Warning: this is not in typical LessWrong "style", but nevertheless I think it is of interest to people here.

Most people approach productivity from the bottom up. They notice something about a process that feels inefficient, so they set out to fix that specific problem. They use a website blocker and a habit tracker, but none of these tools address the root problem. Personally, I even went as far as making my own tools, but they yielded only marginally more productive time. I craved more, and I was willing to go as far as it takes. I wanted to solve productivity top down—with a system that would enforce non stop productivity with zero effort on my part.

I had tried less intense “watch you work” solutions before. Sharing a...

1. Don't say false shit omg this one's so basic what are you even doing. And to be perfectly fucking clear "false shit" includes exaggeration for dramatic effect. Exaggeration is just another way for shit to be false.
2. You do NOT (necessarily) know what you fucking saw. What you saw and what you thought about it are two different things. Keep them the fuck straight.
3. Performative overconfidence can go suck a bag of dicks. Tell us how sure you are, and don't pretend to know shit you don't.
4. If you're going to talk unfalsifiable twaddle out of your ass, at least fucking warn us first.
5. Try to find the actual factual goddamn truth together with whatever assholes you're talking to. Be a Chad scout, not a Virgin soldier.
6. One hypothesis is not e-fucking-nough.

I was looking at the specs for the Kia EV6 after someone brought it up in a discussion:

DC Fast Charge Time (10-80% @ 350 kW via Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) Level 3 Charger: Approx. 18 min.

If you're not familiar with EVs or other similar equipment you might think that this draws a constant 350kW, but charging a 77.4 kWh battery from 10-80% at 350kW would take only 9min so it can't be that. Instead, EVs are smart: they communicate with the charger to draw varying amounts of current depending on how quickly the battery can accept charge.

So then you might think that 350kW reflects the peak current the car draws. But no: when P3 Group measured it they found it peaks at 235kW, before throttling back when the battery gets to 50%.

This isn't unique to Kia:...

Changelog:

• 4 Feb 2022: Checklist started, score is 5/10. Updates will be sporadic unless new developments put the virus in the newspaper more often. As always, this data is based on what the virus and society is doing now, though with an eye to future developments.

My current overall assessment is probably common sense:

• Transmissibility: H5N1 can transmit from birds to a wide range of mammalian species. Spread from birds to mammals happens but is rare. However, likely spread between minks at a fur farm is a new and concerning development. If H5N1 became transmissible among humans, while retaining anywhere close to its current deadliness, it could become a civilization-threatening global catastrophe.
• Danger: H5N1 is extremely deadly. It

You've done it. You've built the machine.

You've read the AI safety arguments and you aren't stupid, so you've made sure you've mitigated all the reasons people are worried your system could be dangerous, but it wasn't so hard to do. AI safety seems a tractable concern. You've built a useful and intelligent system that operates along limited lines, with specifically placed deficiencies in its mental faculties that cleanly prevent it from being able to do unboundedly harmful things. You think.

After all, your system is just a GPT, a pre-trained predictive text model. The model is intuitively smart—it probably has a good standard deviation or two better intuition than any human that has ever lived—and it's fairly cheap to run, but it is just a cleverly tweaked GPT,...

Writing down something I’ve found myself repeating in different conversations:

If you're looking for ways to help with the whole “the world looks pretty doomed” business, here's my advice: look around for places where we're all being total idiots.

Look for places where everyone's fretting about a problem that some part of you thinks it could obviously just solve.

Look around for places where something seems incompetently run, or hopelessly inept, and where some part of you thinks you can do better.

Then do it better.

For a concrete example, consider Devansh. Devansh came to me last year and said something to the effect of,  “Hey, wait, it sounds like you think Eliezer does a sort of alignment-idea-generation that nobody else does, and he's limited here by his unusually low stamina, but I...