I think in real life most people have multiple roles, for example if you are a parent and a software developer, you talk to other parents about parenting, and to other software developers about software development, but you usually don't ask random parents for programming advice or random software developers for parenting advice. This can be modeled by people talking in different chats (like in Discord), instead of having a "friend or not friend" binary (like in Facebook or Twitter). In reality, there happens to be some overlap, like I may have a friend with whom I discuss both parenting and programming, but usually I have different friends for different roles.

Then there are also roles like "my relatives" and "my neighbors". This gets tricky, because these are not completely transitive, like someone who lives on the next street is my neighbor, but someone who lives hundred streets away is not? Similarly, a cousin of my cousin is almost a stranger to me. This is probably better modeled with the Facebook-like approach, where I connect to my cousin, he connects to his cousin, but I am not connected to the cousin's cousin? But it would still be better if the software specified the role of the connection, such as "relative" or "neighbor" instead of just a generic "friend".

We also have a concept of private and public setting, like when I am speaking at a software developers' conference, it is public speech, and when it's four neighbors drinking in a pub, it is private speech. I guess the difference is something like "does everyone know everyone else in person? or can any stranger join?". In public setting, there are the speakers and the audience; the organizer is responsible for the speakers but not for the audience, the speakers are one who talk freely, and the audience may be invited to comment but may also be silenced.

Amazing, is this the future of psychotherapy?

"Doctor, I have a problem..." "Stop talking, just give me a blood sample. Okay, your problem is X."

The tension between short-term outcomes and long-term outcomes is already there in the "winning" itself. For example, from a certain perspective, every time you don't shoplift (a reasonable amount, to keep it a misdemeanor), you are in some sense leaving money on the table.

Some people would be practically taxed for existing.

We could leverage the externality god to figure out answers to difficult questions. Often the problem is to figure out what are the second-order effects of something, and here we would get an exact number.

My problem with reducing internet usage is that I stop reading the less interesting websites first, but then what remains is the more interesting websites and that makes it even more difficult to turn off the web browser. These days it is mostly just LW and ACX, but even that is a ton of text.

That said, the corporations can make it all much worse. On LW, it is my choice whether to read something or not, but in theory if I resisted the temptation to read everything useful, the tools are there. As opposed to e.g. Facebook, which keeps my contacts hostage and pushes tons of unwanted content on me.

I wonder if I could design a tool to help me overcome the human weakness without missing out some important things, what would it be. For example, to overcome the fear of missing out, a tool could regularly download content to a local database, and only show it to me when I want. Group articles by topic. Make summaries of discussions. Make summaries of individual articles, or maybe even one long summary for the entire topic. Everything with the possibility to show the original content, but not unless I actively click it.

A sufficiently smart AI can find a way to kill humans faster than they reproduce. Humans depend on food production and distribution; if AI (which doesn't need them) disrupts those, the population will drop.

Not sure if this is the place that can provide the help you need.

what if you don't sleep and your future self is misaligned anyway?

my continued existence is basically at the whim of this insensible incomprehensible alien entity that cannot actually be predicted or reasoned with and is capable of dismembering me.

Sounds like a good description of democracy, where a mob of people with average IQ about 100 decides your future.

Human perception of society has some paradoxes. Consider freedom of speech: In countries that generally have freedom of speech, many people complain about all kinds of injustice, censorship, etc. In countries that have no freedom of speech, everyone is quiet, and when asked explicitly, says: everything is great. Therefore, naive observers often conclude that the former countries have less freedom of speech than the latter, judging by the number of complaints about censorship.

I believe there is a similar effect with meritocracy/equality/etc. Imagine a perfectly unfair feudal society where unless you are born as a member of aristocracy, you are screwed; your talents and hard work will make absolutely no difference. Ironically, many people will believe that this society is fair, that the aristocrats are chosen by God for being better. If the poor kids are never given an opportunity to learn, everyone may believe, based on what they observe, that the poor kids are completely unable to learn. This is what all their priests would teach.

Then comes a revolution, and people find out that the aristocrats are often stupid, and that if you give free education to the poor kids, many of them turn out to be talented. So a meritocratic society is established, everyone gets the chance, the smart and hard-working people can raise, and the stupid and lazy can fall. After a few decades the society is rearranged and made much more fair than before. Ironically, people living in this society believe that it is most unfair, and that you only need to keep giving more and more resources to those at the bottom so that their geniality can manifest. Existence of IQ is denied, because to most people it seems similar to the arbitrary aristocracy of the past.