ketamine sourced in San Fransisco. Also the service I linked in SF also sends samples to a lab for quite thorough testing and you get results in about four weeks. You should believe I genuinely disagree with you on what the risks are for the substances mentioned.
I think modafinal is great for a lot of people. But I made the choice to only write up the very best (in terms of expected outcomes) stuff. Given that many substances have risks or legal issues it was much simpler for me to just not mention a lot of stuff. I do not intend any implicit claim that other things aren't useful. But I didn't make a list of 'stuff I've investigated and found less good on average' vs 'stuff I have not investigated'.
Thanks for sharing moda is working that well for you
It feels like bad praxis to punish people for things they got right!
The circle is by far my favorite solstice song. I like to it all the time. It is definitely the most 'sapph values' part of the performance. I find it beautiful. A ray of pure divine grace. I will say im not exactly bad at being rational in concrete ways. Im fairly successful economically, socially and romantically despite having an abusive childhood. I attribute my success to being methodical and rational about things, at least some of the time. But there is something about rat values that differs from mine. So its very good for my feeling included that the Circle has survived the culls.
If any of my adoring fans, or anyone else, wants to grab lunch/dinner/a drink let me know. Im in SF for a bit. Lots to talk about. Also I try to do an hour plus of walking per day. So happy to walk. Though im not always up for a big hike. Lots to do.
I didn't have time or energy! This shit was going parabolic! Whatever happened to Aumann's agreement theorem!
I will note this is both a cool as fuck project and the token is like 2x+ from when I posted. So idk why im getting downvoted. I guess lesswrong jsut isnt into finance for personal gain or to look at dope stuff.
The lesswrong/EA communities 'inside game' strategy for AI safety is genuinely embarrassing to me as a longtime community member. Quokkas gonna quokka but this is ridiculous.
Obviously this is up a fuckton
Serious advice: Your close friends and partners should actively admire you and how you live your life. Don't settle for less. You can have less close relations across the divide. But your closest circle should see you as a hero.
Emmett Shear reminds us that if you are playing Street Fighter [2 Turbo, presumably] then the solution to the so-called ‘cheese’ moves that seem overpowered is not to ban them, it is to use them until someone shows you or figures out the counter, then everything is fine.
This works exactly because the game is well-designed, with good counters to every such move. If that was not true, this would fail. It also relies on having enough data to find the counter-moves, and enough practice to learn them, to get to the new equilibrium. It does genuinely ruin a different experience some people want. Keep those things in mind while generalizing.
Its worth noting that, at this point, the vast majority of paper magic is explicitly competitive. Commander has eclipsed everything else combined. And in normal commander if your playgroup finds something cheap than you basically can't use it! Normal commander games run on social consensus of whats acceptable, definitely de facto ban fully optimized lists, and have a strong norm of not bringing strategies anyone at the table strongly objects to. Seems like most people prefer this flexible 'scrubby' ruleset.
it is interesting to me that what has won out is neither strictly competitive nor strictly freeform. Commander has a banned list and most people dont explicitly deviate from it. People rarely play totally homebrew formats. What has won is a 'consensus ruleset' + 'flexible social norms around what is de facto banned for being too strong or cheesy'. Very interesting to me.
Note: Im aware CEDH exists but I'm counting it as part of 'everything else' for these purposes. I play IRL modern and modern/legacy on mtgo (im sapphirestar on mtgo! send me a friend request if you wanna jam some games). so im not exactly the scrubbiest person myself. But it definitely seems like the hardcore tribe lost out in the marketplace for playershare.
I don't really get why this wouldn't get funded.
Current AI weights
A culture that denigrates being altruistic/nice in small ways makes it really hard to know who to trust. I understand their is an aversion to 'virtue signaling' but accepting rat/ea culture really feels like it disables my intuitive (and honestly decently reliable) intuition for who is trustworthy. Imo there is a good reason people check things like 'how do they treat waiters' when deciding who is a trustworthy partner or friend. That stuff cannot replace explicit logical altruism. But it seems like a mistake to jettison being kind in smaller ways throughout your life.
Progress is mostly illegal or at least extremely hobbled by regulations. When people are free to innovate there is usually quite rapid progress. There are a few exceptions like fundamental physics but existing physics explains things we actually interact with fairly well except at extremely high energies. I have all sorts of very viable and productive business ideas that would help people. But they are either illegal or regulations make them tooo expensive to start up. This is the norm. If you want to improve things you need to look for areas where innovation is still doable without incurring gigantic costs.
A browser extension that colors reddit usernames red if the user is a likely bot.
I must have a different relation to social media to most rats. Whenever I open twitter I get a constant dopamine rush from all the stuff I find cute or funny. Here are some examples to demonstrate that maybe I am just easy to please:
I dont even live in SF. but I am visiting right now and having so much fun. Filled with joy at the idea of tetra having a lovely trip.
note: I have been informed by my hotel mate I cried writing this comment in the bathroom I had to reassure her the audible crying had nothing to do with her.
I thought about this for awhile. My real opinion is that 'being afraid of a scar on your chest' just isn't a great way to live. And so I am not exactly against the traditional masculine gender role discouraging people from being afraid of that stuff. Arguable the 'traditional masc gender role' only discourages expressing such fears not having them. I think there is a place for expressing negative emotions, you can't always bottle them up. But for the most part expressing emotions makes them stronger not weaker. If you are going to cry tears, cry about something that really matters. Or cry about the plight of others not yourself. Though of course I am against oppressing or bullying others.
I am diagnosed with BPD. A nice way to describe BPD is being someone with 'hard to mange emotions' and almost always means being really sensitive and easy to hurt. I won't speak for others but at least for me personally 'Man up' has been a good attitude. So its hard for me personally to be too against this aspect of the male gender role. I am mostly a queer community norms partisan but on this one I think trad masculinity has a point. It really does seem better to encourage people to 'be strong'. Though I dont think bravery and strength always point in a particularly 'trad' direction - arguably thats a lot of the point of the post. There are a lot of ways to be a man. But this just isn't the softest world. The more you can handle your own pain the more strength you have to fight for the people who are in a lot of trouble.
Thats how I see it anyway. And I decided to be quite open about how I really feel about this stuff. I definitely didn't add many disclaimers to my post, and I could have added a whole lot. For example I am personally not willing to risk bottom surgery. But I have a quite strong commitment to bodily autonomy. I'm very supportive of other people making other choices.
Estrogen seems to make a lot of girls more interested in men over time. Possibly progesterone is involved idk. So you may be meeting girls who are still figuring out their new sexuality with a new hormone balance. I don't think it's well understood. Both certainty a surprising number of trans girls predict they will be lesbian but end up with some sexual interest in cis men .
:heart:
Means a lot tbh
I will say I tried extremely hard to be a good EA. It basically drove me insane. Community is extremely unsupportive. I basically decided Im retired. I put in enough years in the misery mines and donated more than enough money (most of what I did ended in failure but I cashed out 7 figs of crypto and donated a lot). I will be a nice friendly generous person by the extremely low standards of my actually existing society. But otherwise I will just do what I want. I cried enough tears and sacrificed enough of the windfalls I was legally entitled to keep.
People metaphorically run parts of the code themselves all the time! Its quite common for people to work through proofs of major theorems themselves. As a grad student it is expected you will make an effort to understand the derivation of as much of the foundational results in your sub-field as you can. A large part of the rationale is pedagogical but it is also good practice. It is definitely considered moderately distasteful to cite results you dont understand and good mathematicians do try to minimize it. Its rare that an important theorem has a proof that is unusually hard to check out yourself.
Also a few people like Terrance Tao have personally gone through a LOT of results and written up explanations. Terry Tao doesn't seem to report that he looks into X field and finds fatal errors.
Long complicated proofs almost always have mistakes. So in that sense you are right. But its very rare for the mistakes to turn out to be important or hard to fix.
In my opinion the only really logical defense of Academic Mathematics as an epistemic process is that it does seem to generate reliable knowledge. You can read through this thread: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/35468/widely-accepted-mathematical-results-that-were-later-shown-to-be-wrong. There just don't seem to be very many recent results that were widely accepted but proven wrong later. Certainly not many 'important' results. The situation was different in the 1800s but standard for rigor have risen.
Admittedly this isn't the most convincing argument in the world. But it convinces me and I am fairly able to follow academic mathematics.
I used to feel CONSTANTLY gaslit reading the EA forum. For some reason this has substantially reduced in recent months. It feels like people actually lay out their actual reasoning. This is an example of a post that feels 'honest' to me and would be really unusual a few years ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qCF5kETxnk3HkfiEf/cause-generality-is-hard-if-some-causes-have-higher-roi.
For example: For years people would comment that EA seemed increasingly 'about' AI Risk. the response was almost always to point out most EA money goes to near-termist causes. That reply was true but seemed to be trying to deflect rather than engage openly. Some evidence from the above link that that people had a point and weren't just hallucinating:
I don't have much trouble being empathetic or loving to Biden/Trump/Putin either. They are all people with many good and bad qualities. I can imagine myself trying to help. For example if they were ever subjected to solitary confinement I think I would at least call my Senator and ask they receive genuinely humane treatment. It is hard to imagine more idk 'personal' situations since im a normal person and they (current or former) world leaders.
I genuinely feel terrible for Adolf Hitler.
Adolf was close with his mother but she died when he was seventeen. His father was a horribly abusive person to almost everyone. Dad was certainly not kind to his illegitimate son Adolf. Adolf wanted to be an artist. He tried and failed twice to enter the Academy of fine arts. He was deemed physically unfit for the army and had to ask for special permission to serve. He was injured while serving and later gassed! Despite his injuries and seeming lack of aptitude as a soldier he was at the front lines a huge amount of time as a headquarters runner. He sure as fuck earned his iron cross.
After WW1 Germany was treated quite horribly. Hitler loved his country but his country was humiliated and put under terrible onerous conditions. When he got into politics after the war he was finally good at something! Obviously he had views I find abhorrent but lots of people have views I quite seriously dislike. Things escalated. Its easy to get swept up in things, even if you are also contributing to the dynamic. It is especially easy if you have good reasons for feeling hurt. Adolf was vegetarian. I wish he had been given a better life. Here is a poem he wrote about his mother:
When your mother has grown older,
When her dear, faithful eyes
no longer see life as they once did,
When her feet, grown tired,
No longer want to carry her as she walks -Then lend her your arm in support,
Escort her with happy pleasure.
The hour will come when, weeping, you
Must accompany her on her final walk.And if she asks you something,
Then give her an answer.
And if she asks again, then speak!
And if she asks yet again, respond to her,
Not impatiently, but with gentle calm.And if she cannot understand you properly
Explain all to her happily.
The hour will come, the bitter hour,
When her mouth asks for nothing more.
If there is any reason for hate it is to spur action. Im a proud Communist. I'm very proud of my comrades in the Garman communist party. A shocking fraction of German communists took active action to resist the Reich. Many were awarded medals. Their bravery makes me cry whenever I think about them. But Hitler is dead, he cant do anymore harm. In my heart of hearts, I hope that on some other spin of the wheel we can be friends. I love painting. My father abused me too. If Hitler is in any sense around, perhaps in some other world I wish him only the best. If I ever simulated Hitler I would only give him the most joyful life I could.
The best version of this I know is Fractal in NYC. The main idea is everyone lives in the same apartment building in Brooklyn. There is also common area in 1G. Works great. Not very family focused though. But the founders of fractal are looking into a sister project with more family focus.
Good book value. It might trade under book but its presumably not going to zero when it has decent book value.
As you know I don't find the EMH consistently true. The argument for why its more than ~40% to go through are linked.
Yes. You can read the sources to see why its more than 40%.
People disagreeing with you, on public sites and especially on their own blogs, is not abuse!
I have no idea sorry.
I don't think we should help him convince other people of a position that seems to have driven him kinda insane.
It is also kind of funny to me the post references clarity in the title but I honestly don't even know what Zach thinks about when people should transition. To be clear I think we should be supportive of people who transition. And people should transition iff they think it will make them happier. But whatever the best practical policies are I seriously doubt Zach's philosophical point of view is going to be prudent to promote or adopt.
"This means rationalists should be in favor of life extension, getting rich as individuals, and getting personal access to the most powerful artificial general intelligence tools that can be controlled. "
Uhhhh yes they should do this instead of becoming obsessed with this type of stuff. Though 'can be controlled' is certainly load bearing.
Rationality is Winning. Rationality is not about becoming obsessed with this stuff, losing sleep, losing friends and literally going insane. This is a real lesson that we should be emphasizing Rationality is Winning way more.
If a friend or partner wanted to have a child with me Id potentially be down. Though we would need to have extremely aligned view on non-coercive parenting. Also im a sleepy boy so we gotta be aligned on low effort parenting too.
You can buy GDR common shares via LSE on Interactive Brokers.
Farmed animals are currently inside a non-extinction X-risk.
My current allocation to AI is split something like this:
| AMAT | 4.25 |
| AMD | 3.55 |
| ANET | 4.30 |
| ASML | 8.07 |
| CDNS | 4.04 |
| GFS | 1.28 |
| GM | 1.84 |
| GOOG | 7.90 |
| INTC | 6.17 |
| KLAC | 2.33 |
| LLY | 2.88 |
| LRCX | 4.62 |
| MRVL | 1.87 |
| MSFT | 14.65 |
| MSFT Calls | 2.78 |
| MU | 4.38 |
| ONTO | 0.24 |
| RMBS | 1.00 |
| SMSN | 7.88 |
| SNPS | 2.77 |
| TSM | 10.45 |
| TXN | 2.74 |
I recommend sgov for getting safe interest. It effectively just invests in short term treasuries for you. very simple and straightforward. Easier than buying bonds yourself. I do not think 100 percent or more equities is a good idea right now given that we might get more rate increases. Obviously do not buy long term bonds. Im not a prophet just saying how I am handling things
I have supported myself for almost a decade now via speculation / gambling / arbitrage. I almost never find the Kelly criterion all that useful in my own life. If a bet is really juicy go as hard as you can while finding the downside tolerable. If a bet isn't QUITE JUICY I usually pass.
All things arise and all things pass away.
Where do you live in Ohio? In columbus poly isnt very taboo ime living in cbus. But Columbus is the biggest city.
Multi, aren't you a fellow leftist? Why did you summon these demons.
This is a specific claim about what specific people should do