These less depressed people you talk about, are they already getting paid as AI safety researchers, or are they self-studying to (hopefully) become AI safety researchers?
In any case, I’m clearly generalising from my own situation, so it may not extend very far. To flesh out this data point: I had 2 years of runway, so money wasn’t a problem, but I already felt beaten down by LW to the extent that I couldn’t really take any more hits to my self-esteem, so I couldn’t risk putting myself up for rejection again. That’s basically why I mostly left LW.
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Karma: 1,379
Accelerating personal growth: a mashup of models
Toon Alfrink’s sketchpad
Those multiple degrees are high cost but very low risk, because even if you don’t get into the university department, these degrees will give you lots of option value, while a 6 month gap in your CV trying to learn AI Safety on your own does not. More likely you will not survive the hit on your mental health.
I personally decided not to even try AI Safety research for this reason.
Being weird in your heavily filtered weirdness-optimized social environment is very different from being weird out there in the real world with the normies, though.
LW Hangout
LessWrong Hangout
Amsterdam Rationality Dojo
I have received a formal diagnosis twice in my life, once when I was 10 and once when I was 23.
Negative impacts: none. I can disclose or not disclose as I wish. I like to tell people I’m autistic after interacting with them for a while because their surprise gives me a confidence boost. Apparently I’m smart enough to hide it.
Positive impacts: the diagnostic track was quite rigorous, including all kinds of tests (IQ, social intelligence, some qualitative stuff), and the resulting data has been useful for me to understand myself better (for example the subscales of my IQ are highly irregular).
So I’d say: do it. Mildly beneficial.
(Maybe violence is the one exception where these norms aren’t sufficient, but I’m going to roll with it)
Something that Duncan maybe didn’t stress enough is that these norms work best in conjunction with freedom of association. You’re free to punch people in the face as much as you want, but you’ll very quickly end up with a set of friends who like to be punched in the face (the empty set).
Acknowledging that people that don’t like face-punching are correct about their preferences just helps them figure out more quickly that their choice not to interact with you is valid.
If you don’t do this, and you’re convincing enough that the punching was actually good for them, that’s when you run into some pretty dark failure modes.
This is excellent. I associate many of these behaviors with upper-class norms, and I think that upper-class norms generally perform best when optimizing social trust, affordance to coordinate, etc.
While it’s great to have a write-up of these behaviors, I feel that they’re best learned through osmosis, i.e. by frequently interacting with someone who was raised that way, or having them as a role model. I’d expect that to work best when you actually endorse that their habits are (in some ways) better than yours.
I also think that the value of these ideas will scale superlinearly with their uptake. So I’m sharing this with a few fellow group organizers and I’ll try to signal-boost it more generally (though I’m not in a position to make promises)
Ah yeah, on second thought the “father” vibe might also be one that is (disagreeably) investing in the agent, not buying their activities, and when you are buying the activity it seems that the disagreeable/agreeable dimension kind of collapses, i.e. it doesn’t matter how the recipient feels about it, they’re just an object.
How about means versus ends? More precisely, I suppose you can turn this binary distinction into a discrete one by saying that while one donor might be supporting your current activities, the next one might be supporting the one-level-up goal that your current activities are pursuing, while the next one might be supporting the two-levels-up goal that your current activities are pursuing, etc.
In other words, different donors might have different levels of tolerance if you pivot. The more fundamentally you change your plans, the more the donor has to be on the “investing in the agent” end of the spectrum to support it.
thanks, fixed it
Maybe there are better ways to come to agreement on the feasibility of discovery. Perhaps we should look at the success rate of startups? Do you have other ideas?
Our double crux seems to be about the feasibility of finding new combinations that are meaningful.
Using previously discovered combinations as examples doesn’t count, because discovery is easy in hindsight.
Could you come up with a bunch of novel combinations, right here and now, that sound like they might be useful to the world at large?
5 x 7.75 inches
fwiw that’s 12.7 x 19.7 cm
I’m curious to what extent this distinction can be mapped to the disagreeable/agreeable spectrum. Also curious if this thing can be generalized to diff kinds of support in general, i.e. conditional/unconditional love. I’m also getting father/mother archetypes vibes from this.
Except that all the meaningful combinations are already being competed on, while all the meaningless combinations are not.
The amount of meaningful combinations is not , but much lower. This website lists 12.000 career paths. I’d wager that the true number is not more than an order of magnitude away from it. If we take a (totally arbitrary) upper bound guess of 100.000 career paths, that means to be world class you still have to compete with 80.000 people.
Of course you can try and invent a new meaningful combination of skills, but that’s just another skill combination, and it’s one that a lot of people are already competing on.
fwiw: I was hazed in uni, and I’m actually quite happy it happened, and so are my friends who went through it. One of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
Been thinking all day about why LW does not spark joy anymore for me. I left about 2 years ago to seek a meaningful social life elsewhere, but honestly what I found was… mostly a barren wasteland. Now, with enough slack to come back to LW with a lot of energy, I simply find that my heart is not in it. Why?
One problem is, well I’ve essentially settled for the Netherlands as my base, but no matter how much I tried with the meetups, I never quite managed to breathe life into the local LW community. I mean I did get a regular attendance of 15 people after 2 years of consistent meetups, but when I came back after a 6 month hiatus in Blackpool it was all gone, and I had to start over. I haven’t been motivated to organise meetups ever since.
Just interact online? Not meaningful. I’ve invested way too many skill/meaning points into charisma (body language being a big part of that) to throw all that away. Not even covid was reason enough for me to stop seeing people physically even temporarily.
I have some other gripes with LW, and the core cause of most of those is that rationalists tend to be more neurotic than average, while I’m less neurotic, but c’mon, I’m not going to find a community that matches my personality even better than LW, and if I do it’s probably even more sparsely represented in Amsterdam
I’m basically out of ideas. Help is welcome