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Eli Tyre Profile picture
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
Aiming to navigate through the singularity to a humane world. I check DMs about once a month: https://t.co/mOW9MmEFoG
5 subscribers
Jan 14 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
FYI, humans can learn to notice the feeling of confabulating or rationalizing, with a little bit of practice.

You do have to have an honest interest in noticing when it's happening though. It helps for building the habit if you make an unobtrusive but distinct gesture every time you notice it.
Jan 9 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
In the GTF (if we get there), we'll regularly do mental operations that take thousands of symbols.

We'll think it is utterly bizarre and horrifying that the biological bootloader beings (us) could only only do mental operations on ~4 symbols at a time. This is an insane bottleneck.
Jan 8 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I am very libertarian, but have become somewhat more conservative overtime in this sense:

I think it sensible for "society" to try to set social default norms that are healthy and sustainable.

But there HAVE to be ways for people to opt out of that if it doesn't work for them. In fact, those things go together.

If there are ways for people to quietly opt out of the defaults, they don't have to rebel against those norms to create space for themselves to live lives that work for them.
Jan 5 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
I consider myself to "do philosophy", though what I mean by that has very little to do with academic philosophy or the "great philosophers" who I agree are mostly bad (with a few exceptions), except as examples of how different one’s worldview can be from what I take for granted. By "philosophy" I mean "reflecting on the abstractions we use to make sense of and act in the world."
Jan 4 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's notable how many of the replies are variations of "yeah! Taleb sucks!" or "fuck that guy".

Distinctly in contrast to Bryan's recognizing Taleb's value and meeting-negativity-with-sincere-positivity.

Not all though! Some replies were "yeah, I want to embody that energy!" It's interesting to me that some fraction of people's main takeaway from this interaction is

"Taleb got owned"

not

"fuck yeah, what a cool example of someone responding to social attack with sincere appreciation, by investing energy on what's good."
Jan 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The central event of the Christian religion is the crucifixion (and subsequent resurrection).

Presumably, it was not part of the actual Jesus of Nazareth's plan to be captured and crucified. It's kind of crazy that the defining theological feature of Christianity (Christ dying for humanity's sins) is a recon of the actual Jesus's teachings, to address the cognitive dissonance of his execution.
Jan 2 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Man, it's crazy how much the trajectory of the singularity, and the whole cosmic future, probably hinged on the windspeed in Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024.

I guess that our measure split into two radically different timelines on that day. (I wonder what the ratio was. How much of my measure went down which branch? Is most of me in the other timeline, dealing with a different situation?)
Jan 1 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Claude's high-level summary of my date-me page, when I ask it to focus on what's unique and non-cliche :

"Overall, this isn't a typical 'looking for my soulmate' profile - it's more like a detailed technical specification for a collaborative life optimization project." It's a little cringe, but not wholly inaccurate!

I think that summary misses the ways that I'm soulful, in addition to optimizing, which is good to to keep in mind for next drafts of my date-me page.
Dec 30, 2024 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
This is the dreamtime. Human existence as we know it is out of equilibrium, and not long for this world.

In the long run, everything we know and identify with will be eroded away by the crush of incentives, one way or another. (unless humanity becomes unprecedentedly good at coordinating to avoid dispreferred equilibria, and we "get out from underneath" the so far all pervasive pressures of Darwin and Malthus.)
Dec 11, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Do I know anyone who participated in a 24/7 D/s relationship where the sub was *markedly* smarter than the dom? I'm interested in what's psychologically appealing about these relationships. On the sub side, it seems like it's often a comforting release of control to someone else, coupled with a strong personal respect for the dom.
Dec 2, 2024 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
I just took a big-five test.

The post-test's descriptions of what a person with my scores on each factor is like very dramatically DIDN'T describe me.

What should I make of that? Specifically the descriptions of someone who had my scores in...

Overall openness,
Conscientiousness-Industriousness,
Extraversion-Enthusiasm,

...were markedly, dramatically, unlike me.
Nov 25, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A divide between people who are consequentialists "at core" vs virtue ethicists "at core": do you feel more or less motivated act with virtue, if you guess that you're in a solipsist simulation, and other people don't exist. If I was the only being in the universe, and this simulation was created for me, I feel more of an impulse to behave with virtue than if there are billions of other beings to impact, but my actions have an insignificant impact on the whole.
Oct 15, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Is this true?

Are there any outstanding theories for this flip? Image My first, perhaps unflattering, thought is that males, on average, have a stronger internal sense of personal gender identity than females, who's sense of gender identity is more fluid and more socially informed.
Oct 11, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I wonder if the reason why many people learn that it is more authentic and alive to trust their heart, rather than their own reason, is because their mind is pwned by parasitic memes that aren't aligned with their interests. If you can't trust your own reasoning, because it's been coopted by a bunch of ideologies that are out to get you to various extents, and you're not smart enough (relative to those memes) to reason your way out of those errors, it probably DOES...
Oct 11, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
#EconQuestion Why does anyone think that increasing aggregate demand stimulates the economy, on net?

True, if more people are spending, that's more revenue for businesses, and more dollars flowing through the economy. But spending trades of directly with saving, which (if people are investing, or at least keeping their money in banks) flows through the economy as investment.
Sep 7, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Today I confirmed that I've been getting pull-ups and chin-ups confused, and recording one as the other in all my logging, for...the past 10 years.

Pull-ups are the ones where you're palms face out. Chin-ups are the ones where your palms face in. When you do chin-ups you can get your chin over the bar, which is much harder with pull-ups. Hence the name.
Aug 13, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Do we know how many standard deviations on the human IQ bell curve, the average chimpanzee is? Or is that an ill-defined question because the cognitive profile of chimpanzees are so different from humans that using a standard psychometric battery on a chimp doesn't give a meaningful "IQ" number.
Jul 10, 2024 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
@ESYudkowsky, I think you've said that voting is the real life example of Logical Decision Theory in action.

(Quickly searching your facebook posts, I didn't find the citation, so maybe I'm mistaken and you never actually said that?) My understanding of the argument: one person's vote has an insignificant causal impact on the outcome of an election. But it makes sense to vote anyway, because your decision to vote and decision of who to vote for, is an algorithm instantiated across many voters.
Jul 4, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
My impression of 1950s America, from news reels and ads, is that it was markedly more conformist than today.

All the men wear suits and hats?

I get the vibe that there's high levels of agreement about prestige hierarchies (eg everyone treats doctors with regard). There's much more uniform adherence to (eg gendered) social roles?

Is that impression correct? Am I just noticing some dimensions of conformity and missing others?
Jul 2, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Interestingly, this gives me a whole different sense of "virtue".

I value being virtuous for its own sake, as something like an aesthetic judgement. But there's a different way, which is more consequentialist: you just want "straightforward" desirable things like power and respect and sex and happiness, and so you do the things that get you those things.
Jul 2, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'm thinking about if I was old and cognitively impaired, knowing that I would die in less than 10 years. But this would be easy for me. I'm signed up for cryonics. I'd probably already be in suspension if I was loosing track of sentences.

...unless maybe I had grandkids or something, and they were bringing me joy everyday. Maybe that would be a reason to stick around?