I've looked a little bit at the RAISE website, and I've looked at the overview of curriculum topics, and I'm finding it a little...sparse, maybe? (I haven't actually looked at the class materials on grasple though, so maybe there's more stuff there.) I'm wondering how realistic it would be for someone to start engaging with MIRI-esque topics after learning just the courses RAISE has outlined.
At least for the prerequisites course, these are all topics covered throughout the first two years of a typical undergraduate computer science degree. And that doesn't seem like quite enough.
EX: TurnTrout's sequence of essays on their journey to become able to contribute towards MIRI-esque topics seems to span a much greater gamut of topics (linear algebra, analysis, etc.) at greater depth, closer to what one might cover in graduate school.
I guess, to operationalize, I'm curious about:
1. What target audience RAISE has in mind (technical people looking for a refresher, people who have had zero real exposure to technical subjects before, etc. etc.) for their materials.
2. What degree of competence RAISE expects people to come out of the curriculum with, either best-case or average-case.
3. In the best case, how many units of material do you think RAISE can product? In other words, is it enough for students to study RAISE's material for a 6-month long curriculum? 1 year long?
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(Of course, it's also much easier from my position to be engaging/critiquing existing works, than to actually put in the effort to make all of this happen. I don't mean any of the above as an indictment. It's admirable and impressive that y'all have coordinated to make this happen at all!)
Pedagogy as Struggle
2019-02-16T02:12:03.665Z · score: 14 (6 votes)Doing Despite Disliking: Self‐regulatory Strategies in Everyday Aversive Activities
2019-01-19T00:27:05.605Z · score: 14 (3 votes)mindlevelup 3 Year Review
2019-01-09T06:36:01.090Z · score: 19 (5 votes)If you want a proof-based approach, Linear Algebra Done Right is the typical go-to that's also on the MIRI page. I went through maybe the first 3/4ths of it, and I thought it was pretty good, in terms of number of exercises and helping you think about manipulating vector spaces, etc. in a more abstract sense.
Otherwise, I've heard good things about Gilbert Strang's MIT OCW course here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/.
In general, I think that 3B1B's videos are really good for building intuition about a concept, but trying to do exercises off of the pedagogy in his videos alone can be quite challenging, especially as he often assumes some mastery with the subject already. (EX: In the eigen-stuffs video, he doesn't actually explain how to find the eigenvalues of a matrix.)
Thus, I think it makes more sense to stick to a traditional textbook / course for learning linear algebra and using 3B1B as supplementary stuff for when you want a visual / different way of looking at a concept.
Also, it might be worth checking in to see what you want to learn linear algebra for. I suspect there are more domain specific resources if, for example, you cared about just the useful parts of linear algebra used in machine learning (dimensionality reduction, etc.).
I think the overarching thing to do is to simply write more. To that end, there are a lot of ways to make this happen. For example: participating in NaNoWriMo, committing to writing a sequence of articles about topic X, engaging in discourse online, summarizing research papers for a larger audience, writing guest articles for a blog, or journaling.
As for improving your actual workflow, I think that the Typical Writing Class you take in school largely gets it right. For example, writing outlines / summaries before starting the actual writing, asking people to proofread, have several drafts / edit, and try to imagine reading it from the reader's perspective w/o the extra context you have as a writer.
(I think most of the dissatisfaction I had with the skills taught to me during class had a lot more to do with the context of "Oh man, I have to write this thing using this technique for school and not of my own volition?" rather than the skills themselves not being very good.)
Do you have any thoughts written up anywhere on what a game you'd design would look like? I've been following all of your MTG / digital CCG articles with a lot of interest; I'd be really curious which aspects of game design you'd like to incorporate.
I am wondering if there are commonalities between what different self-help things are doing. For example, it seems that a lot of self-help is focused on changing our default actions, ala debiasing, so there is a train of thought that starts with cognitive biases and goes from there.
A related question I'm wondering about, which seems related to this is "Why does self-help work? What is it doing?"
Not 100% related to the question, but maybe the discussion here in the comments could spark more (or another question).
Oh, right, yes, I didn't think about that.
That is a good example where the above advice I listed, as well as the following models, break.
Oh, right. I think an implicit thing here is "for people you want to be close to, this makes sense to do".
In other cases, as I sorta skimmed over, having simplified models, relying on norms/roles, etc. etc. is usually enough to get by.
Letting Others Be Vulnerable
2018-11-19T02:59:21.423Z · score: 32 (16 votes)The Learning from Untrusted Data paper was really clear, and I found the results surprising. Thanks for sharing and for consistently putting this out week after week. I really like the combination of the summary + your personal thoughts.
Specifically for the example of social influencers, I wonder if roles like this might be limited in capacity because, by virtue of their role, they require a large following. Given the way popularity and status tends to be non-uniformly distributed across social groups, it might not be a very large role for most people to fit into.
But overall, I think the underlying theme of humans-as-valuable-because-they-are-human and the examples to Etsy charging a premium on human-made things hits the nail on the head as for where residual value might lie in an automated future.
I suppose one corollary, too, is that it will be human desires which comprise the demand for these goods. If it turns out that automation also shifts the demand for certain services, via machines sending orders to machines, then this might also limit future options for humans?
Bug report: I can no longer view old messages.
I clicked on my profile, went to private messages, and then clicked on something from the conversations sidebar.
Every message had the following red error:
"Error: TypeError: Cannot read property '_id' of null"
You might already be aware, but there's the Unofficial CFAR Canon List which compiles a lot of their earlier material (though some things have now changed) that someone put together a while back.
If you're looking for more derivative content written by people who have gone to CFAR workshops:
There's also the Hammertime sequence alkjash wrote and the Instrumental Rationality sequence I wrote.
Yup! I just set up one up here. I just grabbed an off-the-shelf Python package so let me know if there are any issues.
Owen's short-form blog
2018-09-15T20:13:37.047Z · score: 13 (6 votes)Communication: A Simple Multi-Stage Model
2018-09-15T20:12:16.134Z · score: 13 (4 votes)Note: I am on Windows and find the font fine. I am wondering how many people on Windows find it hard to read?
Thanks for giving us this English overview! I was very curious when someone mentioned Kocherga in a comment a while back, but the site was in Russian and not very clear.
This is really cool to read about!
Ikaxas has already linked to alkjash's sequence, which is excellent. I also wrote a sequence, mostly on habits and planning here.
I think this is largely correct and points at where some of the larger bottlenecks are.
It's not about finding a list of good resources. There are a lot of those already. It's about what happens next. Things like:
- Getting yourself to actually read said resources.
- Figuring out ways of making the material stick.
- Looking for applications, tracking your progress.
- Repeating all of the above, over and over.
Also interested!
The original author had them removed. You can find quite a few of them now on Medium instead, here: https://medium.com/@ThingMaker
Fading Novelty
2018-07-25T21:36:06.303Z · score: 24 (14 votes)Oh, right, yup. The P vs NP analog is a very good parallel.
Generating vs Recognizing
2018-07-14T05:10:22.112Z · score: 16 (6 votes)Here's a comment by Montfort that I liked from the SSC comments:
I can sort of buy the idea of the comments as a dojo – but there’s no personalized instruction or membership fees or belts or anything. The learning here is extremely self-directed, success is hard to judge objectively, and commenters come and go all the time. Still, even just an empty building with some mats where people can show up and practice is something.
That is, if you wanted to design a place to practice “rationality” skills from the ground up, I’m not sure it would look like this. But the blog and comment section can serve multiple purposes at once.
I have competing intuitions about just how much structure and scaffolding is useful for practice. I don't think schools do a lot of things right, but at least here in the US, we can count on them getting people to be literate and able to do basic arithmetic. I'm wondering what a "minimum set" of rationality techniques would look like, things you could teach to people at scale.
It's actually European convention vs US: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-countries-use-a-period-and-others-use-a-comma-to-separate-large-numbers
I really like the maze analogy! The pictures help a whole bunch in explaining the concepts!
Related: I don't know if this has a direct analog to a CS algorithm, but one other heuristic which seemed like it might have been good to try was drawing a line from both start and finish incrementally to see how they could touch in the middle.
Do Conversations Often Circle Back To The Same Topic?
2018-05-24T03:07:38.516Z · score: 9 (2 votes)This feels, at least surface-level, similar to what I was trying to get at here about how things can be self-defeating. Do you also think the connection is there?
I think Raemon has a good overview of everything here:
In addition, MIRI has a recommended textbooks list
Also, CHAI has a textbooks list here
Also, Toon Alfrink has started RAISE to help bring people up to speed.
(META: I think this topic has a very long history of already being discussed. See, for example, lukeprog on the best textbooks. Also, we've tried having monthly open-thread-like-discussion-things in the past, and they sort of flopped. So just a heads-up if you're aiming for something similar.)
I think they're pretty different. My read on on Lotus Eating is basically "addictiveness is considered harmful and there's a bunch of things out there that can hijack your attention".
My thoughts on Attractor Theory are more about "note the ways your preferences will change in response to actions you take and act accordingly". While this certainly often includes how certain activities can be spirals, I think it goes more breadth-wise and prescribes a more general strategy for which actions to take.
Musings on Lotus Eating can get a lot deeper into the "whys" and "hows" of whether or not X counts as Lotus Eating, whether or not you could secretly benefit from X, etc. Attractor Theory just notes that getting spiraled in could be a consequence of certain actions, and you can take this into account.
Thanks!
Alas, for cue independent habits, I'm not quite sure what would be effective. (The literature doesn't cover these well.) For a probably ineffective start, maybe consider intentionally substituting something else at the times where you notice yourself doing the thing the most?
I don't think I have too much to add, but I thought it was nice to see these different takes fleshed out.
My own views are a mix of your last two. It goes a little like:
"At best, humans are operating off leaky abstractions when it comes to 'doing good'. It's not realistic to expect yourself to do The Goodest Thing (TM) all the time, even when it seems like it's doable. Just like how you can't always swim to the other side of the shore, even if you can see it from across the waves. There's a lot of other factors involved, and doing things like taking breaks are instrumental in the long run to avoid burnout."
I really enjoyed reading this personal piece. 10 years is a long time to span, and I found myself wondering what other adventures happened, but I guess that might have just been compression / focusing on the important bits.
I think that providing people with additional actions / alternatives seems good, especially if you can then feel better about yourself because it ended up being easier than you thought to act on a certain moral view.
I think this might be valid mainly places where there do exist easy ways to switch / make the action easier. EX: Providing public transportation credits for commuters, or redirecting their existing charity payments to another cause.
I think the right question to frame it as, then, is something like "How much additional work are we asking of you to do X, and how can we make it easier for you to take X?"
Quick clarification: Does the reasoning in the 99:1 scenario differ from the sort of reasoning used in anthropic reasoning? (I'm unsure of how that differs a lot from survivorship bias.)
This was a very neat writeup of the ways that progress on problems can move. I didn't have a good sense of these being distinct, or of denominating between different types of understanding. Thanks for putting this together!
Fyi the Levin link seems to be broken.
Hurrah for taking the exam!
For my own views, I think it's often the case that people bias towards not changing their mind. This feels like part of the impetus for the push-back early on in stressing the benefit in changing your mind. (Duncan Sabien has a neat simple analogy of a pendulum getting counterbalanced back and forth on this).
However, I don't think I've even really figured out the trick of changing my mind yet. There have been a few instances recently where nothing felt very sacred, and that sort of fluidity felt like it could be a powerful asset when trying to updated towards certain things in reality.
Modulo the motivating problem you mention, the digital textbook medium you propose seems to solve all three, assuming new, revised "editions" are released every now and then. Do you have any thoughts about how it compares with a Wiki medium?
Hm. I think that Wikis might be easier to maintain, perhaps? There seem to be a lot of additional considerations when you're writing to teach and not just to explain / inform.
5) Explaining ideas in detail makes it harder to follow the big picture.
On re-readings of the material, sometimes I wish I could "compress" explanations I already understand to focus on the higher picture and relations between ideas. Skimming seems the thing to do, but it requires some sort of indexing, and right now I feel like digital media should be able to offer more powerful ways of doing this.
This matches my experience. I'd like some way of "collapsing" certain paragraphs, or labeling them as "basically just about X" to help with overall comprehension.
Meditations on the Medium
2018-04-29T02:21:35.595Z · score: 46 (12 votes)I agree that this is something you can learn to notice and avoid. I find myself a little allergic to these things such that gamification actually feels repulsive. I tried out Pokemon Go recently, and it was terrifying how the game was set up, such that all your actions gave you little boosts, and the tapping led to bubbles, which burst and gave you colored points, etc.
There's something very much about being "in the thrall" of one of these traps, where you can get sucked in. I think the "one more X" mentality also captures a good part of this (where X is food, porn, videos, games, etc.)
Thanks for sharing this! I've been trying to collect thoughts on the nature of self-improvement for a while now. I think there's a lot here that has to with recalibrating our expectations, and the Typical Self Help Narrative certainly doesn't help.
In my head, I'm not quite sure what a 3% change looks like, but I'm also not sure what a better framing would be, especially one that allows you to stick with the compound interest analogy. Some potential contenders for alternate mental images:
1. Some sort of internal gamified EXP meter, borrowing from video games ("It's all about doing it over and over to rack up those points! Yeah, let me floss again today to rack up those Virtue Points(C)!")
2. Increased frequency, improved long-term performance. ("You might not do better today, but most days will become better!"), e.g. From journaling every 10 days to journaling every 5 days.
3. Base rates: It's 2 months for a habit. This is Empirically Backed. ("If you haven't stuck with X for 2 months, shut up and stick it out. Then we'll talk.")
Awesome!
I just started going through this textbook! I'm working my through the proofs in chapter 1 right now, and I expect to progress through it as a supplement to the linear algebra course I'm taking right now.
This was great, and I found it to be a clearer way of pointing at how typical "straw rationalist-y" ways of looking at decision-making might not work well in certain situations. I'm looking forward to the rest of the sequence!
Charting Deaths: Reality vs Reported
2018-03-30T00:50:00.314Z · score: 38 (11 votes)The thing I'd like to point to in 1) is "sometimes, you just run with the meta-knowledge that your brain is corrupted <right now>, and you just default to your Shoulds". And if any part of you tries to object, you silence it with a "Can't listen to you right now! You're compromised!"
Something like that has been useful for me in certain...sensitive, shall we say, situations.
<insert obvious caveats and problems with this approach here.>
Thanks for writing this up! I think postmortems are great, and now I'm imagining what having a specific section on the site dedicated to postmortems would look like... You'd be able to browse through and see how projects like yours, MetaMed, Arbital, etc. all ended and see if there were lessons learned across them, etc.
Anyway, I think this one part:
Perhaps an interested reader would like to take a couple hours and reassemble the most useful parts of Hammertime into a cleaner subsequence. As a resource on instrumental rationality instruction at most half of the posts in Hammertime are of high value.
is quite interesting to note. Especially the bit about cleaner subsequences. I'm wondering if there's ample post-processing happening to blog posts written, as efforts to crystallize and clarify / distill feel like they could be quite high value for pedagogical purposes.
Also some stuff from Kuhn about field-building, but those thoughts are still percolating right now.
Oooh, yes! The names thing is definitely a good example of this!
Thanks for sharing!
Taking the Hammertime Final Exam
2018-03-22T17:22:17.964Z · score: 41 (11 votes)CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
Introducing Box Your Brain, Exceptions All The Way Down, and No Do-Overs.
I'm curious about the specifics! If you were to brag, what were some of the most awesome things y'all got done? What were some ambitious projects that members undertook and succeeded?
The carbon emissions example is a great one that I think people don't take into account that often. EX: *Even if* every recycling / energy reduction campaign worked, i.e. if residential emissions dropped to 0%, this is still only about 12% of the US's overall emissions.
Omega also feels out-of-place to me. While it feels like the Web exists as a Thing with properties which can lead attitudes / etc. to propagate, painting it as the archetypal omniscient alien we've come to know doesn't really fit.
Nice, that sounds really good! Any thoughts on how well that worked?
(I agree that skipping around, moving back and forth, etc. is doable and I don't want it to be cached that the only way to move forward is go sequentially or anything like that.)
Yeah, one thing I made sure to not do in this essay was number the stages with numbers, which I thought might imply more of a hierarchical structure than what I think is accurate. It definitely feels like people bounce around a lot, and I definitely think people will re-approach different places with more insight, which allows you to better grok the models used in that stage.
A Developmental Framework for Rationality
2018-03-13T01:36:27.492Z · score: 61 (19 votes)Ah yes, you're correct about how the internal experiences differ. I don't think I did a good job of pointing out how that is the thing that differs.
Thanks for the additional exposition on stage 5!
Whoa, the thing about learning by imitation is really good.
Thanks for making that explicit.
Thanks for the heads up!