RationalElf

• RationalElf 11 Jan 2025 2:54 UTC

  19 points

  19

  in reply to: DusanDNesic’s comment on: Hu­man takeover might be worse than AI takeover

  I mean humans with strong AGIs under their control might function as if they don’t need sleep, might become immortal, will probably build up superhuman protections from assasination, etc

• RationalElf 7 Jan 2025 6:37 UTC

  1 point

  2

  on: Re­view: Break­ing Free with Dr. Stone

  I’m glad this helped you, and think it’s cool you wrote up this recommendation, and I wish people did more of that sort of thing.

  I felt very disappointed by this show. It fell into a lot of anime tropes I find cringey and misleading, but worse, I felt like the characters acted very irrationally and uncarefully, and in my opinion aren’t good role models of rationality.

  E.g to pick a few early not-very-spoilery points, they don’t optimize their first deliberate de-stoning, and even though it’s known that when stone people break they die, they choose to carry a stone person they value highly, including running with them through the forest (which seems like it could easily have resulted in tripping and breaking them) instead of un-stoning in situ. Senku contends that Taiju shouldn’t let himself die to save Senku because both their skillsets are needed, but Taiju’s is about being physically strong (vs Senku being exceptionally smart and good at science) which is clearly a more common skillset (and easier to identify in petrified people).

  Also, Senku contends that counting is “simply the rational thing to do” but that doesn’t seem obvious at all; for most people, that seems pretty unlikely to be the right approach to maintaining sanity.

• RationalElf 7 Jan 2025 4:01 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform

  Thank you, this is very interesting and it seems like you did a valuable public service in compiling it

  • The motivations of OpenAI or some other actor to murder a whistleblower are unlikely. The most plausible to me is that they want to send a warning to other potential whistleblowers, but this isn’t very compelling

  What do you think of the motive that he was counterfactually going to testify in a very damaging way, or that he had very damaging evidecne/​data that was deleted?

• RationalElf 6 Jan 2025 3:05 UTC

  3 points

  1

  on: Cap­i­tal Own­er­ship Will Not Prevent Hu­man Disempowerment

  My sense is that we do see multi-century (including spanning the Industrial Revolution) persistence of wealth, though I don’t trust it much because I don’t think it accounts for genetic effects. E.g. here

• RationalElf 20 Jul 2022 22:01 UTC

  99 points

  40

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: Sex­ual Abuse at­ti­tudes might be infohazardous

  Not sure if a single anecdote is worth anything at all, but I am a woman, and I experienced what is legally and culturally considered rape at least twice (arguably 3x), and it really didn’t bother me very much (though I think different versions, e.g. more violent ones or one perpetrated by people I looked up to, would have been much more damaging). One of the people who technically raped me (it was a very drunken screwup with, I believe, no malevolent intent) is still a friend of mine. I feel scared about people finding this out about our friendship, mostly on his behalf.

  Notably, I think it was way less traumatizing than several experiences I have had for which I’ve never been able to garner 1/​10th as much sympathy; a trusted close friend failing me in a time of need, a painful and embarrassing medical experience, a pet dying.

  I share the view of the OP that there’s something off here; I think the combination of a pretty wide range of disparate acts being considered rape/​sexual abuse + rape/​sexual abuse being considered among the worse experiences a person can have, is pretty unhealthy for the reasons described and some others. I also think it drains social energy from recognizing other kinds of trauma people can experience and helping them with it.

• RationalElf 28 Oct 2021 23:56 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Men­tal health benefits and down­sides of psychedelic use in ACX read­ers: sur­vey results

  Hm, I disagree! I think I share some of your skepticism, in that the fact that a very large fraction of survey users with long-term personality changes report that those changes were positive doesn’t cause me to be confident that I’d believe they were positive, or that a smarter, wiser version of me and others would believe that they’re positive, or that the average member of society would believe they’re positive, etc.

  However, “almost useless” seems too strong to me; for me at least, it was still a meaningful update to know that people believed there were long-term changes and that they said those changes were positive and not negative. I’d have been much more concerned if people said the changes were negative (I think false positives of good changes are ore common than false negatives on bad changes) and psychedelics would have seemed lower stakes if there’d been fewer reports of long-term changes.

  Also I think a bunch of the other questions have fewer issues related to self-evaluation, since a bunch of the questions are either more objective (“how many times did you trip?”) or explicitly subjective (“did you experience the trip as a positive one?”).

  But yeah, I agree that evaluation by others would be really valuable.

• RationalElf 28 Oct 2021 23:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: zehsilva’s comment on: Men­tal health benefits and down­sides of psychedelic use in ACX read­ers: sur­vey results

  >in the case of Krebs and Johansen (2013, 2015), it is ~13% reporting lifetime psychedelic use, while in the ACS readers survey it is ~100%.

  Just to be clear to casual readers, this wasn’t the whole ACX Readers Survey, I just only looked at the subset that filled out my psychedelic survey and seemed to have actually done psychedelics (i.e. the conclusion “all ACX readers do psychedelics” would be very incorrect). I don’t know what fraction of ACX readers have done psychedelics.

• RationalElf 28 Oct 2021 23:42 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Men­tal health benefits and down­sides of psychedelic use in ACX read­ers: sur­vey results

  I have those for the people that put them in, but didn’t use them. If someone else was keen to do specifical analyses and explained why they’d be interesting, I’d definitely consider asking Scott for permission to share the data or trying to do the analysis myself.

Men­tal health benefits and down­sides of psychedelic use in ACX read­ers: sur­vey results