rationalnewsletter

Issue #202

A recent study provides evidence that facial masculinity in men is an honest signal of men’s aggressive capacity and intent within same-sex contests. // psyarxiv.com

# Coronavirus

The Long Long Covid Post // Zvi, 64 min

Does needle anxiety drive vaccine hesitancy? // matthew-barnett, 4 min

Why do people avoid vaccination? // KatjaGrace, 5 min

Covid 2/10/22: Happy Birthday // Zvi, 24 min

Decreasing Isolation Further // jkaufman, 2 min

# Instrumental

Theses on Sleep // guzey, 41 min Favorite

If you say "don't lose focus," what does that actually tell you to focus on? // nicole-dieker, 4 min

# Epistemic

Epistemic Legibility // pktechgirl, 24 min Favorite

Clarifying the palatability theory of obesity // matthew-barnett, 12 min

Our philosophical thought experiments aren’t good enough and we can do better // Dead Hour Canoe, 5 min

The Defeat of Reason? // M. Y. Zuo, 7 min

Heuristics That Almost Always Work // Scott Alexander, 8 min

# Ai

Inferring utility functions from locally non-transitive preferences // jan-2, 9 min

Hypothesis: gradient descent prefers general circuits // quintin-pope, 14 min

A broad basin of attraction around human values? // Wei_Dai, 2 min

EleutherAI's GPT-NeoX-20B release // leogao, 1 min

Metaculus launches contest for essays with quantitative predictions about AI // tamay-besiroglu, 1 min

# Meta-ethics

"Moral progress" vs. the simple passage of time // HoldenKarnofsky, 3 min

# Longevity

Why rationalists are not much concerned about mortality? // alex_lw, 1 min

If you want to live longer, become President // Bezzi, 9 min

# Anthropic

Full Non-Indexical Conditioning Also Assumes A Self Sampling Process. // dadadarren, 3 min

Reverse engineering of the simulation // jan-betley, 1 min

# Decision theory

Your Enemies Can Use Your Prediction Markets Against You // lsusr, 2 min

Prediction Markets are for Outcomes Beyond Our Control // lsusr, 1 min

Chaos and Stability // lsusr, 4 min

Bet on Rare Undesirable Outcomes when Seeding a Prediction Market // lsusr, 2 min

How to Legally Conduct "Rationalist Bets" in California? // Davis_Kingsley, 1 min

# Math and cs

Most likely is not likely // Elmer of Malmesbury, 2 min

A Nice Representation of the Laplacian // DanielFilan, 1 min

Better impossibility result for unbounded utilities // paulfchristiano, 5 min

# Books

The Planiverse // Robin Hanson, 6 min

# Ea

Simplify EA Pitches to "Holy Shit, X-Risk" // neel-nanda-1, 12 min

Paradigm-building from first principles: Effective altruism, AGI, and alignment // cameron-berg, 16 min

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half // Scott Alexander, 49 min

So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program // Scott Alexander, 30 min

# Community

Experimenting with microsolidarity crews // 4thWayWastrel, 4 min

# Culture war

Brainwashing is Sorcery // Robin Hanson, 2 min

# Misc

No, human life was not a misery until the 1950s // david-hugh-jones, 5 min

To Match the Greats, Don’t Follow In Their Footsteps // HoldenKarnofsky, 4 min

The case for "mental strength" // VipulNaik, 11 min

Meditation and Neuroscience, some odds and ends // zeek123, 13 min

Rituals and symbolism // TsviBT, 2 min

# Podcasts

c38: Script Draft 1, Beats 4-5 // Constellation, 54 min

YANSS 225 – How a better understanding of neuromarketing can make you a smarter consumer //

EP 152 Gary Bengier on Hard-Science Futures // The Jim Rutt Show, 89 min

155 – Normal Predictions, and Change is Bad // The Bayesian Conspiracy, 100 min

# Rational fiction

To Change the World // lsusr, 7 min

Luna Lovegood and the Fidelius Curse - Part 6 // lsusr, 2 min

# Videos of the week

Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #267 // Lex Fridman, 120 min