see also my eaforum at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dirk and my tumblr at https://d-i-r-k-s-t-r-i-d-e-r.tumblr.com/ .
dirk
Karma: 553
You’re way off on the number of meetups. The LW events page has 4684 entries (kudos to Said for designing GreaterWrong such that one can simply adjust the URL to find this info). The number will be inflated by any duplicates or non-meetup events, of course, but it only goes back to 2018 and is thus missing the prior decade+ of events; accordingly, I think it’s reasonable to treat it as a lower bound.
Claude shows the authentic chain of thought (unless the system flags the COT as unsafe, in which case the user will be shown an encrypted version). It sounds from an announcement tweet like Gemini does as well, but I couldn’t find anything definitive in the docs for that one.
By that metric, though, you should probably also be including many/most videos with labels like “teen”, “schoolgirl”, “barely legal”, etc; it’s not uncommon for videos in those categories to emphasize youth in similar fashion.
I don’t think this post makes compelling arguments for its premises. Downvoted.
If your worldview is that letting people starve is just as beneficial as feeding them, then I think it is your worldview that is deluded and causes suffering. I think that is an evil belief to hold and will lead only to harm.
Things based in delusion can still have truly beneficial impact; for example, if you spent a decade working in a soup kitchen without ever meditating even once, you’d still have standard levels of delusion (and you certainly wouldn’t have done the most effective thing) but you’d have helped feed hundreds or thousands of people who might otherwise have gone hungry.
If you spent that whole time meditating, on the other hand, then at the end of a decade you wouldn’t have had any impact at all.
Awakening and then doing something actually useful can produce beneficial impact, but it’s the doing-something-actually-useful step that produces impact, not the part where you personally see with clearer eyes, and moreover it’s possible to do useful things without seeing clearly.
So it’s not intrinsically valuable but might incentivize lenders to desired behavior? Makes sense, thanks.
Link is dead; here’s an archive. (It’s the podcast Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, episode 75).
Is there a reason to think this would be beneficial? I don’t see what’s supposed to be desirable about taking people’s degrees.
If I take a tree, and I create a computer simulation of that tree, the simulation will not be a way of running the original tree forward at all.
Another Grok prompt-injection, this time trying to make it push Musk’s preferred narrative of white genocide in South Africa: https://x.com/grok/status/1922702387711705247 https://x.com/MattBinder/status/1922713839566561313 https://x.com/AricToler/status/1922702822568513702 (latter two are screenshot compilations). Edit: also covered in Rolling Stone here. Not really notable in its own right aside from the amusement value, but gives the lie to earlier claims that manipulating Grok’s outputs goes against their company culture.
The content of the reddit post linked is missing; it was annoyingly hard to find a mirror, so here’s a link to save others the trouble.
There is indeed an audiobook version; the site links to https://www.audible.com/pd/If-Anyone-Builds-It-Everyone-Dies-Audiobook/B0F2B8J9H5 (where it says it’ll be available September 30) and https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781668652657-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies (available September 16).
As I was reading another post, I encountered this comment by gwern discussing an article about psychological risks of meditation; interestingly, one of the people interviewed, like you, found themself temporarily unable to feel for their children.
There were roughly 2000 respondents to the 2024 EA survey; if we assume that’s undercounting by a factor of 100, that would still only give us 200,000 EAs (and I expect that it’s really more like 10x, for 20,000).
This is with regards to specifically small donations, of under $100; taking $50 as the average small donation and assuming every EA makes political donations, 50 times 200,000 would equal $1 million of campaign contributions ($100,000 if we assume there are only 10x as many EAs as answered the survey).
That is enough to fully cover a small campaign or two, but it’s not clear to me whether, spread over many candidates as would happen in real life, even the higher number would make much of a difference to any of their races.
If you hover your cursor over the react, you should see a popup showing one vote by you; from there, just click again on the highlighted upvote to remove.
Maybe to some, their way of expressing things seems “boring” or “irrelevant.”
But who gets to decide that? Why you? Why me? Why anyone for that matter?
Each individual reader gets to decide that. (In fact, it’s impossible not for readers to experience some amount of boredom from ‘none’ to ‘maximal’, so they actually can’t help making a judgement). There’s not a singular gate you can pass to be heard; every reader must individually be convinced that what you have to say is worth their time, no two ways around it.
That said, I’m getting the vibe that you want friendship as well as audience, and on that front I’m actually somewhat more optimistic; while I lack the expertise to outline a strategy for you, people are often surprisingly amenable to interaction (due to their symmetric drive for social connection), and moreover such interactions can increase the interactee’s friendship in and of themselves. (Also, individual friends are more rewarding than individual audience members, so your efforts go further.)
Which brings me to something I actually consider a major weakness of the post; you write at length about the downsides of dismissing those who communicate in nonstandard fashion, but there’s no trace of what you might want to communicate. Insofar as that’s because you want to talk to people more than you want to talk about anything, relatable, but to potential conversers it’s quite short on affordances. To the extent that the post is itself supposed to invite conversation, I would definitely suggest including more discussion of what interests you. (Also, unsolicited advice, doing an intro post in an open thread might be a good way to start getting to know people.)
As a note, I actually found the additional personal details at the bottom of the post significantly more pleasant to read than the obviously-LLM-authored elements in the main text and your comments; IDK if it’s ultimately worth the tradeoff to you, but I’d encourage you to consider the possibility of shifting toward a higher proportion of self-authored text in future posts/comments.
(e.g. Community Notes).
Elon Musk was not responsible for Community Notes. It was released multiple years before he purchased Twitter. I’m unclear on whether he’s outright lied about being responsible or people are just making mistaken assumptions, but in any case I don’t think you should give him credit for something he didn’t do.
IMO summaries and reviews rarely capture all the content of a book; it would have to be an extraordinarily fluff-laden piece of nonfiction to be perfectly replaceable.
This post fails to define metamodernism and thus fails to communicate anything useful by the term (a grievous error given that metamodernism is its central topic)
The text in general is, moreover, a soup of unsupported, vibes-based claims
With regards to sex, rats and EAs both are significantly likelier to be queer (& for that matter poly, though I don’t have good info re: kink) than baseline American culture (a trivial inference to draw if you’re familiar with our autism rates)
With regards to the “fakeness of EA”, see Scott’s presentation of various statistics here; he estimates roughly 200k lives saved, consistent with EA’s strong commitment to real-world impact as the ultimate measure of charitable spending
With regards to the quality of the post, it’s bad