That’s an encouraging data point! There is still the broader question of why the rationalist community isn’t bigger and AI alignment isn’t more popular/supported, but if more rationalists are having your experience it may suggest that relationships and large group influence should be considered separate domains with separate principal components.
I do think there’s a plausible hypothesis that my lack of relationship winning boils down to: a) lack of time invested in acquaintanceships and b) that trying to make a single relationship work is as hard as trying to make a single person like you.
I’m interested in the articles you linked. It appears that the sex advice article is behind a paywall. Do you know if there is a non-paywalled version or satisfactory summary available?
I have mixed feelings about whether we could be more effective at building local communities, but my read is that very few people are focused on this, but the people are seem to be doing well.
For specific advice to you, I’d recommend making more time if you want to succeed at relationships. If that’s impossible, see if you can add relationship building to other activities (i.e. get a local job or cowork, specifically with people in your age range). Learn how to be good at relationships but also learn when to give up and try forming a relationship with someone you’re more compatible with.
I’m not really sure if anyone else has written similarly-good advice to Aella. I think it’s possible on Substack to get a single article as a trial somehow.
I didn’t know any of those points about rationalist influence, so I’ll update my view about how much influence rationalists have. Still, personally, I have to take a model hit here. Maybe other rationalists came in with better models that predicted less astounding success, but I believed that rationalists could do something on the same order of magnitude as 5 rationalists solving quantum gravity in 1 month. Even if I give myself the benefit of the doubt of fuzzy memory and not having made public predictions and say that I predicted 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than that, we are definitely not at the level of 5 rationalist students solving quantum gravity in 10 or 100 months. The fact that I didn’t immediately dismiss that as laughable fiction or imagine Brennan as possibly having a different number of toes, given that he must obviously live in a world where humans evolved differently—means that my model needs to take a hit unless rationalists are basically running the deep state by now and can shut down public AI development whenever they wish (or I guess, have at least solved quantum gravity by now).
While I’m learning new things, do you happen to know if there’s any directory of community building projects here or any way to determine if in person meetups in my area exist (other than the obvious tools of Google, Facebook search, and meetup search)?
Thank you for the personal advice. I’m working on learning how to be good at relationships, so I’ll check those out, but I suspect that my bigger weakness is knowing when to quit.
I don’t see the way to do a free trial, but I’ll keep looking.
While I’m learning new things, do you happen to know if there’s any directory of community building projects here or any way to determine if in person meetups in my area exist (other than the obvious tools of Google, Facebook search, and meetup search)?
For rationalist-specific meetups, LessWrong has a map, although I think anyone taking meetups seriously also advertises on Meetup.com. For things that aren’t listed, showing up a local meetup and asking people what else is going on is probably the best option. The ACX meetups tend to be much larger but happen less often. I think going to them is too infrequent to make friends, but they can be a good source of information about more frequent meetups.
Other ways to find communities are:
Jobs or coworking
Volunteering
Sports
Whatever you pick, my advice is to find something that you can do at least once a week. Meeting people who you actually keep hanging out with is really difficult for one-off events.
That’s an encouraging data point! There is still the broader question of why the rationalist community isn’t bigger and AI alignment isn’t more popular/supported, but if more rationalists are having your experience it may suggest that relationships and large group influence should be considered separate domains with separate principal components.
I do think there’s a plausible hypothesis that my lack of relationship winning boils down to: a) lack of time invested in acquaintanceships and b) that trying to make a single relationship work is as hard as trying to make a single person like you.
I’m interested in the articles you linked. It appears that the sex advice article is behind a paywall. Do you know if there is a non-paywalled version or satisfactory summary available?
I guess I also disagree about the rationalist community not having influence. Senators talk about P(doom), the VP read AI 2027 (which was also written up in the NYT), and for better or for worse the big AI labs were partially inspired or are run by rationalists.
I have mixed feelings about whether we could be more effective at building local communities, but my read is that very few people are focused on this, but the people are seem to be doing well.
For specific advice to you, I’d recommend making more time if you want to succeed at relationships. If that’s impossible, see if you can add relationship building to other activities (i.e. get a local job or cowork, specifically with people in your age range). Learn how to be good at relationships but also learn when to give up and try forming a relationship with someone you’re more compatible with.
I’m not really sure if anyone else has written similarly-good advice to Aella. I think it’s possible on Substack to get a single article as a trial somehow.
I didn’t know any of those points about rationalist influence, so I’ll update my view about how much influence rationalists have. Still, personally, I have to take a model hit here. Maybe other rationalists came in with better models that predicted less astounding success, but I believed that rationalists could do something on the same order of magnitude as 5 rationalists solving quantum gravity in 1 month. Even if I give myself the benefit of the doubt of fuzzy memory and not having made public predictions and say that I predicted 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than that, we are definitely not at the level of 5 rationalist students solving quantum gravity in 10 or 100 months. The fact that I didn’t immediately dismiss that as laughable fiction or imagine Brennan as possibly having a different number of toes, given that he must obviously live in a world where humans evolved differently—means that my model needs to take a hit unless rationalists are basically running the deep state by now and can shut down public AI development whenever they wish (or I guess, have at least solved quantum gravity by now).
While I’m learning new things, do you happen to know if there’s any directory of community building projects here or any way to determine if in person meetups in my area exist (other than the obvious tools of Google, Facebook search, and meetup search)?
Thank you for the personal advice. I’m working on learning how to be good at relationships, so I’ll check those out, but I suspect that my bigger weakness is knowing when to quit.
I don’t see the way to do a free trial, but I’ll keep looking.
For rationalist-specific meetups, LessWrong has a map, although I think anyone taking meetups seriously also advertises on Meetup.com. For things that aren’t listed, showing up a local meetup and asking people what else is going on is probably the best option. The ACX meetups tend to be much larger but happen less often. I think going to them is too infrequent to make friends, but they can be a good source of information about more frequent meetups.
Other ways to find communities are:
Jobs or coworking
Volunteering
Sports
Whatever you pick, my advice is to find something that you can do at least once a week. Meeting people who you actually keep hanging out with is really difficult for one-off events.