Alex K. Chen (parrot)

Extremely neophilic. Much of my content is on Quora (I was the Quora celebrity). I am also on forum.quantifiedself.com (people do not realize how alignment-relevant this is), rapamycin.news/latest, and crsociety.org

https://linktr.ee/simfish

...People say the craziest things about me, because I'm a peculiar star...

I care about neuroscience (esp human intelligence enhancement) and reducing genetic inequality. The point of transhumanism is to transcend genetic limitations - to reduce the fraction of variance of outcome explained by genetics. I know loads of people in self-experimentation communities (people in our communities need to be less risk-averse if we have to make any difference in our probability of "making it"). When we are right at "the precipice", traditionalism cannot win (I am probably the least traditionalist person ever). I get along well with the unattached.

Slowing human compute loss from reducing microplastics/pollution/noise/rumination/aging rate are alignment-relevant (insofar as the most tractable way of "human enhancement" is to slow decline with age + make human thinking clearer). As is tFUS. I aim to do all I can to make biology keep up with technology. Reconfiguring reward functions to reward "wholesome/growthful/novel tasks over "the past" [you are aged when you think too much of the past].

Alignment through integrating all the diverse skillsets (including those who are not math/CS geniuses) and integrating all their compute + not making them waste time/attention on "dumb things" + making people smarter/more neuroplastic (this is a hard problem, but 40Hz-tACS [1] might do a little).

Unschooling is also alignment-relevant (most value is destroyed in deceptive alignment, and school breeds deceptive alignment). As is inverting "things that feel unfun".

Chaotic people may depend more on a sense of virtue than others, but it takes a lot to get people to trust a group of people/make themselves authentic when school has taken out much of their authenticity. Some people don't lose much or get much emotional damage from it (I've noticed it from several who dropped out of school for alignment), but some people get way more, and this is a way easier problem to solve than directly increasing human intelligence.

I like Dionysians. However, I had to cut back after accidentally destroying an opportunity (a friend having egged me onto being manic...)

Breadth/context produces unique compute value of its own

https://twitter.com/InquilineKea 
facebook.com/simfish

I have a Twitter alt.

I trigger exponential growth trajectories in some. I helped seed the original Ivy League Psychedelics communities and am very good friends with Qualia Research Institute people (though I cannot try them much now, they do have a lot of experimental energy that can be further reconfigured towards tACS)

Main objectives: not get sad, not get worked out over dumb things, not making my life harder than it is now.

I really like https://www.lesswrong.com/users/bhauth. Zvi is smart too https://www.lesswrong.com/users/zvi?from=post_header

[1] there are negative examples too

Wiki Contributions

Comments

Worth following for his take (and YouTube videos he is creating): https://x.com/jacobrintamaki

[he's creating something around this]

What are your scores on the US Economic Experts Comparison (Interactive Matrix)?

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/economist-comparison-interactive-matrix/

How about people who just don't "give a fuck", are Nishkama Karma, and maintain emotional composure even when they create disharmony (sometimes even chaos) in the environment around them? They are graceful on the inside, and maintain internal composure in the face of chaos, but others may view their movements as ungraceful particularly b/c they have the sense (and enough of a reality distortion field) to "make the world adapt to them", rather than "adapt to the world" (if they succeed, they make the world adapt to them such that the world around them becomes more harmonious long-term after the initial reduction in harmony [due to the clumsiness of the world learning to adapt to them]). It takes time to learn grace, and when choosing the ordering of vital skills to learn, grace is often learned later than skills one has comparative advantage in.

[in the long run, learning to read a room is one of the best ways of developing grace, though it matters more if one is ultra-famous than when one is mostly unknown and can afford to experiment with consequence-free failure]

(asking questions that appear dumb to some people can also be "ungraceful" to the audience, even if important. the strategic among that crowd will just have good enough models of everyone to know who the safest people are to ask the "dumb questions" to)

Sometimes, the fastest way to learn is to create faster feedback loops around yourself ("move fast and break things"). The phrase "move fast and break things" appears disharmonious/ungraceful, but (if done in a limited way that "takes profits" before turning into full-blown mania), can be one of the fastest ways of achieving a more harmonious broader state, even when creating some local chaos/disharmony.

People who appear to have high levels of grace can also be extremely dangerous because they can get people to trust them to the very end, especially if their project is an inherently destabilizing project. Ideally, you want a 1-1 correspondence between authenticity/robustness/lack of brittleness and grace, but people's perception of gracefulness at all levels is not high enough for the perception of gracefulness to be the most reliable perception.

Having grace often means doing "efficient calculations" without being explicit about these calculations. It's like keeping your words to yourself and not revealing your cards unless necessary (explicit calculations are clumsy/clunky). Sometimes, a proper understanding of Strauss is necessary to develop grace in some environments (what you say is not what you really mean, except to the readers who have enough context to jump all the layers of abstraction - it may also be needed to communicate unobvious messages in environments where discretion is important)

Patience is also grace (and not getting into situations that cause you to "lose control"/be impatient/exciteable/manic OR do things out of order). At the same time, there are ways of turning a reputation of ditching meetings into gracefulness (after all, most meetings do last longer than needed, as Yishan Wong once mentioned) [some projects also require a high deal of urgency, potentially including eras of accelerated AGI timelines]

Having the appearance of "whatever happens, happens" is graceful. As someone who knows many in the longevity community, I know that having the appearance of "fearing death" or "wanting to live forever" is super-ungraceful (and gives PR image problems in its ungracefulness). There are some people in longevity who are closet immortalists who can appear graceful because they don't appear as if they care that much about whether or not they live forever. In a similar way, doomerism about AI is extremely ungraceful (though those who are closeted doomers/immortalists can sometimes be secretly graceful to those who are less closeted about these things).

Things that are not the most graceful: over-correcting/over-compensating, irritability, appearing emotional enough to lose control, constantly seeking feedback (implies lack of confidence), visibly chasing likes, obsessing over intermediate computations/near-term reinforcement loops, "people pleasing" (esp when one is obvious about it), perseverating, laughing at one's own jokes, not being steadfast, not knowing when to stop (autistics are prone to this..), going for the food too early (semaglutide can help with grace..) Autistic people often lack grace, though some are able to develop it really well over long timescales.

Grace is having confidence over the process without becoming too attentive to short-term reinforcement/feedback loops (this includes patience as part of the process).

As with everything else, intelligence makes grace easier (and makes it possible to learn some things gracefully), but there is enough variation in grace that one can more than make up for lower intelligence with context+grace+strategic awareness. There is also loss of grace with older ages as working memory decline can increase impatience (Richard Posner said writing ability is the last to go, but that's because there's no real time observation of the process, and there's grace in observing the dynamics).

Wow, and Mexico's fertility rate just plunged to 1.82

Isn't that a non-disparagement clause, not a NDA?

This is a very promising start on some thesis (that could go further into the theory of computation/sid mani content/https://lifeiscomputation.com/), but the "intelligence growth curves" are not very intuitive. I wager that dimensionality is more important than number of elements in determining intelligence growth curves and especially number of discontinuous jumps.

Why does F^4_65's intelligence peak out at such a low value at time 2040? Why does 's intelligence peak out at a lower value than equal-dimensional fields with fewer elements in them?

at some point it may have to incorporate quality/diversity/taste, not just size

Has anyone tried Visia skin analysis to get feedback loops on skinhealth? (they reveal WAY more than just pictures) The problem with camera images is that visible light doesn't capture fine lines or wrinkles. My skin SEEMS to look as perfect as that of a 12-year old on the outside, but there is some small amount of wrinkling under my eyes that a visia reveals (which is why this thread prompted me to finally get dermatica tretonin) 

Collagen peptides also can help increase collagen synthesis and relieve fine lines (it's my biggest pet peeve b/c I can't stand ingesting animal products, and this is the only thing Bryan Johnson will ditch veganism for). And it's really irritating that there isn't more vegan collagen available. 

Newt Gingrich started out as an environmentalist (and a former member of the Sierra Club), but later turned away from it.

Even after he left congress, he still had some sympathy for environmental issues, as he wrote the book "Contract with Earth" (with an EO Wilson forward). 

Newt can be surprisingly high openness - a person oriented towards novelty can be pro-drilling (accel), pro-geoengineering, and pro-environment (which can be decel), and maybe not reconcile the two together in the most consistent way. He has been critical of both parties on climate change/environment issues (just as Mitt Romney has been, who scores low on the LCV but who really does care about addressing climate change, just not in the "punitive" way that the Democrats want to see it addressed). Free-market environmentalists who do care have different approaches that might on the surface be seen as riskier (just as making use of more energy gives you more resources to address the problem faster even while pumping more entropy into the system).

But his high openness (for a Republican) seems to have also made him more stochastic, or inconsistent.

The book generated a storm of media attention in late 2007 and early 2008 as the U.S. presidential campaign began to heat up. Gingrich in particular made numerous media appearances arguing that the Republican Party was losing popular support because their response to environmental policy was simply, as he put it, "NO!" Maple toured the country as Gingrich's stand-in, most notably before the Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP, www.repamerica.org) during their annual meeting (at which John McCain was endorsed as the most "green" of the Republican presidential candidates). In 2008 Gingrich published another book that advocated oil drilling, Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less, and many pundits called his environmental commitment into question. However, this book's fifth chapter provided an argument for environmental protection. Like many aspects of Gingrich's career, his interest in environmental issues has generated controversy.

https://archive.ph/LsZeh

Ronald Reagan was surprisingly pro-environment as governor of California (Gavin Newsom even spoke about it when he visited China), but later was seen as anti-environmental by environmental groups as president (esp due to his choices of Secretary of the Interior) and his generally pro-industry choices. George H.W. Bush was surprisingly pro-environment in his first 2 years (ozone, acid rain..), but was advised to no longer be pro-environment b/c it would not sit well with his base..

worth reading: https://kansaspress.ku.edu/blog/2021/10/13/when-democrats-and-republicans-united-to-repair-the-earth/

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the LCV seems to take the view that all drilling/resource extraction (or industry) is bad, but it still is done somewhere, and if not done in America, is just outsourced elsewhere. This still has the effect of reducing pollution in the US (as outsourcing manufacturing has done), which has made America's PM2.5 values lower than those of all but a few countries.

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Now that CA appears likely to pass SB-1047, it seems more probable that Republican states will go against it (simply because they, esp Desantis [who valorizes not being CA], want to "own the libs" - esp as @BasedBeffJezos notices). 

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