RE the NY site, in my experience from living in upstate NY for a time, an hour (or 75min) to Grand Central doesn’t seem to match what people think of when they think of “an hour+ to NYC”; it’s much worse. When I hear “an hour to NYC” I think “an hour to get to my destination”, but if it’s “an hour (or 75min) to Grand Central” it’s likely at least 1.5-2hrs to my destination, perhaps even 2-2.5, with additional subjective hassle from getting to the train upstate, getting out of Grand Central, and transferring to the subway + walking or uber. Plus, you are limited to making the trip while trains are running (so, no late-night hangouts then sleeping in your own bed).
seez
Karma: 721
I think money prevents certain types misery more than it buys happiness.
For example, flights with stopovers and shitty public transportation make me miserable and usually sick. By spending money on direct flights and taxis, I save myself many days of life that would otherwise be lost (I have to travel a lot).
Similarly, knowing I can afford good medical care if I get sick, or find a new apartment if mine becomes unpleasant, or send my kids to a private school if public schools are too useless… these things don’t make me deeply happy, but if they were not true, that would make me constantly anxious.
Money is a cushion against disaster. If something goes awry, you can use it to buy medical or legal or technical assistance. However, for me personally it does not cause an actually happy or joyful affect, nor does it seem to buy the things that do (except very indirectly).
[Question] What authors consistently give accurate pictures of complex topics they discuss?
Discovering Your Secretly Secret Sensory Experiences
I got the two top scientists in my field to both agree to be my advisers. One of them, not an effusively friendly person, said my research proposal was extremely interesting, new, and important. I cried a little, but luckily I don’t think he saw.
What should normal people do?
Seriously! I just overheard someone say “wow, maybe all that rationality stuff actually does help them do better.”
Can you explain more about how you do this?
A conversation between me and my 7-year-old cousin:
Her: “do you believe in God?”
Me: “I don’t, do you?”
Her: “I used to but, then I never really saw any proof, like miracles or good people getting saved from mean people and stuff. But I do believe in the Tooth Fairy, because ever time I put a tooth under my pillow, I get money out in the morning.”
Some questions I’d love to see addressed in posts:
How much can we raise the sanity waterline without transhumanism (i.e. assuming current human biology is a constant)?
Is the sanity waterline rising?
What is the best way to introduce rationality to different groups of people/subcultures?
Does LW and other rationality reading material unnecessarily signal nerdiness so strongly that it limits its effectiveness and ability to spread?
What are the best things someone with very low tech skills can do for the rationality movement, and for the world?
If LW is declining/failing, why is this happening, could this have been prevented, and are other rationality-related communities infected with the same problem?
Getting my first adviser, Professor C, was a nightmare that made me miserable for a month. I really wanted him as my adviser because I think he is one of the only good scientists in my field and my department. I also had long-term plans to ask him to advise my later degree. I met with him once, and showed him a vague, decent research proposal. I focused more on being charming than on the research, because this had been working well for me with the other professors I knew. Unfortunately (and fortunately!) C is more focused on the science. He told me he would think about it, then email me back in a week. He never emailed me. I emailed him. He didn’t respond. I emailed him. He didn’t respond. I despaired, decided I had ruined my career and destroyed my chances of succeeding in the field I love by making him dislike me and now having no advisor, and emailed him again. He didn’t respond. After six weeks of this I told a different professor what had happened, who told my C ignores most emails, even from other professors, and it’s really hard to interpret his lack of response. He recommended that I just show up at his office and try to talk to him again. I worked desperately hard, trying to create a proposal so good it would redeem my earlier failure and weird stalking in C’s eyes. I became completely obsessed, didn’t sleep, read every paper in my entire subfield, thought and talked it over for a week, thought of five original questions, of which three were “important,” wrote the proposal with every important point underlined and put in bold, and finally put on my most professional blazer and went to C’s office. When I found him and showed him my proposal, I was literally shaking. He agreed to be my adviser right away. He seemed kind of confused about the whole thing, and said he just forgot to answer my emails. Sigh.
I got the second adviser because I got the first one. He emailed his colleague Professor K recommending that K meet with me. Otherwise I would not have stood a chance of catching K’s attention, since he does not take early-stage students and does not teach at my school. I wanted a paying position as a research assistant in K’s lab, in addition to him being one of my official advisors, but K was expressing ambivalence about the idea. I basically wrote an extended research proposal/contract, stating exactly what I wanted to do, how I was going to do it, what I expected of him, and what I wanted in return. He agreed, and said he deeply admired my audacity, and that my display of confidence made him feel more confident about my ability, and that I was the sort of intense and serious person he wanted in his lab. This is one of the academically boldest things I have ever done, but I had a strong sense that he would appreciate that sort of behavior.
I write all this because I’m not really sure what made the difference. I certainly acted bolder than I usually do, and I’ve noticed that most of the good things I do follow bursts of very intense misery and feelings of insecurity that I channel into desperately hard work. I’m never surprised when I do well, though; the insecurity is this sort of instrumental self-imposed drama I use. I wish I could work desperately hard without such a seemingly mentally unhealthy process, but so far I haven’t found any better personal motivators than my intense fear, even dread, of failure and the desire to protect my sense of my own identity as a smart, successful person.
I think you should also consider whether this is a worthwhile use of your time and mental energy. Falling into and then waking up from a long-term coma is exceedingly rare, but making sure your goals are transmitted may be a relatively time-consuming and difficult endeavor. And, as others noted, those goals may end up being irrelevant to future-you and the future-world. Couldn’t those hours be better used working towards your goals now, or (for example) becoming a safer driver so that you don’t fall into a coma in the first place?
What is your intended audience? You said “high school students,” and to me this seems great for gifted high school students, but a few sentences seem unclear if directed at average students.
I think this essay is good but would be much improved by a few examples of each point you make, and an explanation of who Paul Graham is (if your audience is average high schoolers outside the Bay Area).
Your last point is also not well explained. Homeschooling is certainly not an option for most people. For highschoolers with only a year or two left, the transition certainly might not be worthwhile given the time they have left. Many of the social advantages (and, admittedly, disadvantages) are lost. I think you need to specify who might want to consider those alternatives, why they would, and how they could go about finding out more.
I think this ad makes LW and EA look cultish, because this ad sounds like hero worship and sexual innuendo. I was especially troubled to see this link on the EA Facebook page, where many potential/new EAs who don’t know who Bostrom is, have lower weirdness tolerance, and have still-forming understanding of effective altruism, could see it.
Conscientious and discreet… Able to keep flexible hours (some days a lot of work, others not much)...Has a good personality ‘fit’ with Bostrom… Willing to do some tasks that are not high-status… Willing to help Bostrom with both his professional and personal life (to free up his attention)...
I showed this to a few smart young people, the type EAs want to reach out to, and they said it sounded “sketchy” “unprofessional” and “kind of like prostitution.” Maybe it’s totally fine and even attractive for LW, but I think EA leaders trying to recruit really need to be more thoughtful about their language. I think a different description should have been written up for that forum.
At the very least, it’s very unconventional. Ads for personal assistants usually mention specific duties like “answering emails” and “preparing food,” not just all-purpose service, so that people know what they are getting into.
tl:dr This ad sounds sketchy to me, and I really wish it wasn’t linked on the EA Facebook group, where it can scare off new/potential EAs
Hi everyone. Just to note from the beginning of this comment, I’m a bit different from the typical LW demographic, so maybe this will help shed light on another way of coming to rationalism.
I was born into a mildly Jewish agnostic household, but when I was about 4, I became strongly drawn to Christianity. I didn’t know much about it, but I somehow heard about heaven and hell, and that was definitely what drew me in. I was terrified of the idea that people didn’t get what they deserved, that bad things happened to good people, that when people died they were really gone forever. When I asked my mother about concern she explained that life isn’t fair. But I knew that couldn’t be true. Because if it was, if there was no supernatural protection against evil and death, then of course everyone would be frantically working to make it better all the time. I knew there were kind, intelligent people in the world, and they weren’t doing this, so they must have a good reason, like that they didn’t need to for reasons I didn’t know about. I was very confused, and the idea that most people believed in heaven and hell, and it was “okay” that life wasn’t fair and we were all going to die because the afterlife was fair and lasted forever, made a great deal of sense to my 4-year-old self. I was quite relieved.
But when I learned more about the Christian afterlife, and realized you either got profoundly inexpressibly screwed forever or bliss forever, and which one you got depended more on where you were born and how much you followed the rules than anything else, I realized that was no more fair. Maybe less so, since the result would last forever. And, I thought, if Christians really believed that, why didn’t they go around trying to convert people 24/7? Were they psychopaths? They thought everyone’s eternal soul might be condemned eternal torture and they didn’t spend every waking moment eating, pooping, or prosthelytizing? Little-me tried to think about being tortured for an hour and not being almost done. And a day and a year and a hundred years and I realized it all didn’t make sense.
So I modified my belief to fit my moral code, making my own personal version of the afterlife a new life where everyone got exactly what they deserved. Which helped me rest easy for a short while. But I noticed that other people didn’t like my version of the afterlife as much. And they didn’t seem that interested in how unfair the world and their vision of the afterworld were so lacking in justice. I know I was a naive little kid, but I felt very alone, like I was the only person really trying to make sense of things. But the truth, that we die, sometimes young and sometimes horribly and sometimes after being treated like shit for our whole lives, was too terrible and strange for little-me to believe in for a while.
I remember the first time I heard about cryonics, when I was 7. I was staying up late with my father watching some scientist talk about some new cryoprotectant. It took about 5 seconds to convince me that cryonics was a good idea. I started crying and my father couldn’t understand why. I simply hadn’t realized there might be another option besides dying within my lifetime. But even this possibility disrupted my fair-afterlife fantasy. It didn’t seem to make sense to base all of my actions off of incredibly slim chance that everything would suddenly get fairer when someone died, especially if I was willing to abandon the belief when I learned I might not have to die. So I kept trying to find out something that didn’t depend on a frail, unknowable hope.
I think the disparity between what people professed to believe was true and what they acted like was true initially pulled me away from rationalism. I felt like there had to be some big simple explanation that I had somehow missed but made it all make sense. When I realized this wasn’t true, I became much more rigorous about examining my beliefs and the beliefs of others, to make sure everything I was learning wasn’t logically insane. I started informally studying psychology to try to understand the why people don’t all sign up for cryonics, and why Christians don’t spend all their time converting non-believers.
There were a few notable “aha!” moments.
One was that same night, at age 7, asking my father whether he had signed me up for cryonics, and hearing him say no, because he thought death was beautiful and lent meaning to life. I asked him whether, if every other parent had signed up their children, he still wouldn’t sign me and my little siblings up because death was “beautiful”, and hearing his voice crack as he struggled to lie to me with a straight face was one of those.
Learning about phrenology and angelology was another, because it confirmed my suspicions that just because lots of people did lots of work for many years in a respected field didn’t mean everything they were doing wasn’t wholly useless. I realized I needed a tool to make sure everything I did wasn’t useless. Rationality seemed to help with that.
Other moments included:
randomly picking up Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation at age 12, and thus learning about utilitarianism.
realizing that I could win arguments even when I knew I was wrong and the other person was right (because I didn’t want to lose my reputation as the local smart person), which meant I could probably win arguments against myself to protect myself from similar discomfort.
reading Watchmen and thinking about a scenario where (spoiler) the enemy turned out to at least maybe be right all along, and maybe (which contrasted, at least in my mind, with “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and the idea that utilitarianism was wrong in some ineffable way that could be proved through storytelling).
Since finding HPMOR and LessWrong, I’ve had many more, but I think the priming that came before was necessary, at least for me. A lot of the time, just hearing someone else say the ideas I’ve had all along, but felt weird/crazy/unwelcome for trying to articulate has been crucial.
Several things:
Title is vague. You say “love”, looks like you mostly mean early-stage romantic love, which is a small subset of love.
So then, the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you.
So, most non-rational people do this about everything, not just (or especially) about love, and I don’t think rational people particularly do this with love.
This article actually explores the brain chemicals involved in love, and suggests that the chemicals are similar to those that appear in OCD.
Chemicals don’t “appear in OCD.” As the article states, OCD is sometimes associated with low serotonin levels, as are many other mental disorders and things that aren’t mental disorders. The only behavioral pattern the article notes that they say resembles OCD is “attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one’s loved one” which is something that happens in almost all intense human relationships, including mother-infant ones, and also is not actually closely associated with OCD.
Also as the article states, romantic love often moves into a calmer, less obsessive state on its own, so worry about excessive obsessiveness may be unfounded.
The conclusion of this paragraph does not follow from the explanation:
Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes.
gut feelings+euphoria ≠ addiction.
Useful Personality Tests
Isn’t male-male homosexual sex illegal in Singapore? And I get the sense it’s generally quite conservative. Seems like a bad deal for a lot of rationalists.
In Silicon Valley. With a group of people who know about LessWrong but are dubious about its instrumental value.
I finished my thesis!