Dysfunctional Altruism

How I'm not an EA anymore, a fun 2m meditation experiment, North Korea, Sex trafficking, and more.

Effective Altruism

I'm not an EA anymore. The shift took a while but it's pretty solidly established now I think. I'd like to do things that are positive for the world, but not "the most" positive that "I could" do. I want to focus on helping the people around me, and not completely disregard my own desires and interests (gasp).

I have many desires it turns out. I want to be more disciplined, learn, help my loved ones, improve the world. I think I want to get rich too. The future is uncertain, having $100M would be good in all cases.

I like general skills, things that allow you to do many things. hyper-specializing in a narrow field of research isn’t very attractive to me.

I want to work on problems I can continuously impact for a while. AI X-Risk is an amorphus blob, you really don't know if your research is doing anything or if it's just mental masturbation. Contrast this to a company like jhourney.io that’s basically the ideal for me. You get all the benefits of “skin-in-the-game, bigger-than-self purpose” and, even if you fail, you’ll have changed the lives of dozens of people!

AI Alignment on the other hand is basically fake. EAs sometimes say (jokingly, but only half) their time is worth 10,000$/hr in positive impact. This is a huge Pascel’s wager. Their value is zero in almost all worlds, and negative in many too. This was quite demotivating (at least the way I was relating to it).

I'm actually pretty worried about EA's effect on young people. I know kids who abandoned their interests to work on AI governance. As a high-schooler. These are wonderfully smart, passionate people having their souls eaten. I can see how Nick Cameratta got “antiea radicalized" now.

Meditation experiment!

This will take you 2 minutes to try! Here are your instructions:

Listen to "My love, mine all mine" and let yourself be absorbed into it. Every time you think about something else, gently bring your attention back to the song and relax. Imagine you're sinking into a deep cloud, and as you sink deeper you become more, and more relaxed, absorbing the pure love that's in this infinite cloud.

Do this now. Then read below.

I'm not kidding! Reading about possible results of the experiment will corrupt it with expectations. The mind is very sensitive to expectations for things like this.

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When I did this with my girlfriend for the first time she couldn't stop laughing and smiling. I told her this was ~roughly what 1st jhana is like & she finally understood my descriptions of it! (even the stuff about desire ruining it! the next few times she tried & failed because craving was there. you have to relax to enter the state, not relax AND crave to enter the state!)

I figured I should write about it because Laura recently had a really bad day & doing this before bed completely reset her state. She couldn't stop smiling! From hating everything all day to not being able to stop smiling! :)

A similar technique was when I first realized meditative stuff can give you superpowers in emotional regulation. I'd had a very bad day & managed to completely reset my state to relaxed and happy with ~20 minutes of lovingkindness meditation on the train home. It was magical. People should learn this skill!

You might see this as wireheading (what meditators call "spiritual bypassing"). I'm still figuring out if it is, but regardless, it's a valuable skill to have. Many negative emotions contain information and shouldn't be bulldozed over (or suppressed which is much worse)

North Korea

Yeonmi Park is a famous North Korean defector. I re-watched her Joe Rogan interview and was reduced to tears. The conditions real humans are going through right now boggle the mind, the concentration camps in North Korea (and in China), the sex trafficking, it's an empathy superstimuli.

Talking about how North Korean girls are sold for 300$ in rural china was awful. I wish there was a charity where I could donate to buy people's freedom, but given the difficulty & personal risk involved it makes sense that there isn’t.

Chinese government policy is to return defectors to North Korea where they're sent to forced labor camps. It's the ideal situation for traffickers, the victims can't even go to the authorities. I’ve also heard the CCP turns a blind eye as the trafficking helps with their gender-ratio problems leftover from the one child policy.

So I imagine the CCP wouldn't be thrilled by you stealing them away. Still. It's an opportunity. Finding people to do the dirty work is probably tractable, the adventure of saving damsels in distress from traffickers would probably attract a lot of guys. That leaves money, which is tractable.

Leaving only logistical issues: How do you smuggle them out of China, and how do you buy them in the first place? I’m not sure but it’s interesting to think about.

(After thinking through all this I found out Yeonmi Park exaggerates and lies repeatedly, which is unfortuante as I enjoyed her story a lot and now can’t fully trust it. Still, I think the basic facts about sex trafficking in China and the low $ rural farmers pay is probably real.)

Andrew Tate's sex trafficking

Speaking of sex trafficking, I somehow went down a rabbithole reading leaked texts from Andrew Tate's "war room", a chatroom his followers paid 10k+ to access that’s advertised as "the illuminati but cooler".

It's exceptionally bad. Thousands of messages of evidence. Andrew's phone calls from jail were even recorded where he instructs people to threaten & bribe witnesses to withdraw their testimony (which actually worked for a few of them.)

Anyway, the most interesting thing about it is how Andrew talked exactly the same way as a (extremely sketch) teen I knew on discord. It's hard to articulate, how eerily similar the bragging about manipulating and exploiting people is, but it’s the exact same. Your best bet at getting the vibe is probably reading The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

It’s crazy who you can meet online!

Unreliable Testimony

I didn’t viscerally understand how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be until now, especially in the case of bad breakups. I watched some videos about Destiny's divorce drama. It seems like his wife's memory was rewritten in her favor. I don't think she's intentionally gaslighting, I think her memories have changed.

Why do I bring this up? Because I've now observed memory rewriting in bad breakups n=4 times, and I'm ready to confidently say "you can't trust shit without talking to both sides, and seeing lots of text message evidence". You really can't. Don't. No matter how genuine someone seems. No matter how bad the accusations are. You may be right that they wouldn't lie to you, but many people lie to themselves.

Another interesting tidbit: in all n=4 cases I’ve seen (one being with my mom & dad) the girl seems to have experienced substantial memory rewriting. I'm not sure if this is a general thing where women are more likely to lie to themselves v.s. men who'll just lie while being aware of it, but putting this out as an interesting pattern.¹

Book on debugging

We had some really tricky bugs to figure out at sfcompute around VM networking and NCCL. After giving up for the time being I vowed to get better at debugging, surely it’s possible to practice right? I’ve met people who are much better debuggers than me.

So I read most of a book on debugging! I think it’s quite good, I recommend stumbling across a PDF of it somewhere and taking a look. The lessons mesh with my experience but I often abandon them under stress. That’s bad! But good to notice, next time I want to pull up the list and think more strategically about what to do.

It’s tempting to bash your head into bugs until they yield, but if they don’t after a couple tries you need to stop what you’re doing and figure out what’s actually wrong!

Unfortunately there’s often a large up-front cost to debugging the root cause (In our case I’d have to figure out how to debug the NCCL library through PyTorch). The plus-side is that these up-front costs are reusable! You can get a lot better at solving other, similar issues. Be brave, attach a debugger.

Lost Ones

I’m going to start taking Lost Ones more seriously. It’s a project where I can help people continuously and scale up. And I could turn it into something big, “the TKS killer” — a community that primarily cares about the individual wellbeing of it’s members, as opposed to EA & TKS which care about impact (though they measure it differently).

Mental Health

I told my friend I'd give them 1000$ if I didn't sleep at 10:30 and work out in the morning, for a week. This has been amazing, I feel positive about the future for the first time in long while. Having >0 discipline completely changes how I think and feel about everything.

It's the first time in weeks (or months?) that I'm able to think strategically about what I want to do, without a cloud of toxic sludge filling my head. I'm going to try and maintain this.

1. I consider average sex-differences in emotional processing well established (case study, book). Though without that prior you may feel it's too big a jump to go from n=4 to conjecturing a general pattern.