cesspool

If you could track the "success rate" of these marriages--not just what couples stayed together, but who ended up genuinely happy later in life--I have to wonder whether those who stuck more closely to their initial "checklist" would have a better track record than those who deviated wildly from the values they thought they had going in. Similarly, given the problem of "figuring out what you actually value", I have to wonder if you get better results by sitting down and methodically writing down a list, or by letting your gut feelings influence you.

Ration... (read more)

You're missing part of the point of buying local. When it comes to meat and animal products, local farming is excellent for animal welfare. Your local farmer selling eggs and cuts of meat out of a cooler in the back of his truck might not have the time, money or inclination to bother with any official certification program like Animal Welfare Approved or Certified Humane, but I'm willing to bet the animals have a better quality of life than most large-scale operations even if they do meet the highest standards. I grew up near some local farms, you can d... (read more)

Proposing that sorting by personality similarity would make pleasant, cohesive families is making an assumption about human nature, which I wish like hell were true, but it's not: It assumes that if only everyone were matched with the right people that "clicked" with their personality, they'd all find their role in happy family units and we'd all live happily ever after. And that's probably true for many or even most people, people who could be miserable and a drag on everyone if they were surrounded by the wrong partners, but turn into happy and contrib... (read more)

While deAcc/Pause is the majoritarian view

The article you cited here is paywalled, so I can't respond to it specifically, but I don't think the widespread opposition to new datacenters is evidence that the majority of people actually want to pause AI development or are worried about x-risk. A lot of people are opposed to data centers not because they're worried about AI progress, but because they're worried about land use, water consumption and electricity prices. If you ask an average person who's protesting the datacenters (especially in rural states w... (read more)

It seems to me that e/acc is the logical viewpoint for someone who has a very low p(doom). If, for whatever reason, you believe the existential risk posed by AI is negligible, then wanting AI to improve as rapidly as possible so we can start wielding it against all of society's problems is kind of a no-brainer. An e/acc is simply a techno-optimist who sees AI no different than rockets or self-driving cars or any of the other futuristic technologies that we're working on. This could make society awesome. What are we waiting for? Let off the brakes and ... (read more)

If that's not how meaning works, then what does "meaning", well... mean? In my opinion, "meaning" is just an emotion like any other. Sure, it's kind of a meta-emotion that dictates what significance our other emotions or values or stimuli seem to have to us, but at the end of the day it's just an emotion that we percieve. If we're assuming all the things about consciousness that thought experiments like this usually assume, there's no reason that any conscious being's sense of "meaning" isn't just as malleable as their sense of bliss or euphoria or wha... (read more)

I believe other people who want to do simple home experiments related to pain tolerance often use ice water. You can either stick your hand in it or even immerse your whole body, if you like, and see how long you can endure it or train yourself to "accept" the pain or other mental techniques for pain tolerance. It's easy to do, and as long as you don't stay in long enough to give yourself hypothermia or frostbite, completely harmless--it may even be good for you though the jury still seems to be out on that.

Yeah, and it's too hard to measure whether someone is "happy" anyway. It's inherently impossible to know another person's subjective experience, and people lie about their own experience for various social reasons all the time so self-reporting is pretty useless. Let alone effectively gauging whether situation A or situation B makes them happier. There probably are humans out there whose optimal life experience consists mostly of laying in bed and watching netflix, just like there are humans out there whose best life looks like training to run ultramara... (read more)

I think the "people living with UBI would suffer from pointless lives devoid of meaning" argument has some truth to it, but people take it too far.

Humans in general derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction in life from engaging their mind and body to solve problems and overcome challenges, and doing those things collaboratively with other humans. A good job ("good" in this case meaning subjectively pleasant to work at, not high-status or high-earning) provides this satisfaction to many people, whether they know it or not. There's no reason a person could... (read more)

Anti-money laundering and fraud protections introduce a lot of bullshit and risks. Many human beings on either side of the transaction in a bank transfer are monitoring it, have to do a lot of paperwork and screening especially for large transfers (that's the "bullshit" part, and someone has to pay them to do it which results in the high fees), and one risk is that the transaction will be erroneously flagged for AML or fraud and get held up and require even more bullshit to be pushed through. Another risk is that now two governments, not just one, have t... (read more)

You hit the nail on the head with the "out of government control" line. As has been shown by some political polling done on LW, a good chunk of rationalists (full disclosure, myself included) have libertarian leanings. We regard the government's ability to control transactions and the money supply as a huge liability. I wish I shared your optimism about our ability to "vote out" governments who do a bad job of money management and use their control of the monetary system to enforce unjust laws, inflate the money supply to prop up spending on unjust wars... (read more)

I would say your description of a world where most people are left to "shut the fuck up and enjoy your government handouts or freemium robot butlers or whatever" while the few elites are uploading their consciousness and living in unimaginable luxury is a post-scarcity vision, and it's a fine one. Inequality is only an issue insofar as it includes suffering and poverty. If 1% of the people have 99% of the wealth and status, but they make sure us plebeians all have plenty of food, water, housing, and free time and access to all the tools and supplies with... (read more)

I appreciate all the time and effort people put into writing utopia stories, but I think most of the really detailed ones are making a mistake based on some totally normal human assumptions.  They depict incredibly complex simulated worlds of uploaded consciousness optimized to have the most subjectively good experience that the author can imagine.  (I just read one of the most highly rated ones so this is partially a critique of that story, but I have read others like it and it seems representative of many utopia-envisioning efforts as a whole.)... (read more)

I'm not sure exactly what point you're trying to make here (Was it "an outdoor space isn't really 'nature' unless there's constant, imminent danger?"), but you said it yourself about a spectrum instead of a binary, and then kind of went back to a binary again by the end of the article (Amazon or Outback = true nature, everything else = tame or domesticated).  I think you had it right earlier on.  Outdoor spaces are on a spectrum.  Parks are not really "pure" nature, but they're one step further towards "nature" on the axis than concrete buil... (read more)

There seems to be a disconnect here between the idea of agency you and these other articles are pursuing, and what your specific goals are.  The definition of "agency" can mean a lot of different things to different people, but the version the LW community seems to coalesce around is something like "recognizing when irrational factors like social norms and emotional influences are stopping you from pursuing your goals as effectively as possible, and changing your behavior so that you are no longer restrained by those factors".  If that's what you... (read more)

It sounds to me like you are looking for two conflicting things, trying to achieve them both at once and getting frustrated at the results.  You're trying to deepen your understanding of philosophy and participate in conversation on the subject, and you're trying to "cure" your growing misanthropy and rediscover your love and kinship for your fellow man.

Any rational person who is above average intelligence can't escape having some elitism.  The majority of average people are, for all practical purposes, not capable of engaging with, understanding... (read more)

Some lawyers, sure, but not the vast majority of the legal profession.

All those points you made are correct (besides maybe the x-risk one--you were right that that one came a little more from opinion, having worked with a bunch of lawyers I believe they generally do nothing better than provide expert arguments and rationalizations for whatever they want to believe or make you believe, rather than following the facts to the truth in good faith), but I don't think they're enough to outweigh the fact that the legal profession is absolutely ripe for the kinds ... (read more)

Update:  After 2 seconds of Googling I realized what I'm talking about is literally just a Wiki and I'm trying to reinvent it.  MediaWiki which powers Wikipedia is open source and would be a perfect fit for this project I think.  Besides, "The Whistleblower Wiki" has a nice ring to it.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Cool to hear my feedback is appreciated!  Spreadsheet is an improvement.  I think the ultimate form of this project would be some kind of SQL database with a website and fancy UI built on top of it--but that's not my area of expertise so I wouldn't even know where to start.  Maybe you have 2 components--a spreadsheet/database that lets you search for names based on categories and filters, and then each gives a link to a Wiki-style page on the person with the full text of their story, notes on what they did right/wrong and all the other stuff... (read more)

First I want to say that I'm really on your team here.  I support what you're trying to do, I agree with you about the importance of whistleblowers, and your idea seems like it could be a valuable resource to prospective whistleblowers or just plain people who want to get more educated about some of the history of government wrongdoing and attempts to cover it up.

But that said...  for something you called a "database", a long list of bullet points is about the worst way the data could be organized and makes it borderline useless as a resource. &n... (read more)