Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# A great hard day

(Draft from a while ago, lightly edited.)

There were times when I was younger that I used to fantasize about having a friend at all, let alone a boyfriend. And there were times when I thought that if I could just figure out how to make life consistently bearable, I’d really be onto something. So when I say how great my life is, it means that hard lives can get a lot better, not that mine is likely to be consistently more awesome than yours (I hope).

* * *

Today was great. I arrived in the world caught in a bundle of sheets with my boyfriend. Half asleep, I decided to wake him up by incrementally escalated cuddling, which I assume is similar in its benefits to those slowly loudening alarms.

At work I came across a thing that was that most unpleasant combination, of implicitly disrespectful and genuine evidence that I might be bad. Which I dealt with largely with calm, curiosity, and good intent. I thought about it and wrote down considerations. Then I asked a couple of other people about that and about another customarily shameful and distressing question, for good measure. I felt something good in my mind growing in strength, and exercising it made other things blossom: what had been an uncomfortable reserve into a fruitful friendliness.

I had gone to bed last night with a headache, and fallen asleep thinking that on the outside view headaches often disappear by sleeping, but that my intuition said that this one would get worse. By the time I finished making lunch today, it was so bad that I quickly degenerated into an unhappy heap. It was that kind of headache where you feel hot and fragile and your neck aches and you wonder if you have meningitis but you don’t have the strength to get into that kind of inquiry. I lay in my reclining chair and thought that it would be wise to take painkillers, but that would involve doing things.

My boyfriend came and looked after me. He put all the things around me - tea and sugar in a bowl and apple sauce and little packets of MeWe peanut butter and painkillers. He got another table for it all, and rubbed my neck, and looked in my eyes, and talked to me about what I care about in the world. I nibbled at the sugar and sipped the tea. I played Sporcle and learned about historic dates and American presidents, and I didn’t feel like I should be doing something else.

I took some xanax, in case my headache was being worsened by my unease about it. I suppose it knocked out my unease at all levels about anything, because after recovering a bit I just kept wanting to work, until I’d been at work for about 10.5 hours, even having missed two hours to wretchedness in the middle of the day.

I felt communality with the people far away reaching out to me across the internet. My room was full of warm lamps and orange wood, with green leaves here and there. My housemates made me meatballs and pasta and my boyfriend brought them to me with butter and parsley and dill. I was comfortable in my fully-reclined chair. I thought about things and made decisions. Someone sent me a book they were writing, and I liked it.
# John Wentworth on "Tabooing 'Should' Exercise" [Sunday Meetup 1pm]

*Note: this meetup is an hour later than usual, due to the* [*SSC meetup*](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/upcjRf8we4ayZaNoZ/rohin-shah-at-the-ssc-online-meetup) *also being hosted in the Garden a few hours earlier.*

Claim: moral/status/value judgements (like "we should blame X for Y", “Z is Bad”, etc) like to sneak into epistemic models and masquerade as weight-bearing components of predictions.

How can we detect moral/status/value judgements masquerading as components of predictive models? In this meetup, we'll try exercises in [tabooing](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationalist-taboo) moral/status/value judgements, and hopefully discover some holes in our models.

We'll be meeting in Walled Garden at 1pm.

[http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=5JyZ&event=john-wentworth-on-tabooing-should](http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=5JyZ&event=john-wentworth-on-tabooing-should)
# What does the FDA actually do between getting the trial results and having their meeting?

It seems that for approving vaccines there's a gap of weeks between the drug company finishing their trial and giving the data to the FDA and the FDA actually making the decision to approve the vaccine. What does the FDA do during that time? What takes weeks?
# Is MIRI actually hiring and does Buck Shlegeris still work for you?

I applied to MIRI software engineer position ~~last year~~ on 26 February 2020. The first stage of the interview was a Triplebyte quiz. Triplebyte said I passed it "particularly well" and qualify for Fast Track program. However, Buck Shlegeris said he's not interested in proceding with an interview, with no explanation. Well, maybe my test score wasn't good enough. Anyway, he provided me with a list of ways to impress him and get back on track, and I did one of them (solve 8 chapters of Lean exercises). Buck said that I've managed to impress him and he'll get back to me about next steps. Two months later he said that MIRI is not hiring because of the pandemic. Buck promised to contact me when the hiring starts again.

I have recently learned from a friend that Buck doesn't work for MIRI anymore, and his Linkedin page also says that he left in 2020. So I decided to reapply for the job, but I got back an automated reply from Buck Shlegeris with a link to the same Triplebyte quiz. 

I am confused. Does Buck still work for MIRI? If you aren't hiring, why are there job ads on your website?
# How Should We Respond to Cade Metz?

The Cade Metz article on Slate Star Codex [is out.](https://web.archive.org/web/20210213173807/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html)

It seems valuable for us to have a discussion about our reactions to it. Also what we want to do about it. Here are my questions:

*   The article pulls quotes out of context, looking for the problematizing angle, distorting the implications of word choice. It's also large. And the context is deep, because Scott's a deep thinker. Having a post explaining these problems that I could send to friends and family members for context, and for my own sanity, would be really nice. *Edit: Scott* [*wrote one.*](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article)
*   Is the article a fair and much-needed outside piece of criticism that we should take seriously? We talk a bigger game about accepting and integrating outside criticism than many communities. Maybe this is our chance to really put that into practice?
*   Scott was told that the way to get ahead of damaging journalism is to reveal everything they might want to find out. For those of us writing under a pseudonym, should we all just be revealing our real names, and letting friends, family members, and colleagues (where appropriate) know about our connection with SSC and this community?

**Update:**

I've learned a lot about media today just by reading comment threads in SCC-associated communities. My intuitive takeaway is that it's time for a reckoning, and I need to build a model of how this stuff works on a systemic level.

I understand why some people criticized this post (and a longer article that I moved to drafts), for giving prominence. Personally, I agree with Dentin that it's best to shrug it off as crappy journalism and ignore it. I'd delete this post, except that I don't want to delete his and a few other comments along with it.
# The ecology of conviction

Supposing that [sincerity has declined](https://worldspiritsockpuppet.com/2020/11/30/sincerity-trends.html), why?

It feels natural to me that sincere enthusiasms should be rare relative to criticism and half-heartedness. But I would have thought this was born of fairly basic features of the situation, and so wouldn’t change over time.

It seems clearly easier and less socially risky to be critical of things, or non-committal, than to stand for a positive vision. It is easier to produce a valid criticism than an idea immune to valid criticism (and easier again to say, ‘this is very simplistic - the situation is subtle’). And if an idea is criticized, the critic gets to seem sophisticated, while the holder of the idea gets to seem naïve. A criticism is smaller than a positive vision, so a critic is usually not staking their reputation on their criticism as much, or claiming that it is good, in the way that the enthusiast is.

But there are also rewards for positive visions and for sincere enthusiasm that aren’t had by critics and routine doubters. So for things to change over time, you really just need the scale of these incentives to change, whether in a basic way or because the situation is changing.

One way this could have happened is that the internet (or even earlier change in the information economy) somehow changed the ecology of enthusiasts and doubters, pushing the incentives away from enthusiasm. e.g. The ease, convenience and anonymity of criticizing and doubting on the internet puts a given positive vision in contact with many more critics, making it basically impossible for an idea to emerge not substantially marred by doubt and teeming with uncertainties and summarizable as ‘maybe X, but I don’t know, it’s complicated’. This makes presenting positive visions less appealing, reducing the population of positive vision havers, and making them either less confident or more the kinds of people whose confidence isn’t affected by the volume of doubt other people might have about what they are saying. Which all make them even easier targets for criticism, and make confident enthusiasm for an idea increasingly correlated with being some kind of arrogant fool. Which decreases the basic respect offered by society for someone seeming to have a positive vision.

This is a very speculative story, but something like these kinds of dynamics seems plausible.

These thoughts were inspired by a conversation I had with Nick Beckstead.
# This is my 100ᵗʰ post on Less Wrong

I started blogging one and a half years ago. Blogging has helped my life in many ways. I have met interesting people online I would never have encountered in meatspace. I have received educated feedback on esoteric topics. I have shared fun projects like [*Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets*](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/TF77XsD5PbucbJsG3) and the [2020 Less Wrong Darwin Game](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/wKPWFvdMyvgDWfusX) with strangers around the globe.

But the most important thing about Less Wrong is it has made me a more positive person, in multiple senses of the word.
1. Speaking in [affirmative](https://www.lsusr.com/blog/speak-in-the-positive.html) statements.
2. Being nice to people. Looking at the bright side of things.

Most ideas come in the form of "$x$ is true" or "$\neg x$ is false". In mathematics "$x$ is true" and "$\neg x$ is false" contain exactly the same information. In real life they don't. Most real life questions have $n$ competing answers, one of which is true. If you say "answer $a_n$ is true" then you answer the question. If $n$ is large and you say "answer $a_{n'}$ is false" then you have conveyed almost zero information.

If a stranger says something wrong then you should ignore them. [Otherwise these people are literally taking your life.](http://paulgraham.com/vb.html) Before I began blogging, if I read a post with 100 claims and 1 of them was wrong then I would focus on the 1 wrong claim. Now I focus on the 99 true claims.

I used to think about the world as a conflict between right and wrong. Now I think about it as a conflict between action and inaction. The problem isn't that the Bad Guys are promoting Bad Ideas. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of people aren't promoting anything at all. Thinking for yourself doesn't equal consuming the right media. It equals 𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘  media.

I used to think of writers as important people who should be held to lofty standards. Now I think of writers as ordinary people on an adventure of discovery. I want to encourage them. After all, when people write nice comments on my posts it makes me really happy. I usually read them several times.

There are a many of people who contribute to this community, but my favorite people to notice are the ones who write nice comments. Thank you [Ben Pace](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/benito) for being such a positive force in this community. You always have such nice things to say to people.
# “PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.

This is in some sense a small detail, but one important enough to be worth write-up and critique: AFAICT, “PR” is a corrupt concept,  in the sense that if you try to “navigate PR concerns” about yourself / your organization / your cause area / etc., the concept will guide you toward harmful and confused actions.  In contrast, if you try to safeguard your “reputation”, your “brand”, or your “honor,” I predict this will basically go fine, and will not lead you to leave a weird confused residue in yourself or others.

To explain the difference:

If I am safeguarding my “honor” (or my “reputation”, “brand”, or “good name”), there are some fixed standards that I try to be known as adhering to.  For example, in Game of Thrones, the Lannisters are safeguarding their “honor” by adhering to the principle “A Lannister always pays his debts.”   They take pains to adhere to a certain standard, and to be known to adhere to that standard.  Many examples are more complicated than this; a gentleman of 1800 who took up a duel to defend his “honor” was usually not defending his known adherence to a single simple principle a la the Lannisters.  But it was still about his visible adherence to a fixed (though not explicit) societal standard.

In contrast, if I am “managing PR concerns,” there is no fixed standards of good conduct, or of my-brand-like conduct, that I am trying to adhere to.  Instead, I am trying to do a more complicated operation:
1. Model which words or actions may cause “people” (especially media, or self-reinforcing miasma) to get upset with me;
2. Try to speak in such a way as to not set that off.

It’s a weirder or loopier process.  One that’s more prone to self-reinforcing fears of shadows, and one that somehow (I think?) tends to pull a person away from communicating anything at all.  Reminiscent of “[Politics and the English Language](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/).”  Not reminiscent of Strunk and White.

One way you can see the difference, is that when people think about “PR” they imagine a weird outside expertise, such that you need to have a “PR consultant” or a “media consultant” who you should nervously heed advice from.  When people think about their “honor," it's more a thing they can know or choose directly, and so it is more a thing that leaves them free to communicate something.

So: simple suggestion.  If, at any point, you find yourself trying to “navigate PR”, or to help some person or organization or cause area or club or whatever to “navigate PR,” see if you can instead think and speak in terms of defending your/their “honor”, “reputation”, or “good name”.  And see if that doesn’t make everybody feel a bit clearer, freer, and more as though their feet are on the ground.

Related: [The Inner Ring](https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/), by CS Lewis; [The New York Times](https://www.robrhinehart.com/the-new-york-times/), by Robert Rhinehart.
# The Median is Less than the Average

In [*The Economics of Media*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9Y5yYm5gJTA7Ln6PE/the-economics-of-media) I discussed how news is written by large organizations including businesses, governments and major political parties.

The same was true in the age of paper media except with the addition of more powerful local monopolies. Much of the United States (and likely the rest of the world) had one (or few) major newspaper(s). Chaos favors the underdog. When a single company controls an industry, it is incentivized to promote **stability**. It is more important for a monopoly newspaper to censor offensive news than to create interesting content.

We often think of "censorship" as suppression of politically sensitive topics. Actually, most censorship pertains to merely **offensive** topics. In the forewords and afterwords to Gary Larson's *The Far Side* collections you'll find incident after incident of his work (which is far less titillating than xkcd) getting suppressed by puritan surburban readers—usually for reasons unrelated to politics. Paper newspapers maintained their monopolies by regurgitating bland moderation.

Centralized anything is a single point of failure. Is is easy to suppress a centralized operation like Bing, Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, a school or *The Seattle Times*. It is impossible to censor the entire Internet. Before the Internet, the only opinions you could conveniently access were those which passed all the filters built into the centralized paper publishers. Now you can access all the opinions.

Increased information makes smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you are smart then increased access to information is unequivocably a good thing. You can master basically any technical subject just from the books available on [two](https://e-booksdirectory.com/) [websites](https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books). If you are stupid then increased information makes the world a confusing place because it's harder to just conform to the party line. Increased information means there is more media specifically designed to dupe stupid people. The Internet increases the **variance** of human intelligence.

Human intelligence is asymmetrically distributed. Intelligence is capped on the bottom but it is long-tailed at the top. It is more like a Poisson distribution than a Gaussian distribution. **The median is less than the average.** As variance increases, the difference gap between average and median widens. Increased variance in intelligence is a pressure behind increasing income inequality. It makes the world less equal and more equitable.
# KAnon

There's a dangerous conspiracy theory spreading, called "[KAnon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity)" by its adherents. Its claims, at their core, come down to the belief that there is a "K" great enough to protect us from attacks by the forces of deanonymization. While followers often make contradictory claims about "K", no matter how great "K" may really be, their trust has been [misplaced](https://cs-people.bu.edu/ads22//talks/2012-08-21-crypto-tutorial.pdf).

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/kanon-2x.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/kanon-big.jpg)

This blind trust that proponents place in "K" is best illustrated by their slogan, "Where We Go One We Go All" ([#WWG1WGA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon)). Originating in the once-marginal "K=N" faction, it represents the idea that individuals, once united, cannot be divided. Despite the undeniable rhetorical appeal, however, its protection is illusory and such division remains possible by [resourceful](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf) and [determined](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1217299.1217302) attackers.

Believers in KAnon are right to seek better anonymization, and robust anonymization is possible. Their approach, however, of gathering large groups not only does not solve the problem but is metaphorically hazardous given the background of the [pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019). We must engage in patient discussion, with careful explanation of how the promises of KAnon have been shown again and again to be false, and bring believers around to [more reliable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy) approaches.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100206055435092)*
# Suggestions of posts on the AF to review

How does one write a good and useful review of a technical post on the Alignment Forum?

I don’t know. Like many people, I tend to comment and give feedback on posts closely related to my own research, or to write down my own ideas when reading the paper. Yet this is quite different from the quality peer-review that you can get (if you’re lucky) in more established fields. And from experience, such quality reviews can improve the research dramatically, give some prestige to it, and help people navigate the field.

In an attempt to understand what makes a good review for the Alignment Forum, Joe Collman, Jérémy Perret (Gyrodiot on LW) and me are launching a project to review many posts in depth. The goal is to actually write reviews of various posts, get feedback on their usefulness from authors and readers alike, and try to extract from them some knowledge about how to go about doing such reviews for the field. We hope to have enough insights to eventually write some guidelines that could be used in an official AF review process.

On that note, despite the support of members of the LW team, this project isn’t official. It’s just the three of us trying out something.

Now, the reason for the existence of this post (and why it is a question) is that we’re looking for posts to review. We already have some in mind, but they are necessarily biased towards what we’re more comfortable about. This is where you come in, to suggest a more varied range of posts.

Anything posted on the AF goes, although we will not take into account things that are clearly not “research outputs” (like transcripts of podcasts or pointers to surveys). This means that posts about specific risks, about timelines, about deconfusion, about alignment schemes, and more, are all welcome.

We would definitely appreciate it if you add a reason to your suggestion, to help us decide whether to include the post on our selection. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of possible reasons:

*   This post is one of the few studying this very important question
*   This is my post and I want some feedback
*   This post was interesting but I cannot decide what to make of it
*   This post is very representative of a way to do AI Alignment research
*   This post is very different from most of AI Alignment research
*   …

Thanks in advance, and we’re excited about reading your suggestions!
# Reasonable ways for an average LW retail investor to get upside risk?

By "upside risk" I mean: more upside risk than just holding the market.  
  
By "reasonable" I mean: will not require an arbitrarily long education process to understand/carry out. I work a day job and have other commitments in my life, and I'm not that fundamentally interested in finance/investing. I'm not trying to get anywhere near an efficient frontier, I just want to be able to get upside risk more systematically than "some smart seeming EA/LWer drops a stock/crypto tip in a facebook group".

By "average": I assume I'm close to the LW median: I'm comfortable making kelly bets in the $1k - $100k range, depending on details. Mostly in the $10k range.

Are [IPO ETF](https://www.etf.com/channels/ipo)s a good candidate for this? ~~SPACE~~ SPAC ETFs? Buy and hold cryptocurrencies that aren't BTC/ETH? Buy and hold BTC/ETH? [Sell random call and put options](https://financial-hacker.com/algorithmic-options-trading/)? Something else? Emerging markets ETFs?
# The feeling of breaking an Overton window

Epistemic status: real but incomplete observations.

In late February of 2020, I went to the grocery store at 2am with my husband (emptiest time), and we bought ~$1k of mostly canned or dry goods.  We were the only customers in line.  The cashier seemed interested in our purchases, and I felt myself stiffening as she looked.  Then she asked me: “are you worried about that virus?”

And… I found myself reaching for a lie, trying to compose a lie, moving my speech-planning-bits as though the thing to do was to lie.  I mean, not a technical lie.  But I found myself looking for a way to camouflage or downplay my model of the virus. 

Oddly, it felt more like a thing happening in me (“I found myself") than like a chosen thing.  If you’ll pardon the analogy, it somehow felt at least a bit like throwing up, in that I remember once when I was trying not to throw up, and all of a sudden it was like an alien process took over my consciousness and throat, reached for the bucket, got my hair out of the way, and did the actual throwing up.  And then returned my body to me when it was over.  The "alien process" sensation felt a bit similar.

With the cashier, I wondered at my impulse as it was happening, but I couldn’t tell if the impulse’s source was “for the cashier's sake” (didn’t seem to make sense); “to prevent her from harming me” (didn’t seem to make sense); or … what exactly?

I forced myself to say “yes” to the cashier's question, and to elaborate a bit; to my surprise, she seemed sincerely curious, and told me several people had been in doing this and she would probably also prepare in some way.  Even after this, my sentences wanted to (sound soothing? fit in?  avoid disrupting others’ “normal”?  I’m still not sure what), and it took me active effort to partially not do this.

—

I am somehow quite interested in what precisely was happening there, and in any related processes.  

My guesses as to how to help with this puzzle-set, if you're so inclined:
* Share observations (not theories) of any related-seeming things you’ve noticed ([the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) [rawer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) the better);
* Share observations (not theories) of what it’s like to be you right now trying to look at this stuff. Do you have introspective access?  Do you have *sort of* have introspective access, and in what way?  Do you kind-of-like identify with it?  Kind-of-like not-identify with it?
* And okay, yes, also theories, I just hope the theory doesn’t overwhelm the observations at this confused stage.
# Are we prepared for Solar Storms?

The COVID19- Pandemic has brought one awful fact to global attention: 

The Powers that Be are woefully unprepared for once-in-century global risks. 

Are we prepared for Solar Storms (solar flares, coronal mass ejection events, etc)?

A basic summary:

A more advanced explanation (that concludes fears are mostly overblown):
# Shortcuts With Chained Probabilities

Let's say you're considering an activity with a risk of death of one in a million. If you do it twice, is your risk two in a million?

Technically, it's just under:

1 - (1 - 1/1,000,000)^2 = ~2/1,000,001

This is quite close! Approximating `1 - (1-p)^2` as `p*2` was only off by 0.00005%.

On the other hand, say you roll a die twice looking for a 1:

1 - (1 - 1/6)^2 = ~31%

The approximation would have given:

1/6 * 2 = ~33%

Which is off by 8%. And if we flip a coin looking for a tails:

1/2 * 2 = 100%

Which is clearly wrong since you could get heads twice in a row.

It seems like this shortcut is better for small probabilities; why?

If something has probability `p`, then the chance of it happening at least once in two independent tries is:

1 - (1-p)^2
 = 1 - (1 - 2p + p^2)
 = 1 - 1 + 2p - p^2
 = 2p - p^2

If `p` is very small, then `p^2` is negligible, and `2p` is only a very slight overestimate. As it gets larger, however, skipping it becomes more of a problem.

This is the calculation that people do when adding [micromorts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort): you can't die from the same thing multiple times, but your chance of death stays low enough that the inaccuracy of naively combining these probabilities is much smaller than the margin of error on our estimates.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100206339540742)*
# Neck abacus

My [points for anxiety](https://worldspiritsockpuppet.com/2020/12/01/points-for-anxiety.html) system continued to help, but was encumbered by the friction of getting my phone out to mark points. Thus I have turned to wearable abaci.

![neclace 1](https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i/katjasgrace/PXL_20210218_064803676.jpg)

![necklace 2](https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i/katjasgrace/PXL_20210218_064811541.jpg)

I made this necklace according to very roughly [this picture](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/212724782374260653/), using knitting wool and beads I bought at one point to use as virtual in-house currency and now found in a box in my room. It works well! The beads don’t shift unless I move them, which is easy and pleasing. It seems clearly more convenient than my phone. (Plus, I can show off to those in the know that I have 4 or 6 or 24 or 26 of something!) I am also for now reminded when I look in a mirror to consider whether I can get a point, which is currently a plus.

You can buy bracelet versions in a very small number of places online, and also keychain or general hanging clip-on versions, but I don’t think I saw necklaces anywhere. This seems striking, given the clear superiority to a phone counter for me so far, and the likely scale of phone counter usage in the world.
# Bedtime reminiscences

Things that I imagine would be cool to do with my kids (if I manage to have some): taking bedtime as a moment to reminisce about the day together.

Recalling enjoyable moments is by itself enjoyable. So ask, what parts of the day did you like? What were some good moments? What about it was enjoyable?

At first, it’ll be just me mentioning things I noticed on that day: “You seemed to really like playing with those toys today.” “You looked happy being with uncle X.”

Hopefully soon the kids will notice that this is enjoyable and start paying more conscious attention to the good moments throughout the day – and start bringing up things on their own. (And feel like that was their own idea to also contribute, rather than it just being their dad telling them these things.)

Later, start also covering the moments when they were unhappy or upset. Are they feeling okay now, anything about it that they still want or need to discuss? Even if they’re fine now, make sure to take those moments and reframe them in an explicitly accepting light (all emotions are fine, including negative ones):

*   “That really was upsetting for you but now you’re okay, all bad feelings pass eventually.”
*   “You held yourself together back there even though you were really unhappy about it, that was great. You could have chosen not to even try, but you did do it.”
*   “We both got a little mad at each other earlier but that’s okay, kids need to be mad at dad sometimes and sometimes dad gets mad back. I try not to, but that’s on me, and I love you no matter what.”

Then maybe recall some happy moments that we discussed when it was bedtime on _earlier_ days, and which they might have forgotten otherwise. Keep those unhappy moments firmly sandwiched between good ones.

Also tell them about all the moments today when they made me and mom happy and how we love them. Then a bedtime story and wishing good night.

Hopefully the conversations should keep getting more sophisticated as the kids get older. Get into topics like the value of negative emotions, and what unmet need their unhappiness in that moment was a signal of. Help them brainstorm ways they could meet that need better from now on.

Then one day when they’re adults, hopefully they’ll be so firmly in the habit of going through the good moments and the lessons-in-the-bad-moments that they won’t need me for it anymore, and it has just become automatic.

And if it hasn’t, that’s cool too. At least we had lots of good moments together doing it.

(Or if this whole thing always just seems uninteresting and dumb to them, then we’ll just have to come up with something completely different that they’ll like more.)
# Scott and Rohin doublecrux on AI with human models

In 2019, Scott Garrabrant wrote about how we might want safe AGI that did NOT use models of humans. Rohin Sha commented about some disagreements with Scott's frame.

This Sunday, they'll meet for a public doublecrux exploring their disagreements.

You can read the original post and discussion here:  
[https://www.lesswrong.com/.../thoughts-on-human-models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BKjJJH2cRpJcAnP7T/thoughts-on-human-models?fbclid=IwAR0XVeMxqBsF9obLShlCFBvoAGunhQOkFL2sPllLXndmSdqhat1DpZFGPEc)

The meetup will be held in Zoom, at 12pm PT.

[https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7151633248?pwd=RnpaUFNZbVYvTTV6RWJVZFFSQ0VPUT09](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7151633248?pwd=RnpaUFNZbVYvTTV6RWJVZFFSQ0VPUT09)
# Coffee trucks: a brilliant idea that someone should do?

I sometimes wonder if the world should have coffee trucks, like ice cream trucks, roaming the street. Especially when half the population is working from home.

Coffee seems ideal for this because:

1.  you can probably prepare it fresh in a briefly stopping vehicle,
2.  you don’t need much variety,
3.  people are often flexible about when they get it,
4.  they often like to get it as a short break from work in which they bump into other people,
5.  more than half of the US population consumes it at least once every day, so potential demand is radically higher than for most foodstuffs!
6.  most people don’t have the means to make cafe-quality coffee in their home,
7.  it doesn’t go bad easily

There are clearly stationary coffee trucks, like food trucks. I think moving trucks may also exist or have existed ever, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, and it’s hard to find mention of them. [Here are](https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/12/01/the-jitter-bus-an-ice-cream-truck-for-adults/) some people who had the same idea, but since nobody was expecting a moving coffee bus, they got more traffic sitting still like a cafe. But surely people expecting your product to exist is an obstacle not unique to circulating coffee trucks. [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/37socy/there_should_be_roaming_coffee_trucks_like_ice/) is someone with the same idea, and someone who says there was one in a holiday park once, and some others who think they exist in Australia and Buffalo, but it sounds like they might be thinking of stationary coffee trucks.

I’m not sure that it’s good for any kind of truck to exist if it makes noise all the time as it travels through neighborhoods, delighting some, but surely disrupting others. But I think that can be entirely resolved digitally: instead of the truck playing music, the service could have an app that plays music when truck is approaching, if you signed up for that. Then you touch the notification to turn off the music and at the same time report whether you want a coffee.

Am I missing something?
# What are the most powerful lotuses?

Bryan Caplan writes an argument against Universal Basic Income: [https://www.econlib.org/from-ubi-to-anomia/.](https://www.econlib.org/from-ubi-to-anomia/.)

To sum up, the majority of the people not in the labor force spend most of their time on screens, and this is bad for their health and their wellness. If more people were to exit the labor force, many of them would presumably behave the same way, therefore UBI is a bad idea.

I am not sure of the validity of the object-level argument (the causal link could be in the other way: maybe people who spend their entire day scrolling their Facebook feed are more likely to become NEET, and not the reverse).

However, on a more abstract level, this hit me as an uncommonly Puritan argument. If people did not have the need to work, many of them would end up living a miserable life, pursuing short-term petty pleasures. This rings true to me, it somewhat resonates with my ["high-level generators of disagreement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentative-experience/). So my brain is trying to find ways to defend this argument.

Is it reasonable to think that, if relieved from the necessity to work, the majority of people would just procastinate all day? But I guess it is possible to conceive a model in which [lotuses](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwdcMts8P8hacqwrX/noticing-the-taste-of-lotus) tend to trap men, and if you decrease the incentive to getting things done (in the example of this article, [if you decrease the reward from green circles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3pKXC62C98EgCeZc4/complex-behavior-from-simple-sub-agents)), more people will spend more times eating lotuses. There are many social incentives to work, which would not disappear if we remove the economic incentive to work; but it is also true that social rewards are often easy to pursue on social network. 

So we should expect an increase the mean time that the population spends on activities that we might judge as "lotuses". But on what lotuses in particular? Is procastinating on the Internet the most brain-gripping short-term reward of this age, or there are other competing lotuses?
# Failed Vegan Choux Experiments

Many kinds of pastry can be made vegan quite easily. Puff pastry, which is thin layers of dough and fat, works very well with various plant-based fats and pre-made puff sheets are very often vegan. Lately, however, I've been excited about choux pastry.

Choux pastry is what makes eclairs, cream puffs, and profiteroles. It's traditionally made from flour, butter, water, salt, and eggs. Using vegan butter in place of butter is not a problem, but the eggs are fundamental to the recipe. They not only provide leavening by releasing their water as steam, but they bind the dough together.

Looking online, I found various recipes that attempts to make vegan Choux pastry, but reading through them many are essentially making an enriched bread. Some go a bit farther, trying to figure out the role of eggs in choux and substitute for them, but none work very well.

I was interested in potentially using aquafaba to substitute for the eggs, but while I could make things that went into the oven very puffy, they didn't set.

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-just-in.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-just-in-big.jpg)

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-deflating.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-deflating-big.jpg)

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-deflated.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-deflated-big.jpg)

More flour helped some:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-more-flour.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-more-flour-big.jpg)

I also tried xanthan gum. Here are four, with different levels (puffier ones have more):

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-xanthan-gum.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-xanthan-gum-big.jpg)

Here's the inside:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-excessive-xanthan-gum.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/vegan-choux-excessive-xanthan-gum-big.jpg)

Unfortunately, amounts of xanthan gum that were sufficient to get approximately the right shape were ridiculously high, and tasted very strongly of xanthan gum. Not tasty. If you're curious:

> *   1/4 C (4T) water
> *   2T salted veg butter
> *   1/4 C (4T) flour
> *   1/8t baking soda
> *   2t xanthan gum
> *   4T aquafaba
> *   1/4t cream of tartar
> 
> Melt the butter in the water, and bring to a boil. Add the flour all at once, remove from the heat, and mix well. Add the baking soda and xanthan gum, mix more, and let it sit and cool.
> 
> Whip the aquafaba and cream of tartar, and mix gradually into the cooled dough, bit by bit. You'll loose most of the foam from the first bits, but it should be pretty puffy by the end. Put it on a greased baking sheet, shaping or piping. Bake at 450F until the outside is firm (??) and then cool down to 325 to bake until done through.

I wrote most of this post in the summer, describing what I tried, and I kept thinking I was going to come back and experiment more. At this point, it doesn't look like I'm going to be experimenting more, so I just wanted to publish what I had.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100206753620922)*
# Principles of Agile Rationalism

*We follow these principles:*

Our highest priority is to seek cruxes  
through early and continuous delivery  
of unfiltered evidence.

Welcome changing beliefs, even late in  
writing. Agile rationality updates beliefs for  
our culture's collective intelligence.

Deliver useful ideas frequently, from a  
couple of days to a couple of weeks, with a  
preference to the shorter timescale.

Readers and writers must [](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GHBLFPDhzeSQHx2eM/writing-that-provokes-comments) comment  
together daily throughout the frontpage.

Consider analysis by properly incentivized individuals.  
Create for ourselves the environment and support we need,  
and trust ourselves to converge on the truth.

The most efficient and effective method of  
conveying information to and within a rationality  
team is face-to-face conversation.

But it's a pandemic, Zoom is fine.

Actionable ideas, gears-level models, and predictions  
are the primary measures of progress.

Agile rationality promotes sustainable writing.  
The dev team, writers, and readers should be able  
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence  
and good prose enhances agility.

Parsimony--the art of maximizing the amount  
of noise not learned--is essential.

The best models, problems, and prose  
emerge from decentralized rationalists.

At regular intervals, the rationalists reflect on how  
to become more effective, then tune and adjust  
their behavior accordingly.
# Intro to the Wedding Sequence

Our wedding was intended to be a ceremony of commitment, to each other, and also to our values. We ([Ruben Bloom](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/ruby) and [Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/swimmer963)) got married in the Lawrence Hall of Science planetarium in Berkeley on February 21st, 2015. Mostly because it took me six years to get the audio recording processed, I'm now, at last, posting on the occasion of our 6th anniversary the recordings and transcripts of our ceremony.

Our friends gave speeches, each expressing a different facet of the values that we were committing to pursue together. They delivered their words against the backdrop of wonderous starscapes, and in between the prose, we played music that captured our love and ambitions.

The speeches stand as excellent essays in their own right, and although some of the authors/speakers have published them independently on their blogs, it seems worthwhile bringing all of them together in one place, especially together alongside the accompanying images and music. (Since it was in a dark planetarium, there is no video).

* * *

*Recording of the entire ceremony. Individual posts have the recordings for each speech alongside the transcript*

  
  
The ceremony had the following structure and was graciously officiated by [Logan Brienne Strohl](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/brienneyudkowsky):

1.  **Values**
    1.  [Darkness (Nate Soares)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qFBf2aDT2oYNWKFaR/intro-darkness)
    2.  [Hope & Triump:  How Far Humany Has Come (Tara Mac Aulay, written by Jess Whittlestone)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xjzEbogdheFqhdszW/triumph-and-hope)
    3.  [Light: The Grandest Vision for Humanity (Riva Melissa-Tez)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rzruCSWMXja6x9BdN/the-grandest-vision-for-humanity-light)
    4.  [Tsuyoku Naritai (Ruby)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WrvQiTvvYeAxPLovW/tsuyoku-naritai)
2.  [**Community** (Oliver Habryka)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Av3XA5AHJRsKzqrFZ/community)
3.  [**Partnership** (Miranda)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rDPgv9KTor6MgmBup/partnership)
4.  **Declaration**
    1.  [Feelings and Admiration](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LEiXp3SdM6rCJZCyP/feelings-of-admiration-ruby-less-than-greater-than-miranda)
        1.  [Ruby towards Miranda](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LEiXp3SdM6rCJZCyP/feelings-of-admiration-ruby-less-than-greater-than-miranda)
        2.  [Miranda towards Ruby](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LEiXp3SdM6rCJZCyP/feelings-of-admiration-ruby-less-than-greater-than-miranda)
    2.  [Vows](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LWs6KSFBpmWo97fyb/vows-and-declaration)
    3.  [Declaration, exchange of rings](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LWs6KSFBpmWo97fyb/vows-and-declaration)

Miranda and I met via LessWrong (me finding her many excellent writings), so it feels quite fitting to celebrate one of our anniversaries here.

*This Sunday, I have published the first two speeches. I will post the remaining ones daily until the Sequence is complete.*
# What's your best alternate history utopia?

Rules:

* Same level of technology as today 
* Basic human psychology is the same
* But you are allowed to change prevalent institutions, cultural assumptions etc.

So e.g. if you think that the modern school system is oppressive and traumatizing, you can describe a world that has something else instead. But you should describe the alternative at least a bit - what kids do with their time instead and how they learn skills and are selected into jobs. Don't just say "no school", give us a positive alternative vision.

Within those constraints, you're allowed to change as much as you like and can think of.

What's your utopia like?
# Science Fiction

This morning (Amman time) I taught a class to a middle school in Jordan. It was the opening to a big daylong event where the parents were invited and the superintendant said some formal words.

Ostensibly, my lecture was about design in the COVID-19 world. That was the pretext from which I obtained the opportunity. Actually, I turned it into a Q&A where I answered questions about what it's like to invent things.

Some of the questions were technical like "How do you advertise your products?" and "What programming language(s) do you use?" When a nerd asked about Arduinos I was happy to answer that we used a few in the prototyping stage.

Technical stuff consists of things you can learn in school…eventually…in theory. The more interesting questions (from my perspective) concerned open-ended topics like "What did you learn?" How am I supposed to explain to middle schoolers what it's like to [carry on when all hope seems lost](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/70)?

Another interesting question was "Where do you get inspiration?" It was asked more than once. I was surprised by how quickly, precisely and consistently I answered the same three words each time. "Read science fiction." These are middle schoolers and they're living in science fiction's golden age.

I am getting better at interfacing with schools. The first time I guest lectured to middle schoolers I gave the teacher nightmares. The students loved my blunt honesty. The teacher did too; he was worried the *parents* would complain. None did, but I learned my lesson. It is more efficient—and produces less collateral damage—if I can point children to George Orwell and Paul Graham rather than attempting to foment mischief directly.

For me, the golden age of science fiction was 9 to 17, with a peak from 12 to 14. Following that, I have studied science and faced the real world instead. When I returned to science fiction the magic was gone. I would read a story and think to myself "I know, from personal experience, that's not how things work."

I am a technical entrepreneur. My job is to build the future. To build the future you must [balance conviction against skepticism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/toZXD7QgKp9vQbvRF/conviction-skepticism). Rationalism is full of advice on cultivating skepticism. Science is an unrivaled tool for cultivating conviction within its domain. However, the vanguard of progress is beyond the reach of science. Peer review is not a fountain of inspiration. I cannot afford to lack imagination.

If you want, as an adult, to maintain the imagination you had as a kid then you have to *do for real* the things you merely imagined doing as a kid. Turn science fiction into science fact.