Pee Doom's Shortform Feed

I'm really noticing how the best life improvements come from purchasing or building better infrastructure, rather than trying permutations of the same set of things and expecting different results. (Much of this results from having more money, granting an expanded sense of possibility to buying useful things.)

The guiding question is, "What upgrades would make my life easier?" In contrast with the question that is more typically asked: "How do I achieve this hard thing?"

It seems like part of what makes this not just immediately obvious is that I feel a sense of resistance (that I don't really identify with). Part of that is a sense of... naughtiness? Like we're supposed to signal how hardworking we are. For me this relates to this fear I have that if I get too powerful, I will break away from others (e.g. skipping restaurants for a Soylent Guzzler Helmet, metaphorically) as I re-engineer my life and thereby invite conflict. There's something like a fear that buying or engaging in nicer things would be an affront to my internalized model of my parents?

The infrastructure guideline relates closely to the observation that to a first approximation we are stimulus-response machines reacting to our environment, and that the best way to improve is to actually change your environment, rather than continuing to throw resources past the point of diminishing marginal returns in adaptation to the current environment. And for the same reasons, the implications can scare me, for it may imply leaving the old environment behind, and it may even imply that the larger the environmental change you make, the more variance you have for a good or bad update to your life. That would mean we should strive for large positive environmental shifts, while minimizing the risk of bad ones.

(This also gives me a small update towards going to Mars being more useful for x-risk, although I may need to still propagate a larger update in the other direction away from space marketing. )

Of course, most of one's upgrades should be tiny and within one's comfort zone. What the portfolio of small vs huge changes one should make in one's life is an open question to me, because while it makes sense to be mostly conservative with one's allocation of one's life resources, I suspect that fear brings people to justify the static zone of safety they've created with their current structure, preventing them from seeking out better states of being that involve jettisoning sunk costs that they identify with. Better coordination infrastructure [? · GW] could make such changes easier if people don't have to risk as much social conflict.

I find the question, "What would change my mind?", to be quite powerful, psychotherapeutic even. AKA "singlecruxing". It cuts right through to seeking disconfirmation of one's model, and can make the model more explicit, legible, object. It's proactively seeking out the data rather than trying to reduce the feeling of avoidant deflection associated with shielding a beloved notion from assault. Seems like it comports well with the OODA loop as well. Taken from Raemon's "Keeping Beliefs Cruxy [LW · GW]".

I am curious how others ask this question of themselves. What follows is me practicing the question.

What would change my mind about the existence of the moon? Here are some hypotheses:

• I would look up in the sky every few hours for several days and nights and see that it's not there.
• I see over a dozen posts on my Facebook feed talking about how it turns out it was just a cardboard cutout and SpaceX accidentally tore a hole in it. They show convincing video of the accident and footage of people reacting such as leaders of the world convening to discuss it.
• Multiple friends are very concerned about my belief in this luminous, reflective rocky body. They suggest I go see a doctor or the government will throw me in the lunatics' asylum. The doctor prescribes me a pill and I no longer believe.
• It turns out I was deluded and now I'm relieved to be sane.
• It turns out they have brainwashed me and now I'm relieved to be sane.
• I am hit over the head with a rock which permanently damages my ability to form lunar concepts. Or it outright kills me. I think this Goodharts (is that the closest term I'm looking for?) the question but it's interesting to know what are bad/nonepistemic/out-of-context reasons I would stop believing in a thing.

These anticipations were System 2 generated and I'm still uncertain to what extent I can imagine them actually happening and changing my mind. It's probably sane and functional that the mind doesn't just let you update on anything you imagine, though I also hear the apocryphal saying that the mind 80% believes whatever you imagine is real.

Why does CHAI exclude people who don't have a near-perfect GPA? This doesn't seem like a good way to maximize the amount of alignment work being done. High GPA won't save the world and in fact selects for obedience to authority and years of status competition, leading to poor mental health to do work in, decreasing the total amount of cognitive resources being thrown at the problem.

(Hypothesis 1: "Yes, this is first-order bad but the second-order effect is we have one institutionally prestigious organization, and we need to say we have selective GPA in order to fit in and retain that prestige." [Translator's Note: "We must work with evil in order to do good." (The evil being colleges and grades and most of the economic system.)])

(Hypothesis 2: "GPA is the most convenient way we found to select for intelligence and conscientiousness, and those are the traits we need the most.")

(Hypothesis 3: "The university just literally requires us to do this or we'll be shut down.")

Won't somebody think of the grad students!

What was the most valuable habit you had during the past decade?

What is the most valuable habit you could inculcate or strengthen over the next decade?

(Habit here broadly construed as: "specific activity that lasts anywhere from a number of seconds to half an hour or more. Examples: playing golf each morning. Better example: practicing your driving swing at 6:00am for 30 minutes (but you can give much more detail than that!). Bad example: poorly operationalized vague statements like "being more friendly".)

See: The One Thing

How might a person develop INCREDIBLY low time preference? (They value their future selves in decades to a century nearly as much as they value their current selves?)

Who are people who have this, or have acquired this, and how did they do it?

Do these concepts make sense or might they be misunderstanding something? Tabooing/decomposing them, what is happening cognitively, experientially, when a human mind does this thing?

What would a literature review say?

I wrote this before it was cool!

https://twitter.com/DonyChristie/status/1372299482235277320

I am very interested in practicing steelmanning/Ideological Turing Test with people of any skill level. I have only done it once conversationally and it felt great. I'm sure we can find things to disagree about. You can book a call here.

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve been digging into a pocket of human knowledge in pursuit of explanations for the success of the traditional Chinese businessman. The hope I have is that some of these explanations are directly applicable to my practice.

Here’s my current bet: I think one can get better at trial and error, and that the body of work around instrumental rationality hold some clues as to how you can get better.

I’ve argued that the successful Chinese businessmen are probably the ones who are better at trial and error than the lousier ones; I posited that perhaps they needed less cycles to learn the right lessons to make their businesses work.

I think the body of research around instrumental rationality tell us how they do so. I’m thankful that Jonathan Baron has written a fairly good overview of the field, with his fourth edition of Thinking and Deciding. And I think both Ray Dalio’s and Nicholas Nassem Taleb’s writings have explored the implications of some of these ideas. If I were to summarise the rough thrust of these books:

Don’t do trial and error where error is catastrophic.

Don’t repeat the same trials over and over again (aka don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over again).

Increase the number of trials you can do in your life. Decrease the length and cost of each trial.

In fields with optionality (i.e. your downside is capped but your upside is large) the more trials you take, and the more cheap each trial costs, the more likely you’ll eventually win. Or, as Taleb says: “randomness is good when you have optionality.”

Write down your lessons and approaches from your previous successful trials, so you may generalise them to more situations (Principles, chapter 5)

Systematically identify the factor that gives positive evidence, and vary that to maximise the expected size of the impact (Thinking and Deciding, chapter 7)

Actively look for disconfirming evidence when you’ve found an approach that seems to work. (Thinking and Deciding, chapter 7, Principles, chapter 3).

https://commoncog.com/blog/chinese-businessmen-superstition-doesnt-count/

Don’t do trial and error where error is catastrophic.

Wearing a mask in a pandemic. Not putting ALL of your money on a roulette wheel. Not balancing on a tightrope without a net between two skyscrapers unless you have extensive training. Not posting about controversial things without much upside. Not posting photos of meat you cooked to Instagram if you want to have good acclaim in 200 years when eating meat is outlawed. Not building AI because it's cool. Falling in love with people who don't reciprocate.

The unknown unknown risk that hasn't been considered yet. Not having enough slack dedicated to detecting this.

Don’t repeat the same trials over and over again (aka don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over again).

If you've gone on OkCupid for the past 7 years and still haven't got a date from it, maybe try a different strategy. If messaging potential tenants on a 3rd-party site doesn't work, try texting them. If asking questions on Yahoo Answers doesn't get good answers, try a different site.

Increase the number of trials you can do in your life. Decrease the length and cost of each trial.

Talk to 10x the number of people; message using templates and/or simple one-liners. Invest with Other People's Money if asymmetric upside. Write something for 5 minutes using Most Dangerous Writing App then post to 5 subreddits. Posting ideas on Twitter instead of Facebook, rationality content on LessWrong Shortform instead of longform. Yoda Timers. If running for the purpose of a runner's high mood boost, try running 5 times that day as fast as possible. Optimizing standard processes for speed.

In fields with optionality (i.e. your downside is capped but your upside is large) the more trials you take, and the more cheap each trial costs, the more likely you’ll eventually win. Or, as Taleb says: “randomness is good when you have optionality.”

Posting content to 10x the people 10x faster generally has huge upside (YMMV). Programming open-source something useful and sharing it.

Write down your lessons and approaches from your previous successful trials, so you may generalise them to more situations (Principles, chapter 5)

Roam is good for this, perhaps SuperMemo. Posting things to social media and coming up with examples of the rules is also a good way of learning content. cough

Systematically identify the factor that gives positive evidence, and vary that to maximise the expected size of the impact (Thinking and Deciding, chapter 7

Did messaging or posting to X different places work? Try 2X, 5X, etc. 1 to N after successfully going 0 to 1.

Actively look for disconfirming evidence when you’ve found an approach that seems to work. (Thinking and Deciding, chapter 7, Principles, chapter 3).

Stating assumptions strongly and clearly so they are disconfirmable, then setting a Yoda Timer to seek counter-examples of the generalization.

Do humans actually need breaks from working, physiologically? How much of this is a cultural construct? And if it is, can those assumptions be changed? Could a person be trained to enjoyably have 100-hour workweeks? (assume, if the book Deep Work is correct that you have max 4 hours of highly productive work on a domain, that my putative powerhuman is working on 2-4 different skill domains that synergize)

Has the "AI Safety"-washing grift accelerated? https://www.lakera.ai/momentum

Math camps are not sufficient to solve civilization's problems.

Warning: TVTropes links

When should I outsource something I'm bad at vs leveling up at that skill?

How would you instruct a virtual assistant to help you with scheduling your day/week/etc?

"You’ve never experienced bliss, and so you’re frantically trying to patch everything up and pin it all together and screw the universe up so that it's fixed." - Alan Watts