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I've observed that consuming certain kinds of media make me smarter and other kinds of media makes me dumber.
Makes me dumber:
- Videogames
- YouTube
- News
Makes me smarter:
- Books
- Audiobooks
- Direct messaging apps
By "smarter" I mean it holistically causes me to behave in a way that increases my overall rate of learning and quality of life. By "dumber" I mean the opposite.
For a long time I rejected this conclusion. Surely playing Kerbal Space Program must be more educational than reading Yu-gi-oh! manga. Nope. Yu-gi-oh! beats it by a long shot. I ran a long series of subjective personal experimen
... (Read more)In light of reading Hazard's Shortform Feed -- which I really enjoy -- based on Raemon's Shortform feed, I'm making my own. There be thoughts here. Hopefully, this will also get me posting more.
You're right on both accounts. Maybe I should've discussed this in my original post... At least for me, Anki serves different purposes at different stages of learning.
Key definitions tend to be useful in the early stages, especially if I'm learning something on and off, as a way to prevent myself from having to constantly refer back and make it easier to think about what they actually mean when I'm away from the source. E.g., I've been exploring alternate interpretations of d-separation in my head during my commute and it helps tha... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I've said in one of my posts:
I'm OK saying:
'The body has an almost infinite number of potential positions'
And I am OK with it, but not completely. Something's niggling at me and I don't know what.
Am I missing something? Or is the statement valid?
(No link to the post containing my reasoning because I don't want to contaminate anyone else's thoughts...)
I contaminated myself because I thought it was a weird question by itself and had a smell of the answer being embedded in the context. In general "Does this analysis miss anything? I have not included analysis to avoid bias" isn't really an answerable question.
One of the tricks ot ponder on meanings is to wonder what the meaning stands in opposition to. To me it seems the statement plays the role of "enumerating the positions is not a fruitful way of approaching handling of positions" and if it is not enumerable then by theorycraft... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
When you click a link, by default your browser sends a request like:
GET /your-page HTTP/1.1 Host: your-site Referer: https://other-site/with-url [other headers]It's telling the server what page it wants ( https://your-site/your-page) and it includes a Referer saying that you came from https://other-site/with-url.
But why Referer and not Referrer? Let's look back. The original version of HTTP had a much simpler request format:
GET /your-pageNo Host:, no Referer: no headers at all. This initial version, implemented in the WWW browser, became know... (Read more)
I am currently conducting research on the persuasiveness of contrarian positions. I'm crowdsourcing a list of unpopular beliefs that people may have for which plausible-enough sounding arguments could be made in support of them.
Existing topics that I use include, "climate change is not primarily caused by human activity", "nuclear proliferation is good for global stability" (an argument made by Kenneth Waltz), and "recycling is bad for the environment." While I don't agree with any of these, compelling-sounding cases can be made for them.
I wish I could delete the thread and start over with "what unpopular opinions do you hold?" as there are more responses critiquing the research methodology than attempting to answer the question.
Your assumptions about the research interest are incorrect (although likely no fault of your own, as I was being vague intentionally). The actual experiment tests different argumentative techniques on certain kinds of positions, depending on the initial level of background support that a position has (contrarian or conventional).
See the comment I mad... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
IANAM[1], but intuitively it seems to me that an exception ought to be made (given the basic idea of Marxist theory) for individuals who own means of production the use of which, however, does not involve any labor but their own.
So in the case of the village cobbler, sure, he owns the means of production, but he’s the only one mixing his labor with the use of those tools. Clearly, he can’t be exploiting anyone. Should the cobbler take on an assistant (continuing my intuitive take on the theory), said assistant would presumably have to now receive some suit
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this posthttps://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?id=3F2AA8B6-36F8-453B-9B59-FC886871CEB9
Tossing this out as I know many here are deep into computer systems and may well have interest or knowledge of the underlying social media (using this in a very broad sense as I think it might go past just FB, Instagram, YouTube, Vimio, Meetups or other settings) technologies.
Status of the thought is "ligh bulb just turned" on but not clear it is really shining a light on anything sensible.
Have not studied the law but from the few news stories I've seen the goal is to require a ... (Read more)
I think there are many questions whose answers would be useful for technical AGI safety research, but which will probably require expertise outside AI to answer. In this post I list 30 of them, divided into four categories. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss these questions and why I think they’re important in more detail. I personally think that making progress on the ones in the first category is particularly vital, and plausibly tractable for researchers from a wide range of academic backgrounds.
Studying and understanding safety problems
- How strong are the econo
[copying from my comment on the EA Forum x-post]
For reference, some other lists of AI safety problems that can be tackled by non-AI people:
Luke Muehlhauser's big (but somewhat old) list: "How to study superintelligence strategy"
AI Impacts has made several lists of research problems
Wei Dai's, "Problems in AI Alignment that philosophers could potentially contribute to"
Kaj Sotala's case for the relevance of psychology/cog sci to AI safety (I would add that Ought is currently testing the feasibility of IDA/Debate by doing psy... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
This is a response to Abram's The Parable of Predict-O-Matic, but you probably don't need to read Abram's post to understand mine. While writing this, I thought of a way in which I think things could wrong with dualist Predict-O-Matic, which I plan to post in about a week. I'm offering a $100 prize to the first commenter who's able to explain how things might go wrong in a sufficiently crisp way before I make my follow-up post.
Dualism
Currently, machine learning algorithms are essentially "Cartesian dualists" when it comes to themselves and their environment. (Not a philosophy major -- let
... (Read more)Assuming that people don't think about the fact that Predict-O-Matic's predictions can affect reality (which seems like it might have been true early on in the story, although it's admittedly unlikely to be true for too long in the real world), they might decide to train it by letting it make predictions about the future (defining and backpropagating the loss once the future comes about). They might think that this is just like training on predefined data, but now the Predict-O-Matic can change the data that it's evaluated against, so t... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Hi there!
I'm a new member and now feeling giddy from the amount of contents presented here on the site. I've read those welcome and FAQ posts, they all point to the library's core reading as material for beginners. BUT... I've just finished the Preface post of R:A-Z, and from the author's very words, it looks like this series focus more on the big, vague things than those hands-on lessons.
So my questions are: among it and the Codex and HPMOR, which is the most newbie-friendly? In your opinion, what are the best 9 sequences rookies like me should read to get to a somewh... (Read more)
I'm currently in Fake beliefs and, as you correctly said, more than half the times I don't really get them. I think part of this is because EY wrote using such big words and complicated grammar that confuse non-native speakers.
However, I'm not a fan of jumping ships and will try to wade through R:A-Z before committing to another sequence. You convinced me! :) That said, HPMOR seems to be very appealing to beginners since it combine something new & strange (rationality) with something most of us are familiar with already (wizardry, lol).
Previous posts:
In the previous post, I talked about what I've learned. That post focused on bigger things. But there were a lot of smaller, more miscellaneous things that I've learned too. Those are the things that I want to talk about in this post.
People think of a mobile app when you say you're building an "app"
Even when I clarify and try to explain that it's a web app, most people are still confused. So sometimes I call it a website, which I hate because that sort of implies tha... (Read more)
Thank you, great sharing.
I want to add my 2 cents about things I disagree.
1) In the last post there was a thought like "I'm rational and proactive, and they're lazy and irrational, and therefore I do not prosper". That can be very dangerous mindset and it's incorrect by definition I think. That's not about pro poker players don't want to take +EV decisions. Vice versa, they have a lot of +EV decisions (check out new software, watch/read theory, discuss hands on forums, private discussions, group/individual classes, soft ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Thanks for the post!
You definitely highlight that there's a continuum here, from "most deliberation-like" being actual humans sitting around thinking, to "least deliberation-like" being highly-abstracted machine learning schemes that don't look much at all like a human sitting around thinking, and in fact extend this continuum past "doing meta-philosophy" and towards the realm of "doing meta-ethics."
However, I'd argue against the notion (just arguing in general, not sure if this was your implication) t... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
In this post, I'll try to bring together two things I enjoy: rationality and magic. Like Hazard, I've also practiced close-up magic for a good amount of time now. After recently seeing Tyler Alterman make a Facebook post about estimations and System 1, it occurred to me that there are a few calibration exercises you can do with a deck of playing cards. The three exercises below are all variants of cutting/manipulating a deck of cards, and then trying to intuit something about the deck.
This serves three purposes:
- Get a feel for your System 1:
- The goal of the following three exercises is
Thanks for trying these out, Ben!
If you ever are interested in learning close-up magic some more, I have lots more thoughts on what good resources are for learning / have strong opinions on what makes a good magic effect. I haven't written about them for the LW audience, but maybe more of this hybrid stuff will manifest later on.
There are two popular language learning software platforms: Anki and Duolingo. Anki is hard, free and effective. Duolingo is easy, commercial and ineffective.
The number of Duolingo users far outstrips the number of Anki users. Duolingo has 8 million downloads on the Play Store. Anki has 40 thousand. So there are 200 Duolingo users for every Anki user[1]. If you ask a random language learner what software to use they'll probably suggest Duolingo. If you ask a random successful language learner what software to use they'll probably suggest Anki. Most language learners are unsuccessful.
It should
... (Read more)Actually making the cards is what stops me.
[Retracted my other reply due to math errors]
This is only true for the kind of things humans typically care about; this is not true for utility functions in general. That's the extra info we have.
While I generally agree that there can be utility functions that aren't subject to Goodhart, I don't think that this strictly pertains to humans. I expect that when the vast majority of agents (human or not) use scientific methods to develop a proxy for the thing it wants to optimize, they will found that proxy to break down upon intense optimizatio... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Originally posted at Living Within Reason.
Last week, Jacob Falkovich, of the Putanumonit blog, put up a post trying to figure out why rationalists are disproportionately polyamorous. He notes that about 5% of Americans engage in consensual nonmonogamy, while 17% of Americans in the 2014 Less Wrong survey indicated that they did. My expectation is that the number for both is slightly higher today. In service of this goal, Falkovich developed several theories and surveyed a number of his readers. His results ended up inconclusive.
Since this involves the intersection of the two themes of this blo... (Read more)
Oh, I see. Reading through his post again, I think I actually agree with you that Jacob was conflating the two. Thanks for clarifying, the whole conversation seems reasonable now.
I'm giving out $1,000 of prize money for the best exercises submitted in the next two weeks on a topic of interest to the LW community. I'm planning to distribute $1,000, with $500 of that go to the first place.
To submit some exercises, leave a comment here linking to your exercise(s) by midnight at the end of Friday 20th September PDT (San Francisco time), and I'll announce the winners by the Friday two weeks later (give me the time to try a bunch out). You're welcome to post them as a LW post, on your shortform feed, or privately link them to me in a PM if you want, thoug... (Read more)
Now announced, see the relevant top-level comment in this thread. Thanks for checking.
Follow-up to: Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence
Somehow, someone is going to horribly misuse all the advice that is contained within this book.
Nothing I know how to say will prevent this, and all I can do is advise you not to shoot your own foot off; have some common sense; pay more attention to observation than to theory in cases where you’re lucky enough to have both and they happen to conflict; put yourself and your skills on trial in every accessible instance where you’re likely to get an answer within the next minute or the next week; and update hard on single pieces... (Read more)
It seems to be hard in practice to draw the line between "only picking certain bets" and "doing things I'm best at" (though the theoretical difference is obvious - maximizing P(win) by events and maximizing usefulness of one's skills to win by skills). The latter seems to be a good practice - yet your attack on the former seems to indirectly hamper it.
I think that links to Chapman's texts should contain some disclaimer that "rationality" as defined by Chapman is something completely different from "rationality" as defined by Less Wrong. (Chapman said that once himself; sorry I don't remember the link.) Just to avoid the confusion that these texts were written specifically as a reaction to Less Wrong or the rationalist community.
Specifically, a lot of the advice to Chapman!rationalists is already in the Sequences. "A map is not the territory" gets mentioned over an... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
In my experience, the content can make a huge difference. For example videogames like Factorio or Minecraft almost feel like writing software to me. Because they require creativity and problem solving skills, just like coding.
There are also huge differences in YouTube videos. Some are very informative and thought-provoking. Watching them does certainly not make me "dumber".
I also don't understand why you distinguish between Books (fiction) and Books (nonfiction). Isn't that the same medium but with different content?