I saw memetic disenfranchisement as central themes of both.
romeostevensit
Karma: 9,814
Two tacit points that seemed to emerge to me:
Have someone who is ambiently aware and proactively getting info to the right people, or noticing when team members will need info and setting up the scaffolding so that they can consistently get it cheaply and up to date.
The authority goes all the way up. The locally ambiently aware person has power vested in them by higher ups, meaning that when people drag their feet bc of not liking some of the harsher OODA loops you have backup.
Surprisingly small amounts of money can do useful things IMO. There’s lots of talk about billions of dollars flying around, but almost all of it can’t structurally be spent on weird things and comes with strings attached that cause the researchers involved to spend significant fractions of their time optimizing to keep those purse strings opened. So you have more leverage here than is perhaps obvious.
My second order advice is to please be careful about getting eaten (memetically) and spend some time on cognitive security. The fact that ~all wealthy people don’t do that much interesting stuff with their money implies that the attractors preventing interesting action are very very strong and you shouldn’t just assume you’re too smart for that. Magic tricks work by violating our intuitions about how much time a person would devote to training a very weird edge case skill or particular trick. Likewise, I think people dramatically underestimate how much their social environment will warp into one that encourages you to be sublimated into the existing wealth hierarchy (the one that seemingly doesn’t do much). Specifically, it’s easy to attribute substitution yourself from high impact choices to choices where the grantees make you feel high impact. But high impact people don’t have the time, talent, or inclination to optimize how you feel.
Since most all of a wealthy person’s impact comes mediated through the actions of others, I believe the top skill to cultivate besides cogsec is expert judgement. I’d encourage you to talk through with an LLM some of the top results from research into expert judgement. It’s a tricky problem to figure out who to defer to when you are giving out money and hence everyone has an incentive to represent themselves as an expert.
I don’t know the details of Talinn’s grant process but as Tallinn seems to have avoided some of these problems it might be worth taking inspiration from. (SFF, S-Process mentioned elsewhere here).
Not entirely wrong
They’re entirely correct. Learning new communication techniques are about what you choose to say, not what other people do.
Red Herring. Quibbling over difficult to detect effects is a waste of time while we’re failing to kill those who commit ten+ violent crimes and account for a substantial fraction of all such crime. I don’t buy mistake theory on this.
Waistcoat and rolled up sleeves works in many more settings and still looks amazing.
Mixed reports on how they have degraded in quality and sometimes misrepresented how thorough their tests are, but still a time saver for finding higher quality options for things you want long service life from like home appliances.
Book reviews that bring in very substantive content from other relevant books are probably the type of post I find the most consistently valuable.
“0.12% of the population (the most persistent offenders) accounted for 20% of violent crime convictions” https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/when-few-do-great-harm
There are the predictable lobbies for increasing the price taxpayers pay for prisoners, but not much advocacy for decreasing it.
Thanks I had wondered about this
Pragmatic note: many of the benefits of polyester (eg activewear wicking) can be had with bamboo sourced rayon. I buy David Archy brand on Amazon.
Ai developers heading to work, colorized
successfully bought out
*got paid to remove them as a social threat
For people who want weirder takes I would recommend Egan’s unstable orbits in the space of lies.
To +1 the rant, my experience across the class spectrum is that many bootstrapped successful people know this but have learned not to talk about it too much as most don’t want to hear supporting evidence for meritocracy, it would invalidate their copes.
To my younger self, I would say you’ll need to learn to ignore those who would stoke your learned helplessness to excuse their own. I was personally gaslit about important life decisions, not out of malice per se but just this sort of choice supportive bias, only to much later discover that jumping in on those decisions actually appeared on lists of advice older folks would give to younger.
Notkilleveryonism, why not Omnicidal AI? As in we oppose OAI.
Thank you for writing this. A couple shorthands I keep in my head for aspects:
My confidence interval ranges across the sign flip.
Due to the waluigi effect, I don’t know if the outcomes I care about are sensitive to the dimension I’m varying my credence along.
I often feel that people don’t get how the sucking up thing works. Not only does it not matter that it is transparent, that is part of the point. There is simultaneously common knowledge of the sucking up and common knowledge that those in the inner party don’t acknowledge the sucking up, that’s part of what the inner party membership consists of. People outside can accuse the insiders of nakedly sucking up and the insiders can just politely smile at them while carrying on. Sucking up can be what deference networks look like from the outside when we don’t particularly like any of the people involved or what they are doing. But their hierarchy visibly produces their own aims, so more fools we.
The two concepts that I thought were missing from Eliezer’s technical explanation of technical explanation that would have simplified some of the explanation were compression and degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom seems very relevant here in terms of how we map between different representations. Why are representations so important for humans? Because they have different computational properties/traversal costs while humans are very computationally limited.