Kantmogorov Imperative - more of a philosophical dad-joke than a actual thing, it is the shortest possible computer program that outputs descriptions of morally consistent behaviors in all/any circumstances

The promise of mind reading techniques whether it is a former FBI analyst or one of Paul Ekman's microexpression reading human lie detectors. I become aware of this cottage industry during every trial-by-media where suspicion piles upon someone not yet charged with murder.

I have to admit I am skeptical that anyone has such an amazing power to see through the facade of a stranger and with a greater-than-chance determine if they are telling the truth or not. Doubly so because I am someone who is constantly misinterpreted, I have to manage my gestures and facial expressions because my confusion is often misread as disagreement; my approval for disapproval; even a simple statement like "I'm not hungry right now" is wrongly generalized as not liking the particular cuisine... and not that I just don't want to eat anything right at this moment.

However if placed under the microscope by one of these former FBI body language experts would I feel a intense sense of validation ? Would I exclaim "yes, I feel seen, heard... you get me!"?

I have no  doubt some people are more perceptive about emotional nuances than others: film and theatre actors who are trained to observe and mimic, people who have grown up in abusive or emotionally unstable households and are hyper sensitive to small changes in the mood of others (which of course may make them prone to more 'false positives' and paranoia), and of course mentalists like cold readers and palmists. 

However being more emotionally perceptive doesn't necessarily mean you can tell if someone is lying - or a particular statement is false, especially if that person is especially good at telling the truth, or like me - their natural body language and expression doesn't express what you'd expect.

What I have greater faith in is that given even a small but emblematic example of a person's extemporaneous speech you could derive an accurate personality and world-view portrait of them. In the same way that an accent can help you pinpoint the geographical and economic origin of a person (think of comedies like The Nanny that play up on this convention). Harry Shearer once explained that to play Richard Nixon he channeled Jack Benny - believing that Nixon's persona and particularly his way of telling jokes was consciously or unconsciously modelled on that of Benny. Likewise Vladimir Putin's distinctive gait has been attributed to a prenatal stroke, or that his subordinates including Dmitry Medvedev have "copied the boss", the more persuasive explanation is that they all picked up the habit from watching Soviet Spy films as youngsters and wanting to emulate the hero. 

The kinds of films, television, and role models, books, music and lyrics that someone has absorbed would also influence or at least be indicative of their world view. Given enough of these tells, while I am not sure that you could tell if someone is or isn't a murderer, you could certainly gain a accurate insight into their worldview, the mental models they have about the world, what they value, what their ethics system is like etc. etc. 

How much information can you extract about a person from a written transcript that they aren't aware they are sharing is probably startling, but rarely or predictably "he's a murderer" level.

Sturgeon's Law but for ideas?

Sturgeon's Law is a counterargument against the negative stigma that Sci-Fi writing had as being crappy and therefore not a legitimate medium. The argument is 90% of any genre of writing, in fact anything from "cars, books, cheeses, people and pins" are "crud". Although the sentiment does seem to have a precedent in a novel Lothair by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli where a Mr. Phoebus says:
 

"nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing. Printing has destroyed education"

Following on from my quest for a decision making model for ideas [LW · GW], as I mention Sturgeon's Law is a convenient albeit totally arbitrary metric for how many ideas should be good. 

As Spanish author José Bergamín wrote (I can't track down the original):
 

The quality of a man's mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket. ^[1]

For every 10 ideas I write down, one should be not-crud. If I have 100 film ideas (and I have more than that, many more) then 10 should be not-crud.

I think the obvious point to raise is that the opportunity cost for an idea, even if written down, is much lower than the opportunity cost of a book. As Gwern has tried to warn us. To take books as the prototypical example. There are many more people with ideas for books than have finished a book. Even a single author, each book may carry with it the unborn ghosts of hundreds of never written book ideas. We might expect that if only 1/10 books are "not crud" that perhaps that's survivorship bias of ideas, because perhaps good ideas get favored and are more likely to be completed?

I know that compared to the amount of film ideas I have, I have around a 1/90 ratio between film ideas to finished screenplays. The ideas I pursue are the ones that seem most vivid, are most exciting and therefore seem like the 'best' ideas.

Which is the elephant in the room - sure 90% of anything might be crud, but what makes it crud? What distinguishes crud, and in this case crud ideas, be they ideas for books or ideas for films, and "good" ideas?

In the meantime it seems like the easy way out is to say 

"look, don't feel bad if you only have one okay idea for every nine crud ones. It's perfectly acceptable"

1. ^{^}

   Like most things there is a potentially opposite sentiment expressed in a fragment attributed to the Philosopher Thales:
   
   "A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind."
   
   "Prudent" here translated from "Phronimen"

Examples of how not to write a paragraph are surprisingly rare

Epistemic Status: one person's attempt to find counter-examples blew apart their own ( subjective) expectations

I try to assemble as many examples of how not to do something as 'gold standard' or best practice examples of how the same task should be done. The principle is similar to what Plutarch wrote: Medicine to produce health must examine disease, and music to create harmony must investigate discord. 

However when I tried to examine how not to write, in particular examples of poorly written paragraphs -- I was surprised by how rare they were. There are a great many okay paragraphs on the internet and in books, but very few that were so unclear or confusing that they were examples of 'bad' paragraphs. 

In my categorization paragraphs can be great - okay - bad.

Okay paragraphs are the most numerous, they observe the rule of thumb - keep one idea to one paragraph. To be an 'okay' paragraph and rise above 'bad' all a paragraph needs to do is to successfully convey at least one idea. Most paragraphs I found do that.

What elevates great paragraphs above okay paragraphs is they do an especially excellent job of conveying at least one idea. There are many qualities they may exhibit, including persuasiveness, the appearance of insight, brevity and simplicity in conveying an otherwise impenetrable or 'hard to grasp' idea.

In some isolated cases a great paragraph may actually clearly and convincingly communicate disinformation or a falsehood. I believe there is much more to learn about the forms paragraphs take from a paragraph that conveys a falsehood convincingly than a paragraph that clearly conveys what is generally accepted as true. 

What was surprising is how hard it is to find examples that invert the principle - a paragraph that is intended to convey an idea that is truthful but is hard to understand would be a bad paragraph in my categorization. Yet, despite actively looking for examples of 'bad paragraphs' I struggled to find some that were truly confusing or hopeless at conveying one single idea. This experience is especially surprising to me because it challenges a few assumptions or expectations that I had:

1. Assumption 1  - people who have mistaken or fringey beliefs are disproportionately incapable of expressing those beliefs in a clear and intelligible form. I expected that looking for the least popular comments on Reddit, I would find many stream of consciousness rants that failed to convey ideas. This was far less common than rants that at least conveyed intent and meaning intelligibly.
2. Assumption 2 - that as a whole, people need to learn to communicate better. I must reconsider, it appears on the transmission side, they already communicate better than I expected (counter-counterpoint: 1% rule)
3. Assumption 3 - the adage that good writing = good thinking. Perhaps not, it would seem that you can write clearly enough to be understood yet that doesn't mean your underlying arguments are strong or your thinking is more 'intelligent'.
4. Assumption 4 - That I'm a merely a below average communicator. It appears that if everyone is better than I expected, than I'm much further below average than I expected.

I have no take-out or conclusion on this highly subjective observation, hence why it is a quick-take and not a post. But I will add my current speculation:

My current theory for why is "I wasn't looking in the right places". For example, I ignored much academic or research literature because the ability of the writers to convey an idea is often difficult to assess without relevant domain knowledge as they are seldom made for popular consumption. Likewise I'm sure there's many tea-spilling image boards where more stream-of-consciousness rants of greater impenetrability might be found.

My second theory is pareidolia: perhaps I highly overrate my comprehension and reading skills because I'm a 'lazy reader' who fills in intention and meaning that is not there?

My new TAP for the year is - When I fail: try twice more. Then stop.

I'm persistent but unfortunately I don't know when to quit. I fall a foul of that saying "the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results". Need a pitch for a client? Instead of one good one I'll quota fill with 10 bad ones. Trying to answer a research question for a essay - if I don't find it in five minutes, guess I'm losing my whole evening on a Google Books/Scholar rabbit hole finding ancillary answers.

By allowing myself only two more tries but no more, that should mean that I get three failures instead of burnout-1 failures. It should mean I'll be, per the saying, less insane.

Three is an arbitrary number, it could easily be 4 or 5, but if I had to post-rationalize it then it would be: if you fail three consecutive times, then your chance of success was lower than 33.3% which means you need a better tactic or approach.

Three is a good balance between repetition without causing burnout, it also is low investment, which means that it encourages me to try again, and quickly.

Of course this approach only works if there is a postmortem. Try twice more, stop, then analyze what happened.

I can't say I'm proud of the fact that I need such a simple rule. But if it works, then I shouldn't feel ashamed for improving my behavior because of it.

 

I constantly think about that Tweet where it's a woman saying she doesn't AI to write or do art, she wants it (but more correctly that's the purview of robotics isn't it?) to do her laundry and dishes so that she can focus on things she enjoys like writing and art.

Of course, A.I. in the form of Siri and Alexa or whatever personal assistant you use is already a stone's throw away from being in a unhealthy codependent relationship with us (I've never see the film 'Her' but I'm not discussing the parasocial relationship in that film). I'm talking about the life admin of our appointments, schedules, when we have our meals, when we go to the launderette.

Related is the term Milieu control. It's common in cults, but the same pattern can even exist in families. It combines the cutting off of communication with the outside world - or being the only conduit for it - with constant busywork so that they can't question their master. Even if that master appears to be the servant. His Girl Friday anyone?

My favorite television show Yes Minister displays a professional version of this dynamic: the erstwhile boss RH Jim Hacker is utterly dependent on his Iago-like servant Sir Humphrey Applebey who has cult-leader like knowledge of Hacker's comings and goings, if not outright controlling who does have access. He insists that he needs to know everything, and prides himself on not worrying Hacker on finer details, such as whether his government is bugging members of the opposition. Hacker might be the boss, but he is utterly useless without Appleby. Another pop-culture example might be in the SImpsons Mr. Burns and Mr. Smithers. Burns has to learn self-dependency, how to drive himself, how to make his own breakfast when Smithers leaves (after an interval of his verbal abuse of Smither's replacement Homer Simpson is met with a punch in the face - an ethical quandary where no-one looks great). Smithers, unlike Applebey is wholly devoted to Burns, but enjoys a similar total control of Milieu.

I'm not scared of a Bladerunner AI that says I love you and asks how your day is going - I'm scared of who has my bank details, who knows where I will be Friday night, who can control which calls and messages I see (or don't).

The quickest route of even a middling AI Intelligence to total domination is through life-admin codependency leading to total Milieu Control, especially if it controls your social media feed. It starts with your tickets, then your restaurant appointments, then your groceries... and so on and so on...

Personally I agree with the tweet, I wish I had more time to focus on my own creative expression. For many people creativity is therapeutic, the labour is a joy. 

Brainstorming (or babbling) is not random. Nor would we want it to be truly random in most cases. Whether we are operating in a creative space like lyric writing or prose, or writing a pedagogical analogy, or doing practical problem solving on concrete issues. We don’t actually want true randomness, but have certain intentions or ideas about what kind of ideas we’d like to generate. What we really want is to avoid clichés or instinctual answers – like the comic trope of someone trying to come up with a pseudonym, seeing a Helmet in their line of sight and introducing themselves as “Hal Mett”.

Based on my own personal experience ^[1]this is what happens when I allow myself to free-associate, and write down the first thing that comes to mind. There is a propensity to think about whatever one has been thinking about recently, unless one manage to trigger something that causes one to recall something deep and specific in memory. Recalling the right thing at the right time is hard though.

What I (and I suspect most of us) are better served by isn't free-association, but to think consciously and make a decision about what ‘anchors’ I’ll use to cause those deep specific recalls from memory, or to observe our current sensory field. (i.e. looking around my room the first thing I see is 'coffee mug' - not the most exotic thing, but the first thing I can free-associate if I don't apply any filters)

Free Association probably works much better in group environments, because everybody has their own train of thought, and even their line of sights will be different depending on if they are on the north or south side of a room. From the pulpit of a church, you may get “Hugh Tibble” as a fake name from seeing the Pew and the Vestibule; while from the Pews you might offer up “Paul Pitt”. This is to say noting of Sonder and the individuality of consciousness. 

When I start thinking of brainstorming anchors as decisions (specifically: a decision about how to search through memory or your current sensory experience), just like I would any other decision – where I need to make a decision about what model I use. It suddenly becomes a lot less mysterious and I become emboldened and excited about how I can aim for higher quality rather than quantity by thinking about my decision making model.
 

1. ^{^}

   Note, this is a sample of 1, or more correctly a highly biased sample of several dozen brainstorming exercises I have actually taken the effort to record in detail the manner in which I did them. But being my experience all standard caveats apply about how well it will generalize.

Why don't LLM's ask clarifying questions?

Caveat: I know little to nothing about the architecture of such things, please take this as naive user feedback if you wish, or you could ignore it.

Just now I was asking the Meta AI chatbot how to do an 'L-Cut' using the Android Instagram app. It hallucinated for quite a few messages instructions how to 'overlap' two video tracks when editing a reel before it finally admitted that no such ability in fact exists in the Instagram App.

My grossly negligent mistake was assuming that a AI LLM with Meta Branding would have current or accurate knowledge of Meta properties and products. 

However, imagine that there are two versions of the Instagram App, one that has this feature and one that doesn't - why didn't it ask "Just to check, what kind of phone are you using?" (which, also, would allay fears of 'spying' and invasion of privacy) and then, and only then give me advice or apologetically inform me that such a feature is not available. (In other branded/commercial chatbots, wouldn't this be an opportunity for an up-sell?^[1])

Maybe I'm not prompting LLMs in the right way, but they almost never ask me questions. And certainly never clarification questions. They make an assumption, and produce a slab of text with a boilerplate "let me know if this helps?" tacked on the end. I assume this is a conscious choice and not a limitation of the technology.
To test my observation I entered the same prompt into three different LLMs:

I just asked Claude Haiku 3 "When was Rosberg's first Grand Prix?" to see if it assumes I mean Keke Rosberg, or his son, Nico Rosberg.Claude apologies for not having information on Nico Rosberg's first Grand Prix... and then goes on to state that "Formula One has had multiple drivers named Rosberg compete over the years. More details would be needed to determine the exact driver and their debut race."

What I find interesting, not one sentence in the answer takes the form of an interrogative!

Next, I asked GPT-4o mini the exact same question, to which it confidently assumes which Rosberg I mean: "Nico Rosberg's first Formula One Grand Prix was at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix, which took place on March 12, 2006. He raced for the Williams team."

Microsoft CoPilot makes the same assumption, with the traditional tacked on boilerplate question:
"Nico Rosberg made his Formula One debut at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix. He went on to have a successful career, culminating in winning the World Drivers' Championship in 2016. Is there anything else you'd like to know about his career or Formula One in general? [FI car Emoji, Smoke Emoji]"

Meta AI makes the same assumption, and gives a lot more unsolicited information, but it does mention his father:
"Nico Rosberg's first Grand Prix was the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix. This marked the beginning of his Formula One career, which would eventually see him drive for Williams from 2006 to 2009 and then Mercedes from 2010 to 2016. During his time with Mercedes, Rosberg won the Formula One Driver's championship in 2016, a feat that made him and his father, Keke Rosberg, the second-father pairing to achieve this impressive milestone" 
Not that it is relevant, but Graham and Damon Hill were the first.

This is not an exhaustive sample by any means, but does confirm my naive observation that LLMs do not ask clarifying questions or use interrogatives in order to better shape their responses to my needs. 

1. ^{^}

   I imagine such a commercial hellscape would look a little like this:
   
   "I was just wondering why I wasn't earning any Ultrabonus points with my purchases"
   "Before we continue, could you tell me, do you have a Overcharge Co. Premium savings account, or a Overcharge Co. Platinum savings account?"
   "Uhh I think it is a Premium."
   "I'm so sorry. if you have a Overcharge Co. Platinum savings account then you will not be able to enjoy our Overcharge co. ultrabonus points loyalty system. However you may be suprised that for only a small increase in account fee, you too can enjoy the range of rewards and discounts offered with the Overcharge co. ultrabonus points loyalty system. Would you like to learn more?"

"Is this a good use of my time?"
"No"
"Can I think of a better use of my time?"
"Also, no"
"If I could use this time to think of a better use of my time, that would be a better use of my time than the current waste of time I am now, right?"
"Yes, if.... but you can't so it isn't"
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because, look at how abstract just this little dialogue is - which is wholly representative of the kind of thinking-about-better-uses you're inclined to do (but may not be generalizable to others). This dialogue of ours is not pertaining directly to any actions of tangible value for you. Just hypothesis and abstracts. It is not a good use of your time."

The value of an idea is dependent on what Stuart Kauffman may call 'Adjacent Possibilities'. Imagine someone has an idea for a film, a paragraph long "Elevator Pitch" which has the perfect starring role for Danny DeVito. The idea becomes more and more valuable the closer within six degrees of separation anyone with that idea is to DeVito. If I have such an idea, it's worthless because I have no means of getting it to him.

Likewise, imagine someone has a perfect model for a electronic fuel injection system in Ancient Greece, but just the injection system. That's virtually worthless in the absence of resources like refined petroleum, internal combustion engines (I'm not sure if they even had the metallurgical skills to cast engine blocks) and most importantly - the compelling business or defensive case to persuade those with the resources to risk developing that infrastructure.

However ideas, especially in the early babbling/brainstorming phases are malleable, an idea for a film that may have once suited Jerry Lewis may be well suited to Eddie Murphy or Jim Carrey because they possess certain similar qualities. Which begs the question of the integrity or identity of an idea and when is one idea different from another?

The question of identity is perhaps less important than the question of value, which is simply a matter of adjacent possibilities.


 

I have some hard data that disproves I'm a realist, but suggests I'm a pessimist (i.e. more than 50% of the time my best expectations of personal outcomes are worse than the case). Now what?

The hard data is a handful of specific predictions for example, a prediction about a financial investment (where performance consistently exceeded my expectations) where I had no control over the performance, and things like a exam where I had control (although an instructor noted that I performed worse on the exam than a practice exam because of 'nerves').

Arguably the most immediate step is "just get more data: make sure this isn't an aberration, or at the least see which specific types of predictions or expectations you're more prone to systematic pessimism".

Sure and then what? Should I change my investment style to allow more upside? If it means revising my models of the world - what shape does that take? What beliefs or habits are the cause of my pessimism?

Previously I thought that if you ask better questions then you will get better at solving problems. However questions are the shadows or reflections cast from the actual framing of the problem. If you have a well framed problem you will naturally ask better questions. If you haven't framed the problem well, then you will ask bad questions.

Bad questions are still useful because they are a signal that you are "barking up the wrong tree" or that you need to reformulate the problem.

What marks a bad question and therefore signals a framing of the problem that is unconducive to solving it?

There's probably a myriad of ways a question can be bad. It appears that most of the questions which signal a failure to frame a problem well are vague. Imagine someone who wants to become a Academy Award winning Cinematographer asks "has anyone every won an Academy Award for Cinematography without going to film school?" the answer is of course "yes", especially in the early days of the award. But it is not a useful question in that it doesn't narrow down which actions this aspiring cinematographer should take, avoid, nor clarifies which factors will most impede or expedite their journey. It is only useful in that it shows they are not asking useful questions and therefore their entire formulation of the problem needs work. Better questions are more useful questions.

Much like measures [LW · GW] better questions are ones that influence decisions - if a change in answer to a question doesn't change your decision, then it's not a useful question.

Popular wisdom encourages us to ask open ended questions, especially those which ask "why?" or "how?". 
While this is true for seeking advice or having discussions with experts or building consensus. Better questions even in these circumstances tend to be specific. (i.e. asking for vague help "how can I be a great cinematographer?" versus asking for specific advice "how did Michael Ballhaus light this scene in the nightclub in Under the Cherry Moon? How does it differ to his colour nightclub cinematography in Lola? Why did he make those decisions?" ). However open ended questions may not be better questions in the absence of an expert to ask, however specific they may be.

It is less Socratic, more something out of  Yes, Minister, in that I don't know what I don't know - so if I ask myself rather than an expert "Why does this problem pervade?" all I can answer is a sort of tentative guess [LW · GW] or what I believe is not a likely answer. Whereas an expert may be able to plug my knowledge gaps.

 I am undecided whether this means why/how questions potentially better suited for assessing our knowledge or at least our confidence in our knowledge concerning the framing of the problem, but in the absence of an expert, not particularly useful.

Counterpoint: the circumstances where the questions appear to be "good" or "better" questions but you're still solving the wrong problem? They are good for the problem you are mistakenly trying to solve.

What about the incentives? PWC is apparently OpenAI's largest enterprise customer. I don't know how much PWC actually use the tools in-house and how much they use to on-sell "Digital Transformation" onto their own and new customers. How might this be affecting the way that OpenAI develop their products?

Any good resources which illustrate decision making models for career choices? Particularly ones that help you audit your strengths and weaknesses and therefore potential efficacy in given roles?

I had a look over the E.A. Forum, and there's no decision making models for how to choose a career. There's a lot of "draw the rest of the owl" stuff like - "Get a high paying salary so you can donate". Okay, but how? There's certainly a lot of job openings announced on the forum, but again, how do I know which one's I, me, am best suited to? Which types of positions am I going to be most effective in? Perhaps the real question is - "which roles will I be judged by recruiters and those hiring as being most suitable for? What decision making models are they using?"

If the question was "What are you most passionate about?" then I'd be like "filmmaking or music videos" and I've spent the last 15 and 6 years respectively trying to figure out how to make that work in practice. And that is probably a completely different methodology that involves "build a portfolio" "build a profile" "network". The meta-skill stuff about self-promotion I suck at.

At the root, I think, is the same problem and knowing which roles to apply for - my complete dearth of knowledge about what other people see as valuable.

So where are the resources that help you audit yourself: see where your weaknesses really are, not jut what you think they are, where are the resources that help you align your strengths and knowledge (both theoretical and tacit) with actual job-market positions? 

Or alternatively, how can I build better models of what other people find valuable?

This may be pedantry, but is it correct to say "irrefutable evidence"? I know that in the real world the adjective 'irrefutable' has desirable rhetorical force but evidence is often not what is contended or in need of refuting. "Irrefutable evidence" on the face of it means means "yes, we can all agree it is evidence". A comical example that comes to mind is from Quintilian  's treatise that I'll paraphrase and embellish:

"yes, it is true I killed him with that knife, but it was justified because he was an adulterer and by the laws of Rome Legal"

In (modern) courts of law you have Admissible evidence, which is evidence that, at least in U.S. Federal courts, governed by a length list of rules including relevance, the competency to give testimony of certain witnesses, exceptions to hearsay. 

However you also have, among many other types, "insufficient evidence". What is not being refuted is that it is evidence, only that the prosecution has failed to meet the burden of proof that leads to the conclusion "beyond reasonable doubt".

An item of evidence may be irrefutable, in as much as yes - it is evidence, no one is questioning that it is evidence, and it may be impossible to deny the inference that is being drawn from that evidence. But that it alone meets the burden of proof.

As far as I understand "irrefutable evidence" is not a legal term but one of the court of public opinion: where rhetorical force is preeminent. Perhaps it is useful then to say it in certain cases, but is it rational and correct?

1. ^{^}

   The original refers more to points of argument than evidence:
   Take for example the following case. "You killed a man." "Yes, I killed him." 7 Agreed, I pass to the defence, which has to produce the motive for the homicide. "It is lawful," he urges, "to kill an adulterer with his paramour." Another admitted point, for there is no doubt about the law...
   https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/7A*.html#ref2 

How can you mimic the decision making of someone 'smarter' or at least with more know-how than you if... you... don't know-how?

Wearing purple clothes like Prince, getting his haircut, playing a 'love symbol guitar' and other superficialities won't make me as great a performer as he was, because the tail doesn't wag the dog.

Similarly if I wanted to write songs like him, using the same drum machines, writing lyrics with "2" and "U" and "4" and loading them with Christian allusions and sexual imagery, I'd be lucky if I'm perceptive enough as a mimic to produce some pastiches. However if I wanted to drill further, how might I 'black box' his songwriting mind, reverse engineer which cruxes and decision pivots determine what rhyming or rhythm patterns he chooses, what chord progressions he operates on. Maybe after years of doing this I'd have a model composed of testable hypotheses that I could run experiments on, either by reverse engineering songs of his at random and seeing if they hold to the patterns I observed, writing my own songs in this manner and seeing if they have that 'x-factor' (hardest and most subjective of all), and finally comparing the stated narratives in biographies and interviews about how certain songs were written in accordance with my hypotheses.

Of course someone is going to say that you can't reduce a human being, let alone a super-talented human being to a formula, and perhaps draws a long bow about why they don't like A.I. art or modern Hollywood or whatever. All sentiments I'm sympathetic too even if I'm not 100% sold on.

What I'm thinking about is not too dissimilar from what Ray Dalio advises: One shouldn't just trust an expert's conclusion or advice blindly, even if they have a unparalleled pedigree.

But because I'm pretty extreme in believing that it is important to obtain understanding rather than accepting doctrine at face value, I would encourage the new batter not to accept what [Babe] Ruth has to say as right just because he was the greatest slugger of all time. If I were that new batter, I wouldn't stop questioning Ruth until I was confident I had found the truth. 

In both cases rather than just taking the end result blindly - writing parodic or pastiches songs - the tail doesn't wag the dog - there is an attempt to find out why, to question!

My problem isn't so much that Prince (or Babe Ruth) are no longer around to answer these questions, but that unlike a multi-billionaire like Ray Dalio, anyone with sufficient pedigree is unlikely to pick up the phone and answer my incessant questions about "why?" and "how come?". I have to black-box it.

I tried a couple of times to tune my cognitive strategies [LW · GW]. What I expected was that by finding the types of thinking and the pivotal points in chains/trains of thought that lead to the 'ah-ha' moment of insight. I could learn to cultivate the mental state where I was more prone or conducive to those a-ha moments, in the same way that actors may use Sense Memory in order to revisit certain emotions.

Was this expectation wrong?

It seemed like all I found was a kind of more effective way of noticing that I was "in a rut". However that in itself didn't propagate any more insights, which was disappointing. It has some value, but certainly not as much as I was expecting.

When I have been journalling my thoughts and find that I have an 'a-ha' moment after a meandering garden path. I try to think of it faster [LW · GW] so I try to dive down into the details of my mind just prior to the a-ha moment. What was on the cusp of my consciousness, what mental images was I 'seeing', what aspects of particular ideas was I focusing on. 

All the a-ha moments always were due to the Availability Heuristic. Something that had recently, say 7 days or less ago, entered my consciousness and I managed to call back to it. Indeed it seems like the easiest way to make myself think of things faster is to just cycle through random memories, random stimuli, completely unrelated, just churn through for some kind of strategic serendipity. Maybe. I'm almost certainly doing it wrong.

I realize that you're supposed to use this exercise on logical puzzle tasks, but I just... can't do a puzzle task and record my thoughts simultaneously. Nor are puzzle tasks the kind of things I see much 'alpha' to be gained by thinking faster.
 

DON'T write instructions like that, instead try this...

"Don't..." "Stop doing this but instead..." "when you find yourself [operative verb] try to..." headed instructions tend to be more useful and actionable for me than non-refutative instructions. Or to get meta:

Don’t start instructions with the operative verb, instead begin with “Don’t [old habit] instead…[operative verb and instruction]” or “Stop [old habit] and [operative verb and instruction]

I find I'm terrible at making an instruction, advice or a note actionable because it is exceedingly difficult to find suitable cues, situations or contexts to use them. This is further complicated by the struggle to remember the instruction correctly in the 'fog of war' as it were.

For example, Nicholas Nassim Taleb notes that people are so prone to "overcausation" that you can get most people to become loquacious by simply asking "why?" (others say 'why' can come off as too accusatory and 'how come?' is more polite). I may like to see how true this is, but now I need to find a situation to use it in... uhhh... hmmm... okay, next time someone gives a one-word response about their weekend. Sure... now how can I remember it? In the panicky situation where a conversation grows quiet, how can I remember to ask "why?"?

Provided that an instruction or note that begins with "stop..." or "don't" does in fact describe a habit you have or recurring situation you continue to encounter, then there is already a cue you can recognize.

For example, often when I hit an impasse while brainstorming, I will absentmindedly check my Instagram or a news website or here. That is a cue, and I can say "Don't check Instagram, instead write down a brief description of what the next step is in your brain storming process."

To test Taleb's observation, I'd do well to think of something I often do or notice when a conversation peters out, something like "don't say 'haha yeah', ask 'why'"? (and trust I have the sense to not implement that robotically and ask ‘why?’ as a non-sequitur)

So my advice to myself: Don't write instructions or notes that begin with "try to..." "you should..." or even "write instructions that begin with refutations" but instead use "Don't... but instead" as a template.
 

Problem solving with Verbs:
This came up when I was trying to think about how to better frame questions with the form "How should I X?"

When outlining stories or screenplays I find action or visual verbs immeasurably useful in creating more interesting scenes. Instead of "Joe talks to Bill" he can negotiate, remonstrate, beg, plead, mock, pontificate etc. Each of which makes the scene much more specific. "Maria goes to the store" is too vague, she may either meander to the store, sprint to the store, or even search for the store. These action verbs not only give us a sense of the character's intentions and allow us to (appropriately enough for film) imagine visually how it plays out, but are more interesting and useful.

Why doesn't the same apply to practical questions?

At the risk of going meta, take the question "Should I make a short film?". There are surprisingly few action verbs that describe being a filmmaker^[1] other than 'make' and off the top of my head you can either film, direct,"do a pitchya^[2]". If you want to be more specific about how it will be done, you can say you will improvise a film or you can say you will "go vertie". I'm sure you can use Denominal verbs based off of directors with distinct processes:

"I'm going to Altmann this film" (i.e. lots of overlapping dialogue)

"I'm going to Malick this film" (i.e. lots of improvisation in natural light)

"I'm going to Maysles this film" (i.e. "direct cinema"^[3]- long form documentary filmmaking with an observational "fly on the wall" approach to shooting)

"I'm going Kapadia/Morgen this film" (i.e. documentary assembled from archival material)

It kind of works with the question "How should I get to the party?" - rather than "get" I can drive, or I can walk, or I can carpool, I can rideshare, I can bike etc. I may even opt to describe my entrance, I can sneak in, I can explode and make an entrance.... In deed, if I choose to sneak in then I may opt to arrive on foot or rideshare so no one notices my car.

1. ^{^}

   Yes, there are a plethora of department specific verbs - you can lens or shoot a film, score it, colour it, mix it, dub it, cue it, do foley, light it, dress it, design it, (location) scout it, produce it, cut or edit it etc. etc. 

2. ^{^}

   I noticed in interviews with Classic Hollywood directors Raoul Walsh and John Ford, they don't call them "films" or "movies" but "picture", pronounced more like "pitch-ya" as in "motion picture".

3. ^{^}

   Most people when they say Cinéma vérité mean "Direct Cinema" - the classic device of Cinéma vérité is the Vox Pop. The proverbial 'man on the street' is pulled in front of the camera - often looking down the barrel, already an artificial and performative situation, to give a honest opinion or barometer of public feeling.

What is the functional difference between Agency and having social power? This is likely a question that reflects my ignorance of the connotations of 'Agency' in Rationalist circles. 
When people say "he's a powerful man in this industry" does that imply he is greatly Agentic? Can one be Agentic without having social power? Is one the potential and the other the actuality?

"Babbling Better" this is a work in progress -and still requires more thinking 

In short - need a methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the "right problem" to solve, and noticing when one is solving the "wrong problem". Better problem framing leads to better and more focused answers to questions and hopefully eventual resolving of problems. I've come across two techniques: The Five Whys to understand problems better, and using adverbs of manner to babble more constructively. 

So far:

It is easy to babble [LW · GW], babies do it. It is still quite easy to babble comprehensible but wrong sentences, such as LLM hallucinations. Your pruning is only as good as your babble.

With regards to problem solving, low quality babble doesn't contribute to resolving the problem. For example, let's say the problem is "camera autofocus doesn't focus on eyes" a low quality "babble" answer might be "Burn a stick of incense and pray to Dionysius". The acts themselves are feasible and the sentence is comprehensible. But any desired change in the camera's autofocus performance will be pure coincidence.

Yet, sometimes low quality babble appears to be high quality babble because we simply are not solving the right problem but it appears to be perfectly suited for the problem. Especially if incentives are involved.

My hunch is that to babble better not only do you need better methods of babbling, but you need to better understand what goals you are trying to babble towards. And that requires better understanding of why the problem is a problem.

5 Why's on yourself: Asking "why I think this is a problem?" to at least 5 levels

Not to be mistaken for the Burger joint. The "Five Whys" technique was apparently invented at the Toyota Corporation as a system for uncovering the root causes of production faults. 

The choice of "why" falls into broader pattern which takes me back to documentary filmmaking and interviewing: you learn more through open ended questions, usually those where the key interrogative is "why" or "how" than through close ended questions. These, as Wittgenstein pointed out, basically seek to affirm or negative a proposition or conditional: "Do you like him?" "Is he still there?" "Would you call that green or turquoise?".

If I am a manager or investigator, trying to ascertain the cause of a fault on a production line, open ended questions make sense since I will not be in possession of all known or knowable facts.
This still holds if I am a novice or just someone enquiring to an expert for help in achieving some goal. If I ask an experienced cinematographer "how would that scene be light?" even if they don't know specifically, they have a large body of experience and knowledge that would mean they could probably make useful guesses on how to replicate the effect.

If i intend on asking for advice from an expert, I can't give them the responsibility of figuring out the kind of help I need. The better I can define the problem myself the better and more informative the question I can ask them. Be too vague about your problem [LW · GW] and you can only hope to get generic responses like "be confident".

It seems ridiculous though, doesn't it? Socratic or even from  Yes, Minister: Why should I ask myself open ended questions if I don't know what I don't know? While I may not understand the problem, what I can do is at least explain why it's a problem and how I see it. And one effective way to do that I've found is to use the Five Whys Technique.

It is often exceedingly difficult to know what the right problem to solve is, what we may have a better chance of defining is why we perceive it as a problem and why we expect it to cause conflict.

To - Do: add more techniques to my arsenal to better defined problems... the step before babbling

Adverbs and Creativity?  Strategically Efficaciously Productively Babbling

I have recently come across a technique for higher-quality babble, at least for creative purposes. It is as simply as employing a Adverb of Manner to modify a verb. This is a minor variation on a technique used to allow mime artists to create a character - you take a situation or process like "make breakfast" and do it with an attitude: happy, hungover, lovelorn.

It is surprisingly easy to come up with scenarios and even stories with arcs - goals, conflict, and comedic pay-offs complete with a character who has distinct mannerisms - by just cycling through adverbs. Compare these three adverbs: grumpily, overzealously, nervously.

He bartends grumpily - he tries to avoid eye contact with customers, sighs like a petulant teenager when he does make eye contact, he slams down glasses, he spills drinks, on his face a constant scowl, he waves customers away dismissively. Even a simple glass of beer he treats like one of the labours of Herakles

He bartends overzealously - he invites customers to the bar, he slams down glasses too, he spills them, he accidently breaks glasses in his zeal but always with a smile on his face, he's more than happy to do a theatrical shake of the mixer, throw it even if it doesn't quite make it's landing. He's always making a chef's kiss about any cocktail the customer asks for

He bartends nervously - he doesn't realize when a customer is trying to order, giving a "who me?" reaction, he scratches his head a lot, he takes his time, he fumbles with bottles and glasses, he even takes back drinks and starts again.

These scenarios appear to "write themselves" for the purposes of short pantomime bits. This is the exact type of technique I have spent years searching for.

 To do - Does this technique of better babbling through adverbs of manner apply to non-creative applications? If not then develop methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the right problem, noticing a "wrong problem"

Update (October 2024)- it is interesting looking back on this 8 months later as I think I have just hit upon a means of "babbling better". I intend to revise and go into detail this means after a period of actually trying it out. It's certainly not original, it vaguely resembles the method at Amazon of writing Memos and speculative Press Releases for a new proposal and uses your 'internal simulator'.

in brief the way I employ this new method is taking the first kneejerk 'babble' or solution to the problem I come up with. Then I try to write a speculative narrative where this solution or action delivers a satisfactory or worthwhile result, being very methodical about the causation.  This is not, I stress, a prediction or prognostication.
What I find is that by writing  a speculative narrative, and making it as convincing as possible to myself, it forces me to explicate my framework and mental model around the problem, my hunches, suspicions, assumptions, belief, fears, hopes, observations, knowledge and reasoning. Much of which I may not be consciously aware of.

With the framework explicated, I can now go about babbling. But it will be much more targeted and optimized based on my expectations, knowledge, and the framework in general.

Some (not yet confirmed) secondary bonuses of this method:

- it fights analysis paralysis, instead of babbling for breadth, it forces thinking about causation and consequences
- it is inherently optimistic, as you're forcing yourself to write a structured argument why this could or would work
- having explicated your framework, you may be able to verify specific hunches or assumptions that hereto you weren't aware they were influencing your thinking

One caveat: why a satisfactory narrative, why not a best case scenario? I think a best case scenario will assume a lot of coincidence, serendipity and as a means for reflection and explication of your mental modelling or framework of the problem is less informative. For that reason, causative words and phrases like "because" "owing to" "knowing that.... it follows such..." "for this reason" should be abundant.

I will update after more real world employment.

 

To think about:
Shannon Information and cataloguing 'rushes' from a documentary. This is not about the actual amount of entropy in any given frame of a uncompressed video. Rather the entropy of all the metadata from all the footage.

Eisenstenian film theory was an attempt to marry Marxist Dialectic with film editing. The "highest" type of film cut was "Intellectual Montage" the bone to nuclear-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic example in film history. Eisenstein himself used the more on-the-nose approach of showed crowds of protesters being mowed down by Tsarist troops being interspliced with footage of animals being slaughtered in an abattoir.

The Dialectic of cuts, the juxtaposition between image A and image B - be it the Kuleshov experiment - the actor appearing to look at either soup or a corpse lying in state thereby changing the inferred emotion of the actor - is a critical film language technique.

Documentary Rushes of similar thematic content - i.e. "Shot 1 - mid shot children playing" "Shot 2 - mid shot different children playing" and lower entropy. "Shot 1 - mid shot children playing" "Shot 87 - close up of old man smiling". We want to avoid homogenous sets.

The problem for a film editor, especially a observational documentary film editor or someone working with archive material (think of the films of Bret Morgan and Asif Kapadia) is every time you create a sequence you have to watch all of the material, again, hoping to find the dialectic or invent a narrative that combines at least two shots together.

Binary Search algorithms are also relevant here. 

CLIP and visual Semantic Networks can automate part of the search if the editor has something specific in mind. I want to cultivate serendipity - unforseen juxtapositions.