I picked "resisting social pressure" and then when I got the second message, I thought "Aha, I was asked if I value resisting social pressure, and now I'm offered the chance of applying social pressure to make things go my way, to see if I will defect against the very virtue I claimed to be in favor of! I'm guessing that there's a different message tailored for each of the virtues, where everyone is offered some action that is actually the opposite of the virtue they claimed to endorse, to see how many people are consistent. Clever! Can't wait to see what the opposite choice for the other virtues is."

Now I'm slightly disappointed that this wasn't the case.

If we had 2.5 petabytes of storage, there'd be no reason for the brain to bother!

I recall reading an anecdote (though don't remember the source, ironically enough) from someone who said they had an exceptional memory, saying that such a perfect memory gets nightmarish. Everything they saw constantly reminded them of some other thing associated with it. And when they recalled a memory, they didn't just recall the memory, but they also recalled each time in their life when they had recalled that memory, and also every time they had recalled recalling those memories, and so on.

I also have a friend whose memory isn't quite that good, but she says that unpleasant events have an extra impact on her because the memory of them never fades or weakens. She can recall embarrassments and humiliations from decades back with an equal force and vividity as if they happened yesterday.

Those kinds of anecdotes suggest to me that the issue is not that the brain would in principle have insufficient capacity for storing everything, but that recalling everything would create too much interference and that the median human is more functional if most things are forgotten.

EDIT: Here is one case study reporting this kind of a thing:

We know of no other reported case of someone who recalls personal memories over and over again, who is both the warden and the prisoner of her memories, as AJ reports. We took seriously what she told us about her memory. She is dominated by her constant, uncontrollable remembering, finds her remembering both soothing and burdensome, thinks about the past “all the time,” lives as if she has in her mind “a running movie that never stops” [...]

One way to conceptualize this phenomenon is to see AJ as someone who spends a great deal of time remembering her past and who cannot help but be stimulated by retrieval cues. Normally people do not dwell on their past but they are oriented to the present, the here and now. Yet AJ is bound by recollections of her past. As we have described, recollection of one event from her past links to another and another, with one memory cueing the retrieval of another in a seemingly “unstoppable” manner. [...]

Like us all, AJ has a rich storehouse of memories latent, awaiting the right cues to invigorate them. The memories are there, seemingly dormant, until the right cue brings them to life. But unlike AJ, most of us would not be able to retrieve what we were doing five years ago from this date. Given a date, AJ somehow goes to the day, then what she was doing, then what she was doing next, and left to her own style of recalling, what she was doing next. Give her an opportunity to recall one event and there is a spreading activation of recollection from one island of memory to the next. Her retrieval mode is open, and her recollections are vast and specific.

I don't immediately see the connection in your comment to what I was saying, which implies that I didn't express my point clearly enough.

To rephrase: I interpreted FeepingCreature's comment to suggest that 2.5 petabytes feels implausibly large, and that it to be implausible because based on introspection it doesn't feel like one's memory would contain that much information. My comment was meant to suggest that given that we don't seem to ever run out of memory storage, then we should expect our memory to contain far less information than the brain's maximum capacity, as there always seems to be more capacity to spare for new information.

To me any big number seems plausible, given that AFAIK people don't seem to have run into upper limits of how much information the human brain can contain - while you do forget some things that don't get rehearsed, and learning does slow down at old age, there are plenty of people who continue learning things and having a reasonably sharp memory all the way to old age. If there's any point when the brain "runs out of hard drive space" and becomes unable to store new information, I'm at least not aware of any study that would suggest this.

I think that sharing the reasoning in private with a small number of people might somewhat help with the "Alignment people specifically making bad strategic decisions that end up having major costs" cost, but not the others, and even then it would only help a small amount of the people working in alignment rather than the field in general.

Would you expect to see retrospectives of cases where they did a good job? If an investigation concludes that "X made these accusations about Y but we determined them to be meritless", then there are good reasons for neither CEA nor X to bring further attention to those accusations by including them in a public retrospective. Or in cases where accusations are determined to have merit, it may still be that the victims don't want the case to be discussed in public any more than strictly necessary. Or there may be concerns of a libel suit from the wrongdoer, limiting what can be said openly.

I think that (for this thing and many others too), some people are going to mark you down for it and some people are going to mark you up for it. So the relevant question is not "will some people mark me down" but "what kinds of people will mark me down and what kinds of people will mark me up, and which one of those is the group that I care more about".

You can still send what's called an "Intro" to people who haven't Liked you, but there's a limitation that non-paid members can only see one Intro message at a time (so if you get one and want to see others, you need to either Like or reject the person).

That is a thing that I have seen happen! The normal reply is to remember that ideal parent figures are intentionally unrealistic and portray a standard that isn't even meant to be humanly attainable. (Though also I think the version in the chatbot comes off as a little too over-the-top loving, so it doesn't necessarily quite hit the intended ideal either.) But if you feel like you might react to it this way, it might be a good idea to try working through the anxiety in a less directly triggering way and avoid ideal parent chatbots for now.

Note that while I haven't seen any outside discussion of this article in particular, the consensus among historians seems to be that Guns, Germs and Steel cherry-picks its evidence and misrepresents its overall facts in order to support a thesis Diamond had decided he wanted to present as true (see e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4). As a result, my personal heuristic is to not believe any analysis that Diamond presents, since there's a significant probability that it's misleading in ways that I wouldn't be able to spot.