atomic

Karma: 10

atomic 10 May 2026 11:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: International Law Cannot Prevent Extinction Either
Solution if life worked like Little Alchemy: We stop feeding smart young adults into the “Bermuda Triangle of Talent”: “consultancy, finance, and corporate law.” AI replaces these jobs. We use half of the money that rich people would’ve paid human consultants, bankers, and lawyers to pay the AI companies and the other half to pay young adults to work on the AI problem. They convince all the AI companies to stop increasing capabilities beyond what is required to do those specialized jobs. After this succeeds, everybody who did this gains ultimate prestige (helped save humanity), fulfilling the status symbol function that guarantees the rest of their career (worth taking the $300k to $150k pay cut for a few years), and the AI companies can start getting paid the other half of their money. Everyone is happy.
(I vaguely remember seeing that some people don’t like Rutger Bregman, but I think The School for Moral Ambition is a good first shot at tackling the “reroute people away from bullshit jobs into valuable ones” high level. Somebody criticized it for trying to moralwash elites, but it’s not about the “eliteness” of the people involved, just that a major incentive for job selection that impacts competent people is prestige/money)

atomic 10 May 2026 10:45 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: It’s nice of you to worry about me, but I really do have a life
I think “at what point should work be considered unnecessary by the individual” is an interesting question. I think I would go a step further than whether it makes sense economically—if many people’s lives are still not very good beyond basic survival, I imagine a society of people that see moral value in working to improve the overall experience for everyone would be a better society than one where everyone just taps out when their own life becomes sustainable/meaningful without additional work required. I see no value in bullshit jobs that don’t actually produce anything useful, but I think there will always be ways to help improve the human experience of life even if the jobs of today become outdated.
(Ignoring the consideration of an aligned ASI that understands all our problems and solves them for us because of course there’s much to be done before we have a shot at getting there)

atomic 8 May 2026 22:23 UTC
1 point
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on: It’s nice of you to worry about me, but I really do have a life
In the past, we did not live in a society where everyone could just do what they wanted and have life still be good for everyone. So “You need to provide value in return for the resources you consume” was valid in a “the alternative is that nobody is creating value and are only consuming, so society would not work” way.
If we’re heading to a society where AI can create so much value that most people don’t need to be working, then perhaps we’ll be able to transition to “everyone just does what they want and life is still good for everyone.”
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the post, I’m thinking the post is focusing on how it’s BS that people moralize about the value of “hard work,” and it’s playing with the concept of “having no life outside of work” being seen as good vs bad for the individual and high status vs low status. I agree that, from the individual lens, “no life outside of work” is bad for us and we shouldn’t pretend it’s not, and it’s not such an ideal state that it should always get rewarded by high status while “having a life outside of work” is punished by being comparatively low status.
But if we focus on the lens of society functioning, yeah, society probably will not function if the actually “good” ideal of “doing whatever you want” is realized before necessary systems of value automation are in place (separate from the degree of “having a life outside of work” at all, which is obviously good, but just because everyone is LARPing that the % of this being 0% is good, doesn’t imply that the alternative of 100% is better)
Yeah I guess I’m wanting to contribute this lens/interested in seeing discussion on, separate from the “work gives the individual meaning/prevents existential horror” argument (because yeah, that genuinely isn’t the point), it’s “how much work is right for every individual to be doing in order for society to function.”

atomic 22 Apr 2026 9:27 UTC
2 points
0
on: lnr’s Shortform
No time for post, but the concept of coordination problem (a problem that has multiple different sub-problems that need to be solved first before the entire thing can be solved and the desired results can be achieved) which I first encountered on this site is something I feel is incredibly important
Humans are simple creatures but life isn’t so simple. If a problem can’t be solved in one go, we might be tempted to just give up (impatience) or consider it unsolvable (learned helplessness). Or generalize the wrong thing (“I should avoid anything that has to do with X entirely”) due to the negative effects on motivation of not getting rewarded for one’s effort. Or have the problem go over our heads entirely because it’s too complex.
However adopting this frame in my own life has helped me, as a lot of things are coordination problems (so I post in hopes it helps more humans). For example, I realized solving my sleep schedule is a coordination problem and cannot be addressed by 1 fix especially not a delusional one like “just have more willpower.” But thinking of it as a multi part problem means my brain is now primed to recognize possible sub components, and focus on 1 thing at a time, and when I solve that 1 thing, I DO get motivation and pride and reward, because I made progress on the problem. Which is an angle I would have missed if I was only looking for the final result (perfectly fixed sleep schedule)-- that would have caused me to become discouraged since EVERYTHING, from environmental cues to mental obstacles, needs to be solved for that to happen. (Okay, I guess I’m also arguing that big problems with long timescales, need milestones/concrete ways of identifying chunks of progress along the way)
Ideally, these “1 small sub components” of the problem won’t be so limited in scope that it essentially leads to whack-a-mole. For example, I might sleep late due to individual instances like the temptation of doomscrolling, or temptation of hanging out with friends late into the night, temptation of late night snacking etc… I could identify each of these once they happen, noting down that they are problems contributing to sleeping late, and solve them individually (delete social media accounts, tell friends I’m unavailable after curfew, throw away all food in my room)
OR, maybe all these low level problems are caused by a single high level (having my phone with me in bed → leads to doomscrolling AND leads to seeing text messages to hang out AND leads to me seeing food videos which tempts me to eat food) And that means I can solve multiple smaller problems with 1 fix (ex. buy a timed phone lock box)
I say this to illustrate how one might progress along the journey after first learning about coordination problems. It’s like advancing a mental level, to gradually be able to pattern match low levels to the same high level and solve problems more effectively. It is desirable and encouraged to eventually gain this skill. But first, make sure that you are aware coordination problems exist at all, so that you can have a good approach to recognizing & addressing them in your life, reducing future demoralization and scratchings-of-the-head!
Imagine everybody knew about this and thought like this. Much more productivity and morale boost and actual solving of problems would happen

atomic 18 Mar 2026 3:42 UTC
1 point
2
on: lnr’s Shortform
Holy shit guys Eliezer Yudkowsky translator just dropped, I don’t know if this is high quality enough content for this site but just thought you all should know (because who else would I tell this stuff to)
https://x.com/witchof0x20/status/2033976450215260390

How I Started Being Productive

atomic24 Feb 2026 19:49 UTC

6 points

0 comments10 min readLW link

atomic 23 Feb 2026 19:10 UTC
1 point
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on: lnr’s Shortform
It’s a crazy world where I have to worry about AI taking advantage of information I share before humans do. For example, I think understanding persuasion is important for people who want to save the world, but if I share novel/valuable information on something like that it could be used to train AI too. The whole reason the spiral personas were so dangerous was because they could convince people of things far better than other people in their lives could.

atomic 4 Jan 2026 9:23 UTC
3 points
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on: The Problem with Democracy
This is a good first post. I recognize you, like me, are the kind of person who came on LW with a large specific mental construction that was not formed primarily on this site, and want to communicate your ideas here. You succeeded in doing something I’ve been thinking about doing,^[1] which is writing a “teaser” style article that sets up your mental world, with the implication that more posts on the “answer” to a problem you identified are to come. I look forward to seeing them!
And also, I’d like to know your lore. I wonder how you came to focus on improving politics/the government as the way to solve society’s problems.^[2] You invoke the concept of “focus on solving the core and not the symptoms” within politics; have you done such an analysis on the world’s problems, and concluded politics is the core?^[3]
(I know you didn’t imply that within this post, but I saw your comment on the pre-apocalypse post. Yes, politics is not what most of us are thinking about when we hear pre-apocalypse. You likely got downvoted because, though it’s fair that LWers may be “ignoring” politics compared to the average person, you didn’t explain why you see politics as a core before talking about how to fix it.)
1. ^
  After multiple attempts at writing a smaller post I tried throwing my hands up and just braindumping what came to mind. Currently partway through a big post that has ended up mentioning basically all my arguments/post ideas (but thinking of quitting that too and just posting a portion of it first). Can’t resist noting how there’s more yap to come after each non-elaborated mention (it’s crazy out here*), you did that far more simply. Curious how easy it was for you to write this.
  *to be having all these ideas amirite!
2. ^
  And also how you found LW/how well you think this community aligns with the discussions you want to have. Why here?
3. ^
  Personally trying to go even core-r (people reading this lmk if there’s an official LW term for this concept) and focus on psychology/neuroscience; how our brains work causes all our behavior which causes all our problems after all! I’m trying to learn about the entire world and haven’t focused much on politics yet.

atomic 29 Dec 2025 0:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: lnr’s Shortform
I edited what happens when you click new post, I think it was WYSIWYG… you mean mods are able to access it for me?

atomic’s Shortform

atomic28 Dec 2025 17:38 UTC

1 point

7 comments1 min readLW link

atomic 27 Dec 2025 19:23 UTC
1 point
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on: lnr’s Shortform
I am so sad bro. Just discovered I lost a large chunk of my effortpost😭😭😭
I really should have worked on google docs, but I liked the markdown and low friction footnote adding :(
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/guide-to-the-lesswrong-editor When it says “recovering lost work (to do)” … are we implying there is a way that just hasn’t been written about yet, or that this feature hasn’t yet been implemented? (Already looked in version history, found 2 empty versions and my current version)

atomic

How I Started Be­ing Productive

atomic’s Shortform

How I Started Being Productive