LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it's very important, but my sense is that it's some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don't already know what it's supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don't like "I will go listen to it" as an answer.

So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don't get it yet.

I haven't looked into it; seems plausible it helps, but since it's a signalling molecule I'm wary of amplifying it too much. 

The best known amplifier of NO in the bloodstream is viagra. My understanding is they haven't found general health effects from it, despite looking really hard and first investigating it as a treatment for heart disease. 

Yeah when I was writing this part of me kept saying "but humming is so cheap, why shouldn't everyone do it all the time?", and I had to remind myself that attention is a cost. This is despite the fact that it's not cheap for me (due to trigeminal neuralgia; I'll probably stick with enovid myslf) and attention is a limiting reagent for me. The too-cheap-to-meter argument is really seductive. 

Maybe I could even write a sequence on this?

Note to self, write a post about the novel akrasia solutions I thought up before becoming a rationalist.

• Figuring out how to want to want to do things
• Personalised advertising of Things I Wanted to Want to Do
• What I do when all else fails

I've definitely noticed that "not reading sheet music" and "guitar" are concepts that go together, but I have to ask "why do beginning guitarists not learn sheet music?". It feels something like algebra, where some percentage of the population just look at a different notation with some abstractions baked in and immediately decide it's not for them.  

Thanks, this is really useful.

I am of the opinion that you should use good epistemics when talking to the public or policy makers, rather than using bad epistemics to try to be more persuasive.

Do you have any particular examples as evidence of this? This is something I've been thinking a lot about for AI and I'm quite uncertain. It seems that ~0% of advocacy campaigns have good epistemics, so it's hard to have evidence about this. Emotional appeals are important and often hard to reconcile with intellectual honesty.

Of course there are different standards for good epistemics and it's probably bad to outright lie, or be highly misleading. But by EA standards of "good epistemics" it seems less clear if the benefits are worth the costs.

As one example, the AI Safety movement may want to partner with advocacy groups who care about AI using copyrighted data or unions concerned about jobs. But these groups basically always have terrible epistemics and partnering usually requires some level of endorsement of their positions.

As an even more extreme example, as far as I can tell about 99.9% of people have terrible epistemics by LessWrong standards so to even expand to a decently sized movement you will have to fill the ranks with people who will constantly say and think things that you think are wrong.

Yeah I wish. I'm even from the region that has a lot of German influence in its dialect (as if Dutch itself wasn't Germanlike enough), but my innate comprehension is at the level where in high school I once looked through the list of words to study before a multiple-choice test, thought "yeah this looks doable, I'd know most of these and thus pass the test", and then went on to score worse than random on the actual test as the only student. (If only that teacher could see me living in Germany now; we'd have a good laugh.) And that's not even considering the language has fifty words for "the" as well as adjectives, which will take forever to become automated in my head.

Didn't have much trouble with French in school -- not that I remember any of it by now -- and evidently English is no problem either. It's just German. I'm listening to German podcasts, posting in German subreddits (using tools like DeepL Write or, before that existed, just DeepL translate it back into English and see if it comes out right), speaking to the neighbors in German, reading German books, recently started chatting with some coworkers in German: the whole shebang. It has been five years and my German is functional now, but only barely...

Ah, look on the bright side: I got the opportunity to work here in English so far and allow myself this time to get that foundation going. And at least I seem to have Zusammenschreibung down to about native level because it works exactly the same as in Dutch. (I think this is an objectively useful feature, which English kinda has it but takes them decades to decide "life saver" or "web site" are really just one word and it needn't use a space that also, ambiguously, separates things that are not part of the noun, so German has that going for it!)

Generalizing, though, I cannot imagine there exist many languages easier than German for a Dutch native (Afrikaans, maybe English because it's so simple and Germanic-ish, and perhaps something like Swedish? So that leaves German around rank ~5 out of about ten thousand languages?) so you're right in that regard, but it's still a considerable amount of effort. It's far beyond learning a dialect but, yeah, also short of learning something like Japanese. The inverse is easier because German has all the grammar rules Dutch has and then some, so they just need to use a subset of what they know.