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Wait, sorry, I misunderstood what you needed. Please disregard.
Desmos has a handy interactive calculator where you can adjust the parameters to get a better feel for what's going on. I think that can potentially help.
Significant Digits.
The new design appears to have higher contrast between the foreground and background, which I'm a fan of. It's an improvement, I think.
(Also hoping for reduced page weight and performance tweaks, but I get that they're already in progress :P)
Specific stories from this list that I've enjoyed:
- Following the Phoenix: probably my favorite continuation fic that ups the ante in an interesting way with a satisfying ending
- Significant Digits: the famous one that got EY's recommendation for worldbuilding. Very cool exploration of a potential future of HPMOR, but the characters' personalities deviate from canon, perhaps too much.
- Orders of Magnitude: an extension (side-quel?) to SD that also goes deep on the worldbuilding.
- Reductionism for the Win: satisfying alternative ending arc.
- Minds, Names, and Faces: also a fairly good alternative ending arc.
Revial also looks promising but I haven't read it fully.
Oh, right, that's a fair point.
Did a cursory look through Twitter and found several critical accounts spreading it, so as gilch said, it's already happening to an extent :/
Is anyone worried about Streisand effect type scenarios with this?
I get that the alternative is Scott being likely doxxed by the article being published, so this support against the NYT seems like a much better outcome.
At the same time, it seems like this might also lead to some malicious people being more motivated (now that they've heard of Scott through these channels) to figure out who he is and then share that to people who Scott would like to not know?
Yes, having them to the margin is much much better. :)
Can other people comment about the UX of preview on hover?
I dislike it because the pop-ups are often quite large, like on gwern.net, where they can completely block whatever it is I'm reading. Arbital-style tool-tips and the Wikipedia ones are borderline okay as they aren't too large, but I find that the visual contrast is often too jarring for me :/
I think that, while it's true that some people might do this, this seems like an especially steep price to pay if it's the only benefit afforded to us by rationalization. (I realize you're not necessarily claiming that here, just pointing out that rationalization seems to have some possible social benefits for a certain group of people.)
If we are crunching the numbers, though, it seems like the flip side is much much more common, i.e. people doing things to benefit themselves under ostensibly altruistic motivations.
Also I want to point out that, perhaps against better design judgment, in actual industry most of modern software engineering has embraced the "agile" methodology where the product is being iterated in small sprints. This means that the design team checks in with the users' needs, changes are made, tests are added, and the cycle begins again. (Simplifying things here, of course.)
It was more common in the past to spend much more time understanding the clients' needs, in what is termed the "waterfall" methodology, where code is shipped perhaps only a few times a year, rather than bi-weekly (or whatever your agile sprint duration is).
Just a note that your windfall clause link to your website is broken. https://cullenokeefe.com/windfall-clause takes me a "We couldn't find the page you're looking for" error.
That seems reasonable, yeah.
Goodhart's Law also seems relevant to invoke here, if we're talking about goal vs incentive mismatch.
You're right that I'm making assumptions about insights which not always be applicable. And I don't mean to claim that theory isn't useful. This post is partially also for me to push back against some default theorizing that happens.
I think that sometimes the right thing to do is to focus on just "reporting the data", so to speak, if we use an analogy from research papers. There are experimental papers which might do some speculation, but their focus is on the results. Then there are also papers which try to do more theorizing and synthesis.
I guess I'm trying to discourage what I see as experimental papers focusing too much on the theorizing aspect.
Slight typo: You've used "fair" instead of "fare".
I've also pondered a similar issue, but from the lens of addictiveness and Skinner boxes. I think the key differentiators for me have to do with meaning and skill cap.
As for the moral obligation aspect, this is really interesting. I think the component about group benefit is quite interesting and is most of it. I do wonder about skills which do not get much attention or are mostly for your own benefit, e.g. someone practicing to be the best in the world at skipping stones seems fine, but we're likely not going to make a spectacle out of it. I guess this skill is at least demonstrable in theory, such that it could entertain some people?
I think I'd also feel morally repugnant at someone who, for example, spent all their time writing great fiction and then locking it up somewhere where no one could read it. (Maybe this gives them enjoyment.) Something-something, I think social responsibility is what's going on here in a very interesting way.
Awesome write-up of your ponderings!
Also, I think the folks at Hacker News would very much like this. I think you'd get a lot of attention if you made a Show HN post.
Congrats! That's a great achievement.
How do you feel after removing sugar? What did the timeline of cravings and their strength look like since you started quitting?
Thanks for pointing this out. It's been a while, and I forgot how I made the original epub.
If someone else figures out how to add them all to a new file, I'm happy to update the link in the OP to point to the new file.
It's actually running a modified version of Android, so you have a lot of possible functionality. For example, YouTube and Google Drive technically work. However, the low refresh rate means that you're not really incentivized to do anything else other than read.
I think it's just very good at what it does, which is display ebooks at a very large size. It also comes with a stylus to draw and markup text, but I don't really use that.
I care a lot about visuals, so the e-ink display (as opposed to just an iPad Pro) is a really big pro for me. If you're fine with a backlit display and want to be able to multitask in any reasonable capacity, the iPad is probably still better.
I wonder if there are apps that disable wifi for a while which could be used to achieve a similar result...
As for the Freewrite, I think I'm a sucker for high-quality products that only do a few things well. I think I've gotten a lot of value out of my Onyx Boox Max, which is an absurdly expensive e-reader that has the benefit of being very very big, such that reading textbooks / Arxiv papers no longer feels like a chore (or has to contend with other internet alternatives).
Awesome, thanks for the answers!
One other feature I'd really like is the ability to save the papers (and then export) I find through this tool, which would probably require an account for persistence.
Are there plans for something like this in the works?
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing. There are some fields where I want to read related papers, and this is a step up from just going through the citations list. Very cool work, and I like how there is also a list view which is much less cluttered.
I just tried to generate a graph for a friend's paper on Arxiv, but it told me that the back-end was overloaded, so hopefully it's working soon.
I have a few general questions about the site:
- Are either the front-end or the graphs themselves open-source?
- Are the graphs being generated ahead of time or on the fly?
- How did you parse through the citation lists for papers from different journals? Even for Arxiv, it seems like there are at least a few different formats for citations.
- What are some surprising things you've learned from analyzing the graphs you've already generated?
- How do you determine how many nodes to show on the screen?
I think it depends on what you're looking to get out of this.
I took theory of computation at university with a textbook by Michael Sipser, which is the standard textbook on the subject for many university classes. I just did a cursory look on YouTube, and most of the things I find are university lecture series, e.g. one from UC Davis; these might be dry to listen to.
If you're willing to dive into written material, I think Scott Aaronson is probably a very good choice for technical writing that explains clearly, without assuming too much.
Who can name the biggest number? will give you a quick introduction to ideas in computability theory.
Past that, I suspect that his lecture series Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science will also serve as a useful overview to many different topics you'll likely encounter when studying the field of theoretical CS.
Also, happy to talk about things personally. Feel free to ping me here or elsewhere where we've connected if you have questions.
This is the case for a lot of CS topics, which you might notice once you start searching for things about algorithms Java, C++, etc.. I'm guessing that many of these schools + lecturers also use YouTube as a platform, and India has a large population, so these videos get lots of views.
Awesome, thanks for following up on this.
Oh, nice! I didn't realize that hyperlinks were there too. In that case, yup, I can see that it does basically the same thing.
Oh, sick. The standalone instructions don't seem too complicated.
Oh cool, I'm really unfamiliar with wikis, so I didn't know about these.
It's awesome that this functionality exists.
I only briefly glanced at both links, but I think they just output a static graph, is that right?
I guess maybe someone might prefer also using the graph for interactive traversal.
I think the most prominent functionality is the mind-mapping. Wikis, AFAICT, don't have that. If you're visually inclined, having the graph layout and being able to traverse / see the connections could be useful.
Also, yeah, this runs locally.
I think that'd work pretty well too, for roughly the same function. I don't know of any simple self-hosted local wiki software off the top of my head though.
I mainly shared this because it seems like mind-mapping is a common-enough use case for people in this community and people seem to be on an "alternative note-taking format" kick right now.
I haven't tried many different tools, so I'm just spitballing here.
It doesn't seem to hard to just rig up a simple Python script or some Excel file that can keep track, if you want something self-hosted and/or local. (I know you have programming exp, so I expect this is not going to be too hard.)
Otherwise, I think some rationalists are on PredictionBook.
I agree that the size of libraries is probably important. For many ML models, things like the under-the-hood optimizer are doing a lot of the "real work", IMO, rather than the source code that uses the libraries, which is usually much terser.
We have. See Daniel Norcera's work on the artificial leaf. Last I heard, it was plagued with difficulties scaling up the prototype.
I've successfully done this as well!
Hi, judging from your post history, you seem to be new to LessWrong. It might help if you add some info on why you think the study would be of interest to our specific community.
I just learned about exponential families which seem to encompass most of the distributions we have named. It seems like the distributions we name, then, do sort of form this natural group with a lot of nice properties.
I think you've hit on one of the core problems and some of my own dissatisfactions with how instrumental rationality is being treated here. (Quick plug is that I've tried to do some theorycrafting on what I think are the relevant issues here).
Specifically for "Why doesn't LessWrong cover this stuff?", I think that CFAR goes over some of these things.
For me personally, I think a big part of solving parts of the problem you describe (e.g. noticing that your brain is making up excuses to not exercise, rearchitecturing an app, etc. etc.) are things that feel like "shoulds" to me. Ideally, what I'd like to do is to have my gut feel like these things are worth doing in the same way that I "already know". I think techniques to make this happen are where some of the CFAR content like Internal Double Crux can be relevant.
For all the other stuff (e.g. noticing when you should leave university if you don't have reasons to stay, learning stuff you when you don't have a solution to the forgetting curve, etc. etc.), I'm pattern-matching this to instances where paying more attention to your situation and asking the right questions about what you're doing / why you're there is important. To that end, I think things like regularly scheduling time to be attentive / update your plans is useful. Evidence-backed interventions you can do can be found in the psychological literature. (see here for planning and here for habits.)
I'm having some difficulty reconciling the above two types of issues with your thesis about not saying wrong things. I think you're pointing to something similar to what I think about when your brain mixes up generative vs recognizing and you end up tricking yourself into believing something wrong (but tempting).
Would definitely love to see extensions to this idea + some more details on the things you listed in your 2nd to last paragraph on what's worked for you!
One of the authors is Victoria Krakanova, who also posts here!
My recollections of writing things are more vivid than when I type things. I think it's easier for me to think back to things that I've written than things I've typed, but it's not that big of a difference.
In general, I think most of my benefit for remembering stuff has to do with how much attention I'm putting into the speaker / class / presentation, and less on what I'm using to take notes. So it's the actual memory of the event that's useful for me, rather than diverting attention from it in the moment to take notes.
Thanks for the catch! The new link is here
Also, for grocery stores under the Impossible Burger section, is "set food" intended?
Would most of your concerns be alleviated if Tetlock just made all or most of the questions public? More generally, it seems fine if you push for a norm of evaluating people only on public predictions, e.g. those made on Metaculus.
There was a recent paper which was popular on Reddit and news sites, which I thought was horrible. It was about how men could supposedly smell female arousal.
I think there's a lot about this paper that's terrible, and if you want something easy to rip into, this is a nice start.
Also related to your points on not-learning-enough: You should always assume that the forgetting curve applies to you. What you don't reinforce dies out.
I think that there are some skills for which the above doesn't necessarily apply (e.g. riding a bike), but I haven't thought enough to figure out what distinguishes these skills (maybe things more mechanical / physical in nature).
Hmmm, I am still figuring this out as I take the course, but to respond to your thoughts:
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I think your formulation makes sense. p-values can tell us when to pay attention to our results, e.g. if it's "expected" or not, to see a difference as large as what we've observed, assuming the null hypothesis is true. (As I mention, there are theoretical reasons this breaks down in the limit because the null hypothesis is technically never true, but I think this is the real-world use of p-values, as most sample sizes aren't that big anyway.)
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Yeah, I know certain areas in biology and medicine have also been hit by these issues, but I don't have the sources at hand to back up those claims, so I tried to make more defensible ones for now.
"why is X is bad" to “how X can be much better”?
Is this about a specific sentence in the post, or more about the general framing of the issue?
Thanks! Should be fixed now.
Oh no, that was a bad typo. It has now been corrected.
Wow. I'm running 3.1 now, and my laptop's fan isn't running at all. Wild!