stavros

An Effec­tive Grab Bag

Up­com­ing heat­wave: advice

• stavros 3 Apr 2022 15:48 UTC

  16 points

  on: 20 Modern Heresies

  This was wonderful; the post that finally got me to create an account here. I got quite a few sensible chuckles and a few hearty laughs out of your list. I think we’ve been reading similar books recently (Graeber’s Dawn of Everything? :) )
  
  My contribution is to remind the participants that a somewhat recurring theme (something of an original in western philosophy—i.e. Socrates) in history is of wise people enjoying themselves too much and getting murdered by the people who’d grown increasingly scared/​estranged/​horrified by them.
  
  Heretical thinking is fun, but in the real world there are people who would harm you for exposing them to it.
  Practice safe heresy kids :)

• stavros 6 Feb 2024 0:44 UTC

  15 points

  3

  on: Notic­ing Panic

  Hmmm, where to start. Something of a mishmash of thought here.

  Actually a manager, not yet clear if I’m particularly successful at it. I certainly enjoy it and I’ve learned a lot in the past year.

  Noticing Panic is a great Step 0, and I really like how you contrast it to noticing confusion.

  I used to experience ‘Analysis Paralysis’ - too much planning, overthinking, and zero doing. This is a form of perfectionism, and is usually rooted in fear of failure.

  I expect most academics have been taught entirely the wrong (in the sense of https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/​​making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) heuristics around failure.

  My life rapidly became more agentic the more I updated toward the following beliefs:

  • Failure is cheap

  • You have an abundance of chances to get it right

  • Plans are maps, reality is terrain. Doing happens in reality. Thus you can offload a bunch of cognitive work to reality simply by trying stuff; failing is one of the most efficient ways of updating your map, and can sometimes reward you with unexpected success (take a look around at all the ‘stupid’ stuff that actually works/​succeeded).

  Thus my management strategy is something like:

  • Have a goal

    • Build a model of the factors that contribute to that goal

  • Determine my constraints (e.g. do I have a rigid deadline)

  • Notice my affordances (most people always underestimate this)

    • What resources do I have, e.g.

      • Who can I ask for help?

      • What work has already been done that I can use (don’t reinvent the wheel)

    • What actions are available to me

      • What is the smallest meaningful step I can take toward my goal?

      • What is the dumbest thing I can do that might actually work?

  • Prioritize my time

    • What needs to be done today vs this week vs this month vs actually doesn’t need to be done

  So I’ve reduced a combinatorially explosive long term goal into a decent heuristic for prioritizing actions, and then I apply it to the actions I can actually take at different timescales… which is usually an easy choice between a handful of options.

  Then I do stuff, and then I update/​iterate based on the results.

  And sometimes stuff just happens that moves me towards my goal (or my goal towards me) - life is chaotic, and if you’re rigidly following a plan then that chaos is always working against you. Whereas if you’re adaptable and opportunistic—that chaos can work for you.

  I guess all of this boils down to: invest in your world model, not your plan.

• stavros 20 Dec 2023 9:58 UTC

  9 points

  2

  on: On plans for a func­tional society

  The polycrisis has been my primary source of novelty/​intellectual stimulation for a good long while now. Excited to see people explicitly talking about it here.

  With regard to the central proposition:

  I think if there were A Plan to make the world visibly less broken, made out of many components which are themselves made out of components that people could join and take responsibility for, this would increase the amount of world-fixing work being done and would meaningfully decrease the brokenness of the world. Further, I think there’s a lot of Common Cause of Many Causes stuff going on here, where people active in this project are likely to passively or actively support other parts of this project /​ there could be an active consulting /​ experience transfer /​ etc. scene built around it.

  I think this is largely sensible and true, but consider top-down implementation of such to be a pipe dream.
  Instead there is a kind of grassroots version where you do some combination of:

  
  1.) Clearly state the problems that need to be worked on, and provide reasonable guidance as to where and how they might be worked on
  2.) Notice what work is already being done on the problems, and who is doing it (avoid reinventing the wheel/​not invented here syndrome; EA is especially guilty of this)
  3.) Actively develop useful connections between 2.)
  4.) Measure engagement (resource flows) and progress

  
  And from that process I expect something like a plan to emerge—it won’t be the best possible plan, but it will be far from the worst plan, more adequate than not, and importantly it will survive contact with reality because reality was a key driver in the development of the plan.

  The platform for generating the plan would need to be more-open-than-not, and should be fairly bleeding edge—incorporating prediction markets, consensus seeking (polis), eigenkarma etc

  
  It should be a design goal that high value contributions should be noticed, no matter the source. An example of this actually happening is where Taiwan was able to respond rapidly to Covid thanks to a moderator noticing and doing due diligence on a post in the .g0v forums re: covid, and having a process in place where that information could be escalated to government.

  
  It should also be subject to a serious amount of adversarial testing—such a platform, if successful, will influence $ flows, and thus will be a target for capture/​gaming etc etc.

  As it stands, we’re lacking all 4. We’re lacking a coherent map of the polycrisis^[1], we’re lacking in useful+discoverable communication channels, we’re lacking meaningful 3rd party measurement.

  As it stands, the barriers to entry for those wishing to engage in meaningful work in this space are absurd.
  If you lack the credentials and/​or wealth to self-fund, then you’re effectively excluded—a problem which was created by an increasingly specialized world (And the worldview, cultural dynamics and behaviours it engenders) has gatekeepers from that same world, enforcing the same bottlenecks/​selective pressures of that world on those who would try to solve the problem.

  The neighbourhood is on fire, and the only people allowed to join the bucket chain are those most likely to be ignoring the fire—so very catch-22.

  P.S.

  I think there’s a ton of funding available in this space, specifically I think speculating on the markets informed by the kind of worldview that allows one to perceive the polycrisis has significant alpha. I think we can make much better predictions about the next 5-10 years than the market, and I don’t think most of the market is even trying to make good predictions on those timescales.

  I’d be interested in talking/​collaborating with anyone who either strongly agrees or disagrees with this logic.

  1. ^

     On this note, if anyone wants to do and/​or fund a version of aisafety.world for the polycrisis, I’m interested in contributing.

• stavros 28 May 2022 11:07 UTC

  9 points

  on: Can growth con­tinue?

  I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/​or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we’re in today.

  To reference Nate Hagens (https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4)
  We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion ‘ghost’ labourers in our society today.

  (Back to me)

  You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them.

  1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.

  You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens—https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)

  .… aaaand then there’s the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.

  The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we’re all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn’t nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don’t waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).

  And finally, re population:

  Demographics, read about them—https://​​www.goodreads.com/​​book/​​show/​​40697556-the-human-tide

  tl;dr Yes, Malthus was ‘wrong’. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/​ideas didn’t save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour.

• stavros 31 May 2023 9:35 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Product En­dorse­ment: Food for sleep interruptions

  Wholely agree with the ‘if it works it works’ perspective.

  Two minor niggles are worth mentioning:

  1. As I understand it, eating any amount will signal the body to stop fasting. The overnight fast is the only one most people have and it seems to be quite important for long term metabolic health.

  2. Your body has several inputs to its internal clock, and the two most significant ones are light and food. So there’s a pathway where this ‘solution’ might also be reinforcing the problem.

  Niggles aside, if it works it works. And nothing is more important than sleep for health. If you are currently chronically sleep deprived and the usual things aren’t helping—absolutely try this.

  Thanks Elizabeth for sharing another potential tool for helping people.

• stavros 26 Feb 2023 13:37 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: The Prefer­ence Fulfill­ment Hypothesis

  In my experience the highest epistemic standard is achieved in the context of ‘nerds arguing on the internet’. If everyone is agreeing, all you have is an echo chamber.

  I would argue that good faith, high effort contributions to any debate are something we should always be grateful for if we are seeking the truth.

  I think the people who would be most concerned with ‘anti-doom’ arguments are those who believe it is existentially important to ‘win the argument/​support the narrative/​spread the meme’ - that truthseeking isn’t as important as trying to embed a cultural norm of deep deep precaution around AI.

  To those people, I would say: I appreciate you, but there are better strategies to pursue in the game you’re trying to play. Collective Intelligence has the potential to completely change the game you’re trying to play and you’re pretty well positioned to leverage that.

• stavros 26 Mar 2024 11:28 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: Should ra­tio­nal­ists be spiritual /​ Spiritu­al­ity as over­com­ing delusion

  Big fan of both of your writings, this dialogue was a real treat for me.

  I’ve been trying to find a satisfying answer to the seeming inverse correlation of ‘wellbeing’ and ‘agency’ (these are very loose labels).

  You briefly allude to a potential mechanism for this^[1]

  You also briefly allude to another mechanism with explanatory power for the inverse^[2] - i.e. that while it might seem an individual is highly agentic, they are in fact little more than a host for a highly agentic egregore

  I’m engaged in that most quixotic endeavour of actually trying to save the world^{[3] [4]}, and thus I’m constantly playing with my world model and looking for levers to pull, dominos to push over, that might plausibly -and quickly- shift probability mass towards pleasant timelines.

  I think germ theory is exactly the kind of intervention that works here—it’s a simple map that even a child can understand, yet it’s a 100x impact.

  I think there’s some kind of ‘germ theory for minds’, and I think we already have all the pieces—we just need to put them together in the right way. I think it’s plausible that this is easy, rapidly scaleable and instrumentally valuable to other efforts in the ‘save the world’ space.

  But… I don’t want to end up net negative on agency. In fact my primary objective is to end up strongly net positive. I need more people trying to change the world, not less.
  Yet… that scale of ambition seems largely the preserve of people you’d be highly unlikey to describe as ‘enlightened’, ‘balanced’ or ‘well adjusted’; it seems to require a certain amount of delusion to even (want to) try, and benefit from unbalanced schema that are willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of success.

  Most of the people who seem to succcessfully change the world are the people I least want to; whereas the people I most want to change the world seem the least likely to.

  1. ^

     Since the schools that removed social conditioning and also empowered practitioners to upend the social order, tended to get targeted for destruction. (Or at least so I suspect and some people on Twitter said “yes this did happen” when I speculated this out loud.)

  2. ^

     In the Buddhist model of human psychology, we are by default colonized by parasitic thought patterns, though I guess in some cases, like the aforementioned fertility increasing religious memes, they should be thought of as symbiotes with a tradeoff, such as degrading the hosts’ episteme.

  3. ^

     I don’t expect to succeed, I don’t expect to even matter, but it’s a fun hobby.

  4. ^

     Also the world does actually seem to be in rather urgent need of saving; short of a miracle or two it seems like I’m unlikely to live to enjoy my midlife crisis.

• stavros 22 Feb 2023 15:48 UTC

  7 points

  3

  on: AI #1: Syd­ney and Bing

  Re: EMH is false, long GOOG

  I wish you’d picked a better example.

  … but wait it gets worse

  tl;dr LLMs make search cost more, much more, and thus significantly threaten GOOG’s bottom line.
  MSFT knows this, and is explicitly using Bing Sydney as an attack on GOOG.

  I’m not questioning the capabilities of GOOG’s AI department, I’m sure Deepmind have the shiniest toys.

  But it’s hardly bullish for their share price if their core revenue stream is about to be decapitated or perhaps even entirely destroyed—ad based revenue has been on shaky ground for a while now, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that one day the bottom will fall out.

  re: EMH in general

  EMH gets weaker the less attention an asset has, the further out in time relevant information is (with significant drops around 1yr, 2yr, 5yr), and the more antimemetic that relevant information is (i.e. Sin is consistently undervalued because it makes people feel bad to think about. Most recently we saw this in coal, and I’m kicking myself for not getting in on that trade.).

  Will GOOG go up? Maybe.
  Is GOOG undervalued? Extremely unlikely.
  

• stavros 15 Apr 2024 7:40 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: A High De­cou­pling Failure

  It’s an interesting framework, I can see it being useful.

  
  I think it’s more useful when you consider both high-decoupling and low-decoupling to be failure modes, more specifically: when one is dominant and the other is neglected, you reliably end up with inacccurate beliefs.

  You went over the mistakes of low-decouplers in your post, and provided a wonderful example of a high-decoupler mistake too!

  High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options

  Aside from https://​​thezvi.wordpress.com/​​2017/​​08/​​12/​​choices-are-really-bad/​​ there’s also the consideration of what choice I offer you, or how I frame the choice (see Kahneman’s stuff).
  And that’s just considering it from the individual psychological level, but there are social/​cultural levers and threads to pull here too.
  
  I think the optimal functioning of this process is cyclical with both high decoupling phases and highly integrated phases, and the measure of balance is something like ‘this isn’t obviously wrong in either context’.

• stavros 3 Apr 2024 19:59 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform

  Fine. You win. Take your upvote.

• stavros 26 Nov 2023 10:13 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: What are the re­sults of more parental su­per­vi­sion and less out­door play?

  There’s a guy called Rafe Kelley on youtube who has a fairly good answer to this, which I’m going to attempt to summarize from memory because I can’t point you toward any reasonable sources (I heard him talking about it in a 1h+ conversation with everyone’s favourite boogeyman, Jordan Peterson).

  His reasoning goes thus:
  1.) We need play in order to develop: play teaches us how to navigate Agent—Arena relationships
  
  This speaks to the result of playground injuries increasing despite increased supervision—kids aren’t actually getting to spend enough time playing in the physical Arena, their capability to navigate it is underdeveloped because of excess indoor time and excess supervision.
  
  2.) We need rough play (e.g. play fighting), specifically, to teach us a whole bunch of capabilities around Agent—Agent—Arena relationships; conflict, boundaries, emotional regulation are all, Rafe argues, rooted in rough play.
  
  Through rough and tumble play, we learn the physical boundaries between agents. We learn that it hurts them, or us, when boundaries are crossed. We learn where those boundaries are. We learn to regulate our emotions with respect to those boundaries.
  
  These are highly transferable, core skills, without which human development is significantly stunted.

• stavros 26 Feb 2023 13:43 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Nod posts

  So I’m basically the target audience for the OP—I read a lot, of all kinds of stuff, and almost zero papers. I’m an autodidact with no academic background.

  I appreciated the post. I usually need a few reminders that ‘this thing has value’ before I finally get around to exploring it :)

  I would say, as the target audience, I’m probably representative when I say that a big part of the reason we don’t read papers is a lack of access, and a lack of discovery tools. I signed up for Elicit a while back, but as above—haven’t gotten around to using it yet :D

• stavros 1 Jan 2023 13:15 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Slack mat­ters more than any outcome

  Thanks for your post, just wanted to contribute by deconfusing ADHD a little (hopefully). I agree that you and OP seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing.

  So speaking from a pretty thorough ignorance of the topic itself, my guess based on my priors is that the problem-ness of ADHD has more to do with the combo of (a) taking in the culture’s demand that you be functional in a very particular way combined with (b) a built-in incapability of functioning that way.

  Correct. However that problem-ness is often a matter of survival/​highly non-optional. ADHD can be an economic (and thus kinda literal) death sentence—if it wasn’t for the support of my family I’d be homeless.

  I think what the OP is referring to, why they raised ADHD specifically in this context, is because this habitualized conscious forcing/​manipulation of our internal state (i.e. dopamine) is a crutch we can’t afford to relinquish—without it we fall down, and we don’t get back up.

  I’m speaking as someone only recently (last year) diagnosed with (and medicated for) ADHD. I am easily twice as functional now as I was before I had medication (and I am still nowhere near as functional as the average person, let alone most of this crowd xD)

  And, quite tidily, ADHD is one of the primary reasons I learned to develop slack—why I’m capable of grokking your position. ADHD is a neverending lesson in the necessity of slack, in learning to let go.
  
  ADHD is basically an extreme version of slack philosophy hardwired into your brain—it’s great from a certain perspective, but it kinda gives us a healthy appreciation for the value of being able to force outcomes—in a ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone’ sense.

• stavros 26 Dec 2022 10:49 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Shared re­al­ity: a key driver of hu­man behavior

  Thanks for this post, it was insightful and perfectly timed; I’ve been intermittently returning to the problem of trust for a while now and it was on my mind this morning when I found your post.

  I think shared reality isn’t just a ‘warm fuzzies’ thing, it’s a vital component of cooperation.

  I think it’s connected with the trust problem; your ability to trust someone is dependent to some degree on a shared reality.

  I think that these problems have been severely exacerbated by our current technologies and the social landscape they’ve shaped, but I’m also highly intrigued by the possibility that we can throw this in reverse—that there is an achievable engineering solution to this problem; that this is something we can not only ‘fix’ with the right technologies, but also empower far beyond ‘baseline’.

  I’m interested in talking with anyone who’s exploring the trust problem in some way. I think even a 20% effective solution to this problem would be world changing; the trust problem is at (or near) the root of many of the dysfunctional aspects of our civilization.

  I’m especially interested in anyone who strongly disagrees with me—about either the importance of the problem or the feasibility of finding a solution.

ChatGPT’s Misal­ign­ment Isn’t What You Think

SF Se­vere Weather Warning

• stavros 26 Dec 2023 6:43 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Roman Leventov’s comment on: On plans for a func­tional society

  Joshua Williams created an initial version of a metacrisis map

  It’s a good presentation, but it isn’t a map.

  A literal map of the polycrisis^[1] can show:

  • The various key facets (pollution, climate, biorisk, energy, ecology, resource constraints, globalization, economy, demography etc etc)

  • Relative degrees of fragility /​ timelines (e.g. climate change being one of the areas where we have the most slack)

  • Many of the significant orgs/​projects working on these facets, with special emphasis placed on those that are aware of the wider polycrisis

  • Many of the significant communities

  • Many of the significant funders

  Do you mean that it’s possible to earn by betting long against the current market sentiment?

  In a nutshell

  1. ^

     I mildly prefer polycrisis because it’s less abstract. The metacrisis points toward a systems dynamic for which we have no adequate levers, whereas the polycrisis points toward the effects in the real world that we need to deal with.
     
     I am assuming we live in a world that is going to be reshaped (or ended) by technology (probably AGI) within a few decades, and that if this fails to occur the inevitable result of the metacrisis is collapse.
     
     I think the most impact I can have is to kick the can down the road far enough that the accelerationistas get their shot. I don’t pretend this is the world I would choose to be living in, or the horse I’d want to be betting on. It is simply my current understanding of reality.

     Hence: polycrisis. Deal with the symptoms. Keep the patient alive.

• stavros 10 Dec 2022 7:58 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: ChatGPT’s Misal­ign­ment Isn’t What You Think

  Yep, big fan of Watts and will +1 this recommendation to any other readers.

  Curious if you’ve read much of Schroeder’s stuff? Lady of Mazes in particular explores, among many other things, an implementation of this tech that might-not-suck.

  The quick version is a society in which everyone owns their GPT-Me, controls distribution of it, and has access to all of its outputs. They use them as a social interface—can’t talk to someone? Send your GPT-Me to talk to them. They can’t talk to you? Your GPT-Me can talk to GPT-Them and you both get the results fed back to you. etc etc.