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I'm thinking of artificial communities and trying to manufacture the benefits of normal human communities.
If you imagine yourself feeling encouraged by the opinions of an llm wrapper agent - how would that have been accomplished?
I'm getting stuck on creating respect and community status. It's hard to see llms as an ingroup (with good reason).
Thanks for reporting this! Most likely it was because of 'window height' wasn't excluding the parts covered by mobile browsers. I'm now specifically using 'inner height' which should fix it.
Wow I wish I had searched before beginning my own summary project.
The projects aren't quite interchangeable though. Mine are significantly longer than these, but are intended to be acceptable replacements for the full text, for less patient readers.
Thank you, I hadn't noticed the difference but I agree that complacency is not the message.
I think I can word things the way you are and spread a positive message.
Thanks a lot, you've un-stumped me.
I'm in the process of summarizing The Twelve Virtues of Rationality and don't feel good about writing the portion on perfectionism
"...If perfection is impossible that is no excuse for not trying. Hold yourself to the highest standard you can imagine, and look for one still higher. Do not be content with the answer that is almost right; seek one that is exactly right."
Sounds like destructive advice for a lot of people. I could add a personal disclaimer or adjust the tone away from "never feel satisfied" towards "don't get complacent" though that's a beyond what I feel a summarizer ought to do.
Similarly, the 'argument' virtue sounds like bad advice to take literally, unless tempered with a 'shut up and be socially aware' virtue.
I'd appreciate any perspective on this or what I should do.
In future should I post summaries individually, or grouped together like this?
Individual posts is more linkable and discoverable, but having a post for a full sequence of summaries might be more ergonomic to read and discuss.
Thanks for your thoughts, I'm glad I asked.
You're right my goal isn't very well defined yet. I'm mostly thinking along the lines of the https://non-trivial.org and https://ui.stampy.ai projects. I'd need a better understanding of beginner readers to communicate with them well. I'm not confident that I'll write great summaries on the first try, but I imagine any serious issues can be solved with some feedback and iteration.
Would summarizing lesswrong writings to be more concise and beginner friendly be a valuable project? Several times I've wanted to introduce people to the ideas, but couldn't expect them to actually get through the sequences (optimized for things other than concision).
Is lowering barrier to entry to rationality considered a good thing? It sounds intuitively good, but I could imagine concern of the techniques being misused, or benefit of some minimum barrier to entry.
Any failstates I should be concerned of? I anticipate shorter content is easier to immediately forget, giving an illusion of learning.
Thanks for your time. Please resist any impulse to tell me what you think I want to hear :)
I think that list covers the top priorities I can think of. I really loved the Embedded Agency illustrated guide (though to be honest it still leads to brain implosions and giving up for most people I've sent it to). I'd love to see more areas made more approachable that way.
Good point on avoiding duplication of effort.. I suppose most courses would correspond to a series of nodes in the wiki graph, but the course would want slightly different writing for flow between points, and maybe extended metaphors or related images.
I guess the size of typical Stampy cards has a lot to do with how much that kind of additional layering would be needed. Smaller cards are more reusable but may take more effort in gluing together cohesively.
Maybe it'd be beneficial to try to outline topics worth covering, kind of like a curriculum and course outlines. That might help learn things like how often the nodes form long chains or are densely linked.
Inspired by https://non-trivial.org, I logged in to ask if people thought a very-beginner-friendly course like that would be valuable for the alignment problem - then I saw Stampy. Is there room for both? Or maybe a recommended beginner path in Stampy styled similarly to non-trivial?
There's a lot of great work going on.
I have an implementation here https://thirdtime.toren.dev
I guess it generalizes to: if there's an unsolved problem and the solution looks obvious, you're probably missing something.
- Beware the natural tendency towards overconfidence
- It's easiest to think of the easy happy path. The problems are usually more nuanced and less mentally available.
- Other people thinking about it are probably not being dumb or thoughtless.
I don't think it's caused me to overthink in that if something seems one dimensional it's probably being underthought.
There are learnable exceptions, like a friend might have a mental blindspot to a certain kind of solution, or you might consistently overthink certain situations.
To be honest, I'm still not a great listener because I haven't squashed the urge to think of advice before empathizing.
Thank you for making my floundering into something actionable...
I'll first try looking into what people have found before on this thinking. I find it surprisingly difficult to see what my outgroups are or what advice I should be thinking of reversing.
I'm pretty sure it would have been easy to find ten more of most of those, but it would have felt like cheating.
I felt the same way. It's easy to generate something similar to an existing choice, like I included both catapult and trebuchet, but it feels wrong. But when I think about it feeling wrong, that's premature pruning...
- find the moon's postal code and mail
- catapult
- shot-put style
- by waterslide - to the moon
- hack the package's location value
- bring the moon to the package
- create a children's book "how the package reached the moon" with a choose your own ending page, and use the most promising submission
- space escalator
- photoshop the package on the moon
- trebuchet - superior to the catapult
- just build a bridge
- look at the moon, hold up the package, close one eye, and position it just right
- close my eyes and imagine the package is on the moon, then leave the room
- name your house "the moon"
- email the moon announcing their package has been delivered, and ignore any responses
- disguise the package as a baseball and hope
- just hope
- rocket
- hot air balloon rising in escape velocity
- moon portal (remember airlock)
- pully system
- E.T. bike
- the package is already at the moon
- ask the moon to come pick it up from a local post office
- jump on a see-saw with the package on the other side
- tie it to a homing pigeon in a homing pigeon space suit
- put it on a boat, and then raise the water level
- jump down from the moon, onto a trampoline, and carry the package on the way back up
- pledge 50$ to whoever delivers the package to the moon
- cannon
- cannon, thrown by a trebuchet, on a rocket
- smuggle it in past moon customs
- give the package to a sea turtle
- attach a curb to the moon and olley up it
- tie to balloon and consider job done
- put it on the moon-train
- flubber
- remove the earth and let gravity do it
- stack boxes to climb up
- up strong the package from the top platform
- bet someone they can't get the package to the moon. Call them chicken if necessary.
- wait for the moon to fall into the earth
- get a full 3d scan of the particles in the package, have it digitized and reproduced on the moon
- flick it with a giant hand
- roll the package into an extremely long and thin baton and just hand it over
- go to the past and sneak it into the shuttle
- go to the past and sneak it into astronaut food
- cast "Deliver to Moon"
- put the package on the moon's christmas list
- ball and chain flail around the earth
- offer the package to the moon as a purely symbolic gesture
- find a place on earth called moon and bring it there
Thank you! I had been looking through tags, and even thinking "what I really need are 'techniques'" - yet I did not search for techniques.
The "drilling down along a new and different branch of the tree" concept makes me think of tree search algorithms, naively being depth or breadth first searching. It's overly simplified, but might uncover related theory.
The goal is to search from whichever node you estimate to being closest to the goal. Calculating the estimate is difficult, so we tend to only look at a small nearby neighbourhood, which is usually low level. Backtracking forces you to make estimates for earlier nodes.
If I was making this algorithm faster, I'd try to find a way to make the heuristic (the estimate of nearness to the goal) more efficient. I've no idea how to do that, but maybe looking at how past discoveries were made could help.
Then again, given that research takes a long time, maybe it's not worth making any sacrifices to the heuristic accuracy.
I'm not certain if this qualifies as a planning fallacy, but I've noticed a class or problem where a large nebulous task isn't made actionable, and we just expect it to happen at some point. More an error of "when it will be done by" than "how long it will take."
For example, my family knew for maybe a year that we would benefit from an exercise machine, and had discussed it many times. It was only when I realized the problem and set a deadline for myself that we actually got it.
The tedx video lost me at the "just get over it" step, which at first glance looked extremely unhelpful. Looking at the CFAR handbook helped it make sense: Ideally at that point the things you're getting over are small, concrete, and approachable.
For minor inconveniences having drastic outcomes, I didn't get a significant haircut for years because I didn't want to hear a day of "oh you got a haircut" comments.
I've never consciously thought in terms of mantras as far as I know, so there's probably a good answer in my brain I'm failing to recollect.
This sounds like a good way of making a thought easy to recall.
Not a series of magic words, but I regularly think along the lines of "it can be done." That people can accomplish amazing things with time and effort. It is not a question of if I can, but if it is worth my unfortunately limited time.
"If I was born in their body, and lived their life, I would make the same choice." - If you believe human behavior is predictable like any other physical system, this lets you feel some empathy for people you don't understand.
"That sounds like the plan of an ordinary man" - Jonathan Coulton.
Reminds me that I have high standards for myself, and I'm not going to meet them by taking the easy options.
Not words I live by, but I like the energy behind "If you can't beat 'em, make 'em bleed like pigs." - Mountain Goats
The sense of "all hope is lost? Then push harder."
Inspired by the SSC post on reversing advice:
How can I tell what should be moderated versus what should be taken more-or-less to an extreme?
Also, is rationality something I should think about moderating? Should I be concerned about not having enough spiritualism in my life and missing beneficial aspects of that?
Tentative plan: look for things I strongly value or identify with, and find my best arguments against them.
This also reminds me of something I read but can't find about problems arising from "broken alarms" in self inspection, such as a person being quiet and withdrawn because they fear that they're loud and annoying.
I spent 2 timers writing down approximately nothing. My brain mostly generated large projects I'm already interested in (like itavero's), and things where I have no interest or potential benefit. Many of the examples like "shout as loud as you can" felt like this.
I understand forcing myself to do things I'm slightly uncomfortable about for practice, and in entertaining more ideas to avoid under exploring.
Looking at my recent history I have asked strangers for help with something, joined and started posting here, and started trying to mashup melodies on a piano roll. That looks promising, though I expect I should still be exploring more.
For the next week, I resolve to watch carefully for opportunities for new actions, and especially the feeling of discomfort that may cause me to avoid them, and to pause to consciously examine the choice.
I had a hard time with this one for a few reasons.
I have a very unusual living situation that gives me very little space that control. Pretty much just a desk. I've already optimized my desk pretty hard. I adjusted my startup-apps, but otherwise my phone and pc are both very streamlined.
I think noticing and being irritated by repeated time costs may be related to me being a programmer.
I think taps are great any time you actually want to act some way automatically, but often things are more contextual than that, and the miss rate would make the tap unproductive. Sapience seems like such a tap, as Raemon says. Maybe a better solution would be more specific taps for avoiding common automatic failures, like learning what status quo bias feels like, and practicing detecting that so you can tap it to a fix.
I'd be interested in seeing other's experiences with picking up many taps, and which ended up being useful.
I've decided I should be less intimidated by people with qualities I admire, and interact with them more.
Hello.
Recently I've been thinking about how certain ways of reframing things can yield quick and easy benefits.
- Reversal test for status quo bias.
- Taking an inside or outside view.
- And in particular, deliberately imagining that you are another person looking at yourself, to advise from outside yourself. In my experience that can be very helpful for self compassion, and result in better thinking than I would have had in first person. I recommend trying this, particularly if you notice you treat yourself differently than others.
Is there a collection of such perspective shifts, or searchable name for it?
Most of the bugs were solved through rapid googling, which felt a little like cheating, but was probably the best method.
Results
- Realized the shelf on my desk was only used ~ once per month, and removed it, giving me more work space.
- Found trivially easy healthier breakfasts.
- Resolved to continually add gratitude notes to anki at least once a week. Method is to appreciate the item on the card, visualizing life without it to better feel the value.
- Learned about linters for technical writing like vale, and plan to incorporate. Found a book to skim later.
- Reread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4K5pJnKBGkqqTbyxx/to-listen-well-get-curious
and made notes on how I can approach conversations differently. In particular "if a solution to someone's problem looks obvious, assume it isn't and try to understand why."
Strangest bug fix is willfully changing perspective often, similar to how this page suggests imagining the perspective of a friend, or looking at the far future, or taking an outside view.
While it feels a little silly in principle, changing perspective often gets immediate results in overcoming a bias or seeing things I would have missed.
Obsidian's dataview plugin might have all the database features you're looking for.
Strongly agree with sync and publish though. The free solutions I out together for each are ugly.
Software: Zenhub https://www.zenhub.com/
Need: Agile project management for multiple projects.
Other programs I've tried: jira, Monday, clickup, trello, etc
I use scrum to manage my general productivity (not just professional work) and other programs have tended to be painful when managing multiple projects, or have been fiddly in ways I didn't need. A downside to zenhub is it's only free for public projects, so someone inclined could read through your tasks. Zenhub's main selling point is github integration, but I largely ignore that and just use it for standard issue management.
Software: Obsidian.md
Need: Knowledge management system.
Other programs I've tried: Roam, dynalist, tiddlywiki, lightweight or physical note taking systems.
If you're not using a personal knowledge management system I highly recommend you read about what they can do for you, possibly under "zettlekasten" or "digital gardening". I wish I'd started earlier. Obsidian.md is sadly closed source, but it works entirely on standard markdown with locally stored files. It has a thriving thriving plugin community supporting things like sql queries of your notes, kanban boards, and spaced repetition.
Software: Pycharm, and other jetbrains IDEs https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/
Need: Programming environment
Other programs I've tried: Vscode, atom, sublime, etc.
Jetbrains ides make so many things easier that I would have a pretty bad time if forced to work without them. In particular their debuggers probably save me hours of pain every week. I also appreciate the perpetual license, where any version owned for at least a year is kept for life.