This was what confirmed Eliezer’s skill as a writer in my mind. He resisted the (typical nerdish) impulse to vomit out pages of obsessively detailed explanations, instead leading the reader on with tantalising hints spaced far apart. It probably accounts for a lot of the book’s notorious addictiveness.
wilkox
Karma: 348
“things that people say that really actionable beliefs even though they may not be clear on the difference”
This sounds interesting, but I can’t parse it.
In any case there really isn’t any reason to be offended and especially there is no reason to allow the other person to provoke you to anger or acting without thought.
It seems really, really difficult to convey to people who don’t understand it already that becoming offended is a choice, and it’s possible to not allow someone to control you in that way. Maybe “offendibility” is linked to a fundamental personality trait.
Agreed, with the addendum that in this context there seems as much disagreement over the definition of “possible” as the definition of “omnipotent”.
This bothered me too. If ‘omnipotent’ is defined as ‘able to do things which can be done’, we’re all gods.
The difference between activation energy and inertia is that you can want to do something, but be having a hard time getting started—that’s activation energy. Whereas inertia suggests you’ll keep doing what you’ve been doing, and largely turn your mind off. Breaking out of inertia takes serious energy and tends to make people uncomfortable.
I don’t mean to nitpick, but this distinction isn’t obvious to me. It seems like inertia is just a component of activation energy.
Great post regardless.
This problem is compounded when the students feel obliged to stay in the class even if they’re not getting anything out of it. The result is a room full of tired, frustrated students terrified of being “found out” or giving the wrong answer. I encourage my undergrad students to leave and work on a problem later if their brains just aren’t up to the job, but they never do. It’s not clear if this is because of years of authoritarian schooling, or if they just don’t trust themselves to do the work outside of a classroom.
Thank you very much for doing this. You’ve clearly put a lot of effort into making it both thorough and readable.
Formulate methods of validating the SIAI’s execution of goals.
Seconded. Being able to measure the effectiveness of the institute is important both for maintaining the confidence of their donors, and for making progress towards their long-term goals.
I’m also not sure why the position of her eyes is supposed to be relevant to any of this.
Maybe something to do with the facial asymmetry JanetK mentions here?
Why do you say this?
Always wait for someone else to laugh at your joke before you join in.
This is generally good advice, but can backfire if you show no signs that you are conscious of making a joke. Making people laugh while remaining deadpan yourself is a high-level humour skill. Listeners who are not sure whether or not to laugh will look for cues from other listeners and from you, and if you’re not laughing they may just go along with that.
Often it’s better to make it obvious that you’ve amused yourself with your own joke, with a smile or small chuckle, but not react to whether others laugh or not. That displays confidence, and gives others the social room to laugh if they want.
I have an intuition that most people would find it less weird to hear a pro-cryonics advertisment from an actual cryonics company than a “Public Service Announcement” from a third party. The former would be processed more like a normal advertisement, to be judged on its merits, while the latter could invite suspicion of the creators’ motives. I might be wrong—anyone from marketing or advertising have something to say here?
I’m confused by the idea that the kinds of meditation you are talking about have until now been practised by “small and somewhat private groups” in secret. Why would this kind of meditation be taboo? What did these groups have to fear that drove them to secrecy, and why has that changed?
Why is continuing to donate as you did previously mutually exclusive with your evangelism plan?
Possibly, although I didn’t think of that analogy until your comment. It seems more likely that the program will break even when I consider the potential for increased donation compared to my previous estimate, which was based only on AnnaSalamon’s described expected outcomes for the program (“more rational, effective people”). I’m not sure that the program actually will break even in terms of existential risk reduction, which is why I’m very interested in seeing SIAI measure any increase in donations.
I don’t know they will—see my above comment suggesting the SIAI actually measure donations from program participants. It does seem more likely now, however, that the program will at least break even on reducing existential risk, hence my increased comfort with the idea.
By way of analogy, suppose a cancer charity has $10,000 to spend. It could invest the money directly into research, for a marginal expected return in decreased cancer suffering, or it could spend it on a glitzy event where potential donors get to “try their hand” at working in a research lab for a day. The second option could sound like a waste of money, as the donors probably won’t do anything worthwhile in a day of messing around in a lab. However, if they go on to contribute $100,000 more to the charity than they otherwise would have, that money can be reinvested in research for a 9x greater return on investment than investing the original $10,000 directly into research would have yielded (ignoring discount rates and assuming linear return on research investment). If any of the participants did happen to go on and become great cancer researchers, this would just be an excellent bonus effect.
The idea that this program will result in increased donations makes me more comfortable because it seems this is a more likely way the program will directly reduce existential risk than the vaguer goal of ‘raising the sanity waterline’. If it does succeed in raising the sanity waterline in a way that reduces existential risk, that would be an excellent bonus.
The idea of holding a program to increase donations actually made me more comfortable, as it seems more like a long term investment in reducing existential risk then money squandered on something fun but not obviously essential.
That’s a good point. An increase in donations from a specific group of people should be easy to measure too, so the SIAI could use it to directly assess the effectiveness of these programs.
A one year doubling or tripling time doesn’t strike me as “phenomenally low”.