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[silverspawn]

I was thinking the former, though the latter seems like a really good point as well.

Why would the intellectual elite lift  the vaccine mandate? The push is toward more authoritarianism. I expect her to believe that they'll leave it indedfinitely.

[Awaclus]

I was thinking the former, though the latter seems like a really good point as well.

Why would the intellectual elite lift  the vaccine mandate? The push is toward more authoritarianism. I expect her to believe that they'll leave it indedfinitely.

Apparently the intellectual elite still cares about having the general public support them (otherwise they could just do something obviously authoritarian instead of trying to trick people into getting a vaccine — and given how well the trick is working on the vast majority of people, it must require enormous effort), and it would be difficult to justify a vaccine mandate for a long time. Either it works and we get rid of the virus, in which case it's difficult to justify keeping it when the virus isn't around anymore, or it doesn't, in which case it's difficult to justify keeping it when it doesn't work.

[silverspawn]

People are so stupid about this 'never resign' mentality. We're at rating 1400. If you blunder a piece, just resign already

[silverspawn]

Especially since I believe this is an understood principle in high level play. Also explicitly taught in The Queen's Gambit as early as episode 1

[silverspawn]

These people do improve their rating. It is not at all beyond me to blunder a piece back. But 'increasing your rating' is not good for you. People are confusing the metric with the goal. You want to get better at chess. Your rating is information about how to get better at chess. But obviously, if you do things that improve your rating without improving your skill, your rating will grow without your skill -- because, guess what, your rating will overvalue you by exactly as much as your trick made it grow.

Same for dominion, of course. just resign if you're far behind.

[silverspawn]

"Neiklot?" Sunny asked, which meant "Why are you telling us about this ring?"

[silverspawn]

I'm going to do what I should have done years ago, Olaf, and slaughter you.

No way to know how bad the translation is until you read the original

[silverspawn]

Which is really a shame because the whole 'let's use the exact precise awkward phrase for everything all the time' thing works really nicely in German

[silverspawn]

Sam Harris thinks the ironically titled best podcast ever isn't worth listening to, but I think it is an amazing document.

Not if you want to learn about Islam or geopolitics. The conversation is extremely asymmetrical, and if there are good reasons to distrust Sam's views, they're certainly not going to be found here.

But if you want to learn about signaling, this is gold. I've never seen such a pure demonstration of what it looks like if someone's goal during a conversation is entirely to look good to his audience. Sam, having no signaling motivation himself, is endlessly annoyed at the lack of logic coming from his guest, describes this accurately but without understanding the underlying reason, and faults himself for getting so annoyed with him.

[silverspawn]

The signaling algorithm is something like

def reply(message_from_other_person):
   if known_argument(message_from_other_person):
      return download_known_reply(message_from_other_person);
   else
      search_counterargument();
      search_adhominem();
      search_tangent();
   return best_match;

What is missing is any check about whether the argument could be true, and thus we get the amazing 1 hour discussion about whether selling a particular book was a good move to make money, with the guest increasingly embarrassing himself for arguing about something he has no information on and is demonstrably wrong about. Also demonstrates why being signaling driven isn't even effective at gaining status.

[silverspawn]

"Japanese Math Rock" does sound like a genre made to appeal to me

Not super into it but certainly way way more than an average collection of songs

[silverspawn]

This one I am pretty into

[silverspawn]

These people who are in my worst class and never contribute anything and are loud are going to feel my wrath

you probably thought oral grades don't go below 4.0. You're in for a dark awakening

[silverspawn]

Didn't clean up my inbox for like 2 days and have ~20 mails. (It's not even true to say that I didn't check them since i get notificaitons on my phone.)

Over half from the editing company. I sorta-resigned, saying that I won't commit to any minimum number of assignments/week, but apparently they still prefer to keep me.

But this is bs. My phone beeps at least 5 times per day because of them. This a real cost even if it's hard to calculate. Gonna start moving them into the spam folder

[silverspawn]

Sam Harris had this interesting take where you should view attention, rather than time, as the primary resource of your life. You are of course upper-bounded by time, but you're also upper-bounded by attention -- if you're not paying attention to anything, you can't get stuff done -- and attention is the smaller and thus more relevant upper-bound.

which means that you should be mindful of your relationship toward notifications. I'm a believer in answering emails super quickly whenever possible, and thus I want notifications. But only for emails that I'm going to respond to. For other people, it may be facebook or twitter or whatnot.

I solve the twitter problem by only following a small number (< 20) of people and reading all of their tweets. This gives a hard upper bound on how much time I can spend on there. Also, about half are almost inactive anyway; in practice, most of it is from ~4 people. And I don't use facebook or instagram

[silverspawn]

It's not enough to kill everyone, says DeepMind. The goal is to kill everyone quickly.

[silverspawn]

If the world ends in 15 years rather than 30 or more, perhaps trying to do a phd isn't that good of an idea after all

[Awaclus]

If the world ends in 15 years rather than 30 or more, perhaps trying to do a phd isn't that good of an idea after all

If the world ends in 15 years (and there's nothing you can do to prevent it), does anything really matter all that much? If a PhD is something you want to achieve, you might as well achieve it while it's possible. And if it isn't, why do it at all, regardless of when the world ends?

[silverspawn]

The optimization problem I'm trying to solve is minimize P(everyone dies). A phd looked like a reasonable step toward that, but recently I'm less sure

[silverspawn]

With or without a phd, I can do a nonzero amount to lower the probability

[silverspawn]

Seems like my sister has now gone from 'not responding to the analysis of her anti vax video' to 'not responding in general'

My mother has said for a while that my sister doesn't reply to her messages anymore, but she used to still reply to mine

This is generally a trend worse than I would have predicted. It also seems a bit odd; isn't family really important in the Christian faith?

[faust]

The optimization problem I'm trying to solve is minimize P(everyone dies). A phd looked like a reasonable step toward that, but recently I'm less sure

I don't know the answer, but I can say that I wouldn't recommend a PhD if your main motivation is extrinsic.

[silverspawn]

The optimization problem I'm trying to solve is minimize P(everyone dies). A phd looked like a reasonable step toward that, but recently I'm less sure

I don't know the answer, but I can say that I wouldn't recommend a PhD if your main motivation is extrinsic.

why not?

To make the answer more productive: the case for a PhD is roughly

- You want to do research anyway, and a phd allows you to get paid to do that
- You have to learn new things anyway, and a phd allows you to do that
- Machine Learning engineers are really well paid, so having a phd gives you the fallback plan to do earning to give

In this case, it depends a lot on what kind of research I would be doing during the phd; the answer is likely interpretability research since that's in the intersection of safety relevant and mainstream.

[silverspawn]

pretty sure I just donwloaded a virus. How exciting. Didn't even know they were still a thing

[silverspawn]

merkel congratulates Scholz on his inauguration, even though he's from a different party. How nice. Won't prevent the AI from killing us, but still.