…the question does sometimes haunt me, as to whether in the alternative Everett branches of Earth, we could identify a distinct cluster of “successful” Earths, and we’re not in it.

— This Failing Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky

Does anyone else wonder similar things about the EA/rationality scene? If we could scan across Tegmark III, would we see large clusters of nearby Earths that have rationality & EA communities that embarrass us and lay bare our own low standards?

Important but frustrating rationalist skill: getting halfway through a comment and then deleting it because you realized it was wrong

I have a strong anti-Twitter attitude. I will now charge rent from this attitude in the form of anticipated experiences.

My attitude:

Twitter is psychotoxic. That is to say, it has a negative influence on one’s mood, habits, personality, reasoning ability, and so on. Using twitter causes people to practice mental behaviors that are corrosive to clear thinking and agency both immediately and longer-term. The easy availability of bite-sized content is eroding people's ability to read longer-form content like blog sequences or books. Twitter deserves the same condemnation that the 24h news cycle gets and much more. I believe that if far fewer people used Twitter, my life would be noticeably better.

I feel my attention being tugged at by the Twitterverse even when I have been away from it for a long time (weeks or longer). This is in part a sensible worry--Twitter does have noticeable effects on the world, and I wish I could do something.

This is a hackneyed pattern, but: Twitter is the 21st century’s tobacco. It is an addictive, next-gen intoxicant.

On a podcast, I heard some guy recommend that you “don’t let Twitter be the background music of your life. When you’re hanging out with your ... (read more)

I'm looking through some of the posts tagged Practical. I notice that a lot of them, especially the older ones, seem overoptimistic in similar ways. Here are a few of my particular thoughts:

1. Daily interventions need to be usable by busy, tired zombies. Or else they will only be usable by people who already have well-balanced lives (or people with hypomania or something). 
2. Closely related, sometimes people omit cost-benefit analysis entirely, as if their practical intervention pays for itself immediately. Even when an analysis is included, I think it often underrates trivial inconveniences and willpower costs. Some of these things sound so easy and simple, and yet if I'm tired after a day of work, it can feel like a major imposition to defy my automatic, low-effort habits. And it's not just me, when I see the people around me trying out new life hacks, I can often feel the resentment radiating off of them that they have to spend a week's worth of their discretionary willpower on a small expected gain.
3. I perceive some complacency about resource budgeting, specifically around resource sinks that are optimized against you. It is my guess that if you show someone a way to save time on

A prairie is qualitatively different than a billiard table or an asteroid belt: If you tried to use basic kinematics and free body diagrams to describe a prairie ecosystem, you would find that most of the interesting action was left unexplained. To handwave away air resistance and viscosity is to handwave away all the birds. To handwave away friction is to handwave away basically every other mobile life form. And I think it only gets worse if you move from a prairie to a rainforest--floating spores, flying snakes, geckos, soft but breakable eggs, all manne... (read more)

For Winter Solstice, I recommend listening to the album "Soon It Will Be Cold Enough to Build Fires" by Emancipator.

Particularly, "Father King" and "Anthem". For me personally, "Father King" is the solstice song.

In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.
 

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I'm totally stuck.

It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you're talking a... (read more)

Scott Alexander says "Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, 'We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake'. Ezra is a master[...]"

I've never deliberately perused Klein's output, but I've been fairly...repelled by what little I've seen. But that was some pretty glowing praise from Scott; I must be missing something. Googling "what is ezra klein's best writing" isn't very enlight... (read more)

I followed a link to an article about how Facebook was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar. I got a few paragraphs into it and then thought, "Wait, the New York Times is telling me a scandalous but murky story about Big Tech and world events...and I’m just condensing that as 'known facts of public record.' Isn’t this Gell-Mann amnesia?"

So then I felt myself searching for reasons why the NYT could be trusted more about this kind of thing, but found it difficult to come up with a single specific reason that I actually believed. So then I supposed that i... (read more)

News headlines have measurable, harmful effects on people so I never want them to be shown to me without my explicit consent. But YouTube does not have an option to permanently disable the Breaking News section.

The only solutions to this I know of are:

1. Contort my usage by never opening the main page of YouTube
2. Use uBlock with a custom filter to get rid of the news section.
3. Stop using YouTube

I consider this to be psychotoxic design, plain and simple. The next time I need an example of tech companies doing something bad, I will have to reach no further than this.

Alright, you lost the double-crux. Now go ahead and bite these bullets. There you g--nope. Oh nonononono ahahahaha no. I'm not handing them to you. No, I'm going to hold them out and you're going to munch on them out of my hand like a docile horse.
There we go, much better.

Point well taken that technological development and global dominance were achieved by human cultures, not individual humans. But I claim that it is obviously a case of motivated reasoning to treat this as a powerful blow against the arguments for fast takeoff. A human-level AI (able to complete any cognitive task at least as well as you) is a foom risk unless it has specific additional handicaps. These might include:
- For some reason it needs to sleep for a long time every night.
- Its progress gets periodically erased due to random misfortune or enemy acti... (read more)

In this shortform post I will pontificate about some sentiments I sometimes see on twitter. It feels important for me to say, but I can't promise that it will be a good use of any readers' time.

The Fourth Virtue of Rationality is Evenness. One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to fa

They deserve sympathy, but also they must be stopped/avoided/distrusted.

This sentiment is common and I wish there was a common and compact way to express it. Notice the dissonance if the conjunction "but" is swapped out for "and".

As a result the book lacks an intellectual vision. It’s just highly competent in a slick, oversocialized way where little true personality comes out. If the book were a person it’d be like many of the people I met at the elite business school where I briefly studied: smooth, well-oiled bundles of overly appropriate behaviors seemingly dictated by the situation rather than emerging from a strong underlying personality.

(from this Everything Studies post)

I want there to be at least 10 more John Nersts out there. Writing, influencing, telling it like it is.... (read more)

Let's start a new trend where you refuse to speak to journalists unless they can guarantee that the final publication will contain a link to your side of the story.

In our scary new memetic fitness landscape, I think I’ve started to develop a default skepticism toward pith and sass. These days, the pithier and sassier something is, the more likely it is to trigger my deception alarms.

When something 240 characters or less sounds really good, it is increasingly likely that this is because it evolved to sound good to me, rather than because it has any deep wholesomeness.

This posted 4 times. This was the fourth time.

Should I drink sardine juice instead of dumping it down the drain?

I eat sardines that are canned in water, not oil, because I care about my polyunsaturated fatty acid ratio. They're very unappetizing but from my inexpert skimming, they seem like one of the best options in terms of health. But I only eat most of the flesh incidentally, with the main objective being the fat. This is why I always buy fish that is unskinned, and in fact I would buy cans of fish skin if it were easy.

So on this basis, is it worth it for me to just go ahead and choke down the sardine water as well? ...or perhaps instead? It is visibly fatty.

What science fiction should I read? Any subgenre.
 

I ask because I'm rereading HPMOR and I just reread Eliezer's posts about memetic collapse and local validity. I kinda feel like I'm missing out, but I don't know where to look beyond googling "classic sci fi" or "sci fi cult hits". I like HPJEV as a protagonist and would like to see more of that sort. I'm probably going to reread Ender's Game next in order to scratch the itch a bit.

Here are my idiosyncratic preferences, in case it helps:
My top 5 stories probably include The Martian, Rendezvous with Ra... (read more)

Don't yum my yuck. My disgust reactions are valid.