Espedair Street

Karma: 94

Espedair Street 22 Dec 2025 13:44 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: PaulK’s comment on: On Rationalist Solstice and Epistemic Caution
The word ‘sacrifice’ comes from the Latin for ‘making sacred’.

To me, this means devoting some resource to something you care about, basically asserting that you value the thing you care about more than any more directly instrumental utility you could get out of the resource.
It’s a way to signal to yourself and others that you endorse assigning higher value to the thing you are making something sacred to honour than to competing uses of the resource.

Espedair Street 19 Dec 2025 0:49 UTC
2 points
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on: Towards a Categorization of Adlerian Excuses
I found this post useful, thank you. One comment—you say
We often wait until we feel confident to act, but the psychology of courage works in reverse; the feeling follows the movement. We inhabit the posture of the person we wish to be, treating the terrifying moment as a low-stakes simulation rather than a final referendum on our worth. By playing the role of a courageous person before we actually feel like one, we prove to our nervous system that the catastrophe we fear does not occur when we act. This lowers the stakes of the environment, turning a life task into a simple experiment.
I think this contains an unaddressed issue, and the issue is a textbook example of self-fulfilling fun times. If you expect things to go badly, and

1. your system would find it comforting for your model of the world to be confirmed by events; and

2. you now have skin in the the game to fail so that others see that your excuse was true all along and they should just excuse you from Doing The Scary Things in the future (which itself adds tension),

then trying to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ can really not work out so well, even if you—or at least some of your subagents that actually would like to not be shying away from everything or avoiding responsibility/vulnerability—are genuinely on board with taking whatever the step is in the given scenario.

A couple of other elements I see in that causal web (which I’m not fully scoping out here, these are just some dynamics I notice among probably more):

a) anxiety (and I assume other emotions that suck the bandwidth right out of your PFC) quite literally removes your ability to engage fluidly with the situation, which means you’re actually likely to fail/be ungraceful per your expectations, while people who don’t have tangles about this kind of scenario would do just fine and expect you to do just fine (and by the way, then, said people will watch with a mixture of bafflement and admiration for accurately predicting such remarkable failure, which isn’t much comfort, when you fail at something they thought would be trivial and towards which they thought you just needed a bit of encouragement to sail smoothly through)
[a different lens on this is ‘I expect my circumstances to be unsafe, therefore, I act like everything is unsafe in expectation, which causes a bunch of friction by being the wrong behaviour for the actual situation’]

b) predictably, you then learn Real Hard that you in fact should be excusing yourself of any situation involving any of the parameters of this situation in the future. Got really anxious during a dinner date? Better never eat with anyone else, or wear a white shirt again, or walk into a situation too relaxed or too tense, or make eye contact with anyone, etc. Great, now a bunch more things associated with elements of that memory network are super scary, and you’ll be even more on edge trying to meet such situations in the future

Tbc I’m not advocating in favour of hiding behind excuses—but there is a real issue here, at least for me.

I think what allows me to get better over time despite this is—
to be aware that these patterns are at least part of why I fail, and assign a bit more credence to ‘there’s not really anything really wrong with me, but my silly anxiety gets in the way and it’s kinda goofy, oh well’
- to use anxiolytics or similarly grounding/metacognition-supporting substances/practices so I can notice all this better as it unfolds, and encode stories about how things happened that are more useful than what my racing, scared mind might otherwise record + so my predictive processing system comes at situations expecting them to be slightly less doomy, which means I gradually get a higher proportion of experiences that don’t end in ‘everything is terrible’, which creates a virtuous cycle.

(probably other things but my PC is dying!)

Espedair Street 28 Nov 2025 21:59 UTC
5 points
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on: Solstice Season 2025: Ritual Roundup & Megameetups
Where: Kent, near London, UK
When: 19-22 Dec (solstice celebration is Sunday pm)

Come join us for a secular solstice celebration/weekend retreat at Hogwarts School of Alignment and Rationality, Kent − 60-90 min from London by train

https://luma.com/5n7z4ijw

In the grand tradition of secular solstices (but with less grand ambitions than some), we’re hosting a solstice/chill retreat weekend to connect, relax, reflect, process, and of course, celebrate the beauty of rationality and altruism.

Use the Luma page to find out more and sign up! Looking forward to welcoming you at cozy Hogwarts.

Espedair Street 8 Feb 2025 19:42 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: bohaska’s comment on: Here’s the exit.
ICYMI—Kaj mentioned https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/byewoxJiAfwE6zpep/reality-revealing-and-reality-masking-puzzles in a comment below—I think Anna does a pretty good job of that in that post

Espedair Street 7 Jan 2025 2:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: A new process for mapping discussions
I appreciated the work and ideas you shared here. While I understand the kinda natural flow of I designed this cool product > this allowed me to form a clear concept of a potentially useful technique, I think writing

1. an announcement post for the website and why you think it could be a game changer in collective/democratic decision making and similar fields (with a much more succinct coverage of the object level stuff on SB 1047, given that this is LW; and maybe a bit more yet on the good stuff you anticipate from this kind of product, e.g. in terms of tactical benefits for AI safety); and, separately,
2. a short post going ’here’s a neat trick I formulated while working on [link to #1]. I think it could help people get much more out of their discussions’

would have made it easier for your audience to respond better.

I think you did a pretty good job of conveying why you’re enthusiastic both about your project and about your mapping technique, but I suspect
a) the object-level-induced noisiness of the part where you introduce the website might drown out the core value of it, while
b) the simplicity of the mapping idea may suffer from the curse whereby people think simple ideas were already evident to them just because they make intuitive sense, which might stop them from appreciating the implications/usefulness of the concept. It also seems plausible—this is speculative, obvs—that the LW readership has a distribution that skews towards people who are pretty good at holding a bunch of objects in memory and retrieving them effortlessly, such that maybe they’re less excited about this tool than gen pop might lead you to anticipate (I know these last points aren’t directly the type of feedback you requested).

Thanks for this post!

Espedair Street 6 Oct 2024 15:37 UTC
1 point
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on: Procedural Executive Function, Part 3
One point I want to add to my previous comment:

I think it’s possible that ‘fear of failure + fear of difficulty’ doesn’t fully explain why people struggle to start/continue an action.

In fact, I think there’s a third reason, one that’s fuzzier and therefore perhaps somewhat more delicate to deal with which at least I encounter: I’m often vaguely aware (intuitively/not quite consciously) that a/some second-order consequence(s) will be impacted if I undertake the action, or if I undertake the action before obtaining more information, mustering up sharper focus etc (yes, I realise this is exactly how one might rationalise procrastinating, only about something that isn’t the core object). This is esp true if there’s a general sense of uncertainty about various ramifications of my executing/prioritising/executing in a particular way the action in question.
As context, this is something that’s become true for me in the course of heavy burnout. Quite simply, I lost confidence in my ability to effectively track ALL the things (hypervigilant? Me? What do you mean, overoptimising isn’t optimal?), which caused a bunch of paralysis. I’m working on it; simply becoming aware of these kinds of patterns has helped me tremendously. I think it’s worth recognising the impact such mechanisms can have, at least for people who struggle to trust their focus/discernment, either temporarily like me or possibly chronically, if that’s a thing for really anxious people.

I think there’s a way this failure mode can be rolled into your ‘failure or difficulty’ model, by conceptualising this as a subset of the potential failure or difficulty that may arise if you undertake the action.

Espedair Street 30 Sep 2024 22:35 UTC
1 point
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on: Procedural Executive Function, Part 3
I appreciate you writing this sequence. Here’s why:

- I thought the flow of it was pretty smooth (which is helpful when you struggle with EF, obviously) - I esp enjoyed the fact that you maintained a clear enough map of where you were going at a couple of different levels at basically all times.
- I got a lot out of your content, mostly in terms of ‘cool, I now have an easily accessible and pretty intuitive rough structure in mind of what might be going on when I get stuck and which ways the causal arrows point’, which I hadn’t taken the time/didn’t have the bandwidth to figure out/research myself.
- you made connections with frameworks from adjacent fields and examples that spoke to me effortlessly (relevant level of abstraction, etc) and enriched my toolbox.

Thanks esp for the times you shared your personal experiences, offered a bit of your own speculation (I think?) - and pushed through when you struggled to show up to write.

Espedair Street 22 May 2024 14:26 UTC
8 points
1
on: AISafety.com – Resources for AI Safety
Quick responses to the questions you asked:
1. What’s the % likelihood that you will use AISafety.com within the next 1 year? (Please be brutally honest)
  
  For myself, not super likely as I already have first-hand awareness of a lot of these resources (but I’ll likely still be tempted to come to this website to jump straight through a particular URL if I know it’s easy to find through AISafety.com vs looking for the exact link in the target website).
  1. What list of resources will you use?
    
    Events + training, courses, projects, communities, landscape map (and recommending the reading guide a bunch + likely the donation guide)
  2. What could be changed (features, content, design, whatever) to increase that chance?
    
    Really nit-picking here!
    - I’d find it nicer to use if the menu items were listed at the top of the landing page rather than having to scroll down
    - I’d like the copy font to be more legible (my laptop isn’t super bright at the best of time so grey font causes strain)
2. What’s the % likelihood that you will send AISafety.com to someone within the next 1 year?
  
  I estimate 90%—strong expectation in part due to the wide range of target audiences for whom a referral to the site could be useful + confidence in the diversity of perspectives this hub can send people towards.
  1. What could be changed (features, content, design, whatever) to increase that chance?
    
    - This is perhaps going to seem minor but a screenshot of what the Reading Guide landing page view looks like next to the CTA to go read it might give people I recommend the site to a taste of the breezy and interactive feel of the guide. As it is, I can imagine some people might hesitate to click through, maybe expecting a dense 200-page PDF doc that hasn’t been updated in a while and then hesitating as to what to do with it.
    
    - Re intro video: I’d like to see a clickable screenshot of it next to/instead of the CTA. Not the newspaper headline strips, but e.g. the somewhat eerie vibe @ 00′31″
3. Any other general feedback you’d like to share
  
  I have this nagging sense that it might be good to give newcomers a clear, immediate sense of the intentions of the team bringing these resources to people’s attention, right at the top of the landing page, basically.
  As a first-pass suggestion: right under/next to the logo, add ‘A volunteer-curated resources hub about the (critical/essential/existential) safety implications of artificial intelligence. About us [<= link]’ - or something to that effect :)
  
  Otherwise, I think this is a really valuable initiative and I like the site a lot! I also like that the design conveys a sense of urgency, but one that’s grounded in rational concern. Thanks, gang!

Espedair Street 21 May 2024 12:17 UTC
1 point
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on: Compounding Resource X
Thank you for this post.

The only thing about which I want to encourage more reflection is Have more “Move fast and break things” attitude [admittedly there is a bit of context I’m not edit-pasting here, but you do seem to favour this approach to a fair extent].

My gentle nudge here is based on my sense that ‘moving fast and breaking things’ can have pretty bad consequences if you’re (collaboratively) exploring AI safety research tracks that recklessly put into circulation knowledge that can be used to increase capabilities over/without safety ‘points’.

Espedair Street 11 May 2024 22:52 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Shayne O'Neill’s comment on: Navigating LLM embedding spaces using archetype-based directions
@author—thank you for this fascinating exploration. I’m appreciating your intuition that there might be some interesting structures there and your ability to point to their shape through this research. It seems helpful to have some sense of the ways LLM may exhibit features/behaviours/geographies that we didn’t knowingly ‘put there’ and that are not easily noticeable.

@Shayne—Can you expand on ‘Literary analysis however probably works dramatically better. Thus maybe it might be worth looking at the works of literature critics’?

From what I’m understanding of what your comment is caring for, I don’t actually think that the approach you’re suggesting here gets you richer/more meaningful findings—structuralism provides its own extremely context-specific (both in time and culture) framing of the symbolic meaning landscape it’s concerned with. By comparison, the archetypes you find in the major arcana are pretty steeped in the cultural roots that have underpinned much of the you’re proposing to scrutinise instead, and is made up of figures that would have been more foundationally influential in the substrate of today’s Western culture (especially with its combination of cosmological influences). Therefore, it seems to me from the way you’ve phrased your comment that you would propose a shallower tool, essentially, which doesn’t strike me as more helpful in making sense of how an LLM might derive a blueprint of human cosmology.

Also, if the data that shaped the embedding space was all English language text, I think we’re lying to ourselves somewhat if we’re expecting a diverse, non-Western-centric cosmology to emerge from this kind of analysis. I agree with you that using Lévi-Strauss’ frameworks as another track could still be worthwhile, but heeding the previous sentence rather than thinking that the right lens can cure a lack that’s actually in the object we’re exploring.

Finally, can you clarify what you mean by your very first observation, please?