I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but what’s a rationalist (and presumably also carer-about-AI-safety) doing spending this much time (and mental energy—you seem to have been doing a lot of calculations) playing a video game? If you need to play something every so often in order to rest, that’s reasonable, but you explicitly state that you’ve been writing less partially due to playing the game; as someone who has had to mostly eliminate my consumption of video games specifically because I almost invariably get addicted to them and lose tons of time, I can’t help but wonder if you’re in that situation.
I weak-down voted your comment, mainly because it has an underlying movement that is very should-y (beware other-optimizing!), based on at best medium information about the writer. I believe you probably wouldn’t have made a similar comment about someone spending two months learning the piano?
I would like it to be the case that Lesswrong stays a place where overly math-heavy video game discussion is socially allowed, and not where everything that doesn’t reduce x-risk is frowned upon. Let people play during the apocalypse, they should enjoy their remaining time.
No, it is not only designed to be beaten (by children), but designed to tick an artificially addictive skill curve as optimally as possible.
Not necessarily true in general. Many games have challenges/achievements that only a small fraction of the playerbase (sometimes less than 1%) get, and even just beating the main story is sometimes less than 10%. (Though just from the stats we can’t tell how much of that is lack of skill vs. lack of desire).
To put it another way, some video game challenges are harder than most days at my job as a programmer.
If you’re a selfless altruist who eliminated video games from your life so that you can spend more time on altruism, then hats off to you and genuine thanks for your service. But don’t act like you’re confused that someone else would not do it. You can be a rationalist and care about AI safety without being a selfless altruist devoting every minute to it.
I understand why someone would do it. I was projecting my own insecurities. The fact is, I have no idea whether anything I do is useful, and I regularly waste hours watching Youtube or even just walking in circles daydreaming and claiming to myself that I am thinking. I have tremendously weak self-control and decision making ability. Pot calling the kettle black, I suppose.
Just as a data point for you: I made the conscious decision to spend 100 hours on Elden Ring the day I bought it, and have spent almost none of these 100 hours feeling conflicted or shamed. Writing this post was also fun — was writing the comment fun for you?
I don’t want to go into a discussion of all the topics this touches on from self-coercion to time management to AI timelines to fun, just a reminder to be careful about typical minding.
Sometimes it’s better in the long run to take a good chunk of time off to do things for fun and write or work less. Sometimes less is more. But this is very much a YMMV thing.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but what’s a rationalist (and presumably also carer-about-AI-safety) doing spending this much time (and mental energy—you seem to have been doing a lot of calculations) playing a video game? If you need to play something every so often in order to rest, that’s reasonable, but you explicitly state that you’ve been writing less partially due to playing the game; as someone who has had to mostly eliminate my consumption of video games specifically because I almost invariably get addicted to them and lose tons of time, I can’t help but wonder if you’re in that situation.
I weak-down voted your comment, mainly because it has an underlying movement that is very should-y (beware other-optimizing!), based on at best medium information about the writer. I believe you probably wouldn’t have made a similar comment about someone spending two months learning the piano?
I would like it to be the case that Lesswrong stays a place where overly math-heavy video game discussion is socially allowed, and not where everything that doesn’t reduce x-risk is frowned upon. Let people play during the apocalypse, they should enjoy their remaining time.
After playing 10k hours of video games...I do think fake cultivation and fake achievements are a substantial danger.
Eg “requires skill and discipline”
No, it is not only designed to be beaten (by children), but designed to tick an artificially addictive skill curve as optimally as possible.
Not necessarily true in general. Many games have challenges/achievements that only a small fraction of the playerbase (sometimes less than 1%) get, and even just beating the main story is sometimes less than 10%. (Though just from the stats we can’t tell how much of that is lack of skill vs. lack of desire).
To put it another way, some video game challenges are harder than most days at my job as a programmer.
If you’re a selfless altruist who eliminated video games from your life so that you can spend more time on altruism, then hats off to you and genuine thanks for your service. But don’t act like you’re confused that someone else would not do it. You can be a rationalist and care about AI safety without being a selfless altruist devoting every minute to it.
I understand why someone would do it. I was projecting my own insecurities. The fact is, I have no idea whether anything I do is useful, and I regularly waste hours watching Youtube or even just walking in circles daydreaming and claiming to myself that I am thinking. I have tremendously weak self-control and decision making ability. Pot calling the kettle black, I suppose.
Just as a data point for you: I made the conscious decision to spend 100 hours on Elden Ring the day I bought it, and have spent almost none of these 100 hours feeling conflicted or shamed. Writing this post was also fun — was writing the comment fun for you?
I don’t want to go into a discussion of all the topics this touches on from self-coercion to time management to AI timelines to fun, just a reminder to be careful about typical minding.
Sometimes it’s better in the long run to take a good chunk of time off to do things for fun and write or work less. Sometimes less is more. But this is very much a YMMV thing.
Many rationality lessons can be had from video games, in fact.