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It generally had to do with me trying to navigate a part of me that really wanted to just have a nice village, and be a humble village priest who helped their local community be nice. And a part of me that felt "man, the village is not safe. I can't in good conscious just stay here having a nice life. The spirit of the village compels me to leave the village and figure out how to help protect the village. But man something about that feels really sad/bad."
OOF.
Had a similar realization recently. It sucks. I was really lucky¹ to have access to competent emotional support when I did.
¹ not in fact luck, but skilled organizers who were prepared-in-advance for an increased likelihood of such events AT their event.
"an easy lever might be a guide to obvious failure modes of supplements and medications"
I desire to see more things like this.. Especially if they're presented not as a list of "gotchas", but as specifics of a general moving-parts model of how naive models/strategies operate in a complex space. Should be lots of base rates being thrown around.
A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting, and phasing treatments out if they don’t justify the mental load
This part has been a historical blocker to me using luck/exploration based medicine. If one is dissociated, alexythmic, or has an experience completely dominated by one sensation like pain or anxiety, then it's going to be pretty hard to notice fine gradations in how well they're doing. Not having precision really narrows the possible paths to success; effect has to be almost overdetermined before one actually updates on the evidence.
An extension of the noticeable risks and helping/hurting points I think is worth separating out: how to identify and avoid literal poisons. Not risky bets, per se, but things that are likely to directly harm the objective (health) and the other conditions necessary to make your strategy viable (kill your liver, mind, ability to move under your own power).I think it's a useful comparison point to know what it takes to figure out what is safe to eat in an unfamiliar environment. There's a protocol for slow steps of Graduated exposure and Waiting to see how well it's tolerated. Accumulated culture and the FDA are so very cheating technique. It's worth understanding how much work it otherwise takes to narrow down what world you are in without leaning on them.
I wanna offer feedback on the READING.
at "Off the cuff I’d give something like 10%, 3%, 1% for these respectively (conditioned on the previous premises) which multiplies to .003%", the verbal version doubled back to remind what the referents for each percentage we're, then read the sentence again.
that was PERFECT. high value add. made sure the actual point was gotten across, when it would have been very easy to just mentally tune out numerical information.
In TEAM, the therapist takes on a different role: instead of trying to convince the patient to change his or her thoughts, the therapist tries to find reasons that the patient should not change.
I recognize this model! The book "Immunity to Change" goes into great detail on a similar process.
Applying that specifically in a therapeutic context, to clear the path for treatment to really work, is SO BRIILLIANT!
I see it as morally wrong to create a AGI at our current human development
This.. this statement really bugs me. It seems floating. What does it being morally right or wrong cash out to in terms of anticipations? Being morally wrong wouldn't stop it from happening! It wouldn't stop AI from having terrible effects if pursued unsafely!
I wish you luck but don't see an easy entry point. I've been struggling to create one for a while. Reading Rationality A-Z all the way through has historically worked to some degree, but very inefficiently.
scalable decentralized currency/contract/communication systems
Oh? Do say more
THIS. THIS IS THE REASON FOR THE HOLIDAY --
"Anyways. The reasons I wouldn't expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I'm explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves. First, that I'm constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things. In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, more usual for myself, the minutes or hours of my time that I'd spend to get something - including by working to buy it, if it was something that could be bought directly with money."
"The fact that I don't actually have a bank account full of unskilled-labor-hours, anymore, and instead have a completely unfamiliar currency called 'gold pieces', is contributing to a constant state of disorientation in the back of my mind. I'll seem less timid and hesitant once I actually know how much everything around me costs and this core process of all of my cognition is able to actually run again."
written by Yudkowsky in Mad Investor Chaos
So... what I'm getting is that prediction markets will be just as annoying but necessary to police for insider trading as the stock market? Alas.
This... is that experiment?
I also want to know the answer to this question
When you say that consciousness is vague and people look to cues from others for how to interpret it, I think you're onto something very important.
Some parenting books treat that as trivially true for kids. It's a bit the basis of CBT. And yet I have an intuitive sense that its implications are critically under-explored. It feels like a nagging intensity in my perceived environment that i reflexively try to focus my eyes on and rising unease when i can't.
Is that the same or different to your reasoning? When that criticality is communicated, what happens next?
Thank you lightcone team for continuing to make these happen. I expect I owe several of you a free gratitude coffee.
Epistemic Status: groping around at an event idea I hope others are interested in
I don't know how to communicate this yet, but there's a ritual I want to do with friends this summer. The following describes some inspirations and gestures toward the general aesthestic.
- It was part of my step-family's lore to learn camping skills and wilderness survival, at one point even giving little "merit badges" for demonstrating mastery. With a similar spirit they would also host summer 'art shows' where'd we'd learn about a different culture and put things we made that year (or day) on display for the family to see.
- Judaism has this week-long celebration that involves building a simple outdoor shelter which one eats in, sometimes sleeps. The shelter itself symbolizes the fragility and transience of life and one's dependence on God.
- Burning Man is a temporary Art-themed city that springs up for a week in the middle of the nowhere and gets torn down cleanly at the end. The standard middle of nowhere happens to be in a freaking desert, so it's got this strong ethos of pushing one's limits individually but also looking out for each other. It emphasizes raw experiences and co-creation, eschews symbols of consumerism. Whole lot of drugs, music, sex, and weirdness.
- Midsummer bonfires or maypoles. For drinking, dancing, singing around. Associated with "fertility", aka event of the year for flirting and/or hookups.
- How To Make Everything youtube series: "Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery. But could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today?".
- snippets from the sequences
- Making History Available - "I should immerse myself in history, imagine living through eras I only saw as ink on paper. ... I had to overcome the false amnesia of being born at a particular time. I had to recall—make available— all the memories, not just the memories which, by mere coincidence, belonged to myself and my own era. ... So many mistakes, made over and over and over again, because I did not remember making them, in every era I never lived . . ."
- What is Evidence, Entangled Truth, Contagious Lies - rationality as entangling oneself with truths, and truths being heavily entangled with each other.
- Truly Part of You - "How much of your knowledge could you regenerate? From how deep a deletion? ... A shepherd builds a counting system that works by throwing a pebble into a bucket whenever a sheep leaves the fold, and taking a pebble out whenever a sheep returns. If you, the apprentice, do not understand this system—if it is magic that works for no apparent reason—then you will not know what to do if you accidentally drop an extra pebble into the bucket. That which you cannot make yourself, you cannot remake when the situation calls for it."
- Doing stuff badly and having fun with it, like a child. Your work is going to suck. But it's yours in a way many hyper-optimized alternatives are not.
- Hackerspace/Makerspace: Community-operated work spaces where people with common interests (often in technology, science, and digital art) can meet, socialize, shbrare infrastructure, and collaborate.
Am stalled on figuring out what the minimum viable parts are
Not a literal culture, rather In My Culture.
uncomfortable squirm
In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.
I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.
but pain is not the unit of effort.
dying for the cause is not a success.
not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person
who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought
In my culture there's a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.
epistemic status: felt sense poetry
Think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind.
We often dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. It's an important goal. It's not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, tied to this pale blue dot. Sol III, Terra, the world that birthed us. And when we do leave, we will take much of it with us. Some of it we will take intentionally, because we're sentimental like that. But some we will take in the marks of growing up on this pale blue dog, in *what kind of beings our first world made us*.
I want to dedicate a time of the year to think about the environment that we live in, how it shapes us and how we shape it. We ought to know the soil we grow in, and know it well. A general purpose rationality must produce local knowledge, specialized to the time and space and life we are living. We must dig our roots deep, and spread our leaves wide.
We talk a lot about the general theory of rational agents. It informs how you learn true things and make good choices. But, you are not the general example of an agent. Your mind did not spring up from first principals. Evolutionary history, cultural memetics, and human institutions also play a role in the way you learn true things and make good choices. That which is at your roots effected what the truth to be found and good choices to be made even are, thousands of years later.
The tree is a metaphor. Grand forces of optimization have existed before you, and will likely exist after you. Seek them out. Use what they can give you. Dig your roots deep.
And spread your leaves wide. Plants are often portrayed as passive; that's incorrect. They move. They move a great deal, efficiently and slowly, in order to catch the sun. In the spirit of a plant, you need not chase after every opportunity. You can position yourself well, and take the chances as they come to you. Have patience, not passivity. And spread your leaves wide. Catch every ray of sunlight and harness it. Drink in the present moment, and turn it into something awesome.
- What's something you know about the environments that you live in, or that shaped you? Your city. Your ecosystem. Your history. Your economy. Your community. What don't you know about them that you would like to?
- What serendipitous chance might you hope to catch, this month? What would you be prepared to act on if it happened?
I don't remember reading anything like that. If I had to make a wild guess of where to find that topic I'd assume it was part of the Luminosity sequence.
I read through your proposal, and I don't understand how all your suggestions are covered. Can you run through which of your proposed elements
- lightbulb: is used for surprising or insightful information
- exclamation mark: is used to warn about something that requires attention
- question mark: flags open questions that should be answered
- trend (up/down): information about a general positive/negative trend
- checkmark: Different from an up-vote; indicates that something was completed and does not need further attention
you see as corresponding to which elements in the current setup?
Polar opposite opinion on the truth buttons.
Agree / Disagree is not a relevant axis of quality on Lesswrong.
True / False is so relevant, when a comment contains explicit or implicit claims about reality to fact check.
I tentatively infer that the use case you're thinking of is some kind of Quick Poll, where someone shares subjective anecdata and others can quickly chime in with whether their anecdata is alike or in contrast of that example. This would be an incredibly valuable tool; I really want to have that. What I don't want is to have that tool in the place of a quality control system.
if i had to redesign the system right now based on these thoughts, I'd go for 3 sections of feedback.
First, reactions: Skepticism, Enthusiasm, Surprise, Empathy, Ugh, Wrath
Second, upvote/downvote.
Third, rubric breakdown. this is collapsed by default, if you voted Strong in either direction then it automatically opens.
- False | True
- Muddled | Clear
- Irrelevant* | On the Mark
- Seeds Discord | Truth Converging
*-possible alternative: out of bounds?
Agree it's overwhelming.
Agree it'll get better if limited to relevant contexts and polished up.
Agree the axes are difficult to distinguish from one another. True speech, truth-seeking speech, precisely specified speech, and accurately aimed speech are all distinctly important! buuuut they're strongly correlated so the distinctions are usually only useful to point out on the extreme ends of the quality spectrum, or on very short comments.
There's an axis? reaction? that is not quite muddled or conflict-seeking or missing the point or false, nor does it warrants skepticism or surprise. It's just... an ugh field. It's the category of too much text, too far outside my base context, too ugly, too personally triggering, too why I should even try.
My browser shows does not display the skepticism or enthusiasm icons, I too have great difficulty identifying their meaning.
I interpreted it as "vibing with this" or "mood". Feeling a moment of connection with another human being through their words, either because it matches your own experience or because they painted a foreign vista vivid enough to inhabit.
I am getting rectangle boxes for both Enthusiasm and Skepticism.
uh, something got lost in translation because I can't make sense of what you're saying
- we can't unknow our scientific knowledge.
- of course we'd learn from and partially integrate into the local institutions when we stay some place, it would be literally insane not to
- we already have migration--seasonal farmhands, escaping small towns, ratspies to the bay area?
i wish for a modern nomadic tribe
imagine a group that was intelligent, rational enough they could rapidly adjust to new circumstances like (snap) *that*. they carry what they need in with them, wherever they go, and have the science of bootstrapping from the ground up down to an art form.
imagine they had a burning man ethos of 'leave no trace', or even left the place behind them better than it was found. imagine they stealth into a settled community like brownies to turn leather scraps into shoes.
imagine a culture of intentionality: rapid prototyping and testing of norms, thoughtul adoption with an eye to the long term.
i wish. now what?
I love this idea, and I'm glad you shared it
dropping some predictions in my shortform for safekeeping
------------------------------------------
country invades another this year 20%
total covid cases in california < 7.4mil by end 2022 90%
total covid deaths in california < 110,000 by end 2022 93%
https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/
Dow Jones closes year between 17k and 42k 90%
Dow Jones does not exceed 17k and 42k bounds during year 85%
NASDAQ closes year between 8k and 17k 90%
NASDAQ does not exceed 8k and 17k bounds during year 88%
S&P 500 closes year between 3.5k and 6k 90%
S&P 500 does not exceed 3.5k and 6k bounds during year 86%
2024 US Presidential Election is Trump vs. Biden 23%
New Supreme Court Justice in 2022 15%
Omicron variant less lethal than Delta 94%
Wow, I really love that this has been updated and appendix'd. It's really nice to see how this has grown with community feedback and gotten polished this from a rough concept.
Creating common knowledge on how 'cultures' of communication can differ seems really valuable for a community focused on cooperatively finding truth.
I like this, in the sense that it's provoking fascinating thoughts and makes me want to talk with the author about it further. As a communication of a particular concept? I'm kinda having a hard time following what the intent is.
I think the vast majority of my altruistic impact is through donations, I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset.
I agree, but I think what you are doing is a fairly noncentral example of "working in advertising". You are helping to add good constraints on a probably-bad process.
this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can't totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
Third funding model: You pay with contributed labor value
Consider how amazon turk employs people to work on small problems for small payments.
Google maps engages users to answer questions and write reviews for places they have been, for free. What if instead, occasional contributions to updating the map was the price for using it?
What if more online resources worked on a torrent-ish model where those accessing it contribute to hosting it for others? Wouldn't that be grand?
Correct. Though the latter depends on what someone means by "never be fixed"; trauma is always going to leave a mark but it does not have to remain debilitating nor defining.
We were forced to 'play outside' for hours most days and even longer on weekends. I was not even allowed to bring a book outside though sometimes I would hide them outside at night and find them the next day.
Oh stars, this gives me flashbacks. Being forced outside was the worst.
Amazingly my mom made fun of her children for being weirdos.
My mom was also a bigger bully than I ever encountered at school or in the neighborhood, figuratively and literally. It looms even larger in my head, because I had to give a damn about what the person in charge of my life thought.
ps. fiskkit review, it's a thing I'm trying out.
also signing Dath Illan's nonverbal language, because why would you only make use of the visual modality when you happen to have access to a pen and writing surface?
Intuitive and non-intuitive findings of systems theory, like what adding a second queue does or increasing the variability of a flow rate or changing the size of a buffer.
Because rationality is not just winning! Its about winning systematically rather than by fluke, about narrowing the diff between reality and your model of it such that the forecasted wins you aim for correspond to actual wins.
Overall agreed that metacognitive is better branding. I like rationality as in-community jargon for the thing that cognition should aim for.
fwiw I don't think rationality has much connotation of agency, except for what it's achieved by dint of association with us.
I don't expect these to go longer than 1.5 hours, though it's possible people want to hang out on the line.
I do kind of see it as being the responsible action, I just do not think this is the same thing as it being the right or even reasonable action.
It's trying to be "responsible" despite not actually having the kind of control over the situation that makes things your responsibility.
Decentralized Networks Thoughts
Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and Dat
Networking can be demonstrated with people as an anology, and it usually works except for how the speeds are magnitudes off and people naturally handle errors more gracefully.
And the way we currently structure internet applications is analogous to, like, a command economy. All the locus of decision exists in one spot, in a server. It may delegate, but it doesn't ever truly *co*-ordinate. And there's no way that's computationally efficient. The internet allows to access a distant computer with our own, and that's *all* we're doing most of the time. It's exactly like having a whole country of self-interested intelligences close to their individual problems, and trying to make a handful of government officials solve it instead. (And remember: computers handle their errors even less gracefully than people do.) We aren't using most of the compute we have at our fingers!
So that's my focus in decentralized technology. Instead of central coordinators, make swarms of individually capable nodes that can interoperate. Put the controls where they can react meaningfully to local conditions.
An example of this is moderation. Social media moderation teams have to deal with SO much shit, all the concentrated filth in the world lands on their head. They can barely keep up. And we *still* need to have a individual blocking & mute tools, because they can't hope to react appropriately to local need.
Contrast this to the moderation models for scuttlebutt and cabal chat
TBC
You could try to start your own ring, there's templates for it on that page, or I could put you down to invite in for the second meeting. (provided we're not full up then)
This is what I wanted Jester's Court to be. An iterated kickstarter for trust and competence, of self and of others.
Didn't have words for it.
anatomy of a summer solstice talk. comments?
anatomy of a solstice talk
- Dig your roots deep, and spread your leaves wide
- We sometimes associate summer with passion, with fire and flash. As we celebrate today, I say lean into this. Let's have fun. Let's have passionate joy. Let's dive head-first into the gut sense of living at its best. Not to stoke burning hot coals of determination, just to enjoy it. Take in the warmth and light for its own sake. Life is not just abstractly good and important, it's viscerally so.
Pretty good theme. Have fun, be wild. I could end my speech there.
Instead, I'll ask you to think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind, I'm gonna speak more about that in a moment.
The other solstice, we often reference the dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. That's an important goal. It's not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, pretty tied to pale blue dot we were born on. And when we leave, we will take much of it with us. Much of it intentionally, because we're sentimental like that, but also it will come in the marks of *the kind of beings it has made us*.
I want summer to be a time that we think about the environment that we live in, how it shapes us and how we shape it. We ought to know the soil we grow in, and know it well. A general purpose rationality must produce local knowledge, specialized to the time and space and life you are living. We must dig our roots deep, and spread our leaves wide.
We talk a lot about the general theory of rational agents. It informs a lot about how to learn true things and make good choices. But we are not the general example of an agent. Our minds did not spring up from first principals. Evolutionary history, cultural memetics, and an academic tradition also inform the way you learn true things and make good choices. That which is at our roots can affect what the truth and good choices even are, thousands of years later, whether you are aware of them or not.
The tree is a metaphor. There are grand forces of optimization that have existed before you, and will exist after you. Seek them out. Use what they can give you. Dig your roots deep.
And spread your leaves wide. Catch every ray of sunlight and harness it. Drink in the present moment, and turn it into something awesome. Plants are often portrayed as passive; that's incorrect. They move. Their movement is more efficient, and slower, but they move a great deal to catch the sun. In the same way, you don't have to chase after every opportunity. You can position yourself well and take in the chances that come your way. Have patience, not passivity. and spread your leaves wide.
Now for the audience participation bit.
- I'll give you five minutes to think. What's something you know about the environments that you live in, or that shaped you? Your city. your ecosystem. Your history. Your economy. Your community. Just write down some facts, or some questions. After those five minutes, I'll take contributions from the audience. With these, I want to paint a collective picture of where we are rooted, and how deeply. This is the first time I'm trying this, so.
- As an example. California is more environmentally conscientious than most US state governemnts. We have a few extra restrictions on cars and plastics. Native tribes maintained the forests around here with regular burns, and I want to know if they maintained the forests in other ways or if they still do in some areas. There's a lot of resentment towards people moving in for jobs who don't really have roots or interests in the people they're displacing, and the rationalist community is a small part of that.
- If you want to share but don't want to speak, write down what you want to say and hand it to someone. It can keep getting passed along until it hits a person willing to read it aloud. It can be anonymous this way, or you can write your name.
- TIME
- I encourage giving silent responses in ASL or gesture. False. True. Yes. No.
- READ
- Another five minutes, let's talk about opportunities. What serendipitous chance might you hope to catch, today? What would you be prepared to act on if it happened?
- TIME
- READ
Have you considered the possibility that people do not list first-order effects to individuals because huge swaths of the political establishment do not actually care about people they don't know?
The water they swim, the air they breathe: Bringing up how something affects the outgroup's feefees is not "obvious" or "direct", it's bringing up Nth-order civil breakdown effects in the most vague and indirect way possible, with figuring out all the critical details left as an exercise for the listener.
We live in a society; aka we have a tenuous contract to be copacetic and trade resources with others. They give the smallest amount of fucks about the outgroup's happiness because an unhappy outgroup may have second-order effects in breaking down civil society with associated third-order effects on them and theirs.
Someone suggested to me recently that, against all appearances and expectations, the Trump Administration not buying enough mRNA vaccine for everyone right off the bat was actually the right call. We knew other vaccines were on the way which had way less exacting distribution conditions and/or were single-dose.
I suspect that proposition is Off in some important way, like the doses weren't enough even to hold out for a switch out, and am curious what thoughts you all have about it.
That's a possibility, sure, but not an overriding one.
Consider the case that your happy price is $5. It's worth it to you to do for free if your friend wants a cake, as it is a small cost for the sake of a friend. How you balance the costs and benefits of maintaining a relationship is up to you.
Y hates baking, and out of typical-minding expected it to be more like $40 when she asked. She can, at that point, just ask you to do her a personal favor on the scale of $5. How scrupulously you follow up on favours and IOUs is also up to you.
How do politics actually happen? I have so few gears in my model. I don't like trying to figure out the object level of what's going on through layers of other people's interpretations and commentary. I want there to be eyes on the ground collecting what's newsworthy from a Gearsy or EA perspective, and for I might as well give it a try it myself. Ground up, by skimming meeting agendas and possibly video feeds to figure out play by play what powerful people are spending their time on.
Of the US Gov, I want to know
What Congress is up to -
What the Senate is up to -What the President is up to -
What the First Lady is up to -
What the VP is up to -What the Executive Office of the President is putting out -
What the supreme court members are up to -
What the US court of appeals is up to -
Still thinking about how to do this, just want the idea on the record.