I wonder if we need someone to distill and ossify postmodernism into a form that rationalists can process if we are going to tackle the problems postmodernism is meant to solve. A blueprint would be the way that FDT plus prisoners dilemma ossifies sartre’s existentialism is a humanism, at some terrible cost to nuance and beauty, but the core is there. 

My suspicion of what happened at a really high level is that fundamentally one of the driving challenges of postmodernism is to actually understand rape, in the sense that rationalism is supposed to respect: being able to predict outcomes, making the map fit the territory etc. EY is sufficiently naive of postmodernism that the depictions of rape and rape threats in Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR basically filtered out anyone with a basic grasp of postmodernism from the community. There’s an analagous phenomenon where when postmodernist writers depicts quantum physics, they do a bad enough job that it puts off people with a basic grasp of physics from participating in postmodernism. Its epistemically nasty too: this comment is frankly low quality, but if I understood postmodernism well enough to be confident in this comment I suspect I would have been sufficiently put off by the draco-threatens-to-rape-luna subplot in HPMOR to have never actually engaged with rationalism.

Yeah, if you are doing e.g. a lab heavy premed chemistry degree my advice may not apply to an aspiring alignment researcher. This is absolutely me moving the goalposts, but may also be true: on the other hand, if you are picking courses with purpose, in philosophy, physics, math, probability, comp sci: theres decent odds imho that they are good uses of time in proportion to the extent that they are actually demanding your time.

For undergrad students in particular, the current university system coddles. The upshot is that if someone is paying for your school and would not otherwise be paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to fund an ai safety researcher, successfully graduating is sufficiently easy that its something you should probably do while you tackle the real problems, in the same vein as continuing to brush your teeth and file taxes. Plus you get access to university compute and maybe even advice from professors.

This is fascinating- I’ve been a fan of Joseph’s youtube channel for years, but I’ve never seen him comment  on lesswrong. A while ago in that setting, we got into a back and forth about eigenvalues of anti-linear operators, which was object level fascinating, but also ended up requiring both Joseph and me to notice that we were wrong, which we did with little difficulty. What I’m trying to say is that Joseph is actually smart and open minded on technical questions, but is also definitely not respecting community norms here. If we can successfully not scare him off while discouraging quite this level of vitriol, there is definitely potential for him to contribute.

The evidence I am about to ask for may exist! However, I am still comfortable asking for it, as without it the whole thing falls apart, and I think this class of argument really always needs to show this explicitly: can you show that literally anyone reads the “modern Centennial Edition of Etiquette released in 2022?”

Also, I agree that Israel made great use of drones to take out anti-air defenses. However, this use of drones in no way requires manufacturing millions of quadcopters.

A couple notes: israel and russia are extremely comparable in military spending, likewise Ukraine and Iran. In addition, Ukraine and Iran both went hard into drones to counter the disparity, its very noticable that drones basically work against Russia and basically don’t against Israel- but neither conflict provides dramatically more evidence than the other about a war where both sides are well-resourced and nuclear. In particular, the lack of drone based attrition of the israeli airforce is glaring.

The lesson I drew from Israel vs Iran is that stealth just hard-counters drones in a peer conflict. The essential insight is that guided bombs aren't just similar to small suicide drones, they are drones- with all the advantages- as long as you can get a platform in place to drop them

Yep, sarcastic. Sorry, someday I’ll learn not to do that on the Internet, but I’m not holding my breath.