I took the survey.
I realized while answering one of the questions that the comments that I make for free karma are one of my main interactions with the LW website.
DeevGrape
Karma: 364
In addition to the ~$15,000 I’ve donated so far this drive, I’m matching the next 5 donations of (exactly) $1001 this fundraiser. It’s unlikely I’ll donate this money anytime soon without the matching, so I’m hoping my decision is counterfactual enough for the donation-matching skeptics out there :)
To the stars!
Just donated $500 (with the Singularity credit card, so it’s really more like $505 ^_^).
This extremely generous matching offer came at a fortuitous time for me, since I just succeeded at my master plan of becoming an effective altruist in Silicon Valley and doing earn-to-give for MIRI. $10,000 from me as well.
Or, depending on how the interrogation went, ScrimQuirMort.
I’ve been lurking on here for a long time, and just now registered to get a free karma point for taking the survey.
Bayesianism and use of Evidence in Social Deduction Games
Goodhart’s law seems very applicable to natural selection: the Blind Idiot God wants creatures to have higher fitness (G), and so creates targets that are correlated with fitness in the ancestral habitat (e.g., pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance (G*)). Once you get creatures that are self-aware (us), they figure out G-star, and start optimizing for that instead of G.
I definitely teared up reading this. It really makes me desire local rationalist friends to share this real and moving idea with.
Having read only a portion of the book so far (thanks for the pdf cousin_it and Alicorn!), I’ve noticed that the techniques and strategies Schelling goes over are applicable to my struggles with akrasia.
I’m sure it’s been said before on lesswrong that when there’s a conflict between immediate and delayed gratification, you can think of yourself as two agents: one rational, one emotional; one thinking in the present, one able to plan future moves and regret mistakes. These agents are obviously having a conflict, and I often find Rational Me (RM) losing ground to Irrational Me (IM) in situations that this book describes perfectly.
Say RM wants to work, and IM wants to watch TV online. If RM settles on “some” TV, IM can exploit the vagueness and non-natural settling point, and watch an entire season of a show. The two most stable negotiating points seem to be “no TV” and “unlimited amounts of TV”.
Other techniques people use to avoid akrasia map really well with Schelling’s conflict strategies, like breaking up commitments into small chunks (“fifteen minutes of work, then I can have a small reward”) and forming a commitment with a third party to force your hand (like using stickk.com or working with friends or classmates).
Hello, fellow minicampers, this is Ethan! Hello to everyone else too :)
Monday night a few of us went blues dancing, and rather than being all awkward like I’ve done in the past, I used Critch’s smile association method and ended up really enjoying myself!
And I spent the 14-16 hour drive from San Francisco back to Tucson with excellent posture (based on Luke and Cat’s recommendation that it made me look fantastic), smiling and thinking something like “Yeah, I’m a badass,” every time I thought of my posture to make a positive association with posture and with self-modification.
Just started using remember the milk, and I made a list of priorities / medium and short term goals using freemind.
My changes in fashion have been wildly successful. Hanging out with two separate friend groups the week after mini-camp, I was complimented repeatedly on how snazzy my new look was and how I was suddenly fashionable. They asked what happened and I said “I went to San Francisco!”
Even better evidence: I went to a bar with a friend last week, wearing a blazer, black slacks, nice shoes, and a decent T-shirt. We got stopped by the bouncer, and he said they had a strict dress code: no athletic shorts, no plain white t-shirts, etc. (basically my friend’s entire outfit). He said “This guy’s dressed to the core, and you’re violating the whole dress code!”
I’m maintaining my habit of studying Calculus on my own using Khan Academy videos, and have a no-money graph up on Beeminder. I’ve logged about 20 hours, in addition to Precalc videos (so probably over 25 hours), and with no calculus training prior to two weeks ago, I got a 53⁄100 on a Calc 1 final exam. So, not perfect yet, but certainly astonishing progress in my mind.
This week I went into a complete slump triggered by a hangover on Monday and a difficult piece of schoolwork with a flexible due date (creating a syllabus). I’m still procrastinating on creating the syllabus.
Thanks very much for writing and posting this.
The moral tension of what Celestia was doing was well done. I found myself getting excited at how awesome everything was, and then muttering aloud about the “creeping horror” that was coming. I also loved the parallels to the AI-boxing experiments, except the Princess can argue people into boxing themselves.
Thanks very much for writing this! In lieu of anything specifically useful, I leave you with a small proportion of the warm fuzzies you provided to me :)
This article had a big impact on me! I had never even considered the idea that mono vs. poly was a setting you could change, and I discovered that I didn’t have nearly as much of an attachment to monogamy as I had thought.
One problem I’m having is getting started with polyamory in practice. I’m worried that adding another constraint on top of other requirements (i.e. women interested in men, around my age, in Tucson, looking for a romantic relationship, who are rational) will make it hard or impossible to find someone. Any tips?
I require a lower standard of living than most people with middle class incomes, so I don’t anticipate a problem in making my donation goals.
Author, ladies and gentlemen of the comments: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/
Awesome! I’m an appacademy grad and I definitely wanna make it. I may also be able to bring 1-4 people from my AppAcademy Dungeons and Dragons group :D
Said by Quirrell, but appropriate to the question of EY publishing the name of the hero: “it is clear he does not wish the fact announced, and has reasons enough for silence. ”
Eliezer posted a Facebook status about the fundraiser needing more support, so I was going to donate $1000… but then I saw I would get a PrettyRational print if I donated $1500, so here we are :)