Helen Backagain

But anything that involves are large amount of poop is gonna be low status and everyone will seek to not do that as soon as they get rich enough.

"A European study found urban birds flew away sooner when approached by women than men. Men got about 1 metre closer on average before the birds scarpered. It held across 37 species and five countries. Scientists don’t know why. They controlled for height, clothing color, direct gaze, and long hair being visible.."

this hopefully won't sound like an attack on QC but maybe will be taken as one: how you handle the impending singularity is in fact entirely up to you. eliezer wrote the sequences and HPMOR to get young and smart people very interested in these problems and making sure we get the good ending. and he has turned out to be largely quite obviously right in most of the important ways. transformative artificial intelligence *is* impending, in our lifetimes. it almost certainly *is* the most important political, practical, and moral issue of our times, totally outweighing everything else. it very very likely *does* carry tremendous risks. these things have all been proved more correct with time. to the extent that it now looks like we're in a better timeline than we could have been, to the extent that we have better alignment tools and the models seem safer, this is not purely due to luck. we did not "just get alignment by default". we got *some* of that, we got way more than eliezer predicted! but much more importantly we got a huge population of the smartest people in the world who are directly working on the most transformative technologies in the world *being very careful and doing a lot of work* to actually make alignment happen. and this is very clearly downstream of eliezer's efforts and writings. not wholly!! but clearly to a meaningful extent his cultural influence pushed towards this. not everyone was exposed to his memetic sphere and felt immense pressure and panic and shame over the fate of the world. many of the people exposed to these concepts, who correctly determined they were largely accurate, instead now just work at anthropic, or openai. rather than having their minds broken, they decided to do something about it, and are currently doing something about it, and it's currently (to some degree) working. it is not a hell realm for them: they found a problem desperately worth working on and are working on it! they walk out in the light of day and run and laugh and dance along with the rest of us. being crippled with indecision and panic over the weight of the world and feeling that it must rest directly on your shoulders *is not something eliezer yudkowsky told you to do*. it is not unique to lesswrong posters or effective altruists or singularitarians. many people are neurotic! many people twist themselves into horrible painful knots at all kinds of aspects of their lives, important or unimportant. most of the time it actually has very little to do with the specific ideas or subcultures they're in. it's the kind of thing they would do to themselves wherever they are, until they learn enough about themselves to stop. now there's real truth to what QC says. singularitariansim and effective altruism *are* quite potentially totalizing ideologies, and they can have serious negative impacts on certain types of people. i don't mean this as an attack on him: i went through something very similar myself. i read lesswrong very young, starting around 13. i was pulled in by the force of HPMOR in exactly the way it now seems eliezer intended, holistically into his worldview and frame. i planned out my trajectory as a high schooler, applied to colleges with good CS programs for the purpose of getting a PhD in AI, either helping at MIRI directly or wherever else seemed useful at the time. i got into ML PhD programs, and didn't attend. i correctly determined at the time that i was depressed as fuck and that if i tried to go another 5 years stuck in a little box churning through training runs I would lose my mind. i might not survive. i decided i had to just pursue happiness instead. it broke much of my self image, the stuff i'd been working towards since my identity even started forming. i stayed depressed for a long long time. but i reached a different frame. that's just not how morality actually works man. you should care about the child drowning in the pool next to you, you should think about global utility, you should give something to against malaria foundation. and you should care about ai safety. but you're a human!! you're a person! you *deserve* to be happy. you don't have to donate every penny you make to EA orgs! they're *not asking for that*!! the pledge is called "giving what you can" not "giving what you can't". i didn't have it in me to give my youth and mind towards saving the world. i became a normal software engineer, i tried to build a happy life. it's okay! i gave what i could and it turned out i didn't have much more. maybe sometimes my words here help a little, maybe not. maybe one day i'll find it in me to do something harder. but the choice to place the burdens of the world on my shoulders *was mine*, not imposed by anyone else, and it was perfectly possible for me to just... stop. eliezer is mostly right about most things he says. that doesn't stop you from taking a deep breath, and hearing the birds outside, and loving those around you, and being happy. you don't need to believe false things to *be yourself and live a good life*. most people through history have lived with tremendous danger all around them, and found the joy anyway.

i get filled with a sense of sadness seeing videos of nyc churches filled with young people. i grew up catholic and would love to mass important an entire ~value aligned community like that, but believing thing which are false is unfortunately a prerequisite