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To extend this angle -- I notice that we're more likely to call things "difficult" when our expectations of whether we "should" be able to do it are mismatched from our observations of whether we are "able to" do it.
The "oh, that's hard actually" observation shows up reliably for me when I underestimated the effort, pain, or luck required to attain a certain outcome.
"time-consuming" does not cleanly encapsulate difficulty, because lots of easy things are time-consuming too.
Perhaps "slow to reward" is a better way to gesture at the phenomenon you mean? Learning a language takes a high effort investment before you can have a conversation; getting in shape takes a high effort investment before you see unambiguous bodily changes beyond just soreness. Watching TV and scrolling social media are both time-consuming, but I don't see people going around calling those activities difficult.
Green, on its face, seems like one of the main mistakes. Green is what told the rationalists to be more OK with death, and the EAs to be more OK with wild animal suffering. Green thinks that Nature is a harmony that human agency easily disrupts.
The shallow-green that's easy/possible to talk about characterizes humans as separate from or outside of nature. Shallow-green is also characteristic of scientists who probe and measure the world and present their findings as if the ways they touched the world to measure it were irrelevant -- in a sense, the changes made by the instruments' presence don't matter, but there's also a sense in which they matter greatly.
By contrast, imagine a deep-green: a perspective from which humanity is from and of nature itself. This deep-green is impractical to communicate about, and cutting it up into little pieces to try to address them one at a time loses something important of its nature.
One place it's relatively easy to point at this deep-green is our understanding what time means. It touches the way that we accept base-12 and base-60 in our clocks and calendars, and in the reasons that no "better" alternative has been "better" enough to win over the whole world.
The characterization of green as "harmony through acceptance" in your image from Duncan Sabien points at another interesting facet of green: "denial" of reality is antithetical to both "acceptance" and "rationality", albeit with slightly different connotations for each.
Then again, in this system I'd describe myself as having arrived at green through black, so perhaps it's only my biases talking.
I misread it as "murakami-sama" at first, which was also disproportionately charming.
It's clear to me from the post that to properly enjoy it as performance art, the audience is meant to believe that the music is AI-generated.
I don't read the post as disclosing how the music was "actually" made, in the most literal real-world sense.
Pretty cool, regardless, that we live in an era where 'people pretending to be AI making music' is not trivial to distinguish from 'AI trying to make music' :)
I like going barefoot. However, I live in a climate that's muddy for most of the year. When I'm entering and exiting my house frequently, being barefoot is impractical because the time it takes to adequately clean my feet is much greater than the time it takes to slip off a pair of shoes at the door.
Also, in the colder parts of the year, I find that covering my feet indoors allows me to be generally comfortable at lower ambient temperatures than I would require for being barefoot in the house. This isn't much of an issue during outdoor activities that promote circulation to the feet, but it's annoying when reading, at the computer, or doing other activities that involve staying relatively still.
"to clean house" as implication of violence...
Due to a tragic shortage of outbuildings (to be remedied in the mid term but not immediately), my living room is the garage/makerspace of my home. I cleaned as one cleans for guests last week, because a friend from way back was dropping by. I then got to enjoy a clean-enough-for-guests home for several days, which is a big part of why it is nice to be visited by friends un-intimate enough to feel like cleaning for.
Then my partner-in-crafts came over, and we re-occupied every table with a combination of resin casting and miniature clay sculpting shenanigans. It's an excellent time.
We also went shopping for fabric together because I plan to make a baby quilt kid-in-progress of the aforementioned friend from way back. Partner-in-crafts idly asked me when I was planning to do the quilt stuff, because historically I would be expected to launch into it immediately as soon as the fabric came out of the dryer.
However, I found something new in myself: A reluctance to start a new project without a clean place to start it in. I'm not sure where this reluctance came from, as I think it seems new, but I also think I like it. So I got to tidying up the stuff that was un-tidyable last night because the resin was still sticky, but is eminently tidyable now because it cured over time, and carefully examining my reluctance-to-tidy as it tried to yell at me.
In that reluctance-to-tidy, I find time travel again: We store information in the position of objects in our environment. Object location encodes memory, so moving someone else's objects has certain commonalities with the rewriting-of-memory that we call gaslighting when pathological.
For better or worse, my architecture of cognition defaults to relying on empathy twice over when reasoning about moving stuff that someone else was using, or someone else's stuff. By recognizing an object's location as a person's memory of where-they-left-it, I view moving it as rewriting that memory.
The double-empathy thing comes in where I reason about what moves of stuff it's ok to make. If I put the thing where the person will have an easy time finding it, if I model them well enough to guess correctly where they'll first look when they want it, then I can help them by moving it. I can move it from somewhere they'd look later to somewhere they'd look sooner, and thereby improve their life at the moment of seeking it, and that's a clearly good act.
That's the first empathy layer. The second empathy layer comes of a natural tendency to anthropomorphize objects, which I've considered trying to eradicate from myself but settled on keeping because I find it quite convenient to have around in other circumstances. This is the animism of where something "wants" to go, creating a "home" for your keys by the door, and so forth.
So there's 2 layers of modeling minds -- one of complex real minds who are likely to contain surprises in their expectations, and one of simple virtual "minds" that follow from the real-minds as a convenient shortcut. I guess one way to put it is that I figure stuff has/channels feelings kinda like how houseplants do -- they probably don't experience firsthand emotion in any way that would be recognizable to people, but there's a lot of secondhand emotion that's shown in how they're related to and cared for.
Not sure where I'm going with all that, other than noticing how the urge to tidy up can be resisted by the same aesthetic sensibility that says it's generally bad to erase anybody's memories.
Seconding the importance of insulation, especially for disaster preparedness and weathering utility outages.
If any of your friends have a fancy thermal camera, see if you can borrow it. If not, there are some cheap options for building your own or pre-built ones on ebay. The cheap ones don't have great screens or refresh rates, but they do the job of visualizing which things are warmer and which are cooler.
Using a thermal imager, I managed to figure out the importance of closing the window blinds to keep the house warm. Having modern high-efficiency windows lulls me into a false sense of security about their insulative value, which I'm still un-learning.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that even though the electricity here is mostly produced by burning gas you do actually burn less gas by turning it into electricity and then using it to run a heat pump than just burning it for heat.
Fascinating! I guess it'd fall into the "more moving parts to break" bucket, but it gets me wondering about switching from my current propane HVAC to propane generator + electric heat pump.
Searching the web for models that do both in a single unit, I find a lot of heat pumps using propane as their refrigerant, but no immediate hits using it as their fuel.
I personally suspect we'll perpetually keep moving the goalposts so whatever AI we currently have is obviously not AGI because AGI is by definition better than what we've got in some way. I think AI is already here and performing to standards that I would've called AGI or even magic if you'd showed it to me a decade ago, but we're continually coming up with reasons it isn't "really" AGI yet. I see no reason that we would culturally stop that habit of insisting that silicon-based minds are less real than carbon-based ones, at least as long as we keep using "belongs to the same species as me" as a load-bearing proxy for "is a person". (load-bearing because if you stop using species as a personhood constraint, it opens a possibility of human non-people, and we all know that bad things happen when we promote ideologies where that's possible).
However, I'm doing your point (6) anyways because everybody's aging. If I believed in AGI being around the corner, I'd probably spend less time with them, because "real AGI" as it's often mythologized could solve mortality and give me a lot more time with them.
I'm also doing your point (8) to some degree -- if I expect that new tooling will obviate a skill soon, I'm less likely to invest in developing the skill. While I don't think AI will get to a point where we widely recognize it as AGI, I do think we're building a lot of very powerful new tools right now with what we've already got.
If you're talking about literal parades -- I lead them annually at a smallish renaissance fair. Turns out that people with the combination of willingness to run around in front of a group looking silly, and enough time anxiety to actually show up to the morning ones, are in short supply.
That parade goes where I put it. There are several possible paths through the faire and I choose which one the group takes, and make the appropriate exaggerated gestures to steer the front of the crowd in that direction, and then the rest follow.
I also play a conspicuous looking instrument in the parade at a small annual local event that we convene a "band" for, as well. Since the instrument is large and obvious, I'm typically shoved to the front of the group as we line up. I'm pretty sure that if I went off script and took the parade out of the gathering's area, they'd probably follow me, because nobody else is quite sure where we're supposed to be going. If I conspired with the other musicians to take the group out of the event, we could almost certainly make that happen. I'm curious how far down the road we could get the dancers following the parade before they realize something is amiss, but also really don't want to be the individual to instigate that sort of experiment.
Back in high school, I did marching band, I think if our leader had been misinformed about where we should go, we would have followed them anyway. That's mostly because marching band has an almost paramilitary obedience theme going on, and can get a bit culty about directors or leaders in my experience. Marching as a group also confers a certain immunity to individual responsibility as long as you're following your orders. There's this confidence that if the leader takes the group off course, that leader will be the only individual who's personally in trouble for the error. The group might get yelled at collectively for having followed, but no one person in the group is any more responsible for the error than any other, except for the leader.
From these experiences, I'd speculate that the reason we don't see literal parades being counterfactually led off course like that on a regular basis is because the dynamic of leading it disincentivizes abusing that power. Being chosen and trusted by a group to lead them in a public setting where any errors you make will be instantly obvious to all onlookers confers a powerful desire to not mess up.
exceedingly long and complex sentences
Break them down. Long sentences in a comfortable cadence like being punctuated by short ones.
giving masses of detail with little apparent regard for how much information the person at the other end actually needs
Give more regard to what the reader needs.
"stick-on" weird metaphors which appear randomly every time I’m afraid I’m being too technical or annoying (so you get a wall of annoying text with a bit of canned laughter in the middle…)
Have you asked readers whether they dislike the metaphors?
vague sentences that go around for a while as I’m slowly figuring out what I mean to say
Rewrite after discovering your own intent. That's what editing is for.
long paragraphs, etc.
Fortunately your keyboard has an enter key, with no limit of uses.
Also, I spend ages proofreading anything I write and worrying about it…
Write where you feel that the stakes are low. If the consequences of poor proofreading don't feel worth worrying about, you can practice the skill of worrying less.
I anticipate that if your experiment is successful in discovering underrated synergies between perks, your new perk combos will be adopted more widely, which will affect perk selection behavior in your opponents, which will in turn affect the efficacy of the new synergies.
If you were crowdsourcing the perk combo experiments across many players, the experiment's complexity would explode when you try to control for the impact of player skill or individual playstyle preferences on the quality of a build.
I wonder if you could simplify the combinatorics of perk combo testing by grouping and rating perks by category of theme. For instance, it may be much better to factor each specific perk or item by its mechanical impact, when there can be multiple impacts per item. Maybe perk X increases your shooting accuracy while decreasing your move speed. When you discover synergies with it, framing those synergies as "with anything that increases accuracy" or "with anything that decreases speed" or "with anything that both increases accuracy and decreases speed" will give you a better "shopping list" in the perk tree. "oh, I know the thing that increases my damage dealt when I'm moving slower works well with anything that makes me move slower", flavor of insights.
The problem space here also reminds me of a video I saw awhile back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oULEuOoRd0&ab_channel=NightHawkInLight
I think that's definitely an aspect of the interesting side: effective encryption relies on deep understanding of how well the opponent can break the encryption. It needs to be strong enough to seem certain it won't be broken in a reasonable timeframe, but that balances against being fast enough to encrypt/decrypt so it's practical to use.
The encryption metaphor also highlights a side of rationality as rendering one's thoughts and actions maximally legible to observers, which strikes me as being true in some ways and interestingly limited in others.
It is indeed tricky to measure this stuff.
E.g. I can’t ask an LLM to go found a new company, give it some seed capital and an email account, and expect it to succeed.
In general, would you expect a human to succeed under those conditions? I wouldn't, but then most of the humans I associate with on a regular basis aren't entrepreneurs.
There’s a different claim, “we will sooner or later have AIs that can think and act at least 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than a human”. I see that claim as probably true, although I obviously can’t prove it.
Without bounding what tasks we want the computer perform faster than the person, one could argue that we've met that criterion for decades. Definitely a matter of "most people" and "most computers" for both, but there's a lot of math that a majority of humans can't do quickly or can't do at all, whereas it's trivial for most computers.
With the core of rationalism being built from provable patterns of human irrationality, I wonder what "irrationalist" philosophy and behavior would look like.
What conclusions would follow from treating the human capacity for rational thought and behavior with the importance or mere obviousness more traditionally poured into attempting to understand and resolve our "irrationalities"?
There's the side from which the expected results look so obvious ("chaos, duh") that they don't seem worth thinking about. It's the boring one. There are others.
Part of the value of rational thought comes from its verifiability and replicability across many minds and eras. But that's not a proof that no thought which fails to verify, fails to replicate, is certain to be without value.
(swap in whatever comparable term suits you for 'value' in that -- I've tried playing the whack-a-mole of tabooing each term in turn which slips into that conceptual void, and concluded that having some linguistic placeholder there seems load-bearing for communication).
Choose some trivial, popular self-improvement thing you want. Something you wouldn't mind changing about your cognition if it was easy, but wouldn't be heartbroken not to change if it didn't happen. Find some free self-hypnosis audio for it online, and skim a transcript of the script to make sure it's content you're ok with lowering your defenses toward. Then pretend to be the kind of person who just plain thinks it's interesting and worth a try, and listen to it and relax into it.
If you've practiced self-awareness and self-reflection, you will probably have the experience where the parts of your mind you watch yourself with remain normal, while the parts they're watching get lightly hypnotized. If all of you gets hypnotized, that's cool too, you're back to normal at the end of the audio and you might accidentally get a personal change you don't hate.
It's tempting to categorize hypnosis as an intellectual pursuit if you haven't interacted with it much, but it's really got a lot more in common with physical practices than mental ones. As with many physical pursuits, the important bits happen in the parts of human experience that are the hardest to transfer between minds through language, so reading about it will convey much less useful understanding than just giving it a try.
at least, I'm assuming you want to understand it. Some stuff, trying to understand from language is about as effective as trying to "understand" a cuisine by reading a cookbook that calls for a bunch of spices you're unfamiliar with. Skim the cookbook to make sure you're not allergic to any of the known ingredients, maybe, then just go visit the restaurant down the street.
One approach that's helped me in the executive functioning department is choosing to believe that connecting long-term wants to short-term wants is itself a skill.
I don't want to touch a hot stove, and yet I don't frame my "not touching a hot stove" behavior as an executive function problem because there's no time scale on which I want it. I don't want to have touched the stove; that'd just hurt and be of no benefit to anybody.
I don't particularly right-now-want to go do half an hour of exercise and make a small increment of progress on each of several ongoing projects today, but I do frame that as an executive function problem, because I long-term-want those things -- I want to have done them.
It's tempting to default to setting first-order metrics of success: I'll know I did well if I'm in shape and my ongoing projects are completed on time, for instance. But I find it much more actionable and helpful to look at second-order metrics of success: is this approach causing me better or worse progress on my concrete goals than other approaches?
For me, shifting the focus from the infrequent feedback of project completion to the constant feedback of process efficacy is helpful for not getting bored and giving up. Shifting from optimizing outputs to optimizing the process also helps me look for smaller and more concrete indicators that the process is working. I personally find that the most concrete and reliable "having my shit together" indicator is whether I'm keeping my home tidy, because that's always the first thing to go when I start dropping the ball on progress on my ongoing tasks in general. Yours may differ, but I suspect that addressing the alignment problem of coordinating your short-term wants with your long-term wants may be a more promising approach than trying to brute force through the wall of "don't wanna".
Good post on the whole, but I downvoted for the "affiliate link" rickroll. I was genuinely curious, and if it was a real product that seemed good enough to buy I figured I'd make sure they'd tracked my click to get you a payout as a favor to show appreciation for the recommendation. Is that really the kind of behavior you'd like to punish for a laugh?
Or, more to the point, what if they don't compensate at all and just have the money to afford it? Who cares!
We as social animals care if someone else is getting more, because we're wired to want to do what they're doing. In a flock of chickens, when one of them finds something delicious, all the others immediately want some too. Imagine how this impacts the group's survival in the wild, vs if each individual ignored the others' discoveries.
Money decouples earning behavior from spending behavior in a way that those ancient survival-relevant artifacts of behavior habits don't follow well, of course. Just saying it makes sense to me that we have a "that member of my group has what I want so I am going to try to do what they do" reaction wired in at a pretty fundamental level.
With the mattress topper you'd describe buying, I'd say congratulations -- amortize the amount you'd spend to climate control your whole room to the target temperatures over the expected life of the item, and it's probably a pretty efficient way to address the consideration at hand.
With the services, I think it's also worth considering framing them as education -- buying the opportunity to watch experts do a thing, so you can learn to do the thing better yourself. Ultimately I think the role of many experts -- therapists, sports trainers, home organizers, whatever -- has a large element of education/tutoring/training: offering you the opportunity to inherit the relevant portions of their skillset in a more efficient manner than going out and studying the whole skillset from scratch.
In reflecting on which subjects have been surprisingly powerful and implementable for me, I notice a pattern: Catching up my knowledge of subjects that I bounced off of rather than assimilating on prior encounters with them has disproportionate return.
Your example of connecting body language mirroring to likeability highlights how contextual the condition of "learn and know very little" is: If someone had less experience reading others' body language and managing their own, mirroring might be an extremely difficult task. But since you happen to have already paid attention to reading and managing body language, "how to use mirroring" is a missing link to connect those existing skills into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Your question and example read to me as "based on FinalFormula2's current skillset, which subjects will they be surprised at the power and ease of, because they don't have that skill yet but they do have all the high-effort prerequisites already in place?"
The trouble with trying to give answers you'll find good is that you've offered very little information about where you're at right now. To turn it around, what subjects seem more difficult than they should be to you?
"I just need to borrow your earlobe for a second, sorry about this, I have a healing potion for after..."
Cool! Unfortunately I'm not really sure if the idea itself is compatible with turning a profit -- modern business models would push for it to leak data or include ads in ways that would defeat the purpose.
I'll eventually get one of the good macs if I have to, but I'm giving that decision another year or so to become clearer whether or not it'll be really necessary in the long run.
I've also heard some very promising things about eventually being able to do a one-time investment of renting fancy compute for initial training, and then compressing the trained model to run on smaller hardware.
more a piece of glue, but I want a self-hosted AI to basically do experiments on me. I want to tell it a goal that I have, and get its feedback on figuring out how to measure that goal, and then it'd track things about me (either ambiently by me giving it access to home automation, credit card statements, etc, or actively by texting me and asking questions or giving reminders). Ideally it'd ask me to make small/easy modifications to my day-to-day life to test how effective various changes are at moving me toward my goals with minimal active effort on my part. I basically want to outsource the executive function and consistency required to benefit from the whole Quantified Self thing, which seems like it should be absolutely possible these days.
The problem is that I really want it self-hosted -- I'd buy it terabytes of storage, and I'd spend around $1000 for dedicated hardware that it could run on, and if it worked really well I'd consider upgrading it for more of the same to the tune of 10k-100k over time -- but I absolutely don't want that intimate of a software system to ever be emitting data onto the internet or acting like it's owned by someone else and only rented by me.
I wonder if this qualifies as a silver lining to the situation of global climate extremes. When nature behaves so out of the ordinary, I pay closer attention exactly what is happening. Observing the world when it's being unusual feels like carving off a bite-sized piece from the question "why isn't everything homogeneous?".
Why isn't right-now the same as whatever was before the big bang or after the heat death? I can't trace it all the way back; if there's any "why" at all, I think our cognition is limited to processing it through an anthropomorphic lens. But I can trace a step or two with surprisingly good certainty, based on all the information and observations and habits of thought that I've picked up so far. I'm surprised by the certainty because usually I pay the most attention to the questions that seem least obvious to answer. I'm learning -- fashionable term might be "updating", but I couldn't really tell you a distinction other than fashion between "updating" and what "learning" is supposed to mean -- learning that sometimes following the "because" chain as far as I can yields little bitty new and interesting things. Cup-stacking practice.
It's done some sort of freezing rainy thing all night, and there's a layer of ice on almost everything. The snow looks like it's hiding a lake where the water normally runs off in the rain. The gutters are dripping -- icicles off their fore-edge, but rivulets of still-wet water behind them down the fascia.
Some but not all of the icicles tattle on the direction that the wind has blown. With the right weather conditions through a period of freezing, there's no reason an icicle couldn't be shaped to spell out an arbitrary word in cursive. There's the breaking strength of the ice, but with the right ratio of drip speed to freeze rate, each drip of water accretes another reinforcing layer all the way along before lengthening the end of the long skinny cone. That's just like tree rings make trees long skinny cones, only trees usually go up and icicles usually go down. I guess the tree ring count always tells you the age of a log, so by slicing every foot or so and counting rings, you could tell the entire growth history of the tree. How tall was the tree x years ago? It was the height of the first slice with only x rings showing in it.
The garage that came with my house is one of those cheap metal carports, where the corrugations go horizontally along the sides. This creates some fascinating ice behavior: In some spots, the water has conformed to the underside of the corrugation and made fake-icicles flat against the steel, and in other spots the icicles have struck out on their own from the outermost point of a corrugation, hanging with air all around. There are a couple spots inside where I've placed insulation between the frame legs of the structure, and outside that insulation I see more of the ice that drips flat along the steel, and fewer of the free-hanging icicles. Notable exception: that section of the exterior has a big column of ice almost exactly outside of where the cold steel leg of the structure stands inside. I think this means the freestanding icicles are more likely when the air on the opposite side of the steel is colder.
The layer of ice on a horizontal steel rod (top of a cattle panel) nearby has few icicles; the water has encased it all the way around. The fascinating thing with it is how the outermost layer is crackled and islanded, like crocodile-skin or a mostly-burned log glowing in the fire. Some of the little islands of ice protruding above the rest have the lacy patterns which storybooks show on single-paned old windows and call graffiti by Jack Frost. Well, they don't call it graffiti, but that's what we call it nowadays when a stranger uninvitedly draws pictures on your house. I think this means there was a layer of wet water over the ice which has slowly gotten frozen by the air.
Walking on the snow is different again today. The surface seems rougher; stepping straight down in house-slippers yields adequate traction. The strength of the crust is decreasing; in some spots, my heel sinks when all my weight is on a single foot while taking a step. Prints from the intervening days are showing up where they were nearly invisible before, because the layer of water saturating lower layers of snow paints contrast where the white-on-white was imperceptibly crushed before.
The ice makes amazing glassy noises when it creaks and breaks and falls. All the noises are things wiggling and moving; things sliding roughly past each other like microscopic sandpaper; things ripping and tearing apart from one another like that trick to ripping a phone book in half. That trick is to start one page at a time, but overlap them so it looks like you're multi-tasking and super strong. I haven't actually tried that trick, though -- will have to do it next time I'm getting rid of a magazine. Uline sends out phonebook-sized ones; I'll probably receive another within the next few months.
I wonder if ice is really stronger at colder temperatures, or if something else is making it seem that way. Does ice even get below freezing? I know water doesn't really boil hotter than boiling; that's why a double boiler works for making chocolate and yet another reason that the universal solvent is super weird. It must get colder; chest freezers have that setting adjustment dial. I suppose two chest freezers set to different temps, and a standard water mold, and a fixed amount of water, and a stack of weights, could probably test the ice strength question. Or I could look it up later.
The snow continues to surprise me. Freezing rain fell all afternoon, and the crust of ice on top feels harder and slicker than before. But on the driveway, it's sloppy and slushy underneath, like my childhood nightmare of petting an animal only to find that it was dead and the skin had started sloughing and slippering around.
The mailbox is frozen properly shut now, can't open it even pulling with both hands. That's ok; there are no tracks suggesting that any delivery services were mad enough to try to operate in this. The fir needles are still visible atop the snow, but on closer inspection they're under a few millimeters of solid ice. Oddly it's easier to walk now, because the packed snow gives more easily.
When I poke the snow on the road with my index finger, it yields slowly and reluctantly, perhaps rotted out from below by the water moving and making it a little bit translucent from underneath. The snow on a tree stump nearby looks just the same, but poking it feels like prodding at chilly glass.
The eaves of the pumphouse are long, and looked from a distance as if the snow was missing from the final 6" or so above the gutter. I wondered what could possibly have melted the snow off just that part. Upon closer inspection it wasn't gone at all, just saturated with rain that had fallen on the whole roof and succumbed slowly to gravity. Snow full of water gets clear like water -- ice and water have much closer indices of refraction than ice and air, hence why snow looks white and so reflectively blinding.
Coming home, I found some of what's been falling from the sky, caught on a surface that I'd cleaned well just yesterday. Air quality has been good-enough in the interim, so I scooped a bit up to chew on. The texture is a bit like a snow cone, but different -- snowcones are strips cut like wood-shavings or shards like from a rock-crusher, but these are all perfect little spheres. The texture of myriad ice spheres moving against one another is subtly but distinctly different from other shapes, as I would have expected if I'd tried to guess first.
The pumphouse and the mailbox are still at the bottom of the hill, right where I left them. I know, because I walked down to check. The rain that's forecast to freeze onto everything is starting, and I was curious about what it would be like outside.
The snow is doing a strange thing: Pausing for days, unchanging. My tracks from the first day it sat here are still there, sharp and clear. My tracks from the next day are there if I look closely, but less perceptible. The snow has frozen harder and harder each day, so I leave less and less of an impression. Walking back up, I didn't see the marks from walking down at all.
I remain surefooted on this snow thanks to the spikes I'm wearing on my boots; I keep a set of an accessory called yak-trax with my tire chains. Mine are secondhand from someone else and don't fit quite right -- I think they're a little small for my foot size; my mother thinks they're a little too big. Whatever the reason, they migrate into a position where they're giving perfect traction from the mid-foot through the heel, and leaving an inch or two of the toe with only normal shoe-tread. I actually like this better than if they covered the entire sole, because I can compare their effects to what the traction would be like without them.
Pausing as it does, the snow is telling tomes of tiny unimportant stories which normally pass invisibly by. It's littered with brown needles from the fir trees -- "evergreens" continually lose a thin shower of needles, like humans continually dust their environments with scraps of skin and extra hairs. Brown means the needles were dead anyways and falling at their proper time. There are also green tufts -- little branch-tips lost to the wind, not meant to fall yet. No bigger branches, as the trees are pretty young and healthy here.
Here and there are stains darkening the snow around little bits of something. Kneeling for a closer look, I speculate it's where the little birds and rodents have defecated on the ice as they ran by. That happens always in the woods, but usually invisibly. I poke at the crust of ice where it's clean, and it's too hard for my gloved finger to gouge into it. That means I'm concentrating a lot of my weight on a very small surface area to dig my shoe-spikes into the crust and keep my balance. I wonder about the tensile strengths of ice -- for a thicker crust, would I need to concentrate more weight on fewer points of contact to keep traction? Would I need fewer spikes? Would a backpack with a quarter or a half again of my bodyweight make a difference in the conditions I expect to see?
Partway back up the hill, I get the impulse to look more closely at the snow, and get down at a spot selected for seeming unremarkable. The icy crust chills my knees as my weight crushes the insulative layers of my sweats and snow-pants -- it's not the materials, but the air in them, that usually keeps one warm. The individual fir needles aren't iced too tightly to the crust; I can sweep them about with a fingertip. Looking closely at the snow, I spot something different: are those gnat wings? Pair of millimeter wings, dark speck of a body, it looks like some sort of itty bitty flying critter was out in all this after the snow froze. I found a utility knife in one pocket, tore a page from a notebook from another, and carefully excavated the dime-sized bit of snow crust around the probably-an-insect. It's sitting on the porch to freeze a bit more solid after my gloves started warming it, but if it doesn't blow away I'll take a look under the microscope later and see if it reveals anything else about what it was. Tiny insects fall dead on the ground all the time, of course, but this one is unusual because I got to see it, and strange for having happened to be flying over snow. I wonder where it lived and what it ate and how on earth it survived enough winter to end up dying between two icy storms out here.
What happens when you get there? What do you feel?
In the context of "just the very first step" and "slow way, way down", I notice that I enumerate the possibilities (turn or continue), create space for the answers to "what happens if I?" for each possibility, and then my eyes want to follow those paths out one at a time (or kinda gestalt whole-maze-at-once, for one this simple) and come back and compare those two answers to "what happens if?". Then again, I tend to rely heavily on spatial thinking, and I've put many hours into trying to empathize with little machines who can't see the maze from the birds-eye view like I can.
Now go back to the beginning of the maze, and this time, try taking it algorithmically. Imagine reaching out with your right hand to touch the wall, and keep your hand in contact with the wall the whole time you walk forward.
Feels like there's not that "stop" imposed as it was in the first instance. Feels also like once I orient my avatar of myself in the maze to make sure it's the right hand on the wall, I throw out the "which way I'm facing" data because I know it'd be trivial to recalculate later if you asked for it.
Also feels like you could as easily have asked for the left hand. I had to look back and check to do the right-hand-on-wall technique; I realize now that I reflexively simulated left-hand-on-wall and the resulting deja vu upon returning to the first square. I suspect that this is because I prefer to keep my right hand free when exploring a new place, because I'm right handed.
Go back to the beginning again, and notice exactly how your default strategy feels different.
I worry, here, that I might do a better comparison if I'd been nudged to name and snapshot the feeling of the default solving. The worry might be unfounded, though -- looking back (glad I started a comment there!), I see how my default solving parallelized solving all the prospective paths, reminiscent now of that slime mold that they tricked into reinventing the Tokyo metro system.
There is a certain way it feels to recognize that turning left cannot lead you to the exit faster than going straight.
Feels like building something unambiguously adequate-or-better for the task at hand. Feels like replacing a bunch of arithmetic with a single integer. Feels like choosing an additional axiom to free up logic for less-certain parts of the problem.
I have a word for it, actually. It feels like reifying. Feels like what I've usually thought the compiler people meant when they use that word.
How would you describe the main sensation by which you navigate when you encounter a maze?
I usually use the name "logic" for it. This may be wrong, or mismatched from how others use their words. There's a solidity to it (and the word 'solid' may indeed share roots with 'logic'?). It's the part with the bricks and the good straight boards, the part where you don't have to revisit a conclusion to make sure it's still true once you confirmed it. It's the work stereotyped as being for men, fix the car this once, build the deck this once, dig a cellar out and we'll have a cellar forever: things that change slowly enough that the change is negligible. (Contrast that against the work stereotyped as being for women, the constant maintenance of keeping on sweeping the floor that keeps getting dirty again or keeping on washing and folding the clothes that wouldn't be doing their jobs if they just stayed the way you left them.)
Where is the lever that moves your mind into contact with physical necessity?
What is it like to be out of contact with physical necessity?
...that's my marginalia from a single read of this post. If I think more things about it later, I'll try to remember to come back and leave another comment.
Whether having breasts is a minor thing to the person who has them depends greatly on the size.
Below a certain size, you can have breast development that's visible when nude, but easy to hide if you want to. Bras aren't generally necessary (though they can be an aesthetic preference or helpful for reducing friction when clothes move across the area), and little to no effort or discomfort is required to wear a sports bra or binder and comfortably wear clothing cut for body types without breasts. The current selfies in the post make look to me like the author is almost certainly in this category. Plenty of women, both cis and trans, have less volume of breast tissue than a certain phenotype of obese cis men.
Above a certain size, having breasts can be a major inconvenience, even for people who generally like having them. Bras become mandatory for avoiding pain when moving about in one's daily life, and rather than cute decorations, they're expensive feats of structural engineering. Finding any clothing which fits flatteringly can become between difficult and impossible, and major social stigma can be experienced for choosing clothes that the viewer perceives as "too revealing".
Are you calling it a non-minor thing to you as a reader just learning about Sapphire's journey, or a non-minor thing to you as someone considering the pros and cons of transition? The former would seem kind of out of line, but the latter seems very understandable to me.
FWIW, breast growth generally proceeds slowly enough that you can stop it by stopping the hormones causing it, if that's an option for you. (it's not an option when the hormones show up by default at puberty, so that's one of the many facets of being human that's distressing to some teens...)
It's unusually cold. Almost all surface water is frozen, but it's still liquid in a couple little trickles off the hillsides, where the ground folds up carefully to funnel it away.
A little wren keeps visiting the dish of cat food that I left on my porch when trying to figure out where my cat had vanished to (turns out he was deep in the recesses of the master bedroom's walk-in closet). I'll leave it out for now, though, as it's one of the only food sources available for the round, fidgetey little wren.
The hummingbird feeder seemed to freeze solid, but on closer examination, the ice is only in the top part. It's freeze-distilled like turning weak booze into strong booze, and the bottom of the feeder contains a syrup too sugary to freeze. When I tip the feeder, a trickle of that syrup creeps gingerly out of the flower hole, as if regretting its decision to face the wind.
I haven't seen the hummingbird since things froze, nor heard him arguing with his colleagues in the bush where they reside. I think they're in torpor till the weather gets better.
The bird-brained chicken who rejects the coop in favor of sleeping in a tree had snow stuck to her back this morning, and seems to have finally retreated to the coop where it's warmer.
Particle effects of some white stage of water show where the wind is pointing. Sideways usually, eddying straight downward or straight up at other times.
There's the "and if you planned it poorly, then you die" of leaving the house at the moment. Even of staying inside, really. Don't catch it all on fire. Don't fall; don't break a limb; don't hit your head. Unusually bad time for an appendix to do as they are wont to.
Air this cold has an almost meditative self-awareness to it, though. It's conducive to calm, to deliberate movement, tempered by the awareness that calm of the wrong sort can be symptomatic of hypothermia. There's a closer eye to keep on the exact sensations of fingers and nose, with visceral training in how it goes if one lets them get stolen away by frostbite.
There's also an attention to the state of the body's core, which isn't usually worthwhile. But in a freeze this hard, its ROI can include survival. You're ok, more or less, in enough layers, if you stay dry. Sweat, though, and you aren't dry any more. Get too sweaty, you might freeze. Layers of clothing take careful attention and manipulation: Fluffy enough to trap the warm air near, wind-proof enough to keep the gusts from snatching the cold out, breathable enough to keep the whole system as close as possible to dry. Leave any gap, and the sensorium highlights it screamingly.
It's safe enough, of course, being as close to my house as I stay. A castle of modern technology and engineering, containing a tame hot fire backed up by electricity and propane. But it's the nature of the brain, I think, to extrapolate how far that safety extends. How far afield does the house project its safety? Where's the line where it's more important to count on one's preparation and knowledge and skill? I notice myself calculating it all out. If that's abnormal, then the deviation is in the observation of the thoughts, I think, and not the underlying line of processing itself.
And there's a special loss of anonymity in snow. Creatures leave tracks, and I can see their little dramas unfold in ways they'd never do in line-of-sight from me. The deer rushed across the driveway, eyed the steep embankment, realized it was too tall, skidded to a stop, then walked away. A rabbit snuck out, sat staring around itself, got startled by something, scampered away home. A car or two have gone this way along the road, but not the other.
I don't mind snow's tattling, though, because the stories are only revealed if you're close enough to when and where they are. The only bigger right than privacy, I think, is the right to perceive one's own surroundings. If I'm in the immediate surroundings of something, they get to see my tracks. I can see my tracks too; I can tell where I'm leaving them. If I valued not being seen somewhere more than I valued going there, I could simply not go, and not leave tracks. I can go back out later, check if my tracks have filled in and blown away yet, and know exactly what my neighbors or the deer would know of the paths I've walked today.
Snow stretches out temporal perception, I'd say, when we're all leaving tracks in it. It buys us time, procrastinates, lets later-selves see things that would normally be restricted to onlookers of only a moment.
I'm glad we get it sometimes here, but as glad when it eventually goes away.
It was a yes or no question, friend.
Do you believe that there's currently a "mutual conversion of understanding without any gaps" between mathematics and physics?
Is this supposed to sound a little crazy? I'm reading it with the assumption that it might be some fully formed field of expertise with its own jargon etc that i haven't heard about yet...
You're seeing a thing and trying to get it across and, as I can tell from checking your profile's karma, not communicating in a way that's making people feel like they're learning or understanding something valuable to them from your words.
If one is able to philosophize rationally and objectively, it is akin to positioning philosophy on par with physics and mathematics. Where physics and mathematics have modular formulas that can be synchronized among physicists and mathematicians.
So... philosophizing rationally and objectively elevates philsophy, in some abstract ranking space, to become equal to physics and math. In that ranking space, philosophy is implied to have been below math and physics before, or else nobody would be lauding having brought it to their level.
In that ranking space, physics and maths are composed of operations that are repeatable between practitioners of the field. Repeatable operations like any machinist should be able to build an exact machine from a sufficiently detailed set of blueprints.
But the machinist doesn't have to be the inventor. They might, but they don't have to. The skills of doing a thing and the skills of deciding what thing to do are discrete. Solving a test, versus choosing which problems are the appropriate difficulty to include on the test. They're at completely different levels. Call those levels insight and execution, maybe. The skillsets are separate. Under scarcity pressures, we often try to get both skillsets in the same individual, like in hiring and careers. But outside of scarcity pressures, like in many hobby organizations and recreational collaborations, people who are missing insight or missing execution can nevertheless thrive and contribute.
I think philosophy, physics, and mathematics are already all the same, in each comprising the separate insight and execution layers. Is there some cognitive or intellectual difference between a straight-A philosophy student, and the philosophers they study? Is just knowing about philosophy sufficient to actually do it?
Like how we spend years painstakingly copying other peoples' words and letters to develop the handwriting skills to write something brilliant, or even to write something mundane but unique and personal, math and physics and philosophy all have some amount of sloggy grind at the very beginning before you can start making art with them as paints upon experience's canvas.
And regarding synchronized among physicists and mathematicians... Some elements of philosophy can already be synchronized as well, as evidenced by our ability to make up grading systems for philosophy classes. Maybe that's not a good way to teach philosophy... but then again, who said it was a good way to teach physics or maths?
Then philosophy, with its many logical consequence formulas, is also able to synergize scientifically (and even surpass) with physicists and mathematicians.
What does "synergize scientifically" or "surpass" mean in this context?
I fear that happiness may be a sort of consolation prize in the games we're talking about. If we agree that the factor we're talking about is mutually exclusive with happiness, then we can describe him as someone who may have considered the full portfolio of benefits of both option and chosen the one that's not available to most "normal" people.
Well, thanks for the brain-worm, I've been viewing my own behavior through the lens of "am I being agentic about this?" all day =)
You mentioned in passing the theme that agentic-looking outcomes arise from disregarding unnecessary constraints. In watching myself, I notice that my agentic-looking behaviors and accomplishments often arise from rigidly applying an explicit list of gestures-worth-trying, even when I don't expect them to work.
For instance, I dislike looking at labels on most stuff, so I devote a moderate amount of time to removing unneeded ones. I've developed a checklist of techniques which sometimes get sticky stuff un-stuck from other stuff. The list includes water, acetone, heat, paint stripper, sandpaper, magic eraser, razor blades, and other varyingly destructive techniques. I've trained myself to consider it a rule that before I just tolerate looking at an unsightly sticker, I should rule out each intervention on the list. By being inflexible about this approach, I manage to remove all kinds of annoying stickers that I didn't expect would really come off.
Sometimes I also get novel results by going down the list of all the tools I have access to and considering how each one would impact the problem if I used it. It's honestly pretty great how much force a single smallish human can exert with a manual cable winch, a cheater bar if the winch's handle is too short for good leverage, and some carabiners and lifting slings rated for 10,000lbs...
Oh, and if you stick stickers directly to the back of your laptop's screen, consider first putting down either a single full-sized sticker or a protective case. That way when the machine eventually dies you can frame or keep the collection.
Similarly:
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In airports (LAX comes to mind), sometimes you can get outdoors after security by visiting the smoking area! I don't smoke; I just like fresh air and sunlight. But sometimes the "smoking area" is the best place to get that.
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You might like social engineering content. I have occasionally bluffed my way past security personnel to get things done, and even (when highly confident that they were incorrect) ignored them saying "you can't go there" while obviously making no attempt to stop me, just to see what would happen. They did not stop me, nor summon anyone to remove me from the area where they claimed I "couldn't" be.
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It's highly agentic but probably immoral by most standards to abuse return policies and use places with generous policies as cheap or free rental options.
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Identifying and exploiting certain personal finance loopholes may count: Compare spending HSA funds with the provided debit card to making the same purchases on a credit card, reimbursing them from the HSA, and keeping the rewards or sign-up bonus from the credit card company.
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Did you know you can go buy a massage chair, which pretty much looks like a regular chair, for a few hundred bucks? Guests are often amazed that I have a massage chair in my living room but I spent less on it than one might on a top-of-the-line recliner.
Have you done the exercise of watching your internal monologue for a day and noting every time you think you "can't" do something, and then transforming those into "prefer not to" by identifying some ways you could accomplish it but choose not to because the tradeoffs aren't worth it.
"I can't fly" becomes "I don't like the hassle of going to an airport unless I'm going to a specific destination, and the risks of current jetpack technology outweigh the rewards, and I could go paragliding or wingsuiting in one of those wind tunnels if I booked an appointment, and I guess if I wanted to allocate the funds I could take pilot lessons".
"I can't defy gravity" becomes "Earth's gravity applies to me because I'm so close to the planet, but if I dedicated my entire life to becoming a billionaire at all costs I could probably do some space tourism. Actually humans do a lot of things that make g-forces go other directions, like roller coasters and those carnival things with a spinning room, which are all things I could go to if I'm patient or build if I'm risk-tolerant. And I can make things pretend to defy gravity by using magnets or tensegrity principles or static electricity or very powerful fans or all sorts of other tricks."
There's a very useful set of intellectual gestures here:
- Notice that something annoys you, or generally seems imperfect, in some way
- Imagine what the world would be like if there was a tool or technique to make it less annoying.
- Investigate whether anyone has ever solved the problem before, and how
- Before buying a tool to solve a problem, think hard about whether you could make the tool yourself. Maybe try making it yourself, if the stakes are low enough, and then buy the good version if you learn that you really do want it.
I sum it up as "YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING. HUMANS USE TOOLS".
My examples are small, and you might not think all of them count, but here are some things I've done that sound kind of like what you're asking for:
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When learning rope splicing, I wanted a fid. Fids online were more expensive than I wanted to buy for a potentially brief interest, so I thought hard about what they actually do (make space between strands of rope with the pointy end, lead the rope through that space with the hollow end) and made a thing that does that by taping a chopstick to a drinking straw. The other thing a fid does is measure a certain multiple of the rope's diameter, but that was easily solved by drawing a mark on the homemade tool at the correct distance from the end.
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I used to think that you had to buy the clothes you wanted already made, but I've gradually gotten better at deciding what I want and then either modifying something to be it or making it from scratch. I frequently modify patterns so that things have more pockets than they're supposed to. Did you know that you can add or enlarge pockets without sewing at all? Get the strongest fusible interfacing you can find, put it where the seams should go, and press [iron] it in place. Seams glued like this aren't as strong as sewn ones, but some people are needlessly intimidated by the concept of learning to thread a needle, knot the thread, and put it in and out of a couple layers of fabric a few times.
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Depending on your cultural background, it may be more agentic to DIY household projects that others would hire someone for, or it may be more agentic to hire a contractor to do stuff which others would either DIY or leave un-done.
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In my house, there was a doorway between the kitchen/dining space and laundry room. I disliked having an open doorway there because the washing machine and dryer are loud, but for a long time I assumed that was just how things had to be. Eventually I realized that I could just go buy a pre-hung door the right size and install it, which I did and am very glad of. (try Habitat For Humanity first for pre-hung doors, and factor a trim kit for both sides into the total cost of the project, if you're doing this)
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I've built a lot of custom bookshelves over the years. You really don't have to be much of a carpenter; as long as you pick nice enough materials that they're not leaking pitch or giving you splinters, and you assemble it well enough to not fall down, it'll do the job. I'm also not shy about cutting holes in the backs of bookshelves when they would otherwise block an electrical outlet or something else small but important.
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I'd argue that it's agentic in a potentially harmful way to uninstall smoke detectors when they annoy you sufficiently. If you're having that problem, replace the ion ones with photoelectric ones. There's a Technology Connections video on youtube explaining it if you want more info there.
That's a lot of "you" which doesn't necessarily apply to all readers, and needlessly weakens the whole post when even a few of the assumptions are obviously wrong.
I personally conceptualize subjective time as deltas in experience. I get more subjective time for the same wall time when I'm doing something that makes me have new thoughts worth remembering, compared to when I'm doing something that's a repeat of familiar experiences.
Your advice to imagine everything having changed/aged, before gathering evidence that it's done so, strikes me as likely to create more of the bad kind of "my assumptions were wrong" surprise than simply updating with real new observations when acquiring them. For instance:
- The new year! This is probably the most quintessential example. When January 1 of a year arrives, you still feel like it was the previous year - you often don't really internalize the year you're in as being the current year until February or so.
I experience writing the year as something that happens on autopilot. For 11 months, the shortcut of using a hardcoded number instead of recalculating which year it really is saves a lot of cognitive effort. The cost of this shortcut is a bit of struggle while overwriting the old value in that cold storage, but I choose it over the alternative.
- You might visit a landmark one day (e.g. a street, a park, a school, etc.) as a tourist or visitor. But the next time you stop by, it might have been renovated or removed to your surprise.
The reason I'm surprised by infrastructure changes is because they happen relatively rarely. If I imagined/predicted that every street, park, and landmark would change between every time I visit a place, my predictions would be mostly-wrong. When I imagine that most stuff won't change but a few things might, my prediction will be mostly-right, and I'll update based on observing which things changed. I experience the surprise/curiosity of "what did they change this to?" as an important part of adding emotional weight to performing the right update quickly and accurately.
- You might have spoken with an old friend many years ago. But when you speak to the friend next, you're surprised that they're so old, even though everyone is always getting older.
Usually when I'm surprised by how someone has aged, it's not the fact that they got older, but that the series of choices/experiences shown by their aging has shaped them in a direction that I wouldn't have expected based on what I used to know about them.
For instance, I fondly recall an acquaintance I haven't seen since in a decade who was quiet, bookish, and surprisingly skilled at making tie dye. If I ran into him today, he would certainly have aged; that's not what would surprise me. There are many new experiences he might have had in the intervening decade, which would show in his appearance: Maybe he got into business, and now wears suits instead of t-shirts and cargos. Maybe he chopped his long hair off, or dyed it. Maybe his circumstances have changed for the worse, and now he looks unhealthy and unkempt. He might have gained weight, even lots, or taken up fitness as a hobby and gained muscle, or encountered health challenges and lost a lot of weight, any of which would change the appearance of his face as well as his body. Regardless of how this acquaintance has changed, the surprise isn't that there were changes, but which changes there were. Whatever direction he's changed in, it'll tell me more about who he was a decade ago as well as who he is now, because who he was before turns out to have had the capacity/proclivity to live the lifestyle I see side effects of in his appearance today.
In short, the surprise isn't that the changes happen, but which changes one sees, out of the myriad possibilities.
- You might get an interesting gadget (like a computer, a smartphone, or a robot), which was state-of-the-art when you bought it. But later on it might feel woefully obsolete, and you might start coveting the newer gadgets your friends all got instead.
I've encountered a lot of old once-state-of-the-art gadgets while organizing my stuff lately. Other than the natural decay of battery life and occasional disappearance of required peripheral infrastructure, their core functionality basically doesn't change. The surprise is not that my old iPod worked as an iPod and basically still does, but that my current phone does those same things and so much more. If my desires for features change, that's because I changed, not because the stuff did.
Remembering the moment when that iPod was the best portable music player in the world, and comparing it to the moment when my phone is basically tied for the best at being a pocket supercomputer in the world, helps me greatly with predicting what it'll look and feel like in another couple decades when my 2024 tech compares unfavorably to the state of the art.
no one ever stops to wonder how the specific day it is today is a foreign world.
Foreign to whom? The present moment is the only truly non-foreign world to us as denizens of linear time. Today is foreign from the perspective of tomorrow or yesterday, but we as we are in this moment don't exist tomorrow and didn't exist yesterday. Although the perspectives from which today is foreign matter a bit, I don't think it's a good idea to privilege them over the perspectives from which today is domestic.
On the one hand, I probably do miss the point economically.
On the other hand, paying the deficit via money printing vs paying it via taxes creates a very different subjective experience to individuals with lower macroeconomic literacy, which is probably a majority of taxpayers and voters. Subjective experiences inform reactions (spending behavior, voting behavior, criminal behavior, etc), and group reactions inform if and how a policy actually plays out in practice.
"Could this work?" and "Could we get there from here?" seem like separate questions in this case.
Could it work in general, starting from a clean slate? Probably. In a tight feedback loop between personal taxation and government spending, voter demand would probably tune government spending so taxes stayed at a tolerable level to allow an adequately satisfying amount of personal consumption.
Set the goal as "do not increase the current deficit", and the link between how much the government spends and how much the individual pays could be concrete enough to be comprehensible to even the below-average half of taxpayers and voters, with a good enough publicity campaign. Hypothetically, a tax return could say exactly how many dollars of your payment went to which initiatives in this system, and with sufficiently legible returns correlated to electoral platforms and feedback on elected politician voting/performance, voters and taxpayers could experience the sensation that they have some say in where their money goes.
Could we get rid of the existing deficit this way? I doubt it. American cultural values say it's bad to punish someone for the actions of others, even if the others are related to them in some way. That value is why almost all personal debts stop at the estate, and aren't inherited by the heirs. Demanding that current taxpayers foot the multi-billion bill for money spent by their ancestors directly violates that value. Although you can ease the populace into tolerating all sorts of horrible things in a frog-boiling sort of way (look at the expense of filing one's taxes at all, perpetuated by tax preparation lobbyists), sudden widespread changes tend to be much easier for the populace to comprehend and resist.
Plenty of grown ups of average or even above average intelligence assume that 99.9% effective contraception means they'll never be in the .01% statistic.
If you've had the "if the highly effective redundant contraception fails, should we abort?" conversation before getting any sperm anywhere near any eggs with every partner you've ever had, I'd posit that you're in a slim minority of humanity.
And no human, no matter how rational, can predict with perfect accuracy what their emotional response will be to experiencing a physiological event that is completely novel to them.
If I was in a relationship where everyone involved wanted a kid and I believed the kid would have a good chance of having positive role models and the kind of environment I'd wish for someone I love throughout its formative years, yes.
The "what if my child can't do intellectual labor because of AI?" question is, IMO, a very similar shape of risk to "what if my child can't do intellectual labor because they have an intellectual disability?".
If you'd love a kid even if they turned out to be in a low percentile of society intellectually, then you're ready for a kid regardless of whether the world you're bringing it into happens to have AI smarter than it. If your desire to add to your family is contingent on assumptions about how the new addition's abilities would compare to those of other agents it interacts with, it might be worth having a good think about whether that's a childhood environment that you would wish upon a person whom you love.
My experience of finding a post significant, in the "expect to want to link others to it in later conversations" sense, is much like the experience of learning a new word. The posts I find memorable not only explore a concept but also name it, and I happen to have the kind of cognition that handles jargon and acronyms well.
When I'm retrieving a post to link to others, I actually search the whole web based on the name I recall for the concept. Sometimes I'll recognize and grab a LW post based on that search, and other times I'll discover that the best concise definition lives elsewhere.
My experience of repeatedly linking a post is that I eventually start associating the winning search term with a concept, when I've searched it before.
For two examples of things I recall wanting to link to others, and how I found them:
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Scissor statements are in the LW vocabulary. When I want to link them, I recall a prior wild goose chase failing to find a good link with "scissor statement" as the search term, so instead I search "shiri's scissor" to get https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/. Turns out the source I wanted wasn't on LW, just LW-adjacent.
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I remember that bug hunting in the lifestyle sense is a term I learned from the LW sequences, so I search the web for "lesswrong sequence bug hunt" to get https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rFjhz5Ks685xHbMXW/hammertime-day-1-bug-hunt, which is what I wanted.
Ah, that makes perfect sense. On the other side, watching videos is often easier than reading, so I often feel like I learn more from the latter =)
I enjoy your content here and would like to continue reading you as you grow into your next platforms.
YouTube grows your audience in the immediate term, among people who have the tech and time to consume videos. However, text is the lowest common denominator for human communication across longer time scales. Text handles copying and archiving in ways that I don't think we can promise for video on a scale of hundreds of years, let alone thousands. Text handles search with an ease that we can only approximate for video by transcribing it. Transcription is tractable with AI, but still requires investment of additional resources, and yields a text of lower quality and intentionality than an essay crafted directly by its own author.
Plenty of people spend time in situations where they can read text but not listen to audio, and plenty of people spend time in situations where they can listen to audio but not read text. Compare the experience of listening to an essay via text to speech to the experience of reading a youtube video's auto-generated transcript. Which makes you feel like it's improving how you think?
A little while ago I vented at my shortform on this topic, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pjCnAXMkXjbmLw3ii/nim-s-shortform?commentId=EczMSzhPMpRAEBhhj.
Since writing that, I still feel a widening gap between my views and those of the LW zeitgeist. I'm not convinced that AI is inevitably killing everybody if it gets smart enough, as the smartest people around here seem to believe.
Back when AI was a "someday" thing, I feel like people discussed its risks here with understanding of perspectives like mine, and I felt like my views were gradually converging toward those of the site as I read more. It felt like people who disagreed about x-risk were regarded as potential allies worth listening to, in a way that I don't experience from more recent content.
Since AI has become a "right now" thing, I feel like there's an attitude that if you aren't already sold on AI destroying everything then you're not worth discussing it with. This may be objectively correct: if someone with the power to help stop AI from destroying us and finite effort to exert spends their time considering ignorant/uninformed/unenlightened perspectives such as my own, diverting that effort from doing more important things may be directly detrimental to the survival of the species.
In short, I get how people smarter than I am are assigning high probability to us being in a timeline where LW needs to stop being the broader forum that I joined it for. I figure they're probably doing the right thing, and I'm probably in the wrong place for what LW is needing to become. Complaining about losing what LW was to make way for what it needs to be feels like complaining about factories transitioning from making luxury items to making essential supplies during a crisis.
And it feels like if this was whole experience was a fable, the moral would be about alignment and human cooperation in some way ;)
Thanks!
To preserve meaning, have you considered using more repetition? In a situation where jumping straight to the most-precise way to explain a point loses a lot of readers, it can be helpful to restate the same point a several times: Start with the most approachable but least accurate framing, then perhaps critique its inaccuracies as a transition to a less approachable but more accurate framing, and repeat till you've built a series of stepping stones from where your reader starts to where you want them to end up.
To get aligned AI, train it on a corpus generated by aligned humans.
Except that we don't have that, and probably can't get it.
I'm not sure why all the people who think harder than I do about the field aren't testing their "how to get alignment" theories on humans first -- there seems to be a prevailing assumption that somehow throwing more intellect at an agent will suddenly render it fully rational, for reasons similar to why higher-IQ humans lead universally happier lives (/s).
At this point I've basically given up on prodding the busy intellectuals to explain that part, and resorted to taking it on faith that it makes sense to them because they're smarter than me.
If your goals include communicating your ideas to a wide audience, please consider dropping your average sentence length and using sub-headings to encapsulate the core idea of each section. I'm low on intellectual energy today and tried to do my usual thing of skimming an article with a neat title to see if it seems like something I want to engage more deeply with, and the current format basically renders it un-skimmable.
If this is more writing-as-artistic-expression and you don't mind if it only gets through to people experiencing top-decile mental functioning at the moment they come across it, keep up the good work.
I initially wanted to paraphrase your description of tapping out in physical pursuits as "a question is answered to my satisfaction", but that's not quite right. More precisely, it sounds like a signal of the inflection point between "better to continue" and "better to stop". The standards of "better to continue" might include pursuing a hope of turning the situation around or getting closer to the goal of an exercise, and standards of "better to stop" might include avoiding immediate or delayed pain or injury, or to simply avoid wasting time after the goal of a drill has been achieved.
"tapping out" carries too much cultural baggage about loss and submission to seem promising, but we would certainly benefit from a term capturing the moment when a line of discussion hits diminishing or even negative returns for its participants and is thus a waste of time to continue.
This makes me realize that I don't even have a particularly good term for the category of topic that gets its social/emotional hooks into the participants and forces/coerces/drags them into continuing discussing/debating it long after any real value has already been extracted from the exchange. (scissor statements come close, and might be a superset of this category, but aren't exactly what I'm referring to)
LW is maximally convenient for me, although I'm not against other options if you or others have strong preferences. The recently released Dialogues feature may do well for this sort of thing, too.
Comment threading is a good fit for the fractal nature of exploring ideas, and we could do that with comment threading on this post or on a shortform.
Bio risks are a nicely concrete case for a subtlety of the prepper mindset that I expect I may explain poorly/incompletely on my first few tries: Surviving and thriving when part of what we take for granted goes away looks very similar regardless of why the thing went away.
The rule of 3s is a good touchstone here, concretely to bio risk:
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Need air. Bio risk may render some/all air unsafe to breathe directly. Having the means to detect whether air is safe to breathe, and remove some/all contaminants from air you're about to breathe when appropriate, is good for preparedness/survival.
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Need shelter. Bio risk fallout/consequences may have economic impacts that affect one's ability to keep one's accustomed housing/shelter. Good financial preparedness and a backup plan for shelter will address these consequences of bio risk.
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Need water. Bio risk may contribute to newly acquired water being unsafe to drink without bad health outcomes. Prepare through a combination of storing some safe water, and having the means to turn unsafe water into safe water (various combinations of disinfection, filtration, and distillation may be appropriate depending on the situation)
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Need food. Bio risk may contribute to newly acquired food being unsafe to consume, or to no food available due to supply chain impact. Prepare by storing some food and optionally having a long-term plan to produce some/all of your own food in a long-term crisis.
Now, each of these practical interventions is also really good for addressing other risks:
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Prepping to breathe clean air in a bad atmosphere increases your chances if a volcano makes a bunch of ash, an earthquake makes a bunch of dust, a nuclear event puts particles into the air that you don't want to be breathing, there's a particularly bad flu year and you still want to go to the grocery store without breathing what everyone is coughing, etc.
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Prepping for continuity/eventualities/options of shelter also increases your chances of [quality * quantity] of life if natural disaster destroys your home, economic disaster destroys your ability to keep your home, maybe even if personal disaster destroys your home if you include redundancy to storage locations. Prepping for shelter redundancy is also great in thermal emergencies -- in extreme cold, living in a tent in a house is warmer/better than living in just the house or just the tent.
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Prepping for clean water is good if you're on municipal water and get a boil water advisory, or natural disaster impacts water supply, or if the water company makes a mistake and shuts yours off, or if your well pump breaks, etc.
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Prepping for safe food is also good if you lose access to regular supply chains for any reason -- local/regional disaster where the food is grown, crop failure, economic issues meaning you can't afford new food, and more
This is basically a low-resolution screencap from a complex film about how the correct preparedness actions to take are very often independent of the risk that a specific disaster caused the action to be relevant.
Caveats, of course, are that some disasters have unique preps that help with them disproportionately. Potassium iodide pills in case of nuclear emergency are the classic example -- every 14 doses is basically a "get out of extreme thyroid cancer risk free" card for 1 adult in the specific scenario of radioactive iodine being present in the environment after a disaster. Similarly, there may be some unique preps for certain classes of bio emergency -- maybe petri dishes, agar medium, and reagents to do rudimentary analysis and detect whether a surface has been contaminated by one thing rather than another? I don't know enough about bio risk to give a good example there.
This toy example also highlights the skill component:
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Prepping to breathe clean air is only as good as the correctness of your mental model about invisible contamination in air. You also need a flexible model -- during wildfire season when the whole atmosphere is smoky, indoors breathing the same air over and over is net safer than outside. But during flu season, indoors with lots of people is net more hazardous than outside.
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Stuff you own to provide yourself with improvised shelter is only as good as your ability to use it. If you set up a tent in a location that becomes a big puddle when it rains, and/or fail to stake it properly on a windy night, you're about to be a lot worse off than you were before.
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Water purification is only as good as your ability to use it and the correctness of your mental model about how contamination works. If you "purify" your water in a way that mixes it with contaminated water, the output is still contaminated. Conversely, if you try to distill everything when a few minutes of boiling would have sufficed, you're going to waste a whole lot of fuel that you probably didn't have to spare.
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Stored food is only as good as your ability to prepare it. Classic vignette of the guy in the bomb shelter with all the canned goods and no can opener, or the old lady who only has an electric can opener and thus can't get to her food during a power outage. If you go further and store whole wheat, you'd better own a grain mill if you want to turn it into flour.