eigen's Shortform

Robin Hanson has a book, Elephant in the Brain, that does a good job getting his basic views across.

I've reread portions of the Sequences, and have derived notable additional value from it. Particularly fruitful at one point (many years ago) was when I reread a bunch of the "Map and territory" stuff (Noticing Confusion; Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions; Fake Beliefs) while substituting in examples of "my beliefs about myself" in place of all of Eliezer's examples -- because somehow that was a different domain I hadn't trained the concepts on when I read it the first time.

I plan to probably do more such exercises soon. I've found "check where my trigger-action patterns are and aren't matching the normative patterns suggested by the Sequences, and design exercises to investigate this" pretty useful in general, and its been ~5 years since I've done it, which seems time for a re-do.

I haven't done a full re-read, but I have re-read certain chapters. It was hella helpful. The experience was often, "Ohhhh, I only got the shadow of the idea on my first pass, it's grown since then but has been scattered, and the reread let me unify the ideas and feel confident I'm now getting the core idea and it's repercussions."

I did, but my last re-reading was long ago, so I don't remember the exact impression.

The comments are sometimes nice, but together they make the already-too-long sequences ten times longer. It would be nice to pick (and edit, if necessary) the best comments for the book version. Because I usually recommend reading the book instead of web, precisely because it is better to read the entire book than to read 10% of the web version and then decide it is too much. So I think you didn't lose much by not reading the comments.

I've reread them about 3-4 times. Two of those times were with comments (the first time and the most recent time). I found reading the comments quite valuable.

I tend to get "nothing" from Reddit in the sense that you described. In other words, I can't distill any insight from what I've been reading. However, I think this is a more general thing than something that just happens on Reddit or time wasting websites.

Sometimes I'll study something for an hour or two and still can't distill my learning into a few sentences. I think the human brain is good at retrieving knowledge upon inquiry rather than generating it on demand. Generating what we learned is a much harder thing to do for any type of task.

I don't read Reddit, but I have a similar experience with Hacker News. While I am reading it, it seems interesting, but when I afterwards try to remember anything useful, I can't.

My explanation is that I spend my time reading, but I don't spend my time processing what I have just read, because I am immediately moving to the next topic. Passivity is bad for remembering. (Compare with how spaced repetition learning software requires you to guess the correct answer, before telling you. Or how the mere act of note-taking improves remembering, even if you don't read your notes afterwards.) But again, reading without actively working with the topic seems to be the default approach when reading sites such as Reddit that throw a lot of content at you. With active engagement, my procrastination sessions wouldn't take an hour or two, but the entire day.

Seems like the rule is that you can only meaningfully process a limited amount of topics during a day. Reading a book seems like about the right amount. Also, the things in the book are related to each other, it is not a random mix of unrelated facts. (Related things are easier to remember than unrelated ones. Even if you make up a silly relation between them; a few mnemonic techniques are based on that.)

Somewhat surprised the answer for reddit was nothing. It didn't provide you with jokes or an opportunity to chill reading moderately interesting comments?

(Which is not to say that those things are worth it, just surprised that they weren't on the list to be evaluated)

The idea of ontological flexibility [LW · GW] hints at this.

Yudkowsky's views can now be found mostly on Twitter. He is very pessimistic, for reasons described in detail in his List of Lethalities [LW · GW] and better summarized by Zvi [LW · GW]. I'm curious about Alexander's current views - I don't keep up on Astral Codex Ten.

To me it seems that Yudkowsky's reasons for pessimism are all good ones, but do not stack up to nearly the 99%+ p(doom) he's espoused. I've attempted to capture why that is in essentially all of my posts, but in brief form in Cruxes of disagreement on alignment difficulty [LW(p) · GW(p)], The (partial) fallacy of dumb superintelligence [LW · GW] and in a little more detail on one important point of disagreement in Conflating value alignment and intent alignment is causing confusion [LW · GW].

None of those address one of his important reasons for pessimism: humans have so far shown themselves to be just terrible at taking the dangers of AGI and the difficulties of alignment seriously. Here I think EY is too pessimistic; humans are short-sighted and argumentative as hell, but they are capable of taking serious issues seriously when they're staring them in the face. Attitudes will change when AI is obviously important, and our likely timelines are long enough for that to make at least some difference.

Read ~all the sequences. Read all of SSC (don't keep up with ACX).

Pessimistic about survival, but attempting to be aggresively open-minded about what will happen instead of confirmation biasing my views from 2015. 

Comment removed for posterity.

Reading Infinite Jest for the first time—it’s really good! I wish I could describe it in a sentence or two, but the thing is so complex I’m not sure that I can.

Re-posted here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X4nYiTLGxAkR2KLAP/open-and-welcome-thread-december-2019?commentId=nS9vvTiDLZYow2KSK [LW(p) · GW(p)]