papetoast's Shortforms

It is sad and annoying that if you do a mediocre job (according to the receiver), doing things even for free (volunteer work/gifting) can sabotage the receiver along the dimension you're supposedly helping.

This is super vague the way I wrote it, so examples.

Example 1. Bob wants to upgrade and buy a new quality headphone. He has a $300 budget. His friend Tim not knowing his budget, bought a $100 headphone for Bob. (Suppose second-handed headphones are worthless) Now Bob cannot just spend $300 to get a quality headphone. He would also waste Tim's $100 which counterfactually could have been used to buy something else for Bob. So Bob is stuck with using the $100 headphone and spending the $300 somewhere else instead.

Example 2. Andy, Bob, and Chris are the only three people who translates Chinese books to English for free as a hobby. Because there are so many books out there, it is often not worth it to re-translate a book even if the previous one is bad, because spending that time to translate a different book is just more helpful to others. Andy and Bob are pretty good, but Chris absolutely sucks. It is not unreadable, but they are just barely better than machine translation. Now Chris has taken over to translate book X, which happens a pretty good book. The world is now stuck with Chris' poor translation on book X with Andy and Bob never touching it again because they have other books to work on.

I think people (myself included) really underestimated this rather trivial statement that people don't really learn about something when they don't spend the time doing it/thinking about it. People even measure mastery by hours practiced and not years practiced, but I still couldn't engrave this idea deep enough into my mind.

I currently don't have much writable evidence about why I think people underestimated this fact, but I think it is true. Below are some things that I have changed my mind/realised after noticing this fact.

• cached thoughts, on yourself

Personally, I am a huge procrastinator and I can really flinch away from doing something even when it is weeks overdue. I was trying out BaaS and Beeminder to build up some good habits, but even with the tools I still somethings have procrastination episodes. Only after quite a lot of cycles of the procrastination episodes, I realised that I basically completely wasted the time when I was procrastinating, and I was overall actually worse than before I started the procrastination episode.

Therefore, what I concluded is that you should expect yourself to be the exact same if you haven't put in the time to think about that topic, especially high-level topics like math. (I acknowledge that motor skills require less thinking) It is a mere wish to be a different person since the last time; You don't just learn a new theorem automatically.

• cached thoughts, on modelling human

There was this bias that you assume other people are at around the same level as you, that is obviously false, but it is quite hard to internalize this. People really don't automatically improve themselves either, there must be a push for that to happen. Also you can probably see many of those people that just stopped changing themselves.

• there's a very limited amount you can learn by just reading a few summaries:

Some texts are better than others, but even if you only read the best text on the topic you are trying to learn, with the text being paraphrased by a magical AI to maximize for your learning efficiency, there is still a maximum bandwidth on learning. Don't expect to replicate what other people is able to do in just a few hours. Though I should acknowledge that there are actually very short texts that can change your mind greatly, I suspect that growth mindset is one of them but I'm not sure.

Alternatively, if the questions you ask are specific enough, then you may just be able to somewhat master that concept in a short amount of time. This seems to be how the "Learn in <very short amount of time>" courses out there do.

version history

[Draft] It is really hard to communicate the level/strength of basically anything on a sliding scale, but especially things that could not make any intuitive sense even if you stated a percentage. One recent example I encountered is expressing what is in my mind the optimal tradeoff between reading quickly and thinking deeply to achieve the best learning efficiency.

Not sure what is the best way to deal with the above example, and other situations where percentage doesn't make sense.

But where percentage makes sense, there are still two annoying problems. 1. sometimes you don't have (haven't generated) a fixed percentage in your mind. 2. You still need to express the uncertainty of that percentage. (vague example: 70% +- 20% vs 70% +- 5%).

I think it could be worth it to establish a common knowledge for what percentages do the uncertainty-hinting keywords represent. Say, "seems like" = 75% +- 30%

Unsorted Ideas Below

• A lot of people don't seem to realise this problem because their models are too black and white.
• It is more difficult to communicate that the other person is being slightly too confident, than to tell them that they are way too overconfident.

Starting today I am going to collect a list of tricks that websites use to prevent you from copy and pasting text + how to circumvent them. In general, using ublock origin and allow right click properly fixes most issues.

1. Using href (https://lnk.to/LACA-15863s, archive)

behavior: https://streamable.com/sxeblz

solution: use remove-attr in ublock origin - lnk.to##.header__link:remove-attr(href)

2. Using a background image to cover the text (https://varium.jp/talent/ahiru/, archive)

Note: this example is probably just incompetence. 

behavior: https://streamable.com/bw2wlv 

solution: block the image with ublock origin

3. Using draggable=true (Spotify album titles, archive)

Note: Spotify does have a legit reason to use draggable. You can drag albums or tracks to your library, but I personally prefer having texts to be selectable.

behavior: https://streamable.com/cm0t6b

solution: use remove-attr in ublock origin - open.spotify.com##.encore-internal-color-text-base.encore-text-headline-large.encore-text:upward(1):remove-attr(draggable)

4. Using EventListeners to nullify selections (https://www.uta-net.com/song/2765/, archive)

behavior: https://streamable.com/2i1e9k

solution: locate the function using the browser debugger/ctrl+f, then do some ublock origin javascript filter stuff that I don't really understand. Seems to just be overriding functions and EventListeners. The Annoyances filters worked in this case.

Many people don't seem to know when and how to invalidate the cached thoughts they have. I noticed an instance of being unable to cache invalidate the model of a person from my dad. He is probably still modelling >50% of me as who I am >5 years ago.

The Intelligent Social Web [LW · GW] briefly talked about this for other reasons.

A lot of (but not all) people get a strong hit of this when they go back to visit their family. If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents… and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”: ignoring surprising things you say, changing the topic to something familiar, starting an old fight, etc.

In most cases, I don’t think this is malice. It’s just that they need the scene to work. They don’t know how to interact with this “new you”, so they tug on their connection with you to pull you back into a role they recognize. If that fails, then they have to redefine who they are in relation to you — which often (but not always) happens eventually.

A common failure mode in group projects is that students will break up the work into non-overlapping parts, and proceed to stop giving a fuck about other's work afterwards because it is not their job anymore.

This especially causes problems at the final stage where they need to combine the work and make a coherent piece out of it.

1. No one is responsible for merging the work
2. Lack of mutual communication during the process means that the work pieces cannot be nicely connected without a lot of modifications (which no one is responsible for).

At this point the deadline is likely just a couple days (or hours) away, everyone is tired of this crap and don't want to work on it, but the combined work is still a piece of incoherent crap.

I wonder how I can do better at coordination while dealing with normal peers and while only doing a fair amount of work.

Ranting about LangChain, a python library for building stuff on top of llm calls.

LangChain is a horrible pile of abstractions. There are many ways of doing the same thing. Every single function has a lot of gotchas (that doesn't even get mentioned in documentations). Common usage patterns are hidden behind unintuitive, hard to find locations (callbacks has to be implemented as an instance of a certain class in a config TypedDict). Community support is non-existent despite large number of users. Exceptions are often incredibly unhelpful with unreadable stack trace. Lots of stuff are impossible to type check because langchain allows for too much flexibility, they take in prompt templates as format strings (i.e. "strings with {variables}") and then allows you to fill in the template at runtime with a dict, so now nothing can be statically type checked :)

There are a few things I dislike about math textbooks and pdfs in general. For example, how math textbooks often use theorems that are from many pages ago and require switching back and forth. (Sometimes there isn't even a hyperlink!). I also don't like how proofs sometimes go way too deep into individual steps and sometimes being way too brief.

I wish something like this exists (Claude generated it for me, prompt: https://pastebin.com/Gnis891p)

4 reasons to talk about your problem with friends

This is an advice I would tell myself 5 years ago, just storing it somewhere public and forcing myself to write. Writing seems like an important skill but I always feel like I have nothing to say.

1. It forces you to think. Sometimes you aren't actually thinking about solutions to a problem even though it has been bothering you for a long time.
2. for certain problems: a psychological feeling of being understood. For some people, getting the idea that "what I'm feeling is normal" is also important. It can be a false sense of comfort, but sometimes you need it. 
3. a hidden "contract" that makes the stake of not fixing your problem higher, you now risk looking unimpressive to more people if you fail to fix your problem, since now your friend also knows you're struggling. This increases the motivation of solving the problem. Related: akrasia??
4. also the slim possibility that even though you think your friend cant help you but actually they can.

Since we have meta search engines that aggregate search results from many search engines, is it time for us to get a meta language model* to get results from chatGPT, Bing, Bard, and Claude all at the same time, and then automatically rank them, perhaps even merging all of the replies into a single reply.

*meta language model is an extremely bad name because of the company Meta and the fact that the thing I am thinking of isn't really a language model, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I always thought that the in-page redirects are fucking stupid, it should bring the text I want to see closer to eye level, not exactly at the top where even browser bars can block the text (happens when you go back from footnotes to article on LW).

Documenting a specific need of mine: LaTeX OCR software

tl;dr: use Mathpix if you use it <10 times per month or you are willing to pay $4.99 per month. Otherwise use SimpleTex

So I have been using Obsidian for note taking for a while now and I eventually decided to stop using screenshots but instead learn about LaTeX so the formulas look better. At first I was relying on the website to show the original LaTeX commands but some websites (wiki :/) doesn't do that, and also I started reading math textbooks as PDF. Thus started my adventure to find a good and ideally free LaTeX OCR software.

An initial google search takes me to Mathpix, it honestly is pretty good except for the limit of 10 free OCRs per month ($4.99/month subscription). But for the worry that I will exceed the 10 free snips soon (it actually haven't happened for 3 months now), I started finding free ones on github, including LaTeX-OCR and Pix2Text, but their GUI kind of suck. Then I also tried SimpleTex and this is the one I will probably use when I run out of free snips on Mathpix.

How likely are people actually clicking through links of related materials in a post, seems unlikely to me, actually unlikely to the point that I am thinking about whether it is actually useful.

related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JZuqyfGYPDjPB9Lne/you-don-t-have-to-click-the-links

[Draft] Are memorisation techniques still useful in this age where you can offload your memory to digital storage?

I am thinking about using anki for spaced repetition, and the memory palace thing also seem (from the surface level) interesting, but I am not sure whether the investments will be worth it. (2023/02/21: Trying out Anki)

I am increasingly finding it more useful to remember your previous work so that you don't need to repeat the effort. Remembering workflow is important. (This means remembering things somewhere is very important, but im still not sure if that somewhere being your brain is as important)

example 1: I download music from youtube and I have been using online downloader for years until one day I learned about yt-dlp, and I spend half an hour reading the document to type the correct command for my use and I didn't save it down somewhere else, so the next time that I want to download music again I had to spend another half an hour reading the doc. Now I have a txt file storing the command.

examples to be written: lyrics (css shit), writing down ideas immediately on the nearest place.

Agree with Dagon that indexing is very important.

trial of using github to host version history

[Draft]

Filter Information Harder (TODO: think of a good concept-handle)

Note: Long post usually mean the post is very well thought out and serious, but this comment is not quite there yet.

Many people are too unselective on what they read, causing them to waste time reading low value material^[1].

2 Personal Examples: 1. I am reading through rationality: A-Z and there are way too many comments that are just bad, and even the average quality of the top comments may not even be worth it to read, because I can probably spend the time better with reading more EY posts. 2. I sometimes read the curated posts instead of finishing rationality: A-Z first which I also think is a suboptimal order.

Too unselective comes in two ways: Not skipping enough parts of what you're reading, and not choosing hard enough.

Not skipping enough parts of what you're reading

I have the tendency of trying to read everything in a textbook, even if it is quite low in information density, with many filler stories or sentences served as conjunctions. I probably should be trying to skip sentences, paragraphs and sections where I have sufficient confidence of either 1. I have already learned it and don't need a refresher, or 2. They are not important for me (filler material or unimportant knowledge)

Not choosing hard enough

Sometimes there are things that even stop reading halfway is giving it too much attention. there are many things that you should just not read^[2]. You can filter a lot of content based on the title, the author, the website which hosts the material, the "genre" of the text (most novels, most social media).

The Best Textbook on Every Subject [LW · GW]

Related Reading: Lessons I've Learned From Self Teaching [LW · GW] (TODO: make a short summary here about why it is related)

Further Question: When you don't read all parts of textbook / posts, are you eligible^[3] to comment on it?

Unsorted Ideas

• There is a few rationality: A-Z posts that I want to link here, which talks about how you would accidentally believe in things you heard from other people.
• Breadth first learning method seem to be better than depth first because it clears the unknown unknowns. Also in general it seems to be better to first have a vague understanding of something and then increase the resolution of the model, using a sort of iterative learning approach.
• This idea can generalize too, but it may start to become useless. First generalizarion would be to filter more on what you listen to, and then to choosing carefully what you do, but then it just becomes rationality.
  • During highschool, one heuristic I learned is to ignore basically every question that people have asked because most of them are just stupid, as in thay are either irrelevant or deducible from previous public knowledge (like what the teacher just said)

1. ^{^}

   This applies to this shortform: think about whether it is worth continue reading, or just close this page and read other stuff

2. ^{^}

   History: feels like most of history only serves as interesting stories to add in conversations to show that you are knowledgeable, unless you are actively trying to learn psychology/human dynamics. One of my friend wanted to give me a Chinese History book and I really dont think reading that would help me.

3. ^{^}

   this word is vague, I know

Just read free will [? · GW], really disappointed.

• not many interesting insights.
  • a couple posts on determinism, ok but I already believed it
  • some unrelated stuff: causality, thinking without notion of time... these are actually interesting but not needed
  • moral consequence of 'no free will': I disregard the notion of moral responsibility
    • EY having really strong sense of morality makes everything worse
• low quality discussions: people keep attacking strawmans

You should always include a summary when recommending anything

You are the one who is interested in that thing, the other person isn't (yet). It saves time for the other person to quickly determine whether they want to learn about it or not.

Related: include a tl;dr in posts?

I think i'm going to unite all my online identities. Starting to get tired of all my wasted efforts that only a single person or two will see.