Elizabeth

Karma: 18,410

Elizabeth Mar 29, 2025, 5:08 AM
23 points
1
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Hank Green on the worst things about no longer having cancer:
1. During cancer you have a team of high status people actively working for your benefit. Suddenly, they are gone.
2. You are not actually done.
  1. The cancer could return.
  2. 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.
3. You have made a bunch of cancer friends, some of whom are doing much worse than you.
4. The cancer and the treatment both leave a permanent mark on your body,
  1. including permanent disability.
  2. your you has gone through a one way transformation

Elizabeth Mar 23, 2025, 7:20 PM
9 points
5
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
- 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.

Elizabeth Mar 23, 2025, 4:58 PM
13 points
11
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth Mar 23, 2025, 4:54 PM
69 points
9
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth Mar 18, 2025, 2:21 AM
13 points
3
in reply to: kave’s comment on: kave’s Shortform
follow up: if you would disagree-vote with a react but not karma downvote, you can use the opposite react.

Elizabeth Mar 15, 2025, 1:27 AM
5 points
12
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
While we’re at it, can it be >99% to match <1%?

Elizabeth Mar 14, 2025, 1:36 AM
29 points
0
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth Mar 14, 2025, 1:29 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Why I quit effective altruism, and why Timothy Telleen-Lawton is staying (for now)
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.

Elizabeth Feb 24, 2025, 12:04 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Dear Self; we need to talk about ambition
Oh hey I did https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tv6KfHitijSyKCr6v/elizabeth-s-shortform?commentId=dpzr9Z8CxutPFbuHx

Elizabeth Feb 23, 2025, 6:00 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: The Sorry State of AI X-Risk Advocacy, and Thoughts on Doing Better
Can you share data on the size of PauseAI protests over time?

Elizabeth Feb 22, 2025, 10:42 PM
6 points
0
on: The Sorry State of AI X-Risk Advocacy, and Thoughts on Doing Better
- Comedians seem like a useful vector.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eUxJZk6niBI

Elizabeth Feb 11, 2025, 1:07 AM
27 points
8
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
Note that at time of donation, Altman was co-chair of the board but 2 years away from becoming CEO.

Elizabeth Feb 9, 2025, 3:10 AM
12 points
3
on: So You Want To Make Marginal Progress...
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.

Elizabeth Feb 7, 2025, 6:41 PM
7 points
5
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: When you downvote, explain why
One possible reason: bouncing off early > putting in a lot of effort and realizing you’ll still never get traction > being kicked out. Giving people false hope hurts them.
I don’t think you should never help out a new person, but I reserve it for people with very specific flaws in otherwise great posts.

Elizabeth Feb 7, 2025, 2:01 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
oh not at all, I think I’m failing on both fronts

Elizabeth Jan 27, 2025, 8:28 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
We’re looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to “represent one consistent thing”. It’s not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases “overall metabolic rate” or “stress”. It’s not an accident that those hormones’ signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason to expect that they’ll be straightforwardly interpretable, and therefore the sort of thing we can look at and (sometimes) intuitively say “I want to turn that up/down”.
This sounds logical but I don’t think is backed empirically, at least to the degree you’re claiming. Source: I have a biology BA and can’t speak directly to the question because I never took those classes because they had reputations for being full of exceptions and memorization.

Elizabeth Jan 16, 2025, 10:19 PM
21 points
3
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
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.

Elizabeth Jan 14, 2025, 8:29 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
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 Jan 10, 2025, 1:46 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Drake Thomas’s Shortform
David Maciver over on Twitter likes a zinc mouthwash, which presumably has a similar mechanism

Elizabeth Jan 8, 2025, 9:50 PM
7 points
1
on: The Type of Writing that Pushes Women Away
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.