Shortform Content [Beta]
"Immortality is cool and all, but our universe is going to run down from entropy eventually"
I consider this argument wrong for two reasons. The first is the obvious reason, which is that even if immortality is impossible, it's still better to live for a long time.
The second reason why I think this argument is wrong is because I'm currently convinced that literal physical immortality is possible in our universe. Usually when I say this out loud I get an audible "what" or something to that effect, but I'm not kidding.
It&#x... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I have a previous high impliciation uncertainty about this (that would be a crux?). " you can't accelerate enough to turn around " seems false to me. The mathematical rotation seems like it ought to exist. The prevoius reasons I thought such a mathematical rotation would be impossible I have signficantly less faith in. If I draw a unit sphere analog in spacetime having a visual observation from the space-time diagram drawn on euclid paper is not sufficient to conclude that the future cone is far from past cone. And thinking that a sphere is ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Strategy mini-post:
One thing that tends to be weak in strategy games is "opponent's choice" effects, where an ability has multiple possible effects and an opponent chooses which is resolved. Usually, each effect is stronger than what you would normally get for a card with that price, but in practice these cards are often quite weak.
For instance, the Magic: the Gathering card "Book Burning" looks quite strong in theory, as it either does 6 damage or mills 6 cards (both strong effects that might well be worth more than the card'... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I wasn't linking to that for the 5/5 star rating - there are zero votes.
Imagine two prediction markets, both with shares that give you $1 if they pay out and $0 otherwise.
One is predicting some event in the real world (and pays out if this event occurs within some timeframe) and has shares currently priced at $X.
The other is predicting the behaviour of the first prediction market. Specifically, it pays out if the price of the first prediction market exceeds an upper threshhold $T before it goes below a lower threshhold $R.
Is there anything that can be said in general about the price of the second prediction market? For example... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
A frequent failure mode that I have as a leader:
- Someone comes on to a new project, and makes a few suggestions.
- All of those suggestions are things we/I have thought about and discussed in detail, and we have detailed reasons why we've made the decisions we have.
- I tell the person those reasons.
- The person comes away feeling like the project isn't really open to criticism feedback, and their ideas won't be heard.
I think a good policy is to just say yes to WHATEVER experiment someone who is new to the project proposes, and let them take their ow... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
This combination of failure modes seems pretty dicey.
I think I've encountered something similar in relationships, where my naive thought was "they're doing something wrong/harmful and I should help them avoid it" but I eventually realized "them having an internal locus of control and not feeling like I'm out to micromanage them is way more important than any given suboptimal thing they're doing."
https://arbital.com/p/cev/ : "If any hypothetical extrapolated person worries about being checked, delete that concern and extrapolate them as though they didn't have it. This is necessary to prevent the check itself from having a UDT influence on the extrapolation and the actual future."
Our altruism (and many other emotions) are evolutionarily just an acausal reaction to the worry that we're being simulated by other humans.
It seems like a jerk move to punish someone for being self-aware enough to replace their emotions by the decision-theoretic considerat
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI think (given my extremely limited understanding of this stuff) this is to prevent UDT agents from fooling the people simulating them by recognizing that they're in a simulation.
IE, you want to ignore the following code:
If (inOmegasHead){
oneBox;
} else{
twoBox}
The Kitty Genovese Equation
Someone's in trouble. You can hear them from your apartment, but you can't tell if any of your neighbors are already rushing down, or already calling the police. It's time sensitive, and you've got to decide now: is it worth spending those precious minutes, or not?
Let's define our variables:
Cost to victim of nobody helping:
cost to each bystander of intervening:
Number of bystanders: (Since , for it's always right to intervene.)
Analysis:
Suppose the bystanders all sim... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post,
Consider a singleton overseeing ten simpletons. Its ontology is that each particle has a position. Each prefers all their body's particles being in it to the alternative. It aggregates their preferences by letting each of them rule out 10% of the space of possibilities. This does not let them gurantee their integrity. What if it considered changes to a single position instead of states? Each would rule out any change that removes a particle from their body, which fits fine in their 10%. Iterating non-ruled-out changes would end up in an optimal state ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Old post: RAND needed the "say oops" skill
[Epistemic status: a middling argument]
A few months ago, I wrote about how RAND, and the “Defense Intellectuals” of the cold war represent another precious datapoint of “very smart people, trying to prevent the destruction of the world, in a civilization that they acknowledge to be inadequate to dealing sanely with x-risk.”
Since then I spent some time doing additional research into what cognitive errors and mistakes those consultants, military officials, and politicians made that endangered the world. Th... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Can you say more about what you got from it?
The fact that Amazon rainforest produces 20% atmospheric oxygen (I read this somewhere, hope this isn't fiction) should be a bigger political piece than it seems to be. Seems like brazil could be leveraging this further on a global stage (have other countries subsidize the cost of maintaining the rainforests, preventing deforestation as we all benefit from/need the CO2 to oxygen conversion)? Also, would other countries have a tree-planting supply race to eliminate dependence on such a large source of oxygen from any one agent?
Just a strange thought th... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
How I managed to stop craving sweets in 3 weeks
For me at least, it is possible to eliminate/drastically reduce my sugar cravings.
Typically I feel cravings for something sweet whenever I’m hungry, bored, have just finished a meal, am feeling sad, or am feeling happy. In short, I eat a lot of sweets and also spend a lot of time and effort trying to resist them.
LAST TIME
A few years ago I managed to cold-turkey sweets while I was following a Keto diet. I noticed that in week 3 of keto, my cravings had vanished. No longer did the desire to finish a meal with... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Congrats!
Is the sweets the primary thing here, or was it just the hardest part of an overall keto diet?
I've had several friends try keto, and on the 2-3rd day say "woah this feels so amazing I'm so energetic life is great!" and then a week or two later go "oh god this sucks everything is terrible."
I haven't made an attempt to control my diet so far. For the past few years I've been incrementally doing more exercise, but if that's had any effect it's been (har har?) outweighed by the effect of, dunno, gettin... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
One thing I'm finding quite surprising about shortform is how long some of these posts are. It seems that many people are using this feature to indicate that they've just written up these ideas quickly in the hope that the feedback is less harsh. This seems valuable; the feedback here can be incredibly harsh at times and I don't doubt that this has discouraged many people from posting.
Can confirm. I don't post on normal lesswrong because the discourse is brutal.
As I said before, I'll be posting book reviews. Please let me know if you have any questions and I'll answer them to the best of my ability.
Book Review: The AI does not hate you by Tom Chivers
The title of this book comes from a quote by Elizier Yudkowsky which reads in full: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use of something else". This book covers not only potential risks from AI, but the rationalist community from which this evolved and also touches on the effective altruism movement.
This book fills s
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postThere's been a lot of noise lately about affirmative consent, a standard of consent which requires explicit verbal confirmation for every escalation of romantic or sexual interaction. It has been adopted as a standard by many college campuses, and efforts have been made to turn it into actual law.
Most of the discussion has centered around the use of affirmative consent as a legal standard, and as such it is quite terrible: unfair, unjust, and impossible to interpret in a consistent way that stops bad behavior without criminalizing normal conduct. But,... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I certainly have the moral instinct to.
I don't have a lot of experience with people within my friend group hooking up, or necessarily a lot of experience hearing about the details of hookups enough to have explicitly put me in that situation.
I have had several personal experiences where I reciprocated advances from women, then later been hit by the fallout of the lack of explicit verbal negotiation of what was going to happen. And I certainly reprimand friends (including women) for failing to communicate in their relationships at a broader level when ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
There are a pair of things in the rationalist community which I like to call "The Two Bad Polys" -- polyphasic sleep and polyamory. Both seem appealing to many people and have been experimented with pretty widely in the community despite being quite harmful; I strongly advise against trying either. In practice they seem to lead to lots of problems for most people who try them.
(Attribution note: I'm not sure whether I was the first to come up with this term to describe the pair -- I think the two were first referred to as a dangerous pair by ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Go after polyamory all you want -- if there is data about problems that are statistically likely to show up, I'd like to know about that, so that I can try minimizing the odds that we will experience them -- and we do experience some of the standard poly jealousy problems -- but if you are going to shoot a sacred cow, bring a high powered rifle, not a squirt gun.
I'll fully admit that I don't have formal statistical data, but I think the point is worth making anyway as a potential warning. My intent is mostly to warn newcomers about patterns... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I generally agree with the heuristic that we should "live on the mainline", meaning that we should mostly plan for events which capture the dominant share of our probability. This heuristic causes me to have a tendency to do some of the following things
- Work on projects that I think have a medium-to-high chance of succeeding and quickly abandon things that seem like they are failing.
- Plan my career trajectory based on where I think I can plausibly maximize my long term values.
- Study subjects only if I think that I will need to understand them at som
I see a few problems with this heuristic, however, and I'm not sure quite how to resolve them. More specifically, I tend to float freely between different projects because I am quick to abandon things if I feel like they aren't working out (compare this to the mindset that some game developers have when they realize their latest game idea isn't very good).
There are two big issues with the "living in the mainline" strategy:
1. Most of the highest EV activities are those that have low chance of success but big rewards. I suspect m... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Some thoughts on Buddhist epistemology.
This risks being threatening, upsetting, and heretical within a certain point of view I commonly see expressed on LW for reasons that will become clear if you keep reading. I don't know if that means you shouldn't read this if that sounds like the kind of thing you don't want to read, but I put it out there so you can make the choice without having to engage in the specifics if you don't want to. I don't think you will be missing out on anything if that warning gives you a tinge of "maybe... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I agree with KaJ Solata and Viliam that episteme is underweighted in Buddhism, but thanks for explicating that world view
I'm going to start writing up short book reviews as I know from past experience that it's very easy to read a book and then come out a few years later with absolutely no knowledge of what was learned.
Book Review: Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope
To be honest, the main reason why I read this book was because I had enjoyed his first and second books (Models and The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck) and so I was willing to take a risk. There were definitely some interesting ideas here, but I'd already received many of these through other s... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I often don't feel like I'm "doing that much", but find that when I list out all of the projects, activities, and thought streams going on, there's an amount that feels like "a lot". This has happened when reflecting on every semester in the past 2 years.
Hyp: Until I write down a list of everything I'm doing, I'm just probing my working memory for "how much stuff am I up to?" Working mem has a limit, and reliably I'm going to get only a handful of things. Anytime when I'm doing more things th... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Relatedly, the KonMari cleaning method involves taking all items of a category "e.g. all books" and putting them in on big pile, before clearing them out. You often feel like you don't own "that much stuff" and are almost always surprised by the size of the pile.
Here are some of the common criticisms I get of myself. If you know me, either in person, through secondhand accounts feel free to comment with your thoughts on which ones feel correct to you and any nuance or comments you'd like to make. Full license for this particular thread to operate on Crocker's rules and not take my feelings into account. If you don't feel comfortable commenting publicly, also feel free to message with your thoughts.
- I have too low epistemic rigor.
- Too confident in myself
- Not confident enough in myself.
- Too focused on st
In discussions about consciousness I find myself repeating the same basic argument against the existence of qualia constantly. I don't do this just to be annoying: It is just my experience that
1. People find consciousness really hard to think about and has been known to cause a lot of disagreements.
2. Personally I think that this particular argument dissolved perhaps 50% of all my confusion about the topic, and was one of the simplest, clearest arguments that I've ever seen.
I am not being original either. The argument is the same one that has b... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
When I say "qualia" I mean individual instances of subjective, conscious experience full stop. These three extensions are not what I mean when I say "qualia".
Not convinced of this. There are known neural correlates of consciousness. That our current brain scanners lack the required resolution to make them inspectable does not prove that they are not inspectable in principle.
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post