ShardPhoenix

• ShardPhoenix 29 Jan 2020 6:08 UTC

  2 points

  on: As­sor­ta­tive Mat­ing And Autism

  Thanks. I was re­cently wor­ry­ing a bit about this spe­cific is­sue, and this is re­as­sur­ing.

• ShardPhoenix 5 Aug 2019 10:56 UTC

  10 points

  on: Can we re­ally pre­vent all warm­ing for less than 10B$ with the mostly side-effect free geo­eng­ineer­ing tech­nique of Marine Cloud Bright­en­ing?

  (Even if cloud bright­en­ing is the ul­ti­mate solu­tion to warm­ing, we still need to ad­dress ocean acid­ifi­ca­tion and car­bon se­ques­tra­tion, and I’m not aware of any ideal solu­tion to those prob­lems yet, but two weeks ago I wasn’t aware of cloud bright­en­ing, so for all I know the prob­lem isn’t a lack of in­vest­ment, might just be a lack of policy dis­cus­sion.)

  
  

  There is also http://​​pro­jectvesta.org which claims that it is pos­si­ble to re­move CO2 from the ocean and at­mo­sphere via oliv­ine weath­er­ing rea­son­ably cheaply.

Open AI: Can we rule out near-term AGI?

• ShardPhoenix 5 Nov 2018 9:36 UTC

  17 points

  on: No Really, Why Aren’t Ra­tion­al­ists Win­ning?

  The win­ningest ra­tio­nal­ist I know of is Do­minic Cum­mings, who was the lead strate­gist be­hind the Brexit pro-leave move­ment. While the ma­jor­ity of LWers may not agree with his goals, he did seem to be effec­tive, and he fre­quently makes refer­ences to ra­tio­nal­ist con­cepts (in­clud­ing IIRC some refer­ences to the work of Eliezer Yud­kowsky) on his blog: https://​​do­minic­cum­mings.com/​​

Open AI co-founder on AGI

• ShardPhoenix 14 Sep 2018 10:01 UTC

  2 points

  on: What To Do If Nu­clear War Seems Imminent

  NZ is such a cliche for nu­clear es­cape by now that I won­der if it might be tar­geted in a full-on nu­clear war just to get the es­cap­ing rich west­ern­ers.

• ShardPhoenix 23 Jul 2018 10:42 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lbThingrb’s comment on: Who Wants The Job?

  > I’ve never heard of any­one do­ing this di­rectly. Has any­one else?

  There’ s a Brazilian job web­site that re­quires users to pay, though I think it’s on a sub­scrip­tion ba­sis.

Melbourne So­cial Meetup July

• ShardPhoenix 5 May 2018 14:02 UTC

  12 points

  on: Dun­can Sa­bien: “In Defense of Punch Bug”

  I should note, for my read­ers in less sen­si­tive and ex­plicit cul­tures: I think that the fact that Har­ley was able to sur­face and ar­tic­u­late these be­liefs is a good thing, on bal­ance.

  Really? Th­ese anec­dotes sound re­ally awful and ex­haust­ing to me. They’re go­ing out of their way to start sta­tus-threat­en­ing con­flicts over minor in­con­ve­niences.

  edit: Read­ing fur­ther it seems OP es­sen­tially agrees that this be­havi­our is un­healthy.

• ShardPhoenix 19 Apr 2018 10:01 UTC

  4 points

  on: Good News for Immunostimulants

  is about to pre­sent its re­sults from two tri­als.

  Might have been bet­ter to wait for the re­sult?

• ShardPhoenix 31 Mar 2018 5:46 UTC

  12 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ist Lent is over

  I was semi-ab­stain­ing from Red­dit (out­side work) and Twit­ter (al­to­gether). I didn’t miss Twit­ter much at all. I did end up go­ing on Red­dit a bit for spe­cific hobby/​game-re­lated things, but I mostly man­aged to avoid poli­tics, memes, and other ad­dic­tive things. Over­all I think it was some­what helpful in terms of avoid­ing stuff that dis­tracted me from my real prob­lems via anx­ious-con­sump­tion, and I had fewer bouts of poli­ti­cal anger. Not sure how I’ll take it mov­ing for­ward—I’ll prob­a­bly stay off Twit­ter at least. Will have to think about how I want to ap­proach Red­dit.

• ShardPhoenix 5 Mar 2018 9:19 UTC

  3 points

  on: God Help Us, Let’s Try To Un­der­stand Fris­ton On Free Energy

  Read­ing this I was won­der­ing when Scott sud­denly got way more con­fi­dent with math. Turns out the quotes are messed up in this ver­sion. Only the first para­graph of each long block-quote is quoted prop­erly.

• ShardPhoenix 24 Feb 2018 23:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Links with underscores

  Thanks, I didn’t know that.

• ShardPhoenix 24 Feb 2018 13:30 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: PeterBorah’s comment on: Mythic Mode

  Med­i­ta­tions on Moloch was cre­ative and effec­tive but ul­ti­mately “just” a restate­ment of well-known game the­ory. This post is a lot more spec­u­la­tive and anec­do­tal.

• ShardPhoenix 24 Feb 2018 13:23 UTC

  29 points

  in reply to: PeterBorah’s comment on: Mythic Mode

  Two differ­ent pos­si­ble failure modes (if con­tin­u­ing far enough down this path) are along the lines of try­ing to cure one’s can­cer with magic in­stead of medicine, and/​or fatal­ism/​”in­shal­lah”.

  A milder pos­si­ble failure case is sim­ply spend­ing too much time on this stuff, if it feels fun and effec­tive even when isn’t work­ing.

  (I didn’t down­vote you by the way)

Links with underscores

• ShardPhoenix 24 Feb 2018 11:24 UTC

  33 points

  on: Mythic Mode

  I’m pretty skep­ti­cal of your nar­ra­tive around fly­ing to NY to see the Bud­dhists. It sounds a bit too much like “The Se­cret” and other forms of pop­u­lar wish­ful think­ing to me. I un­der­stand that you’re try­ing to sand­box this rea­son­ing to “mythic mode”, but the way you write about it in this post (while pre­sum­ably not in mythic mode) makes it seem like the sand­box might be a bit leaky.

• ShardPhoenix 17 Feb 2018 17:28 UTC

  6 points

  on: Kenshō

  I’m a very oc­ca­sional med­i­ta­tor but I think I mostly get what you mean by Look­ing. But it’s 4am and I’m com­ment­ing more to re­port that some­thing weird hap­pened as re­sult of this post. I read this ear­lier to­day, then later via Scott’s re­view read this page about A&P events: http://​​in­te­grated­daniel.info/​​the-aris­ing-and-pass­ing-away/​​

  Then tonight in bed I started hav­ing some strange sen­sa­tions. I started see­ing some of those vibra­tions, maybe. This part was only vi­sual and could have been imag­i­nary. Then I started get­ting a strong sense of “in­ad­e­quate­ness” of all sen­sa­tion which was quite dis­turb­ing. Again I might be been trick­ing my­self some­how—though it kept go­ing even when I was up and out of bed. This went on and off for a while. Then when I was in a hypno­gogic state (and see­ing vibra­tions), I started to ex­pe­rience strong flow of “en­ergy”* flow­ing up my up­per spine into the back of my head, while my up­per body was tense and shak­ing, which lasted a few sec­onds. Un­like the pre­vi­ous stuff this was an un­de­ni­ably real thing. Dur­ing this time the vi­sual that popped into my head was some­thing like a we­b­comic fea­tur­ing crudely drawn an­thro­po­mor­phic toast­ers(!) with no leg­ible di­alogue, which gave the whole thing an al­most com­i­cal sense of un-profun­dity. The sen­sa­tion was per­haps some­what en­joy­able but not ex­actly eu­phoric or any­thing. This seems like the ba­sic phys­iolog­i­cal de­scrip­tion of an “A&P” event, but as men­tioned, no ac­com­pa­ny­ing eu­pho­ria or sense of un­der­stand­ing the uni­verse or what­ever.

  Also, while I don’t re­call hav­ing had this hap­pen be­fore, the “A&P” bit didn’t seem en­tirely un­fa­mil­iar and I wouldn’t be shocked to learn I’d ex­pe­rienced some­thing similar in child­hood. But I wouldn’t be sur­prised if not ei­ther.

  Any­way I’m a lit­tle dis­turbed by this whole course of events (feels like I was some­how hyp­no­tized into hav­ing strong men­tal sen­sa­tions) and hope there won’t be any bad out­comes. Ad­vice wel­come.

  * That’s a vague way to de­scribe it but it wasn’t re­ally like burn­ing or elec­tric­ity or any­thing, just some sort of “rush” of… some­thing.

• ShardPhoenix 15 Feb 2018 8:33 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Priya Ghose’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ist Lent

  Go­ing to do the same.

  edit: Might still look at Red­dit on my phone at work some­times when tak­ing a break, but not at home.

• ShardPhoenix 1 Feb 2018 13:35 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Ar­bital postmortem

  When I con­tributed a lit­tle in the early days I think it was driven by de­sire to pro­mote the things I was in­ter­ested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for his­to­ri­ans etc writ­ing the more se­ri­ous ar­ti­cles. It helped that stan­dards for things like NPOV and cita­tions were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the pro­ject would have got­ten far if ev­ery­thing had to be cited up the wa­zoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipe­dia is es­tab­lished as be­ing im­por­tant peo­ple are will­ing to put a bit more work in).

  Although I’m not autis­tic as such I do sus­pect there’s a con­nec­tion be­tween the above and the stereo­typ­i­cal autis­tic de­sire to ex­ces­sively talk about one’s topic of ob­ses­sive in­ter­est.