"What’s going on with all these CEOs who drastically change their appearance over time?" It's nerds instrumentally converging on looks being useful They start off typical nerds, with no intrinsic drive to look good. So they start off at the bottom of their potential attractiveness As they understand the world more, they realize they can achieve more of any goal they want if they look good, so they actually start putting in effort, which leads to massive improvements They eventually stabilize at the most attractive they can look given base genetics It's just especially noticeable because they start off super low cause they don't care Most people, like politicians or celebrities, cared before they had fame and money, so they can't improve as much. There's diminishing returns to trying to improve your looks. Speaking as a nerd who went through this exact pattern. Read more: All
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Nerds often fall into the trap of thinking that caring about your looks is somehow unethical. “People shouldn’t care about what I look like! They should just like me for me and evaluate my ideas purely on their merit” I used to fall into this camp, but now believe this is misguided. Here’s what changed my mind:
1) 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞’𝐬 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞. What somebody looks like, especially their fashion, contains a 𝘭𝘰𝘵 of information about them. I remember once a rationalist event organizer was proposing that people have special bracelets where different beads signalled different things (e.g. romantic availability, open to talking vs not, etc) and I laughed so hard. That’s what clothing already does! It’s just that some people are blind to its messaging, either on purpose or because of a lack of skill. Imagine somebody wearing full hippie garb, including multi-color dreadlocks, an amethyst necklace, and a tattoo of chakras down his arm. Imagine he tells you that he read a study saying that there’s a dangerous chemical in the water. Imagine you hear the same thing, but from a man in traditional academic garb of comfortable shoes, slacks, button-up top, sweater, with short undyed hair. It is perfectly reasonable to put more credence on the academic-looking man over the hippie-looking man when it comes to studies about chemicals in the water. Of course, if they share the study and you have the time and inclination to look into it, you should evaluate the study based on its own merits, not the merits of who shared it with you. But also, the probability that you 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 look into it more is also dependent on the person who shared it with you. I have a bunch of hippie friends who I love dearly but whose epistemics are so broken that it would be very hard for them to get me to look into any of their theories because I think it’s just too likely to be wrong and a waste of my time. This only applies to people you have so far had little exposure to. As you get to know them, you should let that information dominate over fashion. For example, I have some hippie friends with colorful hair who look deeply uncredible to strangers but I happen to know their epistemology is actually pretty good. However, if you think of your friends and followers as following a funnel, where first they have to meet you or see you, decide whether it’s worth getting to know you and listening to your ideas, etc, then you need to care about that top of the funnel. If people just see you in a youtube thumbnail or see your outward appearance at a party and are deciding whether to approach or not, your looks communicate a lot about whether it will be worth their time. And if you have a neckbeard and a fedora or have strangely colored hair and a visible tattoo, people will (often correctly), infer a lot about you. (Interestingly, attractiveness and persuasiveness often come apart here. For example, having multi-colored hair might attract the sort of romantic partner who will like your personality, but is anti-persuasive to the majority of humanity. What I recommend in those sorts of situations is trying to find something that achieves both goals, such as replacing multi-colored hair with a varied wardrobe. Wear eccentric, vibrant clothes at parties, then wear a regular button up on a podcast) Now, this doesn’t mean you should just dress as attractively as possible. It all depends on your goals. Most people have the goal to attract or keep a mate, so attractiveness is a common goal. But there are others. There’s credibility. There’s in-group signalling. There’s comfort and practicality. There’s self-expression. I remember when I first started working on my appearance, and I found a look that was very attractive but didn’t feel like “me” at all, and it was really uncomfortable. I don’t recommend that. I eventually iterated into something that felt like it authentically represented myself to the outside world while also achieving my other goals, such as attractiveness, comfort, low effort, and credibility. All this is to say that fashion, because it’s a choice, conveys a lot of information. You can choose it more deliberately and get better outcomes. 𝟐) 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞’𝐬 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧’𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 Caring about appearance is to 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 degree cultural. I think our culture is way less shallow than it was in Victorian times. However, we’ve been receiving admonitions from society for ages to care less about appearance and I think we’re as far as we’re going to get. Which makes sense, because fashion does actually provide information. But also, we’re largely visual creatures and have evolved to pay attention to how people attire themselves. We can’t turn it off, even if we wanted to. Like, I think that the vast majority of humans could not take Borat in his banana hammock seriously, no matter how good his points were. If he approached you in a conference to tell you some interesting stats about your favorite field, you’d find it nearly impossible to buy it, no matter how good his ideas were otherwise. 𝟑) 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧’𝐭 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐞, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞. Fighting for people to care less about appearances is not a very high impact cause area and fighting it severely hurts your ability to fight for more important and tractable problems. Pick your battles. You can spend the rest of your life having a constant drain on your impact and ability to achieve your goals for probably no benefit, or you can focus on things that matter more. Fashion doesn’t have to take a long time. I limit myself to 5 minutes or less a day, plus once a year or two shopping trip for clothes. Just 80/20 it. Clothing causes “passive beauty” (like passive income, but for looks), where once you buy them, you look better for years afterwards while you wear them. Read more: All Disclaimer: this will only work for a subset of you. Law of Equal and Opposite Advice and all that. It might only even work for me. This definitely feels like a weird psychological trick that might only work with my brain. I spent my twenties being absolutely devastated by uncertainty. I saw the suffering in the world and I desperately wanted to help, but the more I learned and the more I tried, the wider my confidence intervals got. Maybe I could promote bednets. But what about the meat eater problem? Maybe I could promote veganism? But what about the small animal replacement problem? Even giving out free hugs (the most clearly benign thing I could think of) might cause unexpected trauma for some unknown percentage of the population such that it negates all the positives. It eventually reached a crescendo in 2020 where I sunk into absolute epistemic hopelessness. An RCT had just been published about the intervention I was doing that didn't even show that the intervention didn't work. It was just ambiguous. If at least it had been obviously zero impact, I could have moved on. But it was ambiguous for goodness sake! I actually briefly gave up on altruism. I was going to go be a hippie in the woods and make art and do drugs. After all, if I couldn't know if what I was doing was helping or even hurting, I might as well be happy myself. But then…. I saw something in the news about the suffering in the world. And I wanted to help. No, a part of me said. You can't help, remember? Nothing works. Or you can never tell if it's working. And then another thing showed up in my social media feed…. But no! It wasn’t worth trying because the universe was too complex and I was but a monkey in shoes. But still. . . . another part of me couldn’t look away. It said “Look at the suffering. You can’t possibly see that and not at least try.” I realized in that moment that I couldn’t actually be happy if I wasn’t at least trying. This led to a large breakthrough in how I felt. Before, there was always the possibility of stopping and just having fun. So I was comparing all of the hard work and sacrifice I was doing to this ideal alternative life. When I realized that even if I had basically no hope, I’d still keep trying, this liberated me. There was no alternative life where I wasn’t trying. It felt like the equivalent of burning the ships. No way to go but forward. No temptation of retreat. Many things aren’t bad in and of themselves, but bad compared to something else. If you remove the comparison, then they’re good again. But it wasn’t over yet. I was still deeply uncertain. I went to Rwanda to try to actually get as close to ground truth as possible, while also reading a ton about meta-ethics, to get at the highest level stuff, then covid hit. While I was stuck in lockdown, I realized that I should take the simulation hypothesis seriously. You’d think this would intensify my epistemic nihilism, but it didn’t. It turned me into an epistemic absurdist. Which is basically the same thing, but happy. Even if this is base reality, I’m profoundly uncertain about whether bednets are even net positive. Now you add that this might all be a simulation?!? For real?! (Pun was unintentional but appreciated, so I’m keeping it) This was a blessing in disguise though, because suddenly it went from:
The more certain you feel, the more you feel you can control things, and that leads to feeling more stressed out. As you become more uncertain, it can feel more and more stressful, because there’s an outcome you care about and you’re not sure how to get there. But if you have only very minimal control, you can either freak out more, because it’s out of your control, or you can relax, because it’s out of your control. So I became like the Taoist proverb: "A drunkard falls out of a carriage but doesn't get hurt because they go limp." If somebody walked by a drowning child that would be trivially easy to save, I’d think they were a monster. If somebody walks by a deeply complex situation where getting involved may or may not help and may even accidentally make it worse, but then tries to help anyway, I think they’re a good person and if it doesn’t work out, well, hey, at least they tried. I relaxed into the uncertainty. The uncertainty means I don’t have to be so hard on myself, because it’s just too complicated to really know one way or the other. Nowadays I work in AI safety, and whenever I start feeling anxious about timelines and p(doom), the most reliable way for me to feel better is to remind myself about the deep uncertainty around everything. “Remember, this might all be a simulation. And even if it isn’t, it’s really hard to figure out what’s net positive, so just do something that seems likely to be good, and make sure it’s something you at least enjoy, so no matter what, you’ll at least have had a good life” How can other people apply this? I think this won’t work for most people, but you can try this on and see if it works for you:
Anyways, while I’m sure this won’t work for most people, hopefully some people who are currently struggling in epistemic nihilism might be able to come out the other side and enjoy epistemic absurdism like me. But in the end, who knows? Read more: All If you have a mystery illness, I recommend keeping a spreadsheet that has a list of hypotheses as the rows, then columns for:
Read more: All Writing is like exercise. It’s just good on so many levels.
Yet, much like exercise is for most people, I tend to have little flares of interest, where I get really into it for a week or two, then lose steam, and it just becomes a dormant blog again. You might have had a similar experience, and maybe even have a cobwebby blog or two out there. Perhaps you have some really cool half-finished google docs that you never quite got around to finishing and publishing. It’s a funny thing though, about writing being like exercise. Because do you remember what exercise used to be called when you were a child? Play. And I remembered on a recent vacation I took, where I had the slack to remember, that writing is play. I fell back in love with writing then, typing away furiously on the beach. Not only was it intrinsically fun, but I also loved that it felt like I was making a difference, writing about important topics. That my recommendations were helping people, whether it be making them happier or making them higher impact, or sometimes, if I was lucky, both. To help myself (and perhaps you) remember this and all the other reasons to write, I’ve decided to write about all the reasons I have to write. Reading the list will inspire me and hopefully others. Publishing it will publicly commit me to writing, which will make it more likely. Even better, it could potentially re-inspire some people, perhaps you, to start writing for the forums again. Or maybe even it’ll get you excited to try your hand at writing publicly, even though you’ve never done it before. Epistemic status: motivational Epistemic status: motivational. An explanation of my personal experience that doesn’t generalize to all people. This isn’t meant to be a nuanced look into the pros and cons of writing. It’s meant to inspire a subset of the population (and myself!) to write more. None of this applies to all writing or all people. It’s meant more as a manifesto rather than a research piece. Of course, this is the EA Forum, so feel free to debate the merits and demerits of writing in the comments. Now, with all that hedging out of the way, here’s a giant list of reasons why you, the community, and myself should write. Some reasons to write The reasons to write fall broadly into three categories: enjoyment, capacity building, and impact. Enjoyment and other personal benefits Writing can be personally gratifying in so many ways.
Capacity building
Impact and other benefits to the world Improve the conclusions of the community. This then improves their actions, leading to impact.
I hope this also inspires you to dust off an old blog or start a new one. To experience writing as dancing. Where it counts as exercise and is good for you, but you don’t even care about that, because it’s just so damn fun. Read more: All It's like this expression, but applied to food: don't marry rich. Hangout with rich people, then marry for love. So often when people try to lose weight or be healthier, they try to eat only The Healthiest Thing, regardless of flavor. The thing is - "diets" only work if you can be on them for the rest of your life. Can you eat only things you don't really like for the rest of your life? I know I certainly can't! The fortunate thing though is that there are a bajillion healthy foods that you actually like. Explore. Find those. Don't stop till you have a wide variety of meals and snacks that are healthy and delicious to you. If they're healthy but not delicious, screw 'em. If they're delicious but not healthy, save them for special occasions. If they're healthy and delicious to you? Perfection. Read more: All Networking alternative for introverts : just write. Imagine how many people know and respect you from seeing you give a talk at a conference. Compare that to the numbers of views, influence, and bonding you get from the average post, either on social media or the fora. Think about how much you know and like various writers, despite never having met them. You could be that writer. Read more: All There are two types of tired. When you need 1) Rest 2) Energizing Sometimes the way to feel better is to veg and sleep. Sometimes the way to feel better is to move your body or do something you feel passionate about. If you're tired due to lack of energizing activities, rest will not help you. You'll veg all weekend then you'll come back to work and be just as exhausted as before. It won't help if you go on a long vacation Your fatigue is not from overwork. You're fatigue is from not doing enough energizing stuff. For everybody that includes moving your body For the rest of it, it depends on the person. Some people find talking to people energizing, some people find solitude energizing. Some people find certain tasks energizing, others find them draining. The point is to figure out which of those apply to you, then do more of those things. Either at work or at home. Read more: All Pattern I’ve seen: “AI could kill us all! I should focus on this exclusively, including dropping my exercise routine.” Don’t. 👏 Drop. 👏 Your. 👏 Exercise. 👏 Routine. 👏 You will help AI safety better if you exercise. You will be happier, healthier, less anxious, more creative, more persuasive, more focused, less prone to burnout, and a myriad of other benefits. All of these lead to increased productivity. People often stop working on AI safety because it’s terrible for the mood (turns out staring imminent doom in the face is stressful! Who knew?). Don’t let a lack of exercise exacerbate the problem. Health issues frequently take people out of commission. Exercise is an all purpose reducer of health issues. Exercise makes you happier and thus more creative at problem-solving. One creative idea might be the difference between AI going well or killing everybody. It makes you more focused, with obvious productivity benefits. Overall it makes you less likely to burnout. You’re less likely to have to take a few months off to recover, or, potentially, never come back. Yes, AI could kill us all. All the more reason to exercise. Read more: All I used to be your textbook awkward nerd, and now I’m decently socially skilled (for a nerd, at least 😛). Here’s how I got better at understanding and interacting with my fellow humans. The idea is pretty simple, actually. It’s just the implementation that’s tricky. The idea is making predictions, building models, and learning from the real world. Basically once I became motivated to improve my social skills (I didn’t want to keep accidentally hurting people’s feelings! And I wanted more friends), I applied my nerd analysis to people. Before I went to a hangout, I’d pick a topic and a person. I’d think about what I’d say about the topic and, very importantly, I’d make a prediction of how the person would react. I would do this based on a model I had of the person (informal model. No spreadsheets. Just general things like “Bob is primarily motivated by intellectual curiosity, truth, and humor. He finds drama and politics boring. It’s late and he’s a morning person, so he’ll probably be a bit grouchier tonight” etc.) I’d then go out into the world, test the hypothesis, and then on the way back, I’d update my models based on the data. (“Oh interesting. I thought he’d be grouchy cause it’s late, but he wasn’t. Maybe alcohol reduces the grouchiness for him? And he actually was pretty interested in talking about the elections. Maybe he’s just not interested in European politics?”). It was especially helpful when I was able to do this with a friend who was really interested in psychology and good at it, which sped up the process substantially. But the process works regardless. The main teacher is reality. It also helps to pair this with “book” learning, so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Most books about “social skills” are incredibly remedial. Read those if that’s where you’re at. If you’re looking for something more advanced than “make eye contact” and “smile”, I recommend reading books about psychology, storytelling, persuasion, sales, management, conflict resolution, etc. They’re all indirectly about social skills and much more advanced. I recommend:
So there you go. Just apply your nerd powers to people. Go forth and make predictions and friends! Read more: All |
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