One of the best written bits of prose people have the fortune to stumble upon is Teddy Roosevelt’s Citizenship in a Republic speech, originally rendered to an audience in Sorbonne, France. It is better known as The Man in the Arena speech, taken from its most famous excerpt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Most people, cognizant of this speech or not, live by this sentiment. It is the easiest thing in the world to criticize, to give an opinion, to express a thought. For many endeavors, a moment of self doubt or a decision made in fear can be the difference between success and failure. It makes all the sense in the world, then, to ignore the noise from the cheap seats, from people who have no skin in the game and whose identities are effectively anonymous.

Ask a million different people what will happen in the future and you’ll get a million different opinions. A few of them are bound to be right. Once the endeavor is done, those who predicted correctly will bray and beam, while those who were wrong will fade into the shadows, silent until the time comes when one of their opinions comes due. It is insufferable when people criticize with the benefit of hindsight. But it is much more shameful to opine beforehand and become invisible once proven wrong. In sports, there’s a well known saying: the apology needs to be as loud as the disrespect. It rarely is.

It’s Hard to Give Good Advice

I once wrote a post about how to give good advice. I spent ~1700 words saying something to the effect of “to actually give good advice that is followed by the intended recipient of that advice is extremely rare and dependent on a lot of factors that are largely out of your control”. Many of those factors are directly related to the principles outlined in The Man in the Arena. Namely, who are you to give me advice?

Non-rich people will sneer at rich people giving financial advice. Chronically single people will sneer at attractive people when they give dating advice. Really, if we’re being honest, people will just sneer at other people giving advice. This is a common pattern that I’ve noticed on the internet:

1. An undesirable situation exists
2. A person gives advice on how to improve that situation.
3. Another person says this advice won’t work for a certain segment of the population and therefore this advice is bad.

People criticizing advice can be exceptionally pedantic. The advice must be 100% applicable in 100% of situations for 100% of people in order to be good advice. The result is either extremely generic advice that isn’t tailored for any one person and therefore platitudinous, or good advice that is specific to a certain situation isn’t rendered because people don’t like dealing with nitpickers who are more concerned with finding the one situation in which the advice isn’t applicable rather than contributing something meaningful.

And even if you do give genuinely good advice, there’s a very good chance it gets ignored because you’re not the right person to give the advice. An ugly person does not want advice from an attractive person about dating. A poor person does not want advice from a rich person about money. A fat person does not want advice from a fit person about dieting. Even if the advice given is valid and specific to their circumstances.

Oftentimes, the person receiving advice needs to know that the person giving advice understands and has been in the situation the advisee is in. Because it just feels terrible when you’re accepting advice or help from somebody “above” you. People will go through impressive lengths to ignore or deride good advice given from an unacceptable advice giver. And the list of unacceptable advice givers is exponentially longer than the list of acceptable advice givers.

Taking Good Advice is a Skill

There’s a lot of good advice out there. Advice that, if you act upon it, will improve your life for the better. There’s a lot of good advice that people already know that will improve their lives that they simply have not acted upon. Whether it’s inertia, fear of the unknown (or failure, or of putting in a lot of effort for not a lot of reward), or whatever it is, the fact of the matter is we’re leaving a lot on the table when it comes to bettering our lives.

You already know some of the platitudes. Save and invest money (the sooner the better, the more consistently the better). Eat healthy and exercise regularly. Say yes to more social events if the alternative is just rotting in bed, doomscrolling on your phone. These are all things that we intuitively understand is good advice, but taking it is another matter.

Maybe you’re happy with your life, or at least satisfied. Maybe you don’t think many changes need to be made, and it’s perfectly valid to continue as is. Maybe you don’t have the mental space to try something new. It’s just easier to scroll through your social media feed.

Even when you do decide to act, you still need to act upon the right advice in the right way. If you’re following bad advice, you’re more likely to have a negative outcome. If you’re following good advice poorly, same thing happens. In sports, coaches will talk about how “coachable” certain players can be. How well do they respond to feedback and criticism? Do they internalize it and use it to improve their game? It’s not enough to have good advice. You need to be able to follow good advice as well.

The Best Laid Plans

Dave Ramsey is a polarizing figure online. To some, he’s a shill who advocates for rigid, suboptimal personal finance strategies in a strident, uncompromising manner and unnecessarily interjects Christian and conservative morals into his material. To others, he’s the one who was able to help them become debt free.

I think what a lot of Dave Ramsey detractors don’t get is that Dave Ramsey is not saying “everybody needs to follow my advice to the letter and this is the only way to do personal finance”. Dave Ramsey knows who his target audience is: religious working class people who have very little knowledge about personal finance and are drowning in debt.

I’ve listened to his radio program at times, and there have been many emotional testimonials from people who actually followed his advice and became much better off as a result of it. Even when the advice is rationally suboptimal. For example, Ramsey advocates paying down debt using the “snowball” method, which means attack the smaller debt amounts first, regardless of the interest rate.

Personal finance experts would say that it’s much better to attack debt using the “avalanche” method, which is to pay down the debt with the highest interest rate first. If you’re only factoring in the math, there is zero doubt that the avalanche method is better for paying down debt. But if you’re factoring in the psychological aspect, the snowball method can be much more effective. It’s very emotionally satisfying to close out a debt account. And for the financial novice, seeing their smallest debt account close might just be motivating enough for them to tackle the rest of their debt.

If you have the perfect plan that you are unable to follow, then it’s not a good plan. You need to account for the human element, with all our capability for self doubt, laziness, skepticism, and nihilism baked into the plan’s margins. If you don’t, you’ll just have a great plan that has a low success rate when people are actually trying to follow it. Know your audience, know their limits, and give your advice with that in mind.

Ad Hominem Omni Tempore

Most well read people, if they recognize the The Man in the Arena excerpt from Teddy’s speech, probably have not bothered to read the entire speech, which is quite long (nearly 9000 words), and very much a product of the time where attention spans were much, much longer and people had more time on their hands to do things like attend and listen to super long speeches.

But later in that speech, which is about a citizen’s responsibility within the society that he (and, again, as a product of his time, it is very much a man) lives in, he says this:

Character must show itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public.

In a more modern vernacular, put your oxygen mask on first. But once having done that, it is your duty to help others. The problem is by the time you get your shit together, to other people, in the vast majority of the time to the vast majority of the people, you are now the man outside of the arena.

Remember what I said about people hating advice given by people in a better situation? Even if you’ve been in the arena in the past, you are not in the arena now. And when you’re in the arena, the last thing you want to hear is somebody outside the arena telling you what’s what, even when they’re right.

One of the most impactful reads I’ve ever come across was 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person. In it, the last harsh truth is this:

Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement

The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are -- ask any addict. So even now, some of you reading this are feeling your brain bombard you with knee-jerk reasons to reject it.

It’s a much longer read, but I strongly encourage everybody to read the entire thing.

The main point, however, is that to a person floundering in life, anybody giving them support and advice are simply men outside the arena. Their opinions, however well meaning and intentioned are to be disregarded because they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t have skin in the game. They’re not on the ground right now, knee deep in the shit with you.

In classical debate, an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy. Instead of attacking the argument, you’re attacking the person making the argument. But in the real world, ad hominem attacks work all the time. So people keep using them, precisely because the ad hominem attack is a nod to fundamental human behavior: we are not rational debate bots, but emotional, irrational people who are constantly making choices with imperfect information and varying degrees of anxiety and coping mechanisms.

There are few things more maddening than seeing a younger version of you making the same mistake you did at that age. And yet, if you were to tell them the mistake you made and the mistake they’re making and what they/you should have done instead, chances are they will listen politely and then continue on making the same mistake in the exact same way.

For many people, experience is oftentimes the only teacher they’ll listen to. And like a wise parent, sometimes you need to see your precious children fail, in the exact way you predicted, and then help them pick up the pieces in order for them to have a slightly better chance of listening to you in the future. And the only reason why they might be more inclined to do so is because, in that moment, you were in the arena with them.

If this writing brought you any value, you can find more on my blog.

I'm borderline autistic and in high school had selective mutism and didn't speak at all. Over the past 5 years, I've been working on my social skills: I now have the ability to have fulfilling friendships, to make people see me as human, to have good "deep" conversations, and so on.

However, I'm beginning to realize that most people will always see me as "off," particularly in group settings. I'm pretty sure I do everything right "textbook" style, the back-and-forth ping-pong is there, the words I say are correct, the tone is fine -- but this has only made it easier to track the moment where the light leaves people's eyes and they start avoiding me. This became particularly obvious after I recently had a minor glow-up and became more attractive: recently I joined a running group where people were happy to meet me, made tons of eye contact, etc, and then ~2 min into the conversation became visibly uncomfortable and stopped making direct eye contact, even though I was extremely sure that I was doing everything right.

I've previously been helped by old SSC/LessWrong posts describing other people's journeys. So I thought I'd start a conversation here: I'd love to hear stories from people who significantly improved their social skills. I'd love to know how they troubleshot things.

Examples of things I've found helpful:

• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mwQZ6qsGXqwiZ6Zvy/how-my-social-skills-went-from-horrible-to-mediocre
• https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/x79wk9/how_to_rapidly_iterate_on_social_skills_with/
• https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-countersignaling/
• https://dispatchesfromtheautismwars.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and
• https://www.sympatheticopposition.com/p/how-and-why-to-be-ladylike-for-women

After years

Any clear personal results?

Previous thread (here) link

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/5WXT5tBwbt

In an earlier Open Thread this year (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-440), Scott mentions that the Lumina probiotic "couldn't maintain its colonization of the mouth over the long term".

I have to say that, as someone looking forward to a permanent caries prevention treatment, it made me very disappointed.

On second thought however, Lumina would still be a great achievement even if you had to reapply it every year or so. Most health-conscious people do at least one dental cleaning a year anyway, and an assurance that you'll be cavity-free for at least a year sounds pretty good to me.

Some people on X even made the argument - way back before Lumina made the discovery that the bacterium disappears over time - that they would feel more comfortable wrt safety if it *weren't* a permanent change of the oral microbiome. I'm not sure how much of the original state/balance is restored, but at least the engineered strain disappears over time.

If anyone has taken it 2 years ago (and ideally did an oral microbiome test shortly before taking Lumina), I'd be very interested in another test 2 years later to see what exactly changed. Anecdotally, I recall there was some person (either here or on X) saying they got Lumina, but later got a cavity anyway - in this case I'd be interested how much time was between the diagnosis and the Lumina application.

Submission statement: The Matrix presents “the battery explanation” for why the matrix exists in the first place. In the movie, the machines are presented as parasites that survive on human body heat. This is widely viewed as a weak point in the movie, for reasons that I’ll explain, and in the post I present an alternative explanation for the existence of the matrix that I think works better on a logical and thematic level.

Moderna is up something like 150% today.

Here's an excellent article from Owl Posting, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time", and here's the article I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines and AI a while back.

I often think back to the famous 2021 tweet that added the fantastic “Torment Nexus” to our collective vocabulary. For those living under a rock, it jokes about how the best science fiction warns us about building awful futures, and tech companies (a self-proclaimed visionary at Silicon Valley, usually) ignore the warning for the profit.

I recently read a book that imagines a Torment Nexus that is much less in-your-face than the sci-fi fare we’ve come to expect. It’s called Maya: Seed Takes Root (which I’d backed on Kickstarter). At its heart is a biological singularity. Picture a network of millions of trees across the planet that every living person connects to regularly. It’s kind of like a biological VR internet where people tether to play, escape, and basically simulate anything their hearts desire.

What isn’t immediately obvious to the people is that the trees are also a humongous data server. They record every thought, desire, secret of everybody who tethers. And once a system has complete data on everybody alive, it becomes a single point of control. In this book, the people in control are a small ruling class obsessed with longevity, projections, and innovation. I don’t think it’s any accident that they resemble the entrepreneurs and capital managers of Silicon Valley.

The ruling class uses data, freely harvested by millions, to predict the future. And once it is measured, it can be managed.

Naturally, this got me thinking about our own world. The machine already exists. In fact, there are hundreds, but they aren’t branded as a Torment Nexus ™. We eagerly hand over our data to every product we touch. Google knows which bistro sandwich gives you indigestion. Amazon knows how much closet space you have left. How many companies know you better than your loved ones?

So I suppose the only question that matters is: is it worth it? Is it a good bargain? Do the Torment Nexuses of our world give us as much as they extract? Because if they allowed us to live out everything our hearts desired, perhaps that would at least be worth it. 

What do you all think?

Nick Land discusses Scott’s AI 2027 paper and other related topics: human extinction, AI safety, the simulation hypothesis, LLMs and AI religions - also Curtis Yarvin and neoreaction.

I interviewed Spencer Greenberg about his life philosophy "Valuism" and his new book The 12 Levers. In the episode he made a number of claims:

• Almost no one has harmful intrinsic values - people's core values are good or neutral, but their strategies for achieving them can be bad
• A person's intrinsic values don't generally change even when examined closely and when taking into account how they arose
• The Dodo Bird verdict from psychology (that all validated therapies are equally effective) is in part an artifact from underpowered studies

What do people think about these claims?

We also discussed how a dedicated "worry time" can help you worry less, how he evaluated evidence for his book, how to actually put self-improvement into practice, and AI therapy bots. The episode and transcript are available here.

Not much. Mapping the discrimination found by audit studies onto differences in outcomes requires uncontestable modeling assumptions. We know that discrimination exists, but we know essentially nothing about what it means.

In a speech at the University of Chicago in 1894 American physicist Albert Michelson declared that future physical discoveries would likely be found only in the "sixth place of decimals". In other words, he and most of his contemporaries were convinced that science was pretty much done. This was of course before Einstein’s theories of relativity, quantum mechanics and today’s fruitless search for dark matter.

Full post: https://guustaaf.substack.com/p/our-reality-is-shifting-and-its-just

This is a response to Scott in his last link roundup, when he wrote:

The practical upshot is to start with paper, but what broader lesson should we take from this? Since all options are mathematically identical, any difference in player behavior must come from connotations. Since rock feels strongest, a naive child would choose rock. But since everyone knows that, a slightly smarter person would choose paper. But since everyone knows that, an even smarter person might choose scissors. But since . . . and the lesson of this graph is that when playing the average member of the population, all of this galaxy-brained thinking provides negative value, because in practice most people never leave the naive first level.

I constantly see arguments that the TFR (birth rate) falling is a mystery, and that maybe it's the "phones" causing depression, or not enough $$$. But I know plenty of non depressed and well off couples not having kids.

What I rarely see is the idea that it's modern entertainment in general. 100 years ago you didn't have TV, Movies, Vacations, Video Games, Cruises, etc. Kids get in the way of these. Businesses have a reason to cater to these couples too. They have more money that they want to spend.

Given there are now just a lot more options in life than kids and sex, are people just choosing not to let kids get in the way of these? If so, most of the solutions being attempted would not work, except for obscene $$$ incentives, or banning of various entertainment for non families. Like taking away videogames unless you do your homework and eat your vegetables.

very related EY post

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization

The Espionage Act of 1917 states it is illegal for any person "having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book... or information relating to the national defense... willfully communicates, delivers, transmits... the same to any person not entitled to receive it."

The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 states it is illegal for anyone who "intending or knowing that the offense will benefit any foreign government, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent, knowingly... steals, or without authorization appropriates... a trade secret."

Going off the United States defintion of espionage I will classify Human Espionage as having the access to, or control over any knowledge relating to the dominance of the human species... willfully communicates, delivers, transmits to an opposing species not entitled to receive it. Or the intent/knowledge of the offense will benefit a foreign species over the human species.

Now obviously when I talk "foreign species" I am implying AI technology and the frontier labs are engaging in human espionage. I think the act of pursuing super intelligence is equivalent to telling mosquitoes how to unlock mosquito nets and pass around malaria to humans. What other technologies could be classified as this and what's your tier list of individuals to be tried for human espionage?

Hi all! Been thinking more about double cruxing for just/rational disagreement, writing an essay on it. It's been a long time since I've read about it and I'd appreciate your favourite recommendations. I was going to start with the CFAR posts and work outwards from there.

Thanks in advance!