One of the most important things I've learned from therapy and contemplative practice for pragmatic interactions is that people will usually dig their heels in if they detect you have a bottom line written first. This effect is so strong that it activates even when people agree with you on the bottom line (but they have any level of conflict about it). I think this is one of the overwhelming considerations for why Eliezer gets the results he does. It cuts against another effect public intellectuals are subject to, which is that the easiest way to get popular is to become 'The X Guy' where X is a particular thing that the public has room in their heads for. But if you're the X guy people also associate you with a particular bottom line, so good luck getting any truth finding interactions. Instead, you wind up as a piece that gets moved around the board for conflict/spectacle purposes.

Several dozen people now presumably have Lumina in their mouths. Can we not simply crowdsource some assays of their saliva? I would chip money in to this. Key questions around ethanol levels, aldehyde levels, antibacterial levels, and whether the organism itself stays colonized at useful levels.

It's impossible to come up with a short list of what I truly val- https://imgur.com/a/A26h2JE

A service where a teenager reads something you wrote slowly and sarcastically. The points at which you feel defensive are worthy of further investigation.

A willingness to lose doubled my learning rate. I recently started quitting games faster when I wasn't having fun (or predicted low future fun from playing the game out). I felt bad about this because I might have been cutting off some interesting come backs etc. However, after playing the new way for several months (in many different games) I found I had about doubled the number of games I can play per unit time and therefore upped my learning rate by a lot. This came not only from the fact that many of the quit games were exactly those slogs that take a long time, but also that the willingness to just quit if I stopped enjoying myself made me more likely to experiment rather than play conservatively.

This is similar to the 'fail fast' credo.

Had a facepalm moment the other day. Realized that to-do items were split between two reference classes, unambiguous tasks and ambiguous tasks. Unambiguous tasks have some combination of known next action, known time envelope, known what 'finished' looks like concretely, while ambiguous tasks have below threshold levels of some or all of these. Realized life can be as simple as notating ambiguous items with a capital A, at which point its default next action is to disambiguate the above.

Not a new point but perennially worth noting: subcultures persist via failure. That is to say that subcultures that succeed obviate themselves. This is concretely noticeable in ways that, coming in as an outsider, a subculture about X will have a bunch of mysterious self sabotage behavior that actually keeps ¬X persistent.

I'm worried about notkilleveryonism as a meme. Years ago, Tyler Cowen wrote a post about why more econ professors didn't blog, and his conclusion was that it's too easy to make yourself look like an idiot relative to the payoffs. And that he had observed this actually play out in a bunch of cases where econ professors started blogs, put their foot in their mouth, and quietly stopped. Since earnest discussion of notkilleveryonism tends to make everyone, including the high status, look dumb within ten minutes of starting, it seems like there will be a strong inclination towards attribute substitution. People will tend towards 'nuanced' takes that give them more opportunity to signal with less chance of looking stupid.

Most communities I've participated in seem to have property X. Underrated hypothesis: I am entangled with property X along the relevant dimensions and am self sorting into such communities and have a warped view of 'all communities' as a result.

The smaller an area you're trying to squeeze the probability fluid into the more watertight your inferential walls need to be

Two things that are paralyzing enormous numbers of potential helpers:
fear of not having permission, liability, etc
fear of duplicating effort from not knowing who is working on what

in a fast moving crisis, sufficient confidence about either is always lagging the frontline.

First you have to solve this problem for yourself in order to get enough confidence to act. Something neglected might be to focus on solving it for others rather than just working on object level medical stuff (bottlenecks etc.)

I figured out what bugs me about prediction markets. I would really like for functionality built in for people to share their model considerations.

Science resists surveillance (dramatically more detailed record keeping) because real science is embarrassing.

It would be really cool to link the physical open or closed state of your bedroom door to your digital notifications and 'online' statuses.

Is there a broader term or cluster of concepts within which is situated the idea that human values are often downstream of decisions, not upstream, in that the person with the correct values will simply be selected based on what decisions they are expected to make (ie election of a CEO by shareholders). This seems like a crucial understanding in AI acceleration.

Most intellectual activity is descriptive disguised as prescriptive.

One of the things the internet seems to be doing is a sort of Peter Principle sorting for attention grabbing arguments. People are finding the level of discourse that they feel they can contribute to. This form of arguing winds up higher in the perceived/tacit cost:benefit tradeoff than most productive activity because of the perfect tuning of the difficulty curve, like video games.

We seem to be closing in on needing a lesswrong crypto autopsy autopsy. Continued failure of first principles reasoning bc blinded by speculative frenzies that happen to accompany it.

It can be hard to define sophistry well enough to use the definition as a filter. What is it that makes something superficially seem very compelling but in retrospect obviously lacking in predictive power or lasting value? I think one of the things that such authors do is consistently generate surprise at the sentence level but not at the paragraph or essay level. If you do convert their work into a bullet list of claims the claims are boring/useless or wrong. But the surprise at the sentence level makes them fun to read.

atomization isn't just happening between people but within people across time and preferences as well.

People object to a doctrine of acceptance as implying non-action, but this objection is a form of the is-ought error. Accepting that the boat currently has a leak does not imply a commitment to sinking.

So, the USA seems steadily on trend for between 100-200k deaths. Certainly *feels* like there's no way the stock market has actually priced this in. Reference classes feel pretty hard to define here.

Using the retrospective ratios between number of early cases and number of confirmed cases in China (~25:1 before widespread testing and lockdown) and extrapolating to the SF bay area (~100 confirmed cases), a gathering of 30 people already has a ~1% of chance of an infected person present.

Rashomon could be thought of as being part of the genre of Epistemic Horror. What else goes here? Borges comes to mind, though I don't have a specific short story in mind (maybe library of babel). The Investigation and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem seem to apply. Maybe The Man Who was Thursday by Chesterton. What else?

$100k electric RVs are coming and should be more appealing for lots of people than $100k homes. Or even $200k homes in many areas. I think this might have large ramifications.

Multiple people (some of whom I can't now find) have asked me for citations on the whole 'super cooperation and super defection' thing and I was having trouble finding the relevant papers. The relevant key word is Third Party Punishment, a google scholar search turns up lots of work in the area. Traditionally this only covers super cooperation and not the surprising existence of super defectors, so I still don't have a cite for that specific thing.

Some examples:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16981

http://sjdm.cybermango.or... (read more)

We've got this thing called developmental psychology and also the fact that most breakthrough progress is made while young. What's going on? If dev psych is about becoming a more well adjusted person what is it about being 'well adjusted' that makes breakthrough work less likely?

My guess is that it has to do with flexibility of cognitive representations. Having more degrees of freedom in your cognitive representation feels from the inside like more flexibility but looks from the outside like rationalization, like the person just has more ways of finding an... (read more)

Kegan described the core transition between his stages as a subject-object distinction which feels like a take that emphasizes a self-oriented internal view. Another possibility is that the transition involves the machinery by which we do theory of mind. I.e. Kegan 5 is about having theory of mind about Kegan stage 4 such that you can reason about what other people are doing when they do Kegan 4 mental moves. If true, this might imply that internal family systems could help people level up by engaging their social cognition and ability to model a belief th... (read more)

You can't straightforwardly multiply uncertainty from different domains to propagate uncertainty through a model. Point estimates of differently shaped distributions can mean very different things i.e. the difference between the mean of a normal, bimodal, and fat tailed distribution. This gets worse when there are potential sign flips in various terms as we try to build a causal model out of the underlying distributions.