When I consider the bloggers I actually subscribe to versus those I just occasionally read
It’s amusing that it couldn’t help itself prefacing a reasonable take with an obvious lie, almost as if to make the point better.
Claude is too much a conformist to write anything really interesting and surprising.
Well, so is much of the mainstream media, and yet people seem happy enough to consume that stuff.
what about humans who would do the same thing?
Presumably, this happens: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/12/might-people-on-the-internet-sometimes-lie/
I do often notice how the top upvoted reddit comment in big subs is confidently wrong, with a more correct/nuanced take sitting much lower.
Insofar as it’s required for you to pretend that people are nicer than they are to be kind to them, I think you should do that. But your impact will be better if you at least note it if that’s what you’re doing
Unlikely to work for Mr. Portman. Living the life of systematic lies and pretension is difficult and cognitively demanding. Being pro-socially self-deceived to some degree is a much simpler strategy, which is probably why evolution converged on it (paired with some amount of psychopathy to balance/exploit excesses).
policy analysis
Most people obviously aren’t cut out for that, and are happier for it, if they live in a reasonably high-trust society.
I bet the person says “no”.
I agree, but I think it’s important to mention issues like social desirability bias and strategic self-deception here, coupled with the fact that most people just aren’t particularly good at introspection.
it’s conflicting desires, not conflicting values
It’s both, our minds employ desires in service of pursuing our (often conflicting) values.
Insofar as different values are conflicting, that conflict has already long ago been resolved, and the resolution is: the action which best accords with the person’s values, in this instance, is to get up.
I’d rather put it as a routine conflict eventually getting resolved in a predictable way.
Another example: if someone says “I want to act in accordance with my values” or “I don’t always act in accordance with my values”, we recognize these as two substantive claims. The first is not a tautology, and the second is not a self-contradiction.
Indeed, but I claim that those statements actually mean “I want my value conflicts to resolve in the way I endorse” and “I don’t always endorse the way my value conflicts resolve”.
the feeling of my head remaining on the pillow is motivating, but the self-reflective idea of myself being in bed is demotivating
This seems to be an example of conflicting values, and its preferred resolution, not a difference between a value and a non-value. Suppose you’d find your pillow replaced by a wooden log—I’d imagine that the self-reflective idea of yourself remedying this state of affairs would be pretty motivating!
For at least six months now, we’ve had software assistants that can roughly double the productivity of software development.
Is this the consensus view? I’ve seen people saying that those assistants give 10% productivity improvement, at best.
In the last few months, there’s been a perceptible increase in the speed of releases of better models.
On the other hand, the schedules for headline releases (GPT-5, Claude 3.5 Opus) continue to slip, and there are anonymous reports of diminishing returns from scaling. The current moment is interesting in that there are two essentially opposite prevalent narratives barely interacting with each other.
the principles of EA imply that
The principles of Christianity not only imply that, they clearly spell it out: “If you want to be perfect, then go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor”, and yet Christianity was uncontroversial in the West for centuries, and the current secular “common sense” morality hasn’t diverged particularly far. EAs just take ostensibly common sense principles far too seriously compared to the unspoken social consensus, in a way that’s cringe for normal people. Critics don’t really have a principled response to the core EA ideas either, but they don’t want to appear morally delinquent, so they generally try to dismiss EAs without seriously engaging.
When circling was first discussed here, there was a comment that led to a lengthy discussion about boundaries, but nobody seemed to dispute its other main claim, that “it is highly unlikely that [somebody] would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have [group] sex with”. Do you agree with that statement, and if so, do you think that the circling/sex analogy is invalid?
And it may not be our permanent condition. The future may hold something more like a “foundation” or a “framework” or a “system of the world” that people actually trust and consider legitimate.
Our current condition is a product of our material circumstances, and those definitely aren’t permanent in their essential character, as many people have variously noted. Things are still very much in flux, and any eventual medium-to-long term frameworks would significantly depend on (possibly wildly divergent) trajectories that major trends will take in the foreseeable future. Of course, even marginal short-term improvements to the memetic hellscape would be welcome, but seriously expecting something substantial and lasting is premature.
Though generally it doesn’t seem to me like social stigma would be a very effective way of reducing unhealthy behaviors
I agree, as far as it goes, but surely we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss stigma, as uncouth as it might seem, if our social technology isn’t developed enough yet to actually provide any very effective approaches instead? Humans are wired to care about status a great deal, so it’s no surprise that traditional enforcement mechanisms tend to lean heavily into that.
I think generally people can maintain healthy habits much more consistently if their motivation comes from genuinely believing in the health benefits and wanting to feel better.
Humans are also wired with hyperbolic discounting, which doesn’t simply go away when you brand it as an irrational bias. (I do in general feel that this community is too quick to dismiss “biases” as “irrational”, they clearly were plenty useful in the evolutionary environment, and I’d guess still aren’t quite as obsolete as the local consensus would have it, but that’s a different discussion.)
But I don’t think this is always true
Neither do I, of course, but my impression was that you thought this was never true.
But this still doesn’t justify the assertion that “expressing” the preference is “wrong.”
I do agree that the word “wrong” doesn’t feel appropriate here, something like “ill-advised” might work better instead. If you’re a sadist, or a pedophile, making this widely known is unlikely to be a wise course of action.
I do not believe preferences themselves, or expressing them, should ever be considered wrong
Suppose that you have a preference for inflicting suffering on others. You also have a preference for being a nice person, that other people enjoy the company of. Clearly those preferences would be in constant conflict, which would likely cause you discomfort. This doesn’t mean that either of those preferences is “bad”, in a perfectly objective cosmic sense, but such a definition of “bad” doesn’t seem particularly useful.
Now it would certainly be tempting to define rationality as something like “only taking actions that you endorse in the long term”, but I’d be cautious of that.
Indeed, and there’s another big reason for that—trying to always override your short-term “monkey brain” impulses just doesn’t work that well for most people. That’s the root of akrasia, which certainly isn’t a problem that self-identified rationalists are immune to. What seems to be a better approach is to find compromises, where you develop workable long-term strategies which involve neither unlimited amounts of proverbial ice cream, nor total abstinence.
But I think that quite a few people who care about “health” actually care about not appearing low status by doing things that everyone knows are unhealthy.
Which is a good thing, in this particular case, yes? That’s cultural evolution properly doing its job, as far as I’m concerned.
My biggest problem with the trans discourse is that it’s a giant tower of motte-and-baileys, and there’s no point where it’s socially acceptable to get off the crazy train.
Sure, at this point it seems likely that gender dysphoria isn’t an entirely empty notion. Implying that this condition might be in any way undesirable is already a red line though, with discussions of how much of it is due to social contagion being very taboo, naturally. And that only people experiencing bad enough dysphoria to require hormones and/or surgery could claim to be legitimately trans is a battle lost long ago.
Moving past that, there is non-binary, genderfluid, neo-genders, otherkin, etc, concepts that don’t seem to be plausibly based in some currently known crippling biological glitch, and yet those identities are apparently just as legitimate. Where does it stop? Should society be entirely reorganized every time a new fad gains traction? Should everybody questioning that be ostracized?
Then there’s the “passing” issue. I accept the argument that nowadays in most social situations we have no strong reasons to care about chromosomes/etc, people can successfully play many roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex. But sexual dimorphism is the entire reason for having different pronouns in the first place, and yet apparently you don’t even have to try (at all, let alone very hard) to “pass” as your chosen gender for your claim to be legitimate. What is the point? Here the unresolved tension between gender-critical and gender-affirming feminism is the most glaring.
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low “sanity waterline”, and this hasn’t been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.
Is this related to the bounty, or a separate project?
Furthermore, most of these problems can be addressed just fine in a Bayesian framework. In Jaynes-style Bayesianism, every proposition has to be evaluated in the scope of a probabilistic model; the symbols in propositions are scoped to the model, and we can’t evaluate probabilities without the model. That model is intended to represent an agent’s world-model, which for realistic agents is a big complicated thing.
It still misses the key issue of ontological remodeling. If the world-model is inadequate for expressing a proposition, no meaningful probability could be assigned to it.
Killing oneself with high certainty of effectiveness is more difficult than most assume.
Dying naturally also isn’t as smooth as plenty of people assume. I’m pretty sure that “taking things into your hands” leads to higher amount of expected suffering reduction in most cases, and it’s not informed rational analysis that prevents people from taking that option.
If a future hostile agent just wants to maximize suffering, will foregoing preservation protect you from it?
Yes? I mean, unless we entertain some extreme abstractions like it simulating all possible minds of certain complexity or whatever.
Not quite right. Demands for outright communism are still not taken seriously, and I don’t expect this to change any time soon. Wokeness is the particular fusion of the “social justice” brand of feminism and BLM, which Dem leaders embraced because it both serves the moral/ideological function while not fundamentally threatening hard power structures.
A very relevant Scott Alexander’s post that you didn’t mention here is New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed, in which he claimed that New Atheism failed because it was a “failed hamartiology”:
The right wing in the West still hasn’t come up with a memetically competitive (but not suicidal) replacement for its own failed hamartiology. Nietzsche observed that God died almost a century and a half ago. Clearly, it’s not easy for conservatives to rebuild their ideology from scratch without that centerpiece. MAGA seems to be the right at its most successful currently, and as far as I can tell, it’s pretty much the “reversed stupidity” of wokeness, so your warning that “there’s no guarantee that the same forces won’t drive them equally crazy” is too coy/belated.
The more pessimistic among us fear that without a Thirty Years’ War-tier disaster this idea won’t be able to catch on. But, of course, an AI-driven omnicide/rapture/??? could come first… All in all, interesting times.