chaizen

Alternative hypothesis: it's all about status. Or more specifically, the markers of status, similar to how beauty is a marker of health and fertility in women. Traits like bravery and confidence are markers of high status, which is required to ask women out, escalate, initiate sex, etc.

Evolution didn't settle on something robustly aligned to maximize fitness, but it does seem somewhat robust. That is, if people are consciously aware that status/health is being "faked" with confidence/makeup, that seems to have some negative effect if it's taken too far, bu... (read more)

I think enshittification is playing a role here in people perceiving things to be worse. When things like streaming services or ride-hailing get noticeably worse in a short timeframe, that has a much bigger effect on human perception—see the availability heuristic. In truth, things may be much better in the long-term, but you have to say “remember when you had to deal with X?” in order to surface that over the latest greedy moves. And they aren’t exactly wrong in pointing out certain things getting worse in the short term.

I don't think this is quite as true for high-status people (when they get recognized). Maybe this is part of the pain of being invisible—it implies that you're low-status, which is true for most people in most contexts in the modern world, so it's not actually that bad.

You also run into Dunbar's number and related phenomena with high concentrations of people, so it's presumably even harder to be salient or high-status in an urban area, for example.

it seems weird to ask for images of handwriting? So it’s not clear how much this matters.

This is a thing—in my stats class I had to scan my handwriting, turn it into a PDF, and turn it in online.

Explain?

I'd argue that this is more broadly about having a forcing function, of which status dynamics are a subset. I find that when I tie myself to the mast, I have more willpower, which probably has something to do with the dopaminergic anticipation of reward changing. In the case of status, high-status people have a lot of sway over others in their tribal context, so most people are naturally averse to disobeying them in that context. You wouldn't want to get exiled from the tribe, after all.

The problem is that this doesn't work for more serious cases that migh... (read more)

Eliezer's two posts on security mindset seem especially relevant here. I'd say you need what I might call generalized security mindset to deal with more domains becoming filled with intelligent adversaries.

Two more passes of my own:

Sprinting—Usain Bolt is a world-class sprinter, but does he know the underlying physics behind sprinting? No. What he has is his genes and the muscle memory that resulted from years of training his form. The fact that he doesn't know the physics implies what I might call a ghost that's acting when Usain sprints. It's a ghost because there is no knowledge of physics in there, just neural firing patterns, remnants, that imply lots of training in the past. Now if you were to capture his sprinting with a camera, and feed those pixels ... (read more)

Thanks for the links—I definitely do focus in on the essential parts when I have limited resources. So I personally don't need versions without comments, but I find the alternate link for the Sequences quite aesthetically appealing, which is nice.

As for the anthropic reasoning, there are definitely all kinds of different scenarios that can play out, but I would argue that they can be clumped into one of three categories for anthropics. One is doom soon, meaning that everyone dies soon (no more souls). The second is galactic expansion with huge numbers of n... (read more)

Hi all, I’m Hari. Funnily enough, I found LessWrong after watching a YouTube video on R***’s b*******. (I already had some grasp of the dynamics of internet virality, so no I did not see it as saying anything substantive about the community at large.)

My background spans many subjects, but I tend to focus on computer science, psychology, and statistics. I’m really interested in figuring out the most efficient way to do various things—the most efficient way to learn, the fastest way of arriving at the correct belief, how to communicate the most informat... (read more)