Horseshoe theory in action: the most and least woo people in the world might make a post with this title.
JustisMills
Karma: 1,903
One thing is, babies very gradually get harder in exactly the way you describe! Like, at first by default they breastfeed, and don’t have teeth, which is at the very least highly instinctive to learn. Then they eat a tiiiny bit of solid food, like a bite or two once a day, to train you. So you have gotten way stronger at “baby eating challenges” by the time the baby can e.g. throw food. Likewise they’ll very rarely try to put stuff in their mouths early on, then really gradually more and more, so you hone that instinct too. Even diapers don’t smell bad the first couple of months! Hard to overestimate the effects of the extremely instinct compliant learning curve.
Sure, some of those. But also I just expected parenthood to change me a bunch to be better suited to it. Like, it’s a challenge such that rising to it transforms you. With babysitting you’re just skipping to a random bit pretty far into the process, not already having been transformed.
As a data point I was extremely confident I wanted kids, and didn’t especially vibe with most babies/never had changed a diaper before my kid was born, and my confident prediction, so far, was if anything an underestimate. I doubt a week of babysitting would have changed my intent whatsoever, but it would probably have been stressful and not that fun.
As an audience member, I often passively judge people for responding to criticism intensely or angrily, or judge both parties in a long and bitter back and forth, and basically never judge anyone for not responding.
When I’ve responded to criticism with “oh, thanks, hadn’t thought of that”, I haven’t really felt disapproved of or diminished. Sometimes the critic is just right, and sometimes they just are looking at the topic from another angle and it’s fine for readers to decide whether they like it better than mine. No big deal. I don’t really see evidence that anyone’s tracking my status that hard. I’d rather make sure nobody’s tracking me being unkind though, including myself.
(This comment is offered up as a data point from the peanut gallery. I have no idea if it’s representative! If you reply, it may make me happy, but if not I won’t mind.)
It’s grown on me as I’ve edited more technical stuff; growing up in the US literary tradition it always seemed elegant to put punctuation inside, though now that I read more stuff like LessWrong it does feel kinda imprecise/hand-wavey somehow. Like, wait a minute, that guy you’re quoting didn’t put a comma in there!
Yeah, I messed around with Typst for the first time recently. There’s a whole dang world out there!
Yeah, for me it solves itself instantly once I actually notice it in any given case. I mostly try not to think of myself as an expert at stuff (luckily for that, I rarely am!), but there are weird psychological incentives with being a professional at stuff, I think.
A Pitfall of “Expertise”
Having kids is a huge part of it for me. Came by it but absorbing a philosophy where it mattered a lot from my parents, which I liked and accepted; I’ve always aspired to be pretty similar to them. Now I’ve got a baby and yep, as I hoped or better.
I value many other things too, which have been pretty stable since high school. Helping the global poor somewhat, creating art, having friends, eventually getting married and being a good spouse, and some idiosyncratic imagination stuff. These things have all seemed obviously good to me for so long I don’t really know where they came from. Just following gradients as a kid and imprinting on (I think good) role models, maybe. I think I endorse it all, though.
I doubt this helps your particular quest, but that’s my answer, at least right now!
I haven’t noticed anyone else come out and say it here, and I may express this more rigorously later, but, like, GPT-5 is a pretty big bear signal, right? Not just in terms of benchmarks suggesting a non-superexponential trend but also, to name a few angles/anecdata:
It did slightly worse than o3 at the first thing I tried it on (with thinking mode on)
It failed to one-shot a practical coding problem that was entirely in javascript, which is generally among its strengths (and the problem was certainly in principle solvable)
It’s hallucinating pretty obviously when I give it a 100 page or so document to read and comment on (it references lots from the document, but gets many details wrong and overfixates on others)
It’s described as an automatic family of models that naturally picks the best for the situation, which seems like exactly what you’d do if nothing else was really giving you the sauce
The main reddit reaction seems to be that the demo graphs were atrocious, which is not exactly glowing praise
All the above paired with the fact that this is what they chose to call GPT-5, and with the fact that Claude’s latest release was a well-named and justified 0.1 increment
I’m largely with Zvi that even integrating this stuff as it already exists into the economy does some interesting stuff, and that we live in interesting times already. But other than what’s already priced in by integrations and efficiency optimizations, progress feels s-curvier to me today than it did a week ago.
30 people is the aim!
I think the main disanalogy with startup incubators is that we’re not necessarily betting for successful bloggers to increase their earning power; probably the modal respondent (given the community skews tech) can currently make as much money as a top 1% blogger already (though to be clear not necessarily a top .1% blogger).
I think the analogy that’s better is to a meditation retreat or athletic conditioning program, or something, which afaict do pretty often charge (or at least have a strongly suggested donation in the meditation case); part of the point of charging (other than the obvious reason of just paying for stuff) is to make sure people are really bought-in/personally motivated to get the most out of it possible.
(I am helping with this event, but I don’t speak for Ben here)
Thoughts on how the sort of hyperstition stuff mentioned in nostalgebraist’s “the void” intersects with AI control work.
Yeah, I agree this is more “thing to try on the margin” than “universally correct solution.” Part of why I have the whole (controversial) preamble is that I’m trying to gesture at a state of mind that, if you can get it in a group, seems pretty sweet.
Ah, we may just have different definitions of rich, or perhaps I’m a bit of a spendthrift! Or, I suppose, I might just go to cheaper restaurants. I’m thinking of checks in the like, $150-$200 range for the party, which isn’t nothing but as an occasional splurge doesn’t really fuss me. I guess if you do it 5x per year on a 50k household income (about the local median in my city, I think) that’d be about 2% gross. Not cheap, but also not crazy, at least for my money intuitions.
Do you think occasionally buying a meal for a small group requires being rich? I don’t think I’m rich, but I can manage it without much strain. At least occasionally!
Thank you for the book recommendation! It seems likely I would find it interesting.
The Whole Check
For LessWrong posts specifically, there’s the feedback service.
This isn’t personalized, but I also have suggestions for people in the general LessWrong cluster here.
I think a better analogy is you as a local LLM having root access to the computer it’s running on. If you brick it, you’ve also broken the substrate that facilitates the process by which you’d naively unbrick—the terminal commands you’d use no longer work!