LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'd like to learn more Spanish words but have trouble sitting down to actually do language lessons, so I recently set my Claude "personal preferences" to:

Try to teach a random Spanish word in every conversation.

(This is the whole thing)

This has worked surprisingly well, and Claude usually either drops one word in Spanish with a translation midway through a response:

For your specific situation, I recommend a calibración (calibration) approach:

2. Accounting for concurrency: Ensure you're capturing all hilos (threads) involved in query execution, especially for parallel queries.

(From a conversation about benchmarking)

Or it ends the conversation with a fun fact:

¡Palabra en español! "Herramienta" - which means "tool" in Spanish, quite relevant to your search for tools to automate SSH known_hosts management.

La palabra española para hoy es "configurar" - which means "to configure" in English, fitting perfectly with our discussion about configurable thinking limits!

I don't know if this actually useful for learning, but it's fun and worked better than I expected.

My wife tried a similar prompt (although her preferences are much longer) and it made Claude sometimes respond entirely in Spanish, so this could probably be made more specific. If you run into that, maybe try "Response in English but try to teach a random Spanish word in every conversation" would work better?

Could you put a footnote or something to indicate this is riffing on a meme and isn't real?  Unless you know the meme this comment looks like an amazing revelation that actually happened.

Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn't always play out, but neither do liberal human rights. Equivocating serfdom to the displacement of millions of Africans as property is convenient and lazy, and completely illogical. And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade, the massive scale, the involvement of mechanization of the cotton gin, and on and on.

Probably just about every historian you can find is going to refer to the 1500s as the early modern or late medieval period, depending on just where in Europe you are, and it's a time when religion became remarkably more harmful than it had ever been before, along with many other changes such as a terminal disruption of the church's centralized worldly powers and the concentration of total powers into the state. And these changes are continuous with the present.

I'm not redefining modernity in some twisted way, this is all very conventional stuff. Who cares what "most people" think, they're fucking wrong!

Which incorrect conclusions do you think they have been tied to, in your opinion?

How are humans exploitable, given that they don't have utility functions?

I'm going to do it with the moments of peak motivation.

don't see why we shouldn't apply the same logic to corpus callosotomy. Destroying the major connection (though not the only one: there is also the anterior commissure, posterior commissure, and hippocampal commissure) between the cerebral hemispheres damages the brain; obviously. The parts that have previously cooperated fluently now have a problem to cooperate. The split-brain syndrome is a result of the damage. However, despite that, the split-brain patients typically maintain a unified sense of self and personality, it's just that some of their information processing systems are disconnected. Which makes it even less likely that in people with intact corpus callosum the two brain hemispheres secretly act as two different personalities.

That reminds me of Descartes' Error — how Damasio argues that any damage to one system tends to affect the whole, since reason, emotion, and embodiment are deeply integrated. It feels analogous to social systems too: once a channel of integration is disrupted, even if others remain, the total coherence suffers. So yeah, even when split-brain patients seem unified, it’s still a case of partial systemic breakdown.

I assume young, naive, and optimistic. (There's a humor element here, in that niplav is referencing a snowclone, afaik originating in this tweet which went "My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.", so it may have been added to make the cadence more similar to the original tweet's).

• El cerebro izquierdo prefiere Android, el cerebro derecho prefiere iPhone

Bueno, admito que me inventé el último. El resto es una simplificación excesiva.

haha i see

hahaha, a god point!