Some people are advocating dropping all or most Covid precautions within the rationalist community beyond requiring vaccines. I haven't seen the case for this explicitly laid out anywhere, though. Is there such a write-up anywhere?
When I first heard about Bitcoin, it was around $10. My impression at the time was that it had no cash flow and no potential future cash flow, and the whole thing sounded like a pyramid scheme (I was not yet aware of the distinction between a pyramid scheme and...
My rationalist group house near Boston has a room opening (details here), and I'm wondering if there's a Schelling point for listing that sort of thing. I posted the opening here and to the relevant local Facebook groups, but I'm wondering where might be good places to post it that...
We have a room opening up in a rationalist house near Central Square, Cambridge (Boston). It is a 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom apartment with two floors, with a large kitchen and living room plus additional common space upstairs. There’s a washer, dryer, and dishwasher in-unit. It’s an 8-minute walk from Central station...
Some people are advocating dropping all or most Covid precautions within the rationalist community beyond requiring vaccines. I haven't seen the case for this explicitly laid out anywhere, though. Is there such a write-up anywhere?
Political tensions in the US are high. There have been a lot of mass protests in recent months, some of which have turned violent (often after police provocation). Donald Trump and Mike Pence have not to promise to respect the election result if they lose. Many on the left accuse...
American football has some properties that make it useful for practicing making predictions: * A game consists of a sequence of discrete plays with well-defined outcomes * The plays are fast enough that you get quick feedback on each prediction, and there are enough plays in a game that you...
When I first heard about Bitcoin, it was around $10. My impression at the time was that it had no cash flow and no potential future cash flow, and the whole thing sounded like a pyramid scheme (I was not yet aware of the distinction between a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme). I didn't invest.
With the benefit of hindsight, this was a huge mistake. The part that bothers me is that I don't know what was wrong or missing in my world model that led to that mistake.
My question for people who bought Bitcoin early on is why. What did you understand at the time that I didn't?
This post seems to implicitly assume a monocausal explanation. It gives good reasons why various proposed explanations are not sufficient to explain university attendance and dismisses those explanations because they aren't sufficient. The reality is more likely a complex mix of different reasons, and the right question isn't which one is the reason; it's how much of the reason is each proposed explanation.
The Sheepskin Effect makes it pretty clear that a significant portion of the value is signaling (Wikipedia cites Caplan as claiming that "over 60% of the economic benefit" is from the degree, though it's hard to disentangle signaling effects from selection effects). Failure to complete an almost-completed degree seems more likely to be a failure of conscientiousness than of intelligence or conformity, so that part is probably mainly conscientiousness signaling.
I've found my average conversation with Uber drivers to be more interesting and insightful than reading my phone.
What have you talked with them about, and how did you start the conversations? What have you learned from those conversations?
To really put a stop to this practice, there needs to be a good chance that a space saver will be gone by the time you come back. In a college town, an explicit, well-publicized policy of "if a piece of furniture is being used to block a parking space, anyone who wants it can take it" would probably accomplish this.
Neuro divergent communities sometimes smart their way out of this and eventually become exhausting to be around as everything devolves into requiring neurotic social tracking.
Can you elaborate on that or provide some examples? I was reading along and it sounded right to me, but I couldn't think of specific examples of it.
Provide more public goods for families. Remarkably small things can matter a lot.
What public goods do you have in mind?
No. The average estimate is 26%, which implies at least 26% of the polled population give an estimate of 26% or higher, i.e. a very large gravel of respondents are either very confused or intentionally giving inflated answers.
I have plenty of money. If there's something I know I want that's easy to buy for a reasonable amount of money, I've already bought it. If someone gives me a gift that I wouldn't have thought to buy for myself (but which I do in fact want once I'm aware of it) or would be hard for me to buy myself (e.g. because choosing the right version of that product requires research that I lack the knowledge for) or where I have some mental block that prevents me from admitting to myself that I want it, that's significantly more valuable to me than cash would have been.
When I was a student and had very little money, I preferred cash.
What is there to lose by playing power games with people who think that roughly all communication is power games?
Well for one thing, it can get you dragged into negative-sum power games. Like with gambling, if you don't know what your edge is, you're better off not playing. If there isn't a clear way that getting into a Twitter argument about transgenderism helps you accomplish your goals, then in the typical case you waste your time, and you take on a tail risk of ruining your reputation. It's foolish to take that risk if it doesn't come with enough potential upside to make it +EV.
If you're already stuck in such a power game, then by all means play it as such, but don't go seeking them out.
On September 26th, 1983, the world was nearly destroyed by nuclear war. That day is Petrov Day, named for the man who averted it. Petrov Day is now a yearly event on September 26 commemorating the anniversary of the Petrov incident.
The purpose of the ritual is to make catastrophic and existential risk emotionally salient, by putting it into historical context and providing positive and negative examples of how it has been handled. This is not for the faint of heart and not for the uninitiated; it is aimed at those who already know what catastrophic and existential risk is, have some background knowledge of what those risks are, and believe (at least on an abstract level) that preventing those risks from coming to pass is important.
We'll be hosting this ritual in Cambridge (unit 2 of the above address). It will begin at 8:00 and last for about an hour. Please do not arrive in the middle.
What are the higher utility per unit effort things you could be doing instead during that time? Did you stop doing a gratitude journal? If so, did you do those other things instead?
I ask that because I have often found myself making the opposite mistake of one you describe: There's something I'm considering doing (usually because someone suggested it), and I think to myself that that's not the optimal thing for me to do, so I decide not to do it, but instead of doing something higher-value, I end up doing nothing in particular and would have been better off doing the moderate-value thing.
Prerequisite reading:
Think it faster (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/skEhdgiK6T5HzMhis/think-it-faster-worksheet#)
We're going to take a shot at the Thinking Physics exercise from Raemon's Feedbackloop Rationality sequence. The goal is to get better at 1. thinking faster, and 2. making fewer optimistic assumptions.
We'll have an website full of multiple choice physics questions, some of which focus on intuitive understanding over hard math and some of which are designed to be google proof and hard. (Though if you know the math, that'll help!) We'll pick a problem, tackle it alone for for a bit, in pairs for a bit, then as a group for a bit.
We'll do this a few times and then cap it off with some feedback on the website, which is in the pretty early stages of design.
Please bring a laptop if you can.
“It may indeed be impolite; I don't deny that. Whether it's untrue is a different question. - Eleizer Yudkowsky
Crocker’s Rules, named after and framed by Lee Daniel Crocker, are a social norm you can declare that you’re using where you authorize other people to optimize their messages for information over niceness. In other words, by saying you’re operating by Crocker’s Rules, you’re saying you want people to say true things to you even if those things would be rude, in the interests of efficient communication.
It can be uncomfortable and strange for some people to talk to someone using Crocker’s Rules! If you’re usually a polite person who tries not to make others... (read more)
One of the most important parts of intellectual progress is learning to change your mind. The first step of changing your mind is often that creeping, niggling doubt, followed by realizing that you were wrong about something. Here's three readings on being wrong, and an exercise to practice that often painful realization, in a small way and in a low pressure situation. Without this skill, how can you debate an important issue or confront a challenging topic? You might argue long after it's clear to others that you've lost, because admitting it feels like defeat and defeat is unthinkable.
The first lesson any martial artist learns is often how to fall. There are... (read more)
Prerequisite reading:
Think it faster (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/skEhdgiK6T5HzMhis/think-it-faster-worksheet#)
Optimistic Assumptions, Longterm Planning, and "Cope" (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/skTdjtx87XKurdvWf/p/8ZR3xsWb6TdvmL8kx#)
We're going to take a shot at the Thinking Physics exercise from Raemon's Feedbackloop Rationality sequence. The goal is to get better at 1. thinking faster, and 2. making fewer optimistic assumptions.
We'll have a book full of multiple choice physics questions, ones that focus more on forming an intuitive understanding of what's going on than pure math. (Though if you know the math, that'll help!) We'll pick a problem, tackle it alone for five minutes, in pairs for five minutes, and then as a group for five minutes. We'll do this a few times, and then cap it off with a round of Baba Is You, another exercise from the sequence.
2:00: Doors open, hang out and socialize
2:15: Round one of Thinking Physics
2:30: Break
2:35: Round two of Thinking Physics
2:50: Break
2:55: Round three of Thinking Physics
3:10: Break
3:15: Collective Baba Is You attempt
3:30: Wrapup, compare notes, and socialization
Being well calibrated, in the rationalist sense, is the skill of knowing what you do and do not know. When you think something is 80% likely to happen, that means you think you can make ten guesses like that and be wrong twice. If you're right on half of them, you're overconfident. If you're right on all of them, you're underconfident. It's useful when making plans, sorting through an uncertain world, making a profit on prediction markets, and (anecdotally, ask me for stories) for winning Magic: The Gathering games.
Today we're going to run through three different exercises intended to practice this skill. We'll take about twenty minutes for each exercise, taking a break between them. I'll start Calibration Trivia at fifteen minutes past the hour, so the agenda looks like
2:00: Doors open, hang out and socialize
2:15: Calibration Trivia
2:35: Break
2:40: Clearer Thinking's Calibrate Your Judgement
3:00: Break
3:05: Simplified Poker Calibration
3:30: Wrapup, compare notes, and socialization
Effective Altruism Global: Boston is the weekend of November 1st, which means there's some Effective Altruists from out of town. Lets give them a warm fairwell! There's a different afterparty Sunday night, which I think makes this an after-after party. We'll have cookies, homemade bread, and friendly conversation. Please come and unwind after a busy conference by hanging out or playing some games, or come to meet some out-of-towners if you skipped EAG but live around Boston. (We also have a nice bean bag chair to flop on!)
This is intended as a social mixer for EAG attendees and local Boston rationalists. If you have a deep and abiding objection to altruism or effectiveness, please do not attend this one.
Politics is a hard subject to discuss rationally. Correspondingly, LessWrong has a developed a unique set of norms and habits around discussions politics that still allow for dialog while hopefully avoiding many pitfalls. The exact norms are hard to summarize, but many of them are conveyed through blog posts.
Today, we're going to take a step on that path.
Please read the following three essays, and come prepared to discuss them.
Politics is the Mind Killer: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZnSMHcWjRx6yT4H92/p/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f
Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-sided: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZnSMHcWjRx6yT4H92/p/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b
Conflict vs Mistake Theory: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
Questions to consider:
You may also be interested in the ACX Ballot meetup next week.
Note: I created the event, but Evan is running it since I'll be out of town.
The second part of this title is an exaggeration.
This is a two part meetup, and you'll want a laptop or smartphone for both parts.
In part one, we'll have a feedback form about how rationality meetups in Boston are going. If you want to ask the organizers to pick venues further south, or say you really liked the meetups based on the CFAR handbook, or anything else, here's a great opportunity. Anyone interested can also set up anonymous forms to receive feedback on themselves; there's a tool called https://admonymous.co/ that's used in the rationalist community and elsewhere for the purpose.
If there's some burning question you have about Boston meetups- if you're wondering whether... (read 228 more words →)
Acquiring the knowledge without the college structure would be a more accurate signal of conscientiousness, but it would be a less legible one. Evaluating potential employees involves sifting through a large number of applicants of mostly dubious quality, and unless you have reason to pay special attention to one of them, if a signal isn't obvious, it probably gets rounded off to zero.
A degree from Stanvard Institute of Technology gets an employer to treat your resume as worth reading (and not just skimming). Claiming (with evidence that require crossing a non-trivial inferential distance) to have gotten the same education for $1.50 in late fees at the library doesn't. You get about 5 words.