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Karma: 3,290

Error 25 Dec 2024 17:47 UTC
5 points
0
on: What Have Been Your Most Valuable Casual Conversations At Conferences?
I suspect this varies by event, and also what you think of as “value”. At LessOnline I got a large fraction of the value out of side conversations, but that value mostly wasn’t in the form of practical benefits; the kinds of conversations on offer were simply extremely scarce in the rest of my personal life.

OTOH, at Dragoncon I get most of the value from structured events and the general sense of being-among-one’s-tribe. It’s crowded and anonymous, making private conversations difficult, and I know plenty of other fans in my everyday life, so there’s not that sense of “suddenly having a badly-needed outlet”. Two decades ago, when fandom conventions were smaller and local geeks were (for me) rare-to-nonexistent, that was less true.

Error 23 Nov 2024 19:33 UTC
2 points
0
on: On The Rationalist Megameetup
I enjoyed the hell out of LessOnline and would love to go to this too. I’m not sure yet if I can make the budget work; is anyone I met at LO looking for roommates?

Every year I have run the Rationalist Megameetup [...], we’ve run out of space and I’ve had people ask if they can come anyway. We could limit the size by taking applications and turning people away.

I thought about this after LO—overcrowding is an attractor state for conventions—and wondered if overcrowding could be managed by dynamic pricing. If you know the size of the space, it feels like you could fill it nearly exactly by making the price some function of (time-before-event, number-of-remaining-slots). This is one of the few crowds where that sort of mathematical jiggery might not alienate people.

(on the other hand, I expect it would make budgeting the event much harder, so I dunno).

Error 21 Oct 2024 21:04 UTC
2 points
6
in reply to: Arjun Panickssery’s comment on: What are your favorite books or blogs that are out of print, or whose domains have expired (especially if they also aren’t on LibGen/Wayback/etc, or on Amazon)?
Not sure of the title. The tagline was “almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken.” The address was http://blog.jaibot.com. Some specific essays originating there were “500 million, but not a single one more,” “Foes Without Faces”, and “The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”.

Error 13 Oct 2024 22:24 UTC
4 points
0
on: What are your favorite books or blogs that are out of print, or whose domains have expired (especially if they also aren’t on LibGen/Wayback/etc, or on Amazon)?
First blog that comes to mind is Jai’s old one. A fair number of rationalist memes began there, I think, but it disappeared at some point. I’m not sure if it was rehosted elsewhere or what.

Error 12 Oct 2024 0:23 UTC
9 points
4
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: How much I’m paying for AI productivity software (and the future of AI use)

I can’t imagine integrating any of those things into my normal, day to day routine unless the content of what I was doing were, in normal course, exposed only to me.

I’ve had something like this issue. The places I most want to use LLMs are for work tasks like “refactor this terribleness to not be crap”, or “find the part of this codebase that is responsible for X”, or “fill out this pointless paperwork for me”; but I’m not going to upload my employer’s data to an LLM provider. Also, if you’re in tech, you might want to apply for a job at an AI company. If so, then anything you type into their LLM is potentially exposed to whoever is judging that application. Even if you’re not doing anything questionable, you still have to spend attention on HR-proofing it.

(I’m sure privacy policies are a thing. Have you read them? I have not. I could fix that, but that is also an attention cost, and you have to trust that the policy will be honored when it matters)

The places where exposing things to the LLM provider is a non-issue (e.g. boilerplate), I mostly don’t need help with and mostly do better than the LLM does.

(...for now)

Error 1 Oct 2024 14:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: 2024 Petrov Day Retrospective
Yeah, it’s okay, conveying visuals is a legitimately not-terrible reason for it. My gripe with the trend just jumped to the front of my brain because I tried to C+P something and got a mouseful of image instead.

Error 1 Oct 2024 3:18 UTC
2 points
0
on: 2024 Petrov Day Retrospective
I feel dumb asking, but...what’s the significance of “Stanley Peterson?” Google turns up no relevant hits on the name. Is it just an Americanized version of Petrov’s?
I’m sorry I missed out on this. I follow the site with a feed reader, so I never saw the button. :-( Oh well, perhaps next year.
[edit]: Also, from the major-psychotic-hatreds department but not directed at you in particular: What is with the trend of the last 5-10 years of posting screenshots of text instead of quoting the actual text? It breaks copy/paste, ctrl-f, and anything that relies on the text actually being....text. It drives me up the wall every time I see it.

Error 29 Sep 2024 21:29 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: Cryonics is free
It’s not obvious to me that those are the same, though they might be. Either way, it’s not what I was thinking of. I was considering the Bob-1 you describe vs. a Bob-2 that lives the same 40 years and doesn’t have his brain frozen. It seems to me that Bob-1 (40L + 60F) is taking on a greater s-risk than Bob-2 (40L+0F).

(Of course, Bob-1 is simultaneously buying a shot at revival, which is the whole point after all. Tradeoffs are tradeoffs.)

Error 29 Sep 2024 21:13 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Cryonics is free
[epistemic status: low confidence. I’ve noodled on this subject more than once recently (courtesy of Planecrash), but not all that seriously]

The idea of resurrectors optimizing the measure of resurrect-ees isn’t one I’d considered, but I’m not sure it helps. I think the Future is much more likely to be dominated by unfriendly agents than friendly ones. Friendly ones seem more likely to try to revive cryo patients, but it’s still not obvious to me that rolling those dice is a good idea. Allowing permadeath amounts to giving up a low probability of a very good outcome to eliminate a high(...er) probability of a very bad outcome.

Adding quantum measure doesn’t change that much, I don’t think; hypothetical friendly agents can try to optimize my measure, but if they’re a tiny fraction of my Future then it won’t make much difference.

Adding the infinite MUH is more complicated; it implies that permadeath is probably impossible (which is frightening enough on its own), and it’s not clear to me what cryo does in that case. Suppose my signing up for cryo is 5% likely to “work”, and independently suppose that humanity is 1% likely to solve the aging problem before anyone I care about dies; does signing up under those conditions shift my long-run measure away from futures where I and my loved ones simply got the cure and survived, and towards futures where I’m preserved alone and go senile first? I’m not sure, but if I take MUH as given then that’s the sort of choice I’m making.

Error 29 Sep 2024 19:33 UTC
25 points
15
on: Cryonics is free
This trips my too-good-to-be-true alarms, but has my provisional attention anyway. The main reasons I’m not signed up for cryonics are cost, inconvenience, and s-risks. Eliminating cost (and cost-related inconveniences) could move me...but I want to know how this institution differs such that they can offer such storage at low or no cost, where others don’t or can’t.

Error 29 Aug 2024 1:52 UTC
10 points
4
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: “Deception Genre” What Books are like Project Lawful?
I loved Project Lawful/Planecrash (not sure which is the actual title), but I do hesitate to recommend it to others. Not everyone likes their medium-core S&M with a side of hardcore decision theory, or vice-versa. It is definitely weirder than HPMOR.

Something that threw me off at first: it takes the mechanics of the adapted setting very literally (e.g. spell slots and saving throws are non-metaphorical in-universe Things). That’s not normal for (good) game fanfiction. The authors make it work anyway—perhaps because clear rules make it easier to produce solvable puzzles—but it took some getting used to.

The glowfic format is strange, yeah, but it doesn’t read much different. It does make for a clearer delineation of character perspectives (e.g. compared to an omniscient narrator), and the portraits/icons carry more weight than one might expect. The main drawback I noticed was that, without chapters, clear “you can stop reading and go to bed” breaks were sometimes quite far apart.

(also I had to take Stylus to the CSS to render it comfortably readable, but that’s every site on the internet these days)

Error 9 Aug 2024 21:55 UTC
2 points
0
on: Practical advice for secure virtual communication post easy AI voice-cloning?
In principle, you can solve this with gpg-signed messages (the message could be as simple as “yes, that’s me you’re talking to on the phone”). Anyone you give your public key to can verify anything you sign.

...the problem, of course, is persuading anyone else to use gpg. Good luck with that part. :-(

Error 9 Aug 2024 20:57 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Outrage Bonding
Oh, finding less-partisan circles isn’t the issue. I could do that; what I can’t do is find circles pre-populated with people I’ve known and trusted for 20+ years, or with family. Those aren’t relationships I’m eager to migrate away from.

Anyway, I was (perhaps ironically) more venting than looking for suggestions. I’ve found ways to deal with it, and this, too, shall pass. Thanks though.

Error 9 Aug 2024 16:40 UTC
3 points
0
on: Outrage Bonding
Well this is relevant to my life. -_- I’m torn between feeling validated that someone else is bothered by this behavior, and annoyed that I didn’t post something like this myself.

You even chose almost the same term for it. Mine is “hate bonding”, as in “let’s hate Team Bad together!”, or “Two Minutes Hate” (...which has lasted eight years). It’s infected a large enough fraction of my loved ones to be seriously depressing. I spend a lot of time listening to people I love ranting about how other people I love are stupid and terrible.

(Or did. I considered distancing myself from all noticeable partisans, but chose not to because that covered most of the people I’m close to. Instead I blocked the channels where these conversations took place and stopped responding to mail in this category. …which, at least in the medium term, nearly amounted to the same thing. The last decade has been pretty lonely.)

You note that bringing up the negative consequences is frowned upon, but in my experience it doesn’t even take that much. Declining to bond in this way, even implicitly, often makes people angry in and of itself.

My realtime coping mechanism is closest to your “zoning out.” I read somewhere that people get uncomfortable quickly if they’re talking and not getting verbal acks (“uh huh, sure, yep, okay”), so I just suppress those until they peter out. Works one on one, not so well in a crowd.

Error 5 Aug 2024 20:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: We’re not as 3-Dimensional as We Think
Blink. Were there any significant downsides? And did the improvements persist, or diminish over time?

Error 1 Aug 2024 19:49 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Can UBI overcome inflation and rent seeking?
Does this really hold? I’d expect inflation to cost richer people more purchasing power on an absolute scale (because they have more cash to devalue), but less as a percentage of same (because that cash is a smaller proportion of their net worth).

Error 26 Jul 2024 16:30 UTC
82 points
58
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
+$BIGNUM for this. It’s frustrating when interesting parts of the LW-sphere conversation happen on closed services. Some of us (e.g. and sometimes-feels-like-i.e. me) neither have nor want a twitter account, and twitter has made it increasingly difficult to follow references to it without one.

I have the same complaint about facebook, though it’s not the culprit this time. Every so often I’ll run into a post that depends on a reference that is facebook-account-walled.

Error 8 Jul 2024 21:27 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: davekasten’s comment on: Reflections on Less Online
Yeah, the source post for the plate metaphor is one of the more enlightening things I’ve gotten out of the rationalsphere outside of ACX or the Sequences.
I didn’t get much out of the supply cabinets myself because I travel heavy, but I loved that they existed. The universal whiteboards I wish I could mimic, but most of my wallspace is spoken for. The high-quality display mounts are definitely something I want to copy if I can get away with it (does anyone know the model?), though I think my apartment complex might complain about me bolting equipment to the walls.
Most useful specific amenity for me was the default availability of food/snacks/water/coke (though coke sometimes ran out). Personal fuel management is a substantial interrupter and brainwidth cost at most conventions.
ETA: I do wonder if I can get some of the “empty plate” effect at home by carving out specific days for “no obligation-processing (including social obligations)”. Not a Sabbath-style day of rest from everything, just from “I need to handle X” things. The problem, of course, would be enforcing it in large enough blocks to be useful. Going cross-country for a week ties me to the mast in a way that might be difficult to replicate.

Error 8 Jul 2024 21:14 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Reflections on Less Online
Set up a small monthly donation. Doubt it will help much on its own, but maybe enough others think like me that the sum will.

Error 8 Jul 2024 21:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Reflections on Less Online
Thanks, fixed. I could swear I looked that up, I have no idea how I still got it wrong.