Under MWI of QM, anthropics gets weird.

In a single universe interpretation, we can posit biogenesis is rare, but we do know it happened at least once in ~two trillion galaxies worth of stars in ~13 billion years.

In MWI it could be even rarer - with unlimited branches for wild coincidences of chemistry to occur, we’re necessarily living in a branch where such did occur. Allow for argument’s sake that biogenesis is so rare that branches where life is found are tiny in measure. We find ourselves in such a branch, so anthropics and branching kind of gives us the first miracle for free. But given we’re here, the chance it happened here independently TWICE is vanishingly small again.

If biogenesis is so rare it occurs in a tiny minority of branches only, then in almost all branches where it does occur, it only occurs once.

If I haven’t badly misunderstood something, I think if we accept MWI then it seems much more plausible that we are the only life in the universe.

There are definitely some opportunities like that, but being a classical violinist with an orchestra is the first preference by far because it's so much more enjoyable to play the orchestral repertoire, and because having a full-time seat in an orchestra also puts you at the top of every booking agent's list for casual gigs too. Aim high, fail high, seems to be a good approach.

(To be fair, I would make anything sound this extreme, if I was writing about it while in the mood I was in when I wrote this. I love a rant.)

I guess any classical instrument is a device for torturing perfectionists, but violin has a particularly brutal drop-off in sound quality as you reduce your daily focused practice time. Between 'lapsed professional piano' and 'lapsed professional violin' I know which one I'd pick to listen to. You just can't do a few hours of practice a week and play the violin very nicely in tune, or at least I've never met anyone who can.

There's also the fact we're pack animals. There are normally 8-12 violinists in each section of the orchestra, playing in unison, consciously blending our sound together. We're so wired to watching the others' bows, listening to their vibrato and articulation, and keeping as much focus on the leader of the section as on the conductor, that I swear we develop a hive mind. I guess this exacerbates the social pressures we feel, since we're always so aware of each others' playing.

Ahh good point, sorry I didn't notice that. I'll update the post shortly.

Thanks for checking! The Libsyn feed has been redirected, it's now hosted on BuzzSprout. All new episodes should still be going to all the platforms. Are you having trouble with any of the platforms, or just the Libsyn site itself? That one won't work anymore, unfortunately.

See here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b9oockXDs2xMdYp66/announcement-ai-narrations-available-for-all-new-lesswrong 

Please share your feedback here or in the comments on that post, it's helpful for our decision-making on this :)

Big +1 to playing with others, especially others around the same level or slightly better or worse.
Motivation is one thing, but it's also just... healthier. One's musical 'practice' can't be totally inward-looking, that's when perfectionism starts to bite. Orchestra forces you to compromise and actually learn and perform music, gets you out of the practice room, and generally turbocharges your learning by exposing you to a more varied set of demands on your playing and musicality.
Super hard mode is forming a string quartet with others, since your playing is super exposed and it forces you to stay in time and balance your sound with others. 

Thanks for the feedback!

The audio reflecting updates to the text is relatively easily fixed, and that feature is in the pipeline (though for now user reports are helpful for this.)

There's some fairly complex logic we use for lists — trying to prevent having too many repetitive audio notes, but also keeping those notes when they're helpful. We're still experimenting with it, so thanks for pointing out those formatting issues!


 

You'd probably want to factor in some time for making basic corrections to pronunciation, too.
ElevenLabs is pretty awesome but in my experience can be a little unpredictable with specialist terminology, of which HPMOR has... a lot.
It wouldn't be crazy to do an ElevenLabs version of it with multiple voices etc., but you're looking at significant human time to get that all right.

It's unlikely we'll ever actually GENERATE narrations for every post on LessWrong (distribution of listening time would be extremely long-tailed), but it's plausible if the service continues that we'll be able to enable the player on all LW posts above a certain Karma threshold, as well as certain important sequences.
If you have specific sequences or posts in mind, feel free to send them to us to be added to our list!