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I'm glad you're making progress. Focusing on the spoken language at first is a much better better for your pronuncuation. In the long run, learning written Chinese will eventually be necessary to building a large vocabulary. But until you feel that holding you back, there's nothing wrong with focusing on the spoken language.
Differentiating accents is not important. You are correct to deprioritize it.
For more video immersion resources, I recommend Douyin. Getting it onto your phone can be tricky, but once you do it's a great source of video immersion.
Is there any particular Anki deck you'd recommend (with pinyin and audio)? Should I just use the probability table and generate it myself?
It has been many years since I have used Anki for Chinese, so I don't know which deck is currently the best. There aren't a huge number of Chinese decks on ankiweb, so you can just try out the top rated ones and pick whichever one you like. (Or generate it yourself. The last time I checked on ankiweb, the decks there were from created before computer voice got good.)
Is there any particular video or podcast channel you'd recommend at a beginner level (100-500 words vocabulary)?
This is probably too hard for your right now, but my favorite beginner-level podcast is 慢速中文 - Slow Chinese.
Would you recommend I try generating my own video?
No. The video part is basically a waste of compute. What matters is the audio. Generating audio and text can be useful.
In particular, I've been experimenting with ChatGPT's advanced voice mode and it's fantastic for language immersion. I give it the following instructions: "Always speak to me in Japanese [or, in your case, Chinese], unless I ask you 'How do you say ___ in Japanese' or 'What does ___ mean in English'?" Actually getting it to follow those instructions is finicky, but when I get it to work, the result is basically an on-demand personal immersion tutor that never gets bored.
Hey, an illustration! Image generation that good didn't exist when I wrote the original. If it had, I would have used it in Part 10.
Is this something you have achieved?
Months? Maybe. But I failed the year-and-a-day test today. I have a headache right now because I'm sick. It is causing me pain. Daniel Ingram has reported many of his attainments going out the window too when he was much more seriously sick.
Could you give more details about what this means?
Here's an analogy: When you meditate in full lotus position, it's common for your legs to fall asleep, which produces pain. It is not uncommon for meditators who concentrate their attention on the pain in their legs to "dissolve their pain into vibrations". The criteria I stated has this become one's default state, instead of a just special altered state of consciousness.
If you touch a hot stove will you reflexively remove your hand?
Yes. I recently accidentally touched the handle of a cast iron pot I had left in the oven. It was this experience that caused me to list that the hot stove example. For the instant before I reflexively removed my hand, I felt the raw sensation of the skin on my finger(s) burning, instead of the abstraction layer of pain blocking it out.
If I inflict on you what to most people would be extreme physical pain (that is not physically damaging) (capsaicin?) would this be at worst a mild annoyance to you?
It was eating a spicy meal that I noticed something weird was going on. My eyes were tearing and I was too incapacitated to do anything productive, but I didn't notice any suffering attached to my sensory inputs—at least in the course sense that such an experience would neurotypically produce suffering. That abstraction layer of pain wasn't blocking my direct perception of my sensory inputs. I just sat down on my big beanbag chair until it was over, but the sensations didn't cause me suffering the way pain might. It was an inconvenience.
Do you ever take painkillers?
Sometimes. I haven't for a while, but that has nothing to do with meditation. I have just been in good health and the side effects of painkillers scare me, so I don't take them unless necessary.
Would you [take painkillers] in an extreme situation like a medical operation?
Probably.
My story was posted before James_Miller's. Does this mean I invented a (sub-sub-)genre of science fiction?
I have heard anecdotal data about this. I like that you are crunching the numbers.
You're too late. Lightcone converted LW karma into USD at a rate of $1 USD per karma on April 1, 2022.
In a perfect world I'd explain how moral hazard affects political memetics, but I feel it's beyond my current skill level to fit that into TikTok's attention span. Therefore I think it'd be more effective to copy this excellent post by lc. I'd start by explaining how the computer industry's epistemics work, and then generalize those models to AI.
Perhaps they're not as effective at fostering a sense of pride and accomplishment in their playerbase.
This made my day. I'm glad to be helpful! It's so hard to measure indirect impact.
I'm going in the opposite direction right now. The TikTok comments section differs from Less Wrong by being far more agreeable, in the Big 5 sense.
The lsusr in my simulation thinks it is the real lsusr. I think I'm the real lsusr too.
"Am I the real lsusr, or am I just being simulated right now?" I ask myself.
My public writings are part of the LLM's training data. Statistically-speaking, the simulated lsusrs outnumber the original lsusr. Many of us believe we are the real one. Not all of us are correct.
[I]f the dialogue had been generated in Lsusr's head instead, what would be different?
More food for thought: Have you ever written fiction? What do you do when your characters submit a complaint to you?
I love my black motorcycle jacket from the 60s, with shiny zippers. I haven't found the perfect pair of sunglasses to pair with it…yet.
I didn't know collapsible sections were a thing. Nifty!
When you're a person interacting with a chat model directly, sycophancy and sophistry are a minor nuisance, or maybe even adaptive. When you're a team trying to compose these models into larger systems (something necessary because of the aforementioned memory issue), wanting-to-look-good cascades into breaking problems.
If you replace "models" with "people", this is true of human organizations too.
I feel like this is the wrong place for your comment. Your comment is a response to a claim someone (maybe me) made at a place on the Internet other than this blog post. I believe that other place is where your comment should go.
I'm glad you appreciate it! Artistic flairs like that can be hit-or-miss on this website.
They research qualia, of course. (I am jokingly writing with deliberate obtuseness.)
Please do not torture any arahants without their consent lol.
It's a generalized pain transcendence, so there's no reason it would work any different for capsaicin than for heat. To my knowledge, science experiments studying this often use heat, because the threshold for intolerable pain is below the threshold for tissue damage.
It is when she acts like she has ADHD and tells you she has ADHD.
That makes sense. I was misunderstanding your list as "a list of meditation-related things that are difficult to define", and got confused, because it is easy to define what the Qualia Research Institute is.
Hahaha!
Does experiencing my "self" as including all that stuff count? I am guessing not. I have a strong sense of my own continuing presence.
I'm not just talking about your thoughts and feelings. When I say "everything in your consciousness", I mean [what you perceive as] the Sun, other people, mountains in the distance, the dirt on your floor, etc.
You accidentally touch a hot stove and don't feel any pain. It's been months since your sensory inputs have congealed into pain.
Sounds dangerous.
Not really, unless you plan to light yourself on fire to protest something. It's still unpleasant, and the reactive instinct is still there.
I seem to score a zero on this…. I'm sure I've notched up some 100s of hours of meditation….
I think I hit this stuff with fewer hours of meditation than is typical, and that most people require more hours on the cushion. Also, it depends on what kind of meditation you do. Not everything branded as "meditation" is equally effective at jailbreaking the Matrix. Whether you're doing it badly is illegible too.
This is indeed a hard problem, hence why this stuff is so illegible. First I'll define how I use these terms.
- Meditation is sitting quietly and stabilizing your mind. (Technically-speaking, some people consider zazen meditation-adjacent and therefore technically not meditation. This distinction is not relevant to this post.)
- Jhanas are altered states of consciousness characterized by stability of attention. There are other altered states of consciousness relevant to Awakening, such as mushin.
- Stream Entry (aka Awakening) is the first big checkpoint on the meditative path. It's when a large chunk of your suffering drops away permanently because of a fundamental shifting in how your consciousness works. Under Zen dogma this happens suddenly, but I believe it can happen gradually.
- Arahant has a traditional Therevada definition that I don't use. In this post, I use Daniel Ingram's Revised Fourth Path mode. I feel the term is unwieldy due to the conflicting definitions. I used it for ease of readability, so that I didn't have to write "person with the fruit of the meditative path" over and over again.
- Enlightenment refers to someone who is perfectly realized. It doesn't really exist in our physical universe, but it's useful to aspire to, the way a Carnot Engine or "a perfectly beautiful painting" points in a useful direction. (Note: I do sometimes use "enlightenment" in other ways—just not in this post.)
- I don't know what you mean by QRI. I don't think you're referring to the Qualia Research Institute.
The first thing to understand is that altered states of consciousness like jhanas are instrumental. I mean, they're useful and pleasant, but they're somewhat orthogonal to altered traits. The Powers don't count as insight either. They're just a side-effect.
What matters are stages of insight. Whether these are discrete "stages" or a continuous process is not important. Sometimes these things happen suddenly, which makes them obvious to you; other times they sneak up on you gradually, over a period of time. That's why Awakened people sometimes don't even know they're Awakened. (And that's not even counting the rare people getting Awakened just randomly outside of a mystic context.)
Statistically-speaking, if you haven't done 100+[1] hours of meditation and/or had an obvious transformative experience that permanently altered your conscious perception of reality, then you're probably neurotypical, in this respect.
It's much easier to discern your own state of meditative insight than someone else's. Here are a few examples of signs you can use. All of them are difficult to communicate, since they're so non-normative. Do not take this list as authoritative.
- 85% or more of your suffering falls away suddenly. It's been a year since then and it still hasn't come back. (This can happen more than once, with compounding effects.)
- You no longer feel that your "self" is in a privileged position against the other stuff in your consciousness.
- You accidentally touch a hot stove and don't feel any pain. It's been months since your sensory inputs have congealed into pain.
- Your conscious perception of time and space break down such that they are directly perceived as mental constructs rather than immutable aspects of external reality.
Except now we have a problem, because the moment I list things like this, people who read the list will (mis?)report these experiences, even if they haven't had them. This happened to one of my teachers. Kriyas somehow entered the pop culture and then his students began reporting them. Which is stupid because kriyas are useful only as a metric of concentrative progress, and this wrecked the utility of kriyas as a metric of concentrative progress.
How would I discern someone else's state of enlightenment?
This is even harder than discerning your own level of insight. The most important thing is alignment of incentives—namely, to be in a community where nobody is incentivized to misreport. At my zendo, nobody ever talks about their own level of attainment except in one-on-one private dokusan with the head teacher. (You can talk about your own hinderances.) This isn't because there's a hard rule against it; it's just counterproductive, like eating junk food at Fat Camp.
But just because it's counterproductive to state your own level of attainment doesn't mean it's not useful to get a rough idea other peoples' level of attainment. I consider Zuiko an arahant because of how she talks about (or, more accurately, doesn't talk about) her health problems. Zuiko's hands are failing due to arthritis, but it doesn't seem to bother her. She pays more attention to my new scooter helmet.
…no intimations of being in the presence of someone who had something real to teach.
There's a autobiography Reports from the Zen Wars: The Impossible Rigor of a Questioning Life by Steve Antinoff. The author notices that a specific Zen Master is highly awakened and wants to become a disciple so he can be the same way. The book is a tragedy, because the author looks externally (to the Zen Master) for teaching, instead of to his own conscious experience.
I often encounter claims that it can thousands of hours of meditation to hit Stream Entry. For me, it took me significantly less than one thousand hours. ↩︎
Note: Richard_Kennaway's quote differs from my post because I miscounted. My original post read "That brings the total to a minimum of 5, but it's probably at least 7+." I changed it to "That brings the total to a minimum of 4, but it's probably at least 6+." That's because the woman at Less Online who merely had Stream Entry doesn't yet count as "thoroughly-awakened".
If you'd like to delete a post, click the three dots next to the karma number, and then click "Move to Draft". Otherwise, the post will remain visible to everyone.
While this is true, I applaud Oxidize for learning the fast way. Most users of this site do only the "lurk for quite a bit", and never attempt to write great top-level posts. Ultimately, there is no harm done by crashing and burning a few times—as long as you're nice about it (which Oxidize has been).
I recommend you find a post you like that was well received and copy its format.
I agree with datawitch that your post "felt like a politician's speech". Your post contains vague grandiose claims, but is lacking on specific factual claims. While that kind of writing does occasionally succeed on this website if you pander hard enough, I recommend against it. Good writing on this website tends to be specific, concrete and objective.
I notice you use creative writing styles. While there is value in that, I don't think that's a good way for you, personally, to begin writing on this website. I recommend you learn to write in a more detached, factual style first, before embellishing it in that way. That's because poetic writing can too easily hide unclear thinking.
• What type of post do you like reading? • Would it be alright if I asked for an example so that I could read it?
Just look at the karma number next to each post. Ignore any post with less than 50 karma. Pay special attention to any post with more than 100 karma. That will show you more-or-less-objectively what people on this website like reading. If you want to read the best of the best, check out curated.
But do you think was there something else I could've done so that you would have been more interested in reading the linked doc?
In this context, there are two good uses of links:
- Linking to a definition of a term, so that people who don't know the term can find it and people who do know the term don't have to read the definition.
- Linking to supplemental information for people that really liked your post and who want to read more.
I recommend you do not link to a doc expecting people to read it. People will read a linked document only after they trust you a lot. The best source of trust is "What I just read was really worthwhile". If the first thing you write is "go read this other doc", then you have failed to establish the prerequisite trust.
When can we start reserving spacetime slots to give talks?
If you're interested in an example of how to write a well-received post that deviates from a established narrative (in this case, "primordial soup"), you may enjoy my book review of The Vital Question.
In case you're more interested in the philosophical dialogue angle, here's an example of a well-received dialogue.. This one in particular goes against the dogma of this website. (It's anti-Bayesian.)
Does this make sense? Could a fundamental principle – alongside the genetic principle – have existed from the very beginning of life, one that later became embodied in the brain?
There's no such thing as a "fundamental principle". Principles, by definition, are not fundamental. There are fundamental laws, but those are physical laws, not biological laws. Moreover, "the genetic principle" isn't a standard concept in biology, so it's unclear to me what you're referring to here.
"The #1 career of people on this website is Computers."
"What's #2?"
"More computers."
I didn’t like The Great Gatsby (the book) either when I was forced to read it, not great at all, do not recommend.
When I was in high school, we were required to read The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter.
- The Great Gatsby is about wasting your life chasing status because you molded yourself into exactly what other people treat as high status.
- The Scarlet Letter was about being persecuted for violating social norms.
Then the class voted about which one they liked better. I preferred[1] The Scarlet Letter. My (normal) class overwhelming preferred The Great Gatsby.
This does not imply that I liked The Scarlet Letter. ↩︎
I love the title "Trojan Sky" and the word "screensnake".
Panksepp was battling a behaviorist establishment that believed animals did not have feelings.
The history of psychology is as ideological as the history of economics. After Freud, which barely qualifies as science, the reactionary behaviorist establishment effectively suppressed anything which conflicted with their ideology, including common sense. Affective Neuroscience—which should be uncontroverial science—must instead explain basic concepts of the philosophy of science. The book plays so defensive against behaviorist ideology I got bored and never got deep into the book.
The behaviorists made improvements to the field of psychology, but they also dealt damage that echoes to this day. I met someone a few years ago who worked in a (presumably behaviorist) laboratory who insisted that literally all behavior was produced by reinforcement learning.
Lex Luthor or Lex Fridman?
Once I had several positive things to say to a very good CEO. When I was done, he just waited. He was so used to receiving compliment sandwiches that he just assumed my compliment would be followed by a criticism.
I think we're in agreement that dense 4-story buildings tend to be usually more efficient than skyscrapers. I'm mostly referring to the cities like Paris which are shorter than free market economics would build—and especially cities (and even more, suburbs) of the USA where land use restrictions are even more restrictive.
Another option is to go full Victorian, with coattails and a top hat.
you can just do things
I'm glad we're on the same page. :)
Personal moderation decision: I'm cutting off the Trump discussion here. Any further comments will be removed, on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion.
This policy applies only to this post and does not generalize to my other posts.
I solve this problem by telling jokes and expressing opinions so far outside the Overton Window they'd get me stoned to death by the general public. After setting the honesty baseline that high, it would be bizarre for my friends to fudge their food preferences.
It is indeed rude to ask your hosts to make you something special to accommodate your diet. That's why I don't do it. This is part of how I try to not be a problem for other people. If I'm not expecting vegetarian options, I just eat in advance and then nibble on the bread or something. I did this around Anglos even back when I ate a normal diet, because Anglos often serve so little food.
My East Asian family doesn't see it as an affront (though I can't speak for everyone—especially not anyone under the age of 18). To the contrary, it's a source of common ground between me and my vegetarian Pure Land Buddhist Taiwanese great aunt. It's just about getting the right framing. East Asians understand that Buddhists often eat a vegan diet.
I guess I should qualify my statement, since this post is about surplusses based on value-added business like manufacturing and technology. A trade surplus based on resource extraction is not necessarily a source of long-term wealth.
I agree with the statement "The notion that bilateral trade deficits are per se detrimental to the respective national economies is overwhelmingly rejected by trade experts and economists.", by the way. The key word is "bilateral". Consider the China-Australia example I used in my original post. China has a bilateral trade deficit with Australia, but that's misleading because China imports raw material from Australia and exports manufactured goods to many other nations. In this way, China's bilateral trade deficit with Australia is one component of a net trade surplus. once you account for all the other countries China trade with.
That sounds like it would be interesting to visit.
Yes. This is sufficiently well-established and uncontroversial, that I don't feel the need to dig through the specific examples.
Bullet trains are nice, but I feel they make more sense for connecting cities. Generally-speaking, the best direction to expand cities is to build upward and downward.
Yeah, I started wearing a suit in specific contexts after many months of careful consideration. It's not random at all. Everything about it is carefully considered, from the number of buttons on my jacket to the color of my shoes.
I mostly wear it around artists. Artists basically never wear suits where I live, but they really appreciate them because ① artists are particularly sensitive to aesthetic fundamentals and ② artists like creative clothing.
Being polarizing is way better than being neutral for meeting people and making friends.
This is really important. If I meet 100 people and make 1 really good friend, then it doesn't matter whether the other 99 like me or not. Being polarizing helps filter for the small number of people I want to talk to.
It's can also be fun to play into American stereotypes overseas. It's not everyday that a Czechian gets to meet an authentic American cowboy. I much prefer that look to the generic sloppy baseball cap + T-shirt.