Various thoughts on articles read unsystematically.

Sometimes I read articles and I need to put my thoughts somewhere. Why not here?

1 Spencer Greenberg on intrinsic vs. instrumental values, overconfidence, and how to actually update beliefs.

<2021-01-24 Sun> https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-bayesian-updating/

1.1 Speakers

Host: Robert Wiblin Guest: Spencer Greenberg

PhD in Applied Mathematics, develops software for mental well-being, founder of ClearerThinking and EffectiveAltruism.

1.2 UpLift – the actual Eliza!

A robot for psychological counselling.

1.3 MindEase … some robot counselling app.

1.4 Positly.com, recruiting social science research guinea pigs.

1.5 Creating happiness habits

That is what my psychologist was telling me about.

1.6 Temptation bundling.

That is when you associate something bad with something good. Spencer is doing workouts while watching TV shows.

1.7 Happiness tricks.

Associate certain things with happy thoughts.

"Tea exists in the world, it's such a wonderful thing!"

1.8 Intrinsic values.

Are something we value for themselves. This is opposed to instrumental values, which are mostly valuable for the effect they make.

1.9 Testing people's understanding is a cool trick.

Like that job offer by Biden's administration, that they have put on the White House website.

1.10 Groups of values: self, community, everyone.

That is almost like UNIX security: oga.

1.11 Everyone has at least one universal intrinsic value.

That helps people work together even if they do not know each other.

1.12 People generally value beauty, non-suffering oga, getting things o

1.12.1 33% value "society does not engage in immoral acts"

A huge number of punishers!

1.13 Value traps.

Pursue the value without actually getting an intrinsic value out of it. Particular case: you associate something with an intrinsic value because it used to be associated. Particular case: you had a false belief that it was your value. Example: not having enough money reduced your autonomy, and you keep searching for money since.

1.14 Learning may be a wrong thing to do!

When you are learning bullshit.

1.15 Doing something unproductive while feeling that you are doing something productive is the most non-productive thing ever.

1.16 Intuition pump

Diminishing returns on scaling own's emotions for larger scale. One person suffers: bad, ten people suffer: worse, million people suffer: ah, so bad, but you cannot scale your emotion.

1.17 Goal factoring

Algorithm: questioning the goal "why do I want it?".

Because A, B, C.

Is there another plan that brings you A, B, C?

This is what makes you find those A, B, C, that are leaves in your value system.

1.18 If you do not find your own intrinsic value, then your life is going into the wrong direction.

1.19 Operant conditioning – education through reward and punishment.

It may mislead you from your true intrinsic values.

1.20 Double-think is when you are convinced in truthfulness of some social theory that contradicts your intrinsic values.

1.21 Another example of double-think happens when your social circle in large numbers believes in a certain value system.

This often makes you reinterpret your intrinsic values in terms of those of your circle. And this is often weird.

1.22 the EA community is especially susceptible to is this,not drawing clear distinctions between these like my intrinsic value,with what I think my intrinsic value should be, versus what I think the universal truth about intrinsic values are, and those are different things and you should understand that

1.23 If you actually want to change your intrinsic values, you still need to know where you’re at

1.24 In hundreds of years if humanity makes a new world, what do we want that world to look like?

1.25 It is possible to measure over-confidence and under-confidence.

1.26 People are generally over-confident at ambiguous skills.

1.27 Experience raises over-confidence.

1.28 if you don’t believe in objective moral truth, then really, what are you doing?

1.29 how likely would I be to see this evidence if my hypothesis is true, compared to if it’s false?

1.30 So that actually raises the bar pretty high because if you’re a psychologist trying to discover some new thing about psychology, you’re competing against people’s pretty well-honed, intuitive psychology detectors that they have really … Not only are they pretty well-honed, but they are getting feedback all the time. I’m like, “Oh, I mis-predicted my friend, and now my friend’s angry at me,” and that kind of thing.