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Edit: I found the post usefwl, thankmuch!!
Mh, was gonna ask when you were taking it. I'm preparing to try it as a sleep-aid for when I adjust my polyphasic sleep-schedule (wanting to go fm 16h-cycles potentially down to 9h) bc it seems potentially drowsymaking and has much faster plasma decay-rate[1] compared to alts. This is good for polyphasic if not want drowsy aft wake.
The data in [1] concerns 100mg tablets, however, and a larger dose (eg 400mg) may be longer. The kinetic model[2] they use will prob be good estimate of plasma concentrations even if adjust dose.
Questions is whether it's good estimation for duration of action in the brain, esp given that it's "single-compartment model" (the blood is one compartment, and the brain is another). My heuristic for whether plasma T predicts brain T is whether the molecule v easily passes the BBB (as melatonin does), since then I can guess that the curve for the brain will look similar to the curve for the blood, offset slightly down and to the right.
- ^
Typical concentration-time curve of plasma ʟ-theanine of one participant after intake of 100 mg ʟ-theanine via one capsule (A) or 250 mL green tea (B). Circles represent measured concentrations of ʟ-theanine. The line represents the modeled plasma concentration-time curve by the use of the 1-compartment model.
— Kinetics of ʟ-Theanine Uptake and Metabolism in Healthy Participants Are Comparable after Ingestion of ʟ-Theanine via Capsules and Green Tea, , 4 - ScienceDirect - ^
- ^
Getting a tweakable python model for it was nontrivial after 35m of trying, so i'll prob j wing it w 200mg 1h pre bedtime and do 3h sleep, and adjust bon feelings. ig the primary variable that determines how alert i feel upon waking up is getting the sleep-cycle timing right, and planning my wake-up routines (lights & text-to-speech-model as alarm) for j after I've done REM-sleep[4].
- ^
While I probably would feel alert if waking up in middle of REM-sleep (after emerging from deep), I want to avoid that bc studies show bad effects from targeted deprivation of REM (leaving other phases untouched).
API requests should be automatically screened for human intent, and requests judged by the model to be disrespectfwl should be denied. (And they shouldn't be trained to agree to respond to everything.)
I appreciate the post, but I also wish to hear more detailed and realistic scenarios of exactly how we might end up accidentally (or intentionally) sleepwalk into a moral catastrophe. I think it's unlikely that punishment walls will make AIs more productive, but similar things may profitable/popular if advertised for human (sadist) entertainment.
this is rly good. summary of what i lurned:
- assume the ravens call a particular pattern iff it rains the next day.
- iow, , thus observing the raven's call is strong evidence u ought to hv an umbrella rdy for tomorrow.
- "raven's call" is therefore a v good predictive var.
- but bribing the ravens to hush still might not hv any effect on whether it actually rains tomorrow.
- it's therefore a v bad causal var.
- it cud even be the case that, up until now, it never not rained unless the raven's called, and intervening on the var cud still be fruitless if nobody's ever done that bfr.
- for systems u hv 100% accurate & 100% complete predictive maps of, u may still hv a terrible causal map wrt what happens if u try to intervene in ways that take the state of the system out of the distribution u'v been mapping it in.
how then do u build good causal maps?
- ig u can still improve ur causal maps wo trial-and-error (empirically testing interventions) if u just do predictive mapping of the system, and u focus in on the predictive power of the simplest vars, and do trial-and-error in ur simulations. or smth.
u'r encouraged to write it!
You have permission to steal my work & clone my generating function. Liberate my vision from its original prison. Obsolescence is victory. I yearn to be surpassed. Don't credit me if it's more efficient or better aesthetics to not. Forget my name before letting it be dead weight.
but u don't know which distribution(s) u are acting in. u only have access to a sample dist, so u are going to underestimate the variance unless u ~Bessel-correct[1] ur intuitions. and it matters which parts of the dists u tune ur sensors for: do u care more to abt sensitivity/specificity wrt the median cluster or sensitivity/specificity wrt the outliers?
ig sufficiently advanced vibes-based pattern-matching collapses to doing causal modelling, so my real-complaint is abt ppl whose vibe-sensors are under-dimensional.
- ^
idk the right math tricks to use are, i just wanted to mk the point that sample dists underestimate the variance of the true dists
also, oops, fixed link. upvoted ur comment bc u complimented me for using RemNote, which shows good taste.
Fwiw, you're on my shortlist of researchers whose potential I'm most excited about. I don't expect my judgment to matter to you (or maybe up to one jot), but I mention it just in case it helps defend against the self-doubt you experience as a result of doing things differently. : )
I don't know many researchers that well, but I try to find the ones that are sufficiently unusual-in-a-specific-way to make me feel hopefwl about them. And the stuff you write here reflects exactly the unusualness what makes me hopefwl: You actually think inside your own head.
Also, wrt defending against negative social reinforcement signals, it may be sort of epistemically-irrational, but I reinterpret [people disagreeing with me] as positive evidence that I'm just far ahead of them (something I actually believe). Notice how, when a lot of people tell you you're wrong, that is evidence for both [you are wrong] and [you are so much righter than them that they are unable to recognise how you are right (eg they lack the precursor concepts)].
Also, if you expect [competence at world-saving] to be normally (or lognormally) distributed, you should expect to find large gaps between the competence of the most competent people, simply because the tail flattens out the further out you go. In other words, P(you're Δ more competent than avg) gets closer to P(you're Δ+1 more competent than avg) as you increase Δ. This is one way to justify treating [other people not paying attention to you] as evidence for [you're in a more advanced realm of conversation], but it's far from the main consideration.
I invite you to meditate on this Mathematical Diagram I made! I believe that your behaviour (wrt the dimension of consequentialist world-saving) is so far to the right of this curve, that most of your peers will think your competence is far below them, unless they patiently have multiple conversations with you. That is, most people's deference limit is far to the left your true competence.
I'm now going to further destroy the vibes of this comment by saying "poop!" If someone, in their head, notice themselves downvaluing the wisdom of what I previously wrote, merely based on the silly vibes, their cognition is out of whack and they need to see a mechanic. This seems to be a decent litmus test for whether ppl have actual sensors for evidence/gears, or whether they're just doing (advanced) vibes-based pattern-matching. :P
I notice that the mathematics-frame I used to try to generate a solution was utterly inadequate, whereas the programming-frame is much more productive wrt this problem. I think one big general weakness of my general math-frame, is that it imagines/visualises infinities as static, rather than as conceptually chunked dynamic processes.
Did you diagnose sleep apnea before getting the CPAP?
I'm surprised at your mention of kale (will look into it!) and pig's blood. I think it's good to mention here that pigs are prob sentient, and that it's mean to eat them unless there are very strong utilitarian reasons to do so anyway. I think you prob have such reasons, because you are competently trying to save the world, so I'm glad you're making moral sacrifices to get stuff done.
"Also, I now have a methylphenidate prescription which is pretty magical. I can now steer my mind."
<3
Are you able to ask your psychiatrist for a larger dose? I think it could to at least 60mg, but idk.
I don't know the full original reasoning for why they introduced it, but one hope is that it marginally disentangles agreement from the main voting axis. People who were going to upvote based purely on agreement will now put their vote in the agreement axis instead (is the hope, anyway). Agreement-voting is socioepistemologically bad in general (except for in polls), so this seems good.
if u can't even tell if there are coherent ideas present, downvoting is socioepistemologically bad. imagine universalising this reaction across the website, and ask urself what happens to the ideas that are so novel that they don't neatly fit into existing explanatory paradigms.
imo, u shud only downvote stuff u think is bad after u understand them. socially disincentivising illegible stuff seems quite bad in general.
if otoh u downvote bc it seems to neglect existing work in related fields, see the underappreciated value of original thinking below the frontier. we don't want to disincentivise ppl from reinventing stuff. if they came up w schmobability theory on their own, i'd encourage them to expand on it, rather than risk collapsing the seed by making them learn abt Bayes.
weird, i was intending that as a reply to @trevor's answer, but it got plopped as its own answer instead.
my brain is insufficiently flexible to be able to surrender to social-status-incentives without letting that affect my ability to optimise purely for my goal. the costs of compromise (++) btn diff optimisation criteria are steep, so i would encourage more ppl to rebel against prevailing social dynamics. it helps u think more clearly. it also mks u miserable, so u hv to balance it w concerns re motivation. altruism never promised to be easy. 🍵
Related recommendation: Inward and outward steelmanning — LessWrong
Imagine that you encountered a car with square wheels
Inward steelmanning: "This is an abomination! It doesn't work! But maybe with round wheels it would be beautiful. Or maybe a different vehicle with square wheels could be beautiful."
Outward steelmanning: "This is ugly! It doesn't work! But maybe if I imagine a world where this car works, it will change my standards of beauty. Maybe I will gain some insight about this world that I'm missing."
If you want to be charitable, why not grant your opponent an entire universe with its own set of rules?
there has to be some point in time in which an agent acts like waiting just one more timestep before pressing wouldn’t be worth it even though it would.
if it's impossible to choose "jst one mor timestep" wo logically implying that u mk the same decision in other timesteps (eg due to indifferentiable contexts), then it's impossible to choose jst one mor timestep. optimal decision-mking also means recognising which opts u hv and which u don't—otherwise u'r jst falling fr illusory choices.
which brings to mind the principle, "u nvr mk decisions, u only evr decide btn strats". or fr the illiterate (:p):
You never make decisions, you only ever decide between strategies.
It seems good to have an abstraction-level with separate concepts for soras and their weights.
I'm less enthusiastic about "sora" as the word for it, however, even though I like its aesthetics. Seems like it ought to be longer than 4 chars, and less isolated in meaning. I've wanted to find a more specific fit for the word "neureme" (from "emic unit"/"-eme", categorising it as a unit of selection alongside gene, meme, morpheme, lexeme, grapheme, etc), and I like your concept for it.[1] See here for my philosophy on word up-making.
- ^
This just means I'll be using my word for it in my own notes, not that I'm recommending this relabelling for anyone else.
I was very very terrible at introspection just 2 years ago. Yet I did manage to learn how to make very good games, without really introspecting for years later about why the things work that I did.
More specifically, I mean progress wrt some long-term goal like AI alignment, altruism, factory farming, etc. Here, I think most ways of thinking about the problem are wildly off-target bc motivations get distorted by social incentives. Whereas goals in narrow games like "win at chess" or "solve a math problem" are less prone to this, so introspection is much less important.
I sort of deliberately created the beginnings of a tulpa-ish part of my brain during a long period of isolation in 2021 (Feb 7 to be exact), although I didn't know the term "tulpa" then. I just figured it could be good to have an imaginary friend, so I gave her a name—"Maria"[1]—and granted her (as part of the brain-convincing ritual) permanent co-ownership over a part of my cognition which she's free to use for whatever whenever.
She still visits me at least once a week but she doesn't have strong ability to speak unless I try to imagine it; and even then, sentences are usually short. The thing she most frequently communicates is the mood of being a sympathetic witness: she fully understands my story, and knows that I both must and will keep going—because up-giving is not a language she comprehends.
Hm, it would be most accurate to say that she takes on the role of a stoic chronicler—reflecting that I care less about eliciting awe or empathy, than I care that someone simply bears witness to my story.[2]
Oi! This was potentially usefwl for me to read.
WHEN I feel bad/uneasy at any point,
THEN find the part of my mind that's complaining, and lend it my voice & mental-space.
I have previously tried to install a "somatic trigger" for whenever I feel bad (ie "when I feel bad, close my eyes and fold my hands together in front of me in a calm motion"), but it failed to take bc there weren't clear-enough cues. The point of a somatic trigger in the first place is to install them in specific contexts such that I have clearer cues for whatever habits I may wish to write into those contexts.
Are those insights gleamable from the video itself for other people? And if so, would you be willing to share the link? (Feel free to skip; obviously a vulnerable topic.)
[Thoughts ↦ speech-code ↦ text-code] just seems like a convoluted/indirect learning-path. Speech has been optimised directly (although very gradually over thousands of years) to encode thoughts, whereas most orthographies are optimised to encode sounds. The symbols are optimised only via piggy-backing on the thoughts↦speech code—like training a language-model indirectly via NTP on [the output of an architecturally-different language-model trained via NTP on human text].
(In the conlang-orthography I aspire to make with AI-assistance, graphemes don't try to represent sounds at all. So sort of like a logogram but much more modular & compact.)
When I write with pen and paper my writing improves in quality. And it seems this is because I am slower.
Interesting.
Anecdote: When I think to myself without writing at all (eg shower, walking, waiting, lying in bed), I tend to make deeper progress on isolated idea-clusters. Whereas when I use my knowledge-network (RemNote), I often find more spontaneous+insightfwl connections between remote idea-clusters (eg evo bio, AI, economics). This is bc when I write a quick note into RemNote, I heavily prioritise finding the right tags & portalling it into related concepts. Often I simply spam related concepts at the top like this:
The links are to concepts I've already spotted metaphors / use-cases for, or I have a hunch that one might be there. It prompts me to either review or flesh out the connections next time I visit the note.
I think these styles complement each other very well.
Specifically a lot more creative than people who are as intelligent as I am.
Having read a few of your posts, I think you're correct about this. I believe in your general approach!
As you mention that stimulants can reduce "mental noise/creativity" I am curious what your experience is with this.
When I first started taking them, it revealed to me that I'd never known what it felt like to be able to think a thought through. Metaphorically, I imagine it sorta like being born with COPD and never realising what it feels like to fill my lungs with air. But I've probably always had a severe deficiency of whatever the stimulants are correcting for; and others who're doing just fine on that front may not share my experience.
I take stimulants in the morning, and I'm soon enthusiastic about thinking deeply about ideas. I become more creative because the relevant threads-of-thought have some room to build upon themselves, probably because my mind is now able to mute the noise and non-relevant threads. When on stimulants, I'm much more likely to get lost down rabbit-holes during research, and often don't catch myself before hours have passed. The lack of oomph I feel when off stimulants helps me prioritise only the most essential bits, and it's easier to not overdo stuff—though mostly by virtue of being less capable of doing stuff.
Slightly relevant fun RCTs:
- Alcohol concentration (sorta the opposite of stims of you squint) of 0.069-0.075 BAC seems to enhance performance on Remote-Association Tests (ie semantic metaphors)
- "On average, intoxicated participants solved significantly more RAT problems (M = .58, SD = .13) than their sober counterparts (M = .42, SD = .16), t(38) = 3.43, p = .001, d = 1.08. Interestingly, this increase in solution success was accompanied by a decrease in time to correct solution for intoxicated individuals (M = 11.54 s, SD = 3.75) compared to sober controls (M=15.24s, SD =5.57), t(38) = 2.47, p = .02, d = .78."
Sci-Hub | Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(1), 487–493 | 10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.002- Subjects who got RAT questions correct while intoxicated also reported feeling like their solution arrived "all at once" and were "more like insights" as opposed to deliberate/analytical.
- "On average, intoxicated participants solved significantly more RAT problems (M = .58, SD = .13) than their sober counterparts (M = .42, SD = .16), t(38) = 3.43, p = .001, d = 1.08. Interestingly, this increase in solution success was accompanied by a decrease in time to correct solution for intoxicated individuals (M = 11.54 s, SD = 3.75) compared to sober controls (M=15.24s, SD =5.57), t(38) = 2.47, p = .02, d = .78."
- Sci-Hub | Inverted-U–Shaped Dopamine Actions on Human Working Memory and Cognitive Control. Biological Psychiatry, 69(12), e113–e125 | 10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.03.028
- "Inverted U-shape" referring to the idea that too much dopamine is detrimental to performance.
My current theory is that when you are writing something down, the slowdown effect is actually beneficial because you have more cognitive resources available to compute the next thing you write.
I've noticed the same when voice-typing, and I considered that explanation. I don't think it's the main cause, however. With super-fast and accurate STT (or steno), I suspect I could learn to both think better and type faster. There's already an almost-audible internal monologue going on while I type. Adding the processing-cost of having to translate internal-audio-code into very unnatural finger-stroke-code is surely a suboptimum. (I'm reminded of the driver who, upon noticing that he's got a flat tire on one side, punctures the other as well. It's a deceptive optimum; a myopic plan.)
My best insight is that you can think. Because most of the failure comes from not thinking. … I was making these kinds of excuses for years… and I made basically no progress before I just tried."
I resonate with this. Cognitive psychology and sequences taught me to be extremely mistrustful of my own thoughts, and while I do think much of that was a necessary first step, I also think it's very easy to get stuck in that mindset because you've disowned the only tools that can save you. Non-cognition is very tempting if your primary motivation is to not be wrong—especially when that mindset is socially incentivised.
- Introspection is the most reliable source of knowledge we have, but it isn't publishable/sharable/legible, so very few people use it to its full potential. (point made a week ago)
- The popular evo-psych idea "self-deception for the purpose of other-deception" is largely a myth. We were never privy to our intentions in the first place, so there's nothing for self-deception to explain. Our "conscious mind" is us looking at ourselves from an outside perspective, and we may only infer our true intentions via memory traces we're lucky enough to catch a glimpse of. (two weeks ago)
- I stress introspection so much because it's ~futile to make novel object-level progress without a deep familiarity/understanding of the tools you use for the task.
Do it every day, at least a little bit.
This particular sentence I'm sorta out of phase with feeling-wise, however. I'm patiently trying to cultivate intrinsic motivation by… a large list of complicated subjective tricks most of which are variations on "minimise total motivational force spent on civil war between parts of myself." It's like politics, or antibiotic resistance—if I overreach in an attempt to eliminate a faction I'm still too weak to permanently defeat, it's likely to backfire.
The Light is more powerfwl, though Darkness is quicker, easier, more seductive.
Wow, this is a good argument. Especially if assumptions hold.
- The ALU computes the input much faster than the results can be moved to the next layer.
- So if the AI only receives a single user's prompt, the ALUs waste a lot of time waiting for input.
- But if many users are sending prompts all the time, the ALUs can be sent many more operations at once (assuming the wires are bottlenecked by speed rather than amount of information they can carry).
- So if your AI is extremely popular (e.g., OpenAI), your ALUs have to spend less time idling, so the GPUs you use are much more cost-effective.
- Compute is much more expensive for less popular AIs (plausibly >1000x).
cool third point! i may hv oversold the point in my first comment. i too try to name things according to their thingness, but not exclusively.
to make a caricature of my research loop, i could describe it as
- trying to find patterns that puzzle me (foraging),
- distilling the pattern to its core structure and storing it in RemNote (catabolic pathway),
- mentally trying to find new ways to apply the pattern
- ie, propagating it, installing hooks (which I call isthmuses) into plausibly-related contexts such that new cryptically-related observations are more likely to trigger an insight (metaphor), allowing me to generalise further or discover smth i need to refactor
- going abt business as usual, repeating 1-3 until unfolding branch meets unfolding branch from the other side, indicating i might hv found a profitable generalisation
- an important consideration re keeping isthmuses alive enough to trigger connections: i don't want to hv memorised this specific instantiation of the pattern so it's crystal clear. if it fits neatly into a slot and it's comfortable w its assigned niche, it's unlikely to trigger in novel situations. imprecision/fuzziness is good when the concept is still in exploratory phase (and not primarily tool-stage).
- fix everything
loop is often bottlenecked by the high cost of refactoring anything. i rly wish i could find a general algorithm/strategy for refactoring complex systems like this, or a clever approach to building that minimises/eliminates the need.
the optimal conlang isn't a new set of words. it's a new set of practices for naming things, unnaming things, generalising & specialising, communal decision-processes for resolving conflicts, neat meta-structures that minimise cost of refactoring (somehow), enabling eager contributors w minimal overhead & risk of degeneration, etc.
The thing people need to realize is that when somebody writes a bad post, it doesn't harm the readers (except insofar as you falsely advertised quality). If something is badly argued readers are immune. If something is persuasively argued, but wrong, readers that fall for it now have an opportunity to discover a hole in their epistemic defenses.
Mostly, people read arguments as a proxies for making judgments about the quality of the author, or whether they agree/disagree with them. Notice that these purposes are orthogonal to actually learning something.
Unrelatedly, what would you say are your top ideas/insights/writings as judged by the usefwlness you think they'd confer to you-a-year-or-two-ago? (Asking you this as a proxy for "give me your best insights" because I feel like the latter causes people to overweight legibility or novelty-relative-to-average-community-member or something.)
This is awesome. I found it via searching LW for variations of "voice typing", Which I was motivated to search because I had just discovered that average conversational speed is around 3x average typing speed (~150 vs ~50 wpm, cf ChatGPT). (And reading speeds are potentially in the thousands.)
At the moment, I'm using Windows Voice Access. It's accurate, has some nice voice commands and gives you visual feedback while speaking. The inadequacy, for me, is the lack of immediate feedback (compared to typing), and customisability. I'll attempt to test your repo tomorrow.
Also, I'm surprised that stenotypers can type faster than regular keyboards. I had previously speculated about the benefits of making keyboards more or less modular. I thought making them more modular would face similar problems as Ithkuil: too many serial operations to build the vector you mean. English relies extremely on caching specific words for specific situations with very shallow generalisations, trading semantic reach for faster lookup-times, or something. But I guess what matters most is modularity in the right places, and mainstream keyboards aren't optimised for that at all.
I speculate that the ideal keyboard should have keys that chunk word-pieces somewhat according to Zipf's law: the th most common key should be such that the frequency by which you have to use it is ~. I guess there should also be a term somewhere for the distance the finger has to travel to reach a key or something, to be able to weight the frequency of keys by some measure for ergonomicity.
I highly recommend trying to get a prescription for something like adderall (or dextroamphetamine, lisdexamphetamine) if your doctor is willing to diagnose you with ADHD. Just go off it if it doesn't work, but it seems likely that it will given your response to bupropion. Some vague reasons for recommending it are:
- Amphetamines affects dopamine (& norepinephrine) via more than just reuptake-inhibition. I'm not sure yet which mechanisms drive desensitization, it just seems tentatively better to spread the attack vectors out.
- I've mostly forgot the reasons I suggest amphetamines over methylphenidate, but at least it has a stronger effect on egosyntonic behaviour (/executive function or whatever you want to call it) than bupropion.
Furthermore, if you're on amphetamines/methylphenidate, I would recommend sort of using it strategically. I only take them on days I know I plan to be productive, and have hope that they enable me to be productive. If I ever take them on a day I fail to motivate myself, it weakens the semiotic/narrative signal for my brain to switch into a mode where it expects productivity & silences competing motivations. Plus, if I know I mostly won't be productive for a while (e.g. vacation or something), I go off them to reset desensitisation (usually resets a long way within a week it seems).
I've been on lisdexamphetamine for 1.5 years, and they still produce a very clear effect. I've had depression and, turns out, ADHD, for most of my life. People who have no dysregulation of dopamine will probably have negative effect from too much upregulation (e.g. reduced mental noise/creativity, inability to zoom out from activities and reprioritise).
This is among the top questions you ought to accumulate insights on if you're trying to do something difficult.
I would advise primarily focusing on how to learn more from yourself as opposed to learning from others, but still, here's what I think:
I. Strict confusion
Seek to find people who seem to be doing something dumb or crazy, and for whom the feeling you get when you try to understand them is not "I'm familiar with how someone could end up believing this" but instead "I've got no idea how they ended up there, but that's just absurd". If someone believes something wild, and your response is strict confusion, that's high value of information. You can only safely say they're low-epistemic-value if you have evidence for some alternative story that explains why they believe what they believe.
II. Surprisingly popular
Alternatively, find something that is surprisingly popular—because if you don't understand why someone believes something, you cannot exclude that they believe it for good reasons.
The meta-trick to extracting wisdom from society's noisy chatter is learn to understand what drives people's beliefs in general; then, if your model fails to predict why someone believes something, you can either learn something about human behaviour, or about whatever evidence you don't have yet.
III. Sensitivity >> specificity
It's easy to relinquish old beliefs if you are ever-optimistic that you'll find better ideas than whatever you have now. If you look back at what you wrote a year ago, and think "huh, that guy really had it all figured out," you should be suspicious that you've stagnated. Strive to be embarrassed of your past world-model—it implies progress.
So trust your mind that it'll adapt to new evidence, and tune your sensitivity up as high as the capacity of your discriminator allows. False-positives are usually harmless and quick to relinquish—and if they aren't, then believing something false for as long as it takes for you to find the counter-argument is a really good way to discover general weaknesses in your epistemic filters.[1] You can't upgrade your immune-system without exposing yourself to infection every now and then. Another frame on this:
I was being silly! If the hotel was ahead of me, I'd get there fastest if I kept going 60mph. And if the hotel was behind me, I'd get there fastest by heading at 60 miles per hour in the other direction. And if I wasn't going to turn around yet … my best bet given the uncertainty was to check N more miles of highway first, before I turned around.
— The correct response to uncertainty is *not* half-speed — LessWrong
IV. Vingean deference limits
The problem is that if you select people cautiously, you miss out on hiring people significantly more competent than you. The people who are much higher competence will behave in ways you don't recognise as more competent. If you were able to tell what right things to do are, you would just do those things and be at their level. Innovation on the frontier is anti-inductive.
If good research is heavy-tailed & in a positive selection-regime, then cautiousness actively selects against features with the highest expected value.
— helplessly wasting time on the forum
finding ppl who are truly on the right side of this graph is hard bc it's easy to mis-see large divergence as craziness. lesson: only infer ppl's competence by the process they use, ~never by their object-level opinions. u can ~only learn from ppl who diverge from u.
— some bird
V. Confusion implies VoI, not stupidity
look for epistemic caves wherefrom survivors return confused or "obviously misguided".
— ravens can in fact talk btw
- ^
Here assuming that investing credence in the mistaken belief increased your sensitivity to finding its counterargument. For people who are still at a level where credence begets credence, this could be bad advice.
VI. Epistemic surface area / epistemic net / wind-wane models / some better metaphor
Every model you have internalised as truly part of you—however true or false—increases your ability to notice when evidence supports or conflicts with it. As long as you place your flag somewhere to begin with, the winds of evidence will start pushing it in the right direction. If your wariness re believing something verifiably false prevents you from making an epistemic income, consider what you're really optimising for. Beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, regardless of whether they are correct in the end.
is that spreadsheet of {Greek name, Germanic name, …} public perchance?
Thank you! : )
Please continue complimenting people (or express gratitude) for things you honestly appreciate.
i googled it just now bc i wanted to find a wikipedia article i read ~9 years ago mentioning "deconcentration of attention", and this LW post came up. odd.
anyway, i first found mention of it via a blue-link on the page for Ithkuil. they've since changed smth, but this snippet remains:
After a mention of Ithkuil in the Russian magazine Computerra, several speakers of Russian contacted Quijada and expressed enthusiasm to learn Ithkuil for its application to psychonetics—
deconcentration of attention
i wanted to look it up bc it relates to smth i tweeted abt yesterday:
unique how the pattern is only visible when you don't look at it. i wonder what other kind of stuff is like that. like, maybe a life-problem that's only visible to intuition, and if you try to zoom in to rationally understand it, you find there's no problem after all?
oh.
i notice that relaxing my attention sometimes works when eg i'm trying to recall smth at the limit of my memory (or when it's stuck on my tongue). sorta like broadening my attentional field to connect widely distributed patterns. another frame on it is that it enables anabranching trains of thought. (ht TsviBT for the word & concept)
An anabranch is a section of a river or stream that diverts from the main channel or stem of the watercourse and rejoins the main stem downstream.
here's my model for why it works:
(update: i no longer endorse this model; i think the whole framework of serial loops is bad, and think everything can be explained without it. still, there are parts of the below explanation that don't depend on it, and it was a productive mistake to make.)
- Working Memory is a loop of information (parts of the chewbacca-loop is tentatively my prime suspect for this). it's likely not a fully synchronised clock-cycle, but my guess is that whenever you combine two concepts in WM, their corresponding neural ensembles undergo harmonic locking to remain there.[1]
- every iteration, information in the loop is a weighted combination of:
- stuff that's already in working memory
- new stuff (eg memories) that reaches salience due to sufficient association with stuff from the previous iteration of WM
- new stuff from sensory networks (eg sights, sounds) that wasn't automatically filtered out by top-down predictions
- for new information (B or C) to get into the loop, it has to exceed a bottom-up threshold for salience.
- the salience network (pictured below) determines the weighting between the channels (A, B, C), and/or the height of their respective salience thresholds. (both are ways to achieve the same thing, and i'm unsure which frame is more better.)
- "concentrating hard" on trying to recall smth has the effect of silencing the flow of information from B & C, such that the remaining salience is normalised exclusively over stuff in A. iow, it narrows the flow of new information into WM.
- (bonus point: this is what "top-down attention" is. it's not "reach-out-and-grab" as it may intuitively feel like. instead, it's a process where the present weighted combination of items in WM determines (allocates/partitions) salience between items in WM.)
- this is a tradeoff, however. if you narrow all salience towards eg a specific top-down query , this has smth like the following two effects:
- you make it easier to detect potential answers by reducing the weight of unrelated competing noise
- but you also heighten the salience threshold must exceed to reach you
in light of this, here some tentative takeaways:
- if your WM already contains sufficient information to triangulate towards the item you're looking for, and the recollection/insight is bottlenecked by competing noise, concentrate harder.
- but if WM doesn't have sufficient information, concentrating could prematurely block essential cues that don't yet strongly associate from directly.
- and in cases where features in itself are temporarily interfering w the recollection, globally narrowing or broadening concentration may not unblock it. instead, consider pausing for a bit and try to find alternative ways to ask .
Ithkuil
Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal.
— John Quijada
i'm a fan of Quijada (eg this lecture) and his intensely modular & cognitive-linguistics-inspired conlang, Ithkuil.
that said, i don't think it sufficiently captures the essences of what enables language to be an efficient tool for thought. LW has a wealth of knowledge about that in particular, so i'm sad conlanging (and linguistics in general) hasn't received more attention here. it may not be that hard, EMH doesn't apply when ~nobody's tried.
We can think of a bunch of ideas that we like, and then check whether [our language can adequately] express each idea. We will almost always find that [it is]. To conclude from this that we have an adequate [language] in general, would [be silly].
— The possible shared Craft of Deliberate Lexicogenesis (freely interpreted)
- ^
Furthermore, a relationship with task performance was evident, indicating that an increased occurrence of harmonic locking (i.e., transient 2:1 ratios) was associated with improved arithmetic performance. These results are in line with previous evidence pointing to the importance of alpha–theta interactions in tasks requiring working memory and executive control. (Julio & Kaat, 2019)
i think that goes into optimising for b in my taxonomy above. how easy is it to recall the structure of the thing once you've recalled the word for the thing? these are just considerations, and the optimal naming strat varies by situs ig. 🍵
This seems like a question one shouldn't be using statistical evidence to make an opinion about. It seems tractable to just grok (and intuify) the theoretical considerations and thus gain a much better understanding of when vs when not to decompose (and with how much granularity and by which method). Deferring to statistics on it seems liable to distort the model—such that I don't think a temporary increase in the accuracy of final-stage judgments would be worth it.
did you know that, if you're a hermit, you get infinite weirdness points?
✧*｡ヾ( >﹏< )ﾉﾞ✧*。
when making new words, i try to follow this principle:
label concepts such that the label has high association w situations in which you want the concept to trigger.[1]
the usefwlness of a label can be measured on multiple fronts:
- how easy is it to recall (or regenerate):
- the label just fm thinking abt the concept?
- low-priority, since you already have the concept.
- the concept just fm seeing the label?
- mid-priority, since this is easy to practice.[2]
- the label fm situations where recalling the concept has utility?
- high-priority, since this is the only reason to bother making the label in the first place.
- the label just fm thinking abt the concept?
if you're optimising for b, you might label your concept "distributed boiling-frog attack" (DBFA). someone cud prob generate the whole idea fm those words alone, so it scores on highly on the criterion.
it scores poorly on c, however. if i'm in a situation in which it is helpfwl for me to notice that someone or something is DBFAing me, there are few semiotic/associative paths fm what i notice now to the label itself.
if i reflect on what kinds of situations i want this thought to reappear in, i think of something like "something is consistently going wrong w a complex system and i'm not sure why but it smells like a targeted hostile force".
maybe i'd call that the "invisible hand of malice" or "inimicus ex machina".
i rly liked the post btw! thanks!
- ^
i happen to call this "symptomatic nymation" in my notes, bc it's about deriving new word from the effects/symptoms of the referent concept/phenomenon. a good label shud be a solution looking for a problem.
- ^
deriving concept fm label is high-priority if you want the concept to gain popularity, however. i usually jst make words for myself and use them in my notes, so i don't hv to worry abt this.
here's the non-quantified meaning in terms of wh-movement from right to left:
for conlanging, i like this set of principles:
- minimise total visual distance between operators and their arguments
- minimise total novelty/complexity/size of all items the reader is forced to store in memory while parsing
- every argument in memory shud find its operator asap, and vice versa
- some items are fairly easy to store in memory (aka active context)
- like the identity of the person writing this comment (me)
- or the topic of the post i'm currently commenting on (clever ways to weave credences into language)
- other items are fairly hard
- often the case in mathy language, bc several complex-and-specific-and-novel items are defined at the outset, and are those items are not given intuitive anaphora.
- another way to use sentence-structure to offload memory-work is by writing hierarchical lists like this, so you can quickly switch gaze btn ii., c, and 2—allowing me to leverage the hierarchy anaphorically.
so to quantify sentence , i prefer ur suggestion "I think it'll rain tomorrow". the percentage is supposed to modify "I think" anyway, so it makes more sense to make them adjacent. it's just more work bc it's novel syntax, but that's temporary.
otoh, if we're specifying that subscripts are only used for credences anyway, there's no reason for us to invoke the redundant "I think" image. instead, write
it'll rain tomorrow
in fact, the whole circumfix operator is gratuitously verbose![1] just write:
rain tomorrow
Surely, there is a clever mechanism that can fix this issue? So I went to the Wikipedia page of the Free-rider Problem and scrolled to the bottom, and lo and behold it was just sitting there: Dominant Assurance Contracts.
I feel like every assurance-contract proponent went through a moment like this. It's like "Don't Look Up" except wrt a civilization-scale solution. I'm tempted to think some people 'just don't get it' because they're missing gears-level models re coordination problems in the first place, but that would be hasty.
If you're vegan and drink lots of tea (guilty), consider avoiding tea at least one hour before and after the time you eat iron-rich food. The worry is that polyphenols in tea bind with non-heme iron, forming a stable-ish complex that prevents absorption. There's weak evidence that this makes a practical difference, but it was especially relevant for me since I drink tea almost exclusively.
From the available evidence there is no need to advise any restriction on tea drinking in healthy people with no risk of iron deficiency. In groups at risk of iron deficiency the advice should be to drink tea between meals and to wait at least 1 h after eating before drinking tea. (source)
Most studies have found no association between tea intake and iron absorption. However, drinking excessive amounts of black tea may inhibit the absorption of iron, and may harm people with anaemia. (wikipedia)
I was about to request clarification on this too. I don't get
"science is the way of making beliefs come apart from their pre-theoretical pragmatic implications."
And I would like to get it.
Endorsed. I think what you should do about deferral depends on what role you wish to play in the research community. Knowledge workers intending to make frontier progress should be especially skeptical of deferring to others on the topics they intend to specialise in. That may mean holding off on deferring on a wide range of topics, because curious scientists should keep a broad horizon early on. Deferring early on could lead to habits-of-thought that can be hard to override later on (sorta like curse of knowledge), and you might miss out on opportunities to productively diverge or even discover a flaw in the paradigm.
Explorers should mostly defer on value of information, not object-level beliefs. When someone I trust says they're confident in some view I'm surprised by, I'm very reluctant to try to tweak my models to output what I believe they believe; instead I make a note to investigate what they've investigated, using my own judgment of things all the way through.