The Seven Secular Sermons guy. Long-time ingroup member. Current occupation: applied AI in media. Divorced dad of three in Leipzig, Germany.
chaosmage
Karma: 2,833
It seems to me that some types of highly hierarchical organizations rely on this propsed “mindless follower switch” more heavily than others: religions, militaries, political parties come to mind. These all lean male. And they all used to be entirely male, until they were reformed during evolutionarily recent trends against gender inequality.
Thank you for your excellent work. It is much more extensive than I knew. I have much enjoyed your ACX Podcast and will definitely check out some of the other things you linked here.
Please kindly consider narrating my Seven Secular Sermons at https://www.sevensecularsermons.org . I have made my own recordings, but on poor equipment and with faint a German accent. I’m sure you could far surpass those if you wanted.
“The Social Leap” by William von Hippel. He basically says we diverged from chimps when we left the forests for the savannah not only by becoming more cooperative (standard example: sclera that make our focus of attention common knowledge) but also by becoming much more flexible in our social behaviors, cooperating or competing much more dependent on context, over the last six million years.
I have tried and failed to find a short quote in it to paste here. It’s a long and occasionally meandering book, much more alike the anthropological than the rationalist literature.
I didn’t say the risk was “very high” (which would indeed be nonsense), I said it is non-zero. And I personally know two men who were tricked into becomng fathers.
And the thing with average intelligence is that only 50% of the population has it. For both partners to have it has to be (slightly) less likely than that.
PSA: you have less control over whether you have kids, or how many you get, than people generally believe. There are biological problems you might not know you have, there are women who lie about contraception, there are hormonal pressures you won’t feel till you reach a certain age, there are twins and stillbirth, and most of all there are super horny split second decisions in the literal heat of the moment that your system 2 is too slow to stop.
I understand this doesn’t answer the question, I just took the opportunity to share a piece of information that I consider not well-understood enough. Please have a plan for the scenario where your reproductive strategy doesn’t work out.
This is the other, more in-depth post I was preparing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5SbwfQgHCoGRG9LQ9/inside-view-outside-view-and-opposing-view
I continue to stand by this post.
I believe that in our studies of human cognition, we have relatively neglected the aggressive parts of it. We understand they’re there, but they’re kind of yucky and unpleasant, so they get relatively little attention. We can and should go into more detail, try to understand, harness and optimize aggression, because it is part of the brains that we’re trying to run rationality on.
I am preparing another post to do this in more depth.
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Leipzig, Germany
I’d like to complain that the original post popularizing really bright lights was mine in 2013: My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light — LessWrong . This was immediately adopted at MIRI and (I think obviously) led to the Lumenator described by Eliezer three years later.
I suspect it is creation of memories. You don’t experience time when you’re not creating memories, and they’re some kind of very subtle object that lasts from one moment to (at least) the next so they leave a very subtle trace in causality, and the input that goes into them is correlated in time, because it is (some small selection from) the perceptions and representations you had simultaneously when you formed the memory.
I even believe you experience a present moment particularly intensely when you’re creating a long-term memory—I use this to consciously choose to create long-term memories, and it subjectively seems to work.
I fail to see how that’s a problem.
That’s exactly right. It would be much better know a simple method of how to distinguish overconfidence from being actually right without a lot of work. In the absence of that, maybe tables like this can help people choose more epistemic humility.
Well of course there are no true non-relatives, even the sabertooth and antelopes are distant cousins. The question is how much you’re willing to give up for how distant cousins. Here I think the mechanism I describe changes the calculus.
I don’t think we know enough about the lifestyles of cultures/tribes in the ancestral environment, except we can be pretty sure they were extremely diverse. And all cultures we’ve ever found have some kind of incest taboo that promotes mating between members of different groups.
I am utterly in awe. This kind of content is why I keep coming back to LessWrong. Going to spend a couple of days or weeks digesting this...
Welcome. You’re making good points. I intend to make versions of this geared to various audiences but haven’t gotten around to it.
I will attempt to attend this.
A big bounty creates perverse incentives where one guy builds a dangerous AI in a jurisdiction where that isn’t a crime yet, and his friend reports him so they can share the bounty.
I did not know this, and I like it. Thank you!
No it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be consequentialist. I’m challenging people to point out the flaw in the argument.
If you find the argument persuasive, and think the ability to “push the fat man” (without getting LW tangled up in the investigation) might be a resource worth keeping, the correct action to take is not to comment, and perhaps to downvote.
You are right, I agree.