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I liked school. It seems like most rationalists did not like school. Maybe they are so intelligent that being walked through the exact steps of how to do or think something feels like oppression? I didn't like elementary school, but I much enjoyed my time in middle and high school. I liked being taught stuff in 50 minute blocks. There's a nice routine to it, and I liked seeing what new stuff we would learn each day. (I'm just providing this as a data point on my experience, I'm not debating whether or not school is bad in general or needs to be reformed)
I suspect the reasons for not liking school, among those who "didn't like school", are diverse and don't have one single explanation.
Some people had school experiences that were outright abusive, violent, humiliating. Some people were bored and prevented from finding challenge or exploring creativity. Some had home situations that didn't prepare them to make friends. Some people had sensory or disability stuff that wasn't accommodated. Some people had behavioral stuff that kept them in trouble.
These overlap, but they have distinct peaks.
Maybe they are so intelligent that being walked through the exact steps of how to do or think something feels like oppression?
That's not it for me. It's that other people giving me tasks to do* for 6-7 hours a day is not how I want to spend my day.
*with a job, people give you tasks, but at least you get to choose which jobs you apply for. in school, you have no say at all
We could choose our electives to some extent but we always had to take the four main classes (English, math, science, social studies), and even for the electives we don't have complete freedom because there are certain requirements we had to meet to graduate (at least two years of foreign language, for example). So the choices were very constrained.
The oneliner is that subjects are boring or too easy while being held back by 'show your work', failure of the tasks to do anything in the real world (no focus on connecting to similar people, do finances, build a business or portfolio), bad treatment including physical abuse double-standards by classmates and teachers (sometimes parents as well), being forced to be there for years by law, it is a hellish torture prison. This article (and series it's connected to) has some more details that I would agree with. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-9-school
bad treatment including physical abuse
Isn't this illegal nowadays? There are teachers that still engage in corporal punishment?
What I mean is physical abuse from other peers, and teachers doing nothing about it or continuing to put the affected people next to each other.
(I also feel like the differences in how much it effects the person is not significant, considering being physically contained, and still well being capable of being intimidated/yelled at or "in trouble" or having to defend yourself with accusations or litigating evidence of true events, was more mentally damaging, since there's no adult's frame of reference and you fully feel the whole world is in this building)
Looking carefully at how other people speak and write, there are certain cognitive concepts, that simply don't make sense to me, the way that it "makes sense" to me that red is "hot" and blue is "cold". I wonder if the reason I can't understand them is that my consciousness is somehow "simpler", or less "layered", although I don't really know what I mean by that, it's just a vibe i get. Here are some examples:
- I don't understand the concept of "internal monologue".
- I don't understand the difference between "imagine", "picture", "think of", "think about", "consider", etc.
- I don't understand the concept of "trust your gut/heart.", in a decision. If I am presented with 2 decisions, I do not percieve one of them as labeled as "gut/heart says 'do this' ". Sometimes I percieve one of the options as "jumps to mind instinctively as the Thing People Do In This Situation" or "the kind of thing a book protagonist would do" instead, but I don't know if either of those things are what people mean by trusting your gut/heart. Maybe they just mean to think about it.
- I don't understand the concept of "choose to believe X". I believe stuff because I have a certain sensory experience. I cannot consciously change the probabilities my brain assigns to things. Maybe people just mean "act as if you believe X" but just have belief-in-belief type confusions.
- I have never received a satisfactory explaination for the difference between "annoyed" and "frusturated", even though people do tend to insist there is a difference and they're not just synonyms.
- I experience unusually strong placebo and nocebo effects (at least compared to others around me).
I feel a bit confused. I generally sort of just feel (and I don't know what exactly I mean by this) that there is less "structure" separating the "me" part of the Program The Computer-That-Is-My-Brain Is Running from the "not-me" part.
Does any of this make sense?
Frustrated is usually when you keep trying to do something, it's not working, and you are annoyed about that, and you want to give up.
Annoyed is more general, like "this thing peeves me, I want this to stop gah"
- I don't understand the concept of "internal monologue".
I have a hypothesis about this. Most people, most of the time, are automatically preparing to describe, just in case someone asks. You ask them what they're imagining, doing, or sensing, and they can just tell you. The description was ready to go before you asked the question. Sometimes, these prepared descriptions get rehearsed; people imagine saying things out loud. That's internal monologue.
There are some people who do not automatically prepare to describe, and hence have less internal monologue, or none. Those people end up having difficulty describing things. They might even get annoyed (frustrated?) if you ask them too many questions, because answering can be hard.
(I wonder how one might test whether or not a person automatically prepares to describe. The ability to describe things quickly is probably measurable, and one could compare that to self-reports about internal monologue. If there were no correlation, that'd be evidence against this hypothesis.)
This tracks for me. I was explicitly taught, as a small child, to be ready to explain what I was doing at all times. Failure to have a ready and satisfactory answer to "what are you doing?" was treated as strong evidence that I was idle (or up to no good!) and should be redirected to do something explicable instead.
(And today, if a friend asks me "how are you?" as a sincere question rather than a casual politeness, it sometimes locks up my cognition for a few seconds as I scramble to introspect enough to come up with a good answer...)
Have you read Generalizing From One Example and Typical Mind Fallacy stuff? (that won't directly answer all your questions but the short answer is people just vary a lot in what their internal cognitive processes are like)
choose to believe is, in my experience, about situations where what is true depends on what you believe because your actions affect what is true and thus your beliefs affect your motivation to action which affects what you can believe. "I choose to believe that humanity is good" is a common one, which if a lot of people choose, will in fact be more true. "I choose to believe I can handle this problem" is another, where again, the truth in question is (partially) downstream of your beliefs. see also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8dbimB7EJXuYxmteW/fixdt
Even in situations where my beliefs affect my action those beliefs are not choices. If I notice that if I had a certain belief I would act in a way that would give me more utility, well then that observation becomes instead my motivation to act as if i have that belief.
"act as if you hold a belief" and "hold a belief for justified reasons" aren't the same thing, the latter seems to me to produce higher quality actions if the belief is true. eg:
- believing [someone cares about you if-and-only-if you care about them, AND you care about them if-and-only-if they care about you, AND they don't care about you now, AND you don't care about them, AND (you will act as if they care about you now => you will act as if you care about them) ]
- vs believing [someone cares about you if-and-only-if you care about them, AND you care about them if-and-only-if they care about you, AND you care about them => they care about you)]
- vs believing [someone cares about you if-and-only-if you care about them, AND you care about them if-and-only-if they care about you, AND you don't care about each other ever]
in the first one your innate trust falls on they-care-about-you will be less reliable, your caring for them will have little hints anywhere you aren't a good enough actor, etc. if neither of you pick up on it, the first can emulate the second, and thereby produce a world where the second becomes a past-justified true belief. but if you're able to instead reliably make the second a *future-*justified true belief, then you can avoid the first collapsing into the third. (I'm eliding some details about what the uncertainty looks like between these beliefs and what it looks like if you're both uncertain about which of the three statements is true, which makes it a lot more complicated if you're particularly uncertain).
if you have multiple conflicting beliefs you can hold for justified reasons (because what is true comes after the picking between the beliefs), then there can be situations where it's objectively the case that one can choose the beliefs first, and thereby choose actions. maybe your thoughts aren't organized this way! but this is what it seems to me to mean when someone who is being careful to only believe things in proportion to how likely they are (aka "rational") still gets to say the phrase "I choose to believe". I also think that people who say "I choose to believe" in situations where it's objectively irrational (because their beliefs can't affect what is true) are doing so based on incorrectly expecting their beliefs to affect reality, eg "I choose to believe in a god who created the universe" cannot affect whether that's true but is often taken to. ("I choose to believe in a god that emerges from our shared participation in a religion" is entirely rational, that's just an egregore/memeplex/character fandom).
We should have a wikitag for protests so people can talk about them, their effectiveness, announcements of them, etc.
In my opinion (feel free to ignore it), it makes sense to create a tag if you have already at least three examples of things that could be tagged by it. A tag is a way to group existing content, not an way to create it.
I thought anyone could create new wikitags? https://www.lesswrong.com/w/create
If someone does create this, it might be helpful to have separate tags for literal protests and meta discussion of protesting, like we have with meetups.
1Sometimes I wonder if I'm an actual rationalist that does actual rationality or if it's all just performative and I just think I do it in order to feel good about myself
1It's on a scale. Some people are closer to the ideal, and I wonder what 100% human rationality would look like. (Maybe it wouldn't look like anything specific, because the person would strategically hide their superpowers.)
But even then, it makes sense to worry how much of the imperfect rationality is performance, or groupthink.
One approach is to judge by outcomes (what has changed in your life since you started "doing rationality"), but you usually do not know what the alternative would like, and it is difficult to say which parts were mere luck. Or sometimes it is like you need to do all of X, Y, Z perfectly in order to achieve a certain outcome, and you genuinely improved at X and Y, but made no progress on Z yet, so the outcome is zero.
For epistemic rationality, it is difficult to say whether your understanding has improved, or you are in a bubble.
Because the expected value of increasing the chance of living in posthuman eutopia until at least the end of the stelliferous era is still extremely valuable, would be my best guess.
until at least the end of the stelliferous era
How could this possibly be relevant? Stars are very likely extremely wasteful anyway and worth disassembling, and at 100T years all reachable galaxy clusters will be colonized, with enough time to disassemble all stars in the reachable universe much earlier than that.
I was being conservative (hence the "at least" :-), and agree that we'd want to disassemble stars. But maybe reachable technology can't become so advanced to allow that kind of stellar engineering, so we're stuck with living in space habitats orbiting suns. I think the median scenario for an advanced civilization extends far longer than the stelliferous era.
1(My point is more that there will probably be no natural "end of stelliferous era" at all, because the last stars that are not part of some nature reserve will be disassembled much earlier than that, and the nature reserve stars could well be maintained for much longer.)
1From a straight expected value case, it can still be an easy call - cryonics has a nonzero chance of working, and p(doom) is less than 100%, and cryonics doesn't cost much (for his class of worker).
A low-cost, low-chance wager with an insanely high payoff (more life) is an easy lottery ticket to justify.
It probably does indicate that he puts an extremely low weight on Basilisk-like futures, where he gets resurrected just to be tortured forever. I agree that this is orders of magnitude less probable than other cryonics-works scenarios.
It's sort of a riff on pascal's wager. If he's right about p(doom), not freezing himself means he loses nothing, and freezing himself means he also loses nothing. If he's wrong, not freezing himself means he loses everything, freezing himself means he gains indefinite life extension. The only real cost he faces is the money he could have given to someone else upon death. Seems like a personal value decision.
For a while I've felt a sense of deep horrible fear every time I was in the presence of someone I knew to grossly exceed my intelligence and/or competence. Now I think I've figured why. I reckon it's because I'm afraid that in interacting with them, there is some thing I could do to extract lots of value from the interaction, and that I'm scared I won't do it and that later I'll think of something I could have perhaps said that would lead the conversation in a really interesting and valuable way.
2Quick thought: If you have an aligned AI in a multipolar scenario, other AIs might threaten to cause S-risk in order to get said FAI to do stuff, or as blackmail. Therefore, we should make the FAI think of X-risk and S-risk as equally bad (even though S-risk is in reality terrifyingly worse), because that way other powerful AIs will simply use oblivion as a threat instead of astronomical suffering (as oblivion is much easier to bring about).
It is possible that an FAI would be able to do some sort of weird crazy acausal decision-theory trick to make itself act as if it doesn't care about anything done in efforts to blackmail it or something like that. But this is just to make sure.
This has the obvious problem that an AI will then be indifferent between astronomical suffering and oblivion. In ANY situation where it will need to choose between those two, it will not care about which occurs on the merits, not just blackmail situations.
You don't want your AI to prefer a 99.999% chance of astronomical suffering to a 99.9999% of oblivion. Astronomical suffering is much worse.
Is there a non-mysterious explanation somewhere of the idea that the universe "conserves information"?
As a nerd who considers myself part of many nerd spaces, I am ashamed and my conscience is disturbed by how unwelcoming all kinds of nerd spaces tend to be towards women. Wikipedia editors, for example. They're definitely nerds. They stick to strict checklists about style and word choice, strict checklists about article structure and layout, strict checklists about what is and isn't notable (i.e. worthy of being made into an article). They should be immune to this, or at least highly resistant. And yet scholarly articles and studies are written showing that the gender gap exists on Wikipedia as it does everywhere else. Why do nerd spaces which actively try to not be sexist still end up being sexist? It baffles me.
(Edit: By "unwelcoming" I don't mean just "participation ratio is skewed". A space can have a dramatically unbalanced gender ratio but still be welcoming to both genders. I mean that Wikipedia articles about women tend to have higher standards for being created, and that lots of women feel alienated by the Wikipedia editing community. I apologize for the lack of clarity.)
Is there evidence that this is caused by sexism and not differences in interest? I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gender gap in how much people (on average) enjoy going through strict checklists to decide if an article is notable.
By the "gender gap" I was not referring to the fact that only 20% of Wikipedia editors were female, but the fact that the writing of Wikipedia feels male-centric despite the fact that strict checklists and style guidelines should stop the writing from feeling any particular way.
1Do you have a specific falsifiable theory on how specifically the nerd places are unwelcoming towards women? Without a specific theory, it is not obvious what specifically could be done. Pointless self-flagellation is not helping anyone.
One possibility is that women are simply statistically less interested in these kinds of activities. I am not saying that this is definitely the full answer. But it's an example of a possible cause that has no one to blame.
I am a man and I feel unwelcome at Wikipedia recently. (I wrote about it repeatedly on ACX, but I can't find the comments. Long story short, Wikipedia used to accept short articles, that were extended later by other authors. Now they expect the first submission to be perfect, with many sources establishing notability etc. In my opinion that goes against the entire concept of a collaborative wiki. I am happy to write a few paragraphs, but as an unpaid volunteer I am not going to spend hours polishing an article that an unknown stranger may judge and reject.) So the fact that some women feel unwelcome is not necessarily a proof of sexism.
Many activities aimed at making places welcoming for women are based on "something must be done; X is something; therefore X must be done" logic. Some of them have the opposite effect. For example, they highlight the women who are already in the community as something weird (if you insist that a place makes women feel unwelcome, that logically implies that the women who feel welcome are somehow abnormal), which may be unpleasant for them. Advertising that a community has not enough women can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: a women curious about something may decide to avoid it if she is helpfully told by the media that she would feel unwelcome. The very hypothesis that "X makes women feel good, but Y makes them feel bad" is alienating for those women who happen to like Y and have X. Also, such hypotheses are often sexist themselves: imagine someone proposing that LessWrong needs more pink color and pictures of cute kittens, to be more appealing to women. Many proposals to make places welcome to women are based on what neurotypical women might statistically want, but that may be irrelevant for nerdy women in the same way as things attractive to neurotypical men might be irrelevant for nerdy men.
tl;dr -- without a specific testable theory, it is easy to actually do harm while trying to fix things
Maybe I suffer from the problem of too much willpower. I grinded in elementary school and resisted the temptation to talk to others in the hallway, thereby stunting my social development. I resisted loneliness for years until it became desperate enough for me to do something. I never run out of energy doing something in a way that makes me try something else.
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1Maybe. Taboo "willpower". Are you doing the things you genuinely believe are the best to do? Or is it just that when you start doing something, you become obsessed and unable to stop (even if it is obviously not the best thing to do).