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Self10

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

Self*10

(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?

Self*30

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
Self32

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"

Self10


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
Self10

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)

Self10

True!

Useless knowledge should neither be learned nor compressed, as both takes cognition.

Self50

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.

Self*20

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)

Self00

Compressing existing knowledge >> Acquiring new knowledge

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