Less Wrong failed to convince me that I should care after several hours of visiting (I would certainly not be here if I didn’t interact in person with any other users), and I would describe myself as a pretty easy sell.
Since you are definitely the type of person I want LW to attract, I would be interested in anything you could remember about those first several hours of visiting.
In particular I am interested in the effect of the talk here about AGI research’s being at the same time a potent threat to human life and human civilization and an extremely effective form of philanthropy.
At the time I said “LW readers would be uniformly better served by applying their rationality than developing it further.”
The sentiment is still somewhat applicable; the difference between then and now is that then I believed that my own rationality had reached the point where improvements were useless. LessWrong did nothing to convince me otherwise, where this should have been its first priority if it was trying to change my behavior.
(My first real posts to LessWrong were amusinggames vaguely related to a naive conception of safe AGI)
Since you are definitely the type of person I want LW to attract, I would be interested in anything you could remember about those first several hours of visiting.
In particular I am interested in the effect of the talk here about AGI research’s being at the same time a potent threat to human life and human civilization and an extremely effective form of philanthropy.
At the time I said “LW readers would be uniformly better served by applying their rationality than developing it further.”
The sentiment is still somewhat applicable; the difference between then and now is that then I believed that my own rationality had reached the point where improvements were useless. LessWrong did nothing to convince me otherwise, where this should have been its first priority if it was trying to change my behavior.
(My first real posts to LessWrong were amusing games vaguely related to a naive conception of safe AGI)
When you wrote that, did you mean applying it to the problems of society, to personal problems like wealth creation, or to both?
Both.