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- Create educational content to sway opinions of large voting demographics. Especially when you can successfully signal that you are a part of that demographic.
- Do what Zvi is doing but for a lower IQ audience
- Form organisations in your local area
- Try your best to avoid making AI a culture war
- Stay grounded
I think this post points at something quite important. I might suggest adding a TLDR at the top, because the implication section is most valuable, but gets buried.
Anyhow, strong upvote from me.
Not sure yet. I haven't had the opportunity to try it out. I expect it'll be cut down as I use it, for friction avoiding purposes. I'll update in a week if I've found anything interesting.
Haha! I did the exact same thing. I have a Claude project that makes templates for me draft one up. It's a much longer version of yours. I think I'll probably steal the one you made instead. But, I'll post this here in case anyone wants a longer version.
type: think-faster created: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm") %> tags: [think-faster, reflection] aliases: ["TF-<% tp.date.now("YYYYMMDD-HHmm") %>"] situation: "" duration: 5 # minutes spent on reflection difficulty: 3 # 1-5 scale
Think it Faster - Quick Reflection
[!info] Situation What happened? Brief description of the situation or problem that took longer than ideal to solve.
Part 1: Analysis
[!note] Actual Steps Taken
[!tip] Optimal Path What would be the minimum necessary steps to solve this?
Key Insights
-
Wasted Motion: What steps could have been skipped?
-
Missed Opportunities: What clues or approaches did I overlook?
-
Required Skills: What capabilities would have helped?
Part 2: Future Application
[!question] Pattern Recognition Where else might this lesson apply?
- Past:
- Future:
- Next Week:
Action Plan
-
Immediate Action: What can I do right now?
-
Trigger Setup: When should I remember this lesson?
- When I feel [emotion/situation]
- During [activity/context]
- Before starting [task type]
-
Success Prediction: How confident am I this will help? (
/10)- Confidence:
- Why:
Quick Wins
[!important] Key Takeaway The single most important insight from this reflection:
Review Prompts
- [ ] Did I identify the true bottleneck?
- [ ] Is my action plan specific enough?
- [ ] Have I set clear triggers for future application?
- [ ] Could this insight generalize to other areas?
[!note] Related Notes Previous similar situations: [[]] Related principles: [[]] Skills to develop: [[]]
I just finished up a semester of head and neck anatomy. I went into it for the neuroscience, not expecting much from the other topics. I had a similar experience to you, finding many interesting things that are helpful in my day to day.
I found the Hyoid bone especially interesting. I remember my first time seeing it on a model skeleton and thinking “hu, someone attached an extra mandible to this guy… and it’s just floating. That’s weird.”
I then had my mind blown seeing it in a cadaver.
Side bar: If you ever get the chance to go into an anatomy lab and explore the cadavers I highly recommend. Take what they say about eating and hydrating before going in seriously. ~every 2 weeks someone fainted and banged their head on a metal table.
The other key takeaway for me was learning about the cranial nerves. Then having the realisation that mine have probably been compromised in some way. (Perhaps COVID?). Which has left me with the humorous and sometimes useful Specific Anosmia of not being able to smell farts.
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Reading the Manga Guide to statistics has been great for Anki cards. Easy image occlusion cards that make reviewing more fun.
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I wish I liked cells at work more. Still, I was able to explain where blood comes from to a kid yesterday because of things I learned in that show.
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We seem to have overlapping interests. So I’d like to recommend “Curious” by Lily Serna.
Perhaps it isn’t applicable to you. But it took me a day to read, and I added 100s of Anki cards derived from it.
Lily is famous for doing mental math super quickly, and the final section of the book is just a bunch of the tricks she uses clearly written out. With a bit of thought, these tricks combine into more powerful mental movements that have sped up my mental calculations quite a bit.
The rest of the book is cool math trivia and life hacks. Very fun, a bit simplistic.
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I’m enjoying these media reviews, excited for the next one!
Sex is fun and awesome. Though it doesn’t feel fun and awesome to have sex all day everyday. You could probably do transhuman meth and make sex fun all the time. But a Pleasure Cube/Super Happy scenario makes me sad.
I’m also wondering who you’re talking about when you say “most people” here? I have the opposite model of most people.
//This Comment contains references to self harm.
This idea is a little crazy, but... You could use a TAP that punishes you every time you open the app.
Trigger: I just clicked the Twitter Icon
Action: Bite my arm until it hurts
Biting is an example, But you could also:
- Have your phone auto-play fingernails on a chalkboard sound
- Slap yourself
- Punch your knee
- Just have the action be closing the app immediately
- Flick yourself in the nose
I'd recommend reading the Hammer Time Sequence post on TAPS. Specifically, the part about setting a Yoda Timer and practicing it for 5 minutes.
For those who live alone, one option for the phone password is to make it an Antimeme.
- Randomly generate a long random string
- Mix in some novel Unicode characters that you’ll have to remember the names of so that you can google
Write it down somewhere inconvenient
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It seems to link to many things. And might be a bit too much for just a comment. But here are some key concepts from mostly psych that I think link to why sleeping on a problem makes it easier.
- Hebb's Law
- Learning is assumed to take place over a 24hr span
- Chunking
- The Multi-component Model of Working Memory
- Mice developing 'Maze Neurons' when learning a maze
- People who are woken mid-sleep and self report dreaming about a problem they've tried to solve, do better the next day than people who are woken and don't report dreaming about the problem
If I boil it down, I have two hypotheses that could both be true.
- When you dream about a problem you're brain is formulating ideas that can help you solve it. All you have to do the next day is try again and those ideas will become available to you as if you had just 'had an idea'
- Sleeping on a problem breaks it up into more manageable chunks that you can better manipulate in working memory the next time you try to solve it.
There are other things that happen during sleep that will just make every problem easier to solve the next day. For example:
- Cleaning up chemical 'garbage' that collects in your brain during the day.
- Forgetting things that the brain doesn't think you have a use for
- Resetting/reducing your emotions. (If you're stressed about a new problem, you'll find it easier to solve it when you're less stressed.)
Hard agree. I think sleeping on a problem is underrated. But even though I think that, I still fall into the failure of "I don't get it. I must be dumb or something".
While many of the review requirements aren’t applicable to this writing. It doesn’t lessen the impact it has.
This is a horror I would like to avoid. I think Sci-fi of this sort helps to prevent that future. This is something my non-technical Mother could understand. Something I could show people to explain the worst.
I will think of this post as the future goes on. I am desperately trying to make this story one that we look back on and laugh at. “What silly worries” we’ll say. “How naive.”
A LW LLM I would like is a "What post was the one where Eliezer talks about logic or maybe algebra or something? I think it might have been in Plane Crash but idk?"
Sometime I hit a roadblock in my thinking because I'm trying to remember a specific LW post that talks about a skill I'm currently trying to practice. It's quite flow breaking to try and search the normal way. Current LLMs aren't up to the task and Hallucinate LW posts every time I do it.
Closer to the first one. I find when writing to think my mind has two modes. Very system 1 and system 2. If I’ve been going for a while on a side branch system 1 takes over. The writing becomes less about thinking and more about the act of writing. This leads to me making a hypothesis and saying “idk why that is”. That triggers the alias, which points out to me that I’m not really ‘thinking’. I then switch to “How could I test if this is true?”
I appreciate the 25% reframing. That’s something I wish I’d thought faster.
Trigger: I see a %# Action: Switch it in my head
This isn’t an extremely useful technique. What it really does for me is break me out of undirected thinking with my writing and get me to actively start thinking things like “ok, but why would this be happening?”
I think 75% of the time it’s not helpful. Sometimes unhelpful when breaking a flow.
I’m working on thinking things faster. Though, it’s not a skill I’d say I have yet.
However, it’s pretty low cost for any payoff at all.
In my Obsidian.md vault I use the note aliases to point out to myself when I've said something that indicates that I Am Confused. I've progressively added and pruned this over a year. Here are the "Confusion Phrases" that I currently use.
aliases: I am confused, I don't understand, This is confusing, This is very confusing, I am quite confused, Wait what, I don't know where I fucked up, I Feel Confused, I notice I am Confused, I'm confused, I don't get it, I just don't get it, How am I meant to, How do I understand this, That's surprising, I'm not sure I understand, I'm completely lost, I'm lost, you lost me, I have no idea what's going on, what are they even trying to say, what are they trying to say, what is she trying to say, what is he trying to say, I'm lost for words, I can't wrap my head around this, I can't get my head around, I'm struggling to make sense of, I guess I just forgot about, IDK, I don't get,
Kinda related: I was inspired by the Fooming Shoggoths to make a song based on the original Your Strength as a Rationalist post a while ago. Here's that song.
Much appreciated!
I'll:
- Correct that typo
- Add a section back in to hopefully make it less confusing
I decided to create this tag for two reasons:
- The concept of LLM Psychology is interesting and exciting to me
- I have progressively seen more people referring to a type of research as LLM Psychology. I think having a place specifically for it on LW is useful.
If you reply to this comment with posts you think fit under this tag, I'll read them and decide if they seem like they should be here. I'm currently quite fuzzy on what really belongs in this tag. Clarification on what you think LLM Psych is would be much appreciated.
My timelines have now updated to something closer to fast takeoff. In a world like this, how valuable is educating the general public? Claude claims science started worrying about the climate in the 50s/60s. It wasn't until 2010s that we saw meaningful action beginning to take place. Do we have the time to educate?
To be clear, this is more of a question than an opinion that I hold. I am working to form an opinion.
In reference to o3 right? Comparing it to just before the 2020 pandemic started?
As in “Something large is about to happen and we are unprepared”?
I really loved Dr Stone. Excited to read this review and hear what other Rationalists think of it. I was kinda desperate for more Anime/Manga that teaches or inspires a love of science. Here are my recommendations:
- Science Fell in Love so I tried to Prove it (Anime, Focuses on a computer science lab, a whole bunch of statistics)
- Cells at work (Anime, more for kids, but tried to teach you about cells in the human body.)
- The Manga Guide to _____ Series (Manga, I've read most of the statistics book. Though it's from 2004 and about frequentest stats. I have liniar algebra and CPUs, but haven't read them so far. They seem like also very fun books.)
And.... that's kinda it that I've found. Nothing matches up to those. Would really love other recommendations!
Still working my way through this post. But this section gets me excited!
If the Receiver or Giver has high enough skills in one area, they can probably compensate for the other having lower skills, although there's probably some minimum threshold needed for each.
It conjures the image of a future occupation. A conduit. Someone skilled at giving and receiving. Brought in specifically to speed up this type of knowledge pass over between two people.
I may be an outlier here. But if I thought I was going to be assassinated, I would think of:
- JFK -MLK
- James A. Garfield
- Lincoln
- Franz Ferdinand
And from these I'd think "Hu, better buy a bullet proof vest".
I would unfortunately not think about 'Being Suicided', unless I had an expectation that it would occur in this way.
I liked this post and will find use for it in the work I do.
In my experience, repeating a name out loud, or doing some other visible memory trick. Is a good way to signal trying to remember names. Then, if later you forget you are more easily forgiven.
Thank you for your help and excellent comment!
Omg. Oops! I completely forgot about custom instructions and memory! I’ll run some more trials with those off. Thank you very much for pointing this out.
Hu. That is extremely useful. Thank you.
I've got a lot of singing out of AVM. While my current method works well for this, I find it more challenging than eliciting harmful outputs.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I find it trivial to get GPT-4o to output harmful content in advanced voice mode (AVM), given that it doesn’t have a direct content filter on it e.g. NSFW.
In the span of 30 minutes it gave me 1) instructions to make a pipe bomb to attach to a car. And 2) Instructions on how to leak a virus into the public without detection (avoiding saying more on this).
I have a theory as to why it might be easy for me specifically. But I would like to know if this is the experience that others have with AVM?
Thought: Confidently saying “(X) has no Manhattan Project”. Is forgetting how secret the Manhattan Project was.
If I’ll probably see them again, I don’t miss people. I thought people saying they miss you were just being overly polite.
I asked for further details on the 10th point and Claude listed a bunch of stuff I’ve absolutely never heard of. I’d say it’s probably related to meditation if I had to guess. Here’s that.
—
Claude Let me break down Time Perception Management into its deeper components, as this is one of the most subtle yet powerful micro-skills...
- Understanding Psychological Time vs Clock Time
- How different mental states alter time perception
- Flow states can make hours feel like minutes
- Anxiety can make minutes feel like hours
- Learning to intentionally shift between time perspectives
- When to use event-based time vs clock-based time
- How to enter "timeless" states for creative work
- Reading your internal clock
- Understanding your natural rhythms
- Recognizing when time perception is distorted by emotions
- Managing Time Horizons
- Developing multiple concurrent time frames
- Thinking in day/month/year/decade simultaneously
- Balancing immediate tasks with long-term vision
- Time horizon switching
- When to zoom out to years
- When to zoom in to minutes
- How to maintain strategic clarity while handling tactics
- Future-self continuity
- Techniques for making future consequences feel real
- Building strong mental connections to your future self
- Chronotype Optimization
- Understanding your natural energy patterns
- Peak creative hours
- Peak analytical hours
- Recovery periods
- Designing your life around your chronotype
- When to schedule different types of work
- How to handle obligations that fight your natural rhythm
- Seasonal adjustments
- Adapting to changing daylight
- Modifying routines for different seasons
- Timeline Compression and Expansion Techniques
- How to make time feel longer when needed
- Breaking experiences into smaller chunks
- Increasing novelty to slow perceived time
- Using attention to expand moments
- How to make time feel shorter when beneficial
- Chunking similar tasks
- Creating flow states
- Using routine to speed through necessary tasks
- Personal Tempo Awareness
- Understanding your natural pace
- Speaking tempo
- Walking pace
- Decision-making speed
- Tempo matching and mismatching
- When to match others' tempo
- When to intentionally mismatch
- How to set the tempo in group situations
- Rhythm management
- Creating sustainable work rhythms
- Building in recovery cycles
- Recognizing when to speed up or slow down
- Advanced Applications:
- Using time perception in negotiations
- Creating or relieving time pressure
- Understanding how others perceive time
- Memory engineering
- Making good times feel longer in memory
- Making difficult times feel shorter in memory
- Social time management
- Managing group time perception
- Creating shared time experiences
- Decision timing
- Understanding when to decide quickly vs slowly
- Recognizing optimal timing windows
This skill set is particularly valuable because most people are unconscious of how their time perception affects their decisions and experiences. Mastering it gives you significant advantages in:
- Personal productivity
- Emotional regulation
- Strategic planning
- Social influence
- Life satisfaction
Would you like me to elaborate on any particular aspect? Or shall we explore how this connects with some of the other micro-skills we discussed?
I recently saw a tweet that asked GPT, what micro skills a person should master. I asked Claude a similar question, though had preloaded the conversation with “things a modern day Aristotle would teach a 24yo student”.
I think this is probably a valuable exercise to undertake yourself. I’m providing my prompt, and Claude’s response as an ‘appetiser’ to get you interested in this task.
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Prompt Wonderful. Now Let's think less utilized by society. What are some more niche micro skills that you would want a person who you are tutoring to have. And this is given that you want them to be as successful as possible.
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Claude Let me think deeply about valuable micro skills that are often overlooked but can create significant advantages in life...
- Cold Reading & Behavioral Analysis
- Understanding micro-expressions
- Picking up on subtle vocal tone changes
- Recognizing behavioral patterns in groups
- Reading body language clusters rather than isolated gestures
- This isn't about manipulation, but rather developing deeper empathy and understanding
- Strategic Silence & Information Management
- Knowing when not to speak
- Understanding information asymmetry
- The power of selective disclosure
- Using thoughtful pauses in conversation
- The art of asking rather than telling
- Scenario Planning & Secondary Consequence Analysis
- Ability to see 3-4 moves ahead in decisions
- Understanding cascade effects
- Identifying hidden risks and opportunities
- Planning for both success and failure scenarios
- Recognition of system dynamics
- Social Capital Accounting
- Understanding relationship networks
- Tracking favors and obligations implicitly
- Building genuine reciprocity
- Recognition of social momentum
- Understanding status games without playing them
- Energy Management & Recovery Tactics
- Understanding personal energy patterns
- Quick recovery techniques between intense tasks
- Environmental design for optimal performance
- Micro-rest optimization
- State switching abilities
- Pattern Recognition Across Domains
- Transferring insights between unrelated fields
- Spotting emerging trends early
- Recognition of historical rhymes
- Understanding cyclic behaviors
- Identifying underlying principles
- Meta-Learning Optimization
- Learning how you specifically learn best
- Creating personal knowledge management systems
- Information synthesis techniques
- Retention optimization
- Skill transfer mechanisms
- Probabilistic Thinking & Calibration
- Understanding base rates
- Recognizing cognitive biases in real-time
- Bayesian updating in daily life
- Risk assessment calibration
- Decision journaling
- Attention Direction & Management
- Understanding attention as a finite resource
- Strategic ignorance
- Focus maintenance techniques
- Context switching optimization
- Signal-to-noise ratio improvement
- Time Perception Management
- Understanding psychological time vs clock time
- Managing time horizons
- Chronotype optimization
- Timeline compression and expansion techniques
- Personal tempo awareness
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these? I find them fascinating because they're rarely taught explicitly yet can be transformative when mastered. I'm curious which ones resonate most with you?
These skills compound over time and create second-order advantages that aren't immediately obvious to others. They're also relatively timeless - they worked in ancient Athens and still work today.
Professional filmmaker and animator here. I’m willing to donate some of my time (~10-20h) to help create visuals for this project (Should you be in need of that). Happy to send through examples of work if DMed.
Also, what did you shoot on? Netflix used to have a list of camera requirements. I’m not sure if they still hold to them.
I imagine a character (Alice) is constantly used as the rational actor in scenarios. We make Alice a likeable character, give her a personality, a series of events and decisions that lead her to the present.
Then, when the user has been around for a sufficient amount of time. Alice starts to slip. She makes mistakes that harm others, perhaps she has disputes with ‘Stupidus’, Maybe she just begins to say untrue things.
How long will it take a user to pry themself out of the rose tinted glasses, and update on Alice?
I took a university class that based the names of the Veritasium video. Drew and Gun. They rhyme with system 1&2.
I really loved Dr Stone. It gave me the feeling that the science as magic sequences gave me. A deep appreciation for reality and the power it brings an individual to understand it deeply. I really hope to have more rationalists watch it in future.
I also recommend “Science fell in love, so I tried to prove it” for stats nerds. And “My Hero Academia” as the main character embodies “Tsuyoku Naritai!”
If I had sufficient funds. I would consider if it would be beneficial to invade a few subreddits, and offer $1000 to whoever can make the most viral meme that subtly teaches basic concepts of AI Doom.
This thought stems from a comment on “The Best Lay Argument is not a Simple English Yud Essay”. I have more thoughts, but not much time. If my reasoning is unclear I apologise.
Yep! If I think about those 10 people, 5 are having, or I expect to have large impact on the future. As for ages, all the people I thought of except one were over 20. There was one 14yo who is just naturally super high G.
I like what you’re doing trying to do here. I think this is important work.
I’m a bit confused at what you mean by Layperson though? These are good for the ‘every day’ above average intelligence ‘switched on’ type of individual.
But that is not what I image a Layperson as. I interact regularly with ~100 people. (For context, I am a Drama Teacher and Trivia Host)
I thought about how many I predict could understand these examples, given 20 seconds of their attention. I thought of 10 people. The other 90% would fall into a few other categories that all end with them not being more knowledgeable after coming across the text.
But am I confused? Was that 90% not the target audience?
I was recently ease-dropping on a loud phone conversation. A man, maybe late 40s? Had been cheated on. He was angry. He was arguing with his girlfriend.
I noticed that all he argued the way people argue in movies. “Put yourself in my shoes”, “No, you listen to me!”, “I thought you would be the one!”. It hurt to listen to someone in pain.
A few weeks later, I was in a heated discussion with some Non-Rationalist friends. Long story short, I failed to output correct emotional signals, which was making them upset. I noticed the same thing in them. Copying the way people argue on social media. It felt ‘Therapy Culture’ for lack of a better descriptor.
But then I noticed myself. Do you remember when Sam Altman went on world tour? Doing tens of interviews. I watched every one of those. And that is now how I speak in arguments. I think this sounds like a bad thing. Because of what we now know about Sam. But I personally trusted him when he spoke back then.
The moral is, you are what you consume. Be careful.
Took Metamucil in water in glass form for about a year. Lost a lot of weight. Was great 98% of the time. However, sometimes I wouldn’t drink enough water. Would absolutely not recommend that experience.
Recipe Recommendation: I freeze these in small containers. When done right, it’s breakfast for an entire month. Just take one out of the freezer and put in the fridge every morning. That way you’ll always have an unfrozen one.
- Rolled oats (bulk) Some come with fruit chunks
- Clusters of crunchy whatever
- Blue Berries
- Raspberries
- Banana
- Coca powder (a little)
- Peanut Butter (a lot)
- Apple juice (maybe 1inch max)
- cover with soy milk (Oestrogen thing isn’t true. It’s plant oestrogen. Cows milk has animal oestrogen)
- Sprinkle cinnamon
Freeze Highly recommended. Takes a while to prep 30 of them. But makes life pretty damn good.
That matches with what my psychiatrist told me. I find it surprising how large the variation between individuals can be with these meds.
I have met people who can drink an espresso before bed and it actually helps their sleep. But I find those people to be rare. I see much more variance in amphetamines. My mental data set isn’t large enough to make any sold predictions. But I am unable to point to a clear “most people's sleep is (X)ed by amphetamines”.
This seems like it will be useful for me in the future.
I’ve been wondering for a while how the long half life of ADHD meds impact sleep. Any data on that?
I’d say that’s a good guess given the information I provided.
I think I did a good job in this particular circumstance as coming off as confused or curious. That was my aim, and I placed a lot of focus there. However, I haven’t listened back to the audio recordings of the conversation. It’s likely my previous comment is heavily bias.
Unfortunately, I think the average person doesn’t understand misunderstanding. I think it can be taken as…
- You’re too dumb to understand
- You’re being purposely ignorant
- You’re making fun of them I’ll give an example:
— I was recently in a conversation with a non-rationalist. I organised it because I wanted to talk about negative opinions they had on me. We talked a lot about certain scenarios.
In one scenario, I had seemingly rejected the suggestion that we all go bowling. I had said out loud “I hate bowling”. When what I meant was “I hate bowling, but I’m still very happy to sit in a bowling alley and watch my friends play.”
I think I did a bad job communicating there. It made my friends very angry (extra details about situation left out).
During our conversation, I asked for levels of anger or annoyance at me before and after I had explained what I had meant to say. I was surprised when one friend didn’t adjust their anger levels at all. I thought I must have done another bad job at explaining.
“So, you started at 80% angry at me. And now that I’ve told you my perspective, you’re still 80% angry?” This surprised me. I would adjust my levels down if someone explained that to me.
I went back and forth trying to get to the bottom of this for ~half an hour. After which I came to realise we were just wired very different. To do this I used your suggested technique. In the time it took for me to understand this one point, I had deeply annoyed my friend. They were under the impression that I was misunderstanding them on purpose somehow. I think I would have been less comfortable or fulfilled, but better off. If I had just accepted that they were still very angry. And had moved on. Instead, being confused and asking questions made my situation worse.
To be clear though. I did get to the truth with this technique. But sometimes winning can’t be about knowing the truth. Which is sad. I don’t like that. But I think it is true.
Not what I’d expect of reddit. Do you have particular subreddits in mind? I’d personally like to spend my time in places like the ones you described.
Idk if people around the world have those cardboard “Recycle your phone” boxes. That take phones and recycle their components. But I’ve rummaged through a certain one ~5 different times and found 2 completely functional and reset iPhones.
Surely there’s something better we can do with these than disassembling them?
By “NSFW” do you mean pornography? Or are you also including Gore?
I’m messing around with a post about this. However:
- overwhelmingly positive
- with a few things I was a little icked about But I need to think about that more to understand if it’s a problem with me, or the thing that made me icked out
And thanks for checking in. That’s very kind of you
Just returned to Aus from US. One of the most annoying things while travelling was lack of public bathrooms. I could believe that some restaurants just didn’t have a bathroom. I was surprised at how few bathrooms lighthaven seemed to have. Though didn’t go into any of the sleeping areas. Even a place like Disneyland, or a mall. Here is AUS, if I go to a mall I expect to have bathrooms every ~hundred meters. I expect them to be clearly marked, easy to navigate towards and extremely rarely out of order. I can’t imagine needed to pay to use something like a bathroom. Though I did see cafes charging for cups of water. Charging for that type of thing in public places feels like a mistake to me.