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Berkeley
December 20th
The Freight and Salvage
Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bay-area-winter-solstice-2024-tickets-958115718907?aff=oddtdtcreator
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1009580217051675/
Also for practical purposes it's much more clear who is being referred to in the local context especially since there's tons of writing from/about Ziz
Plus it's just a much cooler name for a community villain.
Plenty of people love to be anonymous trolls.
In addition, having information from anonymous sources casts doubt on whether those sources exist at all, or are credible individuals rather than trolls
You are given millions of words of context and examples to learn from.
One of the things to learn is that a few downvotes is basically meaningless, because lots of people disagree in lots of ways and you need to stop caring that much.
I've said this many times but downvotes are a valuable signal that wastes way less time of everyone involved.
Explanations of downvotes don't just take the time of the person writing them, they also take the time of everyone else who has to read them, and multiply the impact of trolls and prolific bullshitters.
If you are getting a lot of downvotes, then it's almost always for a good reason and rarely that mysterious, and if you pay attention you will soon figure out what people don't like about your content, for example that it's whiny.
I think this essay is blatantly manipulative bullshit written in a deliberately hypnotic style, that could be modified to target any topic anyone cares about.
a wood famous for being flimsy seems like a bad choice here
The fact that you highlight Trump as particularly authoritarian and keeping him out of office in 2024 as a priority shows that this is a hopelessly mindkilled effort.
Sorry, this post ignores too many obviously relevant factors to be very convincing.
It makes arguments based on how it would not make sense for someone to take the risk to eliminate Epstein because they would go to jail for murder IF CAUGHT, but the fundamental thing going on with Epstein is people, even well-connected billionaires, are fully willing to do things that will send to prison IF CAUGHT because they believe (for good reason) that they will not be caught, and if caught will not be punished to the full extent of the law. So you're already dealing with a set of people who are willing to risk going to jail to get what they want, and willing to pay other people to take on that risk to help them.
There's also no mention of Trump or Clinton, two people that Epstein might obviously be tempted to implicate who have both direct and indirect power over the CIA and other US government agencies and who we know have few to no moral qualms about having people killed. These are also the exact people who would be in position to subvert the Attorney General or anyone else looking at the evidence.
If Epstein still has enough access to money to bribe people to let him kill himself, he has enough money to bribe people to let him live a life of luxury in jail, or to fully stage an escape, perhaps by bribing them to let him stay in a minimum security prison, where there are frequent escapes (https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-prisons-prison-breaks-business-c1979d6ad6e7b3531968dab0e61eb22d)
The last time he was arrested, he subverted a ton of people to the extent that he got a relatively low level of punishment that let him spend 12 hours a day doing whatever he wanted outside of prison, zero consequences for breaking the rules (eg flying to other cities when he was supposed to stay in florida on his "work release"), and even with that he still get let out early.
In addition, the fundamental premise of the Epstein story is that dozens if not hundreds of wealthy and well-connected people have in fact been "subverted" for years into covering up or at least not making a fuss about frequent underaged sex and rape.
You can credibly claim that Epstein currently had no plans of talking, but like you said he had turned against a past co-conspirator, so you can't credibly claim that no one who was at risk if he talked might not believe that it was a better deal to eliminate him than to worry for the next 20 years.
Measuring homelessness by state seems like a deeply flawed approach given that it involves aggregating enormous geographic areas with different conditions.
Real people can and often are extremely dangerous and it is not rude to describe dangerous people as acting in dangerous ways, or if it is then it is a valuable form of rudeness.
At this point I think enough people have tried to make pitches for various cities that have achieved nothing that I don't really see the value in adding another one to the pile of attempts to get the community as a whole to move somewhere.
On the other hand, a lot of people have moved to a lot of places on an individual or small-group basis so I'm happy to pitch where I live, Madison Wisconsin, as a potential place you might not know about which I think is a pretty good compromise on a lot of things that people want from a place to live.
Madison has a good variety of restaurants, bars, cafes, parks, and other amenities in a small radius. You can rent anything from an efficiency to a whole house in walking distance from all of this without much hassle since there is a large market for student housing due to the relatively huge University in the city.
Rents in this area can vary from 450 a month (if you want to live with me in my house) to around 1800 for a 750 ft 1 bedroom in a brand new high end apartment building a couple blocks away from me.
Crime: In like a decade parking downtown I have never had my car broken into, although I have had it entered a few times when I left it unlocked. I have never been randomly mugged. My roommate is smol and has walked around here at night for longer than I have and has never had a problem. Like many cities we've had some rioting/looting and increase in other crimes this summer but it's mostly not impacting random people.
Culture: In normal years, we have a ton of live music and events in various bars, cafes, and theaters, as well as plays, art shows, and so on. Madison is big enough that touring bands usually stop here, although not always, and sometimes if I want to catch a show I have to drive an hour and a half to Milwaukee or 3 hours to Chicago. There is an enormous gaming scene here, with a ton of great MTG players, lots of roleplaying and LARP, as well as tabletop, boardgaming, etc.
We also have Contra, Swing, and other dance scenes, as well as a few night clubs and an immense amount of bars.
If you like walking outside, Madison has more parks per capita than any other big city, as well as just tons of trees, gardens, and greenery in most neighborhoods, and multiple lakes and rivers in walking distance of downtown. I can walk from my house to the center of government or into a forest equally easily. If you have a car, you can drive to a ton of state parks in an hour, as well as to The House on the Rock, but even if you don't it's easy to bike to see nature, if that's something you're into.
We have a start-up and tech job ecosystem, mostly focused around biotech and healthcare industry but we do have a Google office and as well as Epic Systems in the next town over so there is a very significant percentage of people in software also. We have good internet options available if you are going to be working from home going forward too.
The biggest downsides about living in Madison from my point of view are:
Winter -- Personally I really like having seasons, but if you can't stand cold and snow you will be miserable here for much of the year.
Population -- Madison only has around 250,000 people, which means that your selection of people to hang out with in niche interest areas is fairly limited. We used to have a nice 8-12 person or so Lesswrong meetup group which fell apart after a bunch of people moved to the Bay Area. If you go to nerdy events you will find that you tend to see a lot of the same people over and over. Depending on your interests, you can still find lots of people to hang out with, but if, eg, you are averse to drinking you may have some trouble.
Driving a car is actually very safe. You can expect to drive a car full-time for 100 years before suffering a lethal accident.
The only thing I want to add is that despite pretenses to sameness it's useful to remember that not all ovens are equal and having a conscious awareness of oven quirks can help a lot to diagnose what went wrong.
the absolutely important part that people seem to miss with a basic 101 understanding of EMH is "hard" in no way means "impossible"
People do hard things all the time! It takes work and time and IQ and learning from experience but they do it.
I believe the reason why is that knowing everyone in the community would literally be a full-time job and no one wants to pay for that.
It is especially the case that it should prioritize braking in uncertainty when it's a lonely road with no one behind
Simplest answer: twitter is where everyone else is, which makes it the simplest and easiest way to interact conversationally with potentially anyone on earth without an intro or in-person meeting.
In addition, twitter enables easy one-to-many communication for celebrities who want to spread memes, and brevity is the soul of wit.
That just makes an opening like "I have become very, very interested in developing a skill that I call Dependability." even more annoying to me.
I disapprove of the lesswrongy tendency to try to coin new words or new meanings for old words for concepts that already exist and are useful.
Walmart coordinates 2.2 million people directly and millions more indirectly.
Even the boy scouts coordinates 2.7 million.
Religions coordinate, to a greater or lesser extent, far more.
The key to coordination is to not consider yourself as an individual measuring out a ration of words you can force x number of people to read. Most people never read the bible.
The sensation of new 'vistas' of options and subjective preferences opening up is a very familiar one to me in a similar way from a combination of a) getting actually good socks and shoes and b) lifting sufficient weights that my legs are strong enough to lift me up stairs/hills easily. Doing a bunch of squats once a week means that if people happen to be walking together and we go up a hill i'm no longer suffering, I'm doing fine, and this similarly means that a lot more things which would be terrible are fine journeys.
To people in general I strongly recommend getting your feet measured in width and height as well a length, and shopping around for shoes that actually fit if you can, as this makes a huge difference in how long you can walk before your feet start to hurt. In addition, things that you don't really think about like sole thickness and material and sock materials can make a surprisingly large difference.
I think an under-appreciated aspect is suspicion of Officially Altruistic behavior. A ton of things people do even in countries that weren't run by communists that appear to be altruistic are actually self-enriching, and in addition a ton of things people do to help the less fortunate actually end up hurting them. I would yell at a lot of people if they started ostentatiously saying they were sacrificing for my benefit when I had never asked them to, and you could easily frame that as "anti-social punishment" if you BELIEVE that they're actually helping, but from a suspicious perspective they're both probably not actually helping me and they're also helping themselves.
I liked this at first, but about 6-7 paragraphs of back-and-forth in I got really tired, started skimming, and then realized it went on for way more pages.
I get that your internal experience of trying to talk to people about AI risk feels like going on and on in this sort of "humble and correct person argues with smugly incorrect person forever" way but I don't think that's a good format for actually convincing people.
Something I've been thinking of doing is asking a lot of specific people I like who else would have to move somewhere before they would move and seeing if there's a smallish cluster
I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to live long-term. I'm currently in Madison Wi, which is really nice, but kinda small and has an unfortunately hot/humid summer. Financially I can live pretty much anywhere I want, except maybe Monaco.
Things I want, not in order of importance:
1. A nice house. In an ideal world, the house would house several of my closest friends, be walkable to parks, shops, and restaurants, and be close enough to other friends that they drop by regularly. I am also very interested in running a public space or a semi-public space adjacent or close to the house, possibly a makerspace, possibly a cafe, or something else. This is one of the reasons it's not instantly obvious that I should move to Berkeley or Manhattan or something. I'm financially well-off but there's like, an order of magnitude in difference in cost of having a nice big place to live. On the other hand, I'm also pretty flexible about living in apartment or something, but for the long term I much prefer having a space I own and can modify and build up to become better and better over the years.
2. People. My best friend and one of my partners lives in Madison at the moment, but most everyone else I like to spend time with or who wants to spend time with me seems to live on one of the coasts or are scattered elsewhere. This is the aspect for which Berkeley is the most obvious winner: I know a ton of rationalists, like meeting new ones and rat-adjacents, and in general like having social situations that I don't personally have to seek out or plan. In the Bay Area, there are tons of regular events that I can go to without having to do the leg-work myself. In addition, there are millions of other people in places like the bay area and NYC of varying kinds and personalities.
3. Climate: I'm big, and while I'm losing weight I still get hot and sweaty very easily. My ideal place in terms of year round climate is the Faroe Islands, where it stays between 33 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit year round in the capitol city. I'd like a place where I can walk around without wanting to die for much of the year. The Bay Area is pretty good for this, but still tends to make me sweaty in the afternoons, especially if I'm walking around the hilly parts of San Francisco. At this point I'm pretty resigned to this, but it's still a factor in where-to-live tradeoffs. I also really enjoy having Seasons, love Autumn and Spring, so places that are as similar all year round as the bay are less preferable in that respect.
4. Walkability/transitability. This one is pretty standard. I like being able to go cool places without having to spend hours in traffic or hassle hugely to park my car.
5. Culture: I like living in a place that has lots of little cafes and bookstores and restaurants that are around, as well as museums and bars and live music and stuff. To a lesser extent I care about the culture of the kinds of people who live in the city, but in practice I'm going to end up mostly hanging out with small subcultures anyway.
6. Something one could summarize as Coolness/Importance: I like the idea of being involved in Big, World-changing Things, despite being very lazy. Places like Manhattan, Hollywood, SF, etc. are attractive at least partially because I can see and potentially participate in important cultural events and shifts. This is one of the things I could conceivably do in Madison but, like assembling a friend group of like-minded people from eg grad students, would be a lot of work.
7. The classic things like low-crime and not too smelly/loud would be good but I can mitigate most of these by living in nicer parts of places. Still, not a zero-factor.
8. I like the idea of being a locally medium-to-high status person whose place people like to visit and who people talk to when they want introductions, as a sort of community nexus type thing. This obviously trades off against moving to places where such people already exist.
One of the options I'm considering is buying a big house in Madison and setting it up something like REACH or the Blackpool EA hotel, and trying to lure rationalists to come live here, as well as making it an outreachy type place for local potential rats. The plus side is I'd get to stay in the city I know like, the downside is it would be a lot more work and potentially not even achieve the kind of life I want. But if I succeed in creating a mini-hub, I'll get to have pretty much all I want for like, 1/10 the cost of moving to SF. Another option is to nominally stay in Madison, but travel 2-3 months out of the year, probably in deepest winter/summer.
I'm looking for input like: direct recommendations for specific cities in ways I probably haven't considered, people who specifically like me commenting that they want me to live in their city, case studies/reports of people who have moved and think they're similar enough to me to give me good input, comparisons from people who have lived in multiple Big Cities as to which are Better, and whatever else people feel like mentioning. Also I want horror stories of living in Manhattan, SF, Berkeley, LA, and Seattle (this is my current shortlist).
Thanks in advance!
I think most hard engineering problems are made up of a lot of smaller solutions and especially made up of the lessons learned attempting to implement small solutions, so I think it's incorrect to think of something that's useful but incomplete as being competitive to the true solution rather than actually being a part of the path to it.
I'm gonna be looking for rides to/from Berkeley if, anyone is planning on driving and has space in their car.
I always like Game Theory that has simple advice applicable to real life: If you want people to cooperate with you, Be Comprehensible!
People have values other than suffering/non-suffering, such as autonomy. You may say "animals don't suffer from lack of autonomy" or "I don't care about animal autonomy" but you need to make that case rather than saying people are just being dumb.
I feel like asking people to do a favor for you is a lot more credible/enjoyable/smooth* if you're also doing them a favor or have done them favors in the past, or have been seen doing favors for others. This is a lot easier in certain environments, eg if a bunch of people are helping put a large structure** together, it becomes second nature to offer to hold something for someone briefly, or to ask someone to hand you a tool or a piece of the structure. Environments that are less goal-oriented have a harder time with this because the tasks that need to be done are less immediately seen as for a specific person or needed by a specific person.
*in the sense that gears turning is smooth
**perhaps a geodesic dome
I think you should give more time for the current multipliers to play out. In addition, I think having a separate button for super up-voting is better than click and holding, especially for mobile use and compatibility with different interfaces.
edit - also we ALREADY have a system for Chosen Ones to super-upvote or super-downvote things by promoting them or moderating them out of existence, I'm not sure why we need to add an extra form of super-multiplier effect.
this is the only post of yours I've seen and it's meta whining, and long for that. My guess is the rest of your posts take a long time to say stuff people don't want to read.
what? Why? As far as I can tell my thread was posted before that one?
The main thing I want to say is that it's a huge error to leave something as a coordination problem when it doesn't have to be. The way stag hunts work IRL is by people going "Hey, who wants to go on a Stag Hunt?" and if sufficient people to capture a stag sign up, then the hunt happens. If they don't, there's no situation where a bunch of people waste their time on an impossible stag hunt. You can also do this in the Dragon Army sense by commanding a stag hunt take place as the lord, but either option is better than there being some important, valuable task that has a chance of failing based entirely on individual judgments of whether other individuals will participate.
Sometimes I feel like we lose out on a lot of potential human energy by not having good social or work systems for distributing tasks to people for whom they don't feel like inconveniences
I like this but the main thing I think is missing is the concept of capital. Money making money, leading to a surplus in the future. There's also a big difference between spending your interest and spending your principle.
I think a relevant factor is that people are fully capable of switching the frame from counting up to counting down depending on how they want to spin something. It's not just a case of "People have personalities where they naturally count up/down", but more that people can (if unreliably) acccess either viewpoint when convenient.
This is a neat idea but too long and repetitive. You use a ton of examples when the message gets across after 2 or 3.
There aren't that many people, so the benefits would be minor. Once you've swiped a couple thousand times you're probably through most of the tinder users within your demographic preferences.
Why would it hack itself to think it's getting paperclips if it's originally programmed to want real paperclips? It would not be incentivized to make that hack because that hack would make it NOT get paperclips.
This is why we need downvotes.
You can justify a belief in "Induction works" by induction over your own life.
I strongly disagree. Most classes are pathetically slow and boring, not to mention expensive and time consuming. For one example, I've learned more history just reading books on my own than I ever did in History class, and it's not like I got bad grades back when I was in school. Showing up and being "carried along" was basically worthless.
It's likely that there are some kinds of classes that are functionally better than learning on your own, but given that the vast majority of classes on most topics are de facto going to be aimed at the lowest common denominator, you're gonna have to put in a lot of work to find good ones.
Voiding a transaction deletes it (I'm pretty sure), which removes the information trail. The other way records the transactions, so if they end up being criminal, the cashier in question is caught.
Sarcastic and rambling and not in a fun way to read. Either get to the point faster or make your asides less about mocking your target and more interesting.
THIS IS WHY WE NEED DOWNVOTES.
That's kind of unfair, considering the sheer amount of point-scoring going on in the original post.
I like this comment but I think what this and the original trollpost miss out on is that LW community in general, due to having a lot of people with autism and sensory issues, has a ton of people who actually do NOT have "reasonable expectations of what other people want to guide their behavior". The OP quoted here is making a common typical-mind type error. Of COURSE it's better to live with people who intuit your preferences and act in accordance to them without being told what they are. But it's obnoxious to shit on attempted to solutions to a problem by insisting that morally good people could never have the problem in the first place.
It's an appeal to authority and someone shitting on an organization based on one line of a lesswrong comment by one member of that organization, with no request for clarification or depth.