Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Drake Morrison
Carpathia Day - LessWrong
(The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one) Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece of your world, when no one would fault you for doing less. In the early morning of April 15, the RMS Titanic began to sink with more than two thousand souls on board.
Meaningful Questions Have Return Types — LessWrong
One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning more about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make real progress you have to develop the skill of Righting a Wrong Question. This is a classic, old-school rationalist idea. The standard examples are asking about determinism, or free will, or consciousness.
CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops — LessWrong
I've spent probably 200 hours trying to understand stuff near here, in various ways, across the last 15 years. I don't have a lack of curiosity about it. That's good to hear. Any insights? People who run all kinds of psychological workshops or meditation retreats tell me that their workshops can occasionally trigger manic or psychotic states in folks with a predisposition in that direction.
A Slow Guide to Confronting Doom — LessWrong
Following a few events in April 2022 that caused a many people to update sharply and negatively on outcomes for humanity, I wrote A Quick Guide to Confronting Doom.
Strange New World
Strange New World The design landscape is rapidly evolving alongside our fast-paced world that we live in. Fuelled by technological advancements and a relentless drive for innovation, each year produces profound, cultural shifting inventions/ innovations. As industries evolve and consumer expectations shift, designers are adopting new methods and tools to stay ahead of the curve.
Deep and obvious points in the gap between your thoughts and your pictures of thought — LessWrong
Despite some problems with the dual process model, I think of this as a S1/S2 thing. It's relatively easy to get an insight into S2. All it takes is a valid argument that convinces you. It's much harder to get an insight into S1, because that requires that a bunch of beliefs to change such that the insight becomes an obvious facet of the world rather than a linguistically specified claim. We might also think of this in terms of GOFAI. Tokens in a Lisp program aren't grounded to reality by default.
The Onion Test for Personal and Institutional Honesty — LessWrong
[co-written by Chana Messinger and Andrew Critch, Andrew is the originator of the idea] You (or your organization or your mission or your family or etc.) pass the “onion test” for honesty if each layer hides but does not mislead about the information hidden within. When people get to know you better, or rise higher in your organization, they may find out new things, but should not be shocked by the types of information that were hidden.
Ruling Out Everything Else — LessWrong
Clear communication is difficult. Most people, including many of those with thoughts genuinely worth sharing, are not especially good at it. I am only sometimes good at it, but a major piece of what makes me sometimes good at it is described below in concrete and straightforward terms. The short version of the thing is "rule out everything you didn't mean." That phrase by itself could imply a lot of different things, though, many of which I do not intend.
Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child — LessWrong
(Excerpted from "mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus", about an unusually selfish dath ilani, "Keltham", who dies in a plane accident and ends up in Cheliax, a country governed by D&D!Hell.
Slack Has Positive Externalities For Groups — LessWrong
A few salient examples of this idea particularly relevant to the Berkeley rationalist community (which I didn't put in the post because I don't want them taking over everything)...
Your Cheerful Price — LessWrong
There's a concept I draw on often in social interactions. I've been calling it the "happy price", but that is originally terminology by Michael Ellsberg with subtly different implications. So I now fork off the term "cheerful price", and specialize it anew. Earlier Facebook discussion here.
Making Vaccine - LessWrong
Back in December, I asked how hard it would be to make a vaccine for oneself. Several people pointed to radvac. It was a best-case scenario: an open-source vaccine design, made for self-experimenters, dead simple to make with readily-available materials, well-explained reasoning about the design, and with the name of one of the world’s more competent biologists (who I already knew of beforehand) stamped on the whitepaper.
Lars Doucet's Georgism series on Astral Codex Ten — LessWrong
[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors] Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander) and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Drake
Contact Drake, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack