AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.
AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).
If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.
I’d like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.
[edit, several days later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.
I’d like to like this more but I don’t have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.
Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.
This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:
niceness, community, and civilization
community and civilization
Having seen what “niceness” entails, I’ll opt for (2), which doesn’t prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.
That’s a lot of readers to throw away
Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he’s still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are “dozens of us”, and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.
Daring Fireball, a site you’ve probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:
font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Also, jefftk said “requiring”. Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn’t load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.
If TeX fonts don’t load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?
I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals
BLM’s policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they’re at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:
defund the police
No On Prop 25
voting-rights legislation
support for the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing Act (COUP Act)
Medicare for All
the police not using stuff made for the military
opposing Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court
DC statehood
ending the filibuster
“climate justice”
(emphasis added)
Keep clicking on “Next Pillar” at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they’ve countered Amazon’s attempts to keep a union from forming.
I’m not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don’t spend weekend nights alone?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.
20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.
I’m unconvinced that’s still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they’ll keep getting invited to dinner parties.
I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.
You’ve identified a very powerful bias. If you’re looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?
A key problem to loss of LBM is that you’re either losing bone density (a terrible thing) or muscle (a pretty damn bad thing).
Could also be skin. Losing skin if you’re losing fat is a good thing, I’d think, since you don’t want to weigh 200 pounds yet still have all the skin you had when you were 300 pounds.
Has any work been done to see where the LBM has been coming from?
Oh, that’s something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.
Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?
I’m not jp, but:
too awake to sleep
too brain-fogged to do thinking work
possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I’ve been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to
Meanwhile, here’s what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don’t want to):
balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly hours/week of low-energy time, but maybe hours/week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks
delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I’d need to get my inbox to zero
get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I’ll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I’ll want to use to retrieve it later
We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)
I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you’ve just implemented, but…
Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users’ posts? Shouldn’t I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?
writing things down
A good idea but too general to be good advice.
More specifically (not an exhaustive list):
If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
If you’re in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says “Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don’t snozzle as well as they should.”
More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn’t take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.
If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it’s helpful to think “I want to remember all of it, not just most of it.”
Two responses:
It’s unclear to me what would make diet advice “rationalist”.
The only novel, actionable consensus I’ve seen seems to be “avoid eating or drinking things with sugar added to them, especially if there’s a lot of added sugar”.
This appears to be a personal wiki.
If “refining the art of human rationality” is our goal, we should be doing a lot more outreach and a lot more production of very accessible rationality materials.
I agree, and I’m in favor of this sort of thing. I try to do this sort of thing among my friends. Sometimes it works, at least a little bit.
On the other hand, if we’re trying to save Earth from being turned into paperclips, we ought to focus our efforts on people who’re smart enough to be able to meaningfully contribute to AI risk reduction.
On the other other hand, there are people here who could help with sanity-line-raising materials who can’t help with rationality training as a way to avert AI x-risk.
On the other other other hand, some people who might be able to help with AI risk might get into the possibly-less-important sanity-waterline-raising projects, and this would be a bad thing.
A second laptop charger.
It’s nice to be able to charge your laptop at your desk, with a cord that snakes behind the desk, and not have to go in and undo all that just to get power to your laptop when you’re out and about.
And if you’re not getting out with your laptop, having a second charger is still useful. I have a makeshift standing desk with my laptop on top of my dresser. With a second charger set up like this, I can shift from standing to sitting on my schedule, not my laptop’s battery’s.
Also, I find myself vexed with thoughts […] How do professional or amatuer traders deal with this?
Habituation, meditation, and/or alcohol.
Subjective experience:
Polyester (elastane, etc.) clothes are much more common these days. Back in the 80s, people wore way more cotton shirts to the gym. Nowadays, most people wear some sort of sweat-wicking heat-venting material. They’re also cheaper; Under Armour used to run about $50. Nowadays, UA shirts tend to run about 3⁄5 that.
Remember back when wool was only for itchy sweaters? Nowadays, merino wool, which is less itchy for most people, is used for shirts and undershirts and even socks and underpants. The great thing about wool shirts is that you can wear them for almost a week and they won’t stink; this isn’t something you can do with cotton and especially not polyester.
There are a lot more stretchy materials out there, as well as stretchy materials (polyester) woven into less-stretchy materials (cotton) to give the stiffer materials a bit more give. This makes slim-fitting clothing less restrictive, if nothing else.
There are nylon pants that don’t look out of place at the office. Outlier’s Futureworks pants made out of F.Cloth (click on “Fabric” on the tabs) are better than cotton chinos in at least some respects; you can spill coffee on them and likely all of it will bead up and just run off, not staining anything or even getting wet. (They’ll eventually wet out if you’re walking around in the rain, though.)
You can car camp in the rain, forget your rain gear, and everything’ll turn out mostly OK.
While the price of insulation is a superlatively objective metric, it entirely misses advancements in anything other than insulation effectiveness. The big changes have all been in finding new points that balance the different tradeoffs between stretchiness/durability/stink trapping/cost/water resistance/stain resistance/warmth/air permeability.
I’ve seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.