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'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 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 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.

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)]