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[Epistemic status: rant] There’s something that annoys me about the reoccurring debates on decision theory in this corner of the internet. Take a simple blackmail scenario: > Omega, a near-perfect predictor, knows a piece of embarrassing information about you. He threatens you that he will release it to the public...
Thanks to @eigengender and especially Chris Lakin and Simon Dima for valuable comments on a draft. In this post, I will present an alternate framing[1] of LessWrong-style decision theory. I believe it should make its concrete recommendations much more palatable to people who find them absurd. Very little of the...
Here’s Holden Karnofsky: > I tend to think it’s worse than 51/49. I tend to think we’re always going to be prone to overestimate how robustly good our actions are. And the more we learn about all the galaxy-brained considerations that one should have had in one’s head, the more...
People often make arguments against “trying hard” (working very hard, pushing yourself to the brink, being intensely goal-directed, and so on) by pointing to the risks of burnout or of losing some kind of wholesomeness[1]. But there’s another, very simple argument against it that I have not seen anyone fully...
Crossposted from Substack. I wrote this three years ago, before becoming extremely depressed and developing a lot of aversiveness around it (even though I had gotten a bunch of positive feedback). As a result, it’s a bit “out of step” with the current state of the conversation, and the writing...
A few days ago, I published The Darwinian Honeymoon - why I am not as impressed by human progress as I used to be. To my gratification, it was quite well-received on Twitter, Substack and LessWrong.[1]However, in subsequent conversations I realized that I did not communicate my core point well...
Crossposted from Substack and the EA Forum. A common argument for optimism about the future is that living conditions have improved a lot in the past few hundred years, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and so on. It’s a very strong, grounding piece of evidence -...