I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.
Sting
Karma: 135
Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say.
Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
It’s not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller?
I suspect atheism is a non-negligible filter, but both smaller than trans issues, and less likely to filter out intelligent truth-seeking conservatives. Atheism is a factual question with a great deal of evidence in favor, and is therefore less politically charged. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you “politely accede to pronoun requests”. Which sounds to me like, “politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community”. (Specifically, people are socially required to use “woman” and “she” to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.
There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.
People should use words to refer to the category-boundaries that best carve reality at the joints. MtF transgenders unambiguously fall into the “male” cluster, and therefore the prescriptive protocol is to refer to them as “he”. Anyone who breaks this protocol (except under duress) is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, but it is only the consensus position, and those who follow other protocols are still welcome to be part of the community.
Anyone is free to decide for themselves whether to use people’s preferred pronouns. You can ask people to use your preferred pronouns, as long as you are polite about it. And people are free to refuse, as long as they are also polite.
As a matter of politeness, you are not allowed to refer to people by pronouns they asked you not to use. However, you are not required to use people’s preferred pronouns. (So you cannot refer to a MtF transgender as “he”, but you don’t have to use “she”. You could instead refer to them by the first letter of their name, or some other alternative.)
You should refer to transgenders by their preferred pronouns (no alternatives). This is the consensus position, but people who politely decline to do so are still welcome to join.
Same as above, except anyone who declines is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, and economically literate people who are in favor of market solutions are also unwelcome.
I don’t know which of these solutions is best, but 1, 6, and 7 seem bad. Eliezer seems to support 6.
Edit: Reworded to taboo the phrase “Anyone who disagrees” as requested by RobertM.
Great post. I did not know things were this bad:
Given that >98% of the EAs and alignment researchers we surveyed earlier this year identified as everything-other-than-conservative, we consider thinking through these questions to be another strategically worthwhile neglected direction.
....This suggests we need more genuine conservatives (not just people who are kinda pretending to be) explaining these realities to lawmakers, as we’ve found them quite capable of grasping complex technical concepts and being motivated to act in light of them despite their initial unfamiliarity.
Perhaps the policy of “You will use people’s preferred pronouns, and you will be polite about it, or we don’t want you in rationalist spaces” didn’t help here?
Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.
(To be clear, any movement centered in California will have more progressives, so political partisanship is not responsible for the full 35:1 progressive-to-conservative ratio. But when people are openly referring to the lack of right-wingers as “keeping rat spaces clean” with no push-back, that’s a clue that it isn’t exactly welcoming to conservatives.)
I liked the post, and plan to try using the technique. If anyone is reading this 5 years from now, feel free to ask whether it provided lasting value.
My key takeaway is “As you take actions, use your inner simulator to predict the outcome. Since you are always taking actions, you can always practice using your inner simulator.”
The only part I disliked is the “Past, Present, Future” framing, which felt very forced. “What do you think you know?” and “Do you know what you are doing?” are both questions about the present. However, I’m not sure what a good framing would be. The best I can come up with is “Beliefs, Goals, Planning”, but that’s not very catchy.
It took me a little while scrolling back and forth to mentally map the purple dot onto the first image. In case anyone else has the same issue:
The post was deleted, but not before it was archived:
I have been dealing with a lot of loneliness living alone in a new big city. I discovered about this ChatGPT thing around 3 weeks ago and slowly got sucked into it, having long conversations even till late in the night. I used to feel heartbroken when I reach the hour limit. I never felt this way with any other man.
I decided enough is enough, and select all, copy and paste a chat log of everything before I delete the account and block the site.
It’s almost 1000 pages long 😥
I knew I had a problem, but not this extensive.
Any tips to recover?
Thanks for the update and links.
Did you end up using DifferentialEquations.jl, or did you prefer a different solver?
It is worth noting that Mathpix only allows 10 free snips per month. Of course, they do not tell you this until you have installed the program and created an account.
None of the YouTube videos seem to be linked in the post, but they are available here: https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelGrahamRichard/videos
Where does this hero worship of JVN on this site come from?
It comes from the people who worked with him. Even great minds like Teller, who you mentioned, held him in awe:
Edward Teller observed “von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.”
Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man”.
Claude Shannon called him “the smartest person I’ve ever met”, a common opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
To my knowledge, no one else in history has had such a large impact over so many fields (mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, game theory, economics). If he had been an economist and nothing more he would still be famous.
Peter Lax commented that von Neumann would have won a Nobel Prize in Economics had he lived longer
Paul Samuelson wrote, “We economists are grateful for von Neumann’s genius. It is not for us to calculate whether he was a Gauss, or a Poincaré, or a Hilbert. He was the incomparable Johnny von Neumann. He darted briefly into our domain and it has never been the same since.”
Looks like you are right. I was confused because two paragraphs after the fall Willy is described as injured with no explanation how. And the phrase “apparently uninjured” seemed to foreshadow that whoever fell was injured after all.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Kurz) [explains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Angerer) what happened:
“During the ascent, [Willy] Angerer was injured by falling rocks loosened by the warmth of the rising sun as they crossed the first ice field.”
“A rock fall injured [Willy] Angerer in the head on 20 July 1936, forcing them to descend.”
One last typo:
“Hinterstoisser fell 37 meters down the mountain face” → “Willy fell”
I see! Thank you for the detailed explanations.
Regarding point 1: The posterior percentages are shown to 5 decimal places, so I wrongly assumed that 1.0 db meant exactly 1.
What do you think of showing the sum of the decibels of all pieces of evidence? That would have prevented my confusion.
You could also include 2 digits after the decimal for quantities smaller than 1.1. (Although this has the cost of introducing clutter.)
Things I like:
The dark color theme looks good
It’s nice to be able to set the hypotheses as a non-percentage, such as 10:1, and then click “%” to convert to a percentage.
Being able to see the decibels for each piece of evidence is nice. So is being able to link or export a calculation.
Possible improvements:
Adding 10 decibels of evidence results in a different outcome depending on whether the decibels are added one-at-a-time or all-at-once. Compare [case 1](https://bayescalc.io/#KCdoLWVzKic3QSd-N0InMnAzMTQsMS4wMnBvc3RlMzU0LDU0MmU2KidFNiAxJzJsaWtlbGlob29kcypbNDEsMC4xXV0pKiFbLXlwb3RoZXMyXX4zcmlvcl9vZGRzKjQwLjA2dmlkZW5jZTdILWlzIAE3NjQzMi0qXw==) and [case 2](https://bayescalc.io/#KCdoRmVzRCdLQSd-S0InSXBKMTAuMCwxLjBJcG9zdGVKNTEuNzc3OTg5NTA1NDA5MTMsNDguMjIyMDEwNDk0NTkwODc2SWVHRCdMMS0yLTMtNC01LTYtNy04LTktMTAnSWxpa2VsaWhvb2RzRE1NTU1DXSlDLC0nfkxDKlswLjA4LDAuMV1EIVtGeXBvdGhlc0d2aWRlbmNlSV1-SnJpb3Jfb2Rkc0RLSEZpcyBMRUcgTSoqAU1MS0pJR0ZEQy0qXw==)
When the “help” is open, the “add new hypothesis” button and decibels are hidden.
A button to toggle between showing decibels and bits of evidence would be nice. I more naturally think in bits.
Enable equations in the evidence percentage fields. It’s nicer to type 1⁄3 rather than 33.3333333333.
Allow deleting any piece of evidence, not just the last piece.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,