I'm finally managing to finish my "basic" training in rationality, which is to mean finish studying "Rationality: A-Z" (I had studied the first half years ago, but I foolishly stopped when I got to the part about reductionism, which was unbelievably stupid of me even with all the reasons the...
My master thesis was on the subject of climate change and mass media attitude toward it. Working on it, I've read over 300 newspaper articles on the subject and studied a large number of papers regarding its consequences, its solutions, and the attempts to frame the debate over them, so...
Indeed, including the people who willingly caused it. But profiting from a problem is not the same as fixing it.
Since I wrote my comment I had lots of chances to prod at the apathy of people to act against imminent horrible doom.
I do believe that a large obstacle it's that going "well, maybe I should do something about it, then. Let's actually do that" requires a sudden level of mental effort and responsibility that's... well, it's not quite as unlikely as oxygen turning into gold, but you shouldn't just expect people doing that (it took me a ridiculous amount of time before starting to do so).
People are going to require a lot of prodding or an environment where taking personal responsibility for a collective crisis is the social norm to get... (read more)
She gave me the answer of someone who had recently stopped liking fritos through an act of will. Her answer went something like this: "Just start noticing how greasy they are, and how the grease gets all over your fingers and coats the inside of the bag. Notice that you don't want to eat things soaked in that much grease. Become repulsed by it, and then you won't like them either."
This woman's technique stuck with me. She picked out a very specific property of a thing she wanted to stop enjoying and convinced herself that it repulsed her.
I completely stopped smoking four years ago with the exact same method. It's pretty powerful, I'm definitely making a technique out of this.
I think I've been able to make outstanding progresses last year in improving rationality and starting to work on real problems mostly because of megalomaniac beliefs that were somewhat compartmentalised but that I was able to feel at a gut level each time I had to start working.
Lately, as a result of my progresses, I've started slowing down because I was able to come to terms with these megalomaniac beliefs and realise at a gut level they weren't accurate, so a huge chunk of my drive faded, and my predictions about my goals updated on what I felt I could realise with the drive I was feeling, even if I knew that destroying these beliefs was a sign I really improved and was learning how actually hard it is to do world changing stuff...
I'll definitely give this a trial run, trying to chain down those beliefs and pull them out as fuel when I need to.
Mh... I guess "holy madman" is a definition too vague to make a rational debate on it? I had interpreted it as "sacrifice everything that won't negatively affect your utility function later on". So the interpretation I imagined would be someone that won't leave himself an inch of comfort more than what's needed to keep the quality of his work constant.
I see slack as leaving yourself enough comfort that you'd be ready to use your free energy in ways you can't see at the moment, so I guess I was automatically assuming an "holy madman" would optimise for outputting the current best effort he can in the long term, rather than sacrificing... (read 678 more words →)
I think that the approaches based on being a holy madman greatly underestimates the difficulty on being a value maximiser running on corrupted, basic human hardware.
I'd be extremely skeptical on anyone who claims to have found a way to truly maximise it's utility function, even if they claim to have avoided all the obvious pitfalls of burning out and so-so.
It would be extremely hard to conciliate "put forth your full effort" and staying rational enough to notice you're burning yourself out or noticing that you're getting stuck in some suboptimal route because you're not leaving yourself enough slack to notice better opportunities.
The detached academic seems to me an odd way to describe... (read 367 more words →)
The review seem pretty balanced and interesting, however the bit about Bailey struck me as really misguided.
I'll try to explain why, I apologise if at some times I might come off as angry but the whole issue about autogynephilia annoys me both at a personal level as a trans person and at a professional level as a graduated in psychologist and scientist. Alice Dreger seems to have massively botched this part of her work.
... (read 689 more words →)In 2006, Dreger decided to investigate the controversy around J. Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would be Queen. The book is a popularized account of research on transgenderism, including a typology of transsexualism developed by Ray Blanchard. This
I'll try my best to express it, even if I feel it makes me look stupid:
Short version:
Trying to improve how activism is done, figuring out ways to maximise the positive impact activists and activism organisations can have to advance their cause and that can be reasonably taught.
Reasoning
Activism organisations that are composed by volunteers and that don't hire professionals are limited in what they can learn about their craft. Typically, activists can figure out by trial and errors and by looking at others what seem to work or not, but only if there is a feedback one can correctly eyeball.
So there is no reason to believe that the efficiency of these activists and... (read 419 more words →)
I'm not 100% sure I understood the first paragraph, could you clarify it for me if I got it wrong?
Essentially, the "efficient-markets-as-high-status-authorities" mindset I was trying to describe seems to me that work as such:
Given a problem A, let's say providing life saving medicine to max number of people, it assumes that letting agents motivated by profit act freely, unrestricted by regulations or policies that even be aimed to try fix problem A, would provide said medicine to more people than an intentional policy of a government that's trying to provide said medicine to max number of people.
The market doesn't seem to have a utility function in this model, but any agent... (read more)
I'm finally managing to finish my "basic" training in rationality, which is to mean finish studying "Rationality: A-Z" (I had studied the first half years ago, but I foolishly stopped when I got to the part about reductionism, which was unbelievably stupid of me even with all the reasons the led to me doing so). I plan to continue studying even more material once I'm done with it, to train myself in instrumental rationality and everything else I can find to make myself as smart as I could possibly be. I'm very satisfied with my progresses, the first half of the sequences helped me improve tremendously years ago, and now I can... (read 1119 more words →)
My master thesis was on the subject of climate change and mass media attitude toward it. Working on it, I've read over 300 newspaper articles on the subject and studied a large number of papers regarding its consequences, its solutions, and the attempts to frame the debate over them, so I consider myself to be well informed on it.
In the months I've been on this site though, I've been greatly surprised by the apparent unconcerned attitude many of the users have toward this theme.
Given that
My working theory is that Putin could be worried about some kind of internal threat to himself and his power.
He's betting a lot on his image of strong, dangerous leader to keep afloat. However the Russian constant propaganda that keeps up that image was starting to be more and more known and ineffective.
Europe also has been trying to get rid of Russian influence through gas for a while, and would likely have managed in a few more years. Then they'd be free to be less accepting of his anti-human rights antics.
Ukraine joining Nato would have made him look extremely weak, and it would have made it easier to make him look weak... (read more)