Just pushes the trust problem down a level. Lots of recruiting firms advertise positions that don’t exist so that they have resumes “just in case”
Elizabeth
Karma: 18,420
David Maciver over on Twitter likes a zinc mouthwash, which presumably has a similar mechanism
Can we rescue Effective Altruism?
I didn’t read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don’t think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it’s more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women.
Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.
I loved the old mealsquares but have been very disappointed in version 2.0. They’re similar to Tend bars, nutritionally dense but not filling.
are you correcting for the year the test was taken? The SAT grading has shifted dramatically over time.
A conversation I had in 2021
Them: Man I wish I could do X, it’s so much more valuable then what I’m doing right now, but I can’t.
Me: But could you though?I’d forgotten this, but in 2023 they came up to thank me because they were doing X, were pleased with the choice, and assigned me some credit for it. I’ve heard other people spontaneously praise project X, without knowing I’d been involved in any way.
It’s also very common for seeing someone at a conference to move them along the path of hiring me. Rarely from 0-> hired, but maybe from 0-> idea, or from “been meaning to”->hired, or something in the middle.
short answer: no. Possibly because of hepcidin.
I’m having trouble parsing but I think the first point is about the mutation rate in humans? I don’t expect that to be informative about flu virus except as a floor.
This post was hard for me to read. A few months after I wrote it I developed medical issues that are still ongoing and really sapped my ability to work. Right now I feel on the precipice of developing Large Scale Ambitions, and that I’d probably have taken the plunge to something bigger if I’d hadn’t gotten so sick for so long.
On the other hand, I spent the past 2 years trying to dramatically reform Effective Altruism. I expected to quit in May but got sucked back in via my work with Timothy TL. I didn’t think of this as ambitious, but looking back I do find it ridiculous that I thought I would succeed, which is kind of like ambition except I’m not having any fun with it.
I remain really happy with the “dear self” format. Most advice is advice to your past self anyway, and it’s nice to be straightforward about it. It avoids friction with people very different from me, because they can’t argue that that they know better for me personally.
I like the balance I struck between treating social motivations as real and important, and encouraging people to look beyond them.
You might also enjoy my twitter thread on Frying Pan Agency, where you start with small actions like fixing a wobbly frying pan handle and work your way up.
Still no answer to “how do you tell when to release subpar work and when to keep improving?”. I have a sense I should be working on my ceiling and not my floor right now, but don’t know how.
Thank you for the explanation.
Is there a reason you deflected when I originally asked about AI assistance? To me that’s a much bigger deal than the AI assistance itself.
I think this is a useful concept that I use several times a year. I don’t use the term Dark Forest I’m not sure how much that can be attributed to this post, but this post is the only relevant thing in the review so we’ll go with that.
I also appreciate how easy to read and concise this post is. It gives me a vision of how my own writing could be shorter without losing impact.
I didn’t keep good track of them, but this post led to me receiving many DMs that it had motivated someone to get tested. I also occasionally indirectly hear about people who got tested, so I think the total impact might be up to 100 people, of which maybe 1⁄3 had a deficiency (wide confidence intervals on both numbers). I’m very happy with that impact.
I do wish I’d created a better title. The current one is very generic, and breaks LW’s “aim to inform not persuade” guideline.
My ultimate goal with this post was to use vegan advocacy as an especially legible example of a deepseated problem in effective altruism, which we could use to understand and eventually remove the problem at the root. As far as I know, the only person who has tried to use it as an example is me, and that work didn’t have much visible effect either. I haven’t seen anyone else reference this post while discussing a different problem. It’s possible this happens out of sight (Lincoln Quirk implies this here), but if I’d achieved my goal it would be clearly visible.
I suggest putting your proposed dress code at the top. Right now it’s only kind of described, somewhere in the middle with no way to jump to it.
This sounds like a problem with the transcript itself, not placing it in the post vs. a separate link? Which is fair enough, just want to make sure I understand.
I stand by what I said here: this post asks an important question but badly mangles the discussion. I don’t believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she’s clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications.
The conflation of “Duncan’s ideal” and “the perfect ideal everyone has agreed to” is what I’m complaining about.
If Duncan had, e.g., included guidelines that were LW consensus but he disagreed with, then it would feel more like an attempt to codify the site’s collective preferences rather than his in particular.
I’m very grateful I found Tristan and we were able to have this discussion.
My series on vegan nutrition epistemics generated a lot of friction and hostility. Tristan was one of very few vegan advocates I felt I learned things from, and the things I learned were valuable and beautiful. The frame of impractical reverence continues to come up and I’m glad I can recognize it now. I am also happy this primed me to recognize what I don’t like about reverence as a frame, and refine my articulation of my own values.
How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one’s ability to update.
People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for “completely trashed”, 50% for neutral, >99% for “huge improvement”. Comments with additional details are welcome.