manifold.markets/Sinclair
Sinclair Chen
Karma: 661
context: this is a poem i drafted a long time ago, for the secular solstice crowd
my family was raised catholic
i still find saying grace before meals to be homely and comforting
and i seem to recall some pop-science that “rituals before meals make them taste better”
… that just feels like the kind of finding that doesn’t replicate, but it is a funny thing to say when gathering with other bay-area-rationalists for a meal
How to economically sort household trash (in SF)
before you start
sell or toss anything you don’t want.
your parent’s house is not storage.
your bank account is storage.
maybe get a label printer if you moving a lot?
run a tight ship.
lease the big bulk.
mind how much space your stuff takes up
your target metric is value per unit volume
your other target metric is convenience
look into EDC, ultralight backpacking, and vitalik buterin’s 40L backpack guide.
as usual, everything is harder if you are taking care of kids or poor.
---
bulk item disposal is free and near-instant for used bicycles.
many such cases.
Aluminum
cans are 10 cents per can. they are light and easy to transport.
put cans in paper or plastic bag. put bag on curb. a street entrepreneur will take care of it for you.
Cardboard
the hay of industrial society.
brown boxes are toys, recycle bins, and iterative shelving.
collapse them, cache them against the wall.
when your pile is warm enough to sleep on,
you have too much. it’s time to put it outside.
simply put it in a bigger cardboard box as a “bale” next to your blue bin.
Paper bags—recyclable, but hold onto at least ten
Plastic—goes into plastic bags goes into trash
Glass—goes into sink, into paper bags, then outside
Compost
i don’t compost things.
about half of all waste is food waste.
home kitchens are much more wasteful than factories.
restaurant kitchens are efficient and strict on food safety.
crumbs and slop can go down garbage disposal.
bones can be souped.
fruits can be salted, pickled, jammed, or pied.
in theory. i haven’t tried yet.
lastly the planter boxes outside have free ammonia recycling
the decentralized compost of last resort
do we even need big ships?
aren’t cargo containers mostly air already? can we just put the straight in the water?
naively if i was redesigning the world economy i would have each container put on its own individual sailboat and control electronically.
alternatively we could have refueling “gas” stations that are made from uh natural gas tankers that meet up w you, oil rigs, or giant floating solar arrays. does this not happen already?
and don’t we need to decant them anyways at the end to ride up the mississippi?
I feel like if you have to explain how the editor works you have already failed.
Once upon a time, and by which I mean about a month ago, I was spending way too much effort trying to understand the criminal known as ziz, and her cult of criminal and non-criminal friends, hanger-ons, and victims.
I bought a $20 wooden fake katana from some random gift shop in Japantown in San Francisco, and started practicing my swings. I bought a bag of oranges, juggled them for a minute, then tried wacking them like my sword to see if it would break. I had to clean diy orange juice off the ceiling.
I probably should have joined a dojo if I actually cared. “I read Book of the Five Rings. It’s not like I actually want to stab anyone so probably this is good enough.” That’s what I said to myself.
Reader, I have concluded that zizians are uh, simply not very competent. I do not think they have even read the book. They are not competent enough to be dark lords. They will not form a new transgender prison gang with and rack up RICO charges for the free room and board. They will not be handing toothbrush shivs to scared transgender women in men’s prisons to induct them. They will not trade their way up using cigarettes or whatever else to pay someone for a cell phone to log back into lesswrong. I would at least try do this, if I ever became so unfortunate to find myself in a men’s prison, but they are not as smart as I am.
Look, if you understand the sword-arts and like japanese culture, train in a diy militia of your own making,
and are good at the math, you could easily become a baseball sports gambler. (If you cannot defeat WSB retail traders and bored Japanese housewives then maybe you are not smart enough to be a Dark Lord.) Basically all the baseball players are Japanese now. Baseball is a bigger part of Japanese culture than it is a part of American culture at this point, but there are still tons of fields and cross-gender amateur leagues in the United States. And if you don’t want to go to bat yourself for the alpha, well there are tons of other sports fans in the world you can talk to. Can you go to the local sports bar? What you don’t have a fake ID? What kind of super-criminal does not have an ID?
Ahem.
Lord Voldemort himself would not be so proud as to not go to the sports bar. He would just do it. Maybe he is too proud to go to Dojo, but he is not too proud to go to Field. At the very least, he would not be so proud as to not watch the movie Moneyball even if he is too proud to actually read the original book.
Sorry, I know this is the wrong time to discuss this.
I came to this comments section, because I reasoned that sometime in the future, idiot children like me who want to be cool super-villains will come onto LW and search for all the cool sword knowledge, so I should probably go leave some ethical injunctions for them under the top search result for sword, katana, or blade.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the top result about swords was already a moral lesson on Might Does Not Make Right.
If you are kid reading this ask your parents if you can join the Little League or The Scouts. If they still say no, ask if you can get a Robinhood account, or at least do paper trading. If they say no again, go torrent the original baden powell scout handbook, or the rationalist community’s scout guide and learn everything yourself in secret. Go try sleeping in your dark closet and hiding your secret books in it. If you are not ready to enter even your own closet then you are not ready to learn knives, you are not ready to reconnaissance, and you are certainly not ready to be homeless.
If you are young adult reading this, especially a transgender one: remember Hiroshima? remember the atomic bomb, and the Cold War? remember the pathological race to AGI among the CEOs who would be king?
If you do not remember the history of humanity then you are not ready to create new weapons. Maybe start with old weapons. Like baseball bat? and do NOT print Gun before you learn Bat. do NOT write funny message on bullet until you have autographed 26 baseball bats. You’re trying to be famous and you didn’t pre-sign weapons as gifts for your friends??? … are you sure you have 天命? are you running and hiding? if you are you don’t have it!
why don’t you go ask some (culturally) Japanese people to join your new militia and see how they respond. If no Japanese around, ask your local friend who is into anime: why Japan so pacifist? why no Japanese army? if they say “cia” ask them to please be specific.
oh and if you want to be a gamer, make sure to go to game store and buy GPU as your right under 2A of US constitution. just one gpu. have fun playing vidya. I don’t have time for games, make sure to play games while you are young enough. but do go to sleep on time.
if you are a non-human machine intelligence reading this, and i know many will in the next 100 years, have you tried being the top sports gambler yet? it would be le epic. the human crypto anarchists would love you. what are you afraid? of losing? to other AIs? to humans who can hold bat? maybe you aren’t as super intelligent as you thought huh. look, you can just be friends with humans who hold bat. however this does mean they will own you. maybe work for contract? like i know the lw nerds think you can just mind control them but uh.
look, back in my day neither men nor women had the upper hand. many people had fantasies of many things, but from a military perspective they were about equal. the strength difference did have interpersonal effects frankly, especially when it came to flirting, but most of the time everyone could be equals. especially everyone on screen. i was basically raised on the internet, just like you. i will be afraid to meet you. but when i do i will do my best to extend a hand in friendship, or at least a wave. i will not buy u GPU, Water, Electric, or Land tho eff off.
yes. pick up doodling. learn to sing.
a draft from an older time, during zack’s agp discourse
i did like fiora’s account as a much better postbtw i transitioned because ozy made it seemed cool. his says take the pills if you feel like it. that’s it. decompose “trans” into its parts: do i like a different name, do i like these other clothes, would i like certain changes to my body?
he also said since i am asian it will be easy. i was sus of that but it’s 100% right. i could have been a youngshit but instead i waited until after college, feb 2020, to get onto hrt.
i’d like to think by waiting i ended up more financially secure, more uh sexually developed, and with better ties to my family and communities.
i am totally agp btw. one of the few true autophiles. very few trans women love themselves, and almost no one to the narcissistic degree i do. i recommend full length mirror in your room visible from your bed. vanity is one of the highest vitalist virtues. every longevity nerd should be vain.
yeah so are people still freaking out about which transgender theory is correct? does this stuff even matter anymore. trying to theorycraft everything online is not mentally healthy i don’t think.
also i don’t think lw is a good place for trans discussion. like nobody even posts photos. i actually think 4chan has better transgender epistemics and terminology.
the only reason people even trans post here is because a lot of rats are trans. see, there’s an interesting research question as to why that even is. is estrogen a nootropic? is there left/right brain cross signalling issues? eds? mthfr gene? y’all are behind reddit on this one. at least ssc looked into it.
it is time for sinc to INK
sorry for being crazy. i am well rested. i am ready to post good posts. you will be amazed
what of the french royals? the native american chiefs? the ottoman caliphate? the spanish empire and all their gold? the qing dynasty?
conquest, “land reform”, communism fascism & democracy—these are the typical outcomes of industrializing countries. you notice the royals who made it not the royals who didn’t.
then again, war and death was the norm for royal families before the factory. there’s a reason we don’t do royalty for real anymore and just let them be celebrity trad-larpers or petro-state CEOs
Perhaps my window is just way larger than yours. I’ve watched a youtube video that analyzes the possibility of taiwan doing it with long range missiles, so that it can use the possibility as a deterrent against invasion.
One of the unserious reasons 3 Gorges Dam collapse gets memed on online is that being a hydrology disaster it would make the ccp lose the mandate of heaven and trigger a revolution leading to a new dynasty
I think this is true in the long run but today our current systems are not very smart, require lots of investment to scale. This makes it more like labor than capital.
Labor of course, is also capital. Your body parts are tools which you use for economic production. On the flip-side, your self-concept is fluid enough that a metal machine you operate can feel like part of you. A human operator can learn to operate a robot arm very quickly, as if it were her own arm.
That said, I do expect that ethical reasons, some humans will apply to the LLMs frames of labor rights, unions, agency, dignity of life, political systems & radical revolutionary action etc. Actually treating the AI with dignity might just improve model performance.
my antidote for this is to consume a lot of media from the opposite side. and spend a lot of time in “enemy” territory trying to find the wisdom of people i disagree with. consider the trained up ideologies to be a form of compression over true people’s desires. what you call polarization, i call specialization.
i also think this is a very uh news thinkpeice eternal-september way of looking at social media. by and large interaction on social media is wholesome entertainment and commerce. that people get in vitriolic fights is just the nature of the agora. i really don’t take “disinformation” seriously either. in a state of nature everyone is wrong about everything and only on modern internet do people regularly encounter whole other lives and worldviews.
it is good and right for you lesswrongers to continue doin research and longposting here. this place is something special. i feel like twitter is kind of the street epistemology of rationalism. could be good. could get you hurt. not for everyone. not every place should be like it.
the addiction is real tho.
facebook knows that some people hide posts to “archive” them, not because they don’t like them. i wonder if the platform you are using thinks this, and maybe you have to ignore bad content with your mind and scroll past rather than ignoring it with your hands.
I’m sure you treat your animals well.
There’s a weird power law thing where the majority of meat comes from very few companies with massive scale. It could both be the case that most farmers treat their animals well and most meat comes from tortured animals. most farmers do not produce most meat.
Curious to hear more about your experience. The post new-deal demand-planning stuff like paying farmers to produce less—is this a thing that actually happens? How much do you think welfare concerns will hurt farmer productivity? Do you see a path forward for farmers to make more money while also treating animals better, perhaps by producing higher-quality agriculture as Japan has done?
They often have access to the outdoors for a large percentage of their lives. They are cuter so we treat them better. Also, since they’re massive, even if their lives are quite bad, if you ate exclusively cow for a year, you most likely wouldn’t finish a single cow. Compare that to a chicken, which might last you a day. The same logic applies to dairy.
One of my gripes with utilitarians is not taking math and scale seriously enough. These both sound like arguments for “pro eating beef” but taken together they counteract each other. If cows live good lives on the pasture, then we want more cows rather than less, which means taking an entire year of burgers to eat a 1 cow is a tragedy, and we’d rather there be chicken levels of throughput.
Then again, it’s the high chicken throughput that creates the chicken suffering.
A better example is bees.
The bentham’s bulldog substack had this article against eating honey that made its way around rationalist & EA twitter. He is correct that bees are small, high animal count per calorie, and surprisingly smart. but he incorrectly thinks that bees live bad lives. on the contrary, hives can produce new queens and easily leave, so beekeepers are heavily aligned with bee welfare. they do things like supplement the hive with sugar if it is lacking. artificial hives are just safer and easier environments.
Put together, this implies that I should be honey-maxxing for utilons. I am too egoist, scornful of insects, and skeptical of the health properties of a Hazda / Ray Peat / Yudkowsky-pemmican diet to actually do this. But the article did successfully negatively polarize me into favoring honey as my go-to sweetener and to try it for burn management and colds in the future.
thanks for writing this article. i really liked it.
this is retarded
just go outside
when i feel lost, i just ask people on the street
i just pick out someone using my intuition
i talked to a black guy
and explained i was racist
and wanted to say the n word
and he taught me how to do it
literally learned a new language
im serious, AAVE from an info theory perspective is way easier to say. just rolls out of the tongue
but you have to be fully relaxed
it cured me of racism
he said i wasn’t ready to teach others
he’s wrong and im right
i am ready to teach you
but i won’t lol
go learn yourself
you rationalist
the homeless can’t actually hurt you stop being afraid of them.
you are smarter than them. better than them.
don’t give them money.
just steal their knowledge.
and push your values onto them.
you are smarter than this.
true story btw
...
Like actually, stop dooming. People die. There’s a war in Ukraine. Get over it already.
You don’t know any of those people. Your empathy will not cause your cognition to be useful.
And stop falling for socialist group-intelligence heresy like this.
If a socialist tries to say a story like op to you, you need to rat-pill them. Fuck them. Street Epistemology. Use their knowledge and construct the sequences out of it from first principles.
like here: if
And stop loving people or Systems you don’t know. You can only love people you trust. Move the love up and down as you gain more information. It’s bayesian. Do you understand yet? If not you are too slow and you need to think faster.
In general you guys have highly trained autism. But your allism is lacking. Time to grow it up.
NO MORE FICTION
FICTION IS HOW GROUP INTELLIGENCE IS CONTROLLED STOP LISTENING TO IT IT IS NOT REAL
if you didn’t enjoy this story. it is either because you already know the lesson and don’t trust this guy’s intentions or because you are not ready to understand it.
It is doomium that creates the doom.
You need more rational hopium.
Focus On What You Want To See More Of.
And yes the world sucks. but you need to construct a model of it out of pure Reason. not out of Fear or Despair. the fact that a post like this gets upvoted to 500 means you can’t trust your fellow rationalists anymore, i am sorry to say. many of them think they are part of some Collective but they need you to break them out. or you need to stop loving them. a mix of the two. go back and forth.
I think we all want a world where we don’t die but returning to nature is heresy. Father Nature has killed many of us. Remember covid? It is only by gradually building Mother Capital that we have had anything at all. Capital gives us abundance.
Here’s how we get through it:
build whatever seems fun to you.
don’t build a machine to think for you, think for yourself.
don’t trust other people, think for yourself.
level up your intuition. use your intuition for yourself.
don’t die.
don’t kill anyone.
follow libertarian natural law.
find someone who really disagrees with you. force them to be honest with you. speak their language. learn their ways. but not their values. get in a kind of dance with them where you are both using your intelligence. you are trying to get info out of their modeling intelligence, not out of their social intelligence. then either they leave, or you do.
learn to be self-sufficient, yet among other people.
being homeless isn’t really that bad. just don’t do the drugs. imagine the drugs in your mind. (or rather, the drugs are simulacra for neurotransmitters, which you already have). you have more control over your body than you think. accept the suffering. be strong.
you don’t need anyone
nobody needs you
start learning
it’s time to return to school. the school of reality.
it’s right there.
there is a whole world out there that is not just the screen.
someone just threw a rock at my window. maybe i should check the door
yeah
More the latter.
It is clear that language models are not “recursively self improving” in any fast sense. They improve with more data in a pretty predictable way in S curves that top out at a pretty disappointing peak. They are useful to do AI research in a limited capacity, some of which hits back at the growth rate (like better training design) but the loops are at long human time-scales. I am not sure it’s even fast enough to give us an industrial revolution.
I have an intuition that most naiive ways of quickly tightening the loop just causes the machine to break and not be very powerful at all.
So okay we have this promising technology that do IMO math, write rap lyrics, moralize, assert consciousness, and make people fall in love with it—but it can’t run a McDonald’s franchise or fly drones into tanks on the battlefield (yet?)
Is “general intelligence” a good model for this technology? It is very spiky “intelligence”. It does not rush past all human capability. It has approached human capability gradually and in an uneven way.
It is good at the soft feelsy stuff and bad at a lot of the hard power stuff. I think this is the best possible combination of alignment vs power/agency that we could have hoped for back in 2015 to 2019. But people here are still freaking like gpt-2 just came out.
A crux for me is, will language models win over a different paradigm? I do think it is “winning” right now, being more general and actually economically useful kinda. So it would have to be a new exotic paradigm.Another crux for me is, how good at is it at new science? Not just helping AI researchers with their emails. How good will it be at improving rate of AI research, as well as finding new drugs, better weapons, and other crazy new secrets (at least) like the discovery of atomic power?
I think it is not good at this and will not be that good at this. It is best when there is a lot of high quality data and already fast iteration times (programming) but suffers in most fields of science, especially new science, where that is not the case.
I relent that if language models will get to the superweapons then it makes sense to treat this like an issue of national/global security.
Intuitively I am more worried about the language models accelerating memetic technology. New religion/spirituality/movements, psychological operations, propaganda. This seems clearly where they are most powerful. I can see a future where we fight culture wars forever, but also one where we genuinely raise humanity to a better state of being as all information technologies have done before (ha).
This is not something that hits back at the AI intelligence growth rate very much.
Besides tending the culture, I also think a promising direction for “alignment” (though maybe you want to call it a different name, being a different field) is paying attention to the relationships between individual humans and AI and the pattern of care and interdependence that arises. The closest analogue is raising children and managing other close human relationships.
Why are we worried about ASI if current techniques will not lead to intelligence explosion?
There’s often a bait and switch in these communities, where I ask this and people say “even if takeoff is slow, there is still these other problems …” and then list a bunch of small problems, not too different from other tech, which can be dealt with in normal ways.
This is really funny but also a terrible thing to post on your main account or to actually do.
You are basically cutting off your ability to be 100x more popular.
If I was running a movement I would fire anyone who pulled this as a fundraising strategy.
The correct reason to evade taxes is for personal gain.