JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
My god, can you imagine the drama inside that tiny ship over the past days? I think I'd bet at 90% that the CEO is already long dead, killed by the 4 others in order to save oxygen. Two of the people are a father-son duo, and in a power struggle they might have killed the others too, knowing that they can only trust family. I really hope they find that thing so we get to know what actually happened.
My weird unorthodox opinion: I think a large-dose 5-meo-dmt trip should be mandatory right before assisted suicide. That drug is basically subjective death in molecular form, and at the right dose it brings you right up there to the stratosphere of sublime meditative states, I personally know of 2 people who were completely cured of suicide ideation from one dose of that stuff. Let them experience Death before death, and see if they want to live after that.
(Warning: not for the faint of heart, ptsd possible for the unprepared and you could choke on your own vomit at extreme doses, this is a last resort in case you really want to die today)
So basically: "men search to self-improve, women search to recognize that they are already perfect".
I think your comment illuminated for me a weird fact that I've noticed about the meditation community and the distribution of male/female meditators among the different techniques. One set of meditation techniques heavily emphasize linearly developed skills: there are specific tasks that you must accomplish, and those who can't do those tasks are "worse at meditation" in a very straightforward way than those who can do those tasks well. Put in the time, do the work, and you get better at meditation. This would be the male approach to meditation, and it's the one that I see most guys who pick up meditation gravitate towards. Yet, there is another set of techniques that reject the very premise that there is anything to be done: you are already perfect, exactly as you are right now, you just need to recognize it, any skills you try to pick up and improve are distractions. But in a weird way any attempt at trying to recognize this goes against the point, you must be totally effortless in recognizing you are already perfect, here and now. Trying to do anything at all is useless and against the point. Going on this path requires a weird sort of mental flexibility and intuition, you need to recognize something without trying to do anything at all. Women seem to like these techniques much more than men do, and now it makes sense why they would. In the meditation world both paths ultimately lead to the same place, and it's very hard to get to the end without practicing both to some extent. I think there is something archetypally profound here.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
It's not clear to me either, and it wouldn't be clear to the occupants too, but life and death situations don't tend to make you more reasonable and level-headed, killing the CEO is the "we must do something, and this is something" option here.
Ah, in my case it was extreme fat loss, yeah, I didn't really gain muscle, just revealed what was there. People who haven't seen me in a while tell me I got jacked out of a misunderstanding of where muscle comes from.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
That sounds like the life goal of someone who has never explicitly thought about their life goals, but just read the question and interpreted it as something like "how much do you love your parents". A true life goal is supposed to actually guide your decisions, not just be something nice that you'd like to get. I think about my life goals at least weekly, when I take an hour-long evening walk to think about how my current short and medium term plans will achieve the ultimate goals of my life. I very, very much doubt that people are doing this sort of goal-oriented optimization with the goal of "making my parents proud", most people just don't have life goals that they're explicitly optimizing.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Those for whom forgiving Hitler would be a real act of forgiveness, should of course aim to forgive him while still acknowledging that his actions were evil. I just very much doubt that many people have the required emotional hatred of Hitler to make the forgiveness meaningful. Any "forgiveness" that I could give Hitler wouldn't mean very much because I don't feel his atrocities with much emotional force, I'd have to watch a few holocaust survivor interviews, read Man's Search For Meaning and watch Schindler's List again in order to really feel his atrocities, and then maybe forgiving him would mean anything.
True Forgiveness is really hard. I recently discovered the youtube channel "Soft White Underbelly" and I watched this interview of a prostitute on Skid Row. The black mark she has on the side of her face is a cover-up tattoo of the name of her former pimp, who forced her to tattoo his name on her face when she was 13 years old. By any metric what Hitler did was much worse than what this one pimp did to this one girl, but I spent 30 full minutes yesterday during meditation trying to forgive the pimp this one act, and I couldn't do it.
There will be no better return on hours spent studying in your entire academic career than for the hours you spend preparing for the SAT. You should prepare as if a substantial portion of your future depends on it... because it does.
edit: to be explicit, you should be fucking breathing, drinking and eating SAT practice exams from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, from now until the day of your exam.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Yeah this feels more like a cultural misunderstanding than anything else. I can likewise imagine myself in a playful situation with a 4 year old where I'd say something like "spank my butt" to the child, even if it would sound weird out of context.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I just make sure to always buy loads of pairs of identical socks, and I replace them all at the same time, so I don't have to worry about that shit.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
I'd say it's for the same reason that I "support" north korean refugees not being sex slaves in China. Or I support african children not getting malaria. In fact essentially no world affair news truly ever relates to me directly, not even news in my own country. Having opinions on global news is something on the level of a hobby, it serves to be more interesting in conversation.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Wow, unless you have a weird definition of "drink", then those are truly massive amounts of alcohol. Like Huberman would say, this is called "alcohol use disorder".
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I’m 150 pounds, and with the recommended RDA of 0.8 g/kg body weight for protein intake a day
The recommended RDA is way, way too low if you want to maximise muscle gain and minimise muscle loss on a calorie deficit, same for the 1.6g/kg for athletes. The real number is more like 2.4g/kg of lean body mass. It's true that protein "completeness" is not that big of a deal, since it's pretty easy to get all amino acids with a few different vegetables. What is, however, hard to do on a vegan diet is eat a high-protein, low-calorie diet, which is what you'd want to be able to do if you're planning on losing weight and either maintaining or building muscle at the same time. All vegan foods that contain protein either contain even more fat, or even more carbs. You can get your protein needs from vegan stuff, but you'll need to eat a shit ton of calories to do so. On the other hand, my 2300 cal/day non-vegan diet gives me 190g of protein without that much effort.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
You can make the case that string theorists ahve abandoned truth seeking (though they would certainly disagree), but this is completely unrelated to wokeness. And there are plenty of other branches of physics, chemistry and biology which are very practical (like condensed matter physics), who are pretty much untouched.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
So, party until the lights go out? How do I deal with my AI-driven existential crisis?
Pretty much, yeah. That and develop an absurdist sense of humor. I also started hardcore meditation in 2016 partly to deal with this eventuality, and I'm glad I did. To quiet my "do something!" Inner sense I'm also devoting about an hour everyday during evening walks trying to think of possible alignment ideas, just in case my brain decides to come up with something particularly novel that I think might have a shot.
So far most of my hope is that Boxing and interpretability techniques for LLMs end up enabling us to control a weakly superhuman AI that is nevertheless strong enough to produce AI safety work that can be independently verified.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
By far the worst effects of both nicotine and caffeine should be the chronically lowered sleep quality, no? That's mostly why I wouldn't want kids vaping, given that sleep affects basically every other aspect of your life.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Yes, I've changed my personality quite a bit over the years. One other thing that I was very surprised by is just how much being jacked affords you social leeway. I've been losing weight recently, slowly revealing the muscles I've built over the past 8 years of gym training, and I can literally perceive the difference in social treatment that each additional 10lbs lost makes. I'm planning on writing a longer post on that once I get to where I want to be.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I am "out of the hole" in the sense that once you've lost all the weight, you can start eating at maintenance again, which is much easier than eating at a deep deficit. So pre-semaglutide my daily maintenance calories might have been like 3500, and I was eating at like 3600, very slowly gaining weight. During semaglutide I'm eating 2300, which is a very deep deficit, made much easier due to the appetite reduction. After semaglutide, my reduced body weight will push my maintenance calories at around 3000, which will be much easier to maintain, either with discipline or with low-dose semaglutide. I think that the state of being obese does some kind of permanent damage to appetite regulation, so that anyone who has ever been significantly overweight will basically need to be on some sort of permanent diet for the rest of their lives, and there's no scenario in which they eat "naturally" and don't gain all the weight back.
There are a few ways that GPT-6 or 7 could end humanity, the easiest of which is by massively accelerating progress in more agentic forms of AI like Reinforcement Learning, which has the "King Midas" problem of value alignment. See this comment of mine for a semi-technical argument for why a very powerful AI based on "agentic" methods would be incredibly dangerous.
Of course the actual mechanism for killing all humanity is probably like a super-virus with an incredibly long incubation period, high infectivity and high death rate. You can produce such a virus with literally only an internet connection by sending the proper DNA sequence to a Protein Synthesis lab, then having it shipped to some guy you pay/manipulate on the darknet and have him mix the powders he receives in the mail in some water, kickstarting the whole epidemic, or pretend to be an attractive woman (with deepfakes and voice synthesis) and just have that done for free.
GPT-6 itself might be very dangerous on its own, given that we don't actually know what goals are instantiated inside the agent. It's trained to predict the next word in the same way that humans are "trained" by evolution to replicate their genes, the end result of which is that we care about sex and our kids, but we don't actually literally care about maximally replicating our genes, otherwise sperm banks would be a lot more popular. The worry is that GPT-6 will not actually have the exact goal of predicting the next word, but like a funhouse-mirror version of that, which might be very dangerous if it gets to very high capability.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
It's pretty much impossible to know what the ideal outcome for AGI is, because one of the first things I would ask of an aligned AGI is to augment my own intelligence in a direction aligned with my current values, and I would then leave the job of figuring out what I want to do with infinity to my future better self. A future where we remain meat-machines with our current brains intact and become shepherded by great all-knowing AIs is very unlikely, I don't want to trust and be in awe of the Jupiter-Brain, I want to be the Jupiter-Brain.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.
Oh that's way too charitable towards him, I think he really wanted to go as technically deep as he was able, given that this is about AI and he views AI as part of his region of expertise. At least the crypto-dudes on the bankless podcast asked Eliezer their own naive but sincere questions, they knew they were out of their depth and didn't try to somehow pretend at expertise. But Lex insistently tries to steer the conversation towards "deep topics", and for him this means bringing up Love, Consciousness, The Human Condition, etc.
I think he's trying to imitate Old Esteemed Physicists, who after a lifetime of deep technical contributions spend a few minutes or a small book talking about Beauty and Love, but with Lex it just perpetually feels unearned.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
"Tolkien was heavily critical of people who discriminated based on race", there, no weirdly ambiguous and political word needed.
But that's not the path that they're trying, this is:
0.Define "anti-racist" ambiguously so that people not in the know think it's reasonable
1.Use "anti-racist" in Tolkien article
2.People not in the know associate Tolkien (a respected figure) with anti-racism
3.The prestige of specific anti-racist groups is increased
4.Specific anti-racist groups get more money
It isn't Tolkien that gains in prestige from being anti-racist, but the anti-racist orgs. It's like elevating yourself by claiming that all the greats of history agreed with you.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean by that, does Emily Ratajkowski's SMV really depend on her parents and social status? I guess maybe I'd find her a bit less attractive if I knew she had a deep Appalachian accent or something, but I truly don't give a single fuck about her social status, she could be an outcast with no friends for all I care, and it wouldn't matter a bit.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
In academic circles there's a real prestige that comes with the word "tenured". I think getting that distinction lets professors "relax" in a very important sense. Most really smart researchers in math and physics just want to be left alone to do their research, they want to be insulated from the practicalities of real life to just have space to think, and tenure provides that in a way that your suggestion doesn't really. You don't have to worry that you won't be able to eat if you don't publish a set number of papers or appear well on whatever citation metric, so you can do a bit more pie-in-the-sky thinking than you could without tenure. Though this is probably less true in fields that require lots and lots of grant proposals and lots of actual equipment, but for the theory-heavy fields tenure is really important.
Hustler university is not the way that the Tate brothers initially made their money. The way they became millionaires was basically to get a bunch of romanian girlfriends at the same time and slowly convince them to start doing onlyfans and camming stuff, managing them and taking a cut of the profits. Like, literally their initial business model depended on their ability to be so sexually attractive to young women that they'd be willing to give them a cut from their camming revenue. All the stuff like hustler university and their chains of local gambling houses in Romania came after they made their money from porn. In one interview I remember watching a few years ago Tristan Tate mentioned that at one point they had like 30 girls living at the same time in their mansion doing porn camshows... all of them apparently sexually exclusive with one of the Tate brothers. So the allegations wouldn't be completely outside of their wheelhouse, though this might also be caused by some ex-girlfriend bad blood, I can only imagine the levels of drama that would be going on in a house with 30 girls and 2 guys...
More options
Context Copy link