Hi there!
I’m focused on learning about the different causes of death and how to get rid of them: Viva Immortality! I organize rationality meetups in the Hampton Roads, VA area.
Hi there!
I’m focused on learning about the different causes of death and how to get rid of them: Viva Immortality! I organize rationality meetups in the Hampton Roads, VA area.
Shortform #66 Waht, where did 7 months go?
Working mostly, actually. So that was good, and I’m still enjoying my hospital technology related job quite a bit, but I’ve been sorely missing having other aspects of my life than work (despite enjoying the work a lot).
I experienced a truly wonderful thing tonight, and that was a Norfolk Rationalists meeting with great conversations between excellent people, we went for five & a half hours and only stopped because we all got too sleepy.
Re: Shortform #65: no, I probably will not go to medical school. I am happily focusing on technology jobs and quite enjoying those in the healthcare environment. I would still like to do research, but until a later stage of life and other job decisions, any research I do will have to be independent, which is fine. I have so much to learn about so many areas, even within very specific niches, not only for my profession but also the research area(s) I’m interested in. Such learning will keep me occupied for some time while I grind for knowledge that I must acquire for professional & personal development plus satisfaction. Here’s to learning new things every single day!
I am eating healthier, driving far less, walking & exercising more, and have noticed that my general competency improves as I improve in those areas of my life. This feels great!
I did not listen to music while writing this post, it’s quite late & I did not wish for the extra stimuli. The gentle hum of the air conditioning was sufficient.
Cheers,
Willa
Hi Iwan,
I personally find this subject (pragmatism generally) interesting, but others here might not. If you’re going to link to an external source, could you please write a post detailing what is being explained in the external source and why people here might find it relevant plus why they should care about it? I strong-downvoted your post because simply link-posting with no context or explanation about why the topic is relevant/why people should care, is almost always a non-useful thing for people, and if one is going to post things here, they ought to be useful for the community.
Cheers
Bienvenue!
“I feel like my cognitive capacities are nowhere near the average in this forum.”
Why do you feel that? I like to push back against such framing of cognitive capacities or capabilities generally, and instead frame those things as “where on the pareto frontier for some combination of skills are my capabilities?” My view here is heavily influenced by johnswentworth’s excellent post on the topic and what I’ve read from the history of science, innovation, etc. (Jason Crawford’s Progress Studies works are great, check them out)
Besides my pushing back against your stated framing of cognitive capacities, my main point here is that multi-domain expertise may, even if one’s raw “g (or intelligence)” are not as high as some others, more than make up for any potential shortcomings in said raw g because of how the pareto frontier works and how many possible areas of expertise within human capacity configuration space.
“I would love to exchange ideas and try to improve my rationality with less “advanced” people, wondering if anyone would have recommendations.”
Commenting on posts, asking questions, and writing shortform pieces can be great practice for that! Same with attending meetups, virtual or in-person. Writing posts from your own experience about subjects where you try to understand things better through that writing, discussing self-improvement things, or commenting on how rationality relates to your particular expertises are good ones too.
Building a small group to discuss things you read (the Library, Concepts, and Tags pages are all great spots on this site to find things to read) and posting about your experiences is a great way to have fun and spark more discussion and deliberate improvement with yourself and others.
For more informal discussions and access to lots of rationalists or rationalist adjacent people, there are a smattering of relevant Discord servers (some found here. I’m a member of a bunch and can probably invite you if you send me a PM. I’m also a member of the Guild of the Rose which is an education startup pulling mostly from rationalist communities for members and has been an excellent learning experience and community for me (I recommend and endorse Rose).
Hope these things help! Happy to discuss more. Writing a bunch of shortforms that mostly amounted to personal blogging helped make me more comfortable just posting or commenting as I felt like. I always have an eye to quality and the overall “what do we want LessWrong to be about” ideas when making a post, but also...community curation of posts exists for a reason, so don’t feel overwhelming pressure when writing or expressing yourself here. Feel some pressure though :) but the good kind that comes from pushing for improvement! (i feel a bit odd about saying that for some reason, but I’ll leave it up for now)
Cheers,
Willa
This is an excellent critique, thank you for writing and posting this.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a slow but growing shift away from reactionary anti-traditionalism (I don’t know what to call that phenomenon other than that) on LessWrong, though I wouldn’t say we’re in a great place as a community regarding that yet either. The Sequences were thoroughly saturated with anti-traditional often reactionary sentiments, usually directed at Christianity but really no tradition seemed safe from that ire. And for good reason at the time I think, what with New Atheism dominating online discourse then and honestly the niceness + novelty of encountering a large-ish group of people who weren’t religious: this community has definitely served as a refuge for those from religious and/or conservative upbringings such as myself.
You are spot on about the dangers of extracting useful techniques, ideas, and so on from foreign-to-the-group traditions and cultures and stripping said traditions and cultural practices from what is extracted: as others have written, this can often lead to bad things that the extracting culture may not know how to even pinpoint or handle. Implicitly, I believe your post says that such extraction is disrespectful, not courteous, and I agree. I appreciate your recommendation awhile back that I read Zen Flesh Zen Bones and Three Pillars of Zen to obtain a deeper understanding of Zen Buddism via more traditional teachings rather than secular teachings...this has been helpful to me instrumentally plus I’ve enjoyed learning the history and cultural background to that practice, and feel that knowing that background also makes my practising better, richer, fuller, etc.
I feel similarly about keeping one’s identity small (and really like this post on the subject), and would ask those who feel that their identity is tiny to really try and notice what they are not noticing about their own identity and lived experiences. This question is purposefully vague and not easy to throw intellect at. Anyway. I at one point tried to keep my identity small, but that was harmful to me because doing so caused me to sometimes forget who I am and what I care about, partially, but mostly because I was constraining myself and in so doing forced myself to be not who I am: I’m a human, a trans woman, a rationalist when I try, a lover, a friend, a fighter, and so much more.
Just as it is good to know what language game you are participating in when speaking of X idea, it is similarly good to know the lineage, baggage, history, tradition, culture, and so on of a technique, practice, move, etc. when crafting the art of rationality and improvement. If some technique works and has been well curated then you can gain benefit from practising it without knowing any of such context, but you can never become a chef, an independent thinker, a rationalist without knowing that context.
ToDo #1
I have previously read media consumption diet posts on LW and elsewhere that I thought were quite good and helpful. I need to:
Find the three most helpful to me such posts, search time cannot exceed 20 minutes.
Take a few minutes to assess the three chosen posts more carefully, identify where and how they ebb and flow in response to each other. Find the best flow and most correct-for-me ideas out of them.
Write 1st post detailing structured efforts for improving my media consumption diet to help improve my voicing voice capabilities.
Decide time span between 1st post and 2nd follow-up, reflective, post. Set calendar notifications for end of time span to write 2nd post.
At the marked date, write and publish 2nd post.
re: Shortform #50 “These efforts should help me notice and cultivate my “voice”, and give voice to myself. Developing my thoughts into refined ideas and producing them is highly aligned with my interests, goals, and more, so I’m excited for this! (note to self: the actual methods for how I do these things and what I actually do, plus what my successes and failures turn out to be are good source material for two posts: 1 post detailing the plan and effort and a 2nd post detailing successes and failures; I think writing those two posts will beneficially effect my structuring of this effort, increase my likelihood of follow-through, and provide myself with useful analytics after the fact to reflect on; others who read the two posts may find some benefit too)”
Shortform #50 Voicing Voice
My consume vs produce ratio is not well balanced, I consume dramatically more media, information, entertainment, and other such things compared to what I produce. How can I even notice let alone refine my own thoughts and opinions amidst the ruckus and maelstrom of external inputs rummaging around my mind constantly? Furthermore, many if not most of those external inputs don’t actually pay rent, though there are (and in some ways quite notable) exceptions (e.g. what I learned reading The Sequences).
In response to this problem, I am altering my media consumption “diet” to restrict non-deliberate consumption and increase deliberate, focused, helpful consumption plus increase conscious production efforts to generate significantly more outputs / products than I do now.
These efforts should help me notice and cultivate my “voice”, and give voice to myself. Developing my thoughts into refined ideas and producing them is highly aligned with my interests, goals, and more, so I’m excited for this! (note to self: the actual methods for how I do these things and what I actually do, plus what my successes and failures turn out to be are good source material for two posts: 1 post detailing the plan and effort and a 2nd post detailing successes and failures; I think writing those two posts will beneficially effect my structuring of this effort, increase my likelihood of follow-through, and provide myself with useful analytics after the fact to reflect on; others who read the two posts may find some benefit too)
I am taking my website offline to undergo maintenance and possibly switch hosting providers so that the site is more aligned with how I want to use it and easier to push content out to, and hopefully be cheaper to operate. The present setup is WordPress on AWS Lightsail, and I don’t like the experience of using + maintaining WordPress, don’t want to continue with AWS Lightsail as my hosting provider, and think that a different website CMS or generator would work better for me than WordPress does. This effort will impact my choices for hosting a second soon-ish to be announced website where I will produce exciting and good outputs in a field I care deeply about and am pursuing as a career.
It has been ~2 weeks or so since receiving my second Pfizer vaccine shot, so while I still wear a mask where mandated, or seems generally sensible and/or low cost/effort, I’m returning back to normal with regards to hanging out with people IRL since there doesn’t seem much reason not to do so once fully vaccinated. This has had an immediate and greatly positive effect on my mood and general happiness. Fuck quarantining and not being able to see people, that was a terrible experience. I went axe throwing last night, and that was an amazing and delightful experience! So Much Fun :)
I’ve started CrossFit! I’m only a few classes in, but wow am I loving it. Attending a class has a ridiculously highly positive impact on my mood and well-being for the day and increases my self-confidence. I am not presently self-motivated enough to exercise by myself on a regular basis, so going to CrossFit classes solves my “doesn’t consistently exercise” problem quite nicely. I’m committing to attending CrossFit classes three times per week at a minimum, and because it seems helpful to pre-commit when I’ll attend on a given week, I’ll do that now:
17 - Likelihood Low; 18 - Definitely; 19 - Likelihood High; 20 - Definitely; 21 - Neutral; 22 - Definitely
I updated my calendar for each day based on class time and likelihood of attending. Barring genuinely excessive soreness or injury potentials, I’ll generally aim to do 4 or 5 classes per week with 3 classes as my baseline mandatory attendance rate.
It’s good to develop a voice and voice it, here we go!
Cheers,
Willa
I don’t comment very much, but read this post and decided to chime in with a few thoughts since I am trying to shift my default from passive interaction or lurking, to active interaction: reading a post, commenting on it, etc. I believe that defaults are very powerful and matter immensely, so I’m changing mine in response to a rapidly changing world and for improvement reasons!
I enjoy meta discussions like these, thanks for opening it up with your post.
Note: I read the above linked Stratechery articles last night and found them quite impactful + thought provoking, I’ve been wanting to share them. Doing so in the context of this comment might have been a stretch, but “changing defaults” seems relevant both to this post and my comment since the post is asking that readers comment with a certain set of defaults underlying their comment-style / is providing suggested commenting rules.
I think that, ideally, a comment should avoid those 5 failure modes and be written with an eye to “what quality-bar makes sense given my current skill level, time availability, knowledge, and the context”. I’ll demonstrate what that might look like below.
Suggestions on countering each failure mode and doing the other things I mentioned:
Prickly: I agree with your description of this failure mode. If someone wishes to improve their commenting “warmth” and/or avoid prickliness, they might try the following:
saying Thank you for writing this
saying “I like what you did here” or “This looks like a good effort” prior to “but, I have these specific criticisms.”
if a post makes you mad and/or you think it is bad, take a moment to think about whether you really want to jump in and respond to it. If you decide to respond to it, then be mindful of the poster’s experience level, their background, the inferential distance between you and what the poster wrote, and/or the intent of the poster (if you can’t explicitly tell their intent from their post, use your comment to ask them what their intent was). Being kind but firm seems, anecdotally at least, to be a good approach in most cases.
Opaque: I agree with what you said about combating this failure mode, and I think it can be combated with varying levels of time and effort investment by someone. Specificity is great and seems quite powerful, so providing specific examples or sources to support one’s statements, presuppositions, assertions, and so on is usually a great way to combat opaqueness. Additionally, I think that being explicit about one’s motivations, source and quality of one’s evidence, etc. when making an assertion is valuable (I find it helpful to know my own motivations when doing something, and similarly find it helpful to know another person’s motivations when they do something). An individual might be specific at different levels relative to their time availability, experience, skill level / expertise, the context, and so on, e.g.:
low time availability: “I assert x because it maps well to mine and other’s anecdotal experiences, but don’t have non-intuitive or non-experiential evidence to support this assertion.” (then quickly share at least one personal experience example) Note that one can avoid opaqueness even if the assertion they made is supported by very low epistemic confidence evidence, it’s via providing the evidence itself, source of that evidence, and confidence in that evidence whereby one moves from opaque to specific and explicit.
Nitpicky: I agree with what you said about this failure mode, and don’t have much to add other than: if an individual has trouble combating their own nitpicky-ness I recommend writing out the main points, presuppositions, important assertions, sources of evidence, etc. from a post so that you can view the post’s constituent elements. I do this when unpacking complicated posts and it makes evaluating a post much more doable for me, leading to much deeper analysis, counterpoints, rebuttals, suggestions, etc.
Trying to comment about the entire gist of a post at once seems quite taxing on the working memory, and I usually can’t do that so I have to deconstruct posts into their constituent elements to actively engage with them and think critically about them let alone write good comments in response.
Disengaged: Mostly agreed. I will add that it’s possible to write a long, detailed comment and still come across as disengaged if one does not ask good questions, explicitly state they are open to further discussion, and so on. I agree with remizidae though and believe that short, drive-by-comments can be engaging, depending on what the commenter says and how they say it: well targeted words stated succinctly can be powerful. Additionally, offering someone encouragement, or saying “Good job”, saying “I liked this and want to see more”, or some other nice thing in response to a post can be helpful for a poster to receive, especially if they have low confidence, are just getting started, are exploring something new, and/or might brighten their day and make them feel better about posting here on LW.
Shallow: I agree, though similar to Disengaged, I think it’s possible for long detailed comments to be shallow if the commenter doesn’t actually address what is said in the post and instead rambles on about other things. I think shallowness looks like disengagement, just as disengagement may look like shallowness. Are these really two separate things? They can each be found through the presence of one of them and look similar is why I ask.
I definitely demonstrated having decent time availability with this comment, did I sufficiently address the other things I mentioned that comprise the “quality-bar” I asserted?
General question: What are everyone’s defaults with regards to commenting here on LessWrong? @AllAmericanBreakfast, what other defaults do you have besides PONDS?
Shortform #20 It’s time to hunt down a job!
Today was marvelous :)
I walked 2.18 miles indoors while on phone calls; I did 20 pushups and 100 situps at noon.
I virtually co-worked for about 2 hours and made good progress towards writing my review of Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments.
I began organizing and packing up in preparation for moving.
It was pointed out to me that I keep working on a bunch of different things but haven’t yet started searching for jobs, despite that finding a good job will enable me to move to Seattle and do more fun things in life. Point noted and taken to heart!
Job hunting is now my highest priority, and I will be focusing on that exclusively while virtually co-working plus will do that while doing productive stuff by myself too. I will continue writing my three reviews (for the LW2019Review) during non-workday hours / in my spare time, but my workday hours will be focused on job hunting.
Good luck y’all :)
Cheers,
Willa
2021 Week 1 Review 1 Jan − 9 Jan
This week saw rapid mood changes, a descent into depression, and many actions taken to combat the aforementioned things. I’m happy to report that the actions I took ultimately led to a significant improvement in and stabilization of my mood, the removal of depression and ascent to a slightly higher happiness set point than the week before, and I’ve learned some good things.
Most significant thing noticed or learned this week: Living alone is really bad for me. Runner up: The power of co-working!
Once I realized (noticed) that living alone is really bad for me, I talked with family and they accepted my request to relocate from where I’m living now to go live with them. Now that I have a plan that’s actively being worked towards for combating the “living alone is really bad for me” thing, I’ve been much more capable of dismissing isolation or loneliness feelings and my mood has improved significantly.
I noticed that co-working (only virtual so far) can “rescue” a day that’s going poorly or make an already good day a great day, because I enjoy the social interaction + getting shit done. This upcoming week I have to pack and organize a lot, but I will schedule as much virtual co-working as I can so that I still get other things done that I care about accomplishing.
My focus this week: virtual co-working, every damn day or every other day at the very least Secondary focus: commit to 1 hour of physical activity per day, preferably outside
Things I failed at last week or didn’t do very well at:
I did not complete “Important but Ugh” task nor did I donate $50 to a political party I don’t like as a “punishment”.
I learned that making myself pay money if I don’t do something is a surefire way to ensure that I don’t do that thing, will also destroy my mood, kill my productivity, and generally make me have a very bad time. This technique works for others, and I’m happy I tried it, because now I know more about myself, but wow did it backfire horribly for me so I won’t be trying it again.
I didn’t do much nonfiction reading, though I did have fun with reading fiction.
I didn’t job hunt at all.
I’m not upset about this, moving several states away and helping family sell this house precludes getting any sort of stable job, so I’ll do some freelancing instead.
Things I did well last week or am happy about:
Other than a short break for New Years, I’ve continued to write publicly each day, and that’s fantastic!
I noticed something that was making my life bad (living alone) and started immediately working to correct that thing (I’m moving a few states away to live with family).
I managed to stay somewhat virtually social even while depressed and that helped! This was a triumph because in the past I would typically isolate when depressed, and that wasn’t helpful, so being at least somewhat social was great!
Here’s to a great next week! Amazingly, I have published this by my own deadline, what a great feeling :)
Be well!
Cheers,
Willa
Note: I listened to this progressive trance mix while writing, that mix has always served me well for helping me get things done.
Shortform #16 The power of co-working!
Today was an excellent day :) I woke up late, but immediately started virtually co-working with a friend and during that time we both completed a nice amount of tasks. Jumping from “I’m finally awake now” to virtual co-working helped me stay on track this day, it was very effective and helpful.
I scheduled the January and February Houston Rationalists’ meetups, replied to some messages, tidied up, walked for 30 minutes, and later hungout with a friend around a campfire outside, twas nice!
Tomorrow I will post my 2021 Week 1 Review by 13:00. I will also setup co-working sessions for next week, quite looking forward to those! Seems like I’ll be getting a lot more extra physical activity starting tomorrow because I must start prepping to move cross country and that takes a fair bit of organization, packing, etc. physical effort.
I did not listen to music while writing this shortform.
Be well!
Cheers,
Willa
Shortform #103 Friends are great!
Note to self, I really want to read “Friendship is Optimal”, that along with a rather large number of other things are on my list. A list that would benefit from some pruning, curation, and possibly publishing.
I met with a new friend tonight at a lovely Japanese Fusion place for dinner, and we had ridiculously pleasant, deep, and good conversations.
Friends are amazing. Good night, I must sleep now.
Shortform #94 Boundary Setting at work is suddenly much easier after attending Retreat
Prior to attending the organizer’s retreat, I would let people send me tasks that fell outside of my primary responsibilities, even if they were mundane and not good learning opportunities and/or even if the individual in question actually had time to do the task. After the retreat, I noticed today, I haven’t been doing that and have been saying no much more often, or enforcing better boundaries generally about work tasks.
I’m not sure what changed. My current job admittedly isn’t more than 50-60% aligned with what sparks joy for me and brings about the most professional growth for me. But also, perhaps seeing how much the virtue of consistency was reinforced at retreat and talked about combined with my work mentor strongly emphasizing that too helped me integrate that virtue more deeply. I want to be consistently great at fulfilling my primary responsibilities at work, and doing so requires eliminating distractions or extraneous / not germane tasks & time sinks. Most of what colleagues try to pass off to me doesn’t fall within my primary responsibilities, so perhaps I am now feeling that distinction between primary & secondary or tangential responsibilities more intensely?
Another item heavily emphasized at retreat was time management and how much a person is committing to certain activities or responsibilities: being deliberate about such things matters! I knew logically before that that matters, but perhaps had not emotionally or unconsciously integrated that to a significant enough effect.
Hmm...another factor: I feel much more acutely the limits of “hours in a day” and total healthy life hours in a life that one can use for work now than I did prior to the retreat. That is likely part of the equation.
Yet another factor (why so many?): I felt motivated to find ways to apply what I learned at the retreat to my job, e.g. the workshop on how to recruit a guest speaker to your meetup felt eerily applicable to the process of contacting other teams at work for assistance. I also deliberately chose not to frame returning home as “returning to normalcy, or the mundane world” as I feel that framing is harmful. I wanted there to be no serious distinctions between “the world” as I experienced “the world” at the retreat vs how I experienced “the world” at home and at my job. It’s the same world, the same reality, just with different responsibilities, people, commitments, etc. Instead, I felt and still feel that I would rather work to optimize and improve local situations so that I could generate similar levels of fun, excitement, learning, and growth at home & at work as I did while at the retreat. That was such a distinctly different way of framing returning home than the “mundane” framing that I’ve felt somewhat like a substantially different person because now I’m operating with a better perspective & framing in my home & work lives, local life, etc. I feel optimistic about the local future, eager to learn, eager to grow, and a relentless drive to improve everything around me & my life.
I now believe that frameworks or perspectives of mundanity to be harmful & trigger spirals of bad things. Each moment experienced is different than every other moment if you look at the world with fresh or beginner’s eyes. My priors for the state of affairs around me no longer are warped by the mentally colonizing framework of mundanity.
What metaconversations have you experienced in your closest relationships and/or elsewhere that you think LessWrong would benefit from discussing?
How do you turn the metaconversations into actionable, implemented, and solved advice? Rather than such conversations well...becoming very navel gazing and meta circle jerk-y?
I imagine it’s much easier making such conversations bear fruit and pay rent in the context of close personal relationships because there should be a more visceral “this isn’t working” type of feeling fairly immediately, yes? Whereas in an online, usually loosely connected social environment I imagine the visceral and immediate feelings of “this doesn’t work” probably don’t arise as much, or at least not quickly. This is me speculating, what do you think?
I’ll second the “posting lots of questions” being more catalyzing and accessible feeling than regular posts. I still don’t comment too much nor write as much as I’d like, but whenever I see someone post a question post that seems to generate more discussion with people who’s names I don’t recognize than other types of posts. And seem more accessible.
Anecdote: I comment way more on metaconversation and community norms / culture types of posts than I do ideas focused and other kinds of posts. Not 100% certain why, might have to do with issues concerning people, group and community norms, culture, etc. feeling more accessible and interesting to me whereas pure ideas just...eh are less interesting to me usually. I like people a lot and seem to get more interested in something based on the impact that thing has on people. Probably is why I find X risks, AI Safety, and other such things to be very important and good and have read a good bit about such things, but whenever I try to dig into the weeds of the ideas and grok the technical idea aspects of those things...well that’s a lot less interesting to me. Anyway, this was an aside. Helpful to me though.
I enjoyed how you turned PG’s essay into a manifesto (still a bit implicit, but it’s there) via what you quoted and replied. Nicely done and well agreed! I’m curious to see what such would look like if explicitly written, I do love me some manifestos.
I see overlap between “fierce nerds”, “being a holy madman”, and/or “being highly agentic” in how each type acts aggressively independently minded in clear and deliberate pursuit of goals, even if the path to those goals is extraordinarily uncertain. And socially often end up in positions/situations of isolation or seem incomprehensibly other in some way. Which, definitely seems to be where thinking truly independently may lead.. I don’t have much of a point writing this besides pointing out the overlap between those types and linking what seem to be relevant articles to social implications for being those types. That seems enough though, for a comment.
“‘The bad news is that if it’s not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.’
Normal people can life normal lives. A fierce nerd following the rules is like a wild animal in a zoo. If you don’t do daring things you’ll go nuts.”
Having met many grumpy sysadmins and others deeply struck by bitterness and utter cynicism and been one [grumpy sysadmin type person] myself for a short time, this feels all too painfully accurate. The people who I’ve met who were once fierce (whether fierce nerds or fierce in different capacities) and didn’t take the riskier yet ambitious path are almost universally deeply unhappy, negative, cynical, and deeply bitter (I’m related to several such individuals) or have become totally passive and checked out. Conforming and being passive and hiding ones fierceness (of whatever kind it may be) a single iota more than is strictly necessary to survive at one’s present stage of life, situation, privilege or lack thereof, and so on is a trap, a very dangerous game. I’m still escaping that and becoming stronger., because death still exists and myself and others need to get rid of it.
Bitterness, cynicism, mean-spirited-ness, and so on are not helpful to anyone trying to change the world and/or help others in whatever ways one wishes to do so, they are counterproductive tendencies to possess.
Fierceness, kindness, magnanimity, probity, and so on are much more helpful for getting things done and solving difficult important problems.
This post was an excellent introduction into what an operations job or role looks like and feels like from the inside plus touches on what other people think (especially if they aren’t in operations) think of operations roles and the people working such jobs (hint: they tend to look down on such roles and individuals, especially if they hold a “socially higher status” and/or intellectual type of job). Reading it helped me realize that my previous job was in fact a very high autonomy operations role and that’s been helpful in emotionally processing what that job was to me, what I experienced doing it, and whether or not I want another operations job in the future.
I’m nominating it for the above reasons mostly, but also because I think LessWrong could really use more content about operations type jobs / roles. You can have as many people talking very intelligently about something as you’d like, but until someone gets their hands dirty and does the operations work to spread those ideas, book a venue, publish a book, organize a community, manufacture something novel and innovative, and much much more, then those ideas are nice, but they stay fairly locked up where they originated and don’t get broadly dispersed, thus making them much less helpful / useful than they could have been.
It’s one thing to have a small niche community with unique and new ideas, but it’s quite an entirely other beast of a challenge and accomplishment to spread said ideas more broadly, to “go viral”, and have an outsized impact on the world beyond small local improvements. The aforementioned small niche community is nice, I like it, feels good to be a part of, but if that community or individuals within it want to globally instead of hyper locally “decrease worldsuck”, “do good better”, “raise the sanity waterline”, “create dath’ilan”, etc. etc. etc. then they had better get good at operations and start organizing.
Ideas run the world but operations keep them running and help them grow :) I’d love to see a full sequence on operations such as what Swimmer963 mentioned at the end of their post.
Cheers,
Willa
P.S. I think these yearly reviews are good examples of smart operations at work and they help us as a community become more organized with our ideas, reflect more, open more space for improvement, etc. My paragraph about the niche community vs imagined larger robust good at operations and organizing community was not meant to be any sort of attack nor a critique. Its purpose was only to point things out that seemed good to point out :) (I think many here at LW are already cognizant of such things, anyways.)
HPMOR for me represented the lowest time and effort cost for gaining the ability to kind of grok what this community was about and what its culture was like. I had read a few posts here and there around the original LW site and some posts on SlateStarCodex, but it wasn’t until after I binge read HPMOR over the course of 1-2 weeks that I felt okay with starting on the Sequences. Before reading HPMOR, I could tell that the Sequences were obviously very important to the community, but I wasn’t sure whether they were worth the time and effort to read all the way through...asking new members to read the Sequences before being able to fully join the community is quite a lot to ask of new members (though is still a good thing, since we need that common intellectual framework of thought as a community). Reading HPMOR was fun, I enjoyed the rationality mindset that was conveyed through the story, and I then felt like this was a community I wanted to be a part of. Whether HPMOR should be on the front page or not...eh, I don’t know if it matters very much, I was able to find HPMOR fairly quickly after I initially started poking around the rationalist community internetspace. If putting HPMOR on the front page for new users helps them decide that they want to see what else this community has to offer and to potentially join it, then great. If it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be on the frontpage, though I do think that having a link that’s reasonably prominent somewhere on the site to HPMOR and other rationalist fanfiction would be a useful and good thing. I want to read other rationalist fanfiction stories, but I’m not really sure where to find them.
I think that the frontpage is missing something very important though...a big link to some content that explicitly states what the community is, why it is that way, and the things the community is actively working on. And, perhaps most importantly, content that explicitly states why Johnny-New-Reader/random person who just stumbled across the site, should actually care about what it is we do here. We need some way of conveying in a relatively concise manner, what it is we do here, why a new person should care, and why they would benefit from sticking around here and eventually reading the Sequences. I think it’s perfectly fine to ask that new members to the community read the Sequences, but I think we should have content that explicitly states why they should and why it’s worth their time. While writing this post, I opened up a new tab to see what clicking on the Sequences link shows you...it shows basically the Sequences, and some info about what they are and that they were written by Eliezer, but there’s no: “And this is why you should read them/this is why they are worth your time” present. Having that kind of content show up on the frontpage (as a link, or whatever form works best) provides new readers with a quick and dirty way to see if they are interested in the rationalist community and if they should spend the very significant time and effort it takes to actually join and take part in the rationalist community.
EDIT: Oops, I totally derped and forgot that this post is in the Meta section...you can ignore the stuff below...
The above paragraph probably belonged more in the Meta section of the site...but it felt tangentially related enough to the subject of this post (should HPMOR be on the front page) that I decided to just post it here instead of creating a new post in the Meta (which I’m not sure if I can do or not, this is only my second comment).
Shortform #110 Studying | I vent some about work, but not...intensely, more of a light venting.
I was approved to work four 10 hour days this week meaning that I have Friday entirely free from my current employer! Huzzah! Huzzah! I will be spending the majority of the day studying for the professional cert I take exams for at the end of this month plus will meet with my co-organizer to figure out upcoming meetups. I am grateful that I’ve been able to study some at work, though not usually more than twenty minutes per day, still...the extra time there and the time I’ve been putting in at home have helped, I feel confident in my competency to take the certification exams at the end of this month.
Studying is nice :) I continue to be somewhat ambivalent about my current profession, but I am passionate about many parts of it at least, and it pays well. Still, I’m happy to be pursuing other things simultaneously (yay for organizing, yay for writing, etc.), that helps me stay motivated and handle some of the more boring or annoying parts of my current job as I work to “level up” the rungs of my profession.
Replacing computers all day long is incredibly boring. The conversations I have with people & who I’m helping out and who they serve, those are the rewarding parts of the job. I do love when I get to dive into the technical weeds and do some real troubleshooting, but that’s not as frequent an occurrence as I’d like. Thank goodness for studying, deliberate practice, and continuing to learn nonstop!
Shortform #100 Writing publicly considered beneficial, fun, and not that scary
After writing one hundred shortform posts, writing publicly no longer feels scary and really just feels like a habit more than anything else (especially because the last 33 posts were near daily or daily). A habit I intend to continue as these are fun to write (even when I feel grumpy or hit an ugh field before doing so) and occupy a nice role in my life, plus I love growing my writing & other skills when creating these posts.
I feel a strong desire to write bigger posts than these, but I like having the shortforms as a consistent & foundational habit for regular public writing. Consistency and building foundational habits are of paramount importance, atop such you can build bigger and better things.
Here’s to continuing daily shortforms and growing what is next too!
Shortform #88 Retreat Debriefing & Staying in Touch | I will review some AI Safety literature
Today was a bifurcated day, I spent the morning and early afternoon dealing with the remnants of travelling (picking up my car from my local airport and then my baggage from an airport an hour away from home because that’s where my connecting flight had been routed to last night after the initial one was unexpectedly cancelled) then finally made it to my apartment to shower & recombobulate.
I met with my Norfolk Rationalists co-organizer (shoutout Yitz!!! https://www.lesswrong.com/users/yitz) to essentially debrief and share as much knowledge I gained from the organizer’s retreat as possible. We had many lovely conversations and have concrete actions planned for growing & strengthening the Norfolk Rationalists community. More on that another time, there will be announcements.
I enjoyed reaching out & saying hi to other organizers to check on how their travel went, what they are up to. Many more people to go, if you haven’t heard from me and were at the retreat you should soon, I met and remember almost every organizer there (had at least a 5-10 minute conversation with 90%-95% or so of attending organizers).
Several individuals much more knowledgeable about AI Alignment than myself recommended that I check out Coherent Extrapolated Volition and clarified why I need to familiarize myself with existing AI Alignment research a bit more before I go off and do an in-depth analysis of political values re: AI Alignment. Yitz and I will be reviewing that original article & associated content then publish our review of the idea after determining how well it holds up regarding values determination. This and other AI Safety / Alignment work will take place at upcoming local meetup / coworking sessions in Norfolk separate from the Norfolk Rationalists group (as that is an exclusively social group). Looking forward to increasing my AI Alignment knowledge & helping how I can.
Back to my day-job tomorrow, decently looking forward to that in addition to everything else.
Seconding this.
While it’s possible to get around without a car in some spots of most cities in Texas, your quality of life and ability to visit others, go to interesting places, etc. downright sucks* unless you have a car. Additionally, the moment you leave the big cities in Texas (and even in them in some parts), the culture gets very religious and conservative, very quickly. Also, the state government and legislature is fond of going on crusades against the big cities from time to time, because they think the big cities are too progressive / liberal. Furthermore, everyone has guns. This is not an exaggeration**, unless you’re on university or government property, or in a few very very progressive / particular locales, you can expect that the majority of people you see are armed, and that a majority of people or more keep a gun in their car while driving. People get shot during road rage incidents. Liberals and progressives frequently own guns too, it’s not just conservatives. Avoid Waco, you really don’t want to relocate there.
Though, despite those things, Texas is probably one of the better places in the US for things like local political control, low to no state taxes (correspondingly, low to no state services that you’d find in CA or NY), high amounts of libertarianism and “live and let live” vibes (except when that’s a lie), surprisingly high tolerance for variance and weird / unfamiliar ideas, generally very cheap cost of living, cultural vibrancy, starting and running a business, and some other nice things.
Somewhat of a joke, but not entirely...if you move to Texas you will be assimilated and suddenly find yourself extolling the virtues of Texas and Texanness to everyone who’s not already living there. Texas has very strong cultural memes and you will get infected by at least some of them.
The Texas Hill Country is probably the most compatible area in Texas for MIRI if they chose to relocate to Texas. You can have beautiful rolling hills, decent enough weather, lots of outdoors-y pursuits, breweries, less traffic, slower pace of life, and more while still being within 30-60 minutes driving distance of Austin proper.
*there are exceptions, such as...someone living in Montrose, The Heights, Midtown, or other neighborhoods inside the 610 loop in Houston who doesn’t venture outside the loop can do just fine without a car for the most part. I’m sure the same is true for certain areas of other Texas cities, theoretically (I only have experience with Houston). On a side note, the food scene in Houston is amazing and worth visiting for.
**okay, maybe a little bit of an exaggeration in some ways, but my broader point about “if you move to Texas, you will have to interact with lots of people who are likely rocking concealed weapons” being generally true is a claim I stand behind.