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A celebrity is someone famous for being famous.

Is a rationalist someone famous for being rational? Someone who’s leveraged their reputation to gain privileged access to opportunity, other people’s money, credit, credence, prestige?

Are there any arenas of life where reputation-building is not a heavy determinant of success?

Schelling talks about “the right to be sued” as an important right that businesses need to protect for themselves, not because anyone likes being sued, but because only businesses that can be sued if they slip up have enough credibility to attract customers.

-- Scott Alexander

I think about this every couple of weeks. Seems deep and underappreciated.

Is there a name for this mental state I sometimes find myself in after reading for a while? My breathing slows, I start to feel very "focused", and my physical perceptions start to blur. The book or screen I'm reading seems simultaneously both small/near and huge/far, my limbs feel simultaneously heavy and weightless, and time seems to be simultaneously slowing down and rushing forward. Has anyone here experienced this, and do you know what it's called?

Proposing a "Law Law": applying the Law of Identity to decision-making.

The law of identity is descriptive. It states that some thing is described as itself: X = X. A valid description describes itself.

I think there's a prescriptive analog as well: a Law Law. It would state that some decision-making framework must output itself along with its answer. A valid prescription prescribes itself. Otherwise, it's necessarily a wrong decision-making framework. No further research into the proposed prescription would be needed!

An obvious example of a prescription tha... (read more)

Thinking more about the singleton risk / global stable totalitarian government risk from Bostrom's Superintelligence, human factors, and theory of the firm.

Human factors represent human capacities or limits that are unlikely to change in the short term.  For example, the number of people one can "know" (for some definition of that term), limits to long-term and working memory, etc.

Theory of the firm tries to answer "why are economies markets but businesses autocracies" and related questions.  I'm interested in the subquestion of "what factors giv... (read more)

I'm quite baffled by the lack of response to my recent question asking about which AI-researching companies are good to invest in (as in, would have good impact, not necessarily most profitable)- It indicates either A) most LW'ers aren't investing in stocks (which is a stupid thing not to be doing), or B) are investing in stocks, but aren't trying to think carefully about what impact their actions have on the world, and their own future happiness (which indicates a massive failure of rationality)

Even putting this aside, the fact that nobody jumped at the c... (read more)

A rough and dirty estimate of the COVID externality of visiting your family in the USA for Christmas when you don't feel ill:

You incur some number of μCOVIDs[*] a week, let's call it x. Since the incubation time is about 5 days, let's say that your chance of having COVID is about 5x/7,000,000 when you arrive at the home of your family with n other people. In-house attack rate is about 1/3, I estimate based off hazy recollections, so in expectation you infect 5xn/21,000,000 people, which is about xn/4,000,000 people.

How bad is it to infect one family member... (read more)

How to simulate observers without risking yourself getting simulated.

A common argument for the simulation hypothesis is that if we simulate too many observers relative to our unsimulated population then we'll end up in a state where most observers are simulated, therefore by the self indication assumption we're already in a situation of being simulated ourselves! I'll refer to this as the simulation tragedy.

 I'll introduce a few methods we can use to avoid such an outcome. Why? Because I believe it's better to be unsimulated than simulated. The goal h... (read more)

More on expectations leading to unhappiness: I think the most important instance of this in my life has been the following pattern.

• I do a thing where there is some kind of feedback mechanism
• The reception is better than I expected, sometimes by a lot
  • I'm quite happy about this, for a day or so
  • I immediately and unconsciously update my standards upward to consider the reception the new normal
• I do a comparable thing, the reception is worse than the previous time
  • I brood over this failure for several days, usually with a major loss of productivity

O... (read more)

Here's an idea: we hold the Ideological Turing Test (ITT) world championship. Candidates compete to pass an as broad range of views as possible.

Points awarded for passing a test are commensurate with the amount of people that subscribe to the view. You can subscribe to a bunch of them at once.

The awarding of failures and passes is done anonymously. Points can be awarded partially, according to what % of judges give a pass.

The winner is made president (or something)