Someone posted these quotes in a Slack I'm in... what Ellsberg said to Kissinger: 

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

[...]

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

(link)

Rationality has pubs; we need gyms

Consider the difference between a pub and a gym.

You go to a pub with your rationalist friends to:

• hang out
• discuss interesting ideas
• maybe maths a bit in a notebook someone brought
• gossip
• get inspired about the important mission you're all on
• relax
• brainstorm ambitious plans to save the future
• generally have a good time

You go to a gym to:

• exercise
• that is, repeat a particular movement over and over, paying attention to the motion as you go, being very deliberate about using it correctly
• gradually trying new or heavier moves to improve in areas you are weak in
• maybe talk and socialise -- but that is secondary to your primary focus of becoming stronger
• in fact, it is common knowledge that the point is to practice, and you will not get socially punished for trying really hard, or stopping a conversation quickly and then just focus on your own thing in silence, or making weird noises or grunts, or sweating... in fact, this is all expected
• not necessarily have a good time, but invest in your long-term health, strength and flexibility

One key distinction here is effort.

Going to a bar is low effort. Going to a gym is high effort.

In fact, going to gym requires such a high effort that most people have a constant nagging guilt about doing it. They proceed to set up accountability systems with others, hire personal trainers, use habit installer apps, buy gym memberships as commitment devices, use clever hacks to always have their gym bag packed and ready to go, introspect on their feelings off anxiety about it and try to find work-arounds or sports which suit them, and so forth...

People know gyms are usually a schlep, yet they also know going there is important, so they accept that they'll have to try really hard to build systems which get them exercising.

However, things seem different for rationality. I've often heard people go "this rationality stuff doesn't seem very effective, people just read some blog posts and go to a workshop or two, but don't really seem more effective than other mortals".

But we wouldn't be surprised if someone said "this fitness stuff doesn't seem very effective, some of my friends just read some physiology bloggers and then went to a 5-day calisthenics bootcamp once, but they're not in good shape at all". Of course they aren't!

I think I want to suggest two improvements:

1) On the margin, we should push more for a cultural norm of deliberate practice in the art of rationality.

It should be natural to get together with your friends once a week and use OpenPhil's calibration app, do Thinking Physics problems, practice CFAR techniques, etc...

2) But primarily: we build gyms.

Gyms are places where hundreds of millions of dollars of research have gone into designing equipment specifically allowing you to exercise certain muscles. There are also changing rooms to help you get ready, norms around how much you talk (or not) to help people focus, personal trainers who can give you advice, saunas and showers to help you relax afterwards...

For rationality, we basically have nothing like this [1]. Each time you want to practice rationality, you basically have to start by inventing your own exercises.

[1] The only example I know of is Kocherga, which seems great. But I don't know a lot about what they're doing, and ideally which should have rationality gyms either online or in every major hub, not just Moscow.

I edited a transcript of a 1.5h conversation, and it was 10.000 words. That's roughly 1/8 of a book. Realising that a day of conversations can have more verbal content than half a book(!) seems to say something about how useless many conferences are, and how incredibly useful they could be.

What important book that needs fact-checking is nobody fact-checking?

Someone tried to solve a big schlep of event organizing.

Through this app, you:

• Pledge money when signing up to an event
• Lose it if you don't attend
• Get it back if you attend + a share of the money from all the no-shows

For some reason it uses crypto as the currency. I'm also not sure about the third clause, which seems to incentivise you to want others to no-show to get their deposits.

Anyway, I've heard people wanting something like this to exist and might try it myself at some future event I'll organize.

https://kickback.events/

H/T Vitalik Buterin's Twitter

Blackberries and bananas

Here's a simple metaphor I've recently been using in some double-cruxes about intellectual infrastructure and tools, with Eli Tyre, Ozzie Gooen, and Richard Ngo.

Short people can pick blackberries. Tall people can pick both blackberries and bananas. We can give short people lots of training to make them able to pick blackberries faster, but no amount of blackberries can replace a banana if you're trying to make banana split.

Similarly, making progress in a pre-paradigmatic field might require x number of key insights. But are those insights bananas, which can only be picked by geniuses, whereas ordinary researchers can only get us blackberries?

Or, is this metaphor false, such that having a certain number of non-geniuses + excellent tools, we can actually replicate geniuses?

This has implications for the impact of rationality training and internet intellectual infrastructure, as well as what versions of those endeavours are most promising to focus on.

Had a good conversation with elityre today. Two nuggets of insight:

• If you want to level up, find people who seem mysteriously better than you at something, and try to learn from them.
• Work on projects which are plausibly crucial. That is, projects such that if we look back from a win scenario, it's not too implausible we'd say they were part of the reason.

I made a Foretold notebook for predicting which posts will end up in the Best of 2018 book, following the LessWrong review.

You can submit your own predictions as well.

At some point I might write a longer post explaining why I think having something like "futures markets" on these things can create a more "efficient market" for content.

Anyone have good recommendations for a lightweight, minimalist calendar app?

Google calendar is feeling so bloated. 

I had a quick stab at building something more lightweight in Coda, just for myself. Compare these two: 

I get that G Calendar is trying to solve a bunch of problems for lots of different users. But I feel I can't be the only one with who'd want something more spacious and calm. 

I saw an ad for a new kind of pant: stylish as suit pants, but flexible as sweatpants. I didn't have time to order them now. But I saved the link in a new tab in my clothes database -- an Airtable that tracks all the clothes I own.

This crystallised some thoughts about external systems that have been brewing at the back of my mind. In particular, about the gears-level principles that make some of them useful, and powerful,

When I say "external", I am pointing to things like spreadsheets, apps, databases, organisations, notebooks, institutions, room layouts... and distinguishing those from minds, thoughts and habits. (Though this distinction isn't exact, as will be clear below, and some of these ideas are at an early stage.)

Externalising systems allows the following benefits...

1. Gathering answers to unsearchable queries

There are often things I want lists of, which are very hard to Google or research. For example:

• List of groundbreaking discoveries that seem trivial in hindsight
• List of different kinds of confusion, identified by their phenomenological qualia
• List of good-faith arguments which are elaborate and rigorous, though uncertain, and which turned out to be wrong

etc.

Currently there is no search engine (but the human mind) capable of finding many of these answers (if I am expecting a certain level of quality). But for that reason researching the lists is also very hard.

The only way I can build these lists is by accumulating those nuggets of insight over time.

And the way I make that happen, is to make sure to have external systems which are ready to capture those insights as they appear.

2. Seizing serendipity

Luck favours the prepared mind.

Consider the following anecdote:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. [As an example, he said that] you have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

I think this is true far beyond beyond intellectual discovery. In order for the most valuable companies to exist, there must be VCs ready to fund those companies when their founders are toying with the ideas. In order for the best jokes to exist, there must be audiences ready to hear them.

3. Collision of producers and consumers

Wikipedia has a page on "Bayes theorem".

But it doesn't have a page on things like "The particular confusion that many people feel when trying to apply conservation of expected evidence to scenario X".

Why?

One answer is that more detailed pages aren't as useful. But I think that can't be the entire truth. Some of the greatest insights in science take a lot of sentences to explain (or, even if they have catchy conclusions, they depend on sub-steps which are hard to explain).

Rather, the survival of Wikipedia pages depends on both those who want to edit and those who want to read the page being able to find it. It depends on collisions, the emergence of natural Schelling points for accumulating content on a topic. And that's probably something like exponentially harder to accomplish the longer your thing takes to describe and search for.

Collisions don't just have to occur between different contributors. They must also occur across time.

For example, sometimes when I've had 3 different task management systems going, I end up just using a document at the end of the day. Because I can't trust that if I leave a task in any one of the systems, future Jacob will return to that same system to find it.

4. Allowing collaboration

External systems allow multiple people to contribute. This usually requires some formalism (a database, mathematical notation, lexicons, ...), and some sacrifice of flexibility (which grows superlinearly as the number of contributors grow).

5. Defining systems extensionally rather than intensionally

These are terms from analytic philosophy. Roughly, the "intension" of the concept "dog" is a furry, four-legged mammal which evolved to be friendly and cooperative with a human owner. The "extension" of "dog" is simply the set of all dogs: {Goofy, Sunny, Bo, Beast, Clifford, ...}

If you're defining a concept extensionally, you can simply point to examples as soon as you have some fleeting intuitive sense of what you're after, but long before you can articulate explicit necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept.

Similarly, an externalised system can grow organically, before anyone knows what it is going to become.

6. Learning from mistakes

I have a packing list database, that I use when I travel. I input some parameters about how long I'll be gone and how warm the location is, and it'll output a checklist for everything I need to bring.

It's got at least 30 items per trip.

One unexpected benefit from this, is that whenever I forget something -- sunglasses, plug converters, snacks -- I have a way to ensure I never make that mistake again. I simply add it to my database, and as long as future Jacob uses the database, he'll avoid repeating my error.

This is similar to Ray Dalio's Principles. I recall him suggesting that the act of writing down and reifying his guiding wisdom gave him a way to seize mistakes and turn them into a stronger future self.

This is also true for the Github repo of the current project I'm working on. Whenever I visit our site and find a bug, I have a habit of immediately filing an issue, for it to be solved later. There is a pipeline whereby these real-world nuggets of user experience -- hard-worn lessons from interacting with the app "in-the-field", that you couldn't practically have predicted from first principles -- get converted into a better app. So, whenever a new bug is picked up by me or a user, in addition to annoyance, it causes a little flinch of excitement (though the same might not be true for our main developer...). This also relates to the fact that we're dealing in code. Any mistake can be improved in such a way that no future user will experience it.

I'm confused about the effects of the internet on social groups. [1]

On the one hand... the internet enables much larger social groups (e.g. reddit communities with tens of thousands of members) and much larger circles of social influence (e.g. instagram celebrities having millions of followers). Both of these will tend to display network effects. However, A) social status is zero-sum, and B) there are diminishing returns to the health benefits of social status [2]. This suggests that on the margin moving from a very large number of small communities (e.g. bowling clubs) to a smaller number of larger communities (e.g. bowling YouTubers) will be net negative, because the benefits of status gains at the top will diminish faster than the harms from losses at the median.

On the other hand... the internet enables much more niched social groups. Ceteris paribus, this suggests it should enable more groups and higher quality groups.

I don't know how to weigh these effects, but currenly expect the former to be a fair bit larger.

[1] In addition to being confused I'm also uncertain, due to lack of data I could obtain in a few hours, probably.

[2] In contrast to the psychological benefits of status, I think social capital can sometimes have increasing returns. One mechanism: if you grow your network, the number of connections between units in your network grows even faster.

Something interesting happens when one draws on a whiteboard ⬜✍️while talking.

Even drawing 🌀an arbitrary squiggle while making a point makes me more likely to remember it, whereas points made without squiggles are more easily forgotten.

This is a powerful observation.

We can chunk complex ideas into simple pointers.

This means I can use 2d surfaces as a thinking tool in a new way. I don't have to process content by extending strings over time, and forcibly feeding an exact trail of thought into my mind by navigating with my eyes. Instead I can distill the entire scenario into 🔭a single, manageable, overviewable whole -- and do so in a way which leaves room for my own trails and 🕸️networks of thought.

At a glance I remember what was said, without having to spend mental effort keeping track of that. This allows me to focus more fully on what's important.

In the same way, I've started to like using emojis in 😃📄essays and other documents. They feel like a spiritual counterpart of whiteboard squiggles.

I'm quite excited about this. In future I intend to 🧪experiment more with it.

If you're building something and people's first response is "Doesn't this already exist?" that might be a good sign.

It's hard to find things that actually are good (as opposed to just seeming good), and if you succeed, there ought to be some story for why no one else got there first.

Sometimes that story might be:

People want X. A thing existed which called itself "X", so everyone assumed X already existed. If you look close enough, "X" is actually pretty different from X, but from a distance they blend together; causing people looking for ideas to look elsewhere.

There are different kinds of information instutitions.

• Info-generating (e.g. Science, ...)
• Info-capturing (e.g. short-form? prediction markets?)
• Info-sharing (e.g. postal services, newspapers, social platforms, language regulators, ...)
• Info-preserving (e.g. libraries, archives, religions, Chesterton's fence-norms, ...)
• Info-aggregating (e.g. prediction markets, distill.pub...)

I hadn't considered the use of info-capturing institutions until recently, and in particular how prediction sites might help with this. If you have an insight or an update, there is cheap and standardised way to make it part of the world's share knowledge.

The cheapness means you might actually do it. And the standardisation means it will interface more easily with the other parts of the info pipeline (easier to share, easier to preserve, easier to aggregate into established wisdom...)

Anyone know folks working on semiconductors in Taiwan and Abu Dhabi, or on fiber at Tata Industries in Mumbai? 

I'm currently travelling around the world and talking to folks about various kinds of AI infrastructure, and looking for recommendations of folks to meet! 

If so, freel free to DM me! 

(If you don't know me, I'm a dev here on LessWrong and was also part of founding Lightcone Infrastructure.)

Have you been meaning to buy the LessWrong Books [? · GW], but not been able to due to financial reasons?

Then I might have a solution for you. 

Whenever we do a user interview with someone, they get a book set for free. Now one of our user interviewees asked that instead their set be given to someone who otherwise couldn't afford it. 

So, well, we've got one free set up for grabs!

If you're interested, just send me a private message and briefly describe why getting the book was financially prohibitive to you, and I might be able to send a set your way. 

Very uncertain about this, but makes an interesting claim about a relation between temperature, caffeine and RSI: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/18/rsi-solution/ 

Testing whether images work in spoiler tags

↑ comment by jacobjacob · 2020-10-14T01:48:47.739Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Apparently they don't. 

Replies from: mr-hire

↑ comment by Matt Goldenberg (mr-hire) · 2020-10-14T02:05:49.825Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Alternative hypothesis: His smile lights up even the darkest spoiler tag.

Replies from: Gurkenglas

↑ comment by Gurkenglas · 2020-10-15T22:30:34.475Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

then it would be 

Replies from: Benito

↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2020-10-15T23:03:44.790Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Take my upvote.