jbeshir

[jbeshir]

On People Who Hate You and Effective Altruism

Something that I learned a while ago providing support for people doing online fiction, was that as soon as your fandom gets reasonably big, people will emerge who want to hurt you. There's something you've written or done they don't like, something in (what they believe to be) your messaging that they wish other people would listen to less, some way that they think you're crap and they have the personality type that finds it intensely frustrating when other people don't agree with them and wants to try to get others to do so. These people are a really small minority, but 0.01% of people is enough for an expected one once you have 10,000 people paying attention to you, an expected ten once you have 100,000 people, and so on.

And they'll be wildly unfair to you, send you abusive things, say things optimised to hurt you emotionally, go around trying to convince other people to hate you too. Sometimes put frankly remarkable amounts of work and time into it. And it's really important that you can disengage with people who want to hurt you, as far as you can.

A norm that people must engage with criticism, a never-shifted heuristic that everyone hates criticism and must continually try to engage more with criticism to try to be less that, a cultural assumption that whenever someone says a criticism isn't well-founded it means they're closed-minded and failing to give it enough charity is, I think, toxic, really psychologically unhealthy, and essentially community-mandated social anxiety. It's important that you're allowed to stop interacting with people being unfair and unpleasant to you, and that it's an allowable thought that they might be being that.

I'm pretty sure this dynamic doesn't actually change when you're a group like EA trying to accomplish good instead of just an artist or author. It now matters that you do engage with reasonable critics- a creator isn't really doing anything wrong if they just ignore all feedback but you can't- but the dynamic that produces people who hate you still exists, it's still very harmful for your wellbeing and functioning to be pressured into always believing they must be in-some-sense-right and you must be in-some-sense-wrong, and it's still very important you're allowed to say "this is wildly unfair, and I don't have to engage with it".

I think people wildly disagree about whether EA has a problem with ignoring critics. I don't personally think it does- "do we pay enough attention to critics" is a recurring topic, and my personal view is that it's rare to see anything even remotely grounded that hasn't been debated to death (e.g. "systemic change" discourse) get ignored in public. I think this post more or less aligns with my experience. But it's very reasonable for people to think this problem does exist and push for more attention to critics in general.

However, I think that some people who think it does, or might, are pressing for the opposite-mistake-to-that. They think the bigger problem is incorrectly ignoring critics, so any time they see someone decling to engage with something, they don't look at whether it's unfair, and mean, and whether that's a reasonable choice. They just jump straight to "that's closed minded and bad for the community".

And I think this, actually, is also a bad thing to do to people. It would still be a bad thing to do even if you were right about the broader trend. Having scrupulosity issues, anxiety, default assumption that anyone saying anything bad about you must be right, should not in fact be a mandatory part of being in EA spaces.

In judging whether something should be virtuously engaged with, whether the good thing to do is to spend your energy on it rather than anything else, you cannot escape actually putting the effort in to judge: Was this critique accurate or not? Was it informed, or uninformed? Was it, if none of those things, at least motivated by a desire to help, or by a desire to make more people hate you because they dislike you for reasons litigated elsewhere? And if it's not, and you try to press people to worry about it more, you're not being the good force for community health you think you are.

#effective altruism

[jbeshir]

self care is creating a life you don’t routinely have to escape from

#self-care #instrumental rationality

[jbeshir]

Thinking on this...

The usual way I think of the difference between the "perfect" person I might want to be and the person I am is in terms of "reflective consistency"; I want to want things different to what I want, to be things other than what I am.

The thing I want to be is this very pure, very idealised, untiring optimiser who wants to work and works towards an awesome world until such time as nothing more can be done- with then an ability to enjoy the world with mundane pursuits.

The thing I actually am kinda wants some cake, is a little thirsty, and fairly tired and isn't even making particularly great progress on their flashcards this evening between reading fiction. It steps into those shoes occasionally, and makes small sacrifices like 10% to charity which don't require substantial lifestyle changes.

Humans aren't reflectively consistent; they don't have the property that given the power to change their reasoning they wouldn't do so. I definitely relate to seeing a thing I wish I was and not being that.

I think I relate to it pretty differently in a bunch of ways though.

- I am more or less comfortable accepting the reflective inconsistency without either continually fighting it or having the distorted model of myself that would come from actually thinking of myself -as- the thing I want to be.

- Internal conflict, guilt, etc is (I think) very costly, and seems very painful and ineffective at producing people who in fact do more. Crippling is bad. I'd rather work out how much my current self wants to spend time trying to improve the world and do that, even if it means accepting that I'm not as good as I'd like to be. Particularly for trying to do more altruistic stuff than actually makes you happy, you're System 2 fighting System 1 there, and System 1 will turn off your ability to get out of bed if you predictably make it sad. This is not going to help anyone.

- I don't think of perfection as the goal, because I don't allow myself to have goals that I don't expect to change my concrete behaviour. I think of high goals, and especially the ability to say (including to yourself) you have high goals, as something to be earned by genuine action in pursuit of them, that couldn't be just as easily explained by pursuit of a lesser goal. I shouldn't be allowed to think for a moment about ethics while lighting a candle and feel good about it if I didn't do it at ways and times that actually mattered.

- This is because I think a lot of the really nice stuff you get in the course of a goal of improving the world- warm feelings about being on the side of good, fantasies of nice futures, emotionally compelling songs- comes to you for having the goal, not for actually improving the world. If I let myself say that I have that goal, without asking myself, "Okay but what have you done for it lately, would hearing you say you had that goal let someone predict your actions better...", if then it'd be easy to never actually act on it. Instead of having the goal, I'd have the goal of having the goal. And I'd rather have a strategically-picked lesser goal for real than a higher goal in fantasy.

- I think keeping in touch with the context of the wider world is very important for prioritisation and can help lend weight to the desire to help it, and maybe a little context to one's own travails. I think if you're properly setup mentally, you shouldn't feel much of a need to look away.

- I don't really find anything particularly amazing about a *want* to build a better world existing. It's... there, but if I want it to make me happy I have to do something for it. Or identify as someone giving their all to bring it about, but this runs foul of a bunch of problems above that would mean I was bringing it about less.

- Maybe because I don't identify that way, I don't really experience the mix of joy of having this incredibly perfect vision + crippling guilt from not living up to it, and don't think I'd want to; it sounds like it'd mostly be a daydream, not clearly hedonically better on net, probably make me function less. I prefer my more reasonable but very earned-feeling satisfaction about what I've lived up to and self-acceptance. So I don't think this is a universal human experience!

A friend called me brave the other day. Why? "You don't look away." This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

We were talking about moral obligations. About the fact that millions of people out there are starving, or unvaccinated, or being abused or oppressed, or sick with infectious diseases, or dying of old age. And perhaps, you know, as smart educated citizens of a wealthy country, we are obligated to actually attempt to do something about that. Donate to charity, or become politicians and make sure money is spent on vaccines and not wars, or do medical research, or heck if you don't feel ambitious enough (or just Enough) for any of that then you can always volunteer at a soup kitchen. Just. Don't just sit there. Don't just become an accountant and watch TV in your spare time and never give a shit.

I think you are obligated to substantially devote your life to helping others.

And my friend can't cope with that, or claims not to be able to cope with that. My friend says that if he even thought about that, then he wouldn't be able to handle the obligations, so for his sanity he needs to pretend that none of it is happening. He needs to just become a programmer and not give a shit, because if he gave a shit then what if that obligates him to give away all his possessions and starve? My friend thinks his life should be principally devoted to enjoying himself, with maybe a little side of helping others.

This is bullshit! Of course it doesn't obligate you to give away all your possessions and starve! In what universe does that help anyone? When has any sane normal person ever advocated for "the best way to help the world is to kill yourself"? Never. Literally that is so obviously not what I am saying that if your interpretation of "you are obligated to help others" is "I am obligated to hurt myself" then you are wilfully misinterpreting me so that you have an excuse not to care. You want to look away. You want to not see.

I look away all the time. We all do. I am not spending my entire life constantly aware of the suffering of the world, staring unflinchingly at the darkness. When I decide to play one more League of Legends game before I asleep, when I decide to buy twenty bottles of Pepsi Max because it's tastier than the supermarket lemonade, when I save money because I'm more scared of running out than I am of the guilt of not donating it.... I am not thinking of my moral obligations in those moments. I am just being a human being who is fallible.

When I make my major career choices, when I sit down to plan out my budget for the year, when I encounter a difficult moral conflict - then I think, okay, I need to take into account ETHICS here. When I light a candle at a vigil or sing a meaningful song, I think for a moment of ETHICS. When I read books where the protagonists are morally obligated to defeat an evil dragon because they're the Chosen One, I muse briefly upon ETHICS.

Does it hurt? These people seem to assume it would hurt. Because, you know, I think about how millions of people are suffering, and about how I'm failing to save them all, and then I feel guilty about playing video games. Surely it must hurt! If it didn't hurt, why doesn't everyone do it?

Of course it doesn't fucking hurt.

There is something so exquisitely beautiful inside me. This vision of a world where everyone is safe and happy and kind, where we all work together to pursue knowledge and truth, where the world is covered in beauty and artwork and humanity stretches our arms out to the stars... it's astonishingly lovely. The light! There is a drive inside me to build that world. I was born with it. It glows a little within me whenever I help someone, whenever someone thanks me, whenever I learn something new, whenever I build something that will last, whenever I teach, whenever I heal, whenever I hold someone's hand. It is the opposite of guilt and the opposite of fear and the opposite of hate. THE LIGHT! When I am tempted to stand by and do nothing but instead I speak up and act, the light warms me. I would rather have the light than anything else in the world.

The light is pure. It dims a little if I lie to anyone, but especially if I lie to myself. It dims if I know something is wrong but tolerate it anyway. It dims if I treat myself as more important than another human being. It dims if I stop hoping. It dims if I start making exceptions to the rules.

Am I good enough for the light? FUCK NO. But it is holding on in there, dim, flickering, somewhere in the depths of my soul, underneath all the gunk I buried it in. Yesterday I decided to order takeout instead of giving the money to charity, and the light is still there. I cannot emphasise enough: THAT IS A MIRACLE. I think perhaps this is the miracle that the Christians were trying to describe, in their own broken and false way, when they spoke about how we all sin but Jesus loves us anyway. I can lie about the dog eating my homework, and next time I am kind to someone... the light will still fill me with the same warmth. How astonishingly beautiful! How incredible! The best feeling in the world, and I never build up a tolerance, I never lose it permanently, I can only ever temporarily dim it a little?

The place where the falling angel meets the rising ape, indeed.

You are a HUMAN BEING. That means you were born with the exact same light, I'm pretty sure - I mean, it seems like a pretty complicated thing and it would be very weird if I had the genes for it but it somehow didn't evolve in the rest of the species. You were born blessed with the exact same MIRACLE. If you are kind to others, it will feel good. If you see all the suffering in the world and decide to devote your life to trying to improve the world, it will feel good. If you learn true knowledge and teach it to others and they thank you, it will feel good. Miraculous! Amazing! Beautiful! How wonderful is it, that we were born with the capacity to take joy in doing the right thing? How astonishingly lucky are we, that it doesn't feel like a chore?

Perhaps your experience varies. But if I pretended, even for one singular moment, that I was not driven to put an END to all human suffering, to devote my life to my ethics, to help everyone in the world who needs it, to build that vision... then I'm pretty sure I would not feel the light anymore. The light is too pure and delicate and naïve to survive that kind of self-delusion. That vision of a better world does not include one single suffering innocent, and how could it possibly inspire you or warm you if it did?!

If you are suppressing your light, then YOU are the one who is looking away. I think perhaps you are the one who is brave, to be able to confront the world without the light at your side.

You are not obligated to live up to the standard of a person who always makes the right decision, always prioritises helping others, always chooses goodness. God knows I don't; but the guilt that I don't isn't crippling. The joy that the light is still inside me, even though I fail, is overwhelming.

You are not obligated to meet the standard, but if you refuse to even see the standard, if you refuse to say "I want to live up to that standard" because you think it sounds unreasonable and overly demanding, if you say things like "I couldn't possibly believe that because I don't want to feel guilty for not giving up my guilty pleasures", if you say "I don't want to try to be a good person because it doesn't sound fun" - there is something deeply wrong with you. There is something deeply offensive against humanity in that.

I want to be perfect. I'm not. That is not, and will never be, a reason to pretend that perfection isn't the goal. To say rubbish like "it's unreasonable to aim for perfection" or "utilitarianism is overly demanding" or "it's cruel and mean to say that people aren't good, so you can't possibly require people to devote their lives to goodness to be considered good" or "it's overly stressful to think about ethics all the time so you should basically just try not to hurt anyone". Just live with the fact that you're not good enough! It doesn't hurt that badly! It really does not! How have you lived long enough to be an adult and still not come to terms with the fact that sometimes you will apologise for erring? How haven't you learned to forgive without forgetting?

And people will go online and talk shit about "moral purity" or suggest that having overly high standards is bad? What is wrong with them? The light is pure. Doing something wrong and not feeling guilty about it, lying to yourself that it was right, does suffocate the light. I've seen it, I've felt it. Spending too much time around people who unapologetically hurt others, that'll strangle the light. Knowing what the right thing to do is and being too afraid to do it, that fucks up the light. I've felt the damage from doing that and I never ever ever want to feel it again.

I'm not a firebrand. I am just a guy with a very small candle and I am trying to shield it against the wind. Yes, I am obligated to devote my entire life to helping others. No, that does not make me brave. How sad to think that. I would be brave if I succeeded. I'm going to go and play video games now, fully aware that it is the wrong thing to do, acknowledging that it is the wrong thing to do, apologetic for doing it - and yet later today when I work on projects intended to improve the world, that light will still be with me, because I refuse to pretend to myself that there's nothing wrong with me wasting time.

Can we not.... talk about this? Do people feel odd talking about the light? I rarely see anyone talk about it, and yet it is one of the clearest, most driving, most defining experiences that I have. Even the synaesthetic part of feeling a very small candle, a glow, it's the clearest image. This is a universal human experience, right....?

#altruism #armchair psychology

[jbeshir]

Confusion Around Newcomb’s Problem: Theories of Counterfactuals

So the big reason I’ve been sitting this discourse out is that my take on the discourse has been that it seemed to be to be mostly people with different theories of counterfactuals talking past each other, with no one having read any of the papers that explain what a theory of counterfactuals is.

My main suggestion on all of this is to read one or more of the papers discussing various decision theories, what differs in them, and the different questions they ask to make their decisions. Towards Idealised Decision Theory is a relatively short (13 pages without the citations) one which I think deconfuses things considerably. But I’m going to give explaining a go! I might make errors here, since I’ve not checked this off anyone else.

Very roughly: The disagreement is over how you resolve that as a deterministic/by-hypothesis-perfectly-predictable entity, reasoning conditional on yourself performing any action other than the one you are, in fact, going to do, suffers from problems with contradiction. You need a theory of counterfactuals- a method for constructing hypothetical worlds where you take each action in order to choose between them- to decide where you introduce that potential contradiction at.

Causal Decision Theory’s theory of counterfactuals works by blackboxing (in a somewhat underdefined way) the physical system that is you, and for every action, holding everything not causally downstream of that physical system constant while updating everything casually downstream of it.

It, more or less, answers the question of “If a hand of God reached into the universe at this point and changed my behaviour in a way that ignored causality, what behaviour would I like them to give me?”, and accordingly is big on two-boxing, accepting awful deals in (one-shot) Ultimatum Games against a counterparty who could perfectly predict what they’d accept, paying out in the Counterfactual Blackmail Problem, and defecting on perfect copies of itself in one-shot prisoners’ dilemmas.

Evidential Decision Theory’s theory of counterfactuals works by, for every action, supposing that you observe yourself to perform each action and holding nothing constant.

It more or less answers the question of “If I could see myself take any action, which one would make my expectation for the world highest?”. This sounds a lot like “I choose the action that leads me to expect to win/get the million dollars”, but it’s also big on paying out in XOR blackmail (”If you receive this message, I the superhonest and great predictor predict EITHER that all your investments lose all their value before you can sell them XOR that you will send me $1,000 in the next 24 hours″) and does other weird things.

Updateless Decision Theory’s proposed theory of counterfactuals works by blackboxing (in a somewhat underdefined way) the abstract computation that is your decision making process given all its current parameters, and for every action, holding everything not causally downstream of that computation constant while updating everything causally downstream of it.

It more or less answers the question of “If a hand of God reached into the universe and changed the output of the decision-computation that I’m doing now everywhere it’s instantiated, what would I like them to change it to?”. This is much like CDT, except that it treats the behaviour of all perfect copies, simulations, and sufficiently good predictors (in its “somewhat undefined way”) as also causally downstream of your decision. There’s proof-based (suppose that UDT(observation) = action, what I can prove from this is downstream) and graphical (more CDT looking) conceptions of this.

(There’s also Functional Decision Theory, which I’ve not read about yet, and Timeless Decision Theory, which as far as I can tell is in effect just an earlier name for graphical UDT.)

Which of these appeals to you most probably depends on your position on other things. Of these I lean to UDT personally; CDT and EDT are both reflectively inconsistent, in that if you had them you’d wish you could immediately self modify/make binding precommitments to behave differently under a wide range of circumstances, and there’s circumstances that seemingly adaptive human intuitions differ from both. I would like to one-box and get my million, but also not pay XOR blackmail. UDT as I read it is very heavy on determinism; the rebuttal in that mindset to “you can’t change the past” is essentially “you can’t change the future either”, it views you as not changing but determining the behaviour of anything that is, ever has, or ever will evaluate you with sufficient fidelity, which might either put you off or feel like a way to resolve decision-making with your views on determinism, depending. But there’s a lot of handwaving you need to take on faith that there’s a tidy version in there somewhere.

Mostly though in terms of talking about what choice is better than another in Newcomb’s, it comes down to different ideas of what action selection is doing under determinism/in the presence of extremely good predictors, and how their counterfactuals are being constructed. If you’re answering “which action leads me to expect a world where I get money” and someone else is asking “which action would I like a causality-breaking agent to make me do” then that’s going to go around in circles until that’s properly noticed and addressed.

#rationality #decision theory #theory of counterfactuals #newcomb's problem

[jbeshir]

After years of living in the adulting world, I think I’ve come to a realization: Manners exist to guide you to good conduct even when you’re in a bad mood.

When you’re happy, when you’re feeling generous, when you’re pleased with your gift or your service or your outcome, it’s easy to be nice. It’s easy to tip the waiter well when you’ve had a good day. It’s easy to thank the teller or the clerk when you got what you wanted out of the transaction. It’s easy to smile and chit-chat with strangers on the road when you’re in a good mood.

It’s hard to tip the waiter when you didn’t enjoy your food. It’s hard to thank the clerk for their time when you’ve just been told there’s a problem with their account and they weren’t able to fix it for you. It’s hard to think of something nice to say when your aunt gave you a crappy sweater you neither need nor want. It’s hard to be nice to people when you’ve had a shitty day. It’s HARD.

That’s what manners are for. Scripts and phrases that you learn by rote to say when you can’t think of a single nice or good thing to say from your own volition. Yes, they’re scripted. Yes, the sentiment is empty. But the scripts work in every situation, and the emptiness provides a buffer between your own unhappiness and the rest of society.

Because most of the time, it’s not the waiter’s fault that the food you ordered wasn’t what you expected. It’s not the clerk’s fault that your account is overdrawn. It’s not the fault of the barista or the stranger on the subway that you got fired today or your favorite aunt died. But even when you can’t summon a smile or a cheery word, you can still have manners, because they will serve you the same in sunshine or rain.

#social script #social models

[jbeshir]

Since comments bring up that this is apparently substantially Basilisk-related- When the user Roko posted their basilisk on LW in the first place, it was deleted by Yudkowsky, who justified the deletion on "doesn't work but if you have an idea like this and if you think it might work, you shouldn't be posting it in a public place where it might hurt people" grounds, and it then got Streisand'd because LW was (is?) full of incredibly strongly anti-censorship types who didn’t like things being deleted.

Thus the early mockery was of EY for engaging with “if you think it might work” seriously enough to delete it, or allegedly of believing it would work and hurriedly deleting it to cover it up, or of having the foolishness to think that deleting things in an anti-censorship community was going to end well, and the early mockery of the community as a whole for having concepts such that some people could end up distressed by weird acausal threat ideas.

But “Roko’s Basilisk was created, entertained, or even permitted, as an argument for doing ingroupy things by Yudkowsky”, or any model where taking what Yudkowsky says seriously should lead one to believe it works is just ahistorical here. Wasn’t their idea, they said it doesn’t work, the whole thing that made it blow up in the first place was them deleting it precisely because they thought the class of things of which it was an instance was not good to have around.

(EDIT: And needless to say a community where one of the founders deleting a post on their forum because they think it or things in its category might cause people emotional distress results in a Streisand effect primarily enacted by members of said community against them daring to censor the discourse is... uh, not high-control.)

i may regret saying this, but -

as an outsider looking in with a lot of respect for y'all

the only reason rationalism hasn't gone off the deep end and become a truly scary scientology-style cult

is that the rat community is mostly populated with people who, when you say "jump", start arguing over whether jumping is an ethical use of shoe leather, and whether we should make shoes out of leather, or whether anyone should wear shoes at all

and even that can only protect you so much

#rationality #roko's basilisk

[jbeshir]

I think Frederick DeBoer’s Cult of Smart as reviewed here more or less agrees with the take that intelligence shouldn’t matter morally, but makes a pretty good case for caring that intelligence/g-factor is real and differs between people, for the reason that if it does differ between people then every system we build which is meritocratic or even credential-driven in a way that depends on intelligence is discriminatory against people who happen to have been born less smart, and insofar as this controls how people get rewards this is horrible, and also very self-serving of the (mostly smart) people who build such systems.

Myself I’m somewhat sympathetic to this take on it- that we should be very iffy on claims about intelligence differences becoming common knowledge because regardless of how much we loudly proclaim that we aren’t assigning it moral weight it will go badly because your control over human society is limited, and therefore refrain from amplifying them. I assign this position a plurality and so think it appropriate that people are expected to not be “trying to get [the general public] to care”.

I’m not sure how you can square “smart people are systematically setting the world up to distribute benefits to themselves with unnecessary credentialism and they and we should recognise this bias” and “differences in intelligence are one way the concept of equality of opportunity is broken out the gate, this is a significant argument for prioritising equality of results” with “we should not try to get people to care/notice that g-factor differs between people”, but would like to.

I think it’s a bit unfair to act as though the people being accused of the worst things here (e.g. Scott) weren’t already applying a mix of both of these requests, though. I think they’ve been very consistent in arguing anywhere it did come up that it was morally irrelevant, and not trying to amplify it specifically. The current fuss came up because of digging between the lines followed by sharing of a private conversation about the topic, and I think it’s important to distinguish people getting problems from “trying to get people to care” from people getting problems because others decided to investigate/”whistleblow” whether they had private thoughts about it.

@cromulentenough - that's the thing, and I think I worded my original post badly; I think trying to argue that Intelligence Does Not Exist, or that it isn't distributed among populations, is the wrong argument. it's one meta-level too low.

if what you're trying to argue is "everyone needs and deserves basic human respect, kindness, and the chance to prove themselves on their own terms; intelligence is not the sole arbiter of moral worth or competence", then that is what you should be arguing.

and I think that's why most people who oppose HBD oppose HBD. like i said before: if people didn't give intelligence an undue amount of moral weight, no one would care if intelligence was distributed differently across different populations. no one argues about whether asian people are more disposed to pancreatic cancer because pancreatic cancer don't have moral weight.

so the question isn't "does intelligence real", the question is "so what? why should we care?" and as @worriedaboutmyfern just eloquently said- the people who are trying to get us to care are ignoring the skulls. they do not have good reasons for caring about this, so we can safely ignore them.

#discourse

[jbeshir]

(Seen on FB)

RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE. 

When I was at one of my lowest (mental) points in life, I couldn’t get out of bed some days. I had no energy or motivation and was barely getting by.

I had therapy once per week, and on this particular week I didn’t have much to ‘bring’ to the session. He asked how my week was and I really had nothing to say.

“What are you struggling with?” he asked.

I gestured around me and said “I dunno man. Life.”

Not satisfied with my answer, he said “No, what exactly are you worried about right now? What feels overwhelming? When you go home after this session, what issue will be staring at you?”

I knew the answer, but it was so ridiculous that I didn’t want to say it.

I wanted to have something more substantial.

Something more profound.

But I didn’t.

So I told him, “Honestly? The dishes. It’s stupid, I know, but the more I look at them the more I CAN’T do them because I’ll have to scrub them before I put them in the dishwasher, because the dishwasher sucks, and I just can’t stand and scrub the dishes.”

I felt like an idiot even saying it.

What kind of grown ass woman is undone by a stack of dishes? There are people out there with *actual* problems, and I’m whining to my therapist about dishes?

But my therapist nodded in understanding and then said:

“RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE.”

I began to tell him that you’re not supposed to, but he stopped me.

“Why the hell aren’t you supposed to? If you don’t want to scrub the dishes and your dishwasher sucks, run it twice. Run it three times, who cares?! Rules do not exist, so stop giving yourself rules.”

It blew my mind in a way that I don’t think I can properly express.

That day, I went home and tossed my smelly dishes haphazardly into the dishwasher and ran it three times.

I felt like I had conquered a dragon.

The next day, I took a shower lying down.

A few days later. I folded my laundry and put them wherever the fuck they fit.

There were no longer arbitrary rules I had to follow, and it gave me the freedom to make accomplishments again.

Now that I’m in a healthier place, I rinse off my dishes and put them in the dishwasher properly. I shower standing up. I sort my laundry.

But at a time when living was a struggle instead of a blessing, I learned an incredibly important lesson:

THERE ARE NO RULES.

RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE!!!

(by Kate Scott 2018)

#rationality #life advice

[jbeshir]

“Should we take this sign seriously? It seems to translate as some sort of warning.”

“In that time period people put them everywhere, presumably to ward off thieves. Consider the traditional ‘no cash on premises overnight’ sign.”

Deciding where to put this up. I say front door.

[jbeshir]

I’m hosting a celebration of Petrov Day / EA camping trip near Oxford, UK, as an event in the tradition of the Secular Solstice! Last two years’ events were a lot of fun, so I’m going to run it again on about the same approach as the previous years. Once again, we’ll be gathering around a fire at Willowbrook Farm to rejoice in the world we’re lucky enough to still have, sing songs about science and hope and the future, and renew our shared determination to do as much as we can in our own lives to make the world a better place. Anyone is welcome. Anyone who cares about solving hard problems and helping others and eliminating suffering in the world and finding truth through science and the progress and achievements of humanity will find parts of our celebration that resonate with them. If you want to attend, you are welcome. It does not matter if you can’t sing, can’t dance, don’t know how to pitch a tent, don’t know how to build a bonfire, don’t know anyone else going, don’t know the songs yet, haven’t been to previous events, have never heard of rationality or LessWrong, need accommodations to attend, or don’t want to cook. You are welcome. Anyone who follows this is invited, it’d be nice to meet anyone from here.

#effective altruism #rationality #community building

[jbeshir]

If you enjoyed the Act 1/Act 2 style of humour when Homestuck was still relatively close in feel to Problem Sleuth, and enjoy adventure games ala Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, etc, then Hiveswap so far has been short but funny and I think a bit of a fusion of both. Like a lot of modern stuff in this sort of space it isn’t challenging, though.

If you’re looking for grand narrative or meta-twistiness that comments on the very way we engage with artistic works and transformative works, in the style of Act 6 and the Epilogues, then it does not have any of that yet. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out it coming in later games, but I haven’t seen much sign of that intention yet so I would hold off until the later games are out rather than buying in now in hopes of stuff that isn’t yet there.

It is very set in the 90s and likes to include a bunch of 90s objects that the main characters enthuse over, though, which pandered to me pretty effectively.

Should I buy any of the Homestuck/Hiveswap games

#homestuck

[jbeshir]

I know at least some kinds of alignment issue are treatable by e.g. surgery on eye muscles to adjust strength, at least so long as you haven't already developed amblyopia that resisted patching, so maybe it would be worth trying to get a second opinion from a specialist if you're suspicious they might be being overly dismissive; I would, its a high value area.

Amblyopia is what blinded me in one eye - once the link from the eye to the brain is decayed enough as a result of an underlying issue making the eye not provide useful input, it stops being fixable. I don't know how often/fast this develops in adults whose vision had already fully developed.

I've always heard of alignment issues as the relatively easily fixable underlying cause you want to treat promptly, and while I'd normally trust a optician over that understanding, if I was suspicious of their incentives...

Got an eye exam and the result is my eyes don’t align focus

Which explains why I’ve noticed myself reading text within 16 inches one-eyed

And I asked her if there were exercises to resolve that and she said no it was an insoluble neural issue but I could get glasses w/prism lenses

But she was part of a practice that clearly makes its money off the attached glasses shop, to the point they put a 1-week return appointment (w/ cost for rescheduling) as a gate on getting a contacts prescription

So

[jbeshir]

I once needed the bathroom fairly badly at a London train station, and they had paid turnstiles. Being me, I had no coinage, nor was there a change-making machine in the vicinity.

I ultimately left my luggage outside and just hopped the turnstile while no one was looking. Reportedly they’re going free now. This is good, because it retroactively validates my previous actions.

(On the main topic I think free public bathrooms are good policy primarily because giving homeless/stranded people a place to relieve themselves with a modicum of dignity is probably a really high value thing- it’s the sort of thing that lacking gives you a major utility hit, so it’s probably fairly efficient welfare-wise- but that like nearly every other government service, trying to regulate private business into doing it for you instead of just doing it/hiring people to do it yourself and letting private people run whatever they like extra for money is foolish.)

I lost a whole pound on my walk this morning. “That’s incredible!” You exclaim. I start crying. London’s for-charge public access washrooms are a nightmare

#about me #secondary reason is that the government is tasked with cleaning the streets #and this is easier if you draw the mess to a central location and make it self-cleaning #politics

[jbeshir]

The weirdest instance of “getting my wires crossed” I’ve ever experienced: I had a piece of candy at my desk. My intention was to simultaneously eat the candy and start a brief work task. I put the candy in my mouth and felt a surge of alarm as I was convinced, for a fraction of a second, that I had somehow eaten the task I was about to start.

#rationality #productivity #joke

[jbeshir]

The best strategy to ensure future artificial intelligence is friendly is

The best strategy to ensure future artificial intelligence is friendly is to ask users to promote safety, privacy and security of their devices.

“The pain that could be introduced by encouraging users to report security vulnerabilities is compounded with the fact that there are many security vulnerabilities in every kind of technology,” she said.

#gpt-2 #solved #agi

[jbeshir]

I got interviewed for Vox about what it was like getting malaria for Science. Kind of exciting, really.

I’m free to go now, but I’m going to go see the Pitt Rivers in Oxford first; I went to the Ashmolean and the Museum of the History of Science yesterday.

[jbeshir]

Fraid I've got the malaria; it seems like my vaccine trial is returning a negative result, it looks like at least half the participants failed to be protected by it.

In other news, “’Fraid I’ve got the malaria” is my new favorite sentence. I shall be using it in conversation from now on.

#about me