LessWrong/Lightcone Infrastructure
Ruby
Karma: 736
Congratulations!! Marriage between the right people is wonderful.
Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg and I had EA themes throughout our wedding ceremony. You’re welcome to read and borrow from our ceremony text. (Eventually I’ll post the audio recordings too, but they need some significant audio clean up.)
Context: we had our wedding in a planetarium and had our friends write speeches each according to a particular theme combining into an overall arc. Each speech was read while a matching starscape was projected on the dome.
Holly’s answer reminded me of some of the passages we used in a 3rd anniversary mini-ceremony last year. The mini-ceremony had a couple of posts from the Sequences, one of which appear to be mostly an expansion of that point from Origin.
Just a thought: there’s the common advice that fighting all out with the utmost desperation makes sense for very brief periods, a few weeks or months, but doing so for longer leads to burnout. So you get sayings like “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” But I wonder if length of the “fight”/”war” isn’t the only variable in sustainable effort. Other key ones might be the degree of ongoing feedback and certainty about the cause.
Though I expect a multiyear war which is an existential threat to your home and family to be extremely taxing, I imagine soldiers experiencing less burnout than people investing similar effort for a far-mode cause, let’s say global warming which might be happening, but is slow and your contributions to preventing it unclear. (Actual soldiers may correct me on this, and I can believe war is very traumatizing, though I will still ask how much they believed in the war they were fighting.)
(Perhaps the relevant variables here are something like Hanson’s Near vs Far mode thinking, where hard effort for far-mode thinking more readily leads to burnout than near-mode thinking even when sustained for long periods.)
Then of course there’s generally EA and X-risk where burnout is common. Is this just because of the time scales involved, or is it because trying to work on x-risk is subject to so much uncertainty and paucity of feedback? Who knows if you’re making a positive difference? Contrast with a Mario character toiling for years to rescue the princess he is certain is locked in a castle waiting. Fighting enemy after enemy, sleeping on cold stone night after night, eating scraps. I suspect Mario, with his certainty and much more concrete sense of progress, might be able expend much more effort and endure much more hardship for much longer than is sustainable in the EA/X-risk space.
Related: On Doing the Improbable
We’ve now designated many activities to many different regions of the Walled Garden. If you’re interested in hosting or attending a specific activity, please comment. The organizers can help you set it up and put it on the Official Party Schedule.
The following are scheduling throughout the party, but it seems great to have more specific things scheduled for like-interested people to join.
Ballroom: dancing, toasts & roasts, countdown
Violet Study: meet new people
Moloch Maze: games, e.g., poker, Among Us
Great Library (1st floor): deep philosophical conversations
Orrery: make and discuss predictions for 2021
Map Room: reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going
Hell: complain about 2020
Heaven:....
etc!
Some images of the party locations to pump the imagination:
Early testing of the ballroom Here fishy, fishy Meet new people in the Violet Study
We’ve now got a rough map of the venue.
The Ultra Party Radio (TM) has been constructed (bottom right of attached image). We’ll be streaming tunes to the entire Garden from our own server, but the music will be optimized for the ballroom dancefloor.
What music would you like to hear? Please comment with:
Genres
Specific song requests
Playlists you might like us to use or borrow from
Upvote suggestions from others if you like them too.
Collaborative calendar/schedule for the event is now live! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xUToQ-Wu6w-Uaow7q8Bo5s61beWWRJhIh9P-DNAvx4Q/edit?usp=sharing
Please add any events or activities you’d like to run. Comment here or in the doc if you have questions, e.g . about good places to host your session.
Ah, sorry, we meant to fix that. Should have all been CET.
There is already a (clunky) feature that enables this.
If you hyperlink text with a tag url with the url parameter?userTagName=true, the hyperlinked text will be replaced by whatever the current name of the tag is.
E.g. If the tag is called “Global dystopia” and I put in a post or other tag with the hyperlink url/global-distoptia?useTagName=trueand then it gets renamed to “Dystopia”:The old URL will still work
The text “Global dystopia” will be replaced with the current name “Dystopia”
There’s a user setting that lets you do this.
Seems good to me too.
LessWrong mod speaking here. Just wanted to confirm that everything written here is correct.
To be clear, only the identities of the account that enters a valid code will be shared.
I also see that a lot of the issues were predictable from last year’s comments but were not addressed.
This is my fault. I was the lead organizer for Petrov Day this year though wasn’t an organizer in previous years. I recalled that there were issues with ambiguity last year, which I attempted to address (albeit quite unsuccessfully), however, I didn’t go through and read/re-read all of the comments from last year. If I had done so, I might have corrected more of the design.
I’m sorry for the negative experience you had due to the poor design. I do think it’s bad for people to find themselves threatened by social consequences over something they weren’t given proper context for.
If I’m involved in next year’s Petrov Day, I plan on there being consent mechanisms, as you suggest.
LessWrong Petrov Day Retrospective, just published.
[Speaking from LessWrong here:] based on our experiments so far, I think there’s a fair amount more work to be done before we’d want to widely roll out a new voting system. Unfortunately for this feature, development is paused while we work on some other stuff.
Career Suggestion: Earning to Skill
Earn to Learn
Well dang.
Firstly, thanks for the post above! These are important questions to consider.
I think your main point in your post is that the misperception of EAs as cold is preventing growth, and that’s why we’d want to correct it. Habryka replied that what really matters is ‘are we growing the EA ecosystem in the right way?’. In your response to him, you say that you argue for warmer language because it corrects a false perception of us and that it’s a common point of criticism.
But to reply to Habryka, a clearer argument is needed for saying why those things matter. It could be the case that we are warm, our language falsely makes us seem cold, but this isn’t a problem because it doesn’t adversely affect growing the EA ecosystem in a healthy way, even if there are people turned off by it.
Also, it might not be practical or worthwhile to defend against every criticism based on misrepresentations. This critique might not even be the critic’s true rejection of EA. Defend against that one, and they’ll generate new critiques based on other distortions of who we are. Is this a critique in particular which we need to defend against because it’s damaging us, worse than the next critique they’ll focus on?