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Hm, let me think if I can come up with advice for you. What kind of problems do you run into when you start trying to express these things? (Or if more applicable, what's wrong with the finished product?)
That is definitely true and the title is being a little clickbaity about it, but my thinking is: the kind of person I'm imagining is going around thinking "I don't need to practice writing, I'll just wait til I figure out The Answer and it'll be fine" and I'm trying to convince them that they'll still want to be good at writing even once they know The Answer.
Post that made me pack a suit for Solstice
Yeah, agree. (Also agree with Dagon in not having an existing expectation of strong privacy in LW DMs. Weak privacy, yes, like that mods wouldn't read messages as a matter of course.)
Here's how I would think to implement this unintrusively: little ℹ️-type icon on a top corner of the screen of the DM interface screen (or to the side of the "Conversation with XYZ" header, or something.) When you click on that icon, it toggles a writeup about circumstances in which information from the message might be sent to someone else (what information and who.)
Fair enough. You did write
It might actually be essential that we try to divide people by sex wherever sexual dynamics can meaningfully affect a group's functionality.
and
But gosh, you know what would work really well to fix this?
which made it sound like you thought this would be a good idea.
Didn't like the post then, still don't like it in 2024. I think there are defensible points interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes.
First: generalizes from personal experiences that are not universal. I think a lot of people don't have this or don't struggle with this or find it worth it, and the piece assumes everyone feels the way the author feels.
Second: the thing it describes is a bias, and I don't think the essay realizes this.
Okay, part of the thing is that this doesn't make a case or acknowledge this romantic factor as being different from, like, friendship. Like, in the people-at-work case, you might also do someone a favor at work because you like them as a buddy, which is not necessarily the same as whether they're a good worker or it's a strategic thing for you to do, or whatever - you're inclined to give your friends special treatment. Even in straight same-gender groups, people will end up being friends and having outgroups.
Anyway, you have to be careful reasoning out of "what your in-built stereotypes say". This is sometimes relevant information, totally. But A) your in-built stereotypes are not everyone else's in-built stereotypes, even within your culture, and B) this is reasoning from the territory, not the map. Are they true? In some of the cases given in this piece, it matters if they're true.
Like, the thing being described here is a bias, a flaw in the lens. "Having to navigate around possible sexual dynamics with other people makes it harder to do regular communication with them" is a thing that'll make you less able to reason and less effective. (Especially if it still fires strongly in cases like "this woman is at this event about an unrelated topic, with a partner, and so is probably not available for dating.") I don't begrudge the author for having it. I think it's really common. God knows my own best judgment has failed me before in the face of very pretty people.
But I like this community for usually not giving up on matters of self-improvement and epistemics. Even if you don't prioritize it, you're at least recognizing it and not throwing it out. It's very disconcerting to read "I notice my brain does extra work when I talk with women... wouldn't it be easier if society were radically altered so that I didn't have to talk with women?" Like, what? And there's no way you or anyone else can become more rational about this? This barrier to ideal communication with 50% of people is insurmountable? It's worth giving up on this one? Hello?
I get that the author views this as sort of a series of tenuous hypotheticals and doesn't necessarily stand by these stances and was just putting it out there, which is respectable. I think it's wrong and so tenuous as to be unhelpful.
Overall: bad takes, did have a solid 20 seconds of mixed fun and horror imagining this totally-unsexist society where straight men and women are kept in polite segregated groups, and 10% of people are in fringe situations - stable lesbian gay-male duos who must rely on each other, the bisexuals and the nonbinary people wandering the earth alone, the asexuals reigning supreme; incorruptible, masters of all domains.
This was just a really good post. It starts off imaginative and on something I'd never really thought about - hey, spring shoes are a great idea, or at least the dream of them is. It looks at different ways this has sort have been implemented, checks assumptions, and goes down to the basic physics of it, and then explores some related ideas. I like someone who's just interested in a very specific thing exploring the idea critically from different angles and from the underlying principles. I want to read more posts like this. I also, now, want shoes with springs on them.
Mostly saying the same thing twice, a rhetorical flourish. I guess just really doubling down on how this is not good, in case the reader was like "well this sucks incredibly but maybe there's a good upside" and then got to the second part and was like "ah no I see now it is genuinely bad", or vice versa.
Good point!
I really like this post. Thanks for explaining a complicated thing well!
I think this dynamic in relationships, especially in a more minor form, sometimes emerges from a thing where, like ... Especially if you're used to talking with your partner about brains and preferences and philosophy and rationality and etc - like, a close partner who you hang out day-to-day with is interesting! You get access to someone else making different decisions than you'd make, with different heuristics!
When you want to do something hedonic with potential downsides, you know you've thought about the tradeoffs. You're making a rational decision (of course). But this other person? Well, what's going on in their head? And you ask them and they can't immediately explain their process in a way that makes sense to you? Well, let's get into that! You care about them! What if they're making a mistake?
This isn't always bad. Sometimes this can be an interesting and helpful exploration to do together. The thing is that from the other side, this can be indistinguishable from "my partner demands I justify things that make me happy and then criticizes whatever I say", which sucks incredibly and is bad.
If you think you might be the offending partner in this particular situation, some surface-level ideas for not getting to that point:
- Get a sense of the other person, and how into this kind of thing, as applied to them, they actually are. You can ask them outright but probably also want a vibe of like "do they participate enthusiastically and non-defensively".
- People also often have boundaries or topics they're sensitive about. For instance, a lot of women have been policed obnoxiously and repeatedly about their weight and staying attractive - for the ice cream example in particular this could be a painful thing to stray into. Everyone's are different, you probably have your own, keep this in mind.
- Interrogate your own preferences vocally and curiously as often as you do theirs.
- Are you coming at it from a place of curiosity and observation? Like, you're going to support them in doing whatever they want and just go like "huh, people are so interesting, I love you in all your manifold complexity" even if you don't ultimately understand, right?
- If you think you might be doing this in the moment, pause and ask your interlocutor if they're okay with this and if they're feeling judged. Perhaps reaffirm that you're not doing this as a criticism. (If you are doing it as a criticism, that's kind of beyond the scope of this comment, but refer to the original post + ask them and yourself if this is the time and place, and if it's any of your business.)
- Remember whatever you learned from last time and don't keep having the same conversation. Also, don't do it all the time.
I respect your oatmeal respect and expertise but I think parts of your post are close-minded about certain things. "True roots" is nothing - if you're thinking really old tradition, why is a different new world fruit (blueberries) in there at all? Even if you're not restricting yourself to that, why should coconut in oatmeal be fine but not guava? That makes me think it's just about what tastes good and not really about tradition.
(I haven't tried guava in oatmeal either, but guavas are great, a really unique flavor, I recommend trying it if you ever get the chance!)
I think it's odd and overgeneralizing to assert that people don't like oatmeal because of rationalizations about their diet. In my experience, people often innately dislike widely-popular sensations or experiences for no particular reason - sensory sensitivities or just unusual preferences or etc.
On that front I also dislike the texture of normally-cooked oatmeal - I think I never especially liked it but then I did long trail crews as a teenager where oatmeal was the only breakfast for weeks straight, and I really haven't wanted to eat it since - but overnight oats (oats mixed with liquid and sat in the fridge overnight, not cooked - you could warm it up til it's hot but not to the boiling point) or those packets of instant oats mixed with boiling water (but not otherwise cooked/microwaved after that) both have a soft but much-less-glorpy consistency, so I'll happily eat them for breakfast sometimes. Recommend them to anyone looking for an oatmeal experience but wishing the texture were a little different.
As opposed to other species of bear, which are safe for children to engage with?
Source?
I happened to get to play Optimal Weave today and really liked it. I don't normally go for... well, board games at all, let alone strategy-type ones, but I had a lot of fun. The variable degree to which cooperation was a helpful strategy between goalsets (only sometimes) was neat. Good work!
I'm glad your symptoms went away! Sudden onset seizures sound terrifying.
What made you think in the first place that the problem might be worms? Do you have any risk / exposure factors like the paper mentions?
Ah! I forget about a compass, honestly. He definitely came in with maps (and once he was out there for, like, over eight hours, he would have had cues from the sun.) A lot of the mystery / thing to explain is indeed "why despite being a reasonably competent hiker and map user, Ewasko would have traveled so far in the opposite direction from his car"; defs recommend Adam's videos because he lays out what seems like a very plausible story there.
(EDIT: was rewatching Adam's video, yes Bill absolutely had a compass and had probably used it not long before passing, they found one with his backpack near the top. Forgot that.)
Helicopters were used as part of the initial S&R efforts! Also tracking dogs. They just also didn't find him. There's a little about it in Tom's stuff. I don't know if Tom got the flight path / was able to map where it searched, I think there's some more info buried in this FOIA'd doc about the initial search that Tom Mahood got ahold of.
(One thing I saw - can't remember who mentioned this, if it was Mahood or Adam Marsland - is that the FOIA'D doc mentions S&R requesting a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment to come search too, but that doesn't seem to have actually ever happened. Which is a shame, because at that point Ewasko was alive and presumably closer to/within the main search areas, so that could have actually found him.)
Oh whoa, thanks for commenting! I really appreciate your videos and your work on the search.
Check out Marsland's post-coroner's-report video for all the details, but tentatively it looks like Ewasko:
- Hiked alone
- Didn't tell someone the exact trailhead/route he'd be hiking (later costing time, while he was still alive, while rescuers searched other parts of the park)
- Didn't have a GPS unit / PLB, just a regular (non-smart) cellphone (I don't actually know to what degree a regular smartphone works as a dedicated GPS unit - like, when you're at the edges of regular coverage, is it doing location stuff from phone + data coverage, or does it have a GPS chip? - but either way, he didn't have a smartphone)
- Had an unclear number of the ten essentials - it seems like a fair number? But (as someone in the youtube comments pointed out) if he had lit a fire, rescuers could have found him from the smoke, so either he didn't think of that or he just didn't have a firestarter.
Though I want to point out that doing all of these things - well, it's not an insane amount of preparation, but it's above bare minimum common sense / "anyone going out into the woods who thinks at all about safety is already doing this." I've had training in wilderness/outdoor safety type stuff and I've definitely done day hikes while less prepared than Ewasko was.
Yeah, if anyone reading this liked this, I also really recommend Mahood's search for the Death Valley Germans. It's another kind of brilliant investigation.
Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that before! Hah, so that guy, KarmaFrog, is the same guy as Adam who posted the videos I recommended. He makes fun of himself in the video about the U-haul thing, which he has now, er, moved away from as a hypothesis.
Wait, just checking, when you say you got these examples from ChatGPT, do you know enough to verify that these are true?
Also, what's the deal with the linked sources? They don't mention browser differences. Does Firefox not run this 2023 version of Javascript or something? I'm not a webdev expert.
Huh, clicked on a few of these. I haven't experienced this level of problems - like I said, I have a backup browser, but I don't need to break it out often (once or twice a week?) I mean, I believe these people, but I don't think I'm having some kind of consistently janky web experience that makes it not worth using, so as far as I'm concerned people should still give it a go.
(I also haven't run into problems using Claude on Firefox. Goes fine for me.)
Killer exploration into new avenues of digital mysticism. I have no idea how to assess it but I really enjoyed reading it.
Oh, TIL, fascinating, thanks! Wild.
Thanks for the extra info - this is good stuff! I figured the moon difference might be, like, some extra rocketry on top of ICBMs, but not necessarily a lot - but this makes sense that it's in fact a pretty substantial difference.
Yeah, I think people signing onto the OST really helped bury the idea. (It did not stop the USSR from at one point from violating it in 1974-75 by attaching a 23mm gun to a space station. (For "self defense". It was never used.) This probably isn't that related to the larger nukes question, I just learned that recently and thought it was a fun fact.)
I appreciate your excellent comment.
"I want to indicate an alien microbe," I thought. "I'll just draw something with a distinctly microbial feature but otherwise so weird there's no way it could exist." Archaea have shown me what for once again.
Thank you for introducing me to this odd fellow.
I'm to understand that trichinopoly chain is structurally the same as knitting. See for instance this post and the diagrams included, which look a lot like knitting and describe it as circular knitting. Is that incorrect?
I hadn't seen this post at all until a couple weeks ago. I'd never heard "exfohazard" or similar used.
Insisting on using a different word seems unnecessary. I see how it can be confusing. I also ran into people confused by this a few years ago, and proposed "cognitohazard" for the "thing that harms the knower" subgenre. That also has not caught on. XD The point is, I'm pro-disambiguating the terms, since they have different implications. But I still believe what I did then, that the original broader meaning of the word "infohazard" is occasionally used in the wild in e.g. biodefense, whereas the "thing that harms the knower" meaning is IME quite uncommon, so I think it seems fair to let Bostrom and the people using it in their work keep "infohazard". Maybe the usage in AI is different.
Yeah, great point! So to be fair to them, they were not doing tests that hinged on it having a specific codon scheme or amino acid. Like, they weren't sequencing the samples - it was 1969, they couldn't do that. They were putting it in nutrient-rich media or plants or animals or etc and seeing what happened. So maybe in such a case the coloration change would have been detected in, I don't know, the water of the shrimp tank. But as you say it could well have been too late at that point, if an organism grew in seawater.
Sure, Wikipedia, NASA's About Astrobiology page indicates this is pretty uncontroversial at NASA, Hawking, Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, this website from a NSF-funded exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, Scientific American... I can't immediately find a "how do most biologists think that life came to be" survey but I bet if there is a good one, it would support this. In high school and undergrad, I was taught that abiogenesis was all but consensus, and that other things (divine intervention, panspermia, ??) were considered unlikely.
GREAT post. I sent it to my friends. It may be of interest that the oldest socks we know of have split toes, probably for being worn with sandals! So they've been uncool to wear with sandals for a while but they started out cool to wear with sandals, at least. History could be made to repeat itself.
End-of-2023 author retrospective:
Yeah, this post holds up. I'm proud of it. The Roman dodecahedron and the fox lady still sit proudly on my desk.
I got the oldest known example wrong, but this was addressed in the sequel post: Who invented knitting? The plot thickens. If you haven't read the sequel, where I go looking for the origins of knitting, you will enjoy it. Yes, even if you're here for the broad ideas about history rather than specifically knitting. (That investigation ate my life for a few months in there. Please read it. 🥺)
I'm extremely pleased by the reception I got from this. People say "oh, Less Wrong won't be interested in a post about knitting". These people were not writing good enough posts about knitting. They probably also said that about tree phylogeny.* If you think something is interesting, you can explain why it's interesting to other people and maybe they'll agree with you.
I would say the challenge of writing this was maybe in sort of trusting myself that these freewheeling high-concept connections between alphabetization and knitting and bacterial evolution were worth explicitly relating to each other. On one hand I often sort of hate reading pieces based around the author holding up distantly-connected things and going "do you get it? do you get it??" ...But on the other hand, sometimes they're insightful, and man, sometimes there is a weird concept that's really made clear by seeing a few disparate examples. So it's worth trying and ultimately it is just a blog post and not a scientific paper, so "gesturing vaguely at an idea" is on par for the course. Evidently other people thought the connection was something too. Nice!
*Fact check: Nobody has ever said either of these things to me.
Possibly if by "come in contact" we mean like ingesting or injecting or something. That's the going theory for how the Kuru epidemic started - consumption of the brain of a person with sporadic (randomly-naturally-occuring) CJD. Fortunately cannibalism isn't too common so this isn't a usual means of transmission. I think if anything less intensive (say, skin or saliva contact) made CJD transmissible, we would know by now. See also brain contact with contaminated materials e.g. iatrogenic CJD, or Alzheimers which I mention briefly in this piece.
it's possible that FFI genes cause the patient's body to create prions,
Yep! That's how it works. Real brutal.
Thank you!
Yeah, I mention one or two studies in the article that have to do with altering the host range. There aren't a lot of prion specialists, of course, but there's been quite a bit of interest in understanding how they work and spread, so there is some weird stuff out there.
Unless the meaning is something akin to "kills within X years of contracting the disease", it can only mean "kills the victim if they don't die of something else first."
The latter is true of every fatal disease, yes? Alzheimer's also has a long fuse til death but people don't recover from it. I'm also told there was a very popular recent television show about a man with terminal cancer who died from other causes.
Wikipedia lists fatal familial insomnia, and two others.
"Infectious" means "transmissible between people". As the name suggests, fatal familial insomnia is a genetic condition. (FFI and the others listed are also prion diseases - the prion just emerges on its own without a source prion and no part of the disease is contagious. This is an interesting trait of prions that could not happen with, say, a disease caused by a virus.)
Scrapie, in sheep, has been known since at least 1732, and isn't thought to spread to humans.
True! I could have talked about scrapie more in this article and didn't for two reasons-
First, because I looked at some similar transmission tests and it seems to be even less able to convert human PrP.
Second, because as you mention, it's been around for centuries - if it was going to have spilled over, it probably would have happened by now. CWD, meanwhile, is only a few decades old and has only spread a lot recently- it has more room to explore, so to speak, and some of its possible nearby mutations have never existed around humans before but might now.
As I say in the piece, I think the risk from CWD is in fact low - but this line of reasoning is why human-disease epidemiologists tend to be more concerned about emerging animal diseases than animal diseases that have been around and stable for ages.
There are a bunch of coffee-tasting substitutes made from roasted grain or other stuff! Coffee beans or anything caffeine-producing don't enter the equation at all (as opposed to decaf coffee which is derived from coffee beans), the roasted plant taste is just similar. Chicory or dandelion roots are pretty well-known plant for this. Inka is another grain brand that's good and easy to make, you do it like instant coffee. I've seen others at large natural/health/hippie food type stores.
I get that we all want understanding in a situation like this but let's not go after people's appearances, cripes. Most people look weird in one way or another and are gonna be fine to sit next to on a bus. Come on.
I don't think there's much crossover. I hope you know that there are lots and lots of incentives for active deception and responding to deception in various parts of the natural world and evolutionary psychology - if you're interested in the workings of and responses to deception, definitely read more about it. Like, the argument you make for females being interested in "people over things" could also explain the reverse - males are incentivized to deceive females, which you can do better the better you model people, right? I think you are observing something real about relevant preferences, but if that's the extent of your understanding, I'd learn more about evolution and alternate explanations e.g. cultural pressure towards taking on emotional labor.
Anyhow, this example is narrow and specific to a human problem. As you say, the concern about AGI is mainly about intelligence significantly past humans, that do not share a basic substrate or set of biological imperatives. Like, even a person who I think might be lying to me can be modeled as fundamentally human - having limited amounts of information, limited physical strength, needing to eat, fearing death, etc. Heck, if I'm looking for a partner and am concerned that the partner is going to try to deceive me to get sex or whatever from me, I'm already aware of the threat!
The current environment you're asking about people's experience in is also pretty damn different from the ancestral environment evolved for - in as far as resource constraints, information ability, and I guess most other things - so I doubt that this example applies much.
Gosh! Thank you, this is an unexpected boon.
Yes it was, thank you!
This is a very good point!
Heheh, thanks. Are you talking about AGI?
Recipe blogs look like that (having lots of peripheral text and personal stories before getting to the recipe) because they're blogs. They're not trying to get the recipe to you quickly. The thing you're looking for is a cookbook.
(Or allrecipes or something, I guess. "But I want something where a good cook has vetted the recipe - " You want a cookbook. Get Joy of Cooking.)
Interesting post! It’s cool to see the reasoning you put into it. Reader exercised:
"Is Solstice primarily a rationality holiday? An EA holiday? The broader secular community?"
First 2? I could see it expanding into the broader secular community in an appealing way and generally don’t like things to be insular, but I do think that some of the weird EA prioritization/x-risk/transhumanism is like… very big to my personal worldview and so it’s really nice to bond with other people who agree.
I do think there's often a useful thing about it for getting new people involved - so maybe, like, don't assume everybody agrees with you or knows what you're on about, but it seems reasonable to assume that many do, and to see it as a chance to sell it.
I just went to the NYC Solstice and, reflecting on it, feel strongly that Solstices are both EA and rationality-themed and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. <3
"How essential is the journey from light, into darkness, into light?"
Big to the tone for me. If you replace it with something better or different, I’m interested. If you just ditch the structure, why? It was good!
"Is it okay to have a Solstice where we don't sing Brighter Than Today?"
That’s okay. What’s not okay is having a solstice in which nobody reads the snippet at the end of Matches by Guante (the last chunk at this link) at the end of the moment of darkness.
“But Eukaryote, nobody does that outside of the Seattle Solstices you’ve been to.” Yeah, and they’re great but they’ve suffered for that obvious mistake.
… Which is to say, apparently having some continuity of Big Moment Content feels important. But perhaps this ship has already sailed re: All Solstices Everywhere, so I guess I’d instead suggest that regional organizers ask around about people’s favorite parts / what they’d miss if it weren’t there, and try to keep those bits for their recurring solstices.
"How important are singalongs vs speeches?"
I think both are good. Singalongs get people involved and also the songs are very nice. To get me emotionally on board you need some speeches with un-lyrical fact-shaped material to drive the point home. Also, it seems good to have a wide variety of content types - different things resonate with different people. Get some narratives in there! Get some lists of facts! Get some poetry in there too! Get some visual art! Whoo! Yeah!
"How important is it for singalongs to sound polished, vs for them to feel like an organic part of the community? Is it appropriate to pay professional musicians?"
I could go either way! Paying professional musicians, if you have the budget and interest, seems great! Some friends noodling around with 0.5 practice is also great. I just like music.
Broader than just music, but if you have artists in your community, I think this is a community thing and it’s good to have some content made by them (music, writing, speeches, other people’s writing that members thought would be good Solstice material, etc, whatever) if you can swing it.
"How important is transhumanism or x-risk?"
Big to me! I could imagine a solstice that was more normal-beliefs-appealing and still struck me as, like, a Solstice, but it’d be different, and, like, if you’re not talking about human extinction or glorious transhuman futures, you’d have set the arc up differently to have it … still mesh with what you think the future will be like. So I’d be disappointed in a solstice that just filed the serial numbers off of x-risk and living forever to be more widely appealing, but I think one designed with a different expectation of the future could be fine. … Also, I do very much like that it’s an affirming event for believing in weird things. Seattle (when I was there) included some wild animal suffering stuff in our solstices, which I think is not common. Depends what the attendees care about.
"Is it good or bad to change lyrics over time?"
I think that’s fine and I kinda like that it happens, and so organically, but also just swapping in topical new songs is fine and cool.
"How important is it to celebrate Solstice on literal astronomical Solstice? If you don't, why are we calling it Solstice? Is it important for the name to be clear?"
Yeah. That’s fine. It’s near the solstice. It’s a metaphor. Come on.
"Is it okay to have one solstice someday with a 'bad ending', where instead of climbing back out of the darkness hopefully, we just... sit with it, and accept that maybe it might be what the future holds?"
...Yeah, I mean, that’s fine to do, could be interesting, but by god you have got to warn people in advance; if I went to a Solstice and got really invested in it and then it didn’t bring me back up by the end, that would mess me up and probably do negative good for the world.
Thanks! What makes you say that? It does unravel fairly quickly if it's torn or in gress, but when you're done knitting, say, a hat, you just thread or tie the end off and it's pretty unlikely that a piece will get loose and unravel a completed garment. I guess it's a bit more of a risk for something that sees more wear, like a sock.
I love this, I love Nikolai Vavilov, and I love the holiday concept - I'm going to have to think about doing something similar to commemorate him and his colleagues. I really liked the book The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov by Peter Pringle and recommend it, it's info-dense and well-written. (I haven't intentionally fact-checked it or anything but I did a big research dive into him a few years ago and I don't remember it obviously not holding up against other sources.)
This is a really touching tribute. I'm so sorry.
Very reasonable, noted and thanks for explaining! FWIW my intended vibe there was humorously overhyped - like that I, a stranger, was bursting into your life to tell you about trees - but also definitely see why it would be offputting.
I don't love this thread - your first comment reads like you're correcting me on something or saying I got something important philosophically wrong, and then you just expand on part of what I wrote with fancier language. The actual "correction", if there is one, is down the thread and about a single word used in a minor part of the article, which, by your own findings, I am using in a common way and you are using in an idiosyncratic way. ...It seems like a shoehorn for your pet philosophical stance. (I suppose I do at least appreciate you confining the inevitable "What are Women Really" tie-ins to your own thread, because boy howdy, do I not want that here.)
To be clear, the expansion was in fact good, it's the unsupported framing as a correction that I take issue with. This wouldn't normally bother me enough to remark on, but it's by far the top-rated comment, and you know everyone loves a first-comment correction, so I thought I should put it out there.
Super valid, I appreciate the feedback! For my own future reference, if you have an answer - was it more the general kind of casual/eclectic style, the "antagonistic" bits like what you quoted, or something else?