ROM

Karma: 249

The depths of the sea have been plumbed and surveyed, leaving no place for the sea monsters to dwell. Every river and every forest used to be believed to have a spirit living in it: but they have all been expelled by our advancing science and clonking civilization. Even the human soul has been given notice to vacate! Already we’ve had several pink slips delivered by psychology and neuroscience; and now the bailiff of AI is knocking sternly at the door with a warrant to take possession.

Deep Utopia
Nick Bostrom

ROM 18 Feb 2026 14:47 UTC
3 points
2
on: My experience of the 2025 CFAR Workshop
Appreciate you writing up your thoughts!
When you compare their reported work/career satisfaction improvements to the clinical effect size of antidepressants (typically around d = 0.3 over placebo), the results are impressive
I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Usually clinical trials will involve some sort of control group. If you’re referring to the 2015 longitudinal study, then there was no placebo/control group. You can’t be sure whether the retreat itself had any influence on the measured improvement. Attending the retreat might just select for the kinds of people who are looking to improve in their career/work since it (presumably) selects for those interested in ‘self improvement’ (scare-quotes since this makes it sound like self-help literature, which I don’t think its accurate).

ROM 29 Nov 2025 4:33 UTC
11 points
2
on: Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort posts
The quick post is has a casual style, the effortpost is inscrutably formal
Since you mentioned him earlier, this is something Scott Alexander manages to avoid with his effort post (not to say that he doesn’t put effort into all his posts). He can write 30k words of careful reasoning on the Miracle of Fatima and yet reading it doesn’t feel like engaging with a dense, wordy academic paper.

ROM 21 Apr 2025 9:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Pablo’s Shortform
I believe he means rationality-associsted discourse and it’s not like there are so many contenders.
That would make more sense. Am curious if that was OP’s intended meaning.

ROM 20 Apr 2025 18:45 UTC
8 points
1
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Pablo’s Shortform
I think calling them “one of the biggest online threats to rational discourse” seems like a wild overstatement. That said, I was surprised to learn that RatWiki had a much higher reach compared to LW until very recently (when going by google trends).

ROM 28 Feb 2025 17:20 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Chris Lakin’s comment on: Do clients need years of therapy, or can one conversation resolve the issue?
Hey Chris!
I have a few thoughts on this, though I have strong anti-advertising sentiments and might be overly sensitive to these things, so take it with a grain of salt.
The title sounds a little click baity. It’s directed at the reader. The title “Do patients need years of therapy, or can one conversation resolve their issue?” is functionally identical, but feels less like an advert.
The opening reads somewhat like a common advert tactic: “I hated how business did [thing x] since it was bad for the customer, so I started my practice by doing [thing y] which is both more appealing to a potential customer and delivers better results!’.
I think the advertising vibe might also come from the continued references to your personal practice / mentions of it’s successes:
- “So when I started my business, I made payment contingent on results:”
- “Our clients are often surprised at how we do things because it’s so different than the therapy or other coaching they’ve done before:”
- “Several of my clients have resolved lifelong issues like anxiety in one shot”
- “My business is expanding to help more people in deeper and more efficient ways.”
Finally, it concludes with a link to where people can schedule a call with you.

ROM 26 Nov 2024 11:22 UTC
8 points
1
on: Locally optimal psychology
If there were no downsides to resolving a persistent issue, then why has it lasted so long??
If I understand correctly, your claim is that when we see long-standing issues like depression, chronic neck pain, or patterns of emotional avoidance persisting for years, it’s more likely than not to be some sort of adaptive coping strategy—essentially a way the mind or body protects itself from harm–otherwise the issue would have been resolved.
Why do you think this is more likely than a mundane explanations such as “bad luck in the genetic lottery, no obvious levers to pull”?

ROM 4 Nov 2024 16:36 UTC
12 points
4
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
a field where replications fail so badly that they result in firings and polemics in the New York Times and destroyed careers-
A field can be absolutely packed with dreadful research and still see virtually no one getting fired. Take, for instance, the moment a prominent psychologist dubbed peers who questioned methodological standards as “methodological terrorists.” It’s the kind of rhetoric that sends a clear message: questioning sloppy methods isn’t just unwelcome; it’s practically heretical.

ROM 4 Nov 2024 16:27 UTC
6 points
0
on: The Median Researcher Problem
People did in fact try to sound the alarm about poor statistical practices well before the replication crisis, and yet practices did not change,
This rings painfully true. As early as the late 1950s, at least one person was already raising a red flag about the risks that psychology^[1] might veer into publishing a sea of false claims:
There is some evidence that in fields where statistical tests of significance are commonly used, research which yields nonsignificant results is not published. Such research being unknown to other investigators may be repeated independently until eventually by chance a significant result occurs—an ‘error of the first kind’—and is published. Significant results published in these fields are seldom verified by independent replication. The possibility thus arises that the literature of such a field consists in substantial part of false conclusions resulting from errors of the first kind in statistical tests of significance.
1. ^
  Sterling isn’t explicitly talking about psychology, but rather any field where significance tests are used.

ROM 3 Nov 2024 0:26 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
I understand the claim you were making now and I hope the nitpicking isn’t irritable.

ROM 3 Nov 2024 0:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
This post seems to be arguing that veganism involves trade offs (I didn’t read through the comments). I don’t disagree with that claim^[1] (and am grateful for you taking the time to write it up). The part I take issue with is that the two surveys you conducted were strong evidence, which I don’t think they are.
1. ^
  Though I do lean towards thinking most people or even everyone should bite the bullet and accept the reduced health to spare the animals.

ROM 2 Nov 2024 7:58 UTC
−1 points
−2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
I agree with the claim you’re making: that if FHI still existed and they applied for a grant from OP it would be rejected. This seems true to me.
I don’t mean to nitpick, but it still feels misleading to claim “FHI could not get OP funding” when they did in fact get lots of funding from OP. It implies that FHI operated without any help from OP, which isn’t true.

ROM 2 Nov 2024 7:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
FHI could not get OP funding
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
OP appears to have been one of FHI’s biggest funders according to Sandberg:^[1]
Eventually, Open Philanthropy became FHI’s most important funder, making two major grants: £1.6m in 2017, and £13.3m in 2018. Indeed, the donation behind this second grant was at the time the largest in the Faculty of Philosophy’s history (although, owing to limited faculty administrative capacity for hiring and the subsequent hiring freezes it imposed, a large part of this grant would remain unspent). With generous and unrestricted funding from a foundation that was aligned with FHI’s mission, we were free to expand our research in ways we thought would make the most difference.
The hiring (and fundraising) freeze imposed by Oxf began in 2020.
1. ^
  See page 15

ROM 24 Oct 2024 17:30 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
Nice! I really like that you did that work and am in agreement that too many vegans in general (not just EA vegans) suck at managing their diet. Of the four former vegans who I know/known personally, all of them stopped because of health reasons (though not necessarily health reasons induced by being vegan).
That said, I don’t see round 1 or round 2 as being particularly strong evidence of anything. The sample sizes seem too small to draw much inference from. There’s +7k people in the EA movement,^[1] with around 46% of whom are vegan or vegetarian. Two surveys, one of six people from Lightcone, another of 20 people (also from Lightcone?) just don’t have enough participants to make strong claims on ˜3000 people. You say as much in the second post:
So can we blame veganism for the deficiencies?
This study doesn’t say anything one way or the other, which means I still think yes but you shouldn’t change your opinion based on the results. The sample is too small and skewed to compare deficiency rates in vegans and nonvegans. There were energetic omnivores with deficiencies and tired vegans with perfect scores so it’s clearly not deterministic.
This seems at odds with what you claim in the podcast:^[2]
So I got them nutritional testing. It showed roughly what I thought. And this was like a whole thing. I applied for a grant. I had to test a lot of people. It’s a logistical nightmare. I found exactly what I thought I would. that there were serious nutritional issues, not in everyone, but enough that people should have been concerned.
From there I could prove that vegan advocates had been lying and this was causing harm, and from there I could prove that EA had failed in noticing these obvious lies that everyone knew, but had failed to push back on, and had thus, Let younger people who didn’t know better fall victim to. Because it made the vegans too sad and angry to correct them
Separately, it’s unclear to me how many people in the second survey actually are vegan / vegetarian rather than people with fatigue problems:
I should remind you here that the sample was a mix of 20 ethical EA vegans, vegetarians, people with fatigue issues, and people who happened to be in the office.
1. ^
  This was back in published back in 2021, so I expect the numbers to be even higher now.
2. ^
  A separate point/nitpick, this part of the transcript incorrectly attributes your words to Timothy:
  [00:09:43] Timothy: From there I could prove that vegan advocates had been lying and this was causing harm, and from there I could prove that EA had failed in noticing these obvious lies that everyone knew, but had failed to push back on, and had thus, Let younger people who didn’t know better fall victim to. Because it made the vegans too sad and angry to correct them

ROM 23 Oct 2024 13:25 UTC
1 point
0
on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
Elizabeth: So I got them nutritional testing. It showed roughly what I thought. And this was like a whole thing. I applied for a grant. I had to test a lot of people. It’s a logistical nightmare. I found exactly what I thought I would. that there were serious nutritional issues, not in everyone, but enough that people should have been concerned.
How many people in total were tested? From the Interim report, it looks like only six people got tested, so I assume you’re referencing something else.

ROM 16 Oct 2024 7:27 UTC
6 points
0
on: Laziness death spirals
small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future.
Mildly interesting: In his biography of Deng Xiaoping, Vogel implies he believed the same:
For his civilian breakthrough in consolidation, Deng chose to focus on a project that would quickly both increase production and inspire others. Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles. In 1975, many of the factories criticized for failing to meet production targets complained that they lacked adequate supplies. Transportation was an obvious bottleneck. Could a success in transportation provide an early victory that would both increase production and demonstrate possibilities for success in other areas?

ROM 4 Oct 2024 7:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Cryonics is free
I don’t know.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don’t know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I’m a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.

ROM 2 Oct 2024 14:53 UTC
2 points
1
on: Lonely Dissent
Asch’s conformity experiment showed that the presence of a single dissenter tremendously reduced the incidence of “conforming” wrong answers. Individualism is easy, experiment shows, when you have company in your defiance. Every other subject in the room, except one, says that black is white. You become the second person to say that black is black. And it feels glorious: the two of you, lonely and defiant rebels, against the world!
It’s probably worth noting that most people are actually pretty okay with being lone dissenters—at least if we’re going by Asch’s conformity experiments. The original studies have been a bit overblown in psych textbooks, which tend to portray conformity as more rampant than it really is (see here and here). In reality, individualism shows up more often than you’d think. In the original study, about 35.7% conformed, and in a recent replication, it’s around 33%. None of this really contradicts what Yud said here, though, just adds a little nuance. Most people aren’t conformist sheep.

ROM 30 Sep 2024 22:35 UTC
32 points
25
in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: Cryonics is free
I’m in favour of saying true things. I feel the (current) title is slightly misleading.

ROM 30 Sep 2024 19:21 UTC
90 points
15
on: Cryonics is free
What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it’s not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.

ROM 30 Sep 2024 19:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: Cryonics is free
not including the cost of stand-by, which is also a significant portion (ie. staying at your bedside in advance until you die)
I assumed this was an overstatement. A quick check shows I’m wrong: TomorrowBio offer whole body (€200k) or just brain preservation (€60k). The ‘standby, stabilisation and transport’ service (included in the previous costs) amount to €80k and €50k respectively. I expected it to be much less.
That said, they still set aside €10K for long term storage of the head. I guess this means your head has a higher chance of being stored safety.