LessWrong 2.0 Reader

 A Great Man and an inspiration to me and to this community and to all thinking men.

God rest his soul in peace in Paradise.

Due to the weather, we're moving this from Saturday to Sunday. Same time same place.

I have maybe a naive question. How much do we need to know to find the MSP image within the neural network? Is it only doable if we know the HMM to begin with? Or could it be feasible someday to inspect a neural network, find something that looks like an MSP image, and infer the HMM from it?

Edit: I found the post usefwl, thankmuch!!

Mh, was gonna ask when you were taking it.  I'm preparing to try it as a sleep-aid for when I adjust my polyphasic sleep-schedule (wanting to go fm 16h-cycles potentially down to 9h) bc it seems potentially drowsymaking and has much faster plasma decay-rate^[1] compared to alts.  This is good for polyphasic if not want drowsy aft wake.

The data in ^[1] concerns 100mg tablets, however, and a larger dose (eg 400mg) may be longer. The kinetic model^[2] they use will prob be good estimate of plasma concentrations even if adjust dose.

Questions is whether it's good estimation for duration of action in the brain, esp given that it's "single-compartment model" (the blood is one compartment, and the brain is another). My heuristic for whether plasma T predicts brain T is whether the molecule v easily passes the BBB (as melatonin does), since then I can guess that the curve for the brain will look similar to the curve for the blood, offset slightly down and to the right.
 

1. ^{^}

   

   Typical concentration-time curve of plasma ʟ-theanine of one participant after intake of 100 mg ʟ-theanine via one capsule (A) or 250 mL green tea (B). Circles represent measured concentrations of ʟ-theanine. The line represents the modeled plasma concentration-time curve by the use of the 1-compartment model.
   — Kinetics of ʟ-Theanine Uptake and Metabolism in Healthy Participants Are Comparable after Ingestion of ʟ-Theanine via Capsules and Green Tea, , 4 - ScienceDirect

2. ^{^}

   Hot tip, you can screenshot pdf equations and ask gpt-4-turbo (updated) to write it in latex and/or jupyter-notebook-compatible python^[3].

   

3. ^{^}

   Getting a tweakable python model for it was nontrivial after 35m of trying, so i'll prob j wing it w 200mg 1h pre bedtime and do 3h sleep, and adjust bon feelings.  ig the primary variable that determines how alert i feel upon waking up is getting the sleep-cycle timing right, and planning my wake-up routines (lights & text-to-speech-model as alarm) for j after I've done REM-sleep^[4].

4. ^{^}

   While I probably would feel alert if waking up in middle of REM-sleep (after emerging from deep), I want to avoid that bc studies show bad effects from targeted deprivation of REM (leaving other phases untouched).

I'm gonna guess that you actually wouldn't make people pay for drinks if they said they missed because they had COVID, there was a death in the family, etc.?

This is a tough call. How do you determine what is a "legitimately bad enough" case to miss the event? The examples you mention are clearly bad enough but there are other situation where it's much more personal. If I'm feeling low on energy is that a choice I am making or an unavoidable fact about my metabolism? You would have to set up some kind of tribunal or voting for deciding on these cases. That's a lot of effort and would only create bad vibes. So no, if you don't come you pay, no matter the reason. However, enforcement is lax. Mostly it's up to the people themselves to say "Yeah, today is my turn since two weeks ago I couldn't make it". If someone considers their case to be special they can easily get away with not paying and in all likelihood nobody would even notice let alone question it.

This feels a bit loose on the definitions. I agree that finitism seems intuitively reasonable, and that the finite amount of information we can have about the terrain of the world out there around us is a reason that, as far as I can currently see ahead, it ought to never be possible to conclude the greater multiverse is able to contain infinities.

But I also don't see any way to strongly conclude the multiverse must not contain infinite-sized objects. I know folks who insist that if that's possible, there should be exactly one, infinite, agent in the multiverse.

In any case, I agree with philip_b that this post is pretty hard to parse and harder to check for mathematical validity.

Claude is such a swell dude tbh. hope he's ok

I think that you're right that people's jobs are a significant thing driving the difference here (thanks), but I'd guess that the bigger impact of jobs is via jobs --> culture than via jobs --> individual decisions. This impression is based on a sense of "when visiting Constellation, I feel less pull to engage in the open-ended idea exploration vs at FHI", as well as "at FHI, I think people whose main job was something else would still not-infrequently spend some time engaging with the big open questions of the day".

I might be wrong about that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My introduction to Dennett, half a lifetime ago, was this talk: 

That was the start of his profound influence on my thinking. I especially appreciated his continuous and unapologetic defense of the meme as a useful concept, despite the many detractors of memetics.

Sad to know that we won't be hearing from him anymore.

This isn't anything fundamentally new, is it? You could have the same discussion in the past about say, books. Goods and services that exist only in the realm of ideas have been around for ages.