ioannes

Karma: 891

ioannes 19 Oct 2021 17:07 UTC
32 points
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Big +1.

Really important to disambiguate the two:

”People shouldn’t do psychedelics” is highly debatable and has to argue against a lot of research demonstrating their efficacy for improving mental wellness and treating psychiatric disorders.

”Leaders & subgroups shouldn’t push psychedelics on their followers” seems straightforwardly correct.

ioannes 19 Oct 2021 18:00 UTC
23 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Illegal drugs are, on average, very bad. How about a policy that if you use illegal drugs you are presumptively considered not yet good enough to be in the community?
The risk profile of a drug isn’t correlated with its legal status, largely because our current drug laws were created for political purposes in the 1970s. A quote from Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
A 2010 analysis concluded that psychedelics are causing far less harm than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. (Psychedelics still carry substantial risks, aren’t for everybody, and should always be handled with care.)

ioannes 19 Oct 2021 17:14 UTC
23 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)

Jim Babcock’s stance here is the most sensible one I’ve seen in this thread:

My own impression is that the effect of LSD is not primarily a regression to the mean thing, but rather, that it temporarily enables some self-modification capabilities, which can be powerfully positive but which require a high degree of sanity and care to operate safely.

...

Meanwhile nearly everyone has been exposed to extremely unsubtle and substantially false anti-drug propaganda, which fails to survive contact with reality. So it’s unfortunate but also unsurprising that the how-much-caution pendulum in their heads winds up swinging too far to the other side. The ideal messaging imo would leave most people feeling like planning an acid trip is more work than they personally will get around to, plus mild disdain towards impulsive usage and corner-cutting.
What links here?
- ioannes's comment on My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage) by jessicata (25 Oct 2021 22:31 UTC; 4 points)

ioannes 14 Dec 2019 1:19 UTC
19 points
on: [Link] High-performance government (Dominic Cummings)
Reflecting on this more, I’m realizing that the most important strategist of the current UK government is a straight-up rationalist (e.g. his post on AGI safety (a)).
Wild.
What links here?
- Dominic Cummings: “we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos” by ESRogs (3 Jan 2020 0:33 UTC; 80 points)

ioannes 24 Nov 2019 17:29 UTC
18 points
on: RAISE post-mortem
When I declared RAISE, I knew maybe 20 rationalists in the Netherlands. I was a Bachelor’s student coming out of nowhere. I had maybe 10-15 hours per week to spend on this. I had no dedicated co-founders. I had no connections to funders. I didn’t have much of a technical understanding of AI Safety. Coming from this perspective, the project was downright quixotic...

Given this, why do you think the project felt like a good idea at the time?

ioannes 16 Oct 2019 15:28 UTC
17 points
on: Introducing Foretold.io: A New Open-Source Prediction Registry
Nice!
What are the main ways by which Foretold.io is differentiated from Metaculus?

ioannes 19 Oct 2021 18:40 UTC
16 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
Consequently, psychedelics can be horrible and still not as bad as alcohol and tobacco.
They could be, but current evidence shows that psychedelic-assisted therapy is efficacious for PTSD, depression, end-of-life anxiety, smoking cessation, and probably alcoholism.
Psychedelic experiences have been rated as extremely meaningful by healthy volunteers [1, 2], and psychedelic use is associated with decreased psychological distress and suicidality in population surveys.
What links here?
- ioannes's comment on My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage) by jessicata (25 Oct 2021 22:27 UTC; 1 point)

ioannes 9 Oct 2020 21:42 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: The rationalist community’s location problem
I actually feel like East Bay (Oakland and every place north of Oakland) is really pleasant:
- Cost of living isn’t terrible except for rent, and it’s still possible to find good deals on rent, e.g. I’ve lived in North Oakland for 6 years and have only paid more than $1,000/month for one of those years (granted for the rest of the time I’ve been living in group houses or with a partner)
- East Bay parks are amazing
- Minimal social decay except for downtown Berkeley and parts of Oakland
- Wonderful weather for ~10 months of the year (every season except for fire season)
- Lots of interesting + diverse people, intellectual communities, and social life
What am I missing?

ioannes 24 Oct 2019 19:39 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Bendini’s comment on: Make more land
cf. Inadequate Equilibria

ioannes 2 Sep 2018 18:26 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Quentin Crain’s comment on: On memetic weapons
(updated after serious down-votes)
For what it’s worth, I’m sad that you’re getting down-voted so much.
I’m reading you as engaging in good faith from a different starting viewpoint, and I’d like to see more of that kind of thing :-)

ioannes 29 Jun 2018 3:05 UTC
14 points
on: Last Chance to Fund the Berkeley REACH
Just pledged $10/month. I’m not sure I’ll ever use REACH but I want to see projects like this succeed.

ioannes 19 Oct 2021 17:24 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
It’s interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.

I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren’t for everyone. (This variability probably isn’t fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)

ioannes 2 Jan 2020 22:17 UTC
13 points
on: [Link] High-performance government (Dominic Cummings)
Hot off the presses: https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/ (a)
What links here?
- Dominic Cummings: “we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos” by ESRogs (3 Jan 2020 0:33 UTC; 80 points)

ioannes 16 Dec 2019 14:55 UTC
13 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Approval Extraction Advertised as Production
See also SSC’s Against Lie Inflation

ioannes 25 Jul 2019 23:55 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: Ought: why it matters and ways to help
(I’m helping Ought hire for the web dev role.)
Ought is based in SF (office in North Beach).
Ideally we’d find someone who could work out of the SF office, but we’re open to considering remote arrangements. One of our full-time researchers is based remotely and periodically visits the SF office to co-work.

ioannes 19 Jan 2019 4:26 UTC
13 points
in reply to: ErickBall’s comment on: Some Thoughts on My Psychiatry Practice
Just some quick thoughts:
- Housemates and other group-living arrangements can make living in cities affordable
- Pets are expensive (though probably worth it for lots of people)
- Flights are expensive (though deals can be had)
- Car ownership is expensive
- The internet can provision almost all media at high quality, low inconvenience, minimal risk, for free

ioannes 27 Sep 2020 18:01 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What a 20-year-lead in military tech might look like
For example, Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions of what 2009 would look like were mostly wrong, but if instead you pretend they are predictions about 2019 they are almost entirely correct.
This isn’t right.
See Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results – “So, did more time allow for more perspective or more ways to go wrong? Well, Kurzweil’s predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong”

ioannes 1 Apr 2019 15:47 UTC
10 points
in reply to: ioannes’s comment on: The Case for The EA Hotel
Also Vipul’s donation report is interesting + helpful.

ioannes 30 Mar 2019 17:03 UTC
10 points
on: List of Q&A Assumptions and Uncertainties [LW2.0 internal document]
Curious how LessWrong sees its Q&A function slotting in amongst Quora, Stack Exchange, Twitter, etc.
(There are a lot of question-answering platforms currently extant; I’m not clear on the business case for another one.)
What links here?
- LW2.0: Technology Platform for Intellectual Progress by Ruby (19 Jun 2019 20:25 UTC; 31 points)
- Ruby's comment on Data Analysis of LW: Activity Levels + Age Distribution of User Accounts by Ruby (15 May 2019 4:39 UTC; 6 points)

ioannes 6 Sep 2018 16:01 UTC
10 points
on: Great Founder Theory
The creation of functional institutions is the means by which people are hugely impactful.
Curious what you think of hugely impactful people who didn’t create institutions:
- Gautama Buddha
- Socrates
- Jesus
- ...
- Gauss
- Wittgenstein
- Gödel
It seems like the catalyst for impactful change often comes from a person who is at best indifferent to institution-building.
Maybe you’re arguing that the bulk of the impact should be attributed to the institution-builders who followed? (the Sangha, Plato, Paul...)