Counterpoint, I'm usually pretty skeptical of people who say something like, "just read this book, it explains it better than I can." Telling me you read a book and didn't particularly understand it isn't a great sell. I also wasn't interested in doing labor to argue your point of view when I didn't even think you're right in the first place.

It's probably still better to have that convo though, if your alternative is to argue nonsensically.

In practice the resolution is probably "here's what informed me, I understand you may not be compelled to read it, but if you do and want to discuss it let me know."

I just read the prior/posteriors, thanks, this is a good reference point for me, for how much I would think Yudkowsky will move someone who reads the book.

I'll dive in more to the article later because one open question to me is "should lay people be evaluating their whole argument?" They seem to want to make it accessible but also sometimes use writing hooks where they get mad at you if you don't get it already. It sounds like you did lay- evaluate it though with a fair shake.

I don't agree with "root access" btw. I do agree you can't have it both ways: if you think it's more powerful than a replacement-level healthy habit, then you should also consider that it could be dangerous.

I can try the "access" metaphor. I think of meditation as lowering thoughts from write access to append-only access. Mid-meditation, thoughts can say their thing but then they have to drift off instead of pick up debates with other thoughts.

Vulnerable people may be prone to picking up meditation. Like those with intense mental suffering -- think bipolar-level conditions that require psychiatry.

Have you thought about engineers at frontier labs, FAANG, or other AI-intensive companies (Perplexity, Hume.ai, etc.)?

• At OpenAI or Anthropic, engineers are too high agency to say you'll work on products or operations and not try to further the company's central mission.
• FAANG is harder to answer as they have outsized roles in tech career paths and sprawling businesses. At FAANG frontier, you can say that more plausibly, but I'm not sure you'd want to navigate career growth while avoiding helping SI research.
• At anything else, there's very diminished returns in withholding your career from all AI engineering, and you can plausibly say you care about the mission of "helping developers code" or "helping businesses use empathetic sounding voice bots" without the mission being "create SI".

I do think there's value in a very simple, tractable, broadly applicable guidance. "STEM should avoid non-FAANG frontier labs or FAANG AI divisions" sounds pretty good.

Note I'm not informed enough to agree/disagree strongly with the article; the above is extending the article's conclusion to all STEM jobs.

Is the Mandela effect a Mandela effect?

I poked into this a little. Not a "Fatimah Sun" level investigation, more like "will a couple Google searches confirm my funny hypothesis."

Firstly it's possibly less old than you might think: it was first described in 2009 by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome. It refers to the widespread belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison, when in reality he was alive when this widespread belief was being believed.

But is that actually a widespread belief? Well, Broome had this mis-memory herself, and interviewed others who also had this mis-memory. Her archive of interviews is presently offline, and I'm not positive she didn't pose her question simply like, "hey did you think Nelson Mandela died in prison?" and she could probably get a few hundred yes's that way.

The Mandela effect was, disappointingly, not hallucinated into existence. Now THAT would have been cool. But its eponymous effect was. So, the effect that the Mandela effect is named after is a Mandela effect.

My communication rule is "using lols to soften your too long message, doesn't really work and I can't explain why."

I also recommend using this medical framing, where you take antidepressants, as a medical treatment for depression, if you have depression.

I have like 5 days of water saved for me/partner. I figure 2 days no water could happen under normal disaster situations (like 9/11 10 blocks away or something idk) but getting out into weeks is beyond my prepper aspirations. Does that track?

It's clicking to me how legibility and Goodhardt relate. What if an elite's window into society is Goodhardt-corrupted? This can happen without AI if they're corrupt, or just out of touch. It does seem like a sycophantic AI can really do something novel to this situation. If legibility is low enough, and AI helps make the system legible, outer alignment failure might lead to a successful, permanent deception of the user.

Also it's sort of crazy how AI more than any other STEM I've ever worked with collapses the gap from "very out there" to "practical." If you're using AI for observability, this is a non-negotiable problem you have to solve. Claude Code does answers-faking today; that sort of thing can happen in an observability system.

• "Learned helplessness" is a quasi-popular-therapy word for this.
• You're bringing up cognitive behavior therapy techniques for dealing with it basically. The oreo/heaven-or-hell thing is cognitive defusion in that you're showing your intention and anxiety sort of floats apart from reality. It's more specifically similar to an exposure response prevention exercise: induce the problem on purpose then react to it in a more defused way.
• I'm not entirely sure how this relates to seeing this pattern in others. If they're your friend, you typically take a two-pronged approach: help superficially and get them to address the root problem to the extent you're aware of a root problem. If the attention is the point, the most loving thing to do is show it can be asked for and given freely. Fake pain won't prevent getting attention any more than it will cause getting attention.