LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The thing is, for a given amount of centrifugal force, required material strength is proportional to radius.

Yeah. I wondered what if we have a series of concentric cylinders connected by spokes or walls, then the required material strength might be lower? The amount of material grows with radius, and you can't use all floors as living space because they will have different g's, but maybe some floors could be industry or infrastructure. And maybe the structure could be safer as it wouldn't have so many moving parts in contact.

If there were no downsides to resolving a persistent issue, then why has it lasted so long??

If I understand correctly, your claim is that when we see long-standing issues like depression, chronic neck pain, or patterns of emotional avoidance persisting for years, it's more likely than not to be some sort of adaptive coping strategy—essentially a way the mind or body protects itself from harm–otherwise the issue would have been resolved. 

Why do you think this is more likely than a mundane explanations such as "bad luck in the genetic lottery, no obvious levers to pull"?

Is there a reason why every LLM tokenizer I've seen excludes slurs? It seems like a cheap way to train for AI assistant behavior. 

Also notable that numbers are tokenized individually - I assume this greatly improves its performance in basic arithmetic tasks as compared to GPTs.

Re: moral patienthood, I understand the Sam Harris position (paraphrased by him here as "Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.") as saying that anything else that supposedly matters, only matters because conscious minds care about it. Like, a painting has no more intrinsic value in the universe than any other random arrangement of atoms like a rock; its value stems purely from conscious minds caring about it. Same with concepts like beauty and virtue and biodiversity and anything else that's not directly about conscious minds.

And re: caring more about one's close circle: well, everyone in your close circle has their own close circle they care about, and if you repeat that exercise often enough, the vast majority of people in the world are in someone's close circle.

I remember reading about SAD treatment by lumens in Inadequate Equilibria, though I did not finish the book.

Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further

To me there seems almost an anticorrelation between being a diligent student and going further. It's not gender specific, I've noticed it in musicians in general, and it puzzles and frustrates me. It seems the more diligent they are about learning technique and proper ways and so on, the less willing they are to write their own music. I've known conservatory folks who are literally scared of it. While the messy amateurish folks often do compose, and it's occasionally good. Maybe you have to be a little bit independent-minded to go further than others.

There's a little bit of contradiction in there, in that it's not enough to be independent - you also need some amount of good technique. But you almost need to luck into it, acquire it in your own way. If you get it by being too much of a good student, then that mindset in itself will limit you.

The older I get, and the more I learn about Tolkien, the more he disgusts me.

He is the inverse of all I value and all I find good in the world. 

You've mentioned that you are on optimists discord server. Is there any way I can join this server to ask a few questions about misuse risk there?

CS: Thanks! Although I've done a lot of CS over the past four years - ML, apps, published papers, worked in labs at MIT, etc.- I've never formally immersed myself in theory by watching lectures or reading CS books. Since MIT OCW approximates a flexible and structured curriculum, I thought it best (the fact that the MIT Challenge exists and that I have friends taking the actual classes at MIT were no small factors either).

Sleep: My sleep schedules have been messy for the past two years, but I'm trying to make it a habit to sleep by 9 (10, latest) to ensure I get a steady 8 hours.

Writing: I hope to be able to write blog posts (such as this one) better. I struggled to sketch out what I wanted to say and found putting it on paper to be Herculean. It's a bit hard for me to illustrate what exactly I mean by "better," but writing closer to what William Zinnser and Paul Graham is what I'm targeting right now. I'm going about this as Ben Franklin did. I'll modify my approach as I go. The currently-set goal for writing is to be able to become able to write something like Not Boring for protein design.

“One such exercise he documents was taking a favorite magazine of his, The Spectator, and taking notes on articles that appeared there. He would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them, trying to reconstruct the original argument from memory. After finishing, he “compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Realizing that his vocabulary was limited, he developed another strategy. By turning the prose into verse, he could replace words with synonyms that matched in meter or rhyme. To improve his sense of the rhetorical flow of an essay, he tried his imitation approach again, but this time he jumbled up the hints so he would have to determine the correct order of the sequence of ideas as he wrote again.Once he had established some of the mechanics of writing, he moved on to the more difficult task of writing in a style that would persuade. When reading an English grammar book, he was exposed to the idea of the Socratic method, of challenging another’s ideas through probing questions rather than direct contradiction. He then went to work, carefully avoiding “abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation,” instead focusing[…]” - Ultralearning

Practice: I'm working through the CFAR handbook right now. (I understand it isn't a substitute for the actual camp, but the Atlas Fellowship's gone). I'm picking one concept from it, committing it to memory (SRS), executing it every chance I get during the day, and journalling the results at night. I review them in the morning and make notes on improvement. I'm going to apply for ESPR when it opens up again. 

I will take “actually, it’s even more complicated” as a reasonable response. Yes, it probably is.