Previously Kat Woods and Katherine Savoie.
KatSpartz
Karma: 2,594
“if moon-landing denial and chemtrails are both believed by an average of 15% of people, and the believers in these theories perfectly overlap, that would mean 15% believe in a deranged conspiracy theory, whereas if they’re perfectly disjoint, it would mean 30% do.”
Fair enough. But that would apply equally to each era, so wouldn’t change the results.
Good point!
Have deranged conspiracy theories actually exploded? The short answer: probably not.
Are you talking about polygamy? Or serial monogamy?
I’d be bery surprised if 85% of societies were polyamorous. Polygamy is indeed quite common, and same with serial monogamy.
Would love to read the study you’re referring to if you have a link?
I tracked my emotions for 11 years and here’s what I found out about mental health
I dunno. I tried really hard for 7 years and it didn’t work. I think that there’s decent flexibility in what can work for people if they put in enough work, but there are also limits.
To take an extreme example to illustrate it, I don’t think anybody could be happy in a relationship where their partner had tortured and killed their children, no matter how much work they put in.
How to solve homelessness: what specific laws we need, how to get it past the opposition, all without being an asshole
I totally agree that there can be a healthy amount of jealousy that makes you feel loved or is expressed because you love the person. That’s been a fun thing getting used to in monogamy. :)
But yeah, it’s a totally different level than the feeling you get when your partner is constantly falling in love with and having sex with other people. Some of the most intensely negative emotions of my life.
It’s such a different feeling that I’d almost call them totally different feelings, but I do think it’s just the intensity dialed up. Like, the difference between having a nice massage compared to being crushed to death. Both are “pressure” but one is pleasant and the other is doing genuine damage.
Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it
The x-risk case for exercise: to have the most impact, the world needs you at your best
Burnout, depression, and AI safety: some concrete mental health strategies
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve been considering doing this exact challenge and it helped me have a better sense of the pros and cons.
It’s important for people to share the successes and the failures of this sort of challenge, and of course, people disproportionately write about when it works than when it doesn’t.
ASI Already Knows About Torture—In Defense of Talking Openly About S-Risks
Quick response dashed off without sources:
Trees actually have a cluster of cells at the base of their root system that seems to act in very brain like ways. If you damage it or cut it off, suddenly the tree starts acting “dumbly”, like it’s brain damaged.
Trees actually do a ton of really complex things that certainly look like they’re communicating with other trees and plants, via signals sent along their root systems (I vaguely recall it was electrochemical signalling, much like in brains?). They stop doing such things when they get “brain damage” to their root cluster that seems to do signal coordination.
If you watch videos of vines growing but sped up, they look very much like worms, tapping around, “looking” for where they should grow. And they have a little cluster of cells at their tip that act as sensors. If you cut the sensor tip off, they stop “looking” and look like a drunk man, stumbling around blindly. It’s like you cut off their eyes.
Plants are actually able to sense a ton of different things, and they have reactions to them. It’s just that we can’t see the reactions because they either a) happen on too slowly for us to see them or b) happen chemically, so we can’t see them. For example, you know the famous study showing that when a giraffe eats a particular type of tree leaves, the tree releases a chemical that goes through the air and “warns” other trees in the area, and they start developing tannins which make their leaves bitter tasting to the giraffe? I thought that was a neat one-off trick. It’s actually super duper common across plants. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of all of the things they’re doing we can’t see with our normal senses.
They’ve done some really clever experiments to show that some plants at least, can learn and remember things.
Again, I don’t put crazy high odds. I’d probably put the odds that an oak tree is conscious at about the same probability I put on a worm being conscious.
I recommend reading The Hidden Life of Trees for an infodump about all of the crazy things trees do if you’re curious about this sort of thing.
Yeah, cow’s milk is good. I actually did say that in the post, but it was kinda hidden at the end of the bullet point of me recommending beef in general.
Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
The most common mistakes people make starting EA orgs
Fair enough. There are some for profits where profit and impact are more related than others.
But it’s also quite likely your evals are not actually evaluating anything to do with x-risks or s-risks, and so it just feels like it’s making progress, but isn’t.
I’m assuming here people are trying to prevent AI from killing everyone. If you have other goals, this doesn’t apply.
there are an extremely large number of NGOs with passionate people who do not remotely move the needle on whatever problem they are trying to solve. I think it’s the modal outcome for a new nonprofit
I’d say this is the same thing for AI for-profits from the perspective of AI notkilleveryoneism. Probably, the modal outcome is slightly increasing the odds AI kills everyone. At least the non-profits the modal outcome is not doing anything, rather than making things worse.
If it’s not even close to stat sig different (p=0.11 for pre-2010 vs now) and the data is crazy noisy.
Either way, it’s very unlikely to be an “explosion” by any metric.