I like this post a lot. It might explain why I feel like an expert at addition, but not on addition. I notice when I am struggling with things like this in math, I often start blaming my own intellect instead of trying to understand what is making this hard and if this is perhaps just bad design that is to blame. The second approach seems much more likely to solve the problem. Noticing that word problems are harder seems like a good thing to notice, especially if you want to become an expert at using a particular math tool. For example I don't think I currently really get exterior products and searching for relevant word problems might be a good way to practice. LLMs might be useful in creating problems I can't solve (although I found it astonishing a while ago when Sonnet 3.5 was not able to consistently create word problems for applying bayes rule (~50% were just wrong)).
Suppose the agent's utility function is concave, i.e. the agent prefers (50% double wealth, 50% lose everything) over (100% wealth stays the same).
I think you meant to write convex here.
1Nice work in keeping up your public journal.
1There is a lot of variance in decision-making quality that is not well-accounted for by how much information actors have about the problem domain, and how smart they are.
I currently believe that the factor that explains most of this remaining variance is "paranoia". In-particular the kind of paranoia that becomes more adaptive as your environment gets filled with more competent adversaries. While I am undoubtedly not going to succeed at fully conveying why I believe this, I hope to at least give an introduction into some of the concepts I use to think about it.
I don't know if this was intended, but up until the end I was reading this post thinking you meant in this paragraph that the variance is explained by people not being paranoid enough or not paranoid in the right way and that is why you explain in this post how to be paranoid properly.
I like this post. What I really wish though was if I was better at explaining this to my friends and family. Has anyone on here ever had any success explaining this to an extent where you feel like the other person is really getting it? Perhaps I should become a truth cleric for a while and see if I can convert literal people on the street.
1I like this post. I've been thinking for a while that I feel like I am doing pretty well in terms of epistemic rationality, but I have quite some trouble figuring out what I want or what I even endorse on reflection. I noticed with your wizard post that this was not something I would ever have come up with, because I would not have looked for "true names" of the thing I want in fiction.
Below I was brainstorming some examples where I could get more of what I want.
Notice: With my ego-dystonic wants I probbaly have more room for improvement. Perhaps the goal should be to not have ego-dystonic wants? They are the main drivers why I have a hard time with agentic-ness.
With Ego-syntonic wants, I already do this. For example just before reading this post, I was asking myself if there could be a company doing long-read sequencing for consumers like John who are peculiar and want to understand themselves better (soon concluded this would be worse than MetaMed, so then thought about other people who might be interested in long-read sequencing).
My ego-dystonic interests I don't know that well how to deal with. I remember one of my post-rationalist friends commenting that it seems like I seem to only do things I consider useful. For example I tried to get rid of all my useless hobbies I pursued in the past after they ceased being useful. An ego-dystonic interest that I don't know how to integrate well in a useful way is competitiveness. I get absolutely addicted to improving and competing on metrics. Number go up! For example, hobbies/games that sucked me deep in the past include: juggling, cubing, chess, dominion, learning all japanese kanji with anki (and just staring at the stats ~5-25% of the time), making predictions on metaculus (trying to not be too tempted to maximize points), the universal paperclips game etc..
I now don't pursue any of the above, because improving on these doesn't give me enough improvement in other areas of my life I care about. I also notice unless there is a competitive element where I feel like I have worthy competition, the metrics loose their appeal after some time. Problem with Japanese was also that the only reason to do this particular one was to proove to myself that memorization is not that hard. I recently started using anki more again to remember math and science knowledge, but it doesn't quite feel as addictive when I have to curate all the cards myself. With the kanji, I had premade cards. I was allowed to just grind through.
With Metaculus I had strong frustration that the thing I was competing on was easily goodharted into something that wasn't teaching me anything. I enjoyed Manifold because the incentives were in line, but then the new problem was that this was incentivising me to be more distracted than I would like, so I stopped using Manifold much. I absolutely loved the thinking physics question challenge. My main bottleneck here was friends who were capable and motivated enough to compete with. I had thought of starting a local workshop in Melbourne to work together on problems we don't understand. My thinking there was that the hard step seems to be finding problems that everyone is excited to work on. Now I am thinking the best solution is probably just having some array of challening problems to pick from and then you choose something that everyone finds interesting. Perhaps the first challenge is to come up with lots of cool problems.
Part of me is thinking though, tradeoffs are terrible. Perhaps playing chess, cubing or playing Zelda some of the time and spending some of the other time working on illegible problems despite less outside motivation might be the way to go. Obviously, most of the real value is in places where no one can compete with you sadly. Any place where it's convenient to compete (online games with elo matching being the prototypical example), is where the least of the value is. Finding creative ways to improve my skills by being motivated by competition might be an exception here though. Like running workshops of the sort Raemon is running.
Hm... writing this took me 90 minutes. Ben claims you can write a reasonably long lesswrong comment in under 30 minutes. I already failed the halfhaven challenge, because I would not be able to think of something neat that felt like a round idea to put in a blogpost. Also writing my blogposts took way too long. I did notice that the 500 word lower limit was holding me back there in not publishing short things (I hated the blogpost drafts where I would have a neat 100 word idea and then expanding them to 500 words felt absolutely impossible and wrong). I do think I often like reading rambly comments. I don't like reading super rambly comments. I do find it hard to find the balance here (in general I find it hard to write about internal conflicts as they are happening). Here at the end I went back and forth between writing out what I thought was my takeaway from this. I do think internal conflict is a huge part that makes my writing slow.
Yep I use all of those you mentioned in evil mode. Except I rarely use paragraph and sentence level, which in practice I just use "/" to search the right place at that point. You can go overboard overoptimising here and I've certainly done that in the past.
Why do we have pimples/acne? Pimples are kind of a confusing phenomenon. As far as I can tell, a majority of people finds popping pimples compelling while knowing that this is obviously not "good for you" in the sense that you look worse afterwards, and if you just wait they often do in fact go away on their own again without risking an infection. My first thought was coming up with some lazy evolutionary psychology explanation that maybe popping pimples is so compelling because social grooming (Thinking of apes grooming each others backs) is good for you because that is how you get rid of ticks and make friends. Once people have a drive that compells them to groom other peoples skin, it is now advantageous to have pimples to make friends. That would explain pimples on your back, but it would not explain pimples on your face that well (it makes you look bad). After that I asked claude why people have pimples. Claudes main observations were that hunter gatherers have few to no pimples, which lines up with studies I find on google scholar[1]. People are blaming some type of change in diet. Given that it's related to growth hormones, maybe it is just that people are gettting more calories than most modern hunter gatherers, who tend to be in places where food is not always abundant, so people are both taller and have more acne, because somehow growth and sebum production are coupled for some reason that I don't understand. I guess my evolutionary explanation is probably wrong for why we have pimples, but it might explain why people enjoy messing with them so much.
I wish these studies were including pictures. How am I supposed to know whether the way they assess acne between studies is consistent at all? ↩︎
Is this type of goodness about memetic bullshit value claims or something else? Funnily enough, when I thought I had an example of this with washing vegetables it was somewhat controversial.
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By most people you mean most people hanging around the lesswrong community because they know programming? I agree, an explanation that uses language that the average programmer can understand seems like a good strategy of explaining Bayes rule given the rationality communities demographics (above average programmers).
Was it the code or the example that helped? The code is mostly fine. I don't think it is any simpler than the explanations here, the notation just looks scarier.
This version is correct for naive bayes, but naive bayes is in fact naive and can lead you arbitrarily astray. If you wanted a non-naive version you would write something like this in pseudopython:
I see the case for starting with the naive version though, so this is more of a minor thing.
I don't see a lot more going for the bear example except for it being about something dramatic, so more memorable. Feels like you should be able to do strictly better examples. See Zane's objections in the other comment.