Posts
Comments
The only comments made by Leverage employees in comparable threads were attempts at reputation management. That alone tells you a lot!
So much of this on this site, it's incredible. Makes me wonder if people are consciously doing it. If they are, then why would they even join this cult in the first place? Personally I've observed that the people who easily join cults are rather very impressionable. Even my wife got duped by a couple of middle aged men. It's a different type of intelligence and skill set than the stuff they employ at colleges and research institutions.
Depression has always been an interesting excuse that people like to pull out of their sleeves. It's quite a general overarching term that gets thrown around easily while on a case by case basis, things are much more complicated. Labeling everything that's not positive as depressive is a bit disingenuous, borderline gaslighting if you will. Such dismissive attitude seems more like a means to an end rather than trying to constructively explain anything in-depth.
How is this not a cult?
Goal: increase the number of people who read EA research
Sure you want people to read about climate change, but those things have extensive peer-reviewed research and have gone through a lot of vetting of information and their reliability. What makes the stuff on this site worthwhile? I truly want to understand why these stuff are worthwhile if people haven't put in the work to verify and vet the content. A lot of fictions and a lot of hypothetical scenarios don't usually lead to legitimacy by themselves. Does this make sense to you?
Established intuitions don't accept these works but I do accept them. That means those institutions must suck and I don't. If you've actually dropped out of those established institutions, then I can definitely see why it might be the case.
Is this not negative?
That's one big question I still haven't been able to answer. Just how meaningful is personal happiness? My guess is that it's very subjective. If that's the case then wouldn't existential meaning be completely subjective? How much objectivity, if any, can we derived out of examining existential meaning in different individuals?
Not every number pulled out of the ass is annotated with that. You are arguing semantics with me while I'm just pointing out a general observation on this website. It's not that hard to verify my observations though. Seems like you are just trying to be defensive rather than providing anything of substance to this discussion. There is definitely not a lack of fictional content on here though, just saying.
Existential meaning. It seems that the individual's existential issues are generally correlated to the outreach of their own existence and the work associated with it. The more people they reach, the more meaningful they feel their work is. I was kind of trapped in this type of mindset for many years, thinking my life must be very meaningful because of how many people I've reached. If my work doesn't reach as many people, or even no one, then it must not be that meaningful. If that's the case, does the content and actual substance of the work mean anything at all? Of course, the meaning of the work itself can be objectively and quantitatively measured, just like many historical achievements in math and sciences. Outside of objectivity, the meaning becomes a lot more ambiguous as we can both live with or without great art works that wouldn't have really affected life in general very much. If you aren't listening or watching one artist, you could be listening or watching another artist. The content itself seems rather irrelevant in that sense.
If that's the case regarding existential meaning, then isn't it just about passing on your jeans?
I often see people pulling random numbers out of their asses on here. No wonder there are so many college dropouts on here if that's how they go about doing research (i.e. The people who introduced me to this website are college dropouts themselves). Does the general public and established institutions take these works seriously? These articles and "research" seem to be rather self-contained in their own niche communities, much less of a public acceptance of their work at large. Makes me wonder just how much of these things are taken seriously outside of these communities themselves.
'My April Fools Day Confession', where he claimed that he actually came from that world and none of his ideas were original.
The god of EA community claiming he's a god that came from a different world. I'm not sure why I have this feeling that the EA community is full of people who are full of themselves, a lot like other echo chambers we see on the web these days. At the end of the day, how is the EA community any different from other online discussion forums with their own communities? Even academia is known for quite a bit of people who are also full of themselves. I guess human conditions are very deeply ingrained in the subconscious.
The study's approach to mysticism seems to be rather qualitative than quantitative, based on self reporting and questionnaires, mostly from members of MAPS, whom probably have certain variables that aren't really controlled for compared to the general population.
Mysticism Scale. This 32-item questionnaire (Hood
1975) contains items that ask participants about past mys-
tical experiences (if any). The Mysticism Scale has been
used in research on the psychology of religion (Spilka et
al. 2003) but has only previously been applied to drug
experiences by Griffiths and colleagues (2006), who used
it to assess psychedelic drug (psilocybin) experiences. The
Mysticism Scale yields a total score based on three dimen-
sions of mystical experience: noetic quality (e.g., “I have
never experienced anything to be divine,” reverse-scored);
introvertive mysticism (e.g., “I have never had an experi-
ence which I was unable to express adequately through lan-
guage,” reverse-scored); and extrovertive mysticism (e.g,
“I have had an experience in which I felt everything in the
world to be part of the same whole”). The items are rated
on a nine-point scale ranging from −4 = “this description
is extremely not true of my own experience or experiences”
through 0 = “I cannot decide” to +4 = “this description is
extremely true of my own experience or experiences.” The
psychometric properties of this scale have been reported to
be sound (Reinert & Steifler 1993).
Yes I think exposure to triggers are very important in validating progress, just like how real skill level is measured by real work produced. That's why I don't really have much of a problem with the methodology employed. Triggers work both ways though if you are open-minded about who's teaching who. You can trigger me but I can't trigger you is bit of hypocrisy though. I don't really mind the one-sided dynamic. All I can say is good luck for the next decades and centuries.
It's more about the applicability of your research in reality. The alignment problem has no issue of being discussed in the nonfictional context. That's why most academic research is focused mostly on nonfiction stuff since the applicability of nonfiction in reality is less convoluted and very straightforward compared to fiction. I've never seen research on fiction being much applicable outside of liberal arts. Maybe I just lack exposure. The EA community is definitely something unique I've not seen even in the university settings. I wouldn't mind if someone can link me to materials that explain the applicability of research and fiction.
Little o is just a tighter bound. I don't know what you are referring to by your statement:
That’s “little ” notation; it’s like big notation, but for things which are small rather than things which are large.
I guess he went back into the cave because he thought he didn't meditate enough because he wanted to hit that dude after he accidentally stepped on his foot? What was he like before he started meditating? How does meditation help him solve the problem of wanting to hit someone because they accidentally stepped on his foot?
That is exactly what I said in another comment about changing your state of mind and nothing else. Suggestions are outside of that change of state of mind. You seemed to be confused about mixing the effects of psychedelics and voodoo/woo/spiritual stuff. I know psychedelics being viewed as something related to spirituality is rather a popular rhetoric among both users and nonusers. The spirituality is what I mean by suggestion. You are suggesting something that has nothing to do with the mechanism of action of the drug.
I don't think psychedelics really do much for most people. I think for those who say they have been fundamentally altered by them most likely have a construed notion/prior before getting into the whole spiel. It's just a means to an end to them. Them thinking that psychedelics would change you fundamentally made them easier to give into the notion that they've fundamentally changed as a result of taking psychedelics rather than the psychedelics being part of the entire psychological journey they are going through, regardless of whether psychedelics were involved. Psychedelics are well known for its effect of being open to suggestions. I think that's ultimately what happened. If you weren't going to suggest to yourself in the first place or have someone else suggest to you, you wouldn't have thought of the trip as something special.
spent years and years alone in a cave
A young boy standing in front of the yogi stepped back suddenly in fright—stomping right on the yogi’s bare foot. The yogi, angered and in pain, raised his walking staff to strike the youngster.
What did he do all those years? Seems a bit absurd to me.
The empathetic part probably comes from disconnecting oneself from personal human interactons that allow you to see people in a different light rather than how we see them when we interact with them. You are looking at the human society from the outside rather than how others affect your own interactions with them. It's a form of detachment that allows you to stop being emotionally invested in your interactions and opinions on fellow human beings. When you aren't emotionally invested, it's not difficult to see people as mere animals with their own human conditions and tendencies. You are able to liken others to yourself whereas in normal social interactions or mindset we think of others as completely independent agents with their own autonomous agencies. If they win over a girl, that means you aren't able to be with that girl. The guy is seen as an adversary who takes away your resource for happiness, the girl. Looking from the outside allows you to realize that that dude is just like you, looking for a girl being a source of happiness. That's where the empathy comes from, realizing we are more or less the same and share more or less the same thoughts and going about our days in more or less the same ways.
When you aren't personally involved in some drama, it's a lot easier to see just how silly it is.
He's written so many fictional stuff, which made the EA community quite confusing coming off as research focused work.
I don't think I was advocating for either. I apologize if I came off as saying people should try psychedelics and meditation.
Pain, like money, is a measurable metric compared to skill level which is a much more abstract set of metrics to be measured on. We generally use tests and competitions to measure skill level, but during the personal growth period where those options aren't accessible, people tend to equate suffering as a result of learning to measure progress. Like you said, it's not very reliable since there is really no correlation between pain and skill level. Also your speed of learning can change how much time/enjoyment/suffering you go through as you learn, but ultimately real progress can only be measured by putting those knowledge and skills to work. That's why grades don't really matter after finishing school. There are better and more practical measures of your ability than some tests somebody came up with.
Psychedelics, woo, and meditation are very separate stuff. They are often used in conjunction with each other due to popularity and the context some of these things are discussed along with each other. Buddhism has incorporated meditation into its woo while other religions have mostly focused on group based services in terms of talking about their woos.
I like how some commenters have grouped psychedelics and meditation separate of the woo stuff, but it was a bit surprising to me to see Eliezer dismissing psychedelics along with woo in the same statements. He probably hasn't taken psychedelics before. Meditation is quite different as in it's more of a state of mind as opposed to an altered mentality. With psychedelics there is a clear distinction between when you are tripping and when you aren't tripping. With meditation, it's not so clear when you are meditating and when you aren't. Woo is just putting certain ideas into words, which has nothing to do with different mindset/mentalities.
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don't deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should've explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual elements, or leaf nodes. The sets themselves don't interact directly with the leaf nodes, but they determine the relationships that leaf nodes form by just the set of leaf nodes themselves. They would have their own relationship graph. You have 3 different types of scenarios where the relationship between the sets significantly changes the relationships of the leaf nodes. 1. all leaf nodes exist within the smaller set. 2 Some leaf nodes are inside the smaller set and some outside, which breaks down to whether outside leaf nodes also form sets of their own. 3. All leaf nodes are outside of the smaller set (i.e. in the allegory, that's when the cave people went outside, which marks the end of the allegory). You can think of these 3 different scenarios as separate, or you can think of them as one snapshot of a temporal progression. This pattern can be imposed on human civilization to explain the relationships within it.
I wouldn't say that it explains the moral machinery. It's more of an observation science than an inferential or inductive/deductive process. The "just" is denoting the subset nature of moral machinery existing within the overarching concept of human civilization and development. The allegory of the cave concept is also a paradigm from which you can think about the set theory perspective of human civilization.
The moral machinery is just an manifestation of social hierarchy and societal structure that took civilizations thousands of years to distill into its current form. You can point to the perpetual process at any given time in history and study what came before and what happened after. As individuals, we make up the atomic elements of such hierarchy, so for us personally it's merely a exercise in understanding the underlying fundamental concepts behind the allegory of the cave.
First have a better idea of what you want to get out of reading. Entertainment: fictions. Knowledge: non-fictions. Current event update: news. Social discussions: social media (e.g. LW, Reddit, Facebook, etc.). Once you know what you are looking for exactly, or what kind of experience you are looking for, then you don't end up wasting your time on doing things that you don't consider productive.
When you take a break, I assume you just want some bite-sized, easily digestible content. News aren't really good with that stuff since it's mostly repetitive and mostly inconsequential in your own daily life.
A fun thing to do is to come up with questions yourself. What do you really want to learn about? What are you interested in finding out? Then come up with an approach to answering those questions for yourself or at least a guideline for how you want to look for information. This will make your break from work reading more fulfilling.
Before the internet, people are pretty much limited to whatever is available in their local libraries and more. With internet, we are still only looking around places that are more easily accessible, but other sources and sites are only a few clicks and searches away.
Mindless indulgence is never as satisfying as mindful indulgence, but there is nothing wrong with mindless indulgence if you don't really have anything to look for. It's more about how many years you've spent mindlessly wandering around as opposed to whether you are actively researching something at the present, which essentially may lead to questions like yours/this because of existential dissatisfaction.
If you had the choice of not having sex but get to have your donated sperm fertilized vs having sex but never be able to have your own biological children, what would you choose?
Alignment is always contextual in regards to the social norms at the time. We've not had AI for that long so people assume that the alignment problem is a solve it once for all type of thing instead of an ever changing problem.
It's very similar in nature as in how they test new technologies for mass adoption. Things have been massively adopted before their safety is thoroughly researched, but you can only do so much before the demand for their necessity and people's impatience push for their ubiquity, like asbestos and radiation. When we fail to find alternatives for the new demands, it will be massively adopted regardless of their consequences. AI can be thought of as just an extension of computers, specialized to certain tasks. The technology itself is fundamentally the same, how it's been used is mostly what's been changing because of the improved efficiency. The technology, computer, has seen mass adoption already, but it's no longer the same computers as people were using 30 or even 20 years ago. Most new technologies are even as close to multipurpose as the computer, so we are dealing with an unprecedented type of mass adoption event in human history where the technology itself is closely tied to how it's been used and its ever changing nature of the type of computations people at the time decide to use them for.
This is all you can do in such type of scenarios:
observational study draws inferences from a sample to a population where the independent variable is not under the control of the researcher because of ethical concerns or logistical constraints.
Correlations and causation don't really work the same way as controlled scenarios, which makes it hard for rationalists who have little exposure outside of their expertise and way of thinking.
Observational studies, for lacking an assignment mechanism, naturally present difficulties for inferential analysis.
That can be said about any period in life. It's just a matter of perspective and circumstances. The best years are never the same for different people.
Most people remember their childhoods as a period of joy and their college years as some of the best of their lives.
This seems more anecdotal, and people becoming jaded as they grow older is a similar assertion in nature
Social deduction games
- with clear final objectives: Mafia, Tank Tactics, Neptune's Pride. These games have clear winning conditions, thus final objectives for the players. The meta objectives are open ended, which gives the players a more opened way to play the game. These games have very little rules and mechanics to limit how the game would be played.
- with ambiguous final objectives: Petrov Day, Reddit's The Button. These games have no clear winning conditions, thus the final objectives are open ended. They are the same as above, with little rules and open ended playing styles for the players. The main difference is that there is no final objective, which in turn may change how players play them open endedly, but the overall playing style is more or less the same. They usually call these social experiments for the lack of clearly defined final objectives.
- rules can be directly changed: Nomic and variants. These are basically social deduction games that break the 4th wall. The open endedness have been applied to not just the gameplay but also to directly modifying the game to various extent. If the rules can be followed arbitrarily, then the game moves closer to simulating real life.
- No rules, no objectives: Real life. This is Nomic where everything is arbitrary. The actual limitations we are dealing with are the constraints of reality and the survival of the players themselves in the real world.
- No rules, no objectives, nothing is real: Simulation theory, the Matrix. This is basically the turtles all the way down concept to however many levels you wish to go.
Single player games vs multiplayer games. Single player games are the most restrictive form of gaming. NPCs are limited because mainly they can't play the meta and anything beyond that. You can follow the similar breakdown above for single player games too, but they wouldn't be as interesting for the lack of multiplayer component to form the meta and beyond.
Yes doubts are useless if you don't look to answer them yourself. Most of the time, they can't be fully confirmed based on your own investigation because the collective knowledge is a lot more exhaustive than your own ability and time spent on looking at a few sources for answer. We all more or less share the same access to the same information that are available to us. Like they say about a new startup idea, it's probably been done already. Only very rarely you see something brand new that's not done before, and usually those are very domain specific because there just aren't enough people looking into that specific subject.
It takes time for new research and findings to make it into textbooks and curriculum despite the fact universities are churning out new research all the time. What we learn in school are knowledge that have already been distilled and organized into digestible forms that allow students to easily pick them up. If you want to learn things outside of what school provides, you have to do your own novel research, just like the research they do in universities and research labs. They have monetary incentives to drive the work and keep the cogs churning. Most people don't really have the time and dedication to produce the same quality of work from their own research and investigations.
Society is structured in a way where people either work or relax. When people do work, they are incentivized to put in the minimum amount of effort for the maximum amount of pay and corporate hierarchy status. The incentives therefore aren't directly aligned with quality but with resources gains of the individuals and the corporations they form. The pace that modern society is advancing at definitely is very sub-optimal, which is only limited by our own human conditions.
Having doubts is crucial for better investigations. How you address those doubts and to what extend you address them dictate the success and practicality of your investigations. Some doubts are more easily solvable than others, but doubts are usually not really the direct focus of your investigations but of supplementary materials that can potentially change the course of of your methodology. It can affect how you value your work and what areas you think would be worthwhile to focus on in your future work.
I firmly believe that having doubts is better than not having them. It's one of the core component of thinking outside of the box so to speak. Everything in moderation suggests that there can be a breaking point in having too many unrelated doubts that would hinder your own progress as you get lost in the sea of possibilities. Doubts essentially guide us in whether we think of our own pursuits as something that's fruitful or futile. How we deal with the importance of certain doubts vs others is an art in and of itself.
Definitely eye tracking, else people wouldn't have given me so much shit about my picture folder. I mean I don't even block my front facing camera on my phone anymore. Well good for them with their camera technology.
It takes extra resource to grow up and learn all the stuff that you've learned like K-12 and college education. You can't guarantee that the new person will be more efficient in using resources to grow than the existing person.
Why not? Each model is basically its own hypothesis.
Feels like I would expose my motivation system too much, and make myself vulnerable to possible manipulation.
Definitely. You should take precautions when people make themselves known as your adversary, either implicitly or explicitly each would amount to different counter strategies of course.
Personally, I've separated internally and externally influenced pride. Over time I've found that the externally influenced pride is of little to no value since people are very different from each other. Unless your sole focus is on social status and standings, then external influence is not a really good pathway/guideline for your own growth and personal journey. My proudest moments always correlate to the amount of effort I put into each and my own ability to find solutions and answers to questions that I have. How much you value internal vs external influences depend on your own circumstance and the thought patterns you've developed both consciously and subconsciously as a result of such circumstance. It's nice to hear what others have to say about themselves and what motivate them as they are inspirations for your own journey if they align with your personal path in life.
The more confirmations the better. They contribute different amount to each hypothesis. Then you narrow it down based on your margin of confidence.
What drove you to write this reply?
Communal sadism and the inability to recognize and control one's own primal urges. The outlet does not tame those urges but driving them toward their manifestations, giving form of those emotions and thoughts into actions. Warfare is the most extreme display of such human nature, but things like sports and fight for social status are also just different sides of the same coin. There is a very fine line between engaging in those activities for the sake of passive enjoyment and the desire to make winners and losers. Just look at competitive video games. The only healthy way to engage in those activities is when you have no desire to win whatsoever. The moment you care about winning, it becomes merely a means to an end.
It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence
In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic impulses.
I agree. You should leave professional issues to the professionals, else it's either a waste of time or you are trying to get a superficial glimpse of certain topic, which is fine if it's not toxic. The problem with politics is that it's too toxic for social interactions. The moment you get someone else involved with you on this garbage, you are doing them a disservice. You don't know how they can handle toxicity. There are better things to do in life. You have the freedom to waste your own time and swim in your own toxic waste, but getting someone else to swim in your own garbage with you is just fucking pathetic. But that's what social media is all about, getting others involved in whatever you are discussing. Most real life interactions based on real life relationships are a lot healthier than how strangers engage each other online. There is a lot more to lose in real life than online.
I know I'm bad at this too. I need to be more aware of my own participation even though I may not think it's negative, such as giving my own conjecture on 2008 financial crisis and related world events. I have no background education on those topics. Even though I may feel like I've read enough about those, I need the humility to help me know better, which is why I'm going back to poetry writing now, the more obscure and detached from reality it is, the better for the mental health of the readers and writers involved given my own personal circumstances and social implications however unfortunate this circumstance may be.
It's just a means to an end for most people. The end is solidarity and gaining social status and self-esteem within their solidarity circle. Are they really making any real impact through their participation? Even if they do "research," they are just extracting results that others have gathered. They don't actually have any access to the institutions directly related to those issues, whether it's CDC or DoD. If they did have a role in those institutions, they wouldn't be participating in layman discussion outside of their profession in the first place. Do you really see professional politicians or medical researchers directly engaging the public regarding their job or research on social media outside of a few instances of Reddit AMA?
Monsters usually refer to the concept of threats to survival. Before we could form societies and wall off our dwellings, we had to live among other wild life and other tribes that might threaten our ability to survive. Nowadays these threats are much more abstract and elusive. It's really the changing temporal context that makes things much more nuanced on a case by case basis. Monsters such as slavery is a threat to the survival of a subgroup just like politically incorrect speech only threaten a subgroup as well. Humanity is much more stratified now than back when we lived in caves. Modern civilization is still much a transparent monster to the survival and preservation of lifestyles of indigenous tribes all over the world. They've achieved certain ecological equilibrium with nature for awhile now but have to worry about the invasiveness of the modern man.
Your experience is certainly valid. I was making a generalization in comparison to relationship with a sexual reproduction partner.
I was referring to the fact that the ancestors of sapiens probably didn't live in tribes but have developed sexual reproduction. It is also possible that the ability to feel emotions only developed after we have adopted the tribal lifestyle.
The association transitivity is applied on the individual level rather than on the ideas of the individuals. Most individual's beliefs and thoughts may remain almost static through time, and maybe it became the default level of association transitivity because of it.
As you said that actually being uncertain really doesn't happen because the development of concrete world view is important for survival as the person grows up from childhood. Schools certainly don't focus much on uncertainty itself. It has to be derived from the individual's own willingness to seek out alternatives and develop the habit of uncertainty mindset by reading a bit too much.
Society at large don't encourage uncertainty mainly because it is inefficient to apply on a massive scale. It would lead to too much chaos and misunderstanding. People wouldn't be able to communicate effectively. Having the luxury to be uncertain is not something most people can afford, which would lead to a very different type of societal structure and interoperability.
As a result, we apply the association transitivity on the individuals because ideas themselves are too ephemeral.
I do think a lot of it comes from evolutionary imperatives. Sex came before tribes. Platonic friendships come and go but we don't really feel emotionally hurt from them. Polyamory is a mixture of those two main types of interpersonal relationships. For polyamory to become the default, the very foundation of society has to change for children to grow up and develop a very different set of normative behaviors. Of course other aspects of life would change along with it such as who makes money for the family, the institutions that people develop their world view and grow up in such as school and workplace, etc. The current structure of our societal institutions came out of those ancient paradigms of interpersonal relationships as the distinct concept of school and workplace has existed in almost identical forms for a very long time.