Sometimes I stumble across a strange genre of writing on the internet.

From GameB Home:

We're gaining the power of gods, but without the love, wisdom and discernment of gods—that is a self-extinctionary scenario. Welcome to Game B, a transcontextual inquiry into a new social operating system for humanity. Game A is what got us to this time of metacrisis and collapse. Game B is what emerges in response. Come play with us as we learn to become wiser, together, gain coherence and begin to move towards a new social operating system emphasizing human wellbeing, metastability, and built on good values that we will be happy to call home and we will be proud to leave to our descendants.

From Bryan Johnson's Blueprint:

The enemy is Entropy. The path is Goal Alignment via building your Autonomous Self; enabling compounded rates of progress to bravely explore the Zeroth Principle Future and play infinite games.

If you've also done random walks through cyberspace you might have read this kind of language in some deep corner of the internet as well. It's characteristically esoteric and stuffed with complex vocabulary. I can tell that the writers have something in mind when they're writing it – that they're not totally off the rails – but it still comes off as spiritual nonsense.

Look, I get it! Rationalist writing is stuffed with jargon and machine learning analogies, and self-help books feature businessy pseudoframeworks and vapid motivational prose. It's okay for your field to have its own linguistic subculture! But when you try to dress up your galaxy brain insights in similarly galaxy brain vocabulary, you lose me.

This kind of writing makes me uncomfortable in a way I can't put into words, like the feeling one gets when they look at a liminal photograph. Maybe because it's harder for me to judge the epistemics of the writing. I feel it trying to unfairly hijack the part of my brain which measures the insightfulness of text by presenting itself as mystical, like forbidden knowledge I've finally revealed. But if these insights were really all that, they'd have the balls to present themselves candidly!

Yes, metaphors and complex language are sometimes necessary to get your point across and make text engaging. In Cyborgism, @janus writes:

Corridors of possibility bloom like time-lapse flowers in your wake and burst like mineshafts into nothingness again. But for every one of these there are a far greater number of voids–futures which your mind refuses to touch. Your Loom of Time devours the boundary conditions of the present and traces a garment of glistening cobwebs over the still-forming future, teasing through your fingers and billowing out towards the shadowy unknown like an incoming tide.

But unlike the previous examples, this beautifully flowery depiction of GPT-assisted writing works because it's clearly demarcated within a more down-to-earth post. Good insights survive scrutiny even when nude.

an analogy between longtermism and lifespan extension

One proposition of longtermism is that the extinction of humanity would be especially tragic not just because of the number of people alive today who would die, but because this would eliminate the possibility for astronomical numbers of future people to exist. This implies that humanity should reprioritize resources away from solving near term problems and towards safeguarding itself from extinction.^[1]

On a personal level, I have a chance of living to experience the longevity escape velocity, at which point anti-aging technology would be so advanced that I would only die due to accidents rather than natural factors. I may live for thousands of years, and these years would be much better than my current life because of improvements in general quality of life. Analogous to the potential of many future generations, this future would be so awesome for me that I should be willing to sacrifice a lot to increase the chance that it happens.

I could follow a version of Bryan Johnson’s "Blueprint" lifestyle for around $12,000 per year, which he designed to slow or reverse aging as much as possible. This might not be worth it. Suppose this protocol would extend my expected lifespan by 20%, but the extra $12,000 per year, if spent elsewhere, would increase my quality of life by 30%. This would mean I could gain more (quality of life × lifespan) by spending that money elsewhere.^[2]

However, lifestyle interventions which, if I followed for the rest of my life, would increase my expected lifespan by 20%, would actually increase my expected lifespan by much more than 20% because our knowledge of how to extend lifespan increases as time passes. In other words, spending money on lifestyle interventions to promote longevity instead of quality of life increases the chance that I live to experience longevity escape velocity, so it may be worth it.

society spending resources on neartermist issues : me spending money on immediate quality of life :: society spending money on longtermist issues : me spending money on lifespan extension

Ideally, a competitive market would drive the price of goods close to the price of production, rather than the price that maximizes revenue. Unfortunately, some mechanisms prevent this.

One is the exploitation of the network effect, where a good is more valuable simply because more people use it. For example, a well-designed social media platform is useless if it has no users, and a terrible addictive platform can be useful if it has many users (Twitter).

This makes it difficult to break into a market and gives popular services the chance to charge what people will pay instead of the minimum amount required to keep the lights on. Some would say this is the price that things should be, but I disagree. Life should be less expensive for consumers, and diabetic people shouldn't need to pay an arm and a leg for insulin.

Or maybe I'm just seething that I just willingly paid $40 for a month's access to a dating app's "premium" tier 🤢.

Yes, the increased chance that I find a good person to date in the next month is worth ≥$40 to me. It's still the most efficient way to discover and filter through other single people near me. But I doubt it costs this much to maintain a dating app, even considering that the majority of people don't pay for the premium tier.

The other thing that irks me about the network effect is that I don't always like the thing that matches the puclic's revealed preferences. I think this dating app is full of dark patterns – UI tricks that make it as addicting as possible. And it encourages shallow judgement of people. I would truly rather see people's bio front and center, rather than their face, and I want them to have more space to talk about themselves. I wish I could just fill out a survey on what I'm looking for and be matched with the right person. Alas, OKCupid has fallen out of fashion, so instead I must dodge dark patterns and scroll past selfies because human connection has been commercialized.

Does anyone know whether added sugar is bad for you if you ignore the following points?

1. It spikes your blood sugar quickly (it has a high glycemic index)
2. It doesn't have any nutrients, but it does have calories
3. It does not make you feel full, so it makes it easier to eat more calories, and
4. It increases tooth decay.

I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out what carbohydrate-dense foods to eat when I'm bulking. I find it difficult to cram in enough calories per day, so most of my calories come from fat and protein at the moment. I'm not getting enough carbs. But most "carby foods for bulking" (e.g. potatoes, rice) are very filling! E.g., a cup of rice has 200 kcal, but a cup of nuts has 800.

I did some stats to figure out what carby foods have a low glycemic index but also a low satiation index, i.e. how quickly they make you feel full. My analysis showed that sponge cake was a great choice, having a glycemic index of only 40 while being the least filling of all the foods I analyzed!

But common sense says that cake would be classified as a "dirty bulk" food, which I'm trying to avoid. If it's not dirty for its glycemic index, what makes it dirty? Is it because cake has a "dirty" kind of fat, or is there something bad about sugar besides its glycemic index?

Just going off of the points I listed, eating cake to bulk up isn't "dirty", except for tooth decay. That's because

1. Cake has a low glycemic index, I think because it has a lot of fat?
2. I would be getting enough nutrients from the rest of what I eat; cake would make up the surplus.
3. The whole point of me eating cake is to get more calories, so this point is nil.

What am I missing?

Concision is especially important for public speakers

If I was going to give a talk in front of 200 people, it being 1 minute unnecessarily less consise wastes ~3 hours of the audience's time in total, so I should be willing to spend up to 3 hours to change that.

Maybe someone should make a dating app for effective altruists, where people can indicate which organizations they work for / which funds they receive, and conflicts of interest are automatically detected. Potential solution to the conflict between professional and romantic relationships in this weird community. Other ideas:

• Longer profiles, akin to dating docs
• Calendly date button
• OK Cupid-style matching algorithm, complete with data such as preferred cause area
• Tools for visualizing your polycule graph
• Built-in bounties or prediction markets to incentize people to match-make
• A feature which is just a clone of reciprocity.io, where you can anonymously indicate who you'd be open to dating and if two people indicate each other, they both get notified

This is half a joke and half serious. At least it's an interesting design challenge. How would you design the ideal dating app for a unique community without traditional constraints like "must be gamified to make people addicted", "needs a way to be profitable", "must overcome network effects", and "users aren't open-minded to strange features"?

Prioritizing subjects to self-study (advice wanted)

I plan to do some self-studying in my free time over the summer, on topics I would describe as "most useful to know in the pursuit of making the technological singularity go well". Obviously, this includes technical topics within AI alignment, but I've been itching to learn a broad range of subjects to make better decisions about, for example, what position I should work in to have the most counterfactual impact or what research agendas are most promising. I believe this is important because I aim to eventually attempt something really ambitious like founding an organization, which would require especially good judgement and generalist knowledge. What advice do you have on prioritizing topics to self-study and for how much depth? Any other thoughts or resources about my endeavor? I would be super grateful to have a call with you if this is something you've thought a lot about (Calendly link). More context: I'm a undergraduate sophomore studying Computer Science.

So far, my ordered list includes:

1. Productivity
2. Learning itself
3. Rationality and decision making
4. Epistemology
5. Philosophy of science
6. Political theory, game theory, mechanism design, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, analytic philosophy, forecasting, economics, neuroscience, history, psychology...
7. ...and it's at this point that I realize I've set my sights too high and I need to reach out for advice on how to prioritize subjects to learn!

Sometimes I notice that people in communities formed around an attribute display a higher intensity of that attribute than one'd expect – here's my hypothesis for why this might be.

1. Selection effects: if you pluck a random person from the gym, they will probably be more of a fitness enthusiast than the average person who regularly goes to the gym, because more enthusiastic exercisers work out more often, so you're more likely to have picked them. So if you peer across the gym room, you'll see a bunch of super buff people – not because the average person who goes to the gym is super buff, but because super buff people go to the gym more frequently.
2. Evaporative cooling: out of every student at my university who would attend its queer pride club at least sometimes (set $Q$), some are just on the edge of interest. One of them ($Q_1$) attends a club social and observes a subset $Q^{\prime }\subset Q$: the people who actually showed up. The average member of this subset are more enthusiastic about queer culture than the superset, dissuading $Q_1$ from attending future meetings (they don't fit in) and strengthening the average enthusiasm of members in $Q^{\prime }$.

rational vanity

epistemic status: literal shower thought, uncertain

Gaining social status and becoming more attractive are useful goals because more attractive and higher-status people are treated better (see Halo Effect) and because they increase one's self-confidence. But the desire to improve on these fronts is seen as vain, as a negative virtue. I think there are three reasons this could be:

1. Our evolutionary ancestors who sought status were more likely to have children, so this desire is biologically hardwired into us. Someone who takes action to increase their status might be doing so out of a cold, rational calculation that says it would help them to achieve their goals, but it's more likely that they're doing it because it feels good.
2. Often, out of this irrational motivation, people take actions which increase their status but aren't useful in achieving their goals. For example, buying a fancy, expensive car probably isn't worth the money because there are more efficient ways to convert money into status and it might make one come off as extravagant and douchey instead of classy.
3. Status and attractiveness are zero-sum games because they only mean anything in relation to other people. Everyone buying cosmetic plastic surgery would be a waste of surgeons' time because humanity wouldn't be better off overall.^[1] This means that spending resources to move up the status ladder is like defecting against the rest of humanity (see tragedy of the commons). To prevent people from defecting, society established a norm of judging negatively those who are clearly chasing status, and so people have to be sneaky about it. They either have to have some sort of plausible deniability ("I only bought these expensive clothes because I like how they look, not because I'm chasing status") or a genuine reason other than "I want people to treat me better" ("I only got plastic surgery because my unattractiveness was having an especially negative effect on my mental health").

So, here's the result: someone who rationally chases status and makes themselves more attractive in order to better achieve their goals, even if altruistic, is seen instead as someone succumbing to their natural instinct and defecting against the societal norm of not playing the status game.

I try to avoid most social media because it's addicting and would probably have negative effects on my self-image. But I've found it motivating to join social media websites that are catered to positive habits: Strava and Goodreads leverage my innate desire for status and validation to make me run and read more often. They still have dark patterns, and probably still negatively affect my self-image a bit, but I think my use of them is net positive.

altruism is part of my self-improvement feedback loop

One critique of utilitarianism is that if you seriously use it to guide your decisions, you would find that for any given decision, the choice that maximizes overall wellbeing is usually not the one that does any good for your personal wellbeing, so you would turn into a "happiness pump": someone who only generates happiness for others at the detriment of themself. And, wouldn't you know it, we see people like this pop up in the effective altruism movement (whose philosophy stems mostly from utilitarianism), particularly those who pursue earn-to-give. While most are happy to give away 10% of their income to effective charities, I've heard of some who have taken it to the extreme, to the point of calculating every purchase they make in terms of days of life they could have counterfactually saved via a donation.

However, since its beginnings, EA has shifted its focus away from earning to give and closer to encouraging people to pursue careers where they can work directly on the world's most important problems. For someone with the privilege to consider this kind of career path, I believe this has changed the incentives and made the pursuit of self-fullfillment more closely aligned with maximizing expected utility.

the self-improvement feedback loop

Self-improvement is a feedback loop, or rather, a complicated web of feedback loops. For example,

• The happier you are, the more productive you are, the more money you make, the happier you are.
• The more often you exercise, the better your mental health, the better your executive function, the less often you skip your workouts, the more often you exercise.
• The more often you exercise, the stronger you become, the more attractive you become, the more you benefit from the halo effect, the more likely you are to get a promotion, the more money you make.

It all feeds into itself. Maybe this is just another way of phrasing the effect of accumulated advantage.

let's throw altruism into the loop

In my constant battle to nudge this loop in the right direction, I don't see altruism as a nagging enemy, who would take away energy I could use to get ahead. Rather, I see it as part of the loop.

Learning about the privilege I have (not only in the US but also globally) and how I can meaningful leverage that privilege as an opportunity to help massive numbers of poorer-off people has given me an incredible amount of motivation to better myself. Before I discovered EA, my plan was to become a software developer and retire as early as possible. Great life plan, don't get me wrong – but when I learned I could take a shot at solving the world's most important problems, I realized it was a super lame and selfish waste of privilege in comparison.

Instead of thinking about "how do I make as much money as possible?", I now think about

• How do I form accurate beliefs about the world?
• What does the world look like, where will it be in the future, and where can I fit in to make it better?
• Which professional skills are the best fit for me and the most important for having a positive impact?
• How do I become as productive and agentic as possible?

Notice how this differs from the happiness pump situation. It's more focused on "improving the self to help others" than "sacrificing personal wellbeing to help others". This paradigm shift in what it looks like to try to do as much good as possible brings altruism into the self-improvement feedback loop. It gives my life a sense of meaning, something to work towards. Altruism isn't a diametrically opposed goal to personal fulfillment; it's mostly aligned.