I write shorter sentences thanks to the editing work of LW editor @JustisMills and the book Several Short Sentences About Writing.
Elizabeth
Karma: 18,451
I liked this post a lot more than I expected to, but I’m disappointed the only examples of lying are a combination of people who have no right to the information and people who are better off for you lying (in a way that gives them truer beliefs than if you’d told the literal truth).
The hard cases are much more interesting. What about lying to my landlord about renting a room on airbnb? What about saying your class will make people millionaires for the low low price of $1,000 (hey, it could happen)? What about hiding the rats from the health inspector?
I would love to hear more about yc (and especially how you think it changed over time)
Austin Chen on Winning, Risk-Taking, and FTX
4 months ago I shared that I was taking sublingual vitamins and would test their effect on my nutrition in 2025. This ended up being an unusually good time to test because my stomach was struggling and my doctor took me off almost all vitamins, so the sublinguals were my major non-food source (and I’ve been good at extracting vitamins from food). I now have the “after” test results. I will announce results in 8 days- but before then, you can bet on Manifold. Will I judge my nutrition results to have been noticeably improved over the previous results?
Hank Green on the worst things about no longer having cancer:
During cancer you have a team of high status people actively working for your benefit. Suddenly, they are gone.
You are not actually done.
The cancer could return.
you have to monitor for the cancer’s return, so every weird thing your body does now feels threatening. This will never entirely go away.
You have made a bunch of cancer friends, some of whom are doing much worse than you.
The cancer and the treatment both leave a permanent mark on your body,
including permanent disability.
your you has gone through a one way transformation
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Assuming arguendo this is true: if you care primarily about sex, hiring sex workers is orders of magnitude more efficient than marriage. Therefor the existence of a given marriage is evidence both sides get something out of it besides sex.
female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.
That’s the stereotype, but men are the ones who die sooner if divorced, which suggests they’re getting a lot out of marriage.
ETA: looked it up, divorced women die sooner as well, but the effect is smaller despite divorce having a bigger financial impact on women.
According to a friend of mine in AI, there’s a substantial contingent of people who got into AI safety via Friendship is Optimal. They will only reveal this after several drinks. Until then, they will cite HPMOR. Which means we are probably overvaluing HPMOR and undervaluing FIO.
follow up: if you would disagree-vote with a react but not karma downvote, you can use the opposite react.
Feedback loops for exercise (VO2Max)
While we’re at it, can it be >99% to match <1%?
As a follow up on my previous poll: If you’ve worked closely with someone who used stimulants sometimes but not always, how did stimulants affect their ability to update? Please reply with emojis <1% for “completely trashed”, 50% for neutral, >99% for “huge improvement”.
Comments with additional details are welcome.
Sorry, I missed this too. The first-pass transcript was indeed done by AI. I went over it probably dozens of times, but I guess not enough.
Can you share data on the size of PauseAI protests over time?
Comedians seem like a useful vector.
Note that at time of donation, Altman was co-chair of the board but 2 years away from becoming CEO.
Reasoning through a new example:
There’s no google maps and no internet to help with finding a hotel. You haven’t chosen a destination city yet.
You could work out how to choose hotels and facilitate the group identifying the kind of hotel it wants. They’re both robustly useful.
You could start picking out hotels in cities at random. Somehow my intuition is that doing this when you don’t know the city is still marginally useful (you might choose that city. Obviously more useful the smaller the set of possible cities), but nonzero useful.
OTOH, one of the best ways to build hotel identifying skills is to identify a hotel, even if you don’t use it. A few practice runs choosing hotels in random cities probably does help you make a new reservation in a different city.
My shoulder John says “dry running hotels is a fine thing to do as long as you’re doing it as a part of a plan to get good at a generalizable skill”. I agree that’s ideal, but not everyone has that skill, and one of the ways to get it is to gradient ascend on gradient ascending. I worry that rhetoric like this, and related stuff I see in EA and rationality encouraging people to do the most important thing, ends up paralyzing people when what they need is to do anything so they can start iterating on it.
Thank you, I’m going to investigate this.