Occasionally think about topics discussed here. Will post if I have any thoughts worth sharing.
Bjartur Tómas
Karma: 1,049
Marshalling yourself in this way, reflects poorly on your movement. If I imagine myself as a member of this family, I would react poorly to the behaviour displayed. And would be repulsed by this movement, which can make someone act in such a way.
Now, I don’t share your emotional reaction to animal cruelty, and plausibly I am less empathetic. But consider what your emotional reaction here is doing, compare it to abstract acknowledgement of the harms and kind, thoughtful but confident explanations of your veganism.
And as a matter of scope, your reaction here is incorrect. The terror you saw at that table is as nothing compared to the industrial farming conditions as a whole. Reacting to it as a synecdoche of the agricultural system does not seem useful. It seems paralyzing.
Also, promoting norms of disassociation among vegans makes veganism even more unappealing than it already is.
Once cruelty free meats are cheap, and veganism itself becomes a cheap signal, those looking back from the future at your pledge will admire this uncompromising stance. But in terms of actually doing the most good for animals, I suspect it is harmful.
Love of the Loveless by The Eels:
Thanks. I’ve written enough aborted novels to know I don’t like writing novels, but I will probably write a few more short stories at some point.
This story doesn’t perfectly represent my opinions, and I actually have a lot of sympathy for “mundane utopias”.
Really wish I could get GV is Canada.
Thanks. Fixed… I mean, the secret meaning was too subtle so I removed it so as to not confuse people.
Thanks! I felt weird using LW’s copy-editing feature for fiction and didn’t, so this is really helpful. The double spaces were not intentional, ditto with the unclosed quotations.
Nothing conscious, but I have read Metamorphises of the Prime Intellect.
I started writing this for the EA Forum Creative Writing Contest but missed the deadline, so posting it here.
The Maker of MIND
Yeah, any ideas how to filter for this? Seems difficult not to have this effect on someone. One would hope the smarter people would get orthogonality, but like empirically that does not seem to be the case. The brightest people in AI have insane naïveté on the likely results of AGI.
Or those who might choose to become programmers.
On Raising Awareness
Ha, I know. I was weighing in, in support, against this claim he was replying to:
10 million dollars will probably have very small impact on Terry Tao’s decision to work on the problem.
I’m probably too dumb to have an opinion of this matter, but the belief that all super-genius mathematicians care zero about being fabulously wealthy strikes me as unlikely.
The idea has been joked about for awhile. I think it is probably worth trying in both the literally offer Tao 10 million and the generalized case of finding the highest g people in the world and offering them salaries that seem truly outrageous. Here and on EA forum, many claim genius people would not care about 10 million dollars. I think this is, to put it generously, not at all obvious. And certainly something we should establish empirically. Though Eliezer is a genius, I do not think he is literally the smartest person on the planet. To the extent we can identify the smartest people on the planet, we would be a really pathetic civilization were we were not willing to offer them NBA-level salaries to work on alignment.
I know we used to joke about this, but has anyone considered actually implementing the strategy of paying Terry Tao 10 million dollars to work on the problem for a year?
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
Thanks. Corrected; I probably conflated the two. But my feeling towards that change are the same so the line otherwise remains unchanged. I should probably organize my opinons/feelings on this topic and write an effortpost or something rather than hash it out in the comments.
And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs?
I’m not sure what you find implausible about that. Drugs do not literally propagandize the user, but they can hijack the reward system, in the case of many drugs, and in the case of psychedelics they seem to alter beliefs in reliable ways. Psychedelics are also taken in a memetic context with many crystalized notions about what the psychedelic experience is, what enlightenment is, that enlightenment itself is a mysterious but worthy pursuit.
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
In your own case unless I am misremembering, I believe on your blog you discuss LSD permanently
lowering yourmathematical abilitiesdegrading your memory. This seems really, really bad to me…Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
Perhaps the masturbation line was going too far. But the gloss of virtue that “seeking enlightenment” has strikes me as undeserved.
I’m trying to read more on this topic for a new post. Any other ideas, or books or historical events or people worth adding to my list?