Did Vassar argue that existing EA organizations weren’t doing the work they said they were doing, or that EA as such was a bad idea? Or maybe that it was too hard to get organizations to do it?
NancyLebovitz
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Ameisen
A sidetrack, but a French surgeon found that Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) cured his alcoholism by curing the craving. He was surprised to find that it cured compulsive spending when he didn’t even realize he had a problem.
He had a hard time raising money for an official experiment, and it came out inconclusive, and he died before the research got any further.
This is interesting to me because I was brought up to go to college, but I didn’t take it seriously (plausibly from depression or somesuch), and I definitely think of him as a guy with an interesting perspective. Okay, a smart guy with an interesting perspective, but not a god.
It had never occurred to me before that maybe people who were brought up to assume they were going to college might generally have a different take on the world than I do.
This is reminding me of a book called Plain and Simple by a woman who spent some time as a guest in Amish Families. She found that she’d mistakenly believed that having lots of options was the right way to live, but the actual effect was that she wasn’t making decisions. The revelation hit when she realized she actually wanted something in particular, and ferociously re-decorated her kitchen in as somewhat Amish style. “Ferociously” seems like weirdly strong language, but she seemed surprised that she could really want something and go for it.
It’s a smallish thing, but I think it’s pointing at a pervasive modern error.
“”Why didn’t you tell him the truth? Were you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. I chose not to tell him, because I anticipated negative consequences if I did so.”
“What do you think ‘fear’ is, exactly?”″
The possibly amusing thing is that I read it as being someone who thought fear was shameful and was therefore lying, or possibly lying to themself about not feeling fear. I wasn’t expecting a discussion of p-zombies, though perhaps I should have been.
Does being strongly inhibited against knowing one’s own emotions make one more like a p-zombie?
As for social inhibitions against denying what other people say about their motives, it’s quite true that it can be socially corrosive to propose alternate motives for what people are doing, but I don’t think your proposal will make things much worse.
We’re already there. A lot of political discourse include assuming the worst about the other side’s motivations.
Have a theory about why people can be reluctant to google. It may be excessively bitter.
To a large extent (especially for neurotypical people, though it seems to depend on the subject) learning is an unconscious process. The result is that people don’t know how they learned and don’t know how to teach.
What’s more, people are apt to want to just get things done and also apt to have punishment as an easy strategy. So they shame people for not knowing what they are supposed to have picked up somehow.
This means that googling indicates that you didn’t know something already, so googling means getting past an emotional barrier.
That’s certainly not the only thing that’s going on. I think asking questions as socializing is a thing, and so is not realizing the amazing scope of what can be searched for. And for some of us, just being old enough that the habit of googling didn’t get developed.
I’m a frequent and pretty habitual googler, and I’ve mostly stopped calling it “living in the future”.
It seems to me this is getting into Social Safety Net territory. Elliott is cautious because he really has fewer resources. Would the group benefit if he’s given more so he isn’t running so close to the edge?
Just to underline the fundamental question: if pain isn’t a good metric (and I agree that it isn’t) what is a good metric?
I’m recommending Bruce Frantzis’ tai chi, qi gong, bagua etc. classes at Energyarts.com.
One of the fundamental principles is to put out reliable 70% effort—this is enough to create progress without much chance of injury or burnout. Considerably less effort if you’re sick or injured.
This is harder than it sounds, if you’re from a culture which assumes that more effort = better results and is a sign of more virtue.
Your effort level is what you can do that day. You aren’t competing with yourself. You aren’t expecting that you can make yourself do today what you could do yesterday. You may not be able to do as much with one side of your body as the other. Respect that. In fact, let the stronger side match the weaker side.
I tend to think of overvaluing effort as an American issue, but it appears in other cultures, too. Frantzis teaches water method—the 70% approach—but there’s also fire method in Chinese tradition, which involves pursuing enlightenment or whatever with as much force as you can muster.
This sort of steady effort might be best for sports and qi gong, but it’s my impression that high effort followed by relaxation is better for intellectual work.
What have you been learning? How has it been working out for you?
Until I read this, I didn’t realize there are different possible claims about the dangers of cults. One claim—the one gwern is debunking—is that cults are a large-scale danger, and practically anyone can be taken over by a cult.
The other less hyperbolic claim is that cults can seriously screw up people’s lives, even if it’s a smallish proportion of people. I still think that’s true.
As I understand it, the purpose of a ventilator is to make up for a person’s inability to move sufficient air in and out of their lungs, but it assumes that the lungs, if given air, don’t have a problem with getting oxygen into the bloodstream.
Tell me about more of the things expers weren’t talking about.
https://www.coindesk.com/blackballed-by-paypal-scientific-paper-pirate-takes-bitcoin-donations
″ In 2017, a federal court, the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, sided with Elsevier and ruled Sci-Hub should stop operating and pay $15 million in damages. In a similar lawsuit, the American Chemistry Society won a case against Elbakyan and the right to demand another $4.8 million in damages.
In addition, both courts effectively prohibited any U.S. company from facilitating Sci-Hub’s work. Elbakyan had to migrate the website from its early .org domain, and the U.S.-based online payment services are no longer an option for her. She can no longer use Cloudflare, a service that protects websites from denial-of-service attacks, she said. ”
A thing I regret not thinking of is that ventilators aren’t as crucial as was expected because they’re dependent on the long tissue being healthy.
I’m not an expert, but it’s so obvious. I don’t know how to avoid making that sort of mistake. Maybe being careful about tracking chains of causation.
Conservation of thought, perhaps. The root problem is having more options than you can handle, probably amplified by bad premises. Or the other hand, if you’re swamped, when will you have time to improve your premises?
“Conservation of thought” is from an early issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
I don’t have children, and my upbringing wasn’t especially good or bad on learning rationality.
Still, what I’m noticing in your post and the comments so far is the idea that rationality is something to put into your children.
I believe that rationality mostly needs to be modeled. Take your mind and your children’s connection to the universe seriously. Show them that thinking and arguing are both fun and useful.
I think that even if the NYT doesn’t dox Scott in a first article, his identity is now part of the story, and he’ll be doxed in various major media, probably including a second article from the NYT.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency is about why businesses fail if they ignore all other values in favor of maximizing profit—they lose too much flexibility.
I’m looking forward to the rest of this series.
I never would have thought biological systems are random, but spaghetti code isn’t about randomness, it’s about complex interdependence. This being said, the book looks really valuable—even if can only help sort out the simpler parts of biology, that’s quite a bit.
Yes. Now how do we sieve good information out of this environment?