Often in life we are presented with a choice between what is easy and what is fancy. Hot water is better than cold water. But it requires heating the water up, which is a lot of work. Also, hot water isn't necessarily very enjoyable if you aren't willing to focus on it, to be present with it, to intentionally enjoy it.
When you care for someone, you expend effort on their behalf. There are two importantly different types of effort: effort in service of something useful, and effort that isn't in service of anything useful. I call these "blue" effort and "hashing" effort.
Helping people in ways they might resist or react poorly to is a particularly meaningful way of caring for people.
I really enjoy helping people when they have problems. However, prematurely jumping into helping people can result in the counterparty feeling like you haven't really understood them and don't care about understanding them. Maybe the counterparty would've really liked to explain to you how they feel about the problem.
Luskin gives a lot of examples in his book of people who have held on to a grudge for decades and for whom a grudge has defined and ruined their life. He talks about spouses who were cheated on and then can't stop telling everyone about how much of a scumbag their ex-partner is. He talks about people who feel like they've been unfairly treated at work. He talks about people whose children were killed in a violent conflict. Or people who were abused by their parents.
Sometimes you will hurt people, or do things that other people do not like. There are a few ways you can learn that you're in such a situation. The hurt party might:
I recently read "Why won't you apologize" by Dr. Lerner. It's a great book. It has a lot of lessons that sound extremely obvious when you say them out loud, but which many people don't follow in practice. Here, I'll summarize a few takeaways from the book.
By moving on from a thing, I mean becoming less emotionally distraught at the fact that things are not the way you wish.
David is despicable: he's very selfish, and he lies to everyone in his life. David pretends to be close to people, but is not. He has an affair with Giovani while his wife Hela is off on a trip. Giovani loves him from the first encounter that they have, which feels magical to both of them. The main character allows Giovani to believe that main char will be there to support Giovani. Giovani gives a lot of himself to the main char and trusts him a lot.
I suggest focussing more on what you can give in life, not on what you can get.
I recently started reading Gilead, which is a letter that (fictional) Reverend Ames writes on his deathbed to his son, reflecting on some stories from his life, and some principles he wants his son to live by. One thing that struck me is how cheerful Ames is about his life, including difficult circumstances (e.g., times he was starving, or almost died) from his past and difficult people from his past.
NVC teaches that appreciation is an opportunity to celebrate what's alive in us. However, it's an opportunity that we often squander.
Overconfidence has long plagued me. I see the world in one way and think the world must therefore by that way. This is difficult because sometimes I am just right, and so confidence is positively reinforced. Another difficulty is that when I'm wrong or partially wrong, sometimes in the past (I'm substantially better now) I might try to deflect the pain of this with excuses.
Sometimes when people have a low opinion of me, I get upset about that. I'm interested in investigating what emotional reaction I actually endorse here.
Theorem: $s$ space and $t$ time with $s t< n^{2}$ does not suffice to sort a list.
tl;dr: it's generally best to communicate clearly and truthfully.
Effective altruism, rationality, trans-humanism, utilitarianism, etc empirically seem to have a fairly bad reputation among the wider population. If you mention this in a conversation ppl will instantly be like "oh so you should rob a bank, or be SBF", or talk about how cold calculation gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I was previously pretty confused about this, because most of these ideas seem like common-sense to me.
I don't have any great answers. Would love to hear your thoughts! Here's mine.
A lot of people have asked me lately "what cool stuff have you been learning in your deep learning class"? I haven't had a very good answer. In this post I plan to discuss some stuff that we've talked about and highlight some things that I have found cool.
Suppose you want to lower the chance that a misaligned AI takes over the world. One natural approach is to deter AIs from "taking over AI labs", for instance by launching a rogue internal deployment. But, an under-explored question is, "Are there tractable interventions that decrease $\Pr$("AI takes over the world" $\mid$ "AI takes over an AI lab")?"
When I'm feeling particularly depressed, I often don't want to feel better. But, I have some amount of control over how I feel, even when depressed I think. More precisely, I think if there were fairly easy actions I could take that'd make me feel substantially less depressed, it's pretty plausible that planning in advance to take those actions would cause me to in fact take those actions, even if my present person moment didn't feel too motivated to take the action.
I have a bad habit of minimizing things: saying that things aren't so bad, when they really are; deflecting a genuine compliment.
Fix $n$. Let $X\subset [n^{5}]$ have size $n$. Consider the following problem: There is a circular race track of circumference $1$. $n$ people, with (distinct) speeds $X$ start at the start of the race track, and run around at their speed, until a random time $a\sim [0,1]$. After this, the runners are at locations $aX \bmod 1$. I then cut the race track into $n$ contiguous chunks, each of length $\frac{1}{n}$ and count how many runners are in each chunk. Let $M$, the "maxload", denote the number of runners in the fullest chunk. This is a random variable depending on the time when I stop the runners. In this document I will analyze $\mathbb{E}[M]$.
In this post I describe 7 virtues which are relevant to having great relationships.
To prove a mathematical result, you need two people: a Generator and a Refuter.
Lately, I've been more aware than normal that my words are consequential. I think often this implies that it's a good idea to be more cautious about speaking and picking my words than I normally would. But, also sometimes it might require speaking more, and being more direct with my words.
In this post (the first post of skyspace4!) I reflect on at least 3 topics: (1) There are 3 types of shame: shame that causes you to take actions better aligned with your goals, shame that is maladaptive embarrassment of doing something right, and shame that causes you to pull away from others. (2) What fun pursuits do I value the most? (3) Is it actually good to try to achieve your goals?
Something that I feel pretty strongly about is that technology currently does a lot of harm.
Often -- especially when I'm contemplating doing unfamiliar or "uncomfortable" things with regards to mitigating xrisk from AI -- I'll have thoughts basically of the following form: "I shouldn't be doing this --- I'm the wrong person to be doing this."
Claim: I should seek to fill my life with more quality-adjusted-seconds-spent-socializing.
Exposing your brain to lots of stimuli can wreck your ability to concentrate and stuff.
If you feel that you are doing something misaligned with your values, consider telling an accountability partner about it about committing to change right now.
Strive not to find a convincing explanation. Strive instead to have true beliefs. It's much better to be confused and know that you're confused than believe an incorrect thing.
Sometimes I believe different things than other people that I respect. This is pretty concerning because wrong exists, and I don't want to be wrong, so conditional on me being wrong I'd like to know that I am.
Conjecture: I can hack myself to feel excited about doing lots of things.
How would you like to die? Well, really I'd rather not. Okay, so it's a sore subject. Maybe instead let me ask, how would you like to live? This seems like a better question for several reasons. For instance, it seems more actionable. If I am to die, I don't think assigning lots of extra weight to that moment is good. If anything that moment should have the least weight, because I'll never remember it.
Claim: Suppose you actually want something to happen. Then you should either do that thing right now, or put it on your calendar.
tl;dr: when having a disagreement involving a complex concept X, consider saying what you actually mean by X, or both parties might just be talking past each other!
tl;dr: Some ppl want things to go well for you --- taking advantage of cooperation is great!
Often, I'll send person X a message like "hey do you want to do activity Y?". You can imagine situations where you'd like to only give this bid to person X if their answer is yes. In cryptography this is called "ZK-dating" (ok actually I just made this name up).
What, if anything/anyone, do you feel a responsibility to? How does it manifest in you emotionally and behaviorally?
I recently watched the movie "Don't look up". The movie has a couple main messages, all of which are great (although also some boring parts which I recommend 4x speeding). Max Tegmark has a nice Times article about why this movie is similar to the AI situation. I'll say some different stuff here though.
Sometimes I have different expectations for myself vs for other ppl. I'm sure this goes both ways, but I mostly notice myself holding Alek to a higher standard than other people. There is an idiom in Chinese "严以律己宽以待人" -- it means that it's good to hold yourself to a high standard while being forgiving towards others.