That you are this way is suggestive that you were not victim to a frame controller in your formative years.

(or maybe another way of putting that is, that you were raised by a benign frame controller who gave you a critical frame that you have never needed to question. I'm confused though. What's control? Is it control if I engineer something grow up to do things I don't expect?)

Regarding the Hoskinson Center, a presentation from Avigad: 

If it is definitely beneficial, then I will have identified a technical (not cultural or institutional) frontier that's definitely beneficial! Wow! That would be a first for me. I'd be very happy. Maybe I would want to work on it?

The feeling is misplaced. Information is intentionally being withheld to protect the privacy of our friend. The story only represents my perspective, after having paid only a limited amount of attention to things, and I would discourage anyone close to the situation from taking my characterization of it as conclusive.

Is there a test we could do that would convince me you're right or convince you I'm right depending on how the test turned out?

We did get to a point where we wanted them to take literally any formal bet to demonstrate that they even believe the things they are saying and that there is a real object-level disagreement, and they wouldn't, anticipating malicious fuckerry no matter the terms. That was where I broke off. I suppose, maybe that was one important piece of rationalist culture they did not have. Uncooperative in engaging the disagreement in a respectful, grounded way.

I suppose it would be more suitable if instead of wagering money we wagered duties, as wagering money isn't really appropriate between friends, and probably makes them feel insecure.
Something like "If your surface reading of this claim turns out to be wrong after it has been more deeply investigated, then you must investigate three more claims. And if two of those are wrong, you must investigate 5 more" or something like that. "If you are right, then we must listen to more of your shit (if you refuse to bet, then some of us definitely aren't listening to more of your shit)"

Update: The goblin sack weighs in:

█████ has safety and socio██████ needs that aren't being fully met

needs to feel safe and so on and no rhetoric will change those emotions before or without situations changing

the more times you run a convincing proof against someone who can't emotionally accept it, the more you blunt the convincing proof on them

If I were snarky, I would respond that they find themselves in a state of psychological unsafety because they keep taking hubristic bets and pushing their friends away, regardless, it is still ultimately our problem to solve.

Another adds

so [mako's] post is implying that [rationalists] should be able to maslow people lmao

I do totally buy this. "Maslowing" is a term that arose at some point to mean: ensuring that enough of a person's basic selfish needs are met, that they can begin to think of other people, the rest of the world, or of loftier needs like self-actualization.

I resolve, this task of providing enough psychological safety to allow a person to admit when they were deeply, haplessly wrong (dependent on others for guidance and correction! How horrifying!), is a rationality technique, perhaps the most important rationality technique.

I find that narcissism is our most common adversary, especially in hyperpublic contexts like the global online discourse where narcissism is hard as fuck to resist, and runs in the water.

Narcissism is exactly a felt need to defend a delusional narrative of perfection.

It is a product of social incentives.

We will improve the incentives.

If you actually succeeded and everyone started writing "ifeff" the etymology would no longer point to a logical story.

"Ifof" seems better to me. It more resembles "If and only if" which would make it easier to learn.

Specialization. Yes. I've been making an induction puzzle game over the past couple of years. It takes place largely on the workbench of a reverseng (derivation: Reverse Engineer) employed by a drone factory that is situated in a late industrial society (a few years after creating misaligned AGI, so hardened by its state of biological warfare that it will last a few years yet).

One of the organizing principles that has allowed your world to run so terrifically fast is "Specialism", which holds that a person's profession should cast a long shadow over their entire lives. Most of us are edited straight from the germline, and then we begin our training at birth. The notion that a person would choose their specialization is mostly extinct, and discussed rarely, when it is discussed, it is depicted fantasistically, a little bit like love marriages in India. They happen, they're normal in many elite subcultures, but most of us know why they wouldn't be right for us.

Your training presents you with narratives, the narratives frame your specialization (spec) as the backbone of history, the girthiest load-bearing column, holding up the weight of the whole world. As a child, your media diet is well controlled, as it must be, and by your teen years, the media of other specs, of the same age group, will have grown incomprehensible or uninteresting to you, as if it were written in a different language, for a different belief system, dressed with an alien's sense of beauty. When you enter the workplace, you will have to interact harmoniously with these aliens. Learning to admire them is the final part of your training. It wont be easy. They are deeply unlike you, and even though you are each proud of your spec, you need each other, they can do things you never could, you will love them for their difference.

There will be partings in these black thickets, glimpses out into a calmer world, a world that is doing a lot more rumination, and a lot less hurtling. This other world may, or may not survive these glimpses from our creatures of the black thickets. That will be up to you.

I don't think the world belonging to Specialism is a good one. Everything moves too fast here. Philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, have none of their hands on any of its reigns, instead, market forces looking for 20 years returns, its homesteads pumping out specials like puppies from a mill.
But I can't help but internalize Specialism, a little bit. It is practical. I am finite. I can only be a few types of thing, I can only make a few humble contributions to the global product. Better I approach them with absolute devotion. As a forecaster I'm permitted the relief of looking out over the needs of the future and figure out where I'd fit into them. I get to figure out what I ought to be before becoming it. Most people don't have that. It would be nice if there were some higher civic process that could give this clarity to everyone. It would have been nice if it could have given some clarity to me back when I was wandering deserts.

That's the great thing about roam pages, you don't have to publish. Draft forever. For instance, here's a draft applying my conception of anthropics to fish. It's not finished and maybe it never will be but at least it's recorded and I can show it to people.

x] I actually didn't mean that. The concern is that if this is a simulation, it's unlikely that whales are simulated with much detail, as they don't have much of an effect on the most probably-interesting-to-simulators aspects of this era. Which I really should have mentioned because that's one of the branches of the prediction: If we look closely at some whale brains and find that they ought to be huge anthropic measure attractors, there is a way that the underlying theory could still be probable.

I suppose the reason I didn't mention it is that, if it's a simulation thing, we have no way of demonstrating that until it's too late to do anything with that information, and I'm not sure anything good would come of me writing about it any time soon because simulationism is a big pill that most people aren't eager to swallow.