rationalnewsletter

Issue #88

People tend to adapt to common life events by converging back to a baseline level of happiness, suggesting that adaptation is an important feature of well-being. // ourworldindata.org

# Instrumental

Could someone please start a bright home lighting company? // lincolnquirk, 7 min

Can you eliminate memetic scarcity, instead of fighting? // Raemon, 4 min

My Anki patterns // agentydragon, 5 min

Is daily caffeine consumption beneficial to productivity? // ChristianKl, 1 min

Building awareness habits (cognitive) // Teach, 1 min

# Epistemic

Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything (crosspost) // Michael Edward Johnson, 49 min

Explaining why false ideas spread is more fun than why true ones do // Matthew Barnett, 1 min

Antimemes // lsusr, 1 min

Order and Chaos // ExCeph, 10 min

Updating a Complex Mental Model - An Applied Election Odds Example // Davidmanheim, 2 min

# Ai

Useful Does Not Mean Secure // Ben Pace, 13 min

A test for symbol grounding methods: true zero-sum games // Stuart_Armstrong, 2 min

Breaking Oracles: hyperrationality and acausal trade // Stuart_Armstrong, 1 min

Thoughts on implementing corrigible robust alignment // steve2152, 7 min

Thoughts on Robin Hanson's AI Impacts interview // steve2152, 9 min

# Decision theory

What's been written about the nature of "son-of-CDT"? // Liam Donovan, 1 min

Open-Box Newcomb's Problem and the limitations of the Erasure framing // Chris_Leong, 3 min

Designing Crime Bounties // Robin Hanson, 4 min

# Math and cs

Counterfactuals as a matter of Social Convention // Chris_Leong, 2 min

How to make TensorFlow run faster // rmoehn, 1 min

# Books

Mental Mountains // Scott Alexander, 18 min Favorite

What sources (i.e., blogs) of nonfiction book reviews do you find most useful? // Rudi C, 1 min

# Ea

Getting Ready for the FB Donation Match // jkaufman, 1 min

# Community

RAISE post-mortem // toonalfrink, 5 min

3 Cultural Infrastructure Ideas from MAPLE // Unreal, 11 min

What are the requirements for being "citable?" // Raemon, 1 min

SSC Meetups Everywhere Retrospective // Scott Alexander, 8 min

Preserving Practical Science (Phronesis) // JohnBuridan, 4 min

# Culture war

A Theory of Pervasive Error // Zack_M_Davis, 1 min

Social Roles Make Sense // Robin Hanson, 3 min

# Misc

Effect of Advertising // jkaufman, 2 min

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later - Buterin // crabman, 1 min

How To Change a Dance // jkaufman, 2 min

Solution to the free will homework problem // ejenner, 2 min

# Podcasts

097: Review of I AM MOTHER // Review the Future, 44 min

# Videos of the week

What happens to people in solitary confinement | Laura Rovner // TED, 12 min