August Morley

Karma: 40

August Morley 4 Sep 2025 21:06 UTC
0 points
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on: In Defense of Alcohol
I don’t think alcohol as “social lubricant” is unknown in rationalist circles, but let’s assume it was. Does that new information update the utility of alcohol enough to outweigh the costs? Statistics on this are still very influenced by COVID, but I’ve tried to pull data from 2019 where I could find it easily. This is not exhaustive.
Per NIH^[1]:
- The Alcohol-Related Disease Impact application estimates that each year there are more than 178,000 deaths (approximately 120,000 male deaths and 59,000 female deaths) attributable to excessive alcohol use
- According to 2021 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 21.0% of suicide decedents have blood alcohol concentrations of 0.1% or more
Per NHTSA^[2]:
- In 2019, alcohol-impaired driving fatalities accounted for 10,142 deaths (or 28% of overall driving fatalities)
1. ^
  https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-topics-z/alcohol-facts-and-statistics/alcohol-related-emergencies-and-deaths-united-states
2. ^
  https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813120

August Morley 29 Aug 2025 18:43 UTC
5 points
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on: Defensiveness does not equal guilt
In his book Lapsuuden kehityksellinen trauma, the psychotherapist Juha Klaavu uses the term “magical guilt” to describe an experience that some people have, where they feel guilty about just about everything. A description that he offers for this is that “when I’m in a park and witness a dog I don’t know biting a person I don’t know, even this seems to somehow be my fault”.
One potential mechanism for magical guilt: “I’m a good person” → “There is a world in which I would have made a difference in this situation” → “I observe I’m not currently in that world” → “The gap between this world and that world is because of my lack of {awareness, action, ambition, energy, etc...}”
The epistemic failure occurring either at step (2) or (4). Either there is no world where you can make a meaningful difference, or the thing that limited your ability to make a difference is entirely out of your control.

August Morley 29 Aug 2025 17:38 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Jeffrey Heninger’s comment on: Why Latter-day Saints Have Strong Communities
I think you’re probably right on the topic of standardization—I hadn’t disentangled how important if was to me personally from how generally critical it would be for local community-building.
It may be of value to qualify or Taboo the term “community” here. I understood the question to be “What unique aspects of LDS practice and culture at both the ward, stake, and Church-wide levels have contributed to the formation and maintenance of enduring local and global social structures”. I think your emphasis is on the local community, and my comment had emphasized the more global aspects (likely a consequence of my unique experience, as you point out).
If the question is, instead, “What unique aspects of LDS practice and culture at the ward level have contributed to the formation and maintenance of enduring local social structures, and are recommended for other groups to emulate”, I think you’ve identified all of the prime candidates.

August Morley 24 Aug 2025 20:54 UTC
1 point
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on: Futility Illusions
Optimality: Or, the property can be changed, but only negatively, i.e. it is already so close to the optimum (or marginal improvements are so costly) that no further improvements are practical.
It may be the case that expressions of futility for individual improvement capture the fact that many properties can indeed be improved in isolation, but the local improvement leads a regionally/globally sub-optimal result.
However, for instances of group expressions of futility, I anticipate that this is basically another manifestation of the coordination problem.

August Morley 22 Aug 2025 4:53 UTC
5 points
1
on: The anti-fragile culture
The concept of anti-fragility seems to be often confused with the concept of robustness (something Taleb pointed out specifically^[1]). Of the practices you recommend here, I would have liked to see more discussion on why you think these particular values/practices result in a better culture during the stress of high-growth periods. If the culture is merely preserved, those would be robust values.
I can’t speak to your specific experience at Wave, but it seems like the value of feedback for everything could plausibly be antifragile—the rate and value of feedback seems likely to increase during periods of greater stress. However, others could actually be fragile for example, the fire-fast principle applied during high-stress periods may result in an overabundance of “volatile” over “stable” performers, to borrow lingo I first learned from Matt Blodgett^[2], reducing the orgs ability to consolidate gains and eliminate technical debt.
1. ^
  “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”—Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House. p. 430.
2. ^
  https://www.mattblodgett.com/2024/11/are-you-stable-or-volatile.html

August Morley 21 Aug 2025 13:31 UTC
1 point
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on: August Morley’s Shortform
I’ve been trying to memorize the 12 Virtues of Rationality recently. I’ve been using spaced repetition to memorize each virtue, but I was struggling to keep them in sequence, and to think of them in whole, rather than 12 separate elements.
To aid the process, I developed the following mnemonic with the aid of Claude Sonnet 4. It includes jargon from one of my favorite hobbies (rock climbing), so it probably doesn’t work well for a general audience. Nevertheless, I’m putting it out there in case anyone else might find value in it.
Climbers Reach Ledges Easily After Extra Small Hold Pulling Practice, Sending Victoriously

(Curiosity, Relinquishment, Lightness, Evenness, Argument, Empiricism, Simplicity, Humility, Perfectionism, Precision, Scholarship, Void)

August Morley 20 Aug 2025 3:52 UTC
1 point
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on: Why Latter-day Saints Have Strong Communities
Though I consider myself a rational humanist, I am a currently practicing member of the Church for practical and social reasons. I have participated in perhaps a dozen wards across three countries, several states, and the aforementioned YSA type of congregation.
From my perspective, I think you undersell the standardization aspect. I believe that even within a single Ward, the idea that every person is actively trying to pursue the exact same set of ideals and outcomes has a strong unifying effect. It helps that many of the behavioral ideals of the church are truly pro-social and pro-health, in that the ideals can be appealing independent of conforming to the faith-centric standards of belief.
Another major unifying factor for the church is the common narratives of persecution and “apartness”. It is quite common for a member of the church to have a story of how they were excluded from non-church social groups on account of their faith, particularly when they were young. The church overall also emphasizes the narrative of historical persecution during the initial founding of the church (culminating in the departure for the West). These two combine to create an atmosphere where church members feel that they need the social structure of the church, as other options are felt to be unavailable.
I’d like to think that there is a persecution-free (perceived or otherwise) method to build that type of “apartness”, but I don’t think we can list the reasons for the strength of LDS communities without mentioning it.

August Morley 14 Aug 2025 4:01 UTC
1 point
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on: Interiors can be more fun
I was familiar with Epic as a provider of electronic medical record software—I had no idea that their corporate offices were so full of personality! I would not have predicted that.
My initial hypothesis for the tendency towards un-fun spaces is the gravitation to the lowest common denominator. Every note-worthy feature is both an opportunity for finding fun as well as finding fault. I think many spaces end up bland as a form of loss-aversion.

August Morley 14 Aug 2025 2:51 UTC
12 points
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on: Doing A Thing Puts You in The Top 10% (And That Sucks)
I’m coming at this from the point of view of implied opportunities. I want to improve in my hobbies, and I’d like to maximize the enjoyment I get out of doing them. The path of least resistance is likely to expose me to a peer group who intimidate me, and from whom learning will be difficult or impossible due to a large skill gap.
Peers in the same performance range are going to be more difficult to coordinate with, because they are only engaging in the hobby as often as I am, which is far less than the high performers I would be trying to avoid. Most enthusiast groups I’ve encountered are generally populated by the high performers as well. It feels like there is an underserved market for bringing together the mid-tier hobbyists who aren’t engaged by a beginner group and haven’t reached a level to be comfortable around the advanced practitioners who dominate typical clubs.
My own experience points towards outsized rewards from finding an very enthusiastic beginner to partner with. They provide the schedule flexibility, and you provide what mentorship you can. You know that they will surpass you in time, but you can build confidence and grow with them until they get to a point that you’re not in their peer group any longer.

August Morley 12 Aug 2025 23:27 UTC
7 points
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on: Generalized Coming Out Of The Closet
I’ve been considering “coming out” on a topic for some time now to my family (not in the traditional sense, but on a topic which I nevertheless expect will be painful to discuss). The main reason I feel the need to do so is to achieve a state of truthfulness/wholeness—i.e. I want how other people understand me to align with how I understand myself, and to no longer feel the need to behave in a way that aligns with THEIR image of me.
This post gave me a new perspective that “coming out” could mean something slightly different than what I mention above: the idea that there are aspects of ourselves we don’t actively hide, but which we make a point not to share with some or all of our social groups.
Do you think that/did you observe in your own experiences of “generalized coming out” that you found this feeling of wholeness? In other words, do you feel that your interactions with the community will be fundamentally different post “coming out”? Or was the payoff you experienced primarily in the form of knowing that the community now understands you in a more complete way and still accepts you?

August Morley 28 Jun 2025 2:00 UTC
3 points
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on: Information vs Assurance
As a parent, this is a situation I encounter routinely. My wife and I have a standing policy that we don’t talk to the younger kids about big plans until perhaps a week beforehand (big being anything between visiting Grandma to a international trip). If we even mention that we’re considering a big event/trip of some sort, it immediately enters their minds as an assurance, not information. My gut feel is that this held true for our kids until about age 11, at which point we could state, “We’re thinking about X this summer” and it would not longer be received as “If we do not do X in the next 1-2 weeks I have license to complain about it anytime I’m reminded of X forever and ever”.

August Morley 6 May 2025 3:50 UTC
2 points
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on: What is your favorite podcast?
Complex Systems
1. I like that I finish each episode feeling like I understand the world a little better, that it’s generally free of argument (i.e. not in a debate format), and the episodes are rarely longer than an hour.
2. Guest speakers tend to be folks who have gone through the process of building something (software, hardware, author, etc)
3. Podcast run by Patrick McKenzie, who has established considerable credibility via the blog Bits About Money (at least with me)
4. Would recommend to folks interested in learning about the incentives and processes involved in infrastructure projects of all forms and fashions, who are comfortable with idioms of technical conversations, but who still broadly want to be entertained.

August Morley 1 May 2025 3:15 UTC
1 point
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on: Prioritizing Work
I appreciate that this post states clearly what I’ve certainly thought of in a foggier sense. The oft-repeated platitude quoted by OP is quite black-and-white in how it frames the tension between economic activity and social activity, but it fails to capture a sentiment that I (anecdotally) encounter fairly regularly—people who would rather work long into the sunset of their lives because of the meaning they derive from it.
The value of meaningful work for the person doing it, aside from its economic value, doesn’t get its fair consideration in this Cached Thought.