Are there many people who pay for 3 Saturdays and then skip one? I would be surprised.
What age is the target group? An adult person can probably easily find 3 free Saturdays in a row. For a student living with parents it will probably be more difficult, because it means 3 weekends when the parents cannot organize any whole-weekend activity.
How about “make computers stupid again”?
The actions and statements of this current Trump administration show more support than ever for bold governance such as revitalizing letters of marque.
Against Russia? (As far as I know, most cyber attacks come from there.) In my opinion, unlikely.
I suspect that many people in the rationalist community have a blind spot about prediction markets, and see them as some kind of cooperative effort to make true predictions.
Instead, from the financial perspective, they are zero-sum games, and the best players play accordingly. If making the correct prediction is the winning move, so be it. If it is something else, that works, too.
I suspect that anonymous prediction markets (where people cannot get famous as superforecasters, only either gain or lose money) would make even better predictions that the current ones where many people have a conflict of interest.
I don’t think I’m interested. You didn’t update at all based on our previous bet.
That should make you more interested (financially) in betting against the person.
So, as I see it, the best case is when the skill degrades gracefully (provides the benefits even if other people are unaware of it or doing it wrong); and the second best case is if it has tests, so you know when you can safely use it, and when you need to switch to some plan B.
In case of rationality, I think there is “individual rationality” and “group rationality”. Some things you can do alone, for example keep a diary of your predictions. You can get more benefit from talking to other rational people, but there is also the risk that they turn out to be not that rational and their advice actually harmful. (And I am not just talking about LW-style rationality here, but generally when you should take advice from people around you.) So you should check what the people around you are sane about, and only take that kind of advice from them; with everything else you are probably better using common sense / outside view.
I am also thinking about constructivist education, which works great when it does, but it does not degrade gracefully. (If you have a stupid teacher, it is better if he or she just follows a good textbook, rather than trying to guide the pupils’ cognitive processes.) How can we derive the benefits where we can, but also avoid the degradation? Probably some kind of certification. But this requires an ability to admit things like “this method cannot scale, because we do not have enough teachers who would pass the certification”.
I don’t have a coherent theory of motivation, because when I look at myself, it seems that different parts of my life work quite differently.
For example, when I used to write SF, the social motivation was very important. I had friends who liked SF books and movies, we talked about that a lot, many of us hoped to write something good one day. So I had a community, and an audience. My first attempts had some small success, which inspired me to work harder and achieve more. And then… at some moment this all went down in flames… skipping the unimportant details, I think my mistake was becoming visibly more successful than some people in our community who had higher social status than me, so I got the “status slap-down” and the community became much less friendly towards me, and I lost an important source of motivation. For some time I was motivated by a desire to prove them wrong (for example I avoided a soft blacklist by publishing my story under a pseudonym), but gradually writing stopped being fun, and I stopped writing.
For an opposite example, I am interested in mathematics. Sometimes I read a textbook, do some exercises, try to figure something out. I would prefer to have people around me willing to discuss these topics, but the fact that I don’t doesn’t stop me at all.
Somewhere in the middle is programming. I am motivated to learn new things, but I am not motivated to finish my projects, and I suspect that having an audience would help here.
I guess I find learning intrinsically rewarding, but producing things requires a social reward (which I need to receive during the process, not only after having completed the product).
With regards to homeostasis, I think I have always tried to achieve more, it’s just that my energy and motivation are very limited (more than previously now that I have kids). When I have some free time, I try new things, but often I feel too tired just trying to survive the day. That is, this is partially about me, and partially about my environment. Of course, a stronger internal drive can compensate for a less friendly environment, but a friendly environment can also make a great difference.
Is it possible that the relation between GLP-1 and willpower is basically about willpower depletion? The more mental energy you spend fighting your urge to eat, the less is left for everything else. GLP-1 reduces the hunger, suddenly you have more willpower for everything else.
I suspect this may be related to the feedback one gets. Importantly, not just feedback on having accomplished something, but also on working towards something even if you are not there yet—because this is where you will realistically spend most of your time when working on nontrivial projects.
Writing is probably easy (for an intelligent person) if you have a friendly audience. The question is how to get it before you learn how to write well. Sometimes, the parents provide the service.
I am not entirely sure what specific thing were the rationalists wrong about (the quotes are about various things) and what specifically is the correct version we should update to.
For example, Eliezer’s quote seems to be about how China would prefer a narrow AI (that can be controlled by the Chinese Communist Party) over a general AI, for completely selfish reasons. Do you believe that this is wrong?
A general source of problems is that when people try to get a new partner, they try to be… more appealing than usual, in various ways. Which means that after the partner is secured, the behavior reverts to the norm, which is often a disappointment.
One way how people try to impress their partners is that the one with lower sexual drive pretends to be more enthusiastic about sex than they actually are in long term. So the moment one partner goes “amazing, now I finally have someone who is happy to do X every day or week”, the other partner goes “okay, now that the courtship phase is over, I guess I no longer have to do X every day or week”.
There are also specific excuses in heterosexual couples, like the girl pretending that she is actually super into doing sex whenever possible, it’s just that she is too worried about accidental pregnancy or her reputation… and when these things finally get out of the way, it turns out that it was just an excuse.
Perhaps the polyamorous people keep themselves in better shape, but I suspect that they have similar problems, only instead of “my partner no longer wants to do X” it is “my partner no longer wants to do X with me”.
Put more simply, could we posit that an omnibenevolent God might care more about what kind of person we become than what circumstances we endure?
If you redefine “benevolent” to mean someone who doesn’t care about suffering, we are no longer speaking the same language.
Why is so much suffering needed to figure out “what kind of person we become”? Couldn’t less sadistic circumstances answer this question just as well?
Also, many people die as little kids, so they apparently don’t get a chance to become any kind of person.
“Doesn’t exist, or doesn’t give a fuck about suffering” is the answer that matches the data, sorry.
Occam’s razor says that Trump makes populist statements that appeal to the kind of person who votes for Trump. Whether those are actually good ideas is irrelevant. Mercantilism sounds good to a person who doesn’t know much about economy. Territorial expansion rhymes with “make great”.
21st-century economics is just as irrelevant as e.g. 21-st century medicine. Scientists are not an important group of voters.
This can be quite frustrating if you want to figure out “what happens if I do X”, and all the answers provided by science turn out to be about “what happens if people kinda want to do X, but then most of them don’t”.
I mean, it is good and potentially important to know that most people who kinda want to do X will fail to actually do it… but it doesn’t answer the original question.
a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so.
This seems supported by the popular wisdom. Question is, how much this is about relationships and sex specifically, and how much it is just another instance of a more general “life is full of various frustrations” or “when people reach their goals, after some time they became unsatisfied again” i.e. hedonistic treadmill.
sexual satisfaction is basically binary
Is it?
most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
So, basically those women pretend to be more attracted than they are (to their partner, and probably also to themselves) in order to get married. Then they gradually stop pretending.
But why is it so important to get married (or whatever was the goal of the original pretending), but then it is no longer important to keep the marriage happy? Is that because women get whatever they want even from an unhappy marriage, and divorces are unlikely? That doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me: divorces are quite frequent, and often initiated by women.
I guess I am not sure what exactly is the women’s utility function that this model assumes.
Why don’t the men in question just leave?
Kids, not wanting to lose money in divorce, other value the partner provides, general lack of agency, hoping that the situation will magically improve… probably all of that together.
Also, it seems to me that often both partners lose value on the dating market when they start taking their relationship for granted, stop trying hard, gain weight, stop doing interesting things, and generally get older. Even if the guy is frustrated, that doesn’t automatically mean that entering the dating market again would make him happy. I imagine that many divorced men find out that an alternative to “sex once a month” could also be “sex never” (or “sex once a month, but it also takes a lot of time and effort and money”).
This could be addressed by making a user interface which not only gives the user’s prompt to the LLM, but also provides additional instructions and automatically asks additional questions. The answers to those additional questions could be displayed in smaller font as a side note, or maybe as graphical icons. One such question would be “in this answer, did you simplify things? if yes, tell me a few extra things I could pay attention to in order to get a better understanding of the topic” or something like that.
If you know a fact about humans, then mammals are not important. Humans like stories. Doesn’t matter if mammals in general don’t.
If you don’t know a fact about humans, but somehow you know the fact about mammals, you can use it as evidence (although not as a proof). For example, in a culture with a strong religious taboo against human autopsy they could dissect various mammals, and make probabilistic statements about human anatomy.
Today, a more typical situation is two groups of people, each declaring that they know for a fact that humans are / are not X. In such situation, if you have no way to verify the fact directly, I guess you could use the information about mammals to make a probabilistic estimate about which group is correct.
Also, from a perspective of a scientist, if all mammals are X, then the fact that humans are also X is… not completely guaranteed, but not really surprising. On the other hand, if all other mammals are X but humans don’t… that is definitely possible, but it makes me really curious why. What is the difference, and what was the possible reason evolution made it so?
Good point.
I think there are still two different topics, although with some overlap: how to budget and how to get rich. Good budgeting is good, whether you are poor or rich. If you are poor, it can help avoid losing everything. If you are rich, it can help avoid wasting all your money and becoming non-rich.
But the (implied) idea that budgeting can make poor people rich, or that it is the main force that keeps poor and rich apart… that does not automatically follow, and actually many people doubt it. Hypothetically they may be wrong, but this needs to be checked separately.
Basically, budgeting can never save more money than “your income, minus the minimum necessary expenses”. If your income is e.g. $300 a month, there is no way you could save more than $300 a month. Realistically, you probably can’t even save $50 a month.
Even if you every month put $50 into passively managed index funds (which already seems like an unrealistic best case scenario for someone who makes $300 a month), this will not make you rich. It will help you save $600 a year, $6000 a decade, so maybe $300 000 during a lifetime, generating a passive income of $12000 a year, that is $1000 a month by the time you are old and retired, under the most optimistic scenario. And I am sure that most rich people spend more than $1000 a month.
So what you need is a combination of decent income + good budgeting + good investing, and then keep doing that for decades. Which means that even assuming that it can make you rich, it will only make you rich in a distant future, not now. In other words, if you started poor, even if you are doing everything right, you can still be poor, because the expected wealth is still a few decades in the future, not here and now.
EDIT: And meanwhile, a rich person has inherited a trust fund from their parents, spends as much money as the fund gives them every month, and doesn’t have to worry about anything. The only budgeting skill needed is something like “make sure your monthly expenses do not exceed $20000 this month”.
Then maybe I can link to those posts in a larger post
Yes, this seems to me like a good strategy for posting on LW. Start with smaller, then generalize (and link to previous posts when needed).
One advantage is that when things go wrong—if one of the smaller articles is strongly rejected—it gives you an opportunity to stop and reflect. Maybe you were wrong, in which case it is good that you didn’t write the more general article (because it would be downvoted). Maybe the LW readers were wrong, but that still means that you should communicate your (smaller, specific) point better, before moving to more general claims.
Another advantage is that, if your circumstances or priorities change, and suddenly you don’t have time to write for LW anymore, the smaller self-contained articles still provide value.
I have seen people make a mistake of posting a long outline first (which sometimes even got lots of upvotes), and then part 2 got downvoted because readers fundamentally disagreed with it… and now what? If someone disagrees with the part 2, they probably won’t be happy about part 3 which builds upon the part 2, so now every part would get a downvote.
What would be your proposed alternative to Harry Potter fanfiction? Something else fan fiction? Original fiction? Not a fiction?
As I see it, choosing the Harry Potter universe that many readers already know allows it to use the contrast between how the different versions of Harry Potter behave.
Harry Potter in the books is frankly an idiot. Every year the most powerful dark wizard is trying to murder him, and he always only survives because he gets lucky… and yet the only thing he worries about is quidditch. Voldemort doesn’t seem very smart either; his only smart move in the entire series was making the horcruces. Otherwise he is just a bully who can say “avada kedavra” faster than anyone. It seems like if he really tried to kill Harry, then Harry wouldn’t have a chance. Seriously, if you can possess people, including teachers at Hogwarts, how difficult it would be to say “Harry, come here” and then stab him with a knife? The entire society of wizards seems to have a huge collective blind spot about doing anything that does not involve magic. Which is weird, considering that many students are coming from muggle families.
So I guess if your message is that people are idiots, it can be well delivered in a fan fiction from the universe where all people are idiots, and the book had millions of readers who didn’t mind this fact, probably because in similar circumstances they also would have acted the same way.