I procrastinated on this, but donated $200 today (the day after the fundraiser ended). I have been reading the site for 4 years, and it has been worth significantly more than $50 per year.
According to the site metrics there are around 15,000 logged-in monthly active users, so if everyone donated $200 that would exactly equal the $3,000,000 target. This made $200 seem like a reasonable number.
Is there literally any scene that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5?
If you can use “they” without problems, that sounds a lot like 4.
As for 3 and 5, not to my knowledge. Compromises like this would be more likely in settings with a mix of Liberals and Conservatives, but such places are becoming less common. Perhaps some family reunions would have similar rules or customs?
After thinking about this some more, I suspect the major problem here is value drift of the in-person Rationalist communities. The LessWrong website tolerates dissenting perspectives and seems much closer to the original rationalist vision. It is the in-person Berkeley community (and possibly others) that have left the original rationalist vision and been assimilated into the Urban Liberal Monoculture.
I am guessing EAs and alignment researchers are mostly drawn from, or at least heavily interact with, the in-person communities. If these communities are hostile to Conservatives, then you will tend to have a lack of Conservative EAs and alignment researchers, which may harm your ability to productively interact with Conservative lawmakers.
The value drift of the Berkeley community was described by Sarah Constantin in 2017:
It seems to me that the increasingly ill-named “Rationalist Community” in Berkeley has, in practice, a core value of “unconditional tolerance of weirdos.” It is a haven for outcasts and a paradise for bohemians. It is a social community based on warm connections of mutual support and fun between people who don’t fit in with the broader society.
...
Some other people in the community have more purely intellectual projects, that are closer to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s original goals. To research artificial intelligence; to develop tools for training Tetlock-style good judgment; to practice philosophical discourse. But I still think these are ultimately outcome-focused, external projects.
...
None of these projects need to be community-focused! In fact, I think it would be better if they freed themselves from the Berkeley community and from the particular quirks and prejudices of this group of people. It doesn’t benefit your ability to do AI research that you primarily draw your talent from a particular social group.
Or as Zvi put it:
The rationalists took on Berkeley, and Berkeley won.
...
This is unbelievably, world-doomingly bad. It means we’ve lost the mission.
...
A community needs to have standards. A rationalist community needs to have rationalist standards. Otherwise we are something else, and our well-kept gardens die by pacifism and hopefully great parties.
...
If Sarah is to believed (others who live in the area can speak to whether her observations are correct better than I can) then the community’s basic rationalist standards have degraded, and its priorities and cultural heart are starting to lie elsewhere. The community being built is rapidly ceasing to be all that rationalist, and is no longer conducive (and may be subtly but actively hostile) to the missions of saving and improving the world.
Its members might save or improve the world anyway, and I would still have high hopes for that including for MIRI and CFAR, but that would be in spite of the (local physical) community rather than because of it, if the community is discouraging them from doing so and they need to do all their work elsewhere with other people. Those who keep the mission would then depart, leaving those that remain all the more adrift.
I welcome analysis from anyone who better understands what’s going on. I’m just speculating based on things insiders have written.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
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.
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,
The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use the pronouns the people you’re talking about prefer.
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.
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.)
As a LW reader, I find it to be a great summary!
Eliezer wrote an article about this phenomenon, where people think they are writing for a less sophisticated audience than they actually are.