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Given the above, will antiandrogens make me more introverted? And if so, are there cognitive benefits to introversion? (I think so)
2 days ago started taking the supposed mild but statistically significant antiandrogens and OTC supplements Reishi + Chasteberry + Spearmint
I'll be amused if that before long ends my "frequent public posting" streak
(Vague musing)
There's a type of theory I'd call a "Highlevel Index" into an information body, for example, Predictive Processing is a highlevel index for Neurology, or Natural Selection is a highlevel index for Psychology, or Game Theory and Signaling Theory are highlevel indexes for all kinds of things.
They're tools for delving into information bodies. They give you good taste for lower level theories, a better feel for what pieces of knowledge are and aren't predictive. If you're like me, and you're trying to study Law or Material Science, but you got no highlevel indexes for these domains, you're left standing there, lost, without evaluability, in front of a vast sea of lower-level more detailed knowledge. You could probs make iterative bottom up progress by layer for layer absorbing detail-info and synthesizing or discovering higher-level theories from what you've seen, but that's an unknown and unknowable-feeling amount of work. Standing at the foot of the mountain, you're not feeling it. There's no affordance waiting to be grasped.
One correct framing here is that I'm whining because not all learning is easy.
But also: I do believe the solutionspace ceilng here is much higher than we notice, and that marginal exploration is worth some opportunity cost.
So!
Besides what's common knowledge in rat culture, what are your fave highlevel indexes?
What non-redundant authors besides Eliezer & co talk a lot in highlevel indexes?
Are there established or better verbal pointers to highlevel indexes?
Insightful: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-evolution-of-culture/
- Best intro on memetics I've seen
- Gave me an additional "evaluability dimension" for cultures and history
For this I could write an app that performs a gradual translation to chinese on the .epub file of a fiction I'm currently addicted to
Overly optimistic ballpark estimate is "800k words of text are enough to learn recognize 4k chinese characters"
Evidence in favour:
- Priors allow the possibility that languages are not created equal and lead to different cognitive speeds
- Common discourse is biased towards assuming neutrality in all tribal identity adjacent matters AND the two visible opinions are "English & Chinese are equally fast" and "Chinese is faster" -- "English is faster" is a missing opinion
- Chinese websites tend to look "full of text" to me, which is explained neatly if information absorption rate is higher
- The seeming competence of China
Evidence against:
- Priors allow the possibility that languages are created equal bc they do not present bottlenecks in cognition
Strongly considering learning to read in Chinese based on vague anecdotal reports pointing to higher reading / scanning speeds
(also as a status symbol / intelligence signal, tbc)
True!
Useless knowledge should neither be learned nor compressed, as both takes cognition.
The way I put that may have been overly obscure
But I've come to refer in my mind to the way the brain does chunking of information and noticing patterns and parallels in it for easier recall and use as just Compression.
Compression is what happens when you notice that 2 things share the same structure, and your brain just kinda fuses the shared aspects of the mental objcts together into a single thing. Compression = Abstraction = Analogy = Metaphor. Compression = Eureka moments. And the amazing thing is the brain performs cognition on compressed data just as fast as on original data, effectively increasing your cognitive speed.
For example, I think there's large value in merging as much of your everyday observational data of humans as feasible together into abstracted psychology concepts, and I wanna understand models like BigFive (as far as they're correct) much better on intuitive levels.
Yes. The product I bought identifies itself as "Sceletium tortuosum".
I've only tried 1 brand/product, and haven't seen any outstanding sources on it either, so I can't offer much guidance there.
I can anecdotally note that the effects seem quite strong for a legal substance at 0.5g, that it has short term effects + potentially also weaker long term effects (made me more relaxed? hard to say) (probs comparable to MDMA used in trauma therapy)
Compressing existing knowledge >> Acquiring new knowledge
- Kanna is a legal substance dubbed Nature's MDMA, likely working as an empathogen
- Kanna seems to quite precisely increase my BigFive::Extraversion::Warmth[1]
- Subjectively this feels like suddenly all the people you see are "your friends", and like you could just walk up to them, strike up a conversation, and start bantering
- DHEA is a metabolic precursor of testosterone, among other things, and an OTC supplement in the US
- Single dose DHEA seems to 1:1 have increased my BigFive::Extraversion::Assertiveness[1]
- As a subset of that, it seems to have boosted my executive functioning
- The execfunc boost is (as I read later) vaguely consistent with ADHD research
- It also changes my cognition and motivation in ways I'm not fully comfortable with
There's a subjective 15% chance the mindstate switch was instead placebo-induced
Downvoters: consider "Deception increases predictability"
"Honesty reduces predictability" seems implausible as a thesis.
OpenAI successfully waging the memetic war, as usual
Awesome!
My faves are #4 Intuition Flooding and #12 Incremental Reading. Will try them when I have slack and a topic of interest.
#2 Immersive Reading seems intriguing. I've noticed in myself a sense of my reading speed being capped by mental critical filtering processes. I feel like I could increase my comprehension speed at the cost of absorbing contents less discriminately.
#3 Recursive Sampling and #7 Spot the Core are strategies I've discovered myself, but no less useful for that.
#8. Triangulating Genius seems effortful but like a great fit for particular cases. #9 Expert Observation is great where the material exists. (Someone should do youtube videos liveblogging their math learning or social situation navigation, for me)
Amusing instructive and unfortunate this post's actual meaning got lost in politics. IMO it's one of the better ones.
Am left wondering if "local" here has a technical meaning or is used as a vague pointer.
What people need to get is that Lying is the weaker subset of Deception. It's the type you can easily call out and retaliate against.
Which is why we evolved to have strong instinctive reactions to it.
I take away:
- While doubt may involve encountering disconfirming evidence for a held belief - and it's proper to immediately update on the doubt-creating evidence and thereby factor the expected result of further inquiry into your belief-state, -
- Doubt itself is a pointer to a location of yet-unseen evidence. To a specific line of inquiry that may or may not disconfirm the held belief in question.
- The inverse, or perhaps a generalization to positive and negative cases, is then Suspicion.
- Suspicion points to locations of likely belief-creating or belief-modifying evidence.
Edit: meditating on what this post points to - finding in myself instances of the sensation of rational-doubt, and dwelling on them - proved useful.
I find it important for rationalists to think and talk more about deception.
While in honesty the post is a bit long for my taste, I like the way it approaches the overton window with this kind of dark-artsy, borderline-political topic and presents a plainly-insightful case study.
I'd say Accidentally Load Bearing structures are (statistically speaking) always the work of another optimizer: - someone saw the structure, and built another (architectural, behavioral,) structure on top of it.
So the key question is whether or not this structure may at some point have seemed useful to someone. (In a way that can be retrospectively broken.)
I think the post loses out on mental succinctness not explaining this.
Thanks for starting this rebellion, Eliezer.
Splitting the Great Idea into parts
Applied to "The Sequences", or Rationality:
- a collection of good predictive models
a foundation for a culture more productive and virtuous than mainstream culture
- Treating every additional detail as burdensome
It helps to apply scepticism to every post, and internally rank posts by usefulness and credence.
(I've since found https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality, which does the job.)
Same.
The “how to think” memes floating around, the cached thoughts of Deep Wisdom—some of it will be good advice devised by rationalists. But other notions were invented to protect a lie or self-deception: spawned from the Dark Side.
It's so unfortunate that "how to think" - the rules of proper belief - are not hardcoded in the system's firmware, and must instead be entered via user-supplied data the belief system is built to manage. I'd frame that this post is centrally about this user-caused systembehavior-variability, and the implicit security flaw.
Another aspect: Dominant memes - that is, memes that feel good, fair & highstatus - can be functionally dysvirtuous and unilaterally damaging.
Very cool. Less of a distinct mental handle, more of a subtle mental strategy one can find oneself executing across time.
This cognitive phenomenon is usually lumped in with “confirmation bias.” However, it seems to me that the phenomenon of trying to test positive rather than negative examples, ought to be distinguished from the phenomenon of trying to preserve the belief you started with. “Positive bias” is sometimes used as a synonym for “confirmation bias,” and fits this particular flaw much better.
Subtle distinction I almost missed here. Worth expanding.
I think this page would be more useful if it linked to the individual sequences it lists.
As far as I've seen, there is no page that links to all sequences in order, which would be useful for working through them systematically.
This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc. People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged.
Have you written more about those different styles somewhere?
And this is how talking is anchrored in Costly Signaling.
(Note that "I dunno, probably around 9 pm." is still an assurance, though of a different kind: You're assuring that 9 pm is an honest estimate. If it turns out you make such statements up at random, it will cost you.)
And that's why talking can convey information at all.
TL;DR It often takes me a bit to grasp what you're pointing to.
Not because you're using concepts I don't know but because of some kind of translation friction cost. Writing/reading as an ontological handshake.
For example:
>How does task initiation happen at all, given the existence of multiple different possible acts you could take? What tips the mind in the direction of one over another?
The question maps obviously enough to my understandings, in one way or another*, but without contextual cues, decoding the words took me seconds and marginally-conscious searching.
* I basically took it as "How do decisions work?". Though, given the graphic, it looks like you're implying a kind of privileged passive state before a "decision"/initiation happens, but that part of the model is basically lost on me because its exact shape is within a meaning searchspace with too many remaining degrees of freedom.
>There are four things people confuse all the time, and use the same sort of language to express, despite them meaning very different things:
I think my brain felt a bit of "uncertainty what to do with the rest of the sentence", in a "is there useful info in there" sense, after the first 9 words. I think the first 9 words sufficed for me, they (with context below) contained 85% of the meaning I took away.
>Whether you're journaling, Internal Double Cruxing, doing Narrative Therapy, or exploring Internal Family Systems, there's something uniquely powerful about letting your thoughts finish.
Strikes me as perhaps a plain lack of Minto (present your conclusion/summary first, explanations/examples/defenses/nuances second, for that's how brains parse info). For the first half of the sentence my brain is made to store blank data, waiting for connections that will turn them into info.
Also reminded of parts of this, which imo generalizes way beyond documentations.
Dunno if this is even useful, but it'd be cool if you had some easy to fix bottlenecks.
But those are all just a few ways to unblock the initial spark/decision/compulsion to do something you deliberately plan to do. If you don’t focus too much on deliberate steps of an action, you might find yourself able to do them more easily by just following notions; “non-doing,” or wuwei, is a phrase often used for this state. Of course, you also might find yourself non-doing something else other than the thing you “intend” to (that’s rather the point).
But that this “cheat” can work at all indicates again that there’s something about deliberate attention and focus that can evoke things which demotivate us, or paralyze us with indecision or fear. Acting before your conscious thoughts can get in the way is, in many ways like putting yourself in a state of total freedom from consequences; consequences only impact our behavior when we know about and believe in them, after all. This is a great strategy when the risks or consequences aren’t “real.”
This just gave me a massive "click".
Meta-feedback: I find your content really good conceptually, but unfortunately harder to read than other top posters'
~Don't aim for the correct solution, (first) aim for understanding the space of possible solutions
Seconded (after working with this concept-handle for a day). This here seems to be the exact key for (dis)solving the way my brain executes self-deception (clinging, attachment, addiction,).
(I'm noticing that in writing this, my brain is fabricating an option that has all the self-work results I envision, without any work required)
I find that [letting go of the (im)possible worlds where I'm not trapped] helps reframe/dissolve the feeling of trappedness.
However, that kind of letting go often feels like paying a large price. E.g. in case of sensory overload it can feel like giving up on having any sense of control over reality/sensory-input whatsoever.
Does that maybe get at what you were asking?
It all does! Again, thanks for sharing.
Exciting stuff. This feels like a big puzzle piece I'd been missing. Have you written more about this, somewhere?
~vague gesturing at things I find interesting:
-How do different people (different neurotypes? different childhoods? personality types?) differ in the realities they want to share?
-How do shared realities relate to phenomena like extraversion, charisma, autism?
-What's the significance of creating shared realities by experiencing things together?
Besides, do you use other neglected people-models that are similarly high-yield? Vague gesturing appreciated.
Problem: Abyss-staring is aversive, for some (much) more than for others.
In my case, awareness hasn't removed that roadblock. Psychedelics have, to some degree, but I find it hard to aim them well. MDMA, maybe?
Example: Dividing the cake according to NEEDS versus CONTRIBUTION (progressive tax, capitalism/socialism,)
Both, I'd think.
Also this entire post by Duncan Sabien
(@ Tech Executives, Policymakers & Researches)
Back in February 2020, the vast majority of people didn't see the global event of Covid coming, even though all the signs were there. All it took was a fresh look at the evidence and some honest extrapolation.
Looking at recent AI progress, it seems very possible that we're in the "February of 2020" of AI.
(original argument by Duncan Sabien, rephrased)
(@ Tech Executives, Policymakers & Researches)
If you genuinely believe that the world is ending in 20 years, but are not visibily affected by this, or considering extreme actions, people may be less likely to believe that you believe what you say you do.
IMO, that's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is people thinking you're insane, which composure mitigates.
"Every paper published is a shot fired in a war"
Epistemic virtue isn't a good strategy in that war, I suspect. Voicing your true best guesses is disincentivized unless you can prove them.
Fishbach & Dhar find that re-framing the achievement in terms of showing commitment to values, rather than progress toward goals, has a tendency to reinforce the behavior rather than the paradoxical self-licensing effect.
Hm. Does that mean "Rationality is about winning" is ultimately a bad mantra?
Good stuff.
Speculation time: Would this predict that shame-prone people have bigger, deeper identities? Identities seem like a good place for storing those justifications, and those justifications look like a candidate for the reason we have identities in the first place.
Shame appears to be a reaction to perceived norm violation, so shame-prone people would be those with strong and restrictive internalized social norms.
I don't mind self-help-books-level advice if it pointedly helps me improve my mental hygene. This did.
Which is perhaps most efficiently achieved by killing the wisher and returning an arbitrary inanimate object.
Personal experience / opinion: For me sleeping positions are an issue of expanded (back) or contracted (side) body language.
In an expanded state I seem to have a lower threshold for cognitive dissonance. I.e. my mind is less prone to indulging in pleasant-but-at-odds-with-reality thought trains. So I, for mental health reasons, try to fall asleep on my back when I can manage to tolerate the expanded state.