This may be an ugly-toupee issue. Even if most inkhaven-sourced posts on LW are good, it results in a very noticeable increase of low-quality, rushed, or stream-of-consciousness posts.
Elizabeth
Karma: 22,532
There’s always been jokes about how often day care kids get sick, but I feel like it didn’t used to be more sick days than healthy. I did some AI searches but they didn’t turn up good time series on this.
You don’t need to make “rite of passage”-style mistakes (e.g. drinking or taking drugs, getting into bad relationships, cramming for exams, ignoring your health, becoming a socialist[2])
Probably most kids should do less of this on the margin, but using intelligence + willpower to avoid obvious mistakes cost me the opportunity to develop wisdom, and the same mistakes are much more costly later on.
why? To inform themselves, or to boost the movie’s numbers?
I’m a small donor, so my experience with your cluster[1] has been strictly about political candidates. Within that, someone in the cluster (not you or Eric) pushed me to push someone else to donate more at the the 11th hour on the first day of fundraising. At that point they already knew fundraising had been incredibly successful and the marginal value of a donation had decreased a lot, but didn’t tell me until after I’d pushed the other person. Credit to them for telling me at all, but I would have made different choices if I’d had all the information. Maybe it’s totally unfair to tar everyone in the apparent cluster based on this person’s actions, maybe if I knew the formal relationships and had more information about you and Eric I’d see them as a crazy rogue, but with the information I have I have to expect more of the same. Which doesn’t mean I’m not donating, but does really limit the amount I’ll defer.
- ^
I’m not sure what the formal relationships are
- ^
I can’t articulate exactly what it is, but this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it’s that what you’re saying only holds if there are brakes on the system- points after which you stop advocating people give money- but my impression is that either this never happens, or things move too fast for it to have a chance to happen. Certainly the politicians aren’t saying “we have enough money, save it for the next guy”.
What effects did you have from what dose of glycine, and how quickly did they kick in?
I think for small donors, donating to the best unregistered charity is >>2x times the best registered charity, for the reasons OP outlines: registered charities are much better covered by large institutions, and lots of people are overanchored on registration so the unregistered are neglected by comparison.
The counterargument is that bednets/givedirectly are just pretty good and it’s unlikely any particular new thing beats them. Which is a fine approach, but not what we’re talking about here.
I would push back on DAFs- one of the value adds of nimble donors is donating to projects that don’t have formal status.
Daniel Ellsberg on the corrosive effect of knowing secret information
First, [you feel] a great exhilaration, for getting all these amazing information that you didn’t know even existed. And the next phase is you’ll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this. But that won’t last long. Very soon, you’ll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening too.
I’ve never had a security clearance. But I have had private or secret rationalist information, and it’s shocking how fast it corrupts my epistemics. Claiming to want comparative advantage I overweight the importance of the information. I flinch from imperiling my access to more secret information. Talking about a related area without divulging private information feels too hard so I don’t bother.
I can fight all these effects, but that’s a cost, and one I’ve learned to bill to the goal or person behind the secret information.
Because other people don’t find the question as-asked valuable.
You might like Raemon’s Feedback-Loop First rationality.
Angry ex-wives are the best IRS informants
Public criticism of people who aren’t already in the dog house is an act with concentrated costs and distributed benefits. Sometimes those costs are quite high.
As such, we should expect it to be underprovided.
Occasionally criticism will be provided by very prosocial people, or some other prosocial person will cover some of the costs.
But mostly you should expect public criticism to come from people who are being irrational. Maybe they’re generally fragile, or are angry about being dumped for their ex-husband’s secretary.
Therefore, you cannot dismiss criticisms because the person is fragile or has a grudge.
Under many circumstances- when the target is very well loved and the problem lies in a subtle pattern- the only criticism you should expect will come from people who seem kind of crazy or out to get the target.
This is hard to navigate, because those same irrationalities will drive people to make false criticisms too.
But “they’re irrational/out to get them” is a bad reason to dismiss criticism, because public criticism is an irrational act.
Depends. Are you strictly following standard of care, or personalizing for yourself?
and the alternative minimum tax… and whatever the new thing is...
without minding the effects on everyone else
seems like a job for Pigouvian taxes
datapoint: this was my exact argument for not learning to vibecode (after working as a programmer for 10 years and quitting 9 years ago). Last month was when (I noticed that) vibecoding (had) crossed the threshold where it quickly paid off the time I put into it, and that was with private tutoring from someone who’d been on the cutting edge for >1 a year.
I’m not sure if this supports your argument (because I do think any time I put into learning to vibecode before the recent transition would have been wasted) or counters (because this is the month things transitioned).
I’m working on a piece for Asterisk magazine on how biohackers (broadly defined) think about risk. Are you interested in being interviewed? Do you know someone who is? I’m taking a very broad definition of biohacker (self-medicating to save money counts), but some people I’m especially interested in talking to are those who:
biohack for its own sake- no one needs magnets in their fingernails, but you want them.
receive treatment within the standard medical system, but playing an active role in personalizing it (e.g. trans people adjusting their HRT, diabetics figuring out their insulin dosing)
strongly prefer herbal to allopathic medicine
the aforementioned driven-to-self-medication by financial constraints
people who chronic mystery illnesses
Use peptides besides GLP-1s (love you guys but GLP-1 users were by far the easiest to find)
relevant past work of mine:
pseudonymity is fine, happy to answer other questions. You can reach me by email at elizabeth@acesounderglass.com
Measles causes immune amnesia, which sets your immune system back 2-5 years. You’d need to follow people for years to know what the true cost was.
TBC I agree with you that becoming president was more complicated than win the dam, win the day. But that more complicated story is still much less complicated than I expected it to be.
I’ll keep an eye out, they’re definitionally not ones I want to retain.