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…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 ...
When i’m walking around through my daily life, it helps me to think of myself as a character in a cyberpunk weirdtopia.
Hiro Protagonist, the protagonist of Snow Crash wouldn’t complain about these things; he would go on a sassy, sciencey, poetic monologue about it and appreciate it all for what it was.
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:
New Year’s resolution for 2021: get better at Relinquishment, the Second Virtue.
I’ve already unlocked the power of writing down controversial opinions in private, and even though it's not specifically meant to be a relinquishment exercise, I’m eager to exploit it as one. I’m also eager to try out more tools that make relinquishment easier. I might look for ways to make Leaving a Line of Retreat less effortful and more efficient. Recommendations welcome.
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...
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...
Off the top of my head I can definitely sort these into tiers. I don't know any numbers though other than 2700K for incandescent filaments and like 600F for self-cleaning ovens.
solar flares (these are made of plasma and go very fast, so they're very hot)
welding torches (hottest combustion temperatures, much above this everything is plasma)
incandescent filaments, volcano, boiling point of lead, fighter jet exhaust (most things melt and glow white or yellow, normal combustion)
campfires, Venus, self-cleaning ovens (most things don't melt and glow reddish or not at all)
No idea where to put fulgerites or Chernobyl because I don't know what happens to things there. But you can definitely make inferences like:
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...
If a subculture started trying to remove barriers to trade, for example by popularizing cheerful prices, this might have the downside of making plausible deniability more expensive. On net that might be good or bad (or weird), but either way I think it's an underrated effect (because I also think that the prevalence and load-bearing functions of plausible deniability are also underrated). People have prospects and opportunity costs, often largely comprisi...
I'm planting this flag right here and now: the phenomena of social class (putatively distinct from economic class) is very broad, very deep, and anti-inductive. For these reasons, no no one really knows what's going on or has anything close to the full picture. As a rough heuristic, the more well-known and easily changed a class stereotype is, the more likely it is to be out of date.
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...
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:
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.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11825
Schank’s law: “Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.”
What good thing happens if you read The Sequences?
Sometimes I scroll social media (because I am yet weak) and I see rationalists raising Concerns about various news topics and current events.
Here’s a list of concerns and potential actions, including those I see as inadequate.
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.
I've seen a few people run the thought experiment where one imagines the best life a historical person could live, and/or the most good they could do. There are several variants, and you can tune which cheat codes they are given. People seem to get different answers, and this has me pretty curious.
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".
I assume that the whole flat earth thing will lose its contrarian luster and fall out of style in the next few years. But suppose that's wrong. How soon until there are significant numbers of flat-earther kids enrolling in kindergarten? Will they be like existing fringe religious minorities? Will they mostly be homeschooled? My real best guess is that flat-earthers don't have kids so this won't happen.
Some smart, scrupulous, rational news junkie should write a periodical report on the state of anti-epistemology. I sort of worry that memeplexes, including a...
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....
Ice cream for breakfast with coffee grounds stirred in. Try it.
Talk is cheap. No wait, talk is free. Actually, sometimes talk is cheaper than free--holding your tongue can cost willpower or reputation or understanding.
When you ask an older person, "what do you wish you had known when you were my age?" I think their answer is in large part determined by your framing and phrasing of the question.
Increasing specificity seems to help when people are prone to overly broad answers. "What major mistake were you making in your 30s that you stopped making by your 40s?"
Changing the subject to a different person seems to help too. "What did [some other person] do really right? What is something they think of as a major personal triumph which is better explained by luck?"
Framing qu...
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.
But as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle can only be seen when considering multiple orthogonal factors, after which projecting onto a single dimension will throw out so much information as to be worse than useless.
“Well if I am the victim of a cult then they must have brainwashed me pretty well, because all of your reasons just sound like shallow insults to me."
Here are some thoughts about numeracy as compared to literacy. There is a tl;dr at the end.
The US supposedly has 95% literacy rate or higher. An 14yo english-speaker in the US is almost always an english-reader as well, and will not need much help interpreting an “out of service” sign or a table of business hours or a “Vote for Me” billboard. In fact, most people will instantaneously understand the message, without conscious effort--no need to look at individual letters and punctuation, nor any need to slowly sound it out. You just look, scan, and interpre...
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.
Uh oh, do you really leave the news playing in your living room all the time? Don't you know it's corrosive to your epistemics and agency? Plane crashes are overrated and chronic stress is underrated!
This is pretty much my default attitude, but...SSC once wrote that smoking possibly mitigates schizophrenia, and that "[t]his should be a warning to anyone who’s too quick to tell patients that their coping strategies are maladaptive."
News does have those downsides, just like smoking does cause cancer. But it's good to remember that load-bearing bugs are the r...
Insightful Articles about Politics
Slightly inspired by this post from Julia Galef. I've selected the following posts because they are insightful specifically at the meta-level.
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...
The Lizardman Constant shows up in a poll from Tom Scott.
I wonder if the Lizardman Constant is actually constant. I could imagine it changing over time, hypothetically for the same reason that I hear more about Flat Earth theory today than I did 5 years ago. Maybe there ought to be a whole family of parameters--a family which includes unbelievably wacky and fringe but pre-existing theories like Lizardmen, as well as plausible-sounding but freshly fabricated ones like the North Dakota Crash. And it would be nice if they were given labels that are sticky whi...
When I allow myself to have inconsistencies in my beliefs and attitudes, I’m just using my brain the way it evolved to work. Accepting that I can’t untangle everything is necessary to make any progress.
When other people let themselves have inconsistencies, it is out of self-serving bias; it is anti-social and they ought to do better. Their persistence in trying to have it both ways causes excess harm.