Listening to people demand more specifics from If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies gives me a similar feeling to when a friend’s start-up was considering a merger.

Friend got a bad feeling about this because the other company clearly had different goals, was more sophisticated than them, and had an opportunistic vibe. Friend didn't know how specifically other company would screw them, but that was part of the point- their company wasn't sophisticated enough to defend themselves from the other one.

Friend fought a miserable battle with their coworkers over this. They were called chicken little because they couldn’t explain their threat model, until another employee stepped in with a story of how they'd been outmaneuvered at a previous company in exactly the way friend feared but couldn't describe. Suddenly, co-workers came around on the issue. They ultimately decided against the merger.

“They’ll be so much smarter I can’t describe how they’ll beat us” can feel like a shitty argument because it’s hard to disprove, but sometimes it’s true. The debate has to be about whether a specific They will actually be that smart.

When I am well rested and exercised and just had a great lunch (but not too much) with a good friend, there is no social or emotional issue I can't handle. Everything is just a problem to be solved, and I'm sure I can do it. 

For a long time I worked on increasing my problem solving under perfect conditions, and I succeeded... under perfect conditions. But this was not very helpful for when I was feeling hungry, or lonely, or, god forbid, underslept, which is when most problems happened.^[1] Worse, my fragile skills gave me the impression I was very good at handling [problem], so when I struggled I would either have to violate my vision for myself or blame the other person for not cooperating with my excellent social skills. 

I can only really know that this problem existed in me, but looking around my social circle, I see people who sure look like they're experiencing the exact same problem. I'd like to nudge the culture towards focusing more on "what you can reliably do under strain?" rather than "what's the tallest tower you can build?"

1. ^{^}

   The more complicated version would say that working on the skill ceiling can pay dividends in your skill floor, and maybe I was in t

According to a friend of mine in AI, there's a substantial contingent of people who got into AI safety via Friendship is Optimal. They will only reveal this after several drinks. Until then, they will cite HPMOR. Which means we are probably overvaluing HPMOR and undervaluing FIO.

You will always oversample from the most annoying members of a class.

This is inspired by recent arguments on twitter about how vegans and poly people "always" bring up those facts. I contend that it's simultaneous true that most vegans and poly people are either not judgmental, but it doesn't matter because that's not who people remember. Omnivores don't notice the 9 vegans who quietly ordered an unsatisfying salad, only the vegan who brought up factoring farming conditions at the table. Vegans who just want to abstain from animal products remember the omnivore who ordered the veal on purpose and made little bleating noises. 

And then it spirals. A mono person who had an interaction with an aggro poly person will be quicker to hear judgement in the next poly person's tone, and vice versa. This is especially bad because lots of us are judging others a little. We're quiet about it, we place it in context instead of damning people for a single flaw, but we do exercise our right to have opinions. Or maybe we're not judging the fact, just the logistical impact on us. It is pretty annoying to keep your mouth shut about an issue you view as morally important or a claim on your time, only to have someone demand you placate them about their own choices. 

AFAICT this principle covers every single group on earth. Conservatives hear from the most annoying liberals. Communists hear from the most annoying libertarians. Every hobby will be publicly represented by its members who are least deterred by an uninterested audience. 

 "Do you want to vent or to problem solve?" was useful tech when it was invented but I hate it now. Here's why:

1. The meme enforces the idea that there are exactly two things one might want, which makes it hard for people to even notice they want something different.
2. The thing I most want while complaining is help understanding the problem and myself. Actual solving is often trivial if you understand well enough. This could be viewed as coming under either vent or solve, but in practice if you answer either way people stop information gathering.
   1. Yes, I do tell people I want the secret third thing, and it does improve things.
3. Even if I do just want to vent, people asking that question are rarely good listeners. They treat it like a pressure cooker emitting steam- something they need to observe, but not apply any brain power to.
4. You might hope "understand the problem" would fall under problem solving, but in my experience the people who ask this question will immediately start trying to make the problem go away, instead of understanding it well enough to solve it. They apply more brain power than if you say venting, but not enough to actually be helpful.
5. I want the other person to Ju

I have a model that:

• human bodies actively maintain an equilibrium that works pretty well for them.
• sometimes you are knocked out of this equilibrium, but the all the maintenance mechanisms still work and you get back to normal. E.g. you get sick and feel like shit for a few days, but your body clears the virus and you recover 100%. 
• For issues like this, treatment is based on the first or root cause. if have strep throat you get antibiotics, if you broke your arm you need it set. Treating symptoms might be nice, but the issue will continue until the root cause is cleared. 
• sometimes you get knocked into a new equilbrium. You start out with externally caused anxiety, but that disrupts your sleep, which makes you anxious, which disrupts your sleep... And this is stable even if you remove the initial issue that made you anxious. You now have Bad Equilibrium Disease.
• Original cause is almost irrelevant when treating Bad Equilibrium Disease. If anxiety gives you insomnia and insomnia gives you anxiety, treating either will shift you to a better equilibrium.

Most of medicine focuses on problems with root causes. Even if you go to alternative modalities, they usually sell themselves as being better at finding root causes. But sometimes there either is no root cause, or it's not directly fixable, and you can still get tremendous gains by moving yourself to a better equilibrium. 

EA organizations frequently ask for people to run criticism by them ahead of time. I’ve been wary of the push for this norm. My big concerns were that orgs wouldn’t comment until a post was nearly done, and that it would take a lot of time. My recent post  mentioned a lot of people and organizations, so it seemed like useful data.

I reached out to 12 email addresses, plus one person in FB DMs and one open call for information on a particular topic.  This doesn’t quite match what you see in the post because some people/orgs were used more than once, and other mentions were cut. The post was in a fairly crude state when I sent it out.

Of those 14: 10 had replied by the start of next day. More than half of those replied within a few hours. I expect this was faster than usual because no one had more than a few paragraphs relevant to them or their org, but is still impressive.

It’s hard to say how sending an early draft changed things. Austin Chen got some extra anxiety joked about being anxious because their paragraph was full of TODOs (because it was positive and I hadn’t worked as hard fleshing out the positive mentions ahead of time). Turns out they were fine but then I was w... (read more)

Sometimes people deliberately fill their environment with yes-men and drive out critics. Pointing out what they're doing doesn't help, because they're doing it on purpose. However there are ways well intentioned people end up driving out critics unintentionally, and those are worth talking about.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church (podcast) is about a guy who definitely drove out critics deliberately. Mark Driscoll fired people, led his church to shun them, and rearranged the legal structure of the church to consolidate power. It worked, and his power was unchecked until the entire church collapsed. Yawn.

What's interesting is who he hired after the purges. As described in a later episode, his later hiring was focused on people who were executives in the secular world. These people were great at executing on tasks, but unopinionated about what their task should be. Whatever Driscoll said was what they did. 

This is something a good, feedback-craving leader could have done by accident. Hiring people who are good at the tasks you want them to do is a pretty natural move. But I think the speaker is correct (alas I didn't write down his name) that this is anti-correlated at the ta... (read more)

ooooooh actual Hamming spent 10s of minutes asking people about the most important questions in their field and helping them clarify their own judgment, before asking why they weren't working on this thing they clearly valued and spent time thinking about. That is pretty different from demanding strangers at parties justify why they're not working on your pet cause. 

reposting comment from another post, with edits:

re: accumulating status in hope of future counterfactual impact.

I model status-qua-status (as opposed to status as a side effect of something real) as something like a score for "how good are you at cooperating with this particular machine?". The more you demonstrate cooperation, the more the machine will trust and reward you. But you can't leverage that into getting the machine to do something different- that would immediately zero out your status/cooperation score. 

There are exceptions. If you're exceptionally strategic you might make good use of that status by e.g. changing what the machine thinks it wants, or coopting the resources and splintering. It is also pretty useful to accumulate evidence you're a generally responsible adult before you go off and do something weird. But this isn't the vibe I get from people I talk to with the 'status then impact' plan, or from any of 80ks advice. Their plans only make sense if either that status is a fungible resource like money, or if you plan on cooperating with the machine indefinitely. 

So I don't think people should pursue status as a goal in and of itself, especially if there isn't a clear sign for when they'd stop and prioritize something else.

I was fired from my first job out of college, and in retrospect that was a gift. It taught me that new jobs were easy to get (as a programmer in the late 00s) and took away my fear of job hunting, which otherwise would have been enormous. I watched so many programmer friends stay in miserable jobs when they had a plethora of options, because job hunting was too scary. Being fired early rescued me from that.

Everyone who waits longer than me to publicly share their ideas is a coward, afraid to expose their ideas to the harsh light of day. Everyone who publicly shares their ideas earlier than me is a maniac, wasting others people's time with stream of consciousness bullshit.

HEROIC/REACTIVE VS RESPONSIBLE/PROACTIVE AGENCY

A few month's ago, twitter's big argument was about this AITA, in which a woman left a restaurant to buy ranch dressing. Like most viral AITAs this is probably fake, but the discourse around it is still revealing. The arguments were split between "such agency! good for her for going after what she wants" and "what is she, 3?". I am strongly on the side of people doing what they want with their own food, but in this case I think the people praising her have missed the point, and the people criticizing her have focused on the wrong thing.

I think it's weird but harmless to drown all your food in ranch dressing. But it is, at best, terribly rude to leave a date for 20 minutes to run an errand. If it is so important to you to have ranch on all your food, either check with the restaurant ahead of time or just bring a small bottle by default. 

So this woman is agentic in the sense of "refusing to accept the environment as it is, working to bring it more in line with her preferences". But it's a highly reactive form of agency that creates a lot of negative externalities.

I see this a lot in the way rationalists talk about agency.  What... (read more)

Abstract issues raised by the Nonlinear accusations and counter-accusations

1. How do you handle the risk of witness tampering, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves innocent? Letting people cut corners if they claim a risk of tampering sure sets up bad incentives, but it is a real problem the system needs to be able to deal with
2. How do you handle the fact that the process of providing counter-evidence can be hacked, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves? People can string it out, or bury you in irrelevant data, or provide misleading data that then requires more time to drill into. 
3. How do you handle the risk of true, negative things coming out about the alleged victim? My take is that the first and strongest complaints will come from people who are extra sensitive, fragile, or bad at boundaries regardless of the situation, because duh. If you put two people in the same situation, the more sensitive person will complain more regardless of the situation. That's what sensitive means. 
4. Probably the best thing for the community as a whole is for complete, accurate information to come out about both the victims and the org, but this has h

EA/rationality has this tension between valuing independent thought, and the fact that most original ideas are stupid. But the point of independent thinking isn't necessarily coming up with original conclusions. It's that no one else can convey their models fully so if you want to have a model with fully fleshed-out gears you have to develop it yourself. 

1 day later, my retraction has more karma than the original humming post

Why does Hollywood make movies "based on" books that have extraordinarily little to do with the book? not just simplifying for time or lowest common denominator, but having nothing in common besides a few names and a title? 

According to Brandon Sanderson (link lost) and some other guy (link very lost), this comes about when a writer has an original script. Original scripts written on spec barely get purchased in Hollywood (although they do get commissioned), especially from young writers. But book adaptations do get purchased. So writers or producers will find a book that has an element in common with their story, buy the rights, and then write a script with the story they actually wanted. 

There's a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as "supportive", maybe even a very tiny gift. But that's only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].

One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn't a natural fit for,  because "it's quick and there are few applicants".   This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn't the only person the grantmaker encouraged.  I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.

[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I'm not mad at you personally]. 

I've been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone "yeah you're probably not good enough".

A lot of EA job postings encourage people t... (read more)

As a follow up on my previous poll: If you've worked closely with someone who used stimulants sometimes but not always, how did stimulants affect their ability to update? Please reply with emojis <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement".  

Comments with additional details are welcome. 

I have a friend who spent years working on existential risk. Over time his perception of the risks increased, while his perception of what he could do about them decreased (and the latter was more important). Eventually he dropped out of work in a normal sense to play video games, because the enjoyment was worth more to him than what he could hope to accomplish with regular work. He still does occasional short term projects, when they seem especially useful or enjoyable, but his focus is on generating hedons in the time he has left. 

I love this friend as a counter-example to most of the loudest voices on AI risk.You can think p(doom) is very high and have that be all the more reason to play video games. 

I don't want to valorize this too much because I don't want retiring to play video games becoming the cool new thing. The admirable part is that he did his own math and came to his own conclusions in the face of a lot of social pressure to do otherwise. 

Being fired from my first programming job was a counterintuitive gift. Also counterintuitive: I probably would have been better off with worse interviewing skills. My interview skills outstripped my programming skill, which meant I got jobs I was underqualified for, which ultimately went badly. I would have been better off with interview skills better correlated with my actual job skills. 

Last week I got nerdsniped with the question of why established evangelical leaders had a habit of taking charismatic  narcissists and giving them support to found their own churches^[1]. I expected this to be a whole saga that would teach lessons on how selecting for one set of good things secretly traded off against others. Then I found this checklist on churchplanting.com. It’s basically “tell me you’re a charismatic narcissist who will prioritize growth above virtue without telling me you’re a…“. And not charismatic in the sense of asking reasonable object-level questions that are assessed by a 3rd party and thus vulnerable to halo effects^[2]. 

The first and presumably most important item on the checklist is "Visioning capacity", which includes both the ability to dream that you are very important and to convince others to follow that dream. Comittment to growth has it's own section (7), but it's also embedded in, but there's also section 4 (skill at attracting converts).  Section 12 is Resilience, but the only specific setback mentioned is ups and downs in attendance. The very item on the list is "Can you create a grand Faith" is the last item on the 13 point list... (read more)

Lord grant me the strength to persevere when things are hard
The courage to quit when things are impossible
And the wisdom to know the difference

(original post)

I've stuck with Amazing Marvin longer than any other project management/todo app. That includes some pretty awful times when 95% of my tasks were medical or basic home care, times I was firing on all cylinders and cranking through ambitious projects, and times inbetween. 

Some things I like about Marvin

• The two failures of project management apps are lacking features critical to your process, and feature clutter coming between you and your work. Marvin avoids this by letting you toggle features on and off (many blatantly stolen from other project management apps).
  • For example, I have enabled the feature to add a point value to my tasks, but have disabled frog ratings (as in "eat that frog"). 
• Separate concepts of due date and do date, and it's very easily and rewarding to look at today's do list. 
• Lots of options for recurring tasks- every X days, X days after I complete it the last time, every 4th Tuesday, etc.
• Pinned tasks/projects let me track common recurring tasks without having to schedule them or recreate every time.
• Infinite nesting of projects. 
• Infinite nesting  of projects, plus single levels of tasks and subtasks, plays really well with what David MacIv

Recently Timothy TL and I published a podcast on OpenPhil and GoodVentures. As part of this, we contacted 16 people and organizations asking for comment. They were given access to the full recording as well as a searching transcript.

• Responded with small correction- 2
• Responded with medium size correction- 1
• Responded with long correction- 2
• Asked for more time- 2 (counted in other categories as well)
  • We offered one week to tell us if they were going to respond, an additional week to give a response that would be included in the recording, and longer for something we would link to in text but not include on the recording.
• Responded to say no comment- 4
• No response: 7

Last time I did this the results were impressive, with over half of respondents answering in <24 hours and only 2 non-responders. I walked away thinking asking for comments was a surprisingly cheap norm with a lot of upside. This time it felt like a slog, with the process dragging on for weeks beyond what I felt was a quite generous initial deadline. 

How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update. 

People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement".  Comments with additional details are welcome. 

Check my math: how does Enovid compare to to humming?

Nitric Oxide is an antimicrobial and immune booster. Normal nasal nitric oxide is 0.14ppm for women and 0.18ppm for men (sinus levels are 100x higher). journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

Enovid is a nasal spray that produces NO. I had the damndest time quantifying Enovid, but this trial registration says 0.11ppm NO/hour. They deliver every 8h and I think that dose is amortized, so the true dose is 0.88. But maybe it's more complicated. I've got an email out to the PI but am not hopeful about a response clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05109…

so Enovid increases nasal NO levels somewhere between 75% and 600% compared to baseline- not shabby. Except humming increases nasal NO levels by 1500-2000%. atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116….

Enovid stings and humming doesn't, so it seems like Enovid should have the larger dose. But the spray doesn't contain NO itself, but compounds that react to form NO. Maybe that's where the sting comes from? Cystic fibrosis and burn patients are sometimes given stratospheric levels of NO for hours or days; if the burn from Envoid came from the NO itself than those patients would be in agony. 

I'm not fi... (read more)

Toy model:

a person's skill level has a floor (what they can do with minimal effort) and ceiling (what they can do with a lot of thought and effort). Ceiling raises come from things we commonly recognize as learning: studying the problem, studying common solution. Floor raises come from practicing the skills you already have, to build fluency in them.

There's a rubber band effect where the farther your ceiling is from your floor, the more work you have to put in to raise it further. At a certain point the efficient thing to do is to grind until you have raised your floor, so that further ceiling raises are cheaper, even if you only care about peak performance. 

My guess for why that happens is your brain has some hard constraints on effort, and raising the floor reduces the effort needed at all levels. E.g. it's easier to do 5-digit multiplication if you've memorized 1-digit times tables. 

My guess is the pots theory of art works best  when a person's skill ceiling is well above their floor. This is true both because it means effort is likely the limiting reagent, the artist will have things to try rather than flailing at random, and they will be able to assess how good a given pot is.

Has anyone gotten good results with gemini doc editing? I have found it outrageously useless, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. 

Are impact certificates/retroactive grants the solution to grantmaking corrupting epistemics? They're not viable for everyone, but for people like me who:

1. do a lot of small projects (which barely make sense to apply for grants for individually)
2. benefit from doing what draws their curiosity at the moment (so the delay between grant application and decision is costly)
3. take commitments extremely seriously (so listing a plan on a grant application is very constraining)
4. have enough runway that payment delays and uncertainty for any one project aren't a big deal

They seem pretty ideal.

So why haven't I put more effort into getting retroactive funding? The retroactive sources tend to be crowdsourced. Crowdfunding is miserable in general, and leaves you open to getting very small amounts of money, which feels worse than none at all. Right now I can always preserve the illusion I would get more money, which seems stupid. In particular even if I could get more money for a past project by selling it better and doing some follow up, that time is almost certainly better spent elsewhere. 

[cross-posted from What If You Lived In the Least Convenient Possible World]

I came back to this post a year later because I really wanted to grapple with the idea I should be willing to sacrifice more for the cause. Alas, even in a receptive mood I don't think this post does a very good job of advocating for this position. I don't believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she's clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications. She's clearly confused about what convenient means (having to slow down to take care of yourself is very inconvenient), and I think this is significant and not just a poor choice of words. So I wrote my own version of the position.

Let's say Bob is right that the costs exceed the benefits of working harder or suffering. Does that need to be true forever? Could Bob invest in changing himself so that he could better live up to his values? Does he have an ~obligation^[1] to do that? 

We generally hold that people who can swim have obligations to save drowning children in lakes^[2], but there's no obligation for non-swimmers to make an attempt that will in... (read more)

A very rough draft of a plan to test prophylactics for airborne illnesses.

Start with a potential superspreader event. My ideal is a large conference,  many of whom travelled to get there, in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation and air purification, in winter. Ideally >=4 days, so that people infected on day one are infectious while the conference is still running. 

Call for sign-ups for testing ahead of time (disclosing all possible substances and side effects). Split volunteers into control and test group. I think you need ~500 sign ups in the winter to make this work. 

Splitting controls is probably the hardest part. You'd like the control and treatment group to be identical, but there are a lot of things that affect susceptibility.  Age, local vs. air travel, small children vs. not, sleep habits... it's hard to draw the line

Make it logistically trivial to use the treatment. If it's lozenges or liquids, put individually packed dosages in every bathroom, with a sign reminding people to use them (color code to direct people to the right basket). If it's a nasal spray you will need to give everyone their own bottle, but make it trivial to get more if someone l... (read more)

This is a trial balloon for a longer post. Please let me know which parts you're interested in, if any.

The standard (North American) story of plate tectonics is of accidental discovery: continental drift was rejected for lack of evidence or a mechanism. 50 years the US Navy discovered an anomaly on the sea floor that eventually led to the discovery of plate tectonics. But before that accidental discovery, geologists were very close to codifying plate tectonics on purpose.

Some definitions: 

• continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. He believed that the continents moved through the ocean floor like ships moving through ice.
• Plate tectonics is the theory that the earth has a gooey center, covered in large large plates (the ocean/continental floor) with water/more rock on top of them. Like an M&M with a candy shell several times thicker than the chocolate.

Wegener proposed Continental Drift in 1912. The past is a different country, but when I look at the evidence, it sure looks plausible to me. He didn't just point to the jigsaw puzzle shorelines between Africa and South America, but to fossil evidence that made no sense without adjoining land, geological features... (read more)