dirk

Karma: 198

dirk May 12, 2025, 7:01 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Speedrunning on-demand bliss for improved productivity, wellbeing, and thinking
Another Jhourney attendee, Nadia Asparouhova, has done a writeup of her experiences with some instructions for hopefully achieving the jhanas, which seems potentially helpful; the instructions are nicely succinct and concrete.

dirk Nov 24, 2024, 4:31 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A few questions about recent developments in EA
Why aren’t there more organizations within EA that are trying to be extremely hardcore and totalizing, to the level of religious orders, the Navy SEALs, the Manhattan Project, or even a really intense start-up? It seems like that that is the kind of organization you would want to join, if you truly internalize the stakes here.
There was an attempt at that in rationalism, Dragon Army, though it didn’t ultimately succeed; you can find the postmortem at https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/dragon-army-retrospective-597faf182e50.

dirk Nov 23, 2024, 2:33 AM
4 points
2 ∶ 0
on: dirk’s Quick takes
I’m skeptical of metrics like “x% of people involved said they were satisfied” for estimating cost-effectiveness. Customer satisfaction doesn’t really connect very well to any of the things I care about; in most cases I’m happier with a rough estimate of lives saved/units of suffering prevented/QALYs purchased/etc. per dollar than with a more precise accounting of things that touch less directly on the end goal.

dirk’s Quick takes

dirkNov 23, 2024, 2:33 AM

3 points

1 comment EA link

dirk Nov 23, 2024, 2:23 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Marginal Funding to Support Novel Fish Welfare Interventions
Thanks for including the fish-per-dollar estimate! I know it doesn’t account for the value of your speculative work, but having the number at all makes it a lot easier for me to reason about it.

dirk Nov 11, 2024, 8:38 PM
6 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: Scouts need soldiers for their work to be worth anything
(Also also, it isn’t only the poster who has to worry about the truth of what they say? It’s everyone? Comments also receive criticism all the time. I don’t think this poster/commenter divide cuts reality at the joints.)

dirk Nov 11, 2024, 8:29 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: Scouts need soldiers for their work to be worth anything
(Also, I understand the comment was not phrased helpfully to you, but for my part I felt that it communicated the errors clearly enough that I could understand them easily, and appreciate having the false dichotomy especially pointed out without having to discover it myself).

dirk Nov 11, 2024, 8:25 PM
1 point
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: Scouts need soldiers for their work to be worth anything
Thank you for sharing, but I’ve read your post and am not convinced (either in this instance or in general). I think it was a fine comment to which you reacted with unwarranted negativity. Or, in short: no, you’re wrong.

dirk Nov 11, 2024, 2:41 PM
8 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: Scouts need soldiers for their work to be worth anything
I think if your arguments are locally invalid, that is something important about your post. High standards of accuracy and quality are something I value about Less Wrong and EA, and to me part of having high standards is trying to avoid even small mistakes.

dirk Sep 8, 2024, 12:46 AM
7 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: The EA Hub is retiring
Dunno if it’s still helpful, but https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/talent-directory is a directory of EAs looking for work and contained several each of lawyers and accountants on a quick search.

dirk Sep 1, 2024, 8:44 AM
5 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: Lizka’s Shortform
I think speculating about what exactly constitutes the most good is perfectly on-topic. While ‘murdering meat-eaters’ is perhaps an overly direct phrasing (and of course under most ethical frameworks murder raises additional issues as compared to mere inaction or deprioritization), the question of whether the negative utility produced by one marginal person’s worth of factory farming outweighs the positive utility that person experiences—colloquially referred to as the meat-eater problem—is one that has been discussed here a number of times, and that I feel is quite relevant to the question of which interventions should be prioritized.

dirk Aug 18, 2024, 12:47 AM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Science Dogood’s comment on: The EA case for Trump 2024
My main observation is that he and his people really do think the election was stolen from them.
That sounds to me like a reason not to elect him? Self-deceiving for personal gain (endemic though it is 😔) is not a positive trait for a president to have.

dirk Jul 11, 2024, 1:44 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Adrian Satja Kurdija’s comment on: The Value of Consciousness as a Pivotal Question
I don’t think illusionism is an accurate view, so I’d be opposed to adopting it.

dirk Jul 10, 2024, 5:05 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Nora Belrose’s comment on: AI Pause Will Likely Backfire
If you don’t think their arguments are convincing, I consider it misleading to attempt to convince other people with those same arguments.

dirk Jul 4, 2024, 2:56 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: LGS’s comment on: LLMs cannot usefully be moral patients
The claim that they can’t be moral patients doesn’t seem to me to be well-supported by the fact that their statements aren’t informative about their feelings. Can you explain how you think the latter implies the former?

dirk Jul 3, 2024, 8:43 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: LGS’s comment on: LLMs cannot usefully be moral patients
Of course if we can’t ascertain their internal states we can’t reasonably condition our decisions on same, but that seems to me to be a different question from whether, if they have internal states, those are morally relevant.

dirk Jul 3, 2024, 7:49 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: LLMs cannot usefully be moral patients
I agree that LLM output doesn’t convey useful information about their internal states, but I’m not seeing the logical connection from inability to communicate with LLMs to it being fine to ignore their welfare (if they have the capacity for welfare); could you elaborate?

dirk Jun 22, 2024, 1:37 AM
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why UFOs matter
What makes eyewitness reports of UFOs more credible than eyewitness reports of miracles, which are if anything more frequent?

dirk Apr 30, 2024, 12:16 AM
7 points
2 ∶ 0
on: The Highly Sensitive EA
If you qualify as a Highly Sensitive Person, IMO it’s also worth considering whether you’re autistic; as far as I can tell, the two are synonyms.

dirk Mar 18, 2024, 4:47 AM
13 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism
You wrote that “No self-interested person is ever going to point this out because it pisses off the mods and CEA, who ultimately decide whose voices can be heard—collectively, they can quietly ban anyone from the forum / EAG without any evidence, oversight, or due process.” To me, this implies that you believe all self-interested people would refrain from pointing it out for the reason it upsets the mods, who can ban anyone without evidence or oversight. For it to be true that the mods’ capacity to ban people prevents self-interested people from posting on this topic, the mods would have to be likely to exercise that capacity with regards to this topic (well, or our hypothetical self-interested poster would have to mistakenly believe that they are).