No-Bullshit Optimization/Risk Reduction, Life Extension, EA, Rationality, Startups, Film, MMA. Larry David is my spirit animal.
Read my posts or connect with me: https://www.johncgreer.com/
No-Bullshit Optimization/Risk Reduction, Life Extension, EA, Rationality, Startups, Film, MMA. Larry David is my spirit animal.
Read my posts or connect with me: https://www.johncgreer.com/
Nice to see other people interested in the topic!
Robert McIntyre, the CEO of Nectome, the brain preservation startup, is probably the person who knows the most about this space.
For those interested, I did a writeup on a talk Robert gave that summarizes his thoughts and process here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N7j4xHkyjKbimmF6A/notes-on-robert-mcintyre-s-brain-preservation-talk-at-the-1
And I interviewed him here:
The qualia of enjoyment or not is different for different people. I don’t have the gleeful anticipation of an upcoming twist. My main reason for avoiding spoilers is it ruins the feeling of suspense.
This also applies to sporting events as well. If I’m watching a fight where I know the outcome, it’s much less enjoyable than if I don’t know it. If I know someone wins, I’m not on edge when they’re getting punched and kicked by their opponent like I would be if I thought those blows may decide the fight.
Hello!
I’ve lived in Berkeley for about six years. My girlfriend is going to medical school so we’re going to be moving to Boca Raton, Florida (most likely) or Columbus, Ohio in less than a month. I’m sad to be leaving the Bay Area but thrilled to be with my girlfriend when she starts such an exciting chapter of her life. I’m also very fortunate that I can handle nearly all my business online.
I co-founded a startup devoted to making a web game with an old buddy of mine. This same guy introduced me to LW.
Critical thinking and debate has been a focus of mine since I was quite young so LW fit right into my interests. I’m very interested in instrumental/practical applications of rationality. I’ve been lurking for many years and finally decided to make an account to get over my fear of online embarrassment given my unfamiliarity with a lot of the lexicon and protocol on LW.
Some passions of mine are movies, seeking out novel experiences (examples are shooting an AK-47, judging a singing competition, and visiting Pixar), and martial arts.
I’m also interested in effective altruism and AI research but still have a lot of learning to do, especially in the latter.
It seems implementing systems that prevent hijacking of planes is easier with how airports and plane travel work vs how much would need to change to stop vehicles being used in attacks. Seems similar to the debate over whether the Slaughterbots video and campaign to stop autonomous weapons will be successful. The supporters use nuclear weapons policy as the success story but it may not be the most useful comparison because nuclear weapons are much easier technology to restrict.
I hope Aubrey de Grey negotiated the moral trade with the mathematicians successfully, and now that he solved one of their most beloved problems, they will start working on solving aging.
Haha, this would be wonderful. Let’s get Terence Tao on the aging problem!
I periodically do things to get out of my comfort zone. I started years ago before a friend introduced me to LW where I pleasantly discovered that CoZE was recommended.
This write-up is about my most recent exercise: Do a Non Gender-Conforming Thing
I chose to have my nails painted. Having painted nails requires low enough effort that I have no excuse not to and, wearing them out in public is just out-of-the-ordinary enough to make me worry about how people will react. After getting them painted, I realized why girls say “My nails!” a lot after a manicure and worry about screwing them up. It took work to paint them and chipping them makes them look like shit. Can’t let that happen to me!
Then I challenged some friends to do it and gave these suggestions:
I think breaking arbitrary societal conventions and expanding comfort zones are positive things so I’m challenging a few people to try it and post a picture or video. Bonus points for a write-up of how you felt while doing it and any reactions from observers.
(Those who live in Berkeley are playing on easy mode.)
(People challenged may totally already do these! The list was limited to my imagination and ideas I could find. The idea is to get out of your comfort zone so feel free to get creative...)
Exercises I came up with:
Ideas for men:
Get a manicure/pedicure (it’s basically a massage)
Wear (traditionally feminine) jewelry
Carry a purse
Play a “girly” pop song loud enough for others to hear
Order a fruity alcoholic beverage
Get your nails painted
Wear a feminine outfit (or at least a pink shirt or something)
Read/ask about fashion or some other traditionally feminine topic
Ideas for women:
Wear a masculine outfit. (I feel like women have to try a bit harder than guys here)
Don’t shave your legs for a week
Don’t shave your armpits for a week
Wear a tie
Give a guy a compliment
Ask a guy on a date
Don’t wear makeup for a week
Don’t wear a bra for a week
Read/ask about sports or some other traditionally masculine topic
My thoughts so far: It’s still weird for me to see my own hands. It takes me a second to recognize them as my own. “And how pretty they are!”
I’m already hypervigilant in public but we were in public in a new area and I was more hypervigilant than normal. I had to fight the urge to keep hiding my fingernails in the grocery store. I was worried that our hosts at the Airbnb we’re staying at would be weird about it...
Now I’m caught between not wanting people to see my nails at all and not wanting to see them all chipped (it’s hard taking proper care of them!). I’m conscious of my dad seeing this. I do weird enough things that my model of people in my tribe reacting is “John doing another thing...”
I need to get rid of them before we visit our friend’s parents so that way I don’t make a weird first impression. A lot of the discomfort has more to do with being misperceived or miscategorized. For instance, one time after getting my haircut, my shirts was covered with hair, so my friend lent me her Pink Floyd T-shirt to wear. I wasn’t defying social norms by wearing a Pink Floyd shirt, but that was not the kind of thing I would usually wear so I felt extra-aware of the potential for being perceived a certain way based on how I was dressed. Likewise, if I smoke a clove cigarette or cigar, which I do once every six months with a certain friend, I would be horrified to be falsely labeled a regular smoker.
I’ll have to try this again when I’m in public more frequently to give it a fair shake.
Meta-Communication: I’m also getting out of my comfort zone because I’m not sure this is the right place for this type of post or if these kinds of posts are welcome.
Cross-Posted and editing from my Facebook. Feel free to follow me there!
I find that trivial inconveniences become less powerful the more I go through the routine of overcoming them. For example, I delete apps and re-install them and am now used to the process so while it still helps it’s become less of an inconvenience now that I’m acclimatized to the process. It seems good to try to reduce/get acclimated to trivial inconveniences that stop us from doing useful things and try to increase them for non-optimal things (and also beware starting a routine of getting used to them).
The mailbox thing is a really interesting idea (provided it doesn’t get messed up by the postal worker trying to fit a package in there and dropping it)!
Your mom and you might be interested in this as well if you didn’t know about it: https://www.thekitchensafe.com/
If I were Tom Clancy I hope that I would not have published Debt of Honor. I don’t know whether terrorists were inspired by it, but at least for me it’s pretty clearly in the “not worth the risk” category.
I get the argument but then I’m wondering where it stops? Don’t direct A Clockwork Orange because there’s a high likelihood that copycat murders will happen? Stop production on all things where someone might copy something harmful?
This was a fun read! Thanks for writing it!
No flashing neon text? A bit disappointing but happy to see refreshing innovation from the rationality community...
The link you provided isn’t working. Here is the article: http://www.lifehack.org/330221/6-science-based-hacks-for-growing-mentally-stronger
Thanks for writing this out!
I think most writing glosses over this point because it’d be hard to know exactly how it would kill us and doesn’t matter, but it hurts the persuasiveness of discussion to not have more detailed and gamed out scenarios.
Thanks for sharing this! It’s inspiring to dig up old posts where people talk about their goals and to see how well it worked out.
Mike Johnson’s article might interest you! https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/
“Conceptual gerrymandering” is a very useful concept. Thanks for writing the post.
For people interested in nuclear war history, the 2003 documentary The Fog of War is wonderful. Alex Wellerstein’s blog is also great: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconception/
This also reminds me of how companies may benefit like Buffer’s commitment to transparency: https://open.buffer.com/transparency-timeline/
Unfortunately, with an entity like the US government and military it seems like a hard inadequate equilibria to overcome even if certain actors knew better communication was more effective overall. It seems like coming up with the optimal organizations of groups (branches of the military, intelligence services, government entities) or lack thereof and the hierarchy and responsibilities within and between them is one of the major blockages.
Edit: I found an interesting prescriptive article of potential ways to overcome the problems I discussed: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/03/18/conversation-with-a-super-spook/
Backup your stuff: My backup process is to scan or take pictures of items. Put files on an external hard drive. Backup that external drive to another external hard drive. Then I backup up everything to the cloud through Backblaze. That way you have the physical items themselves, the items on hard drive1 that you take with you, the items on hard drive2 that you store somewhere, AND everything is on the cloud. It may seem excessive but it’s easy once you have everything set up. There are more risk mitigation tips in my post on my experiences prepping for a hurricane for those interested.
Thanks for the in-depth response, Vaniver! I don’t have a good grasp on these issues so it helps reading others’ analyses.
Has there been any response to Brett Hall’s critique of Bostrom’s Superintelligence? What do y’all think? http://www.bretthall.org/superintelligence.html
This reminds me of my favorite TV show Survivor. There are a number of reasons why it’s great, but one aspect that is so fun to watch is seeing someone come up with a new strategy or tactic and then seeing how it immediately gets adopted in the later seasons. One of the most intellectual players, Yau-Man Chan, had the idea to create a fake immunity idol. Now it is standard to save pieces from things to try to make one. Russell Hantz started looking for hidden idols before clues to them were even found. That’s become standard too and new strategies and counter-strategies keep being invented and you can see how fast memes take off in the show. From sanitation to eating Tide Pods, memes are powerful.