manifold.markets/Sinclair
Sinclair Chen
Karma: 542
I’ve also concluded that in-love epistemics are terrible from my own research. For instance, in this n=71 study where college students write about a time they’ve rejected a romantic confession and a time they were rejected:
- suitors report that rejectors are mysterious, but rejectors do not report being mysterious
- suitors severely overestimate probability of being liked back
- suitors report that rejections are very unclear, and while suitors report the same, it is to a much lesser degree/frequency.
I’ve also been overconfident of compatibility and of mutual affection in my own life (n=1)
However, I think there’s something to be said for having something (someone?) to protect.
Eliezer mentions in Inadequate Equillibria using extremely bright lights to solve his partner’s Seasonal Affective Disorder—which was not medical consensus, and only after Eliezer’s experiment are more “official” trials for this intervention being tested.
Or in my case, I was so heartbroken over a bad ex that I researched romance science, learned about the similarity between limerance and OCD, and tried a supplement that cured my heartbreak. I wouldn’t normally try new drugs nor browse google scholar, but I was really motivated.
I hard disagree with your point about the fedora
My true rejection is that we shouldn’t be obsessing over people’s appearances and self-expression, we shouldn’t be asking people to be less than themselves. This is not truth-seeking. It gives off the vibe of fakeness and cults and of your mom telling you not to go out dressed like that.
My more principled rejections
- It overly focuses signalling on what some people on the internet care about over what the average american / person in political power / AI researcher cares about.
- I’m suspect yudkowsky is aware that the stereotypes of the fedora, and wears it anyways, perhaps to reclaim it as a celebration of smartness, perhaps to countersignal that he doesn’t care what the sneer-clubbers think, perhaps to ‘teach in a clown suit’.
- You don’t win the meme war by doing the conventional media stuff good enough. You have to do something out of the distribution, and perhaps “low status” (to some). The Kardashians pioneered a new form of tv. Mr Beast studied a lot and pioneered a new form of media business. I should write a longer post on this. In any case, let’s keep EA and rationality weird, it’s one of the few edges we have.
Seems like a lot of the asserted “failure to cut reality at its joints” is about trans people before they have started transitioning or before they pass.
I nominate the term “aspiring woman” for people who are biologically male, perceived as men, but who desire to be perceived as women. (That’s what I used to call myself, but people were confused why I didn’t just call myself a woman, so instead I resorted to various long winded explanations, and then various inaccurate nonbinary labels that required a tumblr account or university education to understand, and people were still confused, and then I gave up and just identified as a woman.)
Much like “aspiring rationalist” the term is technically correct while still vibes-implying that you are sorta the thing you aspire to but sorta not, or not yet at least.
View and bet in Manifold prediction markets on Lesswrong
lol no to the former
A list of things that “everyone knows you should do” that I have gained value from NOT doing:
- health things recommended by “experts” that few people do and are therefore not lindy
- drink lots of water—diminishing marginal returns. if you have to get to pee at night you may be drinking too much
- sunglasses—outdoor light improves your eyesight and makes you more alert.
- diet stuff. eating a lot of vegetables, eating no vegetables, cutting salt, cutting fat, cutting carbs—nutrition is not solved, your body is a complex system, and your body is not like other bodies for reasons no one really knows.
- avoid fast food
- drink red wine
- don’t waste food
- avoid nicotine
- buy a car
- get a mortgage for a house
- save lots of money in a retirement account and buy index funds
- shower daily
- use shampoo
- wear shoes
- walk
- sleep under a blanket
I think Metaculus’s level of verbosity in resolution criteria is bad in that it makes questions longer to write and longer to understand (because it takes longer to read and because its more complex). Part of the goal of Manifold is to remove trivial inconveniences so that people actually forecast at all, and so that we get markets on literally everything.
I think the synthesis here is to have a subset of high quality markets (clear resolution criteria, clear meta-resolution norms) but still have a fat tail of medium-quality questions.
this suggests also a category for posts that could have lost you good money in hindsight
wheras yudkowsky called rationality as a perfect dance, where you steps land exactly right, like a marching band, or like performing a light and airy piano piece perfectly via long hours of arduous concentration to iron out all the mistakes -
and some promote a more frivolous and fun dance, playing with ideas with humor and letting your mind stretch with imagine, letting your butterflies fly -
perhaps there is something to the synthesis, to a frenetic, awkward, and janky dance. knees scraping against the world you weren’t ready for. excited, ebullient, manic discovery. the crazy thoughts at 2am. the gold in the garbage. climbing trees. It is not actually more “nice” than a cool logical thought, and it is not actually more easy.
Do not be afraid of crushing your own butterflies, stronger ones will take its place!
[Question] Anki setup best practices?
[Question] Prediction markets are consistently underconfident. Why?
Sometimes when one of my LW comments gets a lot of upvotes, I feel an urge that it’s too high relative to how much I believe it and I need to “short” it
why should I ever write longform with the aim of getting to the top of LW, as opposed to the top of Hacker News? similar audiences, but HN is bigger.
I don’t cite. I don’t research.
I have nothing to say about AI.
my friends are on here … but that’s outclassed by discord and twitter.
people here speak in my local dialect … but that trains bad habits.
it helps LW itself … but if im going for impact surely large reach is the way to go?
I guess LW is uniquely about the meta stuff. Thoughts on how to think better. but I’m suspicious of meta.
I’m a trans woman, and am probably the most autogynephilic among the 7? trans women I’ve slept with. As a highschooler (2013?) I started furiously masturbating while imagining myself in the body of a female classmate, and then I had a dream where I was a girl. I woke up in excitement and instantly formed the hypothesis that I was trans. I wasn’t sure, but the thing to do with a hypothesis is to test it quickly and cheaply. So in the morning, I immediately asked my mom to take me to the mall so I could try crossdressing. She didn’t take it well. I didn’t end up taking HRT until 2020. I did grow my hair out and spent a lot of college in this in-between land of publicly dressing like a woman and not entirely passing.
Throughout this I was kinda agnostic about Blanchard and the “trans as kink” narrative. It explained some of my experiences but not all. Mostly I just told myself it wasn’t decision relevant—I didn’t need to be a “real” “girl” to wear women’s clothing or take hormones. Whether I asked people to call me by a different name, or a different pronoun, or which bathroom I used—I would just decide based on my local incentives, keeping in mind what would be better for me, and just iterate. Society didn’t always give me what I wanted—I was kicked out of a religious youth group in college—and though I kinda did think of myself as a victim I no longer do. It’s their right to freedom of association.
Fun fact: according to the top comment in this ask science thread, widespread window-screen installation in the US was done for the sake of malaria eradication, to slow the spread by preventing mosquitos from getting to bed-ridden people infected by the virus. This is also how bed nets work. I have not checked this at all but it sounds true.
Ways I’ve followed math off a cliff
In my first real job search, I told myself I about a month to find a job. Then, after a bit over a week I just decided to go with the best offer I had. I justified this as the solution to optimal stopping problem, to pick the best option after 1/e time has passed. The job was fine, but the reasoning was wrong—the secretary problem assumes you know no info other than which candidate is better. Instead, I should’ve put a price on features I wanted from a job (mentorship, ability to wear a lot of hats and learn lots of things) and judged each job within what I thought was the distribution.
Notably: my next job didn’t pay very well and I stayed there too long after I’d given up hope in the product. I think I was following a pattern of following a path of low resistance both for the first and second jobs.
I was reading up on crypto a couple years ago and saw what I thought was an amazing opportunity. It was a rebasing dao on the avalanche chain, called Wonderland. I looked into the returns, and guessed how long it would keep up, and put that probability and return rate into a Kelly calculator.
Someone at a LW meetup: “hmm I don’t think Kelly is the right model for this...” but I didn’t listen.
I did eventually cut my losses after only losing ~$20,000, and some further reasoning that the whitepaper didn’t really make sense.
I disagree strongly and think we should accelerate almost all forms of scientific progress and inquiry, even when it might find truths that are politically inconvenient. For all the parochial reasons why progress and truth are good (better models of the world, higher standards of living, more slack, all via better tech, like better medicine, even when not explicitly searching for it...). And for those of us who believe the world is in peril, all the more reason to take on risk.
Also it is bad game-theory to give into threats, including hypothetical future threats. Respectability politics saves oppressors from having to do the work of oppressing and instead outsources it onto the oppressed group. This makes it cheaper to oppress trans people.
Also am skeptical of the strategy. If trans people don’t do the science, then cis people will. Unless trans people pressure our cis allies not to, in which case the haters will do the science or make stuff up, which I think is worse.
Another lesson is doing hard things sometimes requires doing things that bend the rules or causes people to disapprove of you. In my personal experience, lesswrongers seem to worry about stuff a bit more than average, and I think the average person worries about stuff much more than is optimal.
I think you overstate the badness of the fedora stereotype (multiplied how many people have that association, like the integral of vibes over all audience). I would disapprove of a notable Rationalist carelessly going onto a podcast wearing a flag of the soviet union, or a shirt that says “all lives matter”.
And I think you understate the memetic benefits of playing into the fedora meme. Culture is a subtle, complicated thing, where “Liquid Death” is a popular fizzy water company valued at $700 million, because it signals something bad and is therefore socially acceptable to drink it at rock concerts and bars. And when it comes to personal clothing, it’s also a matter of individual taste—being cool does partly come from optimizing for what everyone else likes, but also from being unique and genuine and signalling that you don’t care what everyone else thinks.
But also I think it doesn’t matter that much? Should 80,000 hours write an article on being a makeup artist or costume designer? Is personal visual aesthetics the constraint on winning at outreach/policy? That world sounds kind of bizarre and fun, and I think even in that world we should try to seem real. But we aren’t there (yet?) so we can simply be real instead of trying to be real. Let people be their full selves and make their own fashion choices.
okay the unhinged rant I actually wanted to respond with is:
- this post is tooo looong
- I think you’re crazy to not update on evidence sooner, you blame rationality but you should instead focus on how you could’ve done better
- yeah ok maybe I got lucky by being born later, but you read Thing of Things just like I did and you read way more stuff.
- like you, as a kid I thought gender is fake, it’s like a costume, or a mass hallucination. now as a wise adult I realize … it’s only like 80% fake. but it’s still plenty fake.
- it’s my right to ask to be in female spaces and their right to say no
- unless asking is expensive or not possible in which case I just do whatever I want and hope to get away with it, because society needs more doers. despite having boobs, sometimes I’ll use male restrooms if I think I can do it fast enough because urinals are actually better technology and lines on women’s restrooms are longer.
- it’s your right to “misgender” people and their right to uninvite you to things if it hurts their feelings
- sure, I guess a lot of my personality traits are more man-like. ambition, high libido. idk why cis girls are comfortable around me, I think they are wrong. maybe this is being an “AGP male” or maybe it is being a “nonbinary person that presents mostly female.”
- which definition is better? that is a political, aesthetic, cultural question.
- my preferred aesthetics/culture focus on the morphological freedom the most, is progress-ive, accelerationist, pro-technology, pro-freedom. I think it says that the optimal language has no gendered pronouns, titles, and that gendered nouns should be longer than their genderless counterparts; and if speaking in a suboptimal language just say whatever will actually be understood; whatever creates truth in the audience’s heads.
- but the actual answer to political/cultural/questions is usually idk it’s a matter of taste do whatever it doesn’t matter.
Don’t focus on being opposed to rationalist culture or woke culture. Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence. Focus on being the best, and helping other people be the best. I liked the one sentence in your post about how the narrative should be about maximizing gender euphoria and minimizing gender dysphoria, and I particularly disagreed the parts about reactionaries being right and whig history being wrong. I want to hype up the progress-ive, accelerationist, pro-technology, pro-freedom political view that the more people can be the kinds of people they want to be, the better. The rest is just tradeoffs and distractions. Parts of your post sound like they agree with that, and I think focusing on that part the most is what will make you happier and the world better.