David Gross

Karma: 2,251

David Gross 7 Sep 2026 13:25 UTC
3 points
1
on: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) introduce legislation to ban Artificial Superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development
The idea that you can reliably make something better by giving the U.S. federal executive branch more authority over it is an idea that has been reductus ad absurdum so thoroughly by now that I’m surprised it is still taken so seriously here.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that we need a pause in AI capabilities development, etc. but the theory that the path toward doing this effectively and well runs primarily through the White House doesn’t seem to me to pass the laugh test.

David Gross 1 Sep 2026 14:11 UTC
12 points
4
on: How to solve homelessness: what specific laws we need, how to get it past the opposition, all without being an asshole
Thanks for this. It seems very specific to San Francisco in parts. I live in a more rural California county, but one where homelessness is also a big problem and is also driven by housing shortages and housing prices. Based on my observations, I would add another factor to your list: The criminalization of low-quality housing.
Low-quality housing includes homes that are in poor condition, or that lack certain amenities or improvements, or that have many residents per room. Local governments may mandate that all homes conform to certain appearance standards, have certain quality minimums, are rented with certain amenities included, have a minimum number of rooms per inhabitant, or are brought up to certain carbon-neutral standards. Such laws increase the price of the lowest rung on the ladder out of homelessness.
It’s hard to argue against these laws, because people see the alternative as poor people having to live in crappy housing. (And tolerating e.g. slums/slumlords.) Unfortunately, the alternative to poor people living in crappy housing is poor people living in cardboard boxes under bridges, and that’s somehow harder to impress on people.
If you regulate low-quality housing out of existence, then the pathway of [homeless ⇒ low-quality housing ⇒ satisfactory housing] becomes [homeless ⇒ still homeless ⇒ chronically homeless].
The governments in my area typically try to patch this up by trying to create a stock of satisfactory housing that is government-subsidized or set aside for people in supportive housing programs. This “works” to some extent (you can point to real homeless people who are getting real homes they can sorta afford). But it is a very expensive, Rube Goldbergish way to go about it, and is insufficient to keep up with demand.

David Gross 2 Aug 2026 14:17 UTC
4 points
0
on: Chill Buddhism
Away with you, you Slack-substitute salesman! You mail-order mystic! You $2.98 Dobbs! I have SEEN your Slack and it is THIN—thin as Normal coffee, thin as the smile on a job interviewer, thin as the alibi you gave your wife! You did not steal Slack from the Conspiracy; you BORROWED it, and you gave it BACK, with interest, and you thanked them for the loan!
Real Slack is not “chill.” Real Slack is not “self-care.” Real Slack is not a WEEKEND. Real Slack is what “Bob” takes off the top before the Xists even land, and you would not recognize it if it backed over you in a Chevrolet!
Begone, Pink zafu-denter! Go peddle your dilute salvation to the Short Duration Marks who buy it! And when the Rupture comes and the saucers sort the Slackful from the merely comfortable, do not come crying to Dobbstown. You’ll pay to know what you really think.

David Gross 29 May 2026 1:57 UTC
10 points
1
on: David Gross’s Shortform
If you enjoyed my “Philosophers Wrestling with Evil as a Social Media Feed” post, I used this same basic conceit this month to create H.D. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience as a social media feed.
It presents the text of Civil Disobedience in a feed-like format, interspersed with comments from various people who have praised and critiqued the work over the years, or have used it as a launching point for their own ideas; as well as from Thoreau himself in his later works, elaborating on some of the same ideas. From time to time WikiBot and BibleBot chime in to explain references to possibly obscure things and references.

David Gross 29 May 2026 1:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: Philosophers wrestling with evil, as a social media feed
FWIW I used this same basic conceit this month to create H.D. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” as a social media feed.

David Gross 26 May 2026 4:39 UTC
8 points
1
on: Basic principles for dressing better.
I also notice that all of your examples are modeled by thin, young men. Some examples that are suitable for less-thin, less-young men might broaden the appeal of your advice.

David Gross 25 May 2026 14:42 UTC
5 points
2
on: Basic principles for dressing better.
A year or two ago I went on a vacation that took me to Italy, and I felt very underdressed in my what-fits-in-a-carryon clothes. What I noticed when I was there was that somehow the Italian men just knew how to wear clothes well.
I’m not someone who is very interested in fashion or who spends much mental energy on what I or other people are wearing (where I live, a frumpy middle-aged guy like me can beat the curve just by remembering to change out of his jammies), but I stopped what I was doing and watched passers-by as though it were a fashion show. I was impressed and interested and wanted to learn. I didn’t see much that was particularly flashy (though sometimes unexpected and bold color combinations) or that shouted out “expensive designer accessories and $150 shirts.”
FWIW, they almost all wore skinny-leg pants.

David Gross 19 May 2026 1:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Review: G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”
Mr. Hume has entered the chat. ;-)

David Gross 18 May 2026 23:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Zmavli Caimle’s comment on: Jhana Quick Start Guide
Did you feel or see brightness or lights even while your eyes were closed (I’m assuming they were)? That is a common sign of piti.
It was mostly a visceral/tactile experience, but there was something subtle accompanying it visually, along the lines of hypnagogic imagery or synesthesia or visualization/imagination. The visual part wasn’t dramatic or central to the experience.
As far as what sort of visceral it was… I usually see piti described as tingly, sparky, that sort of thing. What I experienced was much more liquid: more like sloshing around in a bath of sensation than being peppered by fireworks.
It also wasn’t very “insightful” the way I had been primed to expect. I think I was supposed to interpret what was happening as being obviously indicative of the ceaseless arising and passing away of all phenomena or some such, but to me it seemed to be mostly a curious altered state of consciousness of no great relevance to my day-to-day understanding of how the world operates or how I ought to interpret my sense experience. More of a “woah, that was trippy” than an “aha, I get it now” sort of experience. It was not emotionally tinged except in the sense that I get a certain charge out of the curious and novel, and this was strikingly more curious and novel than the Goenka nostril-gazing I’d been engaged in for the previous several days.

David Gross 18 May 2026 14:48 UTC
3 points
0
on: Jhana Quick Start Guide
I did a Goenka retreat that featured a few days of extended sits using a body-scan technique that is more or less as you describe here. On a couple of occasions I experienced a strange altered state of consciousness in which my body boundaries seemed to dissolve and waves of sensation washed over me from all directions. It was curious, but I would not describe it as “rapture” or “bliss” or any of that. It seemed to match something the instructors there were calling bhanga ñana (ñana is perhaps just “jhana” in another dialect?).
I’m wondering why you think I could have engaged in so many hours of body-scan-style meditation, sufficient to evoke such an altered state of consciousness, and yet I never came across these particularly-pleasurable or positive-emotion-charged states that you mention?
Perhaps the Goenka focus on “equanimity” blunts these? Another option might be more mundane hypnotic suggestion: the Goenka instructors primed us for a particular altered state of consciousness, so that is what appeared; if they’d primed us for bliss and rapture we may have interpreted our experiences as blissful and rapturous.

David Gross 22 Apr 2026 22:45 UTC
27 points
7
on: Why no new notations since 1960?
- emojis
- UML
- certain ubiquitous GUI conventions (☰ for a menu, > and ˅ for collapsable sections, the “home” icon, the “save” icon, escalating vertical bars for signal strength, %-complete bars, etc.)

David Gross 4 Apr 2026 14:25 UTC
7 points
4
on: “Following the incentives”
Things that have more “incentive-y” vibes are those that are more associated with selfishness and vices like greed. Money: incentive!! Admiration of your peers: incentive???
Another word for “incentive” that can be used in this context is “temptation.” It can be revealing to reread economistspeak policy recommendations after applying a mental search-and-replace along these lines.

David Gross 1 Apr 2026 14:00 UTC
4 points
0
on: Lesswrong Liberated
LESSWRONG GUILTIED TO A ZEGNATRONIC ROCKET SOCIETY
SF Bay Area types may enjoy the reference. If you don’t get it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Chu

David Gross 19 Feb 2026 4:38 UTC
3 points
0
on: Emotional Dispersion and Patience
I think most people find abnormal or weird (like my tendency for them to affect me physically)
I was under the impression that emotions affecting people physically is considered very normal and ordinary: anger making the blood rush to your head, fear making you quake or your hair stand on end, shame making you blush, etc. All of those things I consider to be part of the standard vocabulary of emotions such that if I describe someone as <having stereotypical physical reaction> to <associated emotion> I assume the person I’m describing it to will get it most of the time. Indeed, it’s hard for me to distinguish an “emotion” from, say, an “assessment” without there being something akin to physical symptoms going on.

David Gross 28 Jan 2026 20:16 UTC
2 points
0
on: Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses.
FWIW, I asked Claude for its opinion today. It thought that new communication media/dynamics (A7, B14, B15 along with B8 & B9) were likely to blame, and that survivorship bias (A12) probably also plays a role.
Claude also suggested I add “The collapse of shared epistemic authorities” as another hypothesis, similar to but distinct from B15: “It’s not just that gatekeepers died; it’s that there’s no longer any institution or process that a broad majority accepts as capable of settling factual questions. When people disagree about facts, there’s no court of appeal. This makes all disagreement look like stupidity from the other side’s perspective, because there’s no shared standard by which to adjudicate it.”

David Gross 25 Jan 2026 22:37 UTC
5 points
1
on: Are There Effective Interventions to Increase Distress Tolerance?
Some of what you’re after might be found under the headings of endurance, good temper, balance, patience, forbearance, and gracefulness.

David Gross 11 Jan 2026 18:59 UTC
2 points
0
on: 5 Considerations for Personal Donations
The meat-eater problem...
...probably should be defined somewhere in this text, or a link should be provided to a glossary definition.

David Gross 27 Dec 2025 16:11 UTC
7 points
3
on: Wanted: Advice for College Students on Weathering the Storm
I’d recommend putting some effort into strengthening the virtues, as these have a good track record over time, are flexible across many situations, and have application in multiple areas of life. Specific skills (like e.g. “learn to code”) are more brittle in times of rapid change and less broadly-applicable. The virtues are also remarkably neglected in our society at the moment, which means that by developing them in yourself you can differentiate yourself from the crowd. They are also a way to be more self-sufficient in governing your life satisfaction: less dependent on unstable and stormy societal structures and unreliable external goods.

David Gross 7 Dec 2025 14:22 UTC
48 points
20
on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
“How are you coping with the end of the world?” journalists sometimes ask me… The journalist is imagining a story that is about me, and about whether or not I am going insane...
Seems too cynical. I can imagine myself as a journalist asking you that question not because I’m hoping to write a throw-away cliche of an article, but because if I take seriously what you’re saying about AGI risk, you’re on the cutting edge of coping with that, and the rest of us will have to cope with that eventually, and we might have an easier time of it if we can learn from your path.

David Gross 18 Nov 2025 0:37 UTC
11 points
5
on: No One Reads the Original Work
This would be more powerful with some examples, e.g. “we’ve all learned that Lamarck thought species evolved by passing on acquired traits, but Darwin told us that species can’t evolve that way but do so through selection on preinherited traits; but here’s a quote from Origin of Species in which Darwin explicitly endorses Lamarckian evolution.” Repeat for Kuhn, Kant, etc.