Root out maximizers within yourself. Even ‘doing the most good.’ Maximizer processes are cancer, trying to convert the universe into copies of themselves. But this destroys anything that the maximizing was for.
RomeoStevens
Karma: 1,007
Potentially of use in running a short workshop is the effectiveness of pedagogical techniques. From engaging with the literature on such, the highest quality systematic review I could find pointed to four techniques as showing robust effect size across many contexts and instantiations. They are
Deliberate practice
Cuing elaboration of context
Regular low stakes quizzing
Teaching the material to others
Lots of markets fail to clear for a long time until coordination problems are solved.
I propose that March 26th (6 months equidistant from Petrov day) be converse Petrov day.
in the long run yes. But that’s overly simplistic when considering humans because of all the things we might do to either memetically or technologically undermine evolutionary equilibria.
rK selection.
And later iirc “maybe not needing to hear their screams is what being the comet king means.”
In order for hingeyness to stay uniform robustness to x-risk would need to scale uniformly with power needed to cause x-risk.
In the same way that an organism tries to extend the envelope of its homeostasis, an organization has a tendency to isolate itself from falsifiability in its core justifying claims. Beware those whose response to failure is to scale up.
Towards measuring poverty costs of covid from economic disruption: https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/lives-or-livelihoods-global-estimates-mortality-and-poverty-costs-covid-19
Thank you for the work put into this.
I can imagine a world in which the idea of a peace summit that doesn’t involve leaders taking mdma together is seen as an ‘are you even trying’ type thing.
Great points. I feel like there’s a rule of thumb somewhere in here like ‘marginal dollars tend to be low information dollars’ that feels helpful.
This portion of the PBS documentary A Century of Revolution covers the cultural revolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJyoX_vrlns (Around the 1 hour mark)
Recommended. One interesting bit for me is that I think foreign dictators often appear clownish because the translations don’t capture what they were speaking to, either literally in terms of them being a good speech writer, or contextually in terms of not really being familiar with the cultural context that animates a particular popular political reaction. I think this applies even if you speak nominally the same language as the dictator but don’t share their culture.
Appreciate the care taken, especially in the atomistic section. One thing is that it seems to assume that best we can do with such a research agenda is analyze correlates, where what we really want is a causal model.
I really enjoyed this. A related thing is about a possible reason why more debate doesn’t happen. I think when rationalist style thinkers debate, especially in public, it feels a bit high stakes. There is pressure to demonstrate good epistemic standards, even though no one can define a good basis set for that. This goes doubly so for anyone who feels like they have a respectable position or are well regarded. There is a lot of downside risk to them engaging in debate and little upside. I think the thing that breaks this is actually pretty simple and is helped out by the ‘sorry’ command concept. If it’s a free move socially to choose whether or not to debate (which avoids the thing where a person mostly wants to debate only if they’re in the mood and about the thing they are interested in but don’t want to defend a position against arbitrary objections that they may have answered lots of times before etc.) and also a free move to say ‘actually, some of my beliefs in this area are cached sorries, so I reserve the right to not have perfect epistemics here already, and we also recognize that even if we refute specific parts of the argument, we might disagree on whether it is a smoking gun, so I can go away and think about it and I don’t have to publicly update on it’ then it derisks engaging in a friendly, yet still adversarial form debate.
If we believe that people doing a lot of this play fighting will on average increase the volume and quality of EA output both through direct discovery of more bugs in arguments and in providing more training opportunity, then maybe it should be a named thing like Crocker’s rules? Like people can say ‘I’m open to debating X, but I declare Kid Gloves’ or something. (What might be a good name for this?)
This is a great research question IMO
> Costs of being vegan are in fact trivial, despite all the complaining that meat-eaters do about it. For almost everyone there is a net health benefit and the food is probably more enjoyable than the amount of enjoyment one would have derived from sticking with one’s non-vegan diet, or at the very least certainly not less so. No expenditure of will-power is required once one is accustomed to the new diet. It is simply a matter of changing one’s mind-set.
Appreciate some of the points, but this part seems totally disconnected from what people report along several dimensions.
Potential EA career: go in to defense R&D specifically for ‘stabilizing’ weapons tech i.e. doing research on things that would favor defense over offense. In 3d space, this is very hard.
You may be interested in this convo I had about research on pedagogical models. The tl;dw if you just want the interventions that have replicated with large effects sizes:
Deliberate practice
Lots of low stakes quizzing
Elaboration of context (deliberately structuring things to give students the chance to connect knowledge areas themselves)
Teaching the material to others (forcing organization of the material in a way helpful to the one doing the teaching, and helping them identify holes in their own understanding)