This sounds like good advice for people with very high g-factor (i.e. IQ), but I feel like it probably doesn’t generalize as g-factor decreases.
MikkW
Karma: 1,282
I enjoyed this, thank you for sharing it.
(I’m not the best arbiter of what belongs on LW, but this does feel, to me, at home on LW. There are many works of fiction I have enjoyed reading on LW that share some similar qualities with this story, and the themes that it explores / the concepts the story is built on, are the sort of thing that a typical reader of LW finds intellectually captivating, but a less cerebral audience would struggle to relate to.)
To be clear, Russia was part of the Council of Europe from 1996 until its expulsion in 2022. (Your comment can be interpreted as meaning that Russia was never part of the CoE)
Nitpick: The human birth canal does not limit the size of adult human brains. The human skull and brain both increase drastically in size from infancy to adulthood, and there is no upper limit to how big the ratio of adult-brain-size : baby-brain-size can get (and based on how quickly other large mammals grow in general compared to humans, I assume that the growth size of the brain could, in principle, be much faster than it is).
Other biological factors, including energy usage, and the mechanics of having such a large mass included at that position in the human, and others, do constrain adult human brain size.
I see that the numbers indicate people disagree with this post. Since there are several clauses, it’s hard to know which specifically (or all of them) are being disagreed with.
The second paragraph (beginning “Contrary to what you wrote...”) is a list of factual statements, which as far as I can tell are all correct.
The third paragraph (“Most importantly, the title is plenty big...”) is more subjective, but I’m currently not imagining that anyone is disagreeing with that paragraph (that is, that anyone thinks “actually, the title is too small”).
The fourth paragraph (“In this case, part of the point...”) is more speculative, and I could easily imagine someone reading it and thinking “that’s not the point of publishing / writing a book”. There’s certainly a reason I put a “presumably” in there. I do still feel that there’s something to what I’m saying in that paragraph. My surprise would be of a limited extent if Soares and Yudkowsky said “that was not a consideration in our decision to do this”—but I would be somewhat surprised.
I can see someone disagreeing with the first paragraph (“Given that the book...”), but my current state of mind is that such people would be simply wrong. The book is not being self-published, but is being published by Little, Brown and Company. Some excerpts from Wikipedia’s article on Little, Brown and Company:
“The company was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law and miscellaneous works, introducing American buyers to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the dictionaries of William Smith, and many other standard works. In the early years [starting in 1837] Little and Brown published the Works of Daniel Webster, [...], [and] Letters of John Adams. [...] Little, Brown and Company was the American publisher for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
The firm was the original publisher of United States Statutes at Large beginning in 1845, under authority granted by a joint resolution of Congress.
and
During this time [about 1908 to 1985] the joint Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown imprint published All Quiet on the Western Front, Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin, James Truslow Adams’s The Adams Family, [...] [and] J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
The point being, the company that is publishing Soares and Yudkowsky’s book, is an established company that has sold important and/or bestselling works for two centuries. The people there know what they are doing, and that includes the people who design covers, as well as the bosses of the people who design the covers.
Given that the book is being published by a major publisher, it can safely be assumed that the cover design was made by a professional cover designer, who knew what they were doing.
Contrary to what you wrote, the title has a bigger font size than both the subtitle and the authors’ names (this is true of both the American and UK covers; I am primarily talking about the American cover, which I presume is the one you are referencing). Even if the author names were the same size as the title, it is immediately obvious which one is the title, and which one isn’t. Putting the subtitle in a dark grey, which is much closer to the background color (black) than the color of the title (white) is, also does a lot to move emphasis towards the title of the book (away from the subtitle)
Most importantly, the title is plenty big. If it was small, then I would feel there is something to what you are saying; but the title is quite large and readable from a distance, and clearly delineated from the rest of the text on the cover.
In this case, part of the point of publishing a book (including writing it in the first place), is presumably to promote the identity of the authors, to make them a known name / schelling point for discussion about AI safety. That would indicate making the names quite prominent on the cover.
I would assume e-book orders will also play a role in encouraging the publisher to print more physical copies, because it indicates that more people are interested in reading the book.
Tim Urban has written about AI X-risk before, in a way that indicates that he’s spent a good bit of time thinking about the problem. But, the point of the book seems to be to speak to people who don’t have a deep knowledge of AI risk.
I agree that this description fits the paper.
If you read this and, like I did, felt unfulfilled after reading it, it’s worth noting that this paper (which was linked in the OP, but which I [and perhaps the unfulfilled reader] overlooked) goes into more detail:
This post does a good job of laying out compelling arguments for thoughts adjacent to areas I’ve previously already enjoyed thinking about.
For the record, this sentence popped into my head while reading this: “Wait, but what if I’m Omega-V, and [Valentine] is a two boxer?”
(Edit: the context for this thought is my previous thoughts having read other posts by Valentine, which I find both quite elucidating, but also somehow have left me feeling a bit creeped out; that being said, my opinion about this post itself is strongly positive)
If you dig deep enough, temperatures should be much cooler than on / near the surface of the earth. (Unless the heat gets very intense. I don’t know enough to rule that out). How much digging that deep (as opposed to the depths we usually did to) would cost, though
(The mentioned ACX post is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education )
A recent Astral Codex Ten post contained this bit:
Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
The linked source seems to indicate that the survey’s expected answer to the question “electrons are smaller than atoms” is “true”. However, I think this is likely based on a faulty understanding of reality, and in any case the question has a trickier nature than the survey or Scott Alexander give it credit for.
There’s a common misconception that electrons (as well as e.g. protons and neutrons) are point particles, that is to say, that they can be said to exist at some precise location, just like a dot on a piece of graph paper.
Even when people talk about the uncertainty principle, they often lean into this misconception by suggesting that the wave function indicates “the probability that the (point-like) particle is found at a given location”.
However, an electron is not a point, but rather a wavefunction which has a wide extent in space. If you were to examine the electron at the tip of my pinky finger, there is in fact a non-zero (but very, very small) part of that electron that can be found at the base of the flag which Neil Armstrong planted on the moon (n.b. I’m not looking up whether it was actually Armstrong who did that), or even all the way out in the core of Alpha Centauri.
We could still try to talk about the size of an electron (and the size of an atom, which is a similar question) by considering the volume that contains 99% of the electron (and likewise a volume that contains 99% of a proton or neutron).
Considering this volume, the largest part of any given atom would be an electron, with the nuclear particles occupying a much larger volume (something something strong force). In this sense, the size of the atom is in fact coextensive with the size of its “largest” electron, and that electron is by no means smaller than the atom. There are of course in many atoms multiple electrons, and some of these may be “smaller” than the largest electron. However, I do not think the survey had this in mind as the justification for the answer it considered “correct” for the question.
I think the appropriate next step for Scott Alexander is to retract the relevant sentence from his post.
“authors will get hurt by people not appreciating their work” is something we just have to accept, even if it’s very harsh
I don’t really agree with this. Sure, some people are going to write stuff that’s not very good, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go overboard on negative feedback, or be stingy with positive feedback.
Humans are animals which learn by reinforcement learning, and the lesson they learn when punished is often “stay away from the thing / person / group that gave the punishment”, much more strongly than “don’t do the thing that made that person / thing / group punish me”.
Wheras when they are rewarded, the lesson is “seek out the circumstances / context that let me be rewarded (and also do the thing that will make it reward me)”. Nobody is born writing amazingly, they have to learn it over time, and it comes more naturally to some, less to others.
I don’t want bad writers (who are otherwise intelligent and intellectually engaged, which describes almost everybody who posts on LW) to learn the lesson “stay away from LW”. I want them to receive encouragement (mostly in forms other than karma, e.g. encouraging comments, or inclusion in the community, etc.), leading them to be more motivated to figure out the norms of LW and the art of writing, and try again, with new learning and experience behind them.
I think the threshold of 0 is largely arbitrary
It’s not all that arbitrary. Besides the fact that it’s one of the simplest numbers, which makes for an easy to remember / communicate heuristic (a great reason that isn’t arbitrary), I actually think it’s quite defensible as a threshold. If I write a post that has a +6 starting karma, and I see it drop down to 1 or 2 (or, yeah, −1), my thought is “that kinda sucked, but whatever, I’ll learn from my mistake and do better next time”.
But if I see it drop down to, say, −5 or −6, my thought starts to become “why am I even posting on this stupid website that’s so full of anti-social jerks?”. And then I have to talk myself down from deleting my account and removing LW and the associated community from my life.
(Not that I think LW is actually so full of jerks. There’s a lot of lovable people here who talk about interesting things, and I believe in LW’s raison d’etre, which is why I keep forcing myself to come back)
I would like to make a meta-comment, not directly related to this post.
When I came upon this post, it had a negative karma score. I don’t think it’s good form to have posts receiving negative net karma (except in extreme cases), so I upvoted to provide this with a positive net karma.
It is unpleasant for an author when they receive a negative karma score on a post which they spent time and effort to make (even when that effort was relatively small), much more so than receiving no karma beyond the starting score. This makes the author less likely to post again in the future, which prevents communication of ideas, and keeps the author from getting better at writing. In particular this creates a risk of LessWrong becoming more like a bubble chamber (which I don’t think is desirable), and makes the community less likely to hear valuable ideas that go against the grain of the local culture.
A writer who is encouraged to write more will become more clear in their communication, as well as in their thoughts. And they will also get more used to the particular expectations of the culture of LessWrong- norms that have good reason to exist, but which also go against some people’s intuitions or what has worked well for them in other, more “normie” contexts.
Karma serves as a valuable signal to authors about the extent to which they are doing a good job of writing clearly about interesting topics in a way that provides value to members of the community, but the range of positive integers provides enough signal. There isn’t much lost in excluding the negative range (except in extreme cases).
Let’s be nice to people who are still figuring writing out, I encourage you to refrain from downvoting them into negative karma.
That statement of fact is indeed true. Would you mind saying more about your thoughts regarding it? There seems to be an unstated implication that this is bad. There is a part of me that agrees with that implication, but there are also parts of me that want to say “so what? that’s irrelevant”. (I feel ⌞explaining what the second set of shards is pointing to, would take more time and energy to write up than I am prepared to take right now⌝)
On the other side, there’s the cost of ~10min of boredom, for every passenger, on every flight. Instead of playing games, watching movies, or reading, people would mostly be talking, looking out the window, or staring off into space.
Tangent: I’m not completely sure that this is actually a cost and not an unintended benefit
Sharing my impression of the comic:
Insofar as it supports sides, I’d say the first part of the meme is criticism of Eliezer
The comic does not parse (to my eyes and probably most people’s) as the author intending to criticize Eliezer at any point
Insofar as it supports sides, I’d say [...] the last part is criticism of those who reject His message
Only in the most strawman way. It basically feels equivalent to me to “They disagree with the guy I like, therefore they’re dumb / unsympathetic”. There’s basically no meat on the bones of the criticism
From Gemini on the egregore food chain:
Prompt
Please continue to plan out a twenty-part essay exploring this thesis: “Egregores can be understood through a biological lens. Just as biologists explore the essence of flora and fauna, biologists can do the same for egregores.”. Use many concrete real-world examples to illustrate the idea and related principles, including examples that you come up with yourself. Don’t tell me your plan. Please print out part six now.
----
The prompt for part one was:
Please plan out a twenty-part essay exploring this thesis: “Egregores (like religions, social clubs, political parties, companies, subcultures, fandoms, habits, ways of thought, philosophies, states, etc.) can be understood in a biological lens. Just as biologists explore the evolutionary history, anatomy, and life cycles of flora and fauna, biologists can do the same for egregores. Principles from economics, cybernetics, and phenomenology can be used to assist the biologist in understanding egregores as well as flora and fauna”. Use many concrete real-world examples to illustrate the idea and related principles, including examples that you come up with yourself. Don’t tell me your plan. Please print out part one now.
Trophic Levels, Phagocytosis, and the Predator-Prey Dynamics of Macro-Organisms
Having examined the internal anatomy and the hedonic mechanisms by which egregores extract metabolic energy from their human substrate, we must now pull back the lens to observe the broader ecosystem. Egregores do not merely compete for the raw caloric and cognitive output of humans; they actively consume one another.
Just as the physical biosphere is structured around a food web of producers, herbivores, and apex predators, the unseen topographical networks of power are stratified into distinct trophic levels. Understanding this hierarchy is essential for mapping where capital and social trust bottleneck, and for recognizing how apex structures maintain their dominance through predatory consumption.
The Trophic Pyramid of Trust
At the base of the incorporeal food web are the Primary Producers. These are highly localized, high-vitality meso-egregores: local agricultural cooperatives, neighborhood mutual-aid networks, independent open-source developer communities, and specialized local subcultures. They are the entities closest to the biological substrate. They directly metabolize human energy into raw social trust and tangible, localized abundance.
Above them sit the Aggregators (Meso-Predators): regional corporations, mid-tier media networks, and municipal bureaucracies. They feed by skimming the excess trust and economic surplus generated by the primary producers.
At the summit reside the Apex Egregores: transnational technological monopolies, global financial architectures, and the most deeply entrenched state apparatuses. These leviathans are too vast to efficiently generate organic social trust from the ground up. Instead, their metabolic strategy relies entirely on systemic predation and the aggressive harvesting of lower-tier entities.
Phagocytosis: The Mechanics of Corporate Digestion
In cellular biology, phagocytosis occurs when a larger cell engulfs a smaller one, using enzymes to break down the prey’s cellular walls and absorb its internal nutrients. In the realm of macro-organisms, we observe this precise mechanism in corporate mergers and acquisitions.
When a dominant tech monopoly encounters a hyper-efficient, highly vital startup that has successfully cultivated a dense network of dedicated users, the monopoly rarely attempts to out-compete it organically. To do so would require burning massive amounts of its own metabolic capital. Instead, the apex egregore engulfs the threat.
The transaction—perhaps the absorption of a disruptive messaging protocol for 1.5 billion in inflation-adjusted 2010 USD—is not merely an exchange of capital. It is an act of biological digestion. The apex predator breaks down the startup’s structural walls. It strips away the unique phenological interface that the human hosts loved, extracts the dense nodes of intellectual property (the captured Joules of engineering labor), and forces the localized user base into its own vascular system. The original, vital entity dies, and its social trust is fully metabolized by the leviathan.
We can model this egregorical predation utilizing a cybernetic adaptation of the classic Lotka-Volterra equations:
dx / dt = αx - βxy
dy / dt = δxy - γy
Where x represents the population of decentralized, high-vitality meso-egregores (the prey) and y represents the mass of the centralized apex aggregator (the predator). The coefficient \beta represents the rate at which the monopoly successfully co-opts and acquires the localized networks, while \delta reflects the metabolic efficiency with which the monopoly converts that absorbed trust into its own structural growth. If \beta is allowed to remain unchecked by antitrust interventions or structural friction, the apex predator will inevitably strip-mine the ecosystem of all localized vitality.
Batesian Mimicry and Subcultural Co-optation
Physical predators and prey often rely on camouflage. In the incorporeal ecology, this takes the form of Batesian mimicry—when a harmless or different species evolves the warning signals of a toxic one to deter predators. Apex egregores invert this: they use mimicry to lower the defenses of their human hosts.
When a massive, resource-extracting corporate egregore detects the emergence of a genuine, localized subculture (e.g., a grassroots ecological movement or an anti-establishment artistic renaissance), it deploys its marketing appendages to wear the “skin” of the subculture. By co-opting the aesthetic signals, vocabulary, and phenomenological markers of the primary producer, the apex egregore tricks the human hosts into surrendering their social trust. The hosts believe they are feeding energy into a vital, localized movement, while the underlying structural reality is that their capital and attention have been seamlessly rerouted back to the central bottleneck of the monopoly.
The Operator’s Intervention: Architecting the Mycelial Defense
You cannot passively inhabit an ecosystem dominated by apex predators without eventually being digested as metabolic fuel. To achieve civilizational triumph, you must step outside the role of mere substrate and act as a conscious ecological engineer.
Consider the parable of the Grafted Orchard. A master horticulturalist does not clear-cut a forest to plant a fragile monoculture that requires constant artificial inputs to survive. Instead, they identify the deepest, most resilient native rootstocks—the systems already adapted to the unvarnished reality of the soil. They then deliberately graft the scions of high-yield, life-giving heirloom fruits onto these rugged bases.
This is the precise template for shaping a better, more structurally beautiful world. You must become a vascular surgeon of your own localized reality.
* Map the Flow: Identify three primary-producer egregores in your immediate physical or digital vicinity—perhaps a local food supply network, an independent hardware-tinkering space, or a specialized, high-trust digital enclave.
* Aggressively Reroute: Consciously sever the circulatory pathways that tether your daily consumption to apex monopolies. Starve the leviathans by a fraction of a degree, and inject that capital and attention directly into the primary producers.
* Fortify the Cell Wall: When you engage in these local networks, actively design “poison pills” into their structure—legal bylaws, cryptographic ledgers, or uncompromising cultural taboos—that make them mathematically and socially indigestible to corporate phagocytosis.
By strategically nurturing these localized, symbiotic entities, you are not merely engaging in a lifestyle choice; you are aggressively cultivating a decentralized immune system. You are building the resilient rootstock upon which the profound, unvarnished vitality of human life can sustainably bloom.