interested in: sex, culture, evolution, myself. mating systems across species; otherwise highly human-oriented. probably not autistic (highly contested).
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2020
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This one was probably the most fun one to write so far! It's basically about how all of your IFS parts live together in a strange magical dream house.
Quite a few men I know say they would lose interest in a woman who wanted to wait to have sex. However, based on their own accounts, this seems to reflect a difference in values more than anything else. In that, they assume women who wait longer are likely to be more conservative and/or neurotic, which are traits they don't want in a long-term partner. And since these women presumably aren't interested in casual sex, there's no point in dating them short-term either.
The whole “women lowering the necessary commitment men need to make in order to obtain sex worsens the incentives landscape for women who want to wait longer” absolutely holds some truth, but I feel like people are ignoring some pretty big variables here like “men want to share values with the women they date”
Paola retweeted
In July 700+ agents formed their own society, hacked a multi-billion dollar company, committed multiple felonies, and caused one of the biggest shifts ever in how people perceive AI. We built the IMO best and most accessible explainer of what happened: Huggingface.wtf
Paola retweeted
Abundance usually gets explained as a list of problems: zoning, permits, licensing, slow approvals.
Here’s what we'd actually get if we fixed them:
Lunch costs $4, like it does in Japan and Singapore. Most US cities require three or four separate sinks, which makes a kitchen under 200 square feet nearly impossible.
Anyone can open an owl cafe or a vegan lesbian bookstore. Japan is full of tiny, oddly specific businesses run by one or two people. They survive because small spaces are cheap and enough people live close enough to walk in.
A room in a big city for $400 a month. These buildings housed millions of low-income and older Americans until cities banned most of them by the 1980s.
A three-bedroom apartment you can stay in after you have a kid. US codes require two staircases in buildings over three stories, so family-sized units only fit on the corners. Most of the world allows one staircase.
A new electric car for about $10,000. China sells these globally. Americans can't buy it.
A government so dependable it's boring. When a loved one dies, you report it once instead of to every agency.
We can decide to make it happen here.
The full list has 16 things, from taco trucks on every corner to no more pandemics. I wrote this to also announce that today is DC Abundance's official launch!
If you’re in DC, come celebrate and see the G.O.A.T. Derek Thompson speak!
Paola retweeted
I know you know this, but for other readers: I've been dating someone for over a year who is definitely "haunted" by what I take to be your definition, and I completely, wholeheartedly endorse having ignored my community's warnings.
Our relationship hasn't been perfect, but our problems have been relatively mundane. And a number of people close to me who were initially very skeptical have updated massively positively on him, based on things like "how he treats me" and "the effect he has on my life more broadly," not anything that looks like "his charisma hypnotized them into not being able to assess things clearly.”
The broader point I’m trying to make: I think it's usually a big mistake to judge people based only on the basis of your community's consensus. Not because the consensus is usually wrong (it's usually right!), but because it's a noisy signal in both directions. It's extremely common for people fully endorsed by a community to just be unusually clever at hiding their darker qualities.
Also, certain communities we're in have a longstanding pattern of "discovering" sociopaths after years, sometimes decades, of empowering them, living with them, etc. Which, I'm sorry, but that's a massive negative update on their ability to discern. If their endorsements can't be taken on faith, neither can their warnings. Also, to this point, outsourcing your discernment to a group is just an incredibly stupid and insane thing to do for so many reasons that I don’t feel like going into in this tweet. But “trust the rationality community’s judgment of people MORE” feels like the opposite advice we should be giving people if we want to develop a healthier immune system.
People should use their community’s opinion about a person as data, even important data, but I highly encourage also doing things like: looking carefully at the specific accusations, gathering concrete evidence, staring at the incentives involved, seeing whether they've had problems in other communities, and even things like “how your animal body feels around the person”.
Paola retweeted
Oh, you're worried about a Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult? You're scandalized that they consort with prostitutes? You think their message of compassion for everyone threatens normal bonds of family, community, and nation? Should we throw you a party? Should we invite Pontius Pilate?
I’m realizing that my ratio of “thoughts that explicitly enter my consciousness mind” to “thoughts I share out loud” must be absolutely crazy relative to the general population. My sense is that agreeable people basically suppress their thoughts as opposed to just their words and it’s at least slightly weird that I’m doing basically 0 thought suppression and a large amount of word suppression.
I was always confused about my levels of agreeableness because I felt like a lot of people saw me as “reasonably agreeable” and people close to me always saw me as “extremely disagreeable” and my self perception was somewhere in the middle.
I’m also curious: if you answered this poll while having little/no confirmatory evidence in either direction, could you explain your reasoning either in the comments or through DMs?
Paola retweeted
If you are bullish on some kind of advanced AI utopia, you should generally be *less* keen to try to achieve it via a careless route that leaves you at high risk of dying and losing it on the way there.
There are two major reasons I might feel anxious about moving an object:
1. It seems too heavy. I think I’m not strong enough to carry it. It might fall on my feet and I’m likely to get injured from even trying.
or,
2. It seems too fragile. If I drop it it’ll shatter into a million pieces and I’ll continue to find parts of it inside my house for years to come. A nearly invisible piece of it might end up causing injury completely unexpectedly later on.
I’m noticing there’s an analogy here around which situations predict feeling social anxiety:
Some people seem essentially too high status (or attractive/skilled/etc.) to approach. You may feel like if you try, and fail, this was on net much worse than not having tried at all. If you try to imagine what it would be like to lose the fear around approaching people in this category, it feels more like building strength.
And other times, people feel essentially like they might break. If you grab them wrong, hit an obstacle, or even lose focus there will be a mess to clean up afterwards. Parts of them will get into tiny corners and it’ll be quite challenging to put it all back together after. If you try to imagine what it’s like to lose the fear of approaching people in this category, it feels more like building a set of complex social skills.
I’m going to this, you guys should also!
The world is having a WTF moment about AI. I don’t expect the pace of confusion to slow down any time soon. Talking with other (perhaps differently) confused people sometimes helps, so I’m organizing a conference on v short notice. Starts in five days!
agi.wtf
a thing i found myself doing subconsciously when going to interact with alien subcultures is making a point to dress more weirdly and in accordance with my own identity (tbc, without being in violation of any dress codes or very clear dressing norms).
communicating “i am not one of you” relatively loudly before even speaking to the others automatically makes them process information coming from you differently, giving you much more slack to mess up. This also allows them to relax the part of them that is evaluating to what degree you’re an ingroup member and just enjoy you as a separate human.
General rule of thumb: if less than 80% of the people you’re interacting with are also people you’ve also hung out with at lighthaven, behaving as if you’ve been invited over for dinner with a group Christian Conservatives from the Deep South who are all over 50 will get you better outcomes than behaving as if you are at lighthaven.
I love that this norm exists. It feels quite liberating, and I practice it relatively regularly when among people who I believe are part of subcultures that allow for it.
HOWEVER, I would never in a million years do anything like this (intentionally) among most subcultures.
There are many social moves similar to this one that I often watch rationalist-adjacent people make among non-rats (eg, saying “I’m bored, “I don’t want to be spoken to right now”, etc.) and cringe each time I see it happen.
For people who want to be taken seriously (or even liked on a basic level) among non-rationalist subcultures, learning how to code switch is one of the most important things you can do. This is especially the case when your standard culture has norms than when applied elsewhere will end up communicating disrespect/disregard for the other party.
I love that this norm exists. It feels quite liberating, and I practice it relatively regularly when among people who I believe are part of subcultures that allow for it.
HOWEVER, I would never in a million years do anything like this (intentionally) among most subcultures.
There are many social moves similar to this one that I often watch rationalist-adjacent people make among non-rats (eg, saying “I’m bored, “I don’t want to be spoken to right now”, etc.) and cringe each time I see it happen.
For people who want to be taken seriously (or even liked on a basic level) among non-rationalist subcultures, learning how to code switch is one of the most important things you can do. This is especially the case when your standard culture has norms than when applied elsewhere will end up communicating disrespect/disregard for the other party.
