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This feels related to Hanson's recent article: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/04/to-beat-aliens-we-must-become-aliens.html
Which mentions that the greatest threat to successor ages are preceding ages that don't like the prospect of 'alienation'.
Some of the arguments mentioned here against technology point in that same direction.
I'm not sure I follow. Whether it's the evolving configuration of atoms or bits, both can lead to new applications. The main difference to me seems that today it is typically harder to configure atoms than bits, but perhaps that's just by our own design of the atoms underlying the bits? If some desired information system would require a specific atomic configuration, then you'd be hardware constrained again.
Let's say that in order to build AGI we find out you actually need super power efficient computronium, and silicon can't do that, you need carbon. Now it's no longer a solved hardware problem, you are going to have to invest massively in carbon based computing. Paul and the rationalists are stuck waiting for the hardware engineers.
I once read a comment somewhere that Paul Graham is not a rationalist, though he does share some traits, like writing a lot of self-improvement advice. From what I can tell Paul himself considers himself a builder; a builder of code and companies. But there is some overlap with rationalists, Paul Graham mostly builds information systems. (He is somewhat disdainful of hardware, which I consider the real engineering, but I am a physicist.) Rationalists are focussed on improving their own intelligence and other forms of intelligence. So both spend a great deal of time building and improving intelligent information systems, as well as improving their own mind, but for different reasons. For one the goal is merely to build, and self-improvement is a method, for the other self-improvement is the goal and building is a method. Well, and for some the goal is to build a self-improving intelligence (that doesn't wipe us out).
Builders and rationalists. Experimentalists and theoretical empiricists. I suppose they work well together.
Thanks for taking the time to transparantly writing down your approach. I'm spending more and more time optimizing developer effectiveness at work, so posts like this may help me in my own behavior.
Thanks Lsusr, thinking back there was a post where you asked people to "pick up the glove" and you mentioned people hardly do. It helped kick me out of my passivity. I'm not sure I can be as risk seeking as you have been in life, but I'm trying to create more instead of just consuming.
Woah, thanks for your confirmation.
I'll admit it's a constant struggle. This smartphone is both a blessing and a curse.
Did you ever follow those guided meditation apps? It's all about recognizing you are distracted and moving back to your breath or some other concentration excercise.
Well, I try to catch myself in the act of avoiding boredom. Reaching to my phone. Or opening some social media app. Or even going to read LessWrong. Those are cues. Instead I now stare out the window a bit, accepting the boredom, doing a micro-meditation. Or I start writing a small note about some topic. I tried a Babble just now. But afterwards I looked up that babble link, got distracted by the LessWrong notifications and here we are, replying to your comment.
Ok, I am going to go back now. But I'll think about this a bit as well.
Well this is quite a tantalizing introduction.
I read my first anti-news manifesto about 10 years ago and the meme immediately clicked with me. Haven't gone back ever since, my close family, friends and colleagues inform me of relevant news.
I haven't been able to convince many others though. So I guess I'll just salute you, fellow meme spreader.
On reflection I do this too on occasions. If it helps you then it's great, right?
Also there is a whole literature about the meditation posture. If you are prone to falling asleep while lying down you should consider sitting. But if you are a high energy individual then a reclining posture can actually help. Don't feel bad about what works well for you after experimentation.
This reminds me of Left Brain, Right Stuff. It also has content on how overconfidence helps athletes perform something like 4% better, which is a big deal in a relative competition where small differences can make you win or lose. He then continues to find business analogies.
The internal narrator is only one form of thought.
One meditation technique is to quickly label each passing thought (it's called "noting" I believe). At some point you can begin to label the narrator process itself and see it separate from your other thinking processes ("voice" I call it, though it becomes wordless at that point).
[Edit: nevermind the Focusing link actually mentions the labeling. Though I recall Focusing was more about depth of analysis, not fast, high frequency labeling]
Always lovely such practical advice.
By the way, if you can live so close to work that you can cycle or walk to it, you can combine a lot of great things: more excercise, less commuting, more money. If you can then commute together with coworkers, even better.
As another commenter noted, there exists an alternative strategy. Which is to organize a lot of one-on-one meetings to build consensus. And then to use a single group meeting to demonstrate that consensus and polarizing the remaining minority. This may be a more efficient way to enforce cooperation.
Anyway, I wonder if there is a good method to find out the dominant forces at play here.
Is it not useful to avoid the acceptance of false beliefs? To intercept these false beliefs before they can latch on to your mind or the mind of another. In this sense you should practice spotting false beliefs untill it becomes reflexive.
How about another angle.
Most meetings are not just power games. They are pure status games. Only in such group meetings can you show off. Power plays are one way to show off.
You will speak quickly and confidently, while avoiding to make any commitment to action. If you attend someone else's meeting, you quickly interrupt and share your arguments in order to look confident and competent.
The low status meeting participants are mainly there to watch. They will try to quickly join the highest status viewpoints to avoid loss of more status, thereby causing cascades. As high status person you can deflect actions and delegate actions to a low status participant, thereby further boosting your status.
Being seen as the one who made the decision is nice. Deliberately delaying a decision by arguing for more data is also fine. Visibly polarizing an audience to your viewpoint is an amazing status spectable!
Most meetings are status games. They are boring for the low status participants who have little chance to gain status. But these meetings are what keeps the high status participants going. And it's an opportunity for careerists to grow in status. All decision making and cooperation is irrelevant or a side-effect.
This is an approach I recognize. It works well, except if many one-on-ones are happening in parallel on the same topic. Then you are either in a consensus building race with adversaries and/or constantly re-aligning with allies.
Hah, the polarization effect explains why I always go into important meetings with sufficient number of allies. But unfortunately that's a way to manipulate the decision making, not to actually make better decisions.
Yes! It's all about manipulating existing systems. Startup founders are not free, they just operate in a larger system, namely human society.
It is orders of magnitude harder to cut yourself free from society. And more orders of magnitude harder to cut yourself free from earth's ecosystem.
Another reason for Zvi to paint a bleak picture is to make sure mazedom doesn't grow further, ever. Even if mazedom is low, it may still be beneficial to keep it that way.
Assuming you don't spend all your time in some rationalist enclave, then it's still useful to understand false beliefs and other biases. When communicating with others, it's good to see when they try to convince you with a false belief, or when they are trying to convince another person with a false belief.
Also I admit I recently used a false belief when trying to explain how our corporate organization works to a junior colleague. It's just complex... In my defense, we did briefly brainstorm how to find out how it works.
I agree, it's important to create, or at least detect, well-aligned agents. You suggest we need an honesty API.
I also recognize this feeling of "You have not done enough" or worse "This goal was meaningless in hindsight". It's probably very instrumental, pushing us and our genes to ever greater heights.
So should we lean in to it? Accepting happiness is forever lost behind some horizon? You will just walk around with this internal nagging feeling.
Or should we fix this bug as you say, but risk stagnation? One way may be to become a full-time meditating monk. Then you may have a chance to turn your wetware into a personal nirvana untill you pop out of existence. But that feels meaningless as well.
I'm trying to find a blend; take the edge off the suffering while moving forward.
Rust is a fascinating new language to learn, but not designed for scientific computing. For that Julia is the new kid on the block, and quite easy to pick up if you know Python.
Julia's IterTools has the partition with step argument as well
May I ask why you choose Rust to write math and algorithms? I would have chosen Julia :p
This closely relates to the concept of black swan farming.
The typical argument I've read is that we should take more risk, because risk taking widens the distribution and gives us more probability of ending up in the tail.
However, blind risk taking widens the distribution symmetrically. So we need to find ways to increase the positive tail probability, while taking more risk. You propose 'weak ties' and 'virtue' as a solution.
I'm going to take the leap and assume you mean virtue signaling, or any other form of signaling that makes you look like a good ally. With such signaling, others will be more likely to become your ally and help you out when you undertake your risky venture. This would increase your probability of success. Doing the opposite would reduce your probability (decay your upside).
As I grow older I spend more and more time teaching. I can concur with all points in this post. Sadly it contained no diagrams.
Diagrams are truly awesome. Great diagrams are absolutely amazing. High level summary diagrams are the best. I spend most of my time at work now drawing and explaining diagrams.
Thanks for your article! Improving education is a good, yet difficult goal to pursue.
I'd like to weakly signal boost dev4x.com and the founder Bodo Hoenen, another high school drop-out who became a social entrepreneur with a focus on education. I know him and wish he was more involved with EA and rationality. Maybe a great contact for your network, Samuel?
May I ask why you think you "passively consume" LW content? I notice the same behavior in myself, so I'm curious.
P.S. I hope it's still better than passively consuming most other media.
I think it's worth hammering out the definition of a thread here.
Agreed. I only want to include conscious thought processes. So I am modeling myself as having a single core conscious processor. I assume this aligns with your statement that you are only experiencing a single thing, where experience is equivalent to "a thought during a specified time interval in your consciousness"? The smallest possible time interval that still constitutes a single thought I consider the period of a conscious brainwave. This random site states a conscious brainwave frequency of 12-30Hz, then the shortest possible thought is above 30 milliseconds.
I am assuming it's temporal multithreading, with each though at least one cycle. Note that I am neither a neuroscientist, nor a computer scientist, so I am probably modeling it all wrong. Nevertheless simple toy models can often be of great help. If there's a better analogy, I am more than willing to try it out.
People are discussing this across the internet of course, here's one example on Hacker News
I'll examine the link!
When you say 'one thought at a time', do you mean one conscious thought? From reading all these multi-agent models I assumed the subconscious is a collection of parallel thoughts, or at least multi-threaded.
I also interpreted the Internal Double Crux as spinning up two threads and let them battle it out.
I recall one dream where I was two individuals at the same time.
I do consider it like two parallel thoughts, though one dominates, or at least I relate my 'self' mostly with one of them. However, how do I evaluate my subjective experience? It's not like I can open the taskmanager and monitor my mind's processes (though I am still undecided whether I should invest in some of those open source EEG devices).
Edit: While reading Scott's review, I am more convinced it's multi-threading, due the observation that there may be 'brain wave frequencies':
This is vipassana (“insight”, “wisdom”) meditation. It’s a deep focus on the tiniest details of your mental experience, details so fleeting and subtle that without a samatha-trained mind you’ll miss them entirely. One such detail is the infamous “vibrations”, so beloved of hippies. Ingram notes that every sensation vibrates in and out of consciousness at a rate of between five and forty vibrations per second, sometimes speeding up or slowing down depending on your mental state. I’m a pathetic meditator and about as far from enlightenment as anybody in this world, but with enough focus even I have been able to confirm this to be true. And this is pretty close to the frequency of brain waves, which seems like a pretty interesting coincidence.
Under this hypothesis, I would now state I have at least observed three states of multi-threading:
- Double threading. I picked this up from a mindfulness app. You try to observe your thoughts as they appear. In essence there is one monitoring thread and one free thread.
- Triple threads, i.e. Internal Double Crux. You have one moderator thread that monitors and balances two other debating threads.
- Recursive threading. One thread starts another thread, which starts another, untill you hit the maximum limit, which is probably related to the brainwave frequency.
I'll continue to investigate.
I found a link in your links to Internal Double Crux. This technique I do recognize.
I recently also tried recursively observing my thoughts, which was interesting. I look at my current thought, than I look at the thought that's looking at the first thought, etc. Untill it pops, followed by a moment of stillness, then a new thought arises, I start over. Any name for that?
Gullibility bias?
Thanks!
I wrote with global standards in mind. My own income isn't high compared to US technology industry standards.
In the survey I also see some (social) media links that may be interesting. I have occasionally wondered if we should do something on LinkedIn for more career related rationalist activities?
I inspired someone; yay!
Since I like profound discussions I am now going to have to re-read IFS, it didn't fully resonate with me the first time.
I cannot come up with such a cool wolverine story I am afraid.
Goodday! I've been reading rationalist blogs for approximately 2 years. At this random moment I have decided to make a LessWrong account.
Like most human beings I suffer and struggle in life. As a rich human, like most LessWrong users I assume (we have user stats?), I suffer in luxury.
The main struggle is where to spend my time and energy. The opportunity cost of life I suppose. What I do:
- Improve myself. My thinking, my energy, my health, my wealth, my career, my status.
- Improve my nearest relationships.
- Improve my community (a bit).
- Improve the world (a tiny bit).
But alas, the difficulty, how to choose the right balance? Hopefully I am doing better as I go along. Though how do I measure that?
I have no intellectual answers for you I am afraid. I'll let you know if I find them.
Current status: Europe, 30+ years, 2 kids, physics PhD (bit pointless, but fun), AI/ML related work in high tech hardware company, bicycle to work, dabbled some in social entrepreneurship (failure).
No harm done with experimenting a bit I suppose.
Do you have examples of infographics that come close to what you have in mind?
I would like to encourage this!
Alternative representations for a larger audience could be
- cartoons explaining a single concept, like XKCD or Dilbert.
- graphical overviews, like the cognitive bias cheatsheet.
What else would be feasible?