I took it. A bit sad that it’s shorter than the last one.
ChristianKl
Karma: 34,059
It’s been a while since I looked into Stampi, but from what I remember Claudio Stampi optimizes for the performance during a race and makes statements about what’s optimal for the race environment. As far as I remember Stampi does not advocate that the sailors go down to those low amounts of sleep outside of their racing conditions. In most sports, the behavior that’s optimal for maximum sports performance is not the behavior that’s optimal for long-term health.
I don’t really understand what Zoe went through, just reading her post (although I have talked with other ex-Leverage people about the events). You don’t understand what I went through, either. It was really, really psychologically disturbing. I sound paranoid writing what I wrote, but this paranoia affected so many people.
It would have probably better if you would have focused on your experience and drop all of the talk about Zoe from this post. That would make it easier for the reader to just take the information value from your experience.
I think that your post is still valuable information but that added narrative layer makes it harder to interact with then it would have been if it would have been focused more on your experience.
It seems to me like in the case of Leverage, them working 75 hours per week reduced the time the could have used to use Reason to conclude that they are in a system that’s bad for them.
That’s very different from someone having a few conversation with Vassar and then adopting a new belief and spending a lot of the time reasoning about that alone and the belief being stable without being embedded into a strong enviroment that makes independent thought hard because it keeps people busy.
A cult in it’s nature is a social institution and not just a meme that someone can pass around via having a few conversations.
Given the decision on a cap in length I think it might be worthwhile to do a second LW Lifestyle and Values survey in addition to the census. At best with half a year of distance to the census.
I do appreciate the account being public. At the same time I would have liked more details about the experiences.
Saying “there was a consent issue” is one level of abstraction over a straight recounting of experience. There’s a huge difference between kissing someone with whom you are in mutual love without asking them for permission for it and rape in sense of the criminal code.
Having an account of what happened exactly would be useful to put the incident into practice.
The point of writing an ad like that is to be appealing to people who would fit the job and not be appealing to people who wouldn’t.
LessWrong is a non-evidence-based method of teaching rationality. We don’t have good evidence that someone will get more rational after reading the sequences.
You can make a reasonable theoretic argument that people will get more rational. You don’t have the kind of evidence that you need for a EBM-treatment. In most domains where we make choices in our lives you don’t follow pratices that are supported by evidence from peer-reviewed trials.
You don’t get a haircut from a barber who practices evidence-based barbering. Even the people who pay a lot of money for their haircuts don’t. Reading scientific papers just isn’t the only way to gather useful knowledge.
The term evidence-based medicine comes from a http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=400956 published in 1992.
It says:
Evidence-based medicine de-emphasizes intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiologic rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision making and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research.
I wouldn’t want someone to practice open-heart surgery on me based on his intuition but I don’t see a problem with taking a massage from someone who read no scientific papers but who let’s themselves be guided by his intuition and who has a positive track record with other patients.
Why did so much of the initial CFAR employees decide to leave the organization?
There a certain argument that I will call the glorification of self interest.
It goes like this: People who are subject to personal threats of their livelihood, tend to think about those threats and focus their mental energies on fighting those threats whenever possible. Because those people are indeed facing threats, they are they good guys which have to be defended. Anybody who isn’t centrally concerned with threats against them, is privileged and should be ashamed for being privileged.
The only way to act utilitarian and care substantially about people in some far off country is because one doesn’t have personal threats against oneself that need attention.
I don’t think that’s true. During the last US presidential election there were people who argued that Glenn Greenwald can afford to oppose Obama because of personal liberty issues and being a warmonger because Glenn Greenwald isn’t subject of a minority for whom it’s very important that Obama and not some Republican heads the White House.
At that point Glenn Greenwald lived in exile in Brazil because his homosexual partner couldn’t legally live in the US. As far as being discriminated against being forced to live in exile seems to be something serious. That still didn’t prevent social justice warriors from saying that Glenn opposed Obama because of his privilege as a middle class white American man.
But they’re racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
If you are an African American and get support from some sort of charity, then you are in danger if somebody comes and says that you shouldn’t get that support because it’s higher utility to spend that money on a charity that actually operates in Africa.
If you do the utility calculation you will stop supporting many of the programs that social justice warrorism favors.
I once had a conflict in an online community about whether an African is allowed to say in that community: “Just because some countries legalized homosexuality doesn’t mean that it isn’t still a crime.” The person lived in a country in which it was a crime. We had a split that those who were white heterosexual males favored allowing the African his free expression and a US upper-middle-class woman and homosexual male wanted to censor that person.
The kind of safety belts that US social warriors want are policies that keep the majority of the world from participating.
If you are a member of an US minority group than of course you have to fear someone who makes clear utility calculations and comes to the conclusion that resources are better directed at helping poor Africans than members of US minority groups because in contrast the fate of the poor African is simply worse.
That doesn’t mean that members of US minority groups don’t suffer to some extend. but showing that you suffer just isn’t enough. If you however suffer and don’t want to make clear utility calculations because you don’t want to weaken your tribe, then you will find it hard to fit into this community.
I don’t think the claim that the only way to do those clear utility calculations is to have no self interest and thus have privilege. I think that unfair to those people in minorities.
Participation in the project involved secrecy / privacy / information-management agreements.
How strong were those agreements? How much were the participants allowed to share privately with friends, family or outside therapists?
When it comes to solution criteria, it might be useful to have a Metaculus question. Metaculus questions have a good track record of being resolved in a fair matter.
Are there major points that MIRI considered to be true 5 years ago but doesn’t consider to be true today?
So the default on erring on the side of having some people treated/processed that did not need it rather than not processing some people that needed it seems right.
Medicine long operated by that paradigm and did all sorts of harmful treatments. Maybe the person doesn’t need bloodletting via leeches but why take the chance?
https://www.racgp.org.au/afp/2013/september/psychological-trauma is an article about the current state of the knowledge we have.
It says “Structured psychological interventions, including psychological debriefing, are not routinely recommended in the first few weeks following trauma exposure.”
Psychological debriefing is one of the things someone who thinks that the victim might need to be processed might do, but it’s not helpful.
Instead, the sense that’s helpful to communicate is:
General practitioners can be guided by five empirically derived principles in their early response: promoting a sense of safety, calming, self efficacy, connectedness and hope.
Telling people that they are likely going to need a lot of therapy to deal with their experience is the opposite of providing a sense of self-efficacy and hope.
Basically, you are telling people “you should not believe that you are self-sufficient, because you can never really know whether you are self-sufficient. Telling that meme to potentially traumatized people is the modern equivalent of bloodletting.
What was the negative side for the parents knowing about the incident?
There’s risk that the parents traumatize him over it and try to push him into the victim role.
It seems to me like you never really tried to seriously invite people to participate and write content. The fact that people had to follow Arbitals process through “whispers, rumors, and clairvoyant divination” gave the impression that it was more in a closed state than that it was inviting people to participate.
“5-year-old in a hot 20-year-old’s body.”
40ish startup founder in the rationalist sphere, because he had a close connection to Peter Thiel. At dinner the man bragged that Yudkowsky had modeled a core HPMOR professor on him.
To me, two of the stories look like they are about the same person and that person has been banned from multiple rationalist spaces without the journalist considering it important to mention that.
Harry seems to have forgotten the fact that he rescued Bellatrix from Azkaban. It one of those things he should ask about when asked for unsaid stuff between the two. Given Harry’s knowledge of wizard medicine Quirrell could simply die the next week and take all the knowledge about Bellatrix with him to his grave.
I would prefer posts like that to stand on their own in discussion and not be posted in an open thread.
You put them into a social enviroment where the high status people value logic and evidence. You give them the plausible promise that they can increase their status in that enviroment by increasing the amount that they value logic and evidence.
Given what the post said about the NDA that people signed when leaving, it seems to me like explictely releasing people from that NDA (maybe with a provision to anonymize names of other people) would be very helpful for having a productive discussion that can integrate the experiences of many people into public knowledge and create a shared understanding of what happened.