I think this is also a case of ‘reverse all advice you hear’. No one is at the optimum on most dimensions, so a lot of people will benefit from the advice ‘be more X’ and a lot of people will benefit from the advice ‘be less X’. I’m guessing your (Connor’s) advice applies perfectly to lots of people, but for me...
Even after working at MIRI and living in the Bay for eight years, I don’t have any close rationalist friends who I talk to (e.g.) once a week, and that makes me sad.
I have non-rationalist friends who I do lots of stuff with, but in those interactions I mostly don’t feel like I can fully be ‘me’, because most of the things I’m thinking about moment-to-moment and most of the things that feel deeply important to me don’t fit the mental schemas non-rationalists round things off to. I end up feeling like I have to either play-act at fitting a more normal role, or spend almost all my leisure time bridging inferential gap after inferential gap. (And no, self-modifying to better fit mainstream schemas does not appeal to me!)
I’d love to go to these parties you’re complaining about that are focused on “model-building and… learning”!
Actually, the thing I want is more extreme than that: I’d love to go to more ‘let’s do CFAR-workshop-style stuff together’ or ‘let’s talk about existential risk’ parties.
I think the personal problem I’ve had is the opposite of the one you’re pointing at: I feel like (for my idiosyncratic preferences) there’s usually not enough social affordance to talk about “real stuff” at rationalist-hosted parties, versus talking about pleasantries. This makes me feel like I’m playing a role / reading a script, which I find draining and a little soul-crushing.
In contrast, events where I don’t feel like there’s a ‘pretend to be normal’ expectation (and where I can talk about my bizarre actual goals and problems) feel very freeing and fulfilling to me, and like they’re feeding me nutrients I’ve been low on rather than empty calories.
“Making donations to other [lower-EV] causes helps you take them seriously, in the way that trading with real-but-trivial amounts of money instead of paper trading moves you strongly from Far Mode into Near Mode”
OK, but what about the skills of ‘doing the thing you think is highest-EV’, ‘trying to figure out what the highest-EV thing is’, or ‘developing deeper and more specialized knowledge on the highest-EV things (vs. flitting between topics)’? I feel like those are pretty important skills too, and more neglected by the world at large; and they have the advantage of being good actions on their own terms, rather than relying on a speculative theory that says this might help me do higher-EV things later.
I feel especially excited about trying to come up with new projects that might be extremely-high-EV, rather than just evaluating existing stuff.
I again feel like in my own life, I don’t have enough naive EA conversations about humanity’s big Hamming problems / bottlenecks. (Which is presumably mostly my fault! Certainly it’s up to me to fix this stuff. But if the community were uniformly bad in the opposite direction, then I wouldn’t expect to be able to have this problem.)
“I’d like to see Bay Area rationalist culture put some emphasis on real holidays rather than only rolling their own.”
Rationalist solstice is a real holiday! 😠
I went to a mostly-unironic rationalist July 4 party that I liked a lot, which updates me toward your view. But I think I still mostly come down on the opposite side of this tradeoff, if I were only optimizing for my own happiness.
‘No Christmas’ feels sad and cut-off-from-mainstream-culture to me, but ‘pantomiming Christmas without endorsing its values or virtues’ feels empty to me. “Rationalizing” Christmas feels like the perfect approach here (for me personally): make a new holiday that’s about things I actually care about and value, that draws out neglected aspects of Christmas (or precursor holidays like Saturnalia). I’d love to attend a rationalist seder, a rationalist Easter, a rationalist Chanukkah, etc. (Where ‘rationalist’ refers to changing the traditions themselves, not just ‘a bunch of rationalists celebrating together in a way that studiously tries to avoid any acknowledgment of anything weird about us’.)
I think this is also a case of ‘reverse all advice you hear’. No one is at the optimum on most dimensions, so a lot of people will benefit from the advice ‘be more X’ and a lot of people will benefit from the advice ‘be less X’. I’m guessing your (Connor’s) advice applies perfectly to lots of people, but for me...
Even after working at MIRI and living in the Bay for eight years, I don’t have any close rationalist friends who I talk to (e.g.) once a week, and that makes me sad.
I have non-rationalist friends who I do lots of stuff with, but in those interactions I mostly don’t feel like I can fully be ‘me’, because most of the things I’m thinking about moment-to-moment and most of the things that feel deeply important to me don’t fit the mental schemas non-rationalists round things off to. I end up feeling like I have to either play-act at fitting a more normal role, or spend almost all my leisure time bridging inferential gap after inferential gap. (And no, self-modifying to better fit mainstream schemas does not appeal to me!)
I’d love to go to these parties you’re complaining about that are focused on “model-building and… learning”!
Actually, the thing I want is more extreme than that: I’d love to go to more ‘let’s do CFAR-workshop-style stuff together’ or ‘let’s talk about existential risk’ parties.
I think the personal problem I’ve had is the opposite of the one you’re pointing at: I feel like (for my idiosyncratic preferences) there’s usually not enough social affordance to talk about “real stuff” at rationalist-hosted parties, versus talking about pleasantries. This makes me feel like I’m playing a role / reading a script, which I find draining and a little soul-crushing.
In contrast, events where I don’t feel like there’s a ‘pretend to be normal’ expectation (and where I can talk about my bizarre actual goals and problems) feel very freeing and fulfilling to me, and like they’re feeding me nutrients I’ve been low on rather than empty calories.
“Making donations to other [lower-EV] causes helps you take them seriously, in the way that trading with real-but-trivial amounts of money instead of paper trading moves you strongly from Far Mode into Near Mode”
OK, but what about the skills of ‘doing the thing you think is highest-EV’, ‘trying to figure out what the highest-EV thing is’, or ‘developing deeper and more specialized knowledge on the highest-EV things (vs. flitting between topics)’? I feel like those are pretty important skills too, and more neglected by the world at large; and they have the advantage of being good actions on their own terms, rather than relying on a speculative theory that says this might help me do higher-EV things later.
I feel especially excited about trying to come up with new projects that might be extremely-high-EV, rather than just evaluating existing stuff.
I again feel like in my own life, I don’t have enough naive EA conversations about humanity’s big Hamming problems / bottlenecks. (Which is presumably mostly my fault! Certainly it’s up to me to fix this stuff. But if the community were uniformly bad in the opposite direction, then I wouldn’t expect to be able to have this problem.)
“I’d like to see Bay Area rationalist culture put some emphasis on real holidays rather than only rolling their own.”
Rationalist solstice is a real holiday! 😠
I went to a mostly-unironic rationalist July 4 party that I liked a lot, which updates me toward your view. But I think I still mostly come down on the opposite side of this tradeoff, if I were only optimizing for my own happiness.
‘No Christmas’ feels sad and cut-off-from-mainstream-culture to me, but ‘pantomiming Christmas without endorsing its values or virtues’ feels empty to me. “Rationalizing” Christmas feels like the perfect approach here (for me personally): make a new holiday that’s about things I actually care about and value, that draws out neglected aspects of Christmas (or precursor holidays like Saturnalia). I’d love to attend a rationalist seder, a rationalist Easter, a rationalist Chanukkah, etc. (Where ‘rationalist’ refers to changing the traditions themselves, not just ‘a bunch of rationalists celebrating together in a way that studiously tries to avoid any acknowledgment of anything weird about us’.)