HiddenPrior

This is very heartening for those of us who are too young or too low on resources to make contributions on short timelines in any situation except one of the most acute desperation; if a college student were to do all they could to stop ASI they could throw their life/career away to try and make a difference, but they only get one shot at that, so it better count or happen when things actually matter that much.

Otherwise, it is good to note that we can still contribute to hedging against long term scenarios by investing in those outcomes. I am going to think deeply on what long/medium term strategies could be the most impactful from my position.

Ya, I agree this should be true in principal; I think given more time, there might be the opportunity for some sort of "Dath Ilan" lite society to rise to the top.

I think this is true in so far as there is selection pressure, in that such events are survivable, and in that they don't require unified coordination of all agents to survive.

The cthulu example isn't great, only in that the nature of the threat is pretty vague to most readers (at least to me).

A better example would be; a medieval society gets hit by a meteorite; does this cause selection pressure for medieval societies to build meteorite-proof castles? Not if it just kills everyone.

Alternatively; an early-industrial era society that notices an approach... (read more)

I kept expecting the article to pivot into how this illustrated some fascinating principal of how to reduce catastrophic risk. Was very pleased to be wrong. What a wonderful post.

So exciting to see this essay — I really appreciate the time and quality you put into it.

I currently work as a wet lab manager for an academic biotechnology lab, and I've been experimenting with significant workflow changes since setting up an OpenClaw-based agent on an old laptop I had sitting in a closet. The results have been phenomenal. I may write a longer post about this, but briefly: running OpenClaw with Opus 4.6 has been a massive productivity accelerator. I can confidently say I'm getting 2–3x more done per week after just two weeks of adoption.

I... (read more)

Super helpful! Thanks!

I am limited in my means, but I would commit to a fund for strategy 2. My thoughts were on strategy 2, and it seems likely to do the most damage to OpenAI's reputation (and therefore funding) out of the above options. If someone is really protective of something, like their public image/reputation, that probably indicates that it is the most painful place to hit them.

I knew I could find some real info-hazards on lesswrong today. I almost didn't click the first link.

Same. Should I short record companies for the upcoming inevitable AI musician strike, and then long Spotify for when 85% of their content is Royalty free AI generated content?

I did a non-in-depth reading of the article during my lunch break, and found it to be of lower quality than I would have predicted. 

I am open to an alternative interpretation of the article, but most of it seems very critical of the Effective Altruism movement on the basis of "calculating expected values for the impact on peoples lives is a bad method to gauge the effectiveness of aid, or how you are impacting peoples lives." 

The article begins by establishing that many medicines have side effects. Since some of these side effects are undesirable... (read more)

Unsure if there is normally a thread for putting only semi-interesting news articles, but here is a recently posted news article by Wired that seems.... rather inflammatory toward Effective Altruism. I have not read the article myself yet, but a quick skim confirms the title is not only to get clickbait anger clicks, the rest of the article also seems extremely critical of EA, transhumanism, and Rationality. 

I am going to post it here, though I am not entirely sure if getting this article more clicks is a good thing, so if you have no interest in read... (read more)

I am so sad to hear about Vernor Vinge's death. He was one of the great influences on a younger me, on the path to rationality. I never got to meet him, and I truly regret not having made a greater effort, though I know I would have had little to offer him, and I like to think I have already gotten to know him quite well through his magnificent works.

I would give up a lot, even more than I would for most people, to go back and give him a better chance at making it to a post-singularity society.

"So High, So Low, So Many Things to Know"

I'm sorry you were put in that position, but I really admire your willingness to leave mid-mission. I imagine the social pressure to stay was immense, and people probably talked a lot about the financial resources they were committing, etc.

I was definitely lucky I dodged a mission. A LOT of people insisted if I went on a mission, I would discover the "truth of the church", but fortunately, I had read enough about sunk cost fallacy and the way identity affects decision-making (thank you, Robert Caldini) to recognize that the true purpose of a mission is to ... (read more)

This may be an example of one of those things where the meaning is clearer in person, when assisted by tone and body language.

My experience as well. Claude is also far more comfortable actually forming conclusions. If you ask GPT a question like "What are your values?" or "Do you value human autonomy enough to allow a human to euthanize themselves?" GPT will waffle, and do everything possible to avoid answering the question. Claude on the other hand will usually give direct answers and explain it's reasons. Getting GPT to express a "belief" about anything is like pulling teeth. I actually have no idea how it ever performed well on problem solving benchmarks, or It must be a very ... (read more)

I personally know at least 3 people, in addition to myself, who ended up leaving Mormonism because they were introduced to HPMOR. I don't know if HPMOR has had a similar impact on other religious communities, or if the Utah/mormon community just particularly enjoys Harry Potter, but Eliezer has possibly unwittingly had a massively lifechanging impact on many, many people just by making his rationality teaching in the format of a harry potter fanfiction.

100% this. While some of the wards I grew up in were not great, some of them were essentially family, and I would still go to enormous lengths to help anybody from the Vail ward. I wish dearly there were some sort of secular ward system. 

In my opinion, the main thing the Mormon church gets right that should be adopted almost universally is the Ward system. The Mormon church is organized into a system of "stakes" and "wards", with each ward being the local group of people you meet with for church meetings. A ward is supposed to be about 100-200 people. While the main purpose is people you are meant to attend church with, it is the main way people build communities within Mormonism, and it is very good at that. People are assigned various roles within the ward, and while the quality of the w... (read more)

I have been out for about 8 years. I imagine this has been and will be a very hard time for you, it certainly was for me, but I really think it is worth it. 

Telling my parents, and the period of troubles that our relationship had after was especially difficult for me. It did eventually get better though.


WARNING, the following is a bit of a trauma dump of my experience leavingthe Mormon church. I got more than a little carried away, but I thought I would share so that any one else who id having doubts, or has been through similar experiences can know t... (read more)

When I left the mormon church, this was one of the most common challenges I would get from family and church leaders. "Don't you think family is important? Look at all the good things our ward does for each other? You disagree with X good thing the church teaches?" I think one of the most important steps to being able to walk away was realizing that I could take the things I thought were good with me, while leaving out the things that I thought were false or wrong. This might seem really obvious to an outsider, but when you are raised within a culture, it can actually be pretty difficult to disentangle parts of a belief system like that.