I operate by Crocker's rules.
I think the correct way to think about wild animals' lives is as them living in extreme poverty. They usually have no shelter, so if they get wet they have to dry by themselves.
If they get sick or get infected by parasites they have to wait until they heal, so I'd guess that long-term debilitating illness is very much a thing for wild animals (as well as infection by numerous parasites). Starvation and death from thirst are also long-term.
The way I could be wrong is if there's a threshold effect so that above some threshold, an animal will not die when it's young and be so healthy that daily stress/hunger/weather are not a big problem. But I don't think that's the case, instead "the curve is just shifted to the left".
If you've been collecting data on yourself, it's now moderately easy to let an LLM write code that'll tease out causal relationships between those variables, e.g. with a time series causal inference library like tigramite.
I've done that with some of my data, and surprisingly it both fails to back out results from RCTs I've run, and also doesn't find many (to me) interesting causal relationships.
The most surprising one is that creatine influences creativity. Meditating more doesn't influence anything (e.g. has no influence on mood or productivity), as far as could be determined. More mindful meditations cause happiness.
Because of the resampling/interpolation necessary, everything has a large autocorrelation.
Mainly posting this here so that people know it's now easy to do this, and shill tigramite. I hope I can figure out a way of dealing with rare interventions (e.g. MDMA, CBD, ketamine), and incorporate more collected data. Code here, written by Claude 3.5.1 Sonnet.
Here's a podcast with @Slimepriestess on the whole affair. I'm not particularly involved in any of this, and had some violent disagreements with things said in the podcast[1], but found it informative on the whole. Listen with a critical ear.
E.g. that the right thing to do wrt to people in the Ziz-egregome is to talk to them—if there is a social scene near yours where people start dropping like flies then it's good & wise to say "I will leave and not interact with those people, leaving them alone." Put on your own mask first. (Also the claim that Ziz "did the math" with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories—which IIUC isn't possible because (1) FDT-ish theories aren't fully formalized yet and (2) the formalized parts are extremely computationally demanding to execute.) Plus a smattering of other things. ↩︎
Because their words had forked no lightning they
I think we have the opposite problem: our words are about to fork all the lightning.
Cool to see people doing self-blinded & randomized QS experiments :-)
Two tips (which you might have considered already): (1) You can buy empty pill capsules and fill them with whatever you want. That makes it a lot easier to blind for taste, and far less annoying to consume with eyes closed. (2) I've found it useful to use a wearable tracker for data collection, especially for sleep, since I can't be arsed to write all that down. ~All trackers allow for data export (thanks GDPR!), I use a cheap fitbit.
I think especially if you have a competent coding LLM in the air-gapped network, then probably yes, if you mean software engineering.
The biggest bottlenecks to me look like having nice searchable documentation for libraries the LLM doesn't know well—the documentation for most projects can't easily be downloaded, and the ones for which it can be downloaded easily aren't in a nicely searchable format. Gitbook isn't universal (yet. Growth mindset).
(Similar with the kiwix search—you need to basically know what you're looking for, or you won't find it. E.g. I was trying to think of the Nazi Bureaucrat who in the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s had rescued many Chinese from getting killed in warcrimes, but couldn't think of it—until LLaMa-2-13b (chat) told me the name was John Rabe—but I've despaired over slightly more obscure questions.)
A well-resourced actor could try to clone the Stackoverflow content and their search, or create embeddings for a ton of documentation pages of different software packages. That'd make it much nicer.
Also, a lot of software straight up doesn't work without an internet connection—see e.g. the incident where people couldn't do arithmetic in Elm without an internet connection. Thankfully it's the exception rather than the norm.
Solution: No internet at home[1].
Gave me back ~3hr per day when nothing else worked[2].
Wikipedia can be downloaded via kiwix (~90GB for English WP with images), programming documentation with zeal & devdocs.io. Logseq as a replacement for obsidian/roam, yt-dlp for downloading YouTube videos (and video/audio from many many other sources) to watch/listen to later. wget for downloading whole websites+assets to read at some later point.
No great solution for LLMs (yet…), all the ones I can run on my laptop are not good enough—maybe I should bite the bullet and get a GPU/digits that can run of the big LLaMas/DeepSeek V3 locally. I have internet at my workplace, and a local library with internet 10 minutes away by walk that closes at 7PM.
(No mobile internet either, that'd defeat the purpose. Haven't yet quite figured out to get people to call me when they want stuff…)
For >3 years now. The benefits reduce after a while as homeostasis kicks in (e.g. moving sleeping times back by ~4 hrs got halved to ~2 hrs), but it's still net positive: I used to lose ≥4½ hrs to random aimless websurfing, now it's only about one. Not all time gained is spent productively, I still randomly click through articles of the local Wikipedia copy, but that feels much less unproductive than watching YouTube videos. ↩︎
Website blockers like browser extensions are too easy to turn off (especially since I have complete control over my OS). Accountability didn't work well either. Behavioral interventions (like exercising/meditation/whatever) did ~nil. ↩︎
A superintelligent mind with a reasonable amount of working memory could process generic statements all day long and never whine about dangling concepts. (I feel like the really smart people on LessWrong and Math Overflow also exhibit this behavior to some degree.) But as humans with tragically limited short-term memories, we need all the help we can get. We need our authors and teachers to give us mind-hangers.
I think we can do substantially better than four items in working memory, but not have a working memory with thousands of slots. That is because working memory is the state in which all things in memory are related to each other in one (or two) particular ways, e.g. social relationships between different people or variables in a mathematical system, and that setup creates a combinatorial explosion. Sometimes such variables can be partitioned that the combinatorial explosion isn't as big of a problem because partitions can be dealt with independently (cf. companies as such Coasean partitions vs. the global optimization in a planned economy), but then it's several different working memories (or a hierarchy of those). If we say a main sequence star makes available (at Landauer limit) bit erasures per second. If we want to track all pairwise relationships between WM elements once per second, that gives us elements available. If we want to track all subsets/their relations, the level is far lower, at ~157 elements.
(I'm playing a bit fast and loose here with the exact numbers, but in the spirit of speed…)
I think that superintelligences are probably going to come up with very clever ways of partitioning elements in reasoning tasks, but for very gnarly and inter-related problems working memory slots might become scarce.
For pleasure/insight helmets you probably need intervention in the form of brain simulation (tDCS, tFUS, tMS). Biofeedback might help but you need to at least know where to steer towards.
I'm pretty skeptical of those numbers, all exiting projects I know of don't have a better method of measurement other than surveys and that gets bitten hard by social desirability bias/not wanting to have committed a sunk cost. Seems relevant that jhourney isn't doing much EEG & biofeedback anymore.