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Sinclair Chen — LessWrong

How to economically sort household trash (in SF)

before you start

sell or toss anything you don't want.
your parent's house is not storage.
your bank account is storage.
maybe get a label printer if you moving a lot?

run a tight ship.
lease the big bulk.
mind how much space your stuff takes up
your target metric is value per unit volume
your other target metric is convenience
look into EDC, ultralight backpacking, and vitalik buterin's 40L backpack guide.

as usual, everything is harder if you are taking care of kids or poor.

---

bulk item disposal is free and near-instant for used bicycles.
many such cases.

Aluminum
cans are 10 cents per can. they are light and easy to transport.
put cans in paper or... (read more)

Replying towhy america can't build ships

Sinclair Chen2mo

why america can't build ships

do we even need big ships?
aren't cargo containers mostly air already? can we just put the straight in the water?

naively if i was redesigning the world economy i would have each container put on its own individual sailboat and control electronically.

alternatively we could have refueling "gas" stations that are made from uh natural gas tankers that meet up w you, oil rigs, or giant floating solar arrays. does this not happen already?

and don't we need to decant them anyways at the end to ride up the mississippi?

-9

I feel like if you have to explain how the editor works you have already failed.

Replying toThe Sword of Good

Sinclair Chen3mo

The Sword of Good

Once upon a time, and by which I mean about a month ago, I was spending way too much effort trying to understand the criminal known as ziz, and her cult of criminal and non-criminal friends, hanger-ons, and victims.

I bought a $20 wooden fake katana from some random gift shop in Japantown in San Francisco, and started practicing my swings. I bought a bag of oranges, juggled them for a minute, then tried wacking them like my sword to see if it would break. I had to clean diy orange juice off the ceiling.
I probably should have joined a dojo if I actually cared. "I read Book of the Five Rings. It's... (read 959 more words →)

-1

Sinclair Chen3mo

yes. pick up doodling. learn to sing.

Sinclair Chen3moQuick Take

a draft from an older time, during zack's agp discourse
i did like fiora's account as a much better post

btw i transitioned because ozy made it seemed cool. his says take the pills if you feel like it. that's it. decompose "trans" into its parts: do i like a different name, do i like these other clothes, would i like certain changes to my body?

he also said since i am asian it will be easy. i was sus of that but it's 100% right. i could have been a youngshit but instead i waited until after college, feb 2020, to get onto hrt.
i'd like to think by waiting i ended up more financially... (read more)

Brutalist Prose

Sinclair Chen

3mo

THis may be the laziest lesswrong post you will ever read. Typically, LW house style is heavily edited, tagged, linked, backlinked, and cited. Asides are moved to the endnotes/sidenotes. Sources are checked and double checked. You proofread the draft yourself, then send it to the LW team and ask them pweease is this good is this okie dokie and they are like error on line 17. (uhh team, is this even true? not like i ever actually post anythin here)

I am here today to suggest a radical new approach to writing: Never delete. Never edit. Publish the first draft. Get it write on the first try. Like a language model spitting out... (read 610 more words →)

Sinclair Chen3moQuick Take

it is time for sinc to INK

sorry for being crazy. i am well rested. i am ready to post good posts. you will be amazed

Replying toCapital Ownership Will Not Prevent Human Disempowerment

Sinclair Chen4mo

Capital Ownership Will Not Prevent Human Disempowerment

what of the french royals? the native american chiefs? the ottoman caliphate? the spanish empire and all their gold? the qing dynasty?

conquest, "land reform", communism fascism & democracy - these are the typical outcomes of industrializing countries. you notice the royals who made it not the royals who didn't.

then again, war and death was the norm for royal families before the factory. there's a reason we don't do royalty for real anymore and just let them be celebrity trad-larpers or petro-state CEOs

Replying toI have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11

Sinclair Chen4mo

I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11

Perhaps my window is just way larger than yours. I've watched a youtube video that analyzes the possibility of taiwan doing it with long range missiles, so that it can use the possibility as a deterrent against invasion.

One of the unserious reasons 3 Gorges Dam collapse gets memed on online is that being a hydrology disaster it would make the ccp lose the mandate of heaven and trigger a revolution leading to a new dynasty

Replying toFour ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI

Sinclair Chen4mo

Four ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI

I think this is true in the long run but today our current systems are not very smart, require lots of investment to scale. This makes it more like labor than capital.

Labor of course, is also capital. Your body parts are tools which you use for economic production. On the flip-side, your self-concept is fluid enough that a metal machine you operate can feel like part of you. A human operator can learn to operate a robot arm very quickly, as if it were her own arm.

That said, I do expect that ethical reasons, some humans will apply to the LLMs frames of labor rights, unions, agency, dignity of life, political systems & radical revolutionary action etc. Actually treating the AI with dignity might just improve model performance.

-2

if you were looking for a sign from the universe, from the simulation, that you can stop working on AI, this is it. you can stop working on AI.

work on it if you want to.
don't work on it if you don't want to.
update how much you want to based on how it feels.
other people are working on it too.

if you work on AI, but are full of fear or depression or darkness, you are creating the danger. which is fine if you think that's funny but it's not fine if you unironically are afraid, and also building it.

if you work on AI, but are full of hopium, copium, and not-observing-the-worldium, you are going to kill yourself through hallucinations eventually -- one way or another.

focus on what you want to see more of.
and whatever you do,
never kill yourself.

and trust your own Rationality.

this is your final exam. you have as much time as you need.

In HPMOR, Harry has this big medical kit. But he doesn't exercise and has no qualms messing up his sleep schedule by 4 hours of jet lag a day

Not very Don't Die of him if you ask me

the books in lighthaven are a trap. talk to people!

It would be so cool if the ea / rat extended universe bought a castle. You'd be able to host events like this. Acquiring the real estate would actually be very cheap, castles are literally being given away for free. (though maintenance might suck idk)

Bountied rationality post: $1336 + round trip + 1 ticket for event, if you refer Andre a castle to rent for 1 week in Aug or Sep

btw whytham abbey doesn't count because it's not even a castle

is reciprocity.io still up? did it move? link seems dead. I wanted to link to it in my substack article about manifold.love

... is it still hosted out of someone's laptop? i'd be willing to help people get it onto better infra.

what's the deal with bird flu? do you think it's gonna blow up

I kinda feel like I literally have more subjective experience after experiencing ego death/rebirth. I suspect that humans vary quite a lot in how often they are conscious, and to what degree. And if you believe, as I do, that consciousness is ultimately algorithmic in nature (like, in the "surfing uncertainty" predictive processing view, that it is a human-modeling thing which models itself to transmit prediction-actions) it would not be crazy for it to be a kind of mental motion which sometimes we do more or less of, and which some people lack entirely.

I don't draw any moral conclusions about this because I don't ethically value people or things in proportion to how conscious they are. I love the people I love, I'm certainly happy they are alive, and I would be happier for them to be more alive, but this is not why I love them.

Prediction markets are consistently underconfident. Why?

Sinclair Chen

Sinclair Chen, Unnamed

look at this calibration s-curve from calibration.city

markets are consistently closer to 50% than should be. why?

I have my own guesses but curious to hear yours.

Anki setup best practices?

Sinclair Chen

I'm currently trying to use Anki to crash course japanese vocab before a trip in a few weeks. I feel like the defaults set a card too far into the future after I press Easy even if I had already gotten it wrong several times ahead of that.

Are there like a set of extensions that you're supposed or a settings list or something? I remember Anki being better than this when I was using it in high school years ago...

Sinclair Chen's Shortform

Sinclair Chen

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Manifold Markets community meetup

Sinclair Chen

The entire Manifold Markets team is in Austin, Texas this week and we're having a meetup. Come talk about prediction markets (or anything else) and meet cool people!

Prediction markets meetup/coworking (hosted by Manifold Markets)

Sinclair Chen

Sinclair Chen, Austin Chen

The Manifold Markets team is hosting a meetup this Friday 7/29 at 4:30 in San Francisco
at 4:30pm. You can also come early to cowork with us from 12pm onwards.

View and bet in Manifold prediction markets on Lesswrong

Sinclair Chen

(Crossposted from EA Forum)

Links to prediction markets on Manifold Markets now show a preview of the market on hover.

You can also embed markets directly in posts:

This lets you bet on yes/no questions without leaving Lesswrong! You do need to be logged into Manifold, otherwise when you try to bet it will first bring you to a screen to log in via your google account.

How to embed a market

Just go the market (or create one), copy the link, and paste it in the editor. It will automatically turn into an embed like the one above.

You can get the link from:

The address bar
The copy link button below a market you created

Or the three dot menu above the chart

Much thanks to Ben West for reviewing the code for this, which was heavily based on the previous integrations for Our World in Data, Metaculus, and Elicit.