I have had classes with them, asked questions. and met them personally. I should have anticipated disbelief. And yes, I didn’t notice that I categorized Marcello as non-math, sorry Marcello!
diegocaleiro
On not getting a job as an option
An alarming fact about the anti-aging community
Seize the Maximal Probability Moment
How not to be a Naïve Computationalist
Drowning In An Information Ocean
Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn’t be proportional to your awesomeness
Human Minds are Fragile
Noticing something completely absurd about yourself
Why is it rational to invest in retirement? I don’t get it.
Catching Up With the Present From the Developing World
Happiness and Productivity. Living Alone. Living with Friends. Living with Family.
Confession Thread: Mistakes as an aspiring rationalist
I’ve moved to the place in the planet where after years of deliberation, I decided suits me best (and guess what Dan Gilbert, I still think that! My prospectoscope did not fail!)… , In less than four weeks here, I 1) Solved half my income problem by finding a hack in the writing for money system and being paid aprox 200 dollars per hour of writing/re-writing, for about 5 hours per month. That is, I can pay rent with one day of work. 2) I solved the Visa problem, you don’t understand how valuable solving the Visa problem is if you are not a willing immigrant like a million people per year. 3) I got a scholarship, which can pay my life from 2015 to 2019 while giving me a prestigious PHD degree and save me loads of time to work saving the world on the side. 4) I’m living in a rationalist house with people, which was a dream of mine. I’ve met more and better some people in the rationalist community in the area, I’ve danced for 6 or more hours a week into trancendent bliss and merged with the universe.
And, to cherry top it all, I was just invited to be a TED fellow.
If life is a game, I basically won.
Tried. Don’t expect my results to be generalizable.
Once again, I have no reason to believe that same would happen to anyone.
In any case: Not many good medicines induce vomit. Most people who try it, use water, specially warm water, with mustard. This has all sorts of complications because mustard has a taste and a smell etc… nevertheless, no one in the pharmacy or wikipedia or friends who read pharmapapers had any other indication that would beat mustard water.
I wanted to stop liking chocolate. I waited for a while, so the organism would be sure it was not from lunch, and at dinner time I eat a lot of chocolate, and drank some mustard water. I kept looking at, smelling and thinking about chocolate, and would taste chocolate instantaneously after quickly swallowing the mustard water with my nose held.
It was obvious something bad was going on inside me, less than 10 seconds after the mustard. But my body is not a natural regurgitator. Long story short, I failed to even regurgitate. And now I can say that the weirdest meal I have ever had was composed of 120 grams of white chocolate, 100 grams of lindt milk chocolate, 100 grams of yellow mustard, 1,5 liter of water, and 50 grams of extra strong seedy mustard.
After that I started thinking about fighting for Monsieur Mangetout Guinness title for eating metals and glasses…
Some cool things I did this month. Lost 11 pounds in 15 days. Participated in invitees only party in Rio’s new years eve, by invitation of a billionaire. Caught up to philosophizing about existence with my best friend who lives in Brasilia now. Finished subscribing to all those snazzy PHD programs that can provide me a Visa and income at the place I want to live. Learned to deal with the other side of polyamory by feeling all those stupid, pointless, ridiculous feelings one feels when one’s partner finds happiness with someone else and our savannah minds take over—and did not give up, poly for the win! Finished a writing sample with commentary from Chalmers, Bostrom, Yetter-Chappel and others. Did more than 35 pomodoros in a row, twice. Had a good chat with Nick Beckstead and Nevin Freeman over skype, lovely decent smart gentleman working for the good of mankind, my favourite. Filled in more forms than ever before, and I’m as good at filling out forms as you are good at fishing with a spear. Oh, and I gave a friend advice he considered life saving, in the sense that he would have become a self he didn’t wish to be, had he not stuck with me to the end of my explanation. Oh, and I got 114⁄120 in the TOEFL test, which is better than 96 out of 100 test takers aprox.
In Praise of Tribes that Pretend to Try: Counter-”Critique of Effective Altruism”
Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction
Usually I brag about the great things. This time, I’ll brag about the small daily things.
I’ve spent time every day remembering how cool and nice is the place where I’m living, observing the view, the neighbours and of course, the Spa. I’ve send thank you notes to two of the world’s foremost primatologists. I’ve made a girl laugh uninterruptedly for the entire extension of a game in which Brazil lost to Holland. And she made me. I hauled a couch for a friend into his apartment. I sponsored the caffeine industry a lot. Told three people how beautiful their hair was. Entertained a young couple passing by SF for an afternoon for no particular reason, only to discover they were high, and would have been equally entertained by a goose or a mosquito for that matter.
Decisions aren’t physical.
The above statement is at least hard to defend. Your decisions are physical and occur inside of you… So these two-boxers are using the wrong model amongst these two (see the drawings....) http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/
If you are a part of physics, so is your decision, so it must account for the correlation between your thought processes and the superintelligence. Once it accounts for that, you decide to one box, because you understood the entanglement of the computation done by omega and the physical process going inside your skull.
If the entanglement is there, you are not looking at it from the outside, you are inside the process.
Our minds have this quirk that makes us think there are two moments, you decide, and then you cheat, you get to decide again. But if you are only allowed to decide once, which is the case, you are rational by one-boxing.