All of CatGoddess's Comments + Replies
I like this pitch outline; it's straightforward, intuitive, and does a good job of explaining the core ideas. If this were to actually be delivered as a pitch I would suggest putting more focus on cognitive biases that lead to inaction (e.g. the human tendency to disbelieve that interesting/unusual/terrible things will happen in one's own lifetime, or the implicit self-concept of not being the "sort of person" who does important/impactful things in the world). These are the sorts of things that people don't bring up because they're unconscious beliefs, but...
I would also be interested. I haven't read very many LW articles and I don't know very many people here, so it would be nice to get caught up in the context of a discussion.
Great post! As a tofu enthusiast myself this is pretty exciting on a personal level. That being said, you did ask for concerns/criticism, so:
If our goal is to create new foods, the best people to do so are restaurant chefs.
I'm not sure that this is true. Americans are well-known for eating out often, but what's the actual frequency? I wasn't able to find a reliable survey with some cursory googling, but from personal experience and what I did see (for instance, this) it seems like getting a majority of meals from eating out is rare. In this case, per...
Hello, my name is [name redacted] and I'm a new member here. Or, more accurately, I've been here for a little over a month but I haven't introduced myself yet because writing on a public forum is mildly anxiety-inducing for me. However, I have lately been attempting to become better at things I'm bad at by doing things that make me uncomfortable; this has included applying for an internship at Redwood Research despite not feeling terribly qualified, spending an afternoon using food to entice college students into discussing the merits of not eating meat de...
I think this article paints a fairly misleading picture, in a way that's difficult for me to not construe as deliberate.
It doesn't provide dates for most of the incidents it describes, despite that many of them happened many years ago, and thereby seems to imply that all the bad stuff brought up is ongoing. To my knowledge, no MIRI researcher has had a psychotic break in ~a decade. Brent Dill is banned from entering the group house I live in. I was told by a friend that Michael Vassar (the person who followed Sonia Joseph home and slept on her ... (read more)
With the exception of Brent, who is fully ostracized afaik, I think you seriously understate how much support these abusers still have. My model is sadly that a decent number of important rationalists and EAs just dont care that much about the sort of behavior in the article. CFAR investigated Brent and stood by him until there was public outcry! I will repost what Anna Salomon wrote a year ago, long after his misdeeds were well known. Lots of people have been updating TOWARD Vassar:
... (read more)He was banned, but still managed to slip through the cracks enough to be invited to an SSC online meetup in 2020. (To be very clear, this was not organised or endorsed by Scott alexander, who did ban Vasser from his events).
You can read the mea culpa from the organiser here. It really looks to me like Vasser has been treated with a missing stair approach until very recently, where those in the know quietly disinvite him to things but others, even ... (read more)
It's worth noting that the article was explicit that ex-MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor's psychotic break was in 2017:
She also alleged in December 2021 that at least two other MIRI employees had experienced psychosis in the past few years:
... (read more)It's unsurprising that the people who were willing to allow Bloomberg to print their names or identifying information about the wrongdoers were associated with situations where the community has rallied against the wrongdoer. It's also unsurprising that those who were met with criticism, retailation, and other efforts to protect the wrongdoer were not willing to allow publication of potentially identifying information. Therefore, I don't think it's warranted to draw inferences about community response in the cases without identifying information based on t... (read more)
Someone on the LessWrong crosspost linked this relevant thing: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/