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
Karma: 7
How I Started Being Productive
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.)
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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!
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And also how you found LW/how well you think this community aligns with the discussions you want to have. Why here?
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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.
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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
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)
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