(that's a very irresponsible psychoanalysis of a whole bunch of people i just did there but i've asked some of them about stuff like this, enough that i think i'm not completely making this up)
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i really feel like i get it though. i too now also find that once i've had a taste of what it's like to feel cosmically significant i don't want to give it up. i don't know how to live completely outside a story. i've never had to. i just want a better one and i'm still looking
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i was really really hoping i would never have to think about AI ever again, y'know, after all this. seeing AI discourse turn up here was like running into an ex i was hoping never to see again
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leaving the rationalists was on some level one of the hardest things i've ever done. it was like breaking up with someone in a world where you'd never heard anyone even describe a romantic relationship to you before. i had so little context to understand what had happened to me
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i'm finally getting around to reading your leverage post, i was too scared to read it when it first came out. thank you for writing this 🙏 i don't think any of my experiences were near this intense but there's a family resemblance
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(this is deeply embarrassing to admit but one reason i always found the simulation hypothesis strikingly plausible is that it would explain how i just happened to find myself hanging around who i considered to be plausibly the most important people in human history)
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i had very little direct interaction with leverage but i knew that they were around. geoff anders taught at my first CFAR workshop. at one point i signed up for belief reporting sessions and signed an NDA saying i wasn't allowed to teach belief reporting
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at some point i'm gonna actually talk about what it was like to work at CFAR. it was nowhere near as bad as this but we did circle semi-regularly and that periodic injection of psychological vulnerability did really weird things in retrospect
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oh my god i need to go to sleep but if anyone happened to actually read this whole thing thank you for your time and i hope you've enjoyed learning a little more about why i'm completely fucking insane
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thanks for writing all this!!
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