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True, if you were gonna vomit repeatedly. I suspect the association might be forged after only one or two times. Maybe it fades after one week, so you do it again, then it fades after one month, then a year... like it's an Anki card.
Counterpoint: This sort of thing seems more efficient for my brain to take in, compared to if it were phrased in a more "friendly" way. At least if that'd mean a long-winded and less passionate phrasing that relies more on the reader's own motivation to pay attention.
It's true that this quote is more suitable for informal chat than the front page, but also, a community must be free to be caustic about some things it finds sufficiently basic, else it gets watered down. Sometimes a caustic tone serves a purpose for the current readers.
So there's a balancing act, where the balance Eliezer strikes tends to cause a new discussion about tone, again and again, and I imagine it gets a bit discouraging after the tenth such comment thread.
Well pointed out.
I've done both at different times, so here's a way to tell the difference between "waiting for a reset" and "running towards a reset": it's a good sign if I'm looking forward to waking up!
I recognize myself. Thank you for putting that into words. Out of curiosity, do you have an ADHD diagnosis or consider getting one?
Thanks for the first link, it led me to demand avoidance, where caregivers/friends can make it easier with declarative language. I've been working on similar thoughts about "how to talk to someone with ADHD". E.g. I find it more comfortable to hear "let me know if you want support with that", rather than be asked "do you need support with that?". Somehow, no demand for response makes it easier to think and respond.
Zooming in on one of your examples,
Eating something tasty, or going to a party, or otherwise “indulging” yourself, every time you do something that contributes to your long-term aspiration.
AFAICT, this classic indulgence-as-a-reward can aim at one of two things:
- it can be something you only think to do after having completed a task, to build positive assocations for the future
- it can be something you think of to motivate yourself to start on a task to begin with
I believe that the first thing is generally good advice, but that a lot of people can't do the second thing. At least brains like mine, I go for the reward regardless of whether or not I earned it!
So I found a different formulation that works better: fist-pump.
Just fist-pump each success. It is no reward in itself, no indulgence: the gesture feels meaningful only after there is something to celebrate, so it can not be short-circuited. And yet, it can still work as something to look forward to: "oh, if I finish up that task, then I'll get to fist-pump about it"!
P.S.: The “radical cure for sugar enjoyment” described in your linked post (taking emetic drugs when you consume sugar) is a really bad idea.
Not disagreeing, but what's your reason? Loss of gut flora?
It is currently in a somewhat awkward hybrid state.
And you may see it that way for the rest of your life. Using CLI is like having a taste in coffee, there's always new frontiers. I'd advise embracing the "hybrid state" you've got at any given time as Your System, rather than always be enduring an awkward state of transition.
Well-spotted! My other comment mentions an example of literal "|" in Warcraft 3.
Wow, blast from the past! |n|n|cfffcc00 is in many tooltip strings in Warcraft 3 (with the result of coloring the following text some light gold hue).
Lots of examples: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/tooltip-tutorial.51966/ (archived)
Saw it so many times making custom maps, cffffcc is burned into my memory. I guess the first "c" stands for "color"; it's not part of the hex code.
I'm getting the sentiment "just sort the signal from the noise, same as always", and I disagree it's the same as always. Maybe if you already had some habits of epistemic hygiene such as default to null:
The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text. This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)
If you hadn't already cultivated such habits, it seems to me things have definitely changed since 1993. Amidst the noise is better-cloaked noise. Be that due to Dead Internet Theory or LLMs (not sure if the reason would matter). I understood OP's question as asking basically how do we sort signal from noise, given such cloaking?
I'll propose an overarching principle to either read things carefully enough for a gears-level understanding or not read it at all. And "default to null" is one practical side of that: it guards against one way you might accidentally store what you think is a gear, but isn't.
Nitpick: "...is extremely bizarre" can sound prescriptive. If you only meant it descriptively, maybe "extremely unusual".
Basically agree, but not an useful comment.
I'd nuance that as that being alive and energetic is fun -- but when my body no longer grants energy, it's like death already. Say I'm trying to take notes about the content of this thread, but I'm so tired I barely produce anything. If the terms of my body are such that I must first do a timeskip to tomorrow to get more energy, then I want the timeskip.
I guess I understand becoming sleep-deprived and staying up anyway if you don't notice your IQ dropping...
I think some Rationalists believe everything is supposed to fit into one frame, but Frames != The Truth. [...] we should be able to pick up and drop frames as needed, at will.
Aye - see also In Praise of Fake Frameworks. It's helped me interface with a lot people that would've otherwise befuddled me. That gives me a more fleshed-out range of possible perspectives on things, which shortcuts to new knowledge.
But perhaps it's worth thinking twice when or at least how to introduce this skill, because it looks like a method of doing Salvage Epistemology and so could invite its downsides if taught poorly. I'm undecided whether that's worth worrying about.
Gonna reuse the term "fluency escape velocity"!
A major point of the workshop is to just grind on making cruxy-predictions for 4 days, and hopefully reach some kind of "fluency escape velocity", where it feels easy enough that you'll keep doing it.
Fits my experience with a lot of mental skills, because it often takes me many months or years after reading about a skill that I actually reach a point where I've stacked up enough experience with it that it becomes fluent / natural / a tool in my toolkit.
Gwern's 1001 PredictionBook Nights is a tour de force.
Disclaimer: I am not sure I've done what you think of as Looking, but all your metaphors make sense to me.
If I "get" the general thing, then would you agree that aside from Fake Frameworks, experience with Focusing must help? Especially for people who haven't yet meditated much or find the idea of a "non-verbal thought" elusive.
I'm thinking of Focusing as targeting something that can also happen in meditation, but could take some beginner meditators a long time until they get direct experience with. It's the way that your mind can suddenly produce a new awareness or new knowledge, without any conscious chain-of-thought, any verbal reasoning behind it.
Focusing hammers that home again and again, yes, there's a way and it's right there. It gave me a lot of confidence to try the mental move of "step back and wait until I See Something" in a variety of contexts.
PS: Thank you for pointing out the purpose of koans. I had "dissolved" them, but now I see, that perhaps I can try to answer them anyway!
If it helps, your explanations made perfect sense to me, like plain English. So thank you for putting yourself out there; you gave me and others something to chew on.
I can't really see where this line of inquiry is going, so I'm not the right person to comment, but the list seems to be missing at least one thing:
- Ask people to do you a favor
Oddly that makes people like you more, even though there is nothing obvious traded in return. I got that from either Dale Carnegie or Robert Cialdini.
I think it'd be good to flag April Fools posts when it's not April 1 anymore, no?
Not that I don't appreciate the intellectual challenge of figuring out that it's a joke, I'm just concerned about non-LWers misinterpreting it.
Hmm. About 50% of my note pile can be browsed on https://edstrom.dev/. I have some notes on the method under https://edstrom.dev/zvjjm/slipbox-workflow.
How large did your note pile get before it felt overwhelming?
It's true that sometimes I see things I wrote that are clearly outdated or mistaken, but that's sort of fun because I see that I leveled up!
It's also embarrassing to have published mistakes online, so I've learned to make fewer unqualified claims and instead just document the path by which I arrived to my current conclusion. Such documentations are essentially timeless, as johnswentworth explains at How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor.
Still, I'm keeping more and more notes private over time, because of my increasing quality standards. But ignoring the matter of private/public, then I don't perceive updating as a problem yet, no. I don't mind having very outdated notes lying around, especially if they're private anyway. When I rediscover them, they will be effortless to update.
I can understand that, since you keep the handwritings as they are.
Just sharing my own process, but I like the notepad because it's ephemeral... I scribble what I learn, almost illegibly, and later type it up more nicely in my org-roam knowledge base, driven by sheer motivation to liberate myself from that stack of loose scribblings.
That way I get the upside of writing on paper (you learn better), but skip the downside that they're hard to look up.
There is much bikeshedding about eyestrain. I've seen convincing arguments, especially from older hackers, that a white background is actually less strainful for the eyes. I forgot what the arguments were---will write them down next time---but I don't think it's as simple as the amount of light hitting the eye. Currently I'd advise just trusting in personal experience.
And maybe experiment with increasing ambient light rather than reduce light from the screen.
One problem with the Kindle Scribe is that I couldn’t switch from the note-taking application to the book I was reading very quickly. It would take about 5 to 10 seconds in total to press all the menu buttons
Ah, yes! With the reMarkable (another e-reader), I have a trick: I installed an app switcher so I could merely use a gesture to switch between a writing app and reading app.
I quite appreciated having a single slate to read and write on, in environments like the bus and the beach. Anyway, the software was somewhat buggy... and then I lost my stylus pen and then the replacement stylus pen. So now I just use a paper notepad, which I find works nicely.
I have a question. Would a paper notepad have worked for you instead of a second device? What's better with the device?
Just a thought: I experience discomfort with only being able to sign up via a Google account. I can get over it personally, but we should observe I'm probably not the only one, so there are people out there for whom this is an insurmountable hump that stops them from getting started. I dunno how many in actuality, but there are definitely bubbles where it's normal not to have used a Google service for years.
Alas, I dunno what alternative sign-up would be quickest and easiest to implement.
What is the goal? Why do you need to do more than what has already been sufficient to create high-trust societies?
I'm no historian, but I cannot fit your exiling/killing theory to any recent society I know of.
I know the most about Sweden, so I'll discuss that society. Thinking about Sweden made several things obvious:
- First, an alternative mechanism with similar effect as exiling/killing: simply making the next generation better, and watching the stats improve over time.
- It's not just a question of good norms or correct education, as if these could develop in any direction independent of the government and system in general. Sweden underwent a transformation over many decades of social democracy (1930-1980), and it seems widely accepted now that crime rates went way down because society provided for every last member. Crime is habit-forming, and if no one ever needs to get into the habit, then you get your high-trust society. In fact, I'll add the hypothesis that you don't even need high education nor attempt to directly influence culture.
The toaster link, archived https://web.archive.org/web/20171206051409/http://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/whatever-happened-to-the-free-toaster/
Even when you build alone. Let's say you'll redo the tapestry in one room, with four nice regular walls, but in one corner there's an ornamental stone pillar. Then you can spend one day doing the four walls, and three days just getting the details right near the pillar.
Regularities save time. Each irregularity is a massive delay.
Although every building is "novel" even today, they're not "improvements on an existing building". It's a new site every time with a new blueprint. So your novelty point should apply, yet skyscrapers build slower now.
I do think the Burj Khalifa is also an outlier, and not representative of typical building speed, at least in the West.
I disagree with this definitively. I can’t read most if not almost all LW posts.
That’s interesting. I find it relaxing to read most LW posts/comments, which tempts me to call them good writers. Perhaps it’s not that they write “well” but that they think similar to me?
Because I know, it’s something that can hold me back, thinking “ohhh it’s so obvious what I’m going to say, it would be pretentious to think I’m provinding any value by saying it”.
Katja Grace explains how she got over that: Typology of blog posts that don’t always add anything clear and insightful
When you study practical rhetoric, you learn to hold speeches without any written memory-aid. Instead, you use something like the method of loci to remember a sequence of concepts that you want to lay out to the audience, but you do not memorize any exact phrasings.
The first time you pull it off is almost magical, because the benefits are immense and obvious. You have full freedom to walk around, stand in front of the lectern or wherever you like, look everyone in the eyes and ascertain whether they're following along with you, and to change the speech on-the-fly.
Oddly, it's a lot less stressful this way.
You remember everything you want to say, just not how you're going to say it. You trust yourself to find suitable words when you get there. So have you "memorized the speech" or not? I think yes, in every way that matters.
I'd like to tie this into illiteracy. The privileged class in Ancient Rome were literate, of course, but several ancient Roman teachers said that it was better to compose the speech without writing any part of it.
That is, if you write a speech and then try to memorize it, it will tend to be in a shape that's more difficult to memorize!
It's better to instead generate the sequence of concepts in your head, like an illiterate person! The result tends to be more amenable to memorization.
(The Roman elites of course still wrote during some parts of the process, notably "inventio", which is not composing the final speech, merely writing lots of lists/mindmaps to explore the subject)
Nice, I note that Foam is open source and uses markdown, the same as https://logseq.com/!
I wonder if the markdown documents are compatible? I know Logseq's markdown documents are compatible with Obsidian, so some people use both. At least back in ~2021, several commenters (on another website I forgot) found Logseq nicer for quick idea-generation and Obsidian nicer for exploration.
Sleeping on benches in daytime.
I've often had the thought that controversial topics may just be unknowable: as soon as a topic becomes controversial, it's deleted from the public pool of reliable knowledge.
But yes, you could get around it by constructing a clear chain of inferences that's publicly debuggable. (Ideally a Bayesian network: just input your own priors and see what comes out.)
But that invites a new kind of adversary, because a treasure map to the truth also works in reverse: it's a treasure map to exactly what facts need to be faked, if you want to fool many smart people. I worry we'd end up back on square one.
I agree, although I sense there's some disagreement on the meaning of "learning by rote".
Learning by rote can be tactical move in a larger strategy. In introductory rhetoric, I wasn't retaining much from the lectures until I sat down to memorize the lists of tropes and figures of speech. After that, every time the lectures mentioned a trope or other, even just in passing, the whole lesson stuck better.
Rote memorization prepares an array of "hooks" for lessons to attach to.
Also Nate's Replacing Guilt sequence. I'm still reading it, but I predict it'll be the single most important sequence to me.
I think I was unfair. I concede it's possible to have legible argumentation that people won't understand in a short time, even if it's perfectly clarified in your head. But in my experiences interrogating my own beliefs, I think it's common that they are actually not clear (you just think they are) until you can explain them to someone else, so the term "illegible belief" may help some people properly debug themselves.
Regarding your question about math and the like... The point of having the concept of epistemic legibility is that we want to be able to "debug" articles we read, and the articles should accommodate us doing that. If we cannot debug them, they're not legible.
If your math is correct but poorly explained, I suppose I'd have to call it legible (as long as the explanations don't lead the reader astray). I won't want to grace it with that adjective, as I'm sure you understand, but that's more a matter of signaling.
By contrast, it's fine by me if you assume background knowledge, though keep in mind it's easy to assume too much (Explainers Shoot High, Aim Low).
So if a Rationality Quotient (RQ) became famous for only measuring skills that everyone can build regardless of where they start, rather than innate ability, it'd be less infected than the discourse around IQ?
Paraphrasing from How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens: we easily get away with unfounded claims when we speak orally. We can distract from argumentative gaps with a "you know what I mean", even if on introspection we would find that we don't know what we mean. Writing permanent notes will make these gaps obvious.
Thank you for writing this out. Don't lose heart if the response isn't what you'd hoped--some future post could even be curated into the featured section. Why I say that? The bits about ineffective self-talk:
He notices that he made a mistake by not trusting his gut instinct earlier enough, and then decides once again that he made another mistake. This is not, actually, the only reaction one could have. One could instead react in the following way: “Oops, I guess I didn’t make a mistake after all.” These two different reactions calibrate the mind in two different directions.
For me, it's been important to change my self-talk towards compassion and acceptance, and this presents an interesting new dimension. If it helps us experience life (including our rationalist journey) as more fun, that's so important. Ties in with what Nate was saying about stoking genuine enthusiasm, in his sequence Replacing Guilt.
Finding the cruxes?
(To clarify, that's 6% RDI, not 6% by volume, which would be worrying.)
I'm confused. Are you saying 1 cup of organic peas is "half a day's intake of vegetables" for you?
It happens, but you can't exchange complex ideas this way. You know when someone's talking and you nod or say "Yeah" to show you get it without interrupting? There's a number of other short phrases you could say if you wanted, like "I know" or "Impossible" or "Dunno", and that's mostly what we deafies in Sweden do IME. It's rare that hearing people do this, breaks a norm I guess, but it's in principle you could do it. With sign you can also say a bit more complicated things without breaking flow like "That's a misunderstanding" or "You're lying" or sometimes drop in a whole sentence like "Actually no she didn't "... but at that point the conversation is getting heated and starting to break down.
I guess if you wanted to construct a fulltime full-duplex mode of conversation it would be a bit easier with hands than voices. Or to let one speaker use hands and the other use voice, so as to use different parts of the brain.
As a deaf person, I'm always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don't know what to do with their hands and end up "tangling their elbows together", as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they'd been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.
Not to diminish the difficulty -- to do anything like interpret a group conversation, the whole group needs to put in some effort to slow down and speak only one at a time, and it's still exhausting for an interpreter who's only been learning for a few months. Not to mention the food on their plate goes cold.
I'm just saying. I don't think a lack of progress necessarily something to scare you, but then again, I don't know what it's like to learn sign without someone to sign with. Pretty sure it's usually a lot faster to become a productive conversator in any sign language than any spoken natural lang -- the only thing you really need is the hand alphabet, and then the person you're talking to can show you the signs for every new word you spell out.
I might have legible argumentation, but I don’t expect it to be understandable without a bunch careful explanation and backtracking to prerequisites
That fits great with my definition of illegibility. This case sounds like you've clarified it enough to make it legible to yourself but not yet enough to cross inferential gaps, thus it remains illegible to other people.
Not knocking your idea, but usually when you want to complain that "no one has upvoted me" it's good to think again whether you really want to blame other people.
I can guess at a reason why people may not have read that post you linked. I found it long-winded, like a page out of your diary where you're still developing the idea, thinking aloud by writing -- which is excellent to do, but it doesn't seem like something you wrote from the start for other people to read, so it's hard to follow. At least, I'm still puzzled about what you wanted to put forward in it.
I’m a pretty slow reader and I really get frustrated and distracted with not-correctly written text, so I see the subsequent editing of the text as something really threatening and time-consuming for me.
I've become a fast reader in recent years, but like you, I also get disturbed by incorrectly written text.
To me it sounds like you will get used to these issues in time. You know it's (1) your own words, (2) dictated by an imperfect program, and (3) mostly meant to be deleted. 1 would help me read faster, and 2 and 3 would help me tolerate the "writing flaws".
Reading fast is fundamentally about skipping, and being okay with skipping. I think that should be easy if you remember saying the sentence that the words on screen refer to. If you remember the sentence, you're reminded of the general concept you were getting at. Your job is after all only to figure out whether this whole sentence or section is worth keeping, and you only need to read the first few words to know that, probably.
You could also do a second dictation, to summarize what you're reading. That one'll be much shorter.
It was a perfect analogy for me. One carves up new concepts the same way one always does. A decoupler will carve up a concept differently from a contextualizer. Similar analogy: If someone's knowledge can be seen as a massive mind-map, a feminist will structure a hierarchy in that mind-map quite differently from a Mormon, even if the leaf nodes are the same in the end. When you have a hierarchy in place, more knowledge added will tend to follow that hierarchy and thus subtly influence understanding.
But I've had experiences with people who interpret things very differently from me, receiving my words and hearing the opposite meaning of my intent. Ten years ago I did not have that experience, and maybe I would not have understood the analogy then. Maybe you could introduce it with a story next time, for the benefit of the young and the shut-ins.
Exactly twelve years later--did you ever come up with an example?