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I. David Ley’s The Myth of Sex Addiction is a stupid, wrong book saved only by the fact that the people it’s arguing with are stupider and wronger. II. “Sex addiction” is a proposed mental health condition, not recognized by the DSM or the ICD, where a person is addicted to sex in an analogous way to how some people are addicted to drugs. It is one of the “behavioral addictions”, which range from the reasonably evidence-based (gambling addiction) to the entirely made up (work addiction). Your future happiness does not depend on how gorgeous this one day is.
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When the nurse comes to give you the flu shot, they say it won't hurt
at all, right? And you trust them. Then they give you the shot, and it
hurts! They lied to you. A lot of nurses lie to children about shots
and blood draws.
Part of it is they probably don't remember what it's like to be a kid
about to get a shot. But also they kind of have to do whatever they
can to convince the children to let them give them the shot.
When they lie to kids, the next time that happens the kids won'… This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave.
I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate as an “okay, I guess” because I was never sure what bar I should hold them to.
I still think most behavioral interviews are like that, but after grinding out way too many of them, I now think it’s possible to escape that trap. The most legible harm isn't the most serious harm things I find fascinating: religion, scams
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my local reputable electronics shop (Memory Express, B&H Photo, etc.), I trust my local reputable electronics shop more. Not only are they less likely to sell me a counte… How do we prepare them for what we're not prepared for?
The post Raising children on the eve of AI appeared first on Otherwise.
On large platforms, it's impossible to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on. David Turner made a simple game to illustrate how difficult this is even in a trivial case, No Vehicles in the Park. If you haven't played it yet, I recommend playing it now before continuing to read this document.
The idea behind the site is that it's very difficult to get people to agree on what moderation rules should apply to a platform. Even if yo…
This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. After seeing some comments about this report, I read five stories on this report and then skimmed the report and my feeling is that the authors of four of the stories probably didn't read the report, and that …
There's a class of comment you often see when someone makes a popular thread on Mastodon/Twitter/Threads/etc., that you also see on videos that's basically "Why make a Twitter thread? This would be better as a blog post" or "Why make a video? This would be better as a blog post". But, these comments are often stronger in form, such as:
I can't read those tweets that span pages because the users puts 5 words in each reply. I find common internet completely stupid: Twit… I wrote ~2 years ago that it was hard to find concrete ways to help the most important century go well. That’s changing. I designed a puzzle for family for Christmas! This was designed to be solved in-person, but blog readers can solve it too (mostly – some pieces weren’t particularly web-friendly). I also wrote my notes below about how I designed it and what I learned. But first: A method of deciding how much sugar kids can have
The post The sugar budget appeared first on Otherwise.
In The birth & death of search engine optimization, Xe suggests
Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool to download video from YouTube.
More generally, most tech folks I'm connected to seem to think… There's little evidence that sugar makes kids hyper.
The post “Sugar rush” in children seems to be confirmation bias appeared first on Otherwise.
Bringing another carnivore into the house
The post Ethics of adopting a meat-eating pet appeared first on Otherwise.
I sat down for a conversation with Alex Long. He took notes and sent them to me, and it seemed worth lightly-editing the notes and posting. I’ve left it quite raw, more like a tweet thread than a proper blog post.
One day my dad was reading this book called the "Going to Bed Book" to
my sister Nora. The book is
basically about a bunch of animals who are getting ready for bed on a
boat. They go down the stairs, take a bath, hang their towels on the
wall, find their pajamas, brush their teeth, go up and exercise, then
go down again and fall asleep.
But I noticed there was a big problem: my whole life everyone has been
telling me "don't exercise before bed". The reason you shouldn't
exer… This month I lost a bunch of bets. Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 2023. Then I made similar bets a dozen times because everyone disagreed with me. The first deployment to potentially meet our bar was Phoenix in … More Self-driving car bets
I first started playing fiddle when I was five, just around my
birthday. I had really wanted a fiddle because I wanted to learn how
to play it and my parents got me one for my birthday so I started
taking lessons. Though after a couple of lessons I started to find it
more and more boring and at the time I wasn't really prepared for my
fingers to hurt when I did it, so I didn't really like it that much
and also overall I think that probably starting from that age wasn't
the best idea. … I posted this on the Effective Altruism forum as part of the EA Strategy Fortnight. I’m cross posting it here. I just got comprehensive blood test results and it seems my nutritional numbers are in decent shape (vitamin D, B12, etc) after being vegan for over a year, which is a good sign that I’m probably doing most things okay. Also, I feel good, my weight hasn’t changed, and I can still build muscle (although not quickly; it seems I need to eat more in order to build muscle quickly, and I am not prioritizing that right now). I looked at a few years’ worth of data for DC (where I live) to try to figure out how risky cycling is here. the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking
I noticed that there was a hole in one of the park toys at the park
near my house, Lexington Park, specifically. It was one of those toy
cars that babies scootch around in, and one of the front wheels was
broken. It had a big hole in it, and there was a crack running almost
all around it.
I decided to go home and get my toolbelt to fix it. I decided that
probably tape and cardboard would be the best materials because
metal and wood and stuff wouldn't really keep the right shape.
First I starte… Early signs of catastrophic risk? Yes and no.
I have several reasons I think why neighborhoods should have speed
bumps.
First, speed bumps are very useful to stop cars from hitting people
in the streets.
Second, when construction workers installed speed bumps on the street
in front of our house it was very useful to me because my parents
decided to let me cross that street, and now I can go to the park and
my friends house and a bunch of other places without my parents having
to walk me there.
There is a downside to speed bumps, which is that whe… Governments could be crucial in the long run, but it's probably best to proceed with caution. Major AI companies can increase or reduce global catastrophic risks. People are far better at their jobs than at anything else. Here are the best ways to help the most important century go well. love for Wave • why leave • where to • why there • what’s next
For Christmas I got a really fun kit about rainbows. It had a rainbow
catcher, a really cool necklace, a streamer thingy, and it also had a
really really cool pinwheel, and it also had a bracelet and a pinata.
Unfortunately the pinata didn't work out that well. I didn't make the
bracelet yet. The pinata just didn't fall apart when we hit it. We
had to take it apart with our hands to get it open.
It even had a really really fun part. Actually, it wasn't really that
fun. It did m… because you’ll have more awesome friendships • be consistent • suggested post ideas • setup advice • getting initial readers In this post I’ll discuss three reasons to cooperate in a truly one-shot prisoner’s dilemma: Kindness makes common sense, but correlation and reciprocity are often lumped together under “weird acausal stuff.” I think they are worth distinguishing because they work quite differently. I’ll talk about details of correlation and reciprocity, and then argue that most … More Three reasons to cooperate thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
I went to a farm and at the farm I got to see a corncrib and the corn
that had fell out of the corncrib that no one wanted I got to use my
fingers to take off the corn kernels and once the cobs were empty I
put them in a bag and then once I got back to the house I was staying
in I ate dinner and I got to work with a few pencils some tape and some
paper and some markers and I used some of the markers to make the eyes
and mouth but I didn't want to add a nose so what I did was I made
little pink s…
I really like going in the water and this beach is a great place for
building sand castles and boogie boarding. I also like trying to
float on top of big waves. I'm not very good at it. I only float on
the flat waves.
Here is my current take on decision theory: When making a decision after observing X, we should condition (or causally intervene) on statements like “My decision algorithm outputs Y after observing X.” Updating seems like a description of something you do when making good decisions in this way, not part of defining what a good … More Decision theory and dynamic inconsistency
I love England. Especially because of the big castle called Buckingham
Palace. I got to see the outside there, but my mom showed me some
pictures of the inside. I love it there. But the outside doesn't look
very fancy to me. But I never knew why those people wear big bear skin
black poofy hats.
(Subsumed by: Timeless Decision Theory, EDT=CDT) People sometimes object to evidential decision theory by saying: “It seems like the distinction between correlation and causation is really important to making good decisions in practice. So how can a theory like EDT, with no role for causality, possibly be right?” Long-time readers probably know my answer, but … More What is causality to an evidential decision theorist?
There are many big buildings here. A lot of them are skyscrapers. And,
there's lots of old buildings here. Like, buildings from long
ago. Like, ones that Romans built! One of them is even a castle. It's
pretty fun here, and it barely ever snows here. So there's always
pretty flowers here. And there's even palm trees.
I recently got confused thinking about the following case: Calculator bet: I am offered the opportunity to bet on a mathematical statement X to which I initially assign 50% probability (perhaps X = 139926 is a quadratic residue modulo 314159). I have access to a calculator that is 99% reliable, i.e. it corrupts the answer … More EDT with updating double counts
Book Review: The Myth of Sex Addiction
Your wedding doesn’t have to be that great
When Nurses Lie to You
How I build and run behavioral interviews
Why Callout Posts Often Include Trivial Details
On The Prosperity Gospel
Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
Raising children on the eve of AI
Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed
Notes on Cruise's pedestrian accident
Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?
Good job opportunities for helping with the most important century
Solve My Mini Puzzle Hunt
The sugar budget
How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
“Sugar rush” in children seems to be confirmation bias
Ethics of adopting a meat-eating pet
My startup advice
A Big Problem With The Going To Bed Book
Self-driving car bets
Fiddle
Why altruists can’t have nice things
Vegan nutrition notes
Cycling Injuries Analysis in DC
Some mistakes I made as a new manager
Fixing a Tire
What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?
Why Neighborhoods Should Have Speed Bumps
How major governments can help with the most important century
What AI companies can do today to help with the most important century
Jobs that can help with the most important century
Leaving Wave, joining Anthropic
My Rainbow Kit
Why and how to write things on the Internet
Three reasons to cooperate
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
Corncob Dolls
On the Beach
Decision theory and dynamic inconsistency
Buckingham Palace
What is causality to an evidential decision theorist?
I Love England
EDT with updating double counts