I went to some martial arts class, jiu jitsu, and before they taught me anything else they taught me how to break falls safely. Same with parkour class. You're going to fall, they said. You need a way to catch yourself without fucking up your arms or back. It's not just as mistakes when you're learning a new move, either, though it will certainly happen more often then. You're throwing yourself all over the place, tripping each other; you're going to hit the ground at momentum. You need to know how to handle yourself when that happens, how to roll with it and get up right after safe and sound. Every class, the first thing we do is drill break falls.

I don't think The Art of Rationality has that.

Yes we notice the skulls. It seems like I see a new treatise pointing out the valley of bad rationality every few months. And yet...

• When you share what you know, do you share safety skills and warnings with it?
• Do you have a sense of how likely are you to injure yourself in your practice?
• What specific actions do you take when you notice you're taking epistemic damage?
• How strong are your skills in harm-minimization? Do you have it down to ingrained reaction or habit?
• Do you practice locating individual personal abilities + limits with the distribution of expected human traits as a guide, or are you fitting your strategies to a population-level statistic?

I have some ideas.

I wanna hear yours.

Rationality 010 Meetup (Jester's Court) Principles:

• The zeroth skill is being able to notice evidence at all
• The point of learning is not to come to the same conclusion as the teacher: the bottom line is not yet written.
• Make room for private reasoning, practice non-confrontational forms of dissent, and preserve freedom to self-direct.
• Iff it passes muster, pass it on

Prompts/Exercises:

• Name a trivial promise you could make to someone here, yourself even. Can you make it even simpler?
• How long can the group maintain a conversation made of only nods, head-shakes, finger-pointing, and raised eyebrows?
• Pick a small 30s task. Imagine it vividly, start to finish, with lots of sensory detail. Then do it. Was it like you imagined? Repeat the task. Was it the same?
• Exercise (If there's enough time and focus for it, try the whole Core Transformation sequence)

1. Pick an aspect / thought / behavior you don't like.
2. Recall an instance of when it came up, and where in your body it seemed to reside.
3. Assume it has a positive intent for you, and thank it as you would a well-meaning but mistaken friend.
4. Ask what outcome it's trying to achieve.
5. Thank it for what answer it can give.
6. If you can honestly promise to give that outcome-goal serious consideration next time this aspect comes up, then do so. If you can't, then DON'T.

• Pick a partner and lead them (or together, teach a rubber duck) through one of the previous exercises you thought was good. Get feedback on one thing you did well, and one thing you can do differently to improve. Try it again with that in mind.
  • Bonus points if you record it so you can see your own presentation style
  • Alternative: notice how they do the exercise differently than you, try to improve your model of the person, the exercise, their engagement.
• Practice: One person says some things that are factually incorrect, predicated on bad reasoning, or harm-promoting. Everyone takes a turn expressing their lack of endorsement and/or intent to sit out of the activity.
  • (Sharks are smooth every which way! Contingency plans are important because anything could happen in a quantum universe! We should all go visit so-and-so-with-the-flu's house to cheer them up!)
• EDIT: continued from where I left off
• If we all agree to chip $5 to anyone who could make effective use of it, we could have a pool of up to $5*n to spend on achieving our shared goals. How would you propose using it?
  • If you can manage anonymous approval voting, tally up how much money each proposal'd actually wind up with.
• Brainstorm some small things you don't know how to do, or don't know how to do as well as you'd like. Which of them could you actually commit to pay for resources/lessons/tutoring in if the opportunity presented itself?
• Given you are made of physics and chemistry, what properties of your chemical machine might you want to know?
• Given that you are made of natural selection and memetics and reinforcement learning, what properties of your algorithm might you want to know?
• Given that you are made of fluid plumbing and electrical networks, what properties of your logistics systems might you want to know?
• Have you ever had one good tip put you at a surprisingly major advantage?
• When have you felt good about giving a gift? When have you not?
• If there miraculously existed one fast and easy action that could solve your recent problem, what would it look like?
• Think about the last time someone you knew (yourself, even) seemed in need of support or help. Brainstorm ideas for specific, concrete actions you could take to try to contribute to their wellbeing. Vividly imagine being in that kind of situation again, having since become the kind of person for whom implementing one of them is straightforward and easy, and just doing it. Do it a few times, with your memory as comparison
  • common - grieving, sick, stressed, anxious, melancholy, depressed, bored

I'm interested in whether people can guess what the objectives behind these are, especially if they guess before reading other comments.

- Scribe: Write down the important stuff.
- Strategist: Steer the court towards real problems, and making specific, concrete commitments.
- Social Butterfly: Get to know people and catch up on the latest happenings.
- Contrarian: Forge your own path instead of following the crowd.
- Leader: Be the first to volunteer, and encourage others to join in.
- Guru: Seek the spirit of the exercise. Help others when they struggle.
- Clown: Make 'em smile and laugh.
- Trickster: Advocate for terrible ideas, cause mischief.
- Captain Obvious: Restate the obvious, conspicuously misunderstand the subtle.
- Apprentice: Pay attention to how the organizer runs the exercises, and how different people interact with the instruction.
- Champion: Do it better. Do it the best.

- Givewell: Let no claim stand without a solid evidence base, no action without transparency.
- The Pledge: Affirm shared commitment first, work out implementation details second.
- Hits-based: Try small tests of concept and high-leverage opportunities.
- Empath: Find the human element behind abstract statistics: names, faces, backstories.
- Socrates: Ask questions which help someone refine their thoughts.
- Clippy: Numbers are good, find a number and make it go up.
- Futurist: Look for the trends and turning points.
- Realist: Why are things the way they are now?

I have a personal calendar system. I use it in my planning. Today, for example, I think of as M2 Ω6 and the third day of Joy.

My calendar year begins on Summer solstice. It is 10 "decimos" long. Each Decimo is split into 3 "trieks", of 12 days each, for a total of 36 days per decimo. (With 5-6 extra festival days at the end of the year to pad the solstice alignment)

Why? Why go to the trouble of inventing and then using my own calendar?

Partly for regularity. I like having weeks and months that can be cleanly divided multiple ways, so there are more bases for regularly repeating habits. Every quarter of a triek, for example, gets its own ritual theme. That's certainly why I made my calendar that way but it's not why I made a calendar.

My original inspiration was noticing this statement made during the LW dialogues on Slack:

One more useful attribute of the Jewish Sabbath is the extent to which its rigid rules generate friction in emergency situations. If powerful and pervasive cultural forces are out to get you, you ought to check in from time to time ... to give yourself a chance to notice whether you have gotten got for too much. (Hoffman)[http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/] (Note: The sentences are not in that order in the original source)

A classic work schedule does not line up nicely with trieks and decimos. I can learn to keep track of how the weekdays shift over a series of trieks, but it's not without effort. A different calendar makes sure that I have to think about whether the rhythm of my life lines up with society's, and furthermore whether it should. I'm doing it because it's hard.

I'll need that kind of slack in my ability to choose norms, for what I want to do

Decentralized Networks Thoughts
Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and Dat

Networking can be demonstrated with people as an anology, and it usually works except for how the speeds are magnitudes off and people naturally handle errors more gracefully.

And the way we currently structure internet applications is analogous to, like, a command economy. All the locus of decision exists in one spot, in a server. It may delegate, but it doesn't ever truly *co*-ordinate. And there's no way that's computationally efficient. The internet allows to access a distant computer with our own, and that's *all* we're doing most of the time.  It's exactly like having a whole country of self-interested intelligences close to their individual problems, and trying to make a handful of government officials solve it instead. (And remember: computers handle their errors even less gracefully than people do.) We aren't using most of the compute we have at our fingers!

So that's my focus in decentralized technology. Instead of central coordinators, make swarms of individually capable nodes that can interoperate. Put the controls where they can react meaningfully to local conditions.

An example of this is moderation. Social media moderation teams have to deal with SO much shit, all the concentrated filth in the world lands on their head. They can barely keep up. And we *still* need to have a individual blocking & mute tools, because they can't hope to react appropriately to local need.

Contrast this to the moderation models for scuttlebutt and cabal chat
TBC

How do politics actually happen? I have so few gears in my model. I don't like trying to figure out the object level of what's going on through layers of other people's interpretations and commentary. I want there to be eyes on the ground collecting what's newsworthy from a Gearsy or EA perspective, and for I might as well give it a try it myself. Ground up, by skimming meeting agendas and possibly video feeds to figure out play by play what powerful people are spending their time on.

Of the US Gov, I want to know

What Congress is up to - 
What the Senate is up to -

What the President is up to -
What the First Lady is up to - 
What the VP is up to -

What the Executive Office of the President is putting out -

What the supreme court members are up to -
What the US court of appeals is up to -

Still thinking about how to do this, just want the idea on the record.

Epistemic status: don't know enough in this domain to tell if I'm being stupid, so probably I am

There are a few ideas I keep coming back to when thinking about what legal system my April Fool's alt-world of rationalists would have. One is The Stand On Your Own Two Feet Clause (alternatively I might call it the paleo exemption)

You can achieve massive improvements in safety and equality through industry regulation. Industry scales; change the industry and the effects scale with it. You probably know that trouble comes when industry influences the shape of regulation to benefit themselves at the cost of potential competitors. But while everyone's keeping a hawk's eye on budding monopolies, there's a worse issue that could creep up on you.

What if it's not just the market being captured? What is an individual supposed to do when solving their problems on their own initiative becomes legally or practically unfeasible?

Regulations should not apply to an individual doing things for themselves, by themselves or with some basic assistance.

Maybe that seems redundant. For the most part, government imposed standards don't usually apply to personal and non-commercial use cases anyways. You don't fine the old lady down the road for giving away pies without a food handler's permit. It's simply not practical to enforce on the small scale.

Can you build a simple hut to live in with your own two hands, or do you effectively have to hire a specialist to build something to code? Can you in fact make your own medication, if you have access to raw ingredients and a simple enough recipe, or do you have to get it from a pre-approved lab? Can you do medical procedures to yourself? Can you legally represent yourself?

These may not be good plans, and you'd still liable to causing harm to other people through negligence or illegally dumping contaminants into the air/water/soil, but I really think having the option to self-determine outside of the market matters. A lot. And I think it needs more protection than I'm aware of it having.

So this is what I've spent my time thinking about. It's a consideration of how to structure a Roam-alike cross-referencing notes system on the data mesh structure of CTZN.

\o/ Federated Peer-to-Peer for the WIIIIN!

I could discuss everything within a few very concrete examples. A concrete example tends to create a working understanding in a way mathematical abstraction fails to. I want to give my readers real knowledge, so I do often insist on describing concepts in the world without numbers or equations or proofs.

However, math exists for a reason.

Some patterns generalize so strongly that you simply cannot communicate the breadth of its applications in concrete examples. You have to describe the shape of it by constraint. To do otherwise would render it a handful of independent parlor tricks instead of one sharp and heavy blade.

Epistemic status: wishful thinking

Imagine for a moment, a nomadic tribe

They travel to where the need is great, or by opportunity. They are globalists, able to dive into bubbles but always grokking its existence in context of the wider world. They find what needs doing and do it.

They speak their own strange dialect that cuts to the heart of things. They follow their own customs, which seamlessly flex and adapt to incorporate effective local practices. Change, even drastic change, is a natural part of their culture. They seek to see. They do not hide their young and hold, their blood and shit, their queer and deplorable. You don't taboo human reality.

Wherever they momentarily settle, they strive to leave better than they found. Some of what needs doing wherever they go is providing for their own, of course. They are always prepared to keep infrastructure independent of their neighbors, but only exercise that option when it is efficient. They grok the worth of scale and industry, knowing the alternative. In the same vein, they seek to render aid primarily in ways that promote robust self-reliance rather than create reliance. 'Leave no trace' is the lowest bar to clear.

I wish...

dropping some predictions in my shortform for safekeeping
------------------------------------------
country invades another this year 20%

total covid cases in california < 7.4mil by end 2022 90%
total covid deaths in california < 110,000 by end 2022 93%
https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/

Dow Jones closes year between 17k and 42k 90%
Dow Jones does not exceed 17k and 42k bounds during year 85%
NASDAQ closes year between 8k and 17k 90%
NASDAQ does not exceed 8k and 17k bounds during year 88%
S&P 500 closes year between 3.5k and 6k 90%
S&P 500 does not exceed 3.5k and 6k bounds during year 86%

2024 US Presidential Election is Trump vs. Biden 23%
New Supreme Court Justice in 2022 15%
Omicron variant less lethal than Delta 94%

anatomy of a summer solstice talk. comments?

anatomy of a solstice talk

- Dig your roots deep, and spread your leaves wide

- We sometimes associate summer with passion, with fire and flash. As we celebrate today, I say lean into this. Let's have fun. Let's have passionate joy. Let's dive head-first into the gut sense of living at its best. Not to stoke burning hot coals of determination, just to enjoy it. Take in the warmth and light for its own sake. Life is not just abstractly good and important, it's viscerally so.

Pretty good theme. Have fun, be wild. I could end my speech there.

Instead, I'll ask you to think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind, I'm gonna speak more about that in a moment.

The other solstice, we often reference the dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. That's an important goal. It's not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, pretty tied to pale blue dot we were born on. And when we leave, we will take much of it with us. Much of it intentionally, because we're sentimental like that, but also it will come in the marks of *the kind of beings it has made us*.

I want summer to be a time that we think about the environment that we live in, how it shapes us and how we shape it. We ought to know the soil we grow in, and know it well. A general purpose rationality must produce local knowledge, specialized to the time and space and life you are living. We must dig our roots deep, and spread our leaves wide.

We talk a lot about the general theory of rational agents. It informs a lot about how to learn true things and make good choices. But we are not the general example of an agent. Our minds did not spring up from first principals. Evolutionary history, cultural memetics, and an academic tradition also inform the way you learn true things and make good choices. That which is at our roots can affect what the truth and good choices even are, thousands of years later, whether you are aware of them or not.

The tree is a metaphor. There are grand forces of optimization that have existed before you, and will exist after you. Seek them out. Use what they can give you. Dig your roots deep.

And spread your leaves wide. Catch every ray of sunlight and harness it. Drink in the present moment, and turn it into something awesome. Plants are often portrayed as passive; that's incorrect. They move. Their movement is more efficient, and slower, but they move a great deal to catch the sun. In the same way, you don't have to chase after every opportunity. You can position yourself well and take in the chances that come your way. Have patience, not passivity. and spread your leaves wide.

Now for the audience participation bit. 
- I'll give you five minutes to think. What's something you know about the environments that you live in, or that shaped you? Your city. your ecosystem. Your history. Your economy. Your community. Just write down some facts, or some questions. After those five minutes, I'll take contributions from the audience. With these, I want to paint a collective picture of where we are rooted, and how deeply. This is the first time I'm trying this, so.
- As an example. California is more environmentally conscientious than most US state governemnts. We have a few extra restrictions on cars and plastics. Native tribes maintained the forests around here with regular burns, and I want to know if they maintained the forests in other ways or if they still do in some areas. There's a lot of resentment towards people moving in for jobs who don't really have roots or interests in the people they're displacing, and the rationalist community is a small part of that.
- If you want to share but don't want to speak, write down what you want to say and hand it to someone. It can keep getting passed along until it hits a person willing to read it aloud. It can be anonymous this way, or you can write your name.
- TIME
- I encourage giving silent responses in ASL or gesture.  False. True. Yes. No.
- READ
- Another five minutes, let's talk about opportunities. What serendipitous chance might you hope to catch, today? What would you be prepared to act on if it happened?
- TIME
- READ

i wish for a modern nomadic tribe
 

imagine a group that was intelligent, rational enough they could rapidly adjust to new circumstances like (snap) *that*. they carry what they need in with them, wherever they go, and have the science of bootstrapping from the ground up down to an art form.
 

imagine they had a burning man ethos of 'leave no trace', or even left the place behind them better than it was found. imagine they stealth into a settled community like brownies to turn leather scraps into shoes.

imagine a culture of intentionality: rapid prototyping and testing of norms, thoughtul adoption with an eye to the long term.

i wish. now what?

Table of Contents

1. Epistemology
   1. Intro
      1. This post compiles my personal comments on the Epistemology book from the Lesswrong 2018 bookset. I put almost no effort into making it legible or relevant to anyone else.
   2. A sketch of good communication
      1. For research, we want to exchange deep models
      2. For logistics team, okay to err on side of comparing shallower nodes just to come to agreement.
      3. Has implications for #sbub . Centralized and federated systems look an awful lot like the bad case of communication. The only way to converse is to straight up adopt the output. If I want #sbub to empower people trying to deeply understand the world, there has to be a lot of space just for interacting with other people's models and drawing intricate connections to your own.
   3. Babble and Prune Sequence
      1. Babble and Prune
      2. More Babble
      3. Prune
   4. Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization
      1. Third example at the beginning is shaky. I get stuck on figuring out whether I agree with the implicit judgment of ape-mammalian social instincts as default, naive, and destructive.
      2. Your faith in your priors gates your understanding of the rules of allowable argument steps. Being convincable of unintuitive truths by logical validity could get REALLY REALLY BAD OUTCOMES IN PRACTICE if not coupled with the willingness and ability to rethink your foundational assumptions. That skill does not come easily. "Fair to one side but not the other" speaks to this problem; their machinery to determine local validity works but they won't use it to evaluate an argument from premises that don't fit snugly into their understanding of the world.
      3. I have the weaker version of the low-level attribute, even as I've explicitly championed local validity.
      4. Comment by bryjnar - "this throws up an important constraint for people designing systems that humans are supposed to interact with: you must make it possible to reason simply and locally about them."
   5. Broken alarms
      1. My alarms #habits
      2. Compare to Umeshisms.
   6. Varieties of Argumentative Experience
      1. good faith surveys of evidence take effort. I don't want to prune my efforts to dredge up faded recall or verbalize intuitions about the high-level generator of disagreement.
      2. Going over a public political debate with this framework might train a good habit of thought. Combing over a thread in a rationalist space with this framework may generate useful feedback.
      3. surprised to see double-crux described as a pruning technique. i would think of it as directing seeking: it has a function for determining if you're on track but it also keeps introducing a whole bunch of new avenues to explore.
   7. Naming the Nameless
      1. She was not exaggerating about chinese opera.
      2. Consider how to detect style blindness in others. At its best, style is a high level generator of disagreement. So, "Varieties of Argumentative Experience" may help in describing specific error cascades to style-blind individuals.
      3. Reaction is where the atheism movement was when I first entered it. I have concerns. I would like to co-opt their style to talk rationality to them. On Gab probably.
      4. project in the vicinity of "making amends between creators and expanders": disco.coop.
      5. New distinction: bets of expectation vs. bets of taste. The former requires specificity, the latter requires ????emotional connection????.
   8. Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking
      1. I'm itching to rewrite this with Scott's Argument pyramid as a rubric. If you knows anyone would find that useful to read. Eliezer's writing style may turn some people off for a reason.
      2. How Law vs. Tool is relevant for #sbub . Defining the Ideal of a solution to a problem differs from grabbing the best available tool for it. I define the ideal because I believe the best available tools are not good enough; I want a comprehensible metric to make other people more useful help in coordinating towards better tools.
      3. When I find myself internally protesting that I don't know what math to trust because reality is nearly always messier than proof premises… It's not wrong… but something is funky about that and I need to reframe.
      4. Third, related thinking style: Animus. When you don't know the laws, when the metrics you care about are more nebulous and proxied than "distance", you may still need some way to tie together your strategy and experience and hypotheses about a subject. In comes a form of animism: things and concepts have an essential spirit. It is your spirit, of course, the shadow of your own mind that reflects the subject and how you interact with it. It is the memes and archetypes that suffuse your imagination. It is the norms and incentives that push-pull on your actions. You don't use animus-thinking: animus-thinking uses you.
      5. Thought Eliezer was wrong in the example of sticking to the left-hand rule in a maze. Surely you can just treat the path as a new entrance and resume the left-hand rule? I was wrong. I had fun thinking through it.
      6. People who I'd want to introduce rationality to could benefit from having the fallback ability to understand whatever-it-is as a fact instead of a normative ideal. It was really hard to find the words for at the time. I kept gesturing to something like "cultivate the skill of knowing what it is right and choosing to do the wrong thing" or "face god and walk backwards into hell".
   9. Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation
      1. If I recall correctly, (and I did), the theory of Logical induction uses prediction markets to eliminate the assumption of logical omniscience from Bayes. Logical Induction was a big breakthrough. Would implementing a market to that logic in #sbub constitute a (haha) market gamechanger?
      2. "I focus on the X, with only a minimal account on how Y makes it work" what a nice, succinct way to establish a context I frequently operate in, 10/10 would plagiarize
2. Agency
   1. Lotus-eating
      1. rohit said he resented the idea that life isn't just a series of lotuses to eat. the writing made it sound so easy not to fall into them, did not acknowledge let alone offer any concrete solutions to help with its very real difficulty.

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Epistemology

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Intro

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This post compiles my personal comments on the Epistemology book from the Lesswrong 2018 bookset. I put almost no effort into making it legible or relevant to anyone else.

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A sketch of good communication [LW · GW]

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For research, we want to exchange deep models

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For logistics team, okay to err on side of comparing shallower nodes just to come to agreement.

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Has implications for #sbub . Centralized and federated systems look an awful lot like the bad case of communication. The only way to converse is to straight up adopt the output. If I want #sbub to empower people trying to deeply understand the world, there has to be a lot of space just for interacting with other people's models and drawing intricate connections to your own.

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Babble and Prune Sequence

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Babble and Prune [LW · GW]

1. Currently I need to tune down my prune step and increase my babble. A lot. #habits

2. #sbub in my current imagination is extremely babble and prune. Some concretizations include:

   1. Computers are capable of producing babble. That's an idea for a feature right there: integrated gpt-2.

   2. Run another Lesswrong poll. Seed statements from babble and prune article. Seed claims of which the reader uses and how well this serves them, what others use and need. Seed claims of good sources of babble, good algorithms of prune, good combinations.

      1. ask LW team about make a post with the convo embedded

      2. make a link post, send delayed invitations to answer and comment

      3. "if you notice a hint of confusion or not-rightness, sit with it for a moment. Say a short sentence out loud expressing some aspect of the intuition, write it down and submit it if you will."

      4. provide a submission form for seed statement ideas, things you don't automatically want to vote in favor of.

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More Babble [? · GW]

1. Akjash is a graph theorist, good to know

2. Scrabble babble as an example of the kind of play I want to do with my language generation project.

3. Advice in this article seems geared from an assumption of the brain as an implicit graph, namely that "individual edges and neighborhoods can be computed in reasonable time". This assumption may not hold for me. I really struggle to generate and re-compact local planning. Expansion may be related? Author clarifies this is not the same thing as connectivity, and doesn't clarify which actions in their example address which metric. I find myself trying to capture any babble I have 2 steps ahead

   1. Better if this post had offered its own explanations of expander graph and aji. Wikipedia threw a lot of math symbols at me and I can't tell off-hand how it relates to this context. Go metaphors gave me very aesthetic feels but not a model with moving parts. What are the implications?

   2. "building an argument from scraps lying on the side of the road" captures my experience

4. I have insisted for a couple of years now that everyone should randomize their decisions more. If you're stuck in a bad rut, randomize all the details and then use prune-discernment to tweak it until you have something that looks workable. If your pruning can't keep up with your babble, then prune by weighted randomization or pick your favorite out of the first couple draws. (see the secretary problem)

5. Mysticism is so great for babble. Absolute best. Form tight connections between everything and anything. Encode important ideas in inscrutable, babbling poetry. Find the essence of hope in a dropped kernel of corn.

6. "To save the world, I will start by doing the humble and proper things I know how to do within the confines of my own life" - one for my #TumblrLikes. #habits

   1. Sounds Confucian

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Prune

1. Prune has multiple layers, yes. Subconscious, Conscious thought, Spoken word, Written word, Published word. (At times, Written and Spoken are the other way around for me.)

2. River of Babble: that's powerful imagery right there.

3. This essay has awesome style, it moves the reader in its currents like deep mysticism. We need some of that. We need it in addition to [LW · GW] prized technical, specific writing.

4. Contains one of the better woo-free explications for meditation practice.

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Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization

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Third example at the beginning is shaky. I get stuck on figuring out whether I agree with the implicit judgment of ape-mammalian social instincts as default, naive, and destructive.

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Your faith in your priors gates your understanding of the rules of allowable argument steps. Being convincable of unintuitive truths by logical validity could get REALLY REALLY BAD OUTCOMES IN PRACTICE if not coupled with the willingness and ability to rethink your foundational assumptions. That skill does not come easily. "Fair to one side but not the other" speaks to this problem; their machinery to determine local validity works but they won't use it to evaluate an argument from premises that don't fit snugly into their understanding of the world.

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I have the weaker version of the low-level attribute, even as I've explicitly championed local validity.

1. #habits - When I notice myself steel-manning my own side I will state the original claim's bogus-ness out loud (or write it down) as a simple statement with no equivocation. Only after this will I attend to adjacent, more substantive claims.

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Comment by bryjnar - "this throws up an important constraint for people designing systems that humans are supposed to interact with: you must make it possible to reason simply and locally about them."

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Broken alarms

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My alarms #habits

1. there is too much noise.

2. I need to not bother people.

3. make sense.

4. make myself busy.

5. defensiveness

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Compare to Umeshisms.

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Varieties of Argumentative Experience [LW · GW]

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good faith surveys of evidence take effort. I don't want to prune my efforts to dredge up faded recall or verbalize intuitions about the high-level generator of disagreement.

<a id="org4f0a339"></a>

Going over a public political debate with this framework might train a good habit of thought. Combing over a thread in a rationalist space with this framework may generate useful feedback.

<a id="orga77ea98"></a>

surprised to see double-crux described as a pruning technique. i would think of it as directing seeking: it has a function for determining if you're on track but it also keeps introducing a whole bunch of new avenues to explore.

<a id="org3be4839"></a>

Naming the Nameless

<a id="org640e094"></a>

She was not exaggerating about chinese opera.

<a id="org738d769"></a>

Consider how to detect style blindness in others. At its best, style is a high level generator of disagreement. So, "Varieties of Argumentative Experience" may help in describing specific error cascades to style-blind individuals.

<a id="org26cbe60"></a>

Reaction is where the atheism movement was when I first entered it. I have concerns. I would like to co-opt their style to talk rationality to them. On Gab probably.

<a id="orgf6f0927"></a>

project in the vicinity of "making amends between creators and expanders": disco.coop.

<a id="org1439911"></a>

New distinction: bets of expectation vs. bets of taste. The former requires specificity, the latter requires ????emotional connection????.

<a id="orgf23342b"></a>

Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking

<a id="org87c407c"></a>

I'm itching to rewrite this with Scott's Argument pyramid as a rubric. If you knows anyone would find that useful to read. Eliezer's writing style may turn some people off for a reason.

<a id="orgc6f33c2"></a>

How Law vs. Tool is relevant for #sbub . Defining the Ideal of a solution to a problem differs from grabbing the best available tool for it. I define the ideal because I believe the best available tools are not good enough; I want a comprehensible metric to make other people more useful help in coordinating towards better tools.

<a id="org48189a2"></a>

When I find myself internally protesting that I don't know what math to trust because reality is nearly always messier than proof premises… It's not wrong… but something is funky about that and I need to reframe.

Mathematical law is timeless. There is no "running the algorithm", really just twisting and turning your head until you hit the right angle to see what was by necessity true the whole time. Math, if you're doing it right, is a whole lot of cleverly disguised tautology. #habits

<a id="orgdb1b821"></a>

Third, related thinking style: Animus. When you don't know the laws, when the metrics you care about are more nebulous and proxied than "distance", you may still need some way to tie together your strategy and experience and hypotheses about a subject. In comes a form of animism: things and concepts have an essential spirit. It is your spirit, of course, the shadow of your own mind that reflects the subject and how you interact with it. It is the memes and archetypes that suffuse your imagination. It is the norms and incentives that push-pull on your actions. You don't use animus-thinking: animus-thinking uses you.

<a id="orgfdbe149"></a>

Thought Eliezer was wrong in the example of sticking to the left-hand rule in a maze. Surely you can just treat the path as a new entrance and resume the left-hand rule? I was wrong. I had fun thinking through it.

1. https://photos.app.goo.gl/oDF1ZUV1Em3fCMHX9

<a id="orgedb7530"></a>

People who I'd want to introduce rationality to could benefit from having the fallback ability to understand whatever-it-is as a fact instead of a normative ideal. It was really hard to find the words for at the time. I kept gesturing to something like "cultivate the skill of knowing what it is right and choosing to do the wrong thing" or "face god and walk backwards into hell".

<a id="org8d1c5eb"></a>

Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation

<a id="org99afff0"></a>

If I recall correctly, (and I did), the theory of Logical induction uses prediction markets to eliminate the assumption of logical omniscience from Bayes. Logical Induction was a big breakthrough. Would implementing a market to that logic in #sbub constitute a (haha) market gamechanger?

1. Markets aren't simple. Why would Bayes simplify to this weird thing humans invented to do with other humans?

2. The market assumption "tastes" like a tool shoved in to approximate the mathematical laws governing options space and credit propagation. Markets are a really good tool for searching option space; but still just a tool. MIRI, I accuse thee of wanting to privilege Truth when the actual laws are more about the distribution and properties of different paths through option space which are reachable by evolution.

<a id="org4e4fe25"></a>

"I focus on the X, with only a minimal account on how Y makes it work" what a nice, succinct way to establish a context I frequently operate in, 10/10 would plagiarize

Table of Contents

1. Epistemology
   1. Intro
      1. This post compiles my personal comments on the Epistemology book from the Lesswrong 2018 bookset. I put almost no effort into making it legible or relevant to anyone else.
   2. A sketch of good communication
      1. For research, we want to exchange deep models
      2. For logistics team, okay to err on side of comparing shallower nodes just to come to agreement.
      3. Has implications for #sbub . Centralized and federated systems look an awful lot like the bad case of communication. The only way to converse is to straight up adopt the output. If I want #sbub to empower people trying to deeply understand the world, there has to be a lot of space just for interacting with other people's models and drawing intricate connections to your own.
   3. Babble and Prune Sequence
      1. Babble and Prune
      2. More Babble
      3. Prune
   4. Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization
      1. Third example at the beginning is shaky. I get stuck on figuring out whether I agree with the implicit judgment of ape-mammalian social instincts as default, naive, and destructive.
      2. Your faith in your priors gates your understanding of the rules of allowable argument steps. Being convincable of unintuitive truths by logical validity could get REALLY REALLY BAD OUTCOMES IN PRACTICE if not coupled with the willingness and ability to rethink your foundational assumptions. That skill does not come easily. "Fair to one side but not the other" speaks to this problem; their machinery to determine local validity works but they won't use it to evaluate an argument from premises that don't fit snugly into their understanding of the world.
      3. I have the weaker version of the low-level attribute, even as I've explicitly championed local validity.
      4. Comment by bryjnar - "this throws up an important constraint for people designing systems that humans are supposed to interact with: you must make it possible to reason simply and locally about them."
   5. Broken alarms
      1. My alarms #habits
      2. Compare to Umeshisms.
   6. Varieties of Argumentative Experience
      1. good faith surveys of evidence take effort. I don't want to prune my efforts to dredge up faded recall or verbalize intuitions about the high-level generator of disagreement.
      2. http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/argument_hierarchy.png
      3. Going over a public political debate with this framework might train a good habit of thought. Combing over a thread in a rationalist space with this framework may generate useful feedback.
      4. surprised to see double-crux described as a pruning technique. i would think of it as directing seeking: it has a function for determining if you're on track but it also keeps introducing a whole bunch of new avenues to explore.
   7. Naming the Nameless
      1. She was not exaggerating about chinese opera.
      2. Consider how to detect style blindness in others. At its best, style is a high level generator of disagreement. So, "Varieties of Argumentative Experience" may help in describing specific error cascades to style-blind individuals.
      3. Reaction is where the atheism movement was when I first entered it. I have concerns. I would like to co-opt their style to talk rationality to them. On Gab probably.
      4. project in the vicinity of "making amends between creators and expanders": disco.coop.
      5. New distinction: bets of expectation vs. bets of taste. The former requires specificity, the latter requires ????emotional connection????.
   8. Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking
      1. I'm itching to rewrite this with Scott's Argument pyramid as a rubric. If you knows anyone would find that useful to read. Eliezer's writing style may turn some people off for a reason.
      2. How Law vs. Tool is relevant for #sbub . Defining the Ideal of a solution to a problem differs from grabbing the best available tool for it. I define the ideal because I believe the best available tools are not good enough; I want a comprehensible metric to make other people more useful help in coordinating towards better tools.
      3. When I find myself internally protesting that I don't know what math to trust because reality is nearly always messier than proof premises… It's not wrong… but something is funky about that and I need to reframe.
      4. Third, related thinking style: Animus. When you don't know the laws, when the metrics you care about are more nebulous and proxied than "distance", you may still need some way to tie together your strategy and experience and hypotheses about a subject. In comes a form of animism: things and concepts have an essential spirit. It is your spirit, of course, the shadow of your own mind that reflects the subject and how you interact with it. It is the memes and archetypes that suffuse your imagination. It is the norms and incentives that push-pull on your actions. You don't use animus-thinking: animus-thinking uses you.
      5. Thought Eliezer was wrong in the example of sticking to the left-hand rule in a maze. Surely you can just treat the path as a new entrance and resume the left-hand rule? I was wrong. I had fun thinking through it.
      6. People who I'd want to introduce rationality to could benefit from having the fallback ability to understand whatever-it-is as a fact instead of a normative ideal. It was really hard to find the words for at the time. I kept gesturing to something like "cultivate the skill of knowing what it is right and choosing to do the wrong thing" or "face god and walk backwards into hell".
   9. Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation
      1. If I recall correctly, (and I did), the theory of Logical induction uses prediction markets to eliminate the assumption of logical omniscience from Bayes. Logical Induction was a big breakthrough. Would implementing a market to that logic in #sbub constitute a (haha) market gamechanger?
      2. "I focus on the X, with only a minimal account on how Y makes it work" what a nice, succinct way to establish a context I frequently operate in, 10/10 would plagiarize
2. Agency
   1. Lotus-eating
      1. rohit said he resented the idea that life isn't just a series of lotuses to eat. the writing made it sound so easy not to fall into them, did not acknowledge let alone offer any concrete solutions to help with its very real difficulty.

<a id="org11dc8f3"></a>

Epistemology

<a id="org650c01a"></a>

Intro

<a id="org8794c96"></a>

This post compiles my personal comments on the Epistemology book from the Lesswrong 2018 bookset. I put almost no effort into making it legible or relevant to anyone else.

<a id="orgee2a32d"></a>

A sketch of good communication [LW · GW]

<a id="org652d52a"></a>

For research, we want to exchange deep models

<a id="org10e7c49"></a>

For logistics team, okay to err on side of comparing shallower nodes just to come to agreement.

<a id="org7acebea"></a>

Has implications for #sbub . Centralized and federated systems look an awful lot like the bad case of communication. The only way to converse is to straight up adopt the output. If I want #sbub to empower people trying to deeply understand the world, there has to be a lot of space just for interacting with other people's models and drawing intricate connections to your own.

<a id="orgc259ade"></a>

Babble and Prune Sequence

<a id="orga3edf00"></a>

Babble and Prune [LW · GW]

1. Currently I need to tune down my prune step and increase my babble. A lot. #habits

2. #sbub in my current imagination is extremely babble and prune. Some concretizations include:

   1. Computers are capable of producing babble. That's an idea for a feature right there: integrated gpt-2.

   2. Run another Lesswrong poll. Seed statements from babble and prune article. Seed claims of which the reader uses and how well this serves them, what others use and need. Seed claims of good sources of babble, good algorithms of prune, good combinations.

      1. ask LW team about make a post with the convo embedded

      2. make a link post, send delayed invitations to answer and comment

      3. "if you notice a hint of confusion or not-rightness, sit with it for a moment. Say a short sentence out loud expressing some aspect of the intuition, write it down and submit it if you will."

      4. provide a submission form for seed statement ideas, things you don't automatically want to vote in favor of.

<a id="orgd060fd3"></a>

More Babble [? · GW]

1. Akjash is a graph theorist, good to know

2. Scrabble babble as an example of the kind of play I want to do with my language generation project.

3. Advice in this article seems geared from an assumption of the brain as an implicit graph, namely that "individual edges and neighborhoods can be computed in reasonable time". This assumption may not hold for me. I really struggle to generate and re-compact local planning. Expansion may be related? Author clarifies this is not the same thing as connectivity, and doesn't clarify which actions in their example address which metric. I find myself trying to capture any babble I have 2 steps ahead

   1. Better if this post had offered its own explanations of expander graph and aji. Wikipedia threw a lot of math symbols at me and I can't tell off-hand how it relates to this context. Go metaphors gave me very aesthetic feels but not a model with moving parts. What are the implications?

   2. "building an argument from scraps lying on the side of the road" captures my experience

4. I have insisted for a couple of years now that everyone should randomize their decisions more. If you're stuck in a bad rut, randomize all the details and then use prune-discernment to tweak it until you have something that looks workable. If your pruning can't keep up with your babble, then prune by weighted randomization or pick your favorite out of the first couple draws. (see the secretary problem)

5. Mysticism is so great for babble. Absolute best. Form tight connections between everything and anything. Encode important ideas in inscrutable, babbling poetry. Find the essence of hope in a dropped kernel of corn.

6. "To save the world, I will start by doing the humble and proper things I know how to do within the confines of my own life" - one for my #TumblrLikes. #habits

   1. Sounds Confucian

<a id="org3e0bd7a"></a>

Prune

1. Prune has multiple layers, yes. Subconscious, Conscious thought, Spoken word, Written word, Published word. (At times, Written and Spoken are the other way around for me.)

2. River of Babble: that's powerful imagery right there.

3. This essay has awesome style, it moves the reader in its currents like deep mysticism. We need some of that. We need it in addition to [LW · GW] prized technical, specific writing.

4. Contains one of the better woo-free explications for meditation practice.

<a id="org9a2ddb8"></a>

Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization

<a id="orgd254bb6"></a>

Third example at the beginning is shaky. I get stuck on figuring out whether I agree with the implicit judgment of ape-mammalian social instincts as default, naive, and destructive.

<a id="orgfca63f7"></a>

Your faith in your priors gates your understanding of the rules of allowable argument steps. Being convincable of unintuitive truths by logical validity could get REALLY REALLY BAD OUTCOMES IN PRACTICE if not coupled with the willingness and ability to rethink your foundational assumptions. That skill does not come easily. "Fair to one side but not the other" speaks to this problem; their machinery to determine local validity works but they won't use it to evaluate an argument from premises that don't fit snugly into their understanding of the world.

<a id="orgdadbc9b"></a>

I have the weaker version of the low-level attribute, even as I've explicitly championed local validity.

1. #habits - When I notice myself steel-manning my own side I will state the original claim's bogus-ness out loud (or write it down) as a simple statement with no equivocation. Only after this will I attend to adjacent, more substantive claims.

<a id="org537d959"></a>

Comment by bryjnar - "this throws up an important constraint for people designing systems that humans are supposed to interact with: you must make it possible to reason simply and locally about them."

<a id="org41a40c7"></a>

Broken alarms

<a id="org0831c79"></a>

My alarms #habits

1. there is too much noise.

2. I need to not bother people.

3. make sense.

4. make myself busy.

5. defensiveness

<a id="org4f2200b"></a>

Compare to Umeshisms.

<a id="org519d045"></a>

Varieties of Argumentative Experience [LW · GW]

<a id="orgba5bd31"></a>

good faith surveys of evidence take effort. I don't want to prune my efforts to dredge up faded recall or verbalize intuitions about the high-level generator of disagreement.

<a id="org862ca6f"></a>

<a id="org4f0a339"></a>

Going over a public political debate with this framework might train a good habit of thought. Combing over a thread in a rationalist space with this framework may generate useful feedback.

<a id="orga77ea98"></a>

surprised to see double-crux described as a pruning technique. i would think of it as directing seeking: it has a function for determining if you're on track but it also keeps introducing a whole bunch of new avenues to explore.

<a id="org3be4839"></a>

Naming the Nameless

<a id="org640e094"></a>

She was not exaggerating about chinese opera.

<a id="org738d769"></a>

Consider how to detect style blindness in others. At its best, style is a high level generator of disagreement. So, "Varieties of Argumentative Experience" may help in describing specific error cascades to style-blind individuals.

<a id="org26cbe60"></a>

Reaction is where the atheism movement was when I first entered it. I have concerns. I would like to co-opt their style to talk rationality to them. On Gab probably.

<a id="orgf6f0927"></a>

project in the vicinity of "making amends between creators and expanders": disco.coop.

<a id="org1439911"></a>

New distinction: bets of expectation vs. bets of taste. The former requires specificity, the latter requires ????emotional connection????.

<a id="orgf23342b"></a>

Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking

<a id="org87c407c"></a>

I'm itching to rewrite this with Scott's Argument pyramid as a rubric. If you knows anyone would find that useful to read. Eliezer's writing style may turn some people off for a reason.

<a id="orgc6f33c2"></a>

How Law vs. Tool is relevant for #sbub . Defining the Ideal of a solution to a problem differs from grabbing the best available tool for it. I define the ideal because I believe the best available tools are not good enough; I want a comprehensible metric to make other people more useful help in coordinating towards better tools.

<a id="org48189a2"></a>

When I find myself internally protesting that I don't know what math to trust because reality is nearly always messier than proof premises… It's not wrong… but something is funky about that and I need to reframe.

Mathematical law is timeless. There is no "running the algorithm", really just twisting and turning your head until you hit the right angle to see what was by necessity true the whole time. Math, if you're doing it right, is a whole lot of cleverly disguised tautology. #habits

<a id="orgdb1b821"></a>

Third, related thinking style: Animus. When you don't know the laws, when the metrics you care about are more nebulous and proxied than "distance", you may still need some way to tie together your strategy and experience and hypotheses about a subject. In comes a form of animism: things and concepts have an essential spirit. It is your spirit, of course, the shadow of your own mind that reflects the subject and how you interact with it. It is the memes and archetypes that suffuse your imagination. It is the norms and incentives that push-pull on your actions. You don't use animus-thinking: animus-thinking uses you.

<a id="orgfdbe149"></a>

Thought Eliezer was wrong in the example of sticking to the left-hand rule in a maze. Surely you can just treat the path as a new entrance and resume the left-hand rule? I was wrong. I had fun thinking through it.

1. https://photos.app.goo.gl/oDF1ZUV1Em3fCMHX9

<a id="orgedb7530"></a>

People who I'd want to introduce rationality to could benefit from having the fallback ability to understand whatever-it-is as a fact instead of a normative ideal. It was really hard to find the words for at the time. I kept gesturing to something like "cultivate the skill of knowing what it is right and choosing to do the wrong thing" or "face god and walk backwards into hell".

<a id="org8d1c5eb"></a>

Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation

<a id="org99afff0"></a>

If I recall correctly, (and I did), the theory of Logical induction uses prediction markets to eliminate the assumption of logical omniscience from Bayes. Logical Induction was a big breakthrough. Would implementing a market to that logic in #sbub constitute a (haha) market gamechanger?

1. Markets aren't simple. Why would Bayes simplify to this weird thing humans invented to do with other humans?

2. The market assumption "tastes" like a tool shoved in to approximate the mathematical laws governing options space and credit propagation. Markets are a really good tool for searching option space; but still just a tool. MIRI, I accuse thee of wanting to privilege Truth when the actual laws are more about the distribution and properties of different paths through option space which are reachable by evolution.

<a id="org4e4fe25"></a>

"I focus on the X, with only a minimal account on how Y makes it work" what a nice, succinct way to establish a context I frequently operate in, 10/10 would plagiarize