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I enjoyed the hell out of LessOnline and would love to go to this too. I'm not sure yet if I can make the budget work; is anyone I met at LO looking for roommates?
Every year I have run the Rationalist Megameetup [...], we’ve run out of space and I’ve had people ask if they can come anyway. We could limit the size by taking applications and turning people away.
I thought about this after LO -- overcrowding is an attractor state for conventions -- and wondered if overcrowding could be managed by dynamic pricing. If you know the size of the space, it feels like you could fill it nearly exactly by making the price some function of (time-before-event, number-of-remaining-slots). This is one of the few crowds where that sort of mathematical jiggery might not alienate people.
(on the other hand, I expect it would make budgeting the event much harder, so I dunno).
Not sure of the title. The tagline was "almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken." The address was http://blog.jaibot.com. Some specific essays originating there were "500 million, but not a single one more," "Foes Without Faces", and "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics".
First blog that comes to mind is Jai's old one. A fair number of rationalist memes began there, I think, but it disappeared at some point. I'm not sure if it was rehosted elsewhere or what.
I can’t imagine integrating any of those things into my normal, day to day routine unless the content of what I was doing were, in normal course, exposed only to me.
I've had something like this issue. The places I most want to use LLMs are for work tasks like "refactor this terribleness to not be crap", or "find the part of this codebase that is responsible for X", or "fill out this pointless paperwork for me"; but I'm not going to upload my employer's data to an LLM provider. Also, if you're in tech, you might want to apply for a job at an AI company. If so, then anything you type into their LLM is potentially exposed to whoever is judging that application. Even if you're not doing anything questionable, you still have to spend attention on HR-proofing it.
(I'm sure privacy policies are a thing. Have you read them? I have not. I could fix that, but that is also an attention cost, and you have to trust that the policy will be honored when it matters)
The places where exposing things to the LLM provider is a non-issue (e.g. boilerplate), I mostly don't need help with and mostly do better than the LLM does.
(...for now)
Yeah, it's okay, conveying visuals is a legitimately not-terrible reason for it. My gripe with the trend just jumped to the front of my brain because I tried to C+P something and got a mouseful of image instead.
I feel dumb asking, but...what's the significance of "Stanley Peterson?" Google turns up no relevant hits on the name. Is it just an Americanized version of Petrov's?
I'm sorry I missed out on this. I follow the site with a feed reader, so I never saw the button. :-( Oh well, perhaps next year.
[edit]: Also, from the major-psychotic-hatreds department but not directed at you in particular: What is with the trend of the last 5-10 years of posting screenshots of text instead of quoting the actual text? It breaks copy/paste, ctrl-f, and anything that relies on the text actually being....text. It drives me up the wall every time I see it.
It's not obvious to me that those are the same, though they might be. Either way, it's not what I was thinking of. I was considering the Bob-1 you describe vs. a Bob-2 that lives the same 40 years and doesn't have his brain frozen. It seems to me that Bob-1 (40L + 60F) is taking on a greater s-risk than Bob-2 (40L+0F).
(Of course, Bob-1 is simultaneously buying a shot at revival, which is the whole point after all. Tradeoffs are tradeoffs.)
[epistemic status: low confidence. I've noodled on this subject more than once recently (courtesy of Planecrash), but not all that seriously]
The idea of resurrectors optimizing the measure of resurrect-ees isn't one I'd considered, but I'm not sure it helps. I think the Future is much more likely to be dominated by unfriendly agents than friendly ones. Friendly ones seem more likely to try to revive cryo patients, but it's still not obvious to me that rolling those dice is a good idea. Allowing permadeath amounts to giving up a low probability of a very good outcome to eliminate a high(...er) probability of a very bad outcome.
Adding quantum measure doesn't change that much, I don't think; hypothetical friendly agents can try to optimize my measure, but if they're a tiny fraction of my Future then it won't make much difference.
Adding the infinite MUH is more complicated; it implies that permadeath is probably impossible (which is frightening enough on its own), and it's not clear to me what cryo does in that case. Suppose my signing up for cryo is 5% likely to "work", and independently suppose that humanity is 1% likely to solve the aging problem before anyone I care about dies; does signing up under those conditions shift my long-run measure away from futures where I and my loved ones simply got the cure and survived, and towards futures where I'm preserved alone and go senile first? I'm not sure, but if I take MUH as given then that's the sort of choice I'm making.
This trips my too-good-to-be-true alarms, but has my provisional attention anyway. The main reasons I'm not signed up for cryonics are cost, inconvenience, and s-risks. Eliminating cost (and cost-related inconveniences) could move me...but I want to know how this institution differs such that they can offer such storage at low or no cost, where others don't or can't.
I loved Project Lawful/Planecrash (not sure which is the actual title), but I do hesitate to recommend it to others. Not everyone likes their medium-core S&M with a side of hardcore decision theory, or vice-versa. It is definitely weirder than HPMOR.
Something that threw me off at first: it takes the mechanics of the adapted setting very literally (e.g. spell slots and saving throws are non-metaphorical in-universe Things). That's not normal for (good) game fanfiction. The authors make it work anyway -- perhaps because clear rules make it easier to produce solvable puzzles -- but it took some getting used to.
The glowfic format is strange, yeah, but it doesn't read much different. It does make for a clearer delineation of character perspectives (e.g. compared to an omniscient narrator), and the portraits/icons carry more weight than one might expect. The main drawback I noticed was that, without chapters, clear "you can stop reading and go to bed" breaks were sometimes quite far apart.
(also I had to take Stylus to the CSS to render it comfortably readable, but that's every site on the internet these days)
In principle, you can solve this with gpg-signed messages (the message could be as simple as "yes, that's me you're talking to on the phone"). Anyone you give your public key to can verify anything you sign.
...the problem, of course, is persuading anyone else to use gpg. Good luck with that part. :-(
Oh, finding less-partisan circles isn't the issue. I could do that; what I can't do is find circles pre-populated with people I've known and trusted for 20+ years, or with family. Those aren't relationships I'm eager to migrate away from.
Anyway, I was (perhaps ironically) more venting than looking for suggestions. I've found ways to deal with it, and this, too, shall pass. Thanks though.
Well this is relevant to my life. -_- I'm torn between feeling validated that someone else is bothered by this behavior, and annoyed that I didn't post something like this myself.
You even chose almost the same term for it. Mine is "hate bonding", as in "let's hate Team Bad together!", or "Two Minutes Hate" (...which has lasted eight years). It's infected a large enough fraction of my loved ones to be seriously depressing. I spend a lot of time listening to people I love ranting about how other people I love are stupid and terrible.
(Or did. I considered distancing myself from all noticeable partisans, but chose not to because that covered most of the people I'm close to. Instead I blocked the channels where these conversations took place and stopped responding to mail in this category. ...which, at least in the medium term, nearly amounted to the same thing. The last decade has been pretty lonely.)
You note that bringing up the negative consequences is frowned upon, but in my experience it doesn't even take that much. Declining to bond in this way, even implicitly, often makes people angry in and of itself.
My realtime coping mechanism is closest to your "zoning out." I read somewhere that people get uncomfortable quickly if they're talking and not getting verbal acks ("uh huh, sure, yep, okay"), so I just suppress those until they peter out. Works one on one, not so well in a crowd.
Blink. Were there any significant downsides? And did the improvements persist, or diminish over time?
Does this really hold? I'd expect inflation to cost richer people more purchasing power on an absolute scale (because they have more cash to devalue), but less as a percentage of same (because that cash is a smaller proportion of their net worth).
+$BIGNUM for this. It's frustrating when interesting parts of the LW-sphere conversation happen on closed services. Some of us (e.g. and sometimes-feels-like-i.e. me) neither have nor want a twitter account, and twitter has made it increasingly difficult to follow references to it without one.
I have the same complaint about facebook, though it's not the culprit this time. Every so often I'll run into a post that depends on a reference that is facebook-account-walled.
Yeah, the source post for the plate metaphor is one of the more enlightening things I've gotten out of the rationalsphere outside of ACX or the Sequences.
I didn't get much out of the supply cabinets myself because I travel heavy, but I loved that they existed. The universal whiteboards I wish I could mimic, but most of my wallspace is spoken for. The high-quality display mounts are definitely something I want to copy if I can get away with it (does anyone know the model?), though I think my apartment complex might complain about me bolting equipment to the walls.
Most useful specific amenity for me was the default availability of food/snacks/water/coke (though coke sometimes ran out). Personal fuel management is a substantial interrupter and brainwidth cost at most conventions.
ETA: I do wonder if I can get some of the "empty plate" effect at home by carving out specific days for "no obligation-processing (including social obligations)". Not a Sabbath-style day of rest from everything, just from "I need to handle X" things. The problem, of course, would be enforcing it in large enough blocks to be useful. Going cross-country for a week ties me to the mast in a way that might be difficult to replicate.
Set up a small monthly donation. Doubt it will help much on its own, but maybe enough others think like me that the sum will.
Thanks, fixed. I could swear I looked that up, I have no idea how I still got it wrong.
Both my request and her response were more humorous than serious, though the writeup doesn't fully capture it (and I just edited it to clarify). I don't actually expect a prize. Though I'm thinking of taking my medallion back out to keep, if it's still there. :-P
Thanks. I thought of two more questions after posting:
- Any laundry facilities? (i.e. if I stay a week, will I need clothes for a week?)
- Any refunds if I book a bed/ticket and can't make it? (I'll understand if not, of course; but I have another, much busier event (Momocon) the weekend before, so there's an elevated chance I'll catch con plague at the least convenient possible time)
- [edit]: Possible bug report: I notice one of the shared-dorm rooms has different (higher) pricing than all the others, despite identical descriptions.
I see no general-inquiries address on less.online, so I hope it's okay if I post them here. Longtime rationalsphere lurker, much rarer poster, considering going. I'm based in Atlanta and pricing the trip:
- It's not clear from the page what the 'summer camp' part of the schedule is. To me that phrase connotes 'for kids', but I'm not sure, so I'm not sure if it's worth it to me to stay extra days. [EDIT: Never mind, I see this was answered below.]
- What's the nearest major airport, and is Lighthaven accessible from there by train and/or uber? (i.e. will I need a rental car)
- What's the washroom situation like for the shared dorms vs. private rooms? (I take long showers and worry about blocking others.)
- Most of the shared dorms don't list a building, just "shared dorms". Where are they relative to the rest of the facility?
- What's local connectivity like? (I can stay longer if I can plausibly respond to work emergencies).
[EDIT: And, I just realized this announcement was over a month ago, I'm not sure how I missed it at the time or why I just noticed it now. Dunno if you or anyone else will see this. I'll wait a day in case someone does, then try a PM or something.]
Ah, that put me on the right track. I've been asking google the wrong questions; I was looking for a downloadable program that I could run, but it looks like some (all?) of the interesting things in this space are server-side-only. Which I guess makes sense; presumably gargantuan hardware is required.
The Bill Watterson one requires me to request black bears attacking a black forest campground at midnight.
Optionally: "...as pixel art".
I have to ask, how does one get hold of any of the programs in this vein? I've seen Gwern's TWDNE, and now your experiments with DALL-E, and I'd love to mess with them myself but have no idea where to go. A bit of googling suggests one can buy GPT3 time from OpenAI, but I gather that's for text generation, which I can do just fine already.
The main thing I've gotten out of microcovid is reduced search costs. Having ballpark figures for the relative effects of situations and interventions, gathered in one place, by a source I consider reasonably trustworthy, makes it much cheaper to estimate which risks are worth taking and which interventions are worth bothering with.
"Trustworthy" in this context means "someone systematically looking for the correct numbers, as opposed to targeting a bottom line chosen for reasons other than correctness." As with most politicized information, the problem isn't that the information is unavailable, but that most sources are acting in bad faith. Noise drowns out the signal until search costs become prohibitive. Your whitepaper in particular is excellent in this respect. Showing your work goes a long way towards demonstrating good faith; sharing your sources is better; sharing how and why you're using them is best of all.
Even just having the available options collected together helped. I didn't know P100s were a thing until I read your whitepaper. I use one to attend otherwise-riskier-than-I'd-like events in relative safety and comfort.
It's a shame that Microcovid's numbers haven't been updated for omicron -- that would be the first item on my wishlist, along with the booster and test numbers mentioned in other comments -- but that doesn't diminish the work you've already done. Your team provided an identifiable signal in the noise, and I love it for that.
[edit: since you ask for dollar values, I'd be willing to contribute say $1k towards getting the numbers updated for omicron, tests, and boosters -- provided that it was done to similar standards and preferably by the same team. That's less because I'd derive that much value out of it personally (at this point I know what I need to) and more that I think this sort of work is an underfunded public good.]
Many people seem to find a formal diagnosis helpful for understanding themselves
Anecdote: I was in this camp, for sufficiently low values of "formal." I went to a psychologist to get checked out for autism (among other things) five or ten years ago. After testing, he said that he wouldn't personally diagnose me, but that I was close enough to the line that if I shopped around I could probably find someone who would. I said that was fine -- it told me what I wanted to know.
(hilariously, I also scored rather high on schizophrenia. His reaction went something like "Okay, obviously you're not schizophrenic. Analytical personalities of the sort that take ideas and moral systems seriously just read that way on the tests. You're not schizo, you're just weird.")
The only concierge service I know about, which I somehow got access to, is completely useless to me because it assumes I’m super rich, and I’m not, and also the people who work there can’t follow basic directions or handle anything at all non-standard.
This is my experience, too, with almost any form of assistance. Actual thinking about the task is absent.
It's annoying, because an obnoxiously large proportion of life goes towards 1. doing all the fiddly stupid bits, 2. procrastinating about doing all the fiddly stupid bits, and 3. worrying about procrastinating too much about doing all the fiddly stupid bits. I would love to not have to deal with that. I've automated or outsourced everything I can, but it's never enough.
I suspect the degree of life-competence needed to be good at “personal assistant tasks” is scarce enough that anyone capable of doing it well is also capable of getting a job that pays better. General personal assistance requires non-cached thought, and most people can't do that on demand, if ever. Task-specific assistance can often be had at a reasonable price, because trainable habits can make up for thought. Sadly, in most cases that just replaces the original task with a more-difficult acquire-task-appropriate-services task, so it's only worth it for long-term maintenance, like cleaning.
...having written that, I wonder if there's a task-specific assistant service for "finding good task-specific services and arranging their help." Probably not. Knowing who's good at X often requires being good at X to begin with.
(unimportant, but related and maybe interesting: I get my groceries curbside or delivered. I'd rather pay for delivery, most of the time, but the curbside service is significantly more accurate and less interaction-required. I think it's because curbside groceries are collected by store employees who can proxy-shop the store by habit, while deliveries are third-party and less familiar with the specific store)
Thanks, and you're welcome.
Hrm. So testing organisms takes a while. Oh well. I might try to parallelize it, but I don't actually know hy, I'm just blindly translating python idioms, and concurrency is hard.
I notice that the hy version in the ubuntu repos will not run the program, apparently due to an upstream bug. The version from pip will. I mention this in case anyone else runs into the same hiccup.
I want to test my organisms before submitting them and noticed there wasn't a way to tell the program to use my species files instead of the one in the repo. Also, the shabang line breaks on systems that aren't yours.
I sent you an MR covering both, but I don't know if you're watching them so I figured I'd mention it here.
Is it normal for it to take a couple seconds per generation to run?
"Buying expertise" seems like a good candidate. A friend might prefer to pay me to fix their computer, instead of taking it to a shop, because they know I won't tell them they need an expensive frobnitz unless they actually do. My cheerful price might be higher than the shop's, but it could easily be worth it. A similar situation probably applies to car mechanics.
Not at all a serious suggestion, but it popped into my head: You could solve this problem by making other forms of money laundering more convenient than real estate.
(or making real estate laundering less convenient/riskier, but that's not as funny a thought)
The use of real estate as a store of value/unit of exchange makes me think of an old Diablo II issue. Officially, the medium of exchange in D2 was gold. In practice, it was a relatively rare item called the Stone of Jordan.
How did this happen? For a time, a serious bug allowed players to dupe items easily. Many of them chose to dupe the Stone. After the bug was fixed, players were left with a relatively fixed supply of a high-value item that used little inventory space. It worked very well as both a store and a medium, modulo developer attempts to clean up dupes. Thereafter, I understand that most high-level transactions were done with what amounted to counterfeit currency.
I don't know if that's still the case. I do know at one point the developer created a quest that could only be triggered by destroying Stones, presumably in an attempt to get rid of the counterfeits.
"Mental constipation" is an awesome phrase for a phenomenon I really hate having.
suffer enough of it and you’ll become a connoisseur of it, able to enjoy it, but having also fallen into an attractor that keeps you from enjoying the greater joy of what simply is
A pattern of bullshit becomes a stable orbit in the space of lies.
It doesn't sound like this would require much in the way of coordination. That makes me a bit more hopeful about it than most options. Less room for a tragedy of the commons. Once demonstrated safe and effective, individuals and businesses could deploy UV lighting and derive benefit from it, without worrying about whether their investment will be wasted by the inaction of others.
How did you implement the button? I run a small site, love the idea, and would like to do something similar.
Datum: I have a Pixel 3 (known for a relatively small battery) and the only time battery becomes an issue is when I forget to put it on the charger overnight.
But I don't watch video (too small a screen), play games (ditto), send email (fuck phone keyboards), or do much of anything but SMS, rare phone calls, and internet lookups when I'm away from a keyboard. I think a lot of worrywarting over phone battery capacity stems from trying to use them for things that are better done on a real computer.
That said, I got an external battery after reading this post. I have one use case: at conventions, when I use it constantly to read the schedule. Buying something for a single use case seemed out of line at first, but eventually I thought of it this way: if I'm willing to spend $30 for slightly more convenient parking, I should be willing to spend $30 to stop worrying about phone charge forever.
To change something, you must first describe it. To describe something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as long as it takes to see something
-- Diane Duane
Also, meta decisions take time to bring fruit at the object level, so when you make plans, you should spend the following days executing the plans instead of adjusting them; otherwise you decide without feedback.
Execution is Actual Work, though! Noooooooooooooooo!
(I'm adding that to my fortune file. I could use the reminder from time to time.)
I wonder what distinguishes sphexishness from a simple habit. They're both unreflective, automatic, default behaviors, and "bad habits" are just habits that fail to achieve goals. But they feel different to me. The best I can come up with is something like: habits are in theory changeable, whereas an actual sphex wasp will never change its behavior based on experience. Habits are acting sphexish.
But we need habits. I'm reminded of this:
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
So I think I agree with you about noticing and agency. Agency isn't the opposite of sphexishness. But it does seem to require choosing when to act so, and that requires noticing when you're doing it.
(somewhere in my unposted-blog-notes folder is something about noticing that horrible mental loop where I click random links all over the web, no matter how much I'm not-enjoying-myself, because I can't seem to context-switch. I titled it "Noticing Boredom.")
Suggestion: Attach or link these, rather than putting them inline in a comment. I like that they're available, but I had to scroll down many screens to find the actual comments.
I observe that the idea of incorrectly believing I'm bad at something doesn't disturb me much, while the idea of incorrectly believing I'm good at something is mortifying.
I smell some kind of social signaling here.
Written as "Human-Aligned Summer School", I first read it as an educational experiment aimed at not making kids suffer. For some reason I find the misinterpretation hilarious.
This seems related to something I've been thinking about recently: That the concept of "belief" would benefit from an analysis along the lines of How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside. What we describe as our "beliefs" are sometimes a map of the world (in the beliefs-paying-rent sense), and sometimes a signal to our social group that we share their map of the world, and sometimes a declaration of values, and probably sometimes other (often contradictory) things as well. But we act as if there's a single mental concept underlying them. The ambiguities are hard to shake out, I think because the signal version is only useful if it pretends to be the map version.
(I feel sour about human nature whenever I start thinking about this, because it leaves me feeling like almost all communication is either speaking in bad faith, or displaying a complete lack of intellectual integrity, or both)
I don't use Facebook, but I should try something similar with my RSS feeds.
I find it interesting that facebook responds to commenting by showing you more of the same. IIRC, posts that aggravate people are also the most likely to inspire them to comment. That suggests Facebook is effectively rigged to piss you off.
Does that match people's experience? It matches my priors, but they're weak priors, since I won't touch the service with a ten foot pole.
An RSS feed would be nice. Aside from that, I like it. Curation of content is a lengthy and undervalued service.
Voting to deactivate MD parsing inside the WYSIWYG editor, provided a MD-only editor still exists. A tool should do one thing well.
I'll copy my comment from the other thread in here, though, since it's relevant: Don't hide the alternate editor in the user profile. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. Quite aside from making it immediately obvious that there's more than one way to post, it means you can measure users' preferences by seeing what they use to post with, with much less selection bias (owing to much less inconvenience for the non-default option).
I was disappointed by the new site, but still voted to migrate. The conversation is here, and content is king. Despite my bitching, your team deserves a great deal of credit just for breathing life back into the community.
That being said:
Performance was a big complaint, and kept me off lesserwrong until greaterwrong showed up, but you already know about that and for all I know it may have been fixed. My complaints are less with lesserwrong itself than with modern web design in general, and are mainly variants on "use of javascript as a first resort instead of a last resort," "interfaces that want you to notice them," and "overly complex underlying mechanics." In short, lesserwrong may well be a fantastically engineered site, designed under a paradigm I am predisposed to despise. Discount my opinions accordingly.
(if I may nerdrage for a moment, the top navbar that folds down as soon as I scroll up, covering the text I scrolled up to see, is a common web misfeature that should die and its inventor should be forced to play a variant of the transparent newcomb's problem where both boxes contain tigers.)
Note that the fact that greaterwrong can even exist (that is, that there's an API with enough power and stability to make an alternate interface) is a huge win, and you and whoever else made the decision to allow third party clients deserve +gazillion karma for it. ...but I still have to complain that said API is not documented.
Checking lesserwrong itself for the first time since GW became available, it looks as if it has improved. The comment box in particular is less odious, and the site as a whole no longer seems to grind my browser to a halt. These are good improvements. I'm sure there are other things not obvious at first glance.
If you do want to chat with a quasi-naysayer, I'm on the LW Slack as Error, on Freenode #lesswrong as ehs, and on xmpp as error@xmpp.feymarch.net. I'm best reached in the afternoons, eastern time.
Okay, cool. As long as it's on your radar.
This is a concern for me too. A suggestion I made in feedback: Don't break inbound links. Keep the old site, static, under archive.lesswrong.com or something, and redirect classic-format url paths to the archive.
There is a lot of valuable material on the classic site. It might not be useful for current discussion, but let's not lose it, or let it get buried on archive.org.
(come to think of it, if maintaining an archive is itself unworkable, a redirect to archive.org might be an acceptable next-best alternative)
I would. WYSIWYG is a terrible editing paradigm, but some people like it, so I won't argue against providing it. Trying to mix WYSIWYG with markup-based editing, though, is far worse.
I further suggest that the plain option not be hidden out of the way. Make it selectable when commenting, and remember the selection. I wasn't even aware it existed until just now.
(edit: To be fair, I'm probably going to keep using greaterwrong regardless. Discount my opinion to whatever extent applies)