I'm posting here on behalf of Brent Dill, known here and elsewhere as ialdabaoth-- you may have enjoyed some of his posts. If you read the comments at SSC, you'll recognize him as a contributor of rare honesty and insight. If you'd had the chance to talk with him as much as I have, you'd know he's an awesome guy: clever, resourceful, incisive and deeply moral. Many of you see him as admirable, most as relatable, some as a friend, and more, I hope, as a member of our community.
He could use some help.
Until last Thursday he was gainfully employed as a web developer for a community college in Idaho. Recently, he voluntarily mentioned to his boss that he was concerned that seasonal affective disorder was harming his job performance, who mentioned it to his boss, who suggested in all good faith that Brent should talk to HR to see if they might help through their Employee Assistance Program. In Brent's words: "Instead, HR asked me a lot of pointed questions about when my performance could turn around and whether I wanted to work there, demanded that I come up with all the solutions (after I admitted that I was already out of brainpower and feeling intimidated), and then directed me t...
Official update: HR "explored every possible option" but "ultimately we have to move forward with your termination process" after "making certain there was unanimous consensus".
Apparently several people in my now ex-office are upset about this.
Is Austin on the list? I work at a not-evil tech startup called SchoolAdmin that does school admissions software for a mix of public/private/charter schools. We're not hiring devs right now, but that might possibly change since we have a product manager coming in October. The company is REALLY not evil; we've had three different people come down with mental or physical health issues, and the president's mantra has been 'your job is to get better' in every case.
I could possibly also offer a place to crash, I've got a futon, a study it could be moved to, and already have cats.
That narrative is unambiguously a case of illegal discrimination. Idaho law Defines:
"Disability" means a physical or mental condition of a person, whether congenital or acquired, which constitutes a substantial limitation to that person and is demonstrable by medically accepted clinical or laboratory diagnostic techniques. A person with a disability is one who (a) has such a disability, or (b) has a record of such a disability, or (c) is regarded as having such a disability;
and
It shall be a prohibited act to discriminate against a person because of, or on the basis of, disability in [employment]... provided that the prohibition against discrimination because of disability shall not apply if the particular disability, even with a reasonable accommodation, prevents the performance of the work required in that job.
I am also very confused as to how actual HR drones in an actual HR department wouldn't be familiar with the law and able to create a suitable enough pretext for termination.
I already mentioned the A.D.A. to Ialdabaoth, but fighting a discrimination case probably takes more money than he's looking to raise to move, as well as being psychologically exhausting.
Me too.
The problem is... this is a complex and delicate situation, as all real-life situations are.
There are co-workers who have gone the extra mile to help me and protect me. They didn't do everything they could, because they have families, and they know that if they rock the boat too hard it will be them, not HR, that get thrown overboard.
They aren't rationalists themselves (although I was slowly working on one of them), but they are caring and intelligent people who are themselves struggling to find meaning and stability in a harsh world.
If I could find a way to laser-lance out the demons of stupidity from my workplace, I would do so in an instant. If I could do so in a way that could add net funds to my own cause, I would already be doing so.
But as it is, I know exactly who would suffer for it.
(That doesn't mean that I have committed to a decision yet; I am still weighing necessary evils.)
I hope this is not patronizing advice but rather useful info. To be clear, I am not pressuring you to do anything, I know there are many reasons not to pursue discrimination claims, but I wanted to make sure you are aware of all your options.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a possibly less costly and less adversarial way of pursuing a discrimination claim. They will investigate independently and try to arrange a settlement if they find discrimination. If settlement is impossible, they may even sue on your behalf. They have won a lot of ADA-related claims. I'm pretty sure they will consult with you for free, so the only initial costs are time and emotional energy.
I don't have any sensible way of learning about current affairs. I don't consume broadcast or print news. Most news stories reach me through social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research, and I will independently follow up on the ones I think are worthy of interest. This is nowhere near optimal. It means I will probably find out about innovations in robotic bees before I find out about natural disasters or significant events in world politics.
Regular news outlets seem to be messy, noisy attention traps, rather than the austere factual repositories I wish them to be. Quite importantly, there seems to be a lot of stuff in the news that isn't actually news. I'm pretty sure smart people with different values will converge on what a lot of this stuff is.
Has this problem been solved already? I'm willing to put in time/effort/money for minimalist, noise-free, sensibly-prioritised news digest that I care about.
ETA: Although I haven't replied to all these responses individually, they seem very useful and I will be following them up. Thanks!
What sort of current events do you want to find out about how quickly, and why?
You should consider, if you haven't already, the possibility that the value of learning about such things quickly is almost always almost exactly zero. Suppose e.g. there's an enormous earthquake half-way around the world from you, and many thousands of people die. That's a big deal, it's very important -- but what immediate difference should it make to your life?
One possibility: you might send a lot of money to a charity working in the affected place. But it seems unlikely to me that there's much real difference in practice between doing so on the day of the disaster and doing it a week later.
Another possibility (albeit a kinda callous one): it may come up in conversation and you may not want to sound bad. But I bet that in practice "social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research" do just fine at keeping you sufficiently up to date that you don't sound stupid or ignorant. In any case, what you need to know about in order to sound up to date is probably roughly what you get from existing news sources, rather than from a hypothetical new source of genuinely important, sensibly prioritized news.
Hilariously, a good option for you may be an actual newspaper. Made out of paper.
It comes once a day, it summarizes a few dozen major events in a reasonably succinct way, and many of them try to minimize reporting bias. You could consider specific papers based on size and editorial style (most offer free or cheap trials), and then sign up for a short subscription to see how you like it.
And the greatest advantage is that it has no hyperlinks to click. Thus, you only spend limited time reading it.
I can't find it, but I once read an article from a guy a trust about how he just stopped following news, assuming that if anything sufficiently important happened, he'd find out about it anyway. His quality of life immediately rose. Having followed this approach for a few years now, I would suggest consuming zero news (is minimalist, completely devoid of noise, and exceptionally well-organized).
"Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it." - Bruce Schneier
Wikipedia's current events portal is relatively minimalist and low-noise. It's not prioritized very impressively.
Looks like, but isn't. The goal isn't that you take one viewpoint and take another viewpoint and find "something in the middle"; the point is that having multiple independent viewpoints makes it easier to spot mistakes in each.
It feels natural for us to think critically when our preconceptions are contradicted and to accept information uncritically when our preconceptions are supported. If you want to improve the odds that you're reading critical thought about any given topic, you need sources with a wide range of different preconceptions.
having multiple independent viewpoints
I agree and wouldn't have objected if Prismattic advised to read multiple sources from a variety of viewpoints. As it is, he just said "you need to read progressives as well" and that's a different claim.
part of progressivism is that it is good becuase it is new (the clue is in the name)
No, that's not it. It doesn't mean you can't have new things happen that are bad. It does refer to a time derivative, but it's more of a goal than a statement of fact: government and society are not as good as they could be, and we can engineer the government to improve both. That's 'progress'. (Note: this summary is not an endorsement)
Progressive tax structures are not named so due to this time derivative. They are named so due to the derivative in income. Regressive tax structures exist, but they aren't named so due to being more like the past.
According to the efficient market hypothesis index funds should be the best way for the average person to gain a return from investment. Now there is a plethora of indices to invest in. How should one find the 'best' one?
Further, only a relatively small part of return generating assets are captured in publically tradeable assets. What about private equity and real estate, huge parts of the economy?
It Ain't Necessarily So: Why Much of the Medical Literature Is Wrong
Some of the material will be familiar, but there are examples I hadn't seen before of how really hard it is to be sure you've asked the right question and squeezed out the sources of error in the answer.
What follows is what I consider to be a good parts summary-- if you want more theory, you should read the article.
Consider a study published in the NEJM that showed an association between diabetes and pancreatic cancer.[3] The casual reader might conclude that diabetes causes pancreatic cancer. However, further analysis showed that much of the diabetes was of recent onset. The pancreatic cancer preceded the diabetes, and the cancer subsequently destroyed the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas. Therefore, this was not a case of diabetes causing pancreatic cancer but of pancreatic cancer causing the diabetes.
....
...To illustrate the point, consider the ISIS-2 trial,[8] which showed reduced mortality in patients given aspirin after myocardial infarction. However, subgroup analyses identified some patients who did not benefit: those born under the astrological signs of Gemini and Libra; patients born under
An interesting paper. The abstract says:
Rationality leads people to imitate those with similar tastes but different information. But people who imitate common sources develop correlated beliefs, and rationality demands that later social learners take this correlation into account. This implies severe limits to rational imitation. We show that (i) in most natural observation structures besides the canonical single-file case, full rationality dictates that people must “anti-imitate” some of those they observe; and (ii) in every observation structure full rationality dictates that people imitate, on net, at most one person and are imitated by, on net, at most one person, over any set of interconnected players. We also show that in a very broad class of settings, any learning rule in which people regularly do imitate more than one person without anti-imitating others will lead to a positive probability of people converging to confident and wrong long-run beliefs.
I have a notion that an FAI will be able to create better friends and lovers for you than actual humans could be. Family would be a more complex case if you value the history as well as the current experience.
I'm not talking about catgirls-- if some difficulties in relationships are part of making relationships better in the long haul, then the FAI will supply difficulties.
If people eventually have relationships with FAI-created humans rather than humans generated by other means, is this a problem?
Let's first separate sexual aspects from the need for other companionship
It's not self-evident to me that they are separable.
If you liked Scott Alexander's essay, Meditations on Moloch, you might like this typographic poster-meme I made. It was a minor success on Facebook.
(If you haven't read Scott Alexander's essay, Meditations on Moloch, then you might want to check it out. As Stuart Armstrong said, it's a beautiful, disturbing, poetical look at the future.)
There is the line "thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent" so I see what you mean. But I think that just means that there's no sane agent to deal with, no law of the universe that says we can appease Moloch in exchange for something.
But anthropomorphizing Moloch, perhaps poetically, is different, and there's plenty of anthropomorphizing Moloch in the essay:
"But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours."
"We will break our back lifting Moloch to Heaven, but unless something changes it will be his victory and not ours."
"In the very near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it is on our side, it can kill Moloch dead."
"Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of Carthage. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most ...
In the interest of trying out stuff outside the usual sphere-of-things-that-I'm-doing, I now have a fashion/lifestyle blog.
It's in Finnish, but it has a bunch of pictures of me, which ought to be language-neutral. Also my stuffed animals. (And yes, I know that I need a better camera.)
Hi. I'm Portuguese and live near Lisbon. Are there any LWers out there that live nearby?
The latest survey (2013) shows zero people living in Portugal, and so I feel a bit lonely out here, especially when I read the locations for the LW meetups. They seem so close, only not really...
I guess I could make an effort to start my own meetup in Lisbon or something, maybe, I don't know. I am a little shy and I don't think I am capable of starting something like that on my own.
I work in academia, in the field of computer science, and thus am surrounded by people th...
I remember seeing this organization on LW but cannot find it again or remember the name: it was a for-profit school-like entity that does a short training program (might have been 6 six week, maybe 3 months, that range), which is free upfront and takes their payment entirely as a percentage of the salary from the job they place you in afterward. If I remember correctly, it is run in the Bay Area and took a small pool each session, with a school-like application process.
Can anyone point me to this?
I have yet to find any thoughts on Effective Altruism that do not assume vast amounts of disposable income on the part of the reader. What I am currently trying to determine are things like 'at what point does it make sense to give away some of your income versus the utility of having decent quality of life yourself and insuring against the risk that you end up consuming charitable resources because something happened and you didn't have an emergency fund'. Does anyone know of any posts or similar that tackle the effective utilitarian use of resources when you don't have a lot of resources to begin with?
There are two questions here. The first is how you trade off the value you place on your own welfare vs the value you place on the welfare of distant others. And the second is how having extra cash will benefit your mental health, energy levels, free time, etc. and whether by improving those attributes of yours you'll increase the odds of doing more good for the world in the future.
I consider myself a pretty hardcore EA; I gave $20K to charity last year. But this year I'm saving all my money so my earning-to-give startup will have a bigger cash buffer. And I spend about $100/month on random stuff from Amazon that I think will make my life better (a weighted jump rope for exercising with, an acupressure mat for relaxing more effectively, nootropics, Larry Gonick's cartoon guides to the history of the universe so I can relax & educate myself away from my computer, etc.)
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is you don't even have to deal with the first values question if you decide that investing in yourself is a good investment from a long-run EA perspective. Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish... your mental energy is limited and if you find wet feet at all stressful, i...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.