Alex Hollow
The general lesson is that understanding the thing directly is better than understanding someone else’s explanation of the thing.
This is a massive misread of the article. The benefit of lifting is the feeling of joy in the merely material, and of transforming the feeling of being embodied from a feeling of trappedness to a feeling of capabilities being granted to you.
Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed by the necessity of occupying space while shuffling around this mortal coil. And now I do not. Moreover, I no longer feel that I need some special justification for existing, because simply residing in the material is now a privilege.
The first time I moved apartments after I started seriously lifting, I enjoyed it. I had always suffered while moving before lifting, ending up sore and tired and cranky, but after lifting, I didn’t feel any negatives.
This post is excellent. The airplane runway metaphor hit home for me and I think it will help me explain my worries about exponential growth to other people more clearly than graphs, so thanks for writing it up!
I really enjoyed reading this, and learning about the symmetries between electron shells and nuclear/proton shells. It wasn’t clear to me why the nuclear waste in concrete is safe to hug—from a quick google, apparently all matter blocks gamma radiation, and concrete is made out of matter. Concrete is typically used because it is cheap and dense, and often “heavy concrete” made with dense industrial waste material (fly ash, slag, etc) is used for radiation shield. source
Hi—I like this post and I’m glad you were able to put 60% of the value of a book into a table! One question I had—you say that IVF costs $12k and surrogacy costs $100k, but also that surrogacy is only $20k more than IVF? That doesn’t add up to me.
Also, sperm/egg donation are usually you getting paid to give those things, which help you have children technically. But those children are probably not being raised by you, so a lot of the benefits you cite, like playing with grandchildren, might be smaller for children created with donated gametes than children you bear and raise yourself.
Narrow Roads of Gene Land Volume 2: Evolution of Sex by W. D. Hamilton claims to cover this topic, and I just got a copy. I plan on reading and writing a book review, because I suspect that Hamilton has some good theories that LW would be interested in, given this post and recent interest in the evolution of sex.
Hi—looks like you did a relative link (https://www.lesswrong.com/capital-gains-in-agi-big.png) but you want this absolute link instead: https://www.jefftk.com/capital-gains-in-agi-big.png
I like this post’s idea, and reversing the causal arrow. Most people think that life philosophy causes life outcome, so they look for the right life philosophy, but if it were the opposite you should be chasing the life outcome, and then you will end up with the life philosophy.
I don’t get the first two paragraphs at all, though. Are you trying to say that Sapphire was doing something that everyone could learn how to do, but disguised it behind a mystic pretense, and that was bad? I don’t think I fully get how it ties into the rest of the post (although I haven’t seen the show, so I may be missing something).
If you don’t like doing all the non-programming work that running your own company entails, you might prefer a annoying job that still only requires programming over starting your own company.
I’ve noticed a similar thing with Anki flashcards, where my brain learns to memorize responses to the shape of the input text blob when I have cards that are relatively uniquely-shaped. I have to swap around the layout every few months to ensure that the easiest model to subconsciously learn is the one that actually associates the content on the front of the card with the content on the back of the card.
What asymmetries did you introduce into your simulations that lead to a difference? Models with no gender differences but with mandatory sexual reproduction usually tend to be 50⁄50 in my experience.
I’d recommend GURPS as a base game. It is a very flexible toolkit for making RPGs. It already has some mechanics for things like “Enhanced Time Sense” and the ability to create characters that exist as intelligences without physical bodies other than computational hardware.
I think one issue is that comment trees are just not the ideal format for conversation. It’s pretty common that someone will make a comment with four different claims, and then ten different comments of which two make similar objections to one, and then a couple other objections, and those will be responded to, and it’s all very ad-hoc. Structure doesn’t spontaneously emerge, and having to scan through a whole disordered tree to understand the current state of the argument makes it hard for bystanders to join.
Having a section for posts-for-the-month (or “Ongoing Discussions”?) would help people that want long-running discussions so they would all be in the same place, over only a few threads. But the comment thread discussion format is not great.This would be a large engineering effort, but support for argument maps could help record the structure of an argument, and also help discussion continue, as each new node could be a new post, and having a visual of the state of an argument could help keep things organized, compared to comment trees?
To paraphrase the hiker’s saying “regret is mandatory, suffering is optional”. What you describe as not feeling regret to me sounds like feeling regret but not suffering because of it. Knowing that you could have made a better choice is an act of feeling regret for the choice you did make. Suffering as a result of it is bad for you (it’s suffering, after all), and it sounds like you don’t suffer when you regret. This is a good place to be! It’s good to both recognize that there were better possibilities, and maybe you can aspire to pick better next time, but maybe you did ultimately do as good as you could have done in that situation, so beating yourself up wouldn’t be useful.
We may disagree on the semantics of the word regret, so imagine I’m saying regret_{alex} for my version, and regret_{gordon} for your version.
Unfortunately, all of life is a virtue ethics/game theory context.
Less so under potentially adversarial conditions, when there are politics/culture-war aspects. For example, many people have large personal and social incentives to convince you of various ideas related to UFOs. In that case, it may not be the correct move to engage with the presented arguments, if they are words chosen to manipulate and not to inform. Do not process untrusted input,.
I’m curious if you think that this formulation of the above idea is still antithetical to epistemic rationality.
Kids can be surprisingly useful resources at a surprisingly early age.
On farms, as you’ve said, kids can figure out what to do and help out easily. If your work requires a lot of low-skill repetitive manual labor, kids can do that, and it can help teach them how to do your slightly higher-skill labor next year.
This does not apply if you work as an engineer, or in an office, or many other cases where specific skills contingent on mostly-finished-developing brains are required to do your work and there is no manual labor that you can offload to children. If you expect your kid to go through the standard college route, there are 22 years of waiting before they can really do anything useful to help with your labor.
Excellent post. Well-researched, with important caveats put right where I was about to ask for a clarification, and solidly straddles the line between life advice and teaching new facts about the world. As someone with alcoholic’s genes who gets almost no hangovers, I probably won’t be trying this, but I appreciate knowing that activated charcoal might help if I do start to worry about hangovers.
I think your definition of perfect model is a bit off—a circuit diagram of a computer is definitely not a perfect model of the computer! The computer itself has much more state and complexity, such as temperature of the various components, which are relevant to the computer but not the model.
Containing a copy of your source code is a weird definition of a model. All programs contain their source code, does a program that prints it source code have more of a model of itself than other programs, which are just made of their source code? Human brains are not capable of holding a perfect model of a human brain, plus more, because the best-case encoding requires using one atom of the human brain to model an atom in the human brain, leaving you at 100% capacity.
The key word is “perfect”—to fit a model of a thing inside that thing, the model must contain less information than the thing does.
It feels like an important metric is “karma per view” or “karma per read” or “karma per user-minute-looking-at-text” something similar. Currently, we can’t gauge that, and so when someone who gives a strong prior that their post will be worth reading posts, that post will get more views which means more upvotes even if they have a similar “karma per read”.
EDIT: EY’s post loaded the second I posted this, but I promise it was an independent invention