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1Matthew Barnett16h "Immortality is cool and all, but our universe is going to run down from entropy
eventually"
I consider this argument wrong for two reasons. The first is the obvious reason,
which is that even if immortality is impossible, it's still better to live for a
long time.
The second reason why I think this argument is wrong is because I'm currently
convinced that literal physical immortality is possible in our universe. Usually
when I say this out loud I get an audible "what" or something to that effect,
but I'm not kidding.
It's going to be hard to explain my intuitions for why I think real immortality
is possible, so bear with me. First, this is what I'm not saying:
* I'm not saying that we can outlast the heat death of the universe somehow
* I'm not saying that we just need to shift our conception of immortality to be
something like, "We live in the hearts of our countrymen" or anything like
that.
* I'm not saying that I have a specific plan for how to become immortal
personally, and
* I'm not saying that my proposal has no flaws whatsoever and that this is a
valid line of research to be conducting at the moment.
So what am I saying?
A typical model of our life as humans is that we are something like a worm in 4
dimensional space. On one side of the worm there's our birth, and on the other
side of the worm is our untimely death. We 'live through' this worm, and that is
our life. The length of our life is measured by considering the length of the
worm in 4 dimensional space, measured just like a yardstick.
Now just change the perspective a little bit. If we could somehow abandon our
current way of living, then maybe we can alter the geometry of this worm so that
we are immortal. Consider: a circle has no starting point and no end. If someone
could somehow 'live through' a circle, then their life would consist of an
eternal loop through experiences, repeating endlessly.
The idea is that we somehow construct a physical manifestation of this
immorta
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719h A frequent failure mode that I have as a leader:
* Someone comes on to a new project, and makes a few suggestions.
* All of those suggestions are things we/I have thought about and discussed in
detail, and we have detailed reasons why we've made the decisions we have.
* I tell the person those reasons.
* The person comes away feeling like the project isn't really open to criticism
feedback, and their ideas won't be heard.
I think a good policy is to just say yes to WHATEVER experiment someone who is
new to the project proposes, and let them take their own lumps, or pleasantly
surprised.
But, despite having known this for a bit, I always seem to forget to do this
when it matters. I wonder if I can add this to our onboarding checklists.
42d I generally agree with the heuristic that we should "live on the mainline",
meaning that we should mostly plan for events which capture the dominant share
of our probability. This heuristic causes me to have a tendency to do some of
the following things
* Work on projects that I think have a medium-to-high chance of succeeding and
quickly abandon things that seem like they are failing.
* Plan my career trajectory based on where I think I can plausibly maximize my
long term values.
* Study subjects only if I think that I will need to understand them at some
point in order to grasp an important concept. See more details here
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnrQMLuEg5wZ7f4bn/matthew-barnett-s-shortform#tdTgyEf2Giy6SAZ7n]
.
* Avoid doing work that leverages small probabilities of exceptionally bad
outcomes. For example, I don't focus my studying on worst-case AI safety risk
(although I do think that analyzing worst-case failure modes is useful from
the standpoint of a security mindset
[https://arbital.com/p/AI_safety_mindset/]).
I see a few problems with this heuristic, however, and I'm not sure quite how to
resolve them. More specifically, I tend to float freely between different
projects because I am quick to abandon things if I feel like they aren't working
out (compare this to the mindset that some game developers have when they
realize their latest game idea isn't very good).
One case where this shows up is when I change my beliefs about where the most
effective ways to spend my time as far as long-term future scenarios are
concerned. I will sometimes read an argument about how some line of inquiry is
promising and for an entire day believe that this would be a good thing to work
on, only for the next day to bring another argument.
And things like my AI timeline predictions vary erratically, much more than I
expect most people's: I sometimes wake up and think that AI might be just 10
years away and other days I wake up and wond
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323d A couple weeks ago I spent an hour talking over video chat with Daniel Cantu, a
UCLA neuroscience postdoc who I hired on Wyzant.com
[https://www.wyzant.com/match/tutor/87443576?fbclid=IwAR3n91qFP_ijKlfMHrw1UmOVOhdw3jyG1r1A-whIJBaFPzpBWtWCmzBe414]
to spend an hour answering a variety of questions about neuroscience I had.
(Thanks Daniel for reviewing this blog post for me!)
The most interesting thing I learned is that I had quite substantially
misunderstood the connection between convolutional neural nets and the human
visual system. People claim that these are somewhat bio-inspired, and that if
you look at early layers of the visual cortex you'll find that it operates kind
of like the early layers of a CNN, and so on.
The claim that the visual system works like a CNN didn’t quite make sense to me
though. According to my extremely rough understanding, biological neurons
operate kind of like the artificial neurons in a fully connected neural net
layer--they have some input connections and a nonlinearity and some output
connections, and they have some kind of mechanism for Hebbian learning or
backpropagation or something. But that story doesn't seem to have a mechanism
for how neurons do weight tying, which to me is the key feature of CNNs.
Daniel claimed that indeed human brains don't have weight tying, and we achieve
the efficiency gains over dense neural nets by two other mechanisms instead:
Firstly, the early layers of the visual cortex are set up to recognize
particular low-level visual features like edges and motion, but this is largely
genetically encoded rather than learned with weight-sharing. One way that we
know this is that mice develop a lot of these features before their eyes open.
These low-level features can be reinforced by positive signals from later
layers, like other neurons, but these updates aren't done with weight-tying. So
the weight-sharing and learning here is done at the genetic level.
Secondly, he thinks that we get around the need for
252d Some thoughts on Buddhist epistemology.
This risks being threatening, upsetting, and heretical within a certain point of
view I commonly see expressed on LW for reasons that will become clear if you
keep reading. I don't know if that means you shouldn't read this if that sounds
like the kind of thing you don't want to read, but I put it out there so you can
make the choice without having to engage in the specifics if you don't want to.
I don't think you will be missing out on anything if that warning gives you a
tinge of "maybe I won't like reading this".
My mind produces a type error when people try to perform deep and precise
epistemic analysis of the dharma. That is, when they try to evaluate the truth
of claims made by the dharma this seems generally fine, but when they go deep
enough that they end up trying to evaluate whether the dharma itself is based on
something true, I get the type error.
I'm not sure what people trying to do this turn up. My expectation is that their
results looks like noise if you aggregate over all such attempts. The reason
being that the dharma is not founded on episteme.
As a quick reminder, there are at least three categories of knowledge worth
considering [https://mapandterritory.org/doxa-episteme-and-gnosis-ea35e4408edd]:
doxa, episteme, and gnosis. Doxa might translate as "hearsay" in English; it's
about statements of the truth. Episteme is knowledge you come to believe via
evaluation of the truth. Gnosis is direct, unmediated-by-ontology knowledge of
reality. To this I'll also distinguish techne from episteme, the former being
experienced knowledge and the latter being reasoned knowledge.
I'll make the probably not very bold claim that most LW rationalists value
episteme above all else, accept techne as evidence, accept doxa as evidence
about evidence and only weak evidence of truth itself, and mostly ignore gnosis
because it is not "rational" in the sense that it cannot be put into words and
it can only be pointed at by wor
183d Crossposted from my Facebook timeline (and, in turn, crossposted there from
vaguely secret, dank corners of the rationalsphere)
“So Ray, is LessLong ready to completely replace Facebook? Can I start posting
my cat pictures and political rants there?”
Well, um, hmm....
So here’s the deal. I do hope someday someone builds an actual pure social
platform that’s just actually good, that’s not out-to-get you, with reasonably
good discourse. I even think the LessWrong architecture might be good for that
(and if a team wanted to fork the codebase, they’d be welcome to try)
But LessWrong shortform *is* trying to do a bit of a more nuanced thing than
that.
Shortform is for writing up early stage ideas, brainstorming, or just writing
stuff where you aren’t quite sure how good it is or how much attention to claim
for it.
For it to succeed there, it’s really important that it be a place where people
don’t have to self-censor or stress about how their writing comes across. I
think intellectual progress depends on earnest curiosity, exploring ideas,
sometimes down dead ends.
I even think it involves clever jokes sometimes.
But... I dunno, if looked ahead 5 years and saw that the Future People were
using shortform mostly for cat videos and political rants, I’d have a sense that
we fucked up somehow.
Hopefully the karma system will naturally reward shortform that’s thought
provoking and interesting. If we get deluged in politics and cats and worse
things I can’t predict, we might add some features that affect what shortform
content gets most highly promoted.
But the bottom line is the whole thing is an experiment. The important bits to
know for now are:
1) use some good judgment
2) don’t stress too much about it – if it turns out to be a problem we’ll most
likely try to solve it via positive-selection tech
3) Shortform is one piece of the overall intellectual pipeline. We’re also
looking into things we can also do to improve LessWrong’s reward for the upper
end of the r
112d One thing I'm finding quite surprising about shortform is how long some of these
posts are. It seems that many people are using this feature to indicate that
they've just written up these ideas quickly in the hope that the feedback is
less harsh. This seems valuable; the feedback here can be incredibly harsh at
times and I don't doubt that this has discouraged many people from posting.
62d Here are some of the common criticisms I get of myself. If you know me, either
in person, through secondhand accounts feel free to comment with your thoughts
on which ones feel correct to you and any nuance or comments you'd like to make.
Full license for this particular thread to operate on Crocker's rules and not
take my feelings into account. If you don't feel comfortable commenting
publicly, also feel free to message with your thoughts.
* I have too low epistemic rigor.
* Too confident in myself
* Not confident enough in myself.
* Too focused on status.
* I don't keep good company.
* I'm too impulsive.
* Too risk seeking.
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104d Strategy mini-post:
One thing that tends to be weak in strategy games is "opponent's choice"
effects, where an ability has multiple possible effects and an opponent chooses
which is resolved. Usually, each effect is stronger than what you would normally
get for a card with that price, but in practice these cards are often quite
weak.
For instance, the Magic: the Gathering card "Book Burning"
[https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=35891] looks
quite strong in theory, as it either does 6 damage or mills 6 cards (both strong
effects that might well be worth more than the card's cost, since this was a set
where having cards in your graveyard was quite relevant). However, in fact it is
quite weak, because in practice you will always get the effect that is less
relevant; if the opponent has life to spare they'll take damage, and if the mill
is no longer relevant they'll let you mill instead.
This pattern holds true across multiple games. In Legend of the Five Rings, Levy
[https://l5r.gamepedia.com/Levy] is similarly weak despite the fact that a card
that did only one of its effects would likely be overpowered, as one effect or
the other is likely to be much less relevant at any point in the game and the
opponent can always choose the less relevant effect.
63d There are a pair of things in the rationalist community which I like to call
"The Two Bad Polys" -- polyphasic sleep and polyamory. Both seem appealing to
many people and have been experimented with pretty widely in the community
despite being quite harmful; I strongly advise against trying either. In
practice they seem to lead to lots of problems for most people who try them.
(Attribution note: I'm not sure whether I was the first to come up with this
term to describe the pair -- I think the two were first referred to as a
dangerous pair by someone else but I might have come up with this particular
name for them.)
63d Fiction writing ramble, #2: Worldbuilding.
This is an attempt to walk through the mental process I follow when writing
fiction. [Goals: I'd like to better understand what my brain is doing, and put
out ideas for other people who might be interested in writing fiction.]
Historically, worldbuilding (I'm talking mainly about fantasy settings here, but
sci-fi as well; earthfic applies less) has been one of the planning steps that I
most struggle to do alone; I've tended to do it via brainstorming with friends.
Figuring out how magic systems and societal norms work is shiny, but apparently
less shiny to me than just writing. This method has some obvious downsides; it's
harder to get a setting that feels lawful and consistent, and I can write myself
into a corner; though the upside is that I don't tend to get nerdsniped on the
worldbuilding step and never end up actually writing anything. (I've known
several aspiring authors with this problem).
There are two basic ways that I've approached worldbuilding for fantasy:
1) Top-down: posit some rules for a world, and simulate out the consequences;
can include what magic is possible and easy/hard, but also the consequences it
would have on society.
2) Bottom-up: posit some facts about that world, and try to reverse-engineer the
underlying rule-set that would generate those observations.
Thanks to my tendency to do worldbuilding "as I go" while already halfway into a
story, rather than figuring out all the rules of the setting in advance, (and my
more recent choice to write fanfiction in a setting where the rules were very
poorly explained), I've done more of the latter. Both feel "generative" in a
sense that's hard to describe, but has some similarities to e.g. doing
murphyjitsu on an upcoming event I'm running – I'm building up a model of a
scenario, asking a lot of "if X, then what?", and trying to poke at my
assumptions and edge cases. (I'm assuming there are multiple ways that fantasy
authors do their worldbuildin
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164d Old post: A mechanistic description of status
[https://musingsandroughdrafts.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/a-mechanistic-description-of-status/]
[This is an essay that I’ve had bopping around in my head for a long time. I’m
not sure if this says anything usefully new-but it might click with some folks.
If you haven’t readSocial Status: Down the Rabbit Hole
[https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole/] on Kevin
Simler’s excellent blog, Melting Asphalt [https://meltingasphalt.com/]read that
first. I think this is pretty bad and needs to be rewritten and maybe expanded
substantially, but this blog is called “musings and rough drafts.”]
In this post, I’m going to outline how I think about status. In particular, I
want to give a mechanistic account of how status necessarily arises, given some
set of axioms, in much the same way one can show that evolution by natural
selection must necessarily occur given the axioms of 1) inheritance of traits 2)
variance in reproductive success based on variance in traits and 3) mutation.
(I am not claiming any particular skill at navigating status relationships, any
more than a student of sports-biology is necessarily a skilled basketball
player.)
By “status” I mean prestige-status.
Axiom 1: People have goals.
That is, for any given human, there are some things that they want. This can
include just about anything. You might want more money, more sex, a
ninja-turtles lunchbox, a new car, to have interesting conversations, to become
an expert tennis player, to move to New York etc.
Axiom 2: There are people who control resources relevant to other people
achieving their goals.
The kinds of resources are as varied as the goals one can have.
Thinking about status dynamics and the like, people often focus on the
particularly convergent resources, like money. But resources that are only
relevant to a specific goal are just as much a part of the dynamics I’m about to
describe.
Knowing a bunch about late 16th century Swed
44d Related to: Realism about rationality
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/suxvE2ddnYMPJN9HD/realism-about-rationality]
I have talked to some people who say that they value ethical reflection, and
would prefer that humanity reflected for a very long time before colonizing the
stars. In a sense I agree, but at the same time I can't help but think that
"reflection" is a vacuous feel-good word that has no shared common meaning.
Some forms of reflection are clearly good. Epistemic reflection is good if you
are a consequentialist, since it can help you get what you want. I also agree
that narrow forms of reflection can also be good. One example of a narrow form
of reflection is philosophical reflection where we compare the details of two
possible outcomes and then decide which one is better.
However, there are much broader forms of reflection which I'm less hesitant to
endorse. Namely, the vague types of reflection, such as reflecting on whether we
really value happiness, or whether we should really truly be worried about
animal suffering.
I can perhaps sympathize with the intuition that we should really try to make
sure that what we put into an AI is what we really want, rather than just what
we superficially want. But fundamentally, I have skepticism that there is any
canonical way of doing this type of reflection that leads to non-arbitrariness.
I have heard something along the lines of "I would want a reflective procedure
that extrapolates my values as long as the procedure wasn't deceiving me or had
some ulterior motive" but I just don't see how this type of reflection
corresponds to any natural class. At some point, we will just have to put some
arbitrariness into the value system, and there won't be any "right answer" about
how the extrapolation is done.
34d In discussions about consciousness I find myself repeating the same basic
argument against the existence of qualia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia]
constantly. I don't do this just to be annoying: It is just my experience that
1. People find consciousness really hard to think about and has been known to
cause a lot of disagreements.
2. Personally I think that this particular argument dissolved perhaps 50% of all
my confusion about the topic, and was one of the simplest, clearest arguments
that I've ever seen.
I am not being original either. The argument is the same one that has been used
in various forms across Illusionist/Eliminativist literature that I can find on
the internet. Eliezer Yudkowsky used a version of it
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7DmA3yWwa6AT5jFXt/zombies-redacted] many years
ago. Even David Chalmers, who is quite the formidable consciousness realist,
admits in The Meta-Problem of Consciousness
[https://philpapers.org/archive/CHATMO-32.pdf] that the argument is the best one
he can find against his position.
The argument is simply this:
If we are able to explain why you believe in, and talk about qualia without
referring to qualia whatsoever in our explanation, then we should reject the
existence of qualia as a hypothesis.
This is the standard debunking argument. It has a more general form which can be
used to deny the existence of a lot of other non-reductive things: distinct
personal identities, gods, spirits, libertarian free will, a mind-independent
morality etc. In some sense it's just an extended version of Occam's razor,
showing us that qualia don't do anything in our physical theories, and thus can
be rejected as things that actually exist out there in any sense.
To me this argument is very clear, and yet I find myself arguing it a lot. I am
not sure how else to get people to see my side of it other than sending them a
bunch of articles which more-or-less make the exact same argument but from
different perspectives.
I
35d spectrum of qualia of rapid muscle movement:
1. wiggle back and forth with no delay
2. effort required to make individual movements one in a row
some actions are only sometimes available to me in form #2 e.g. glossolalia,
patterns of rapid eye movement
sometimes it seems like a matter of training e.g. learning to wiggle my ears
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505d I think that an extremely effective way to get a better feel for a new subject
is to pay an online tutor to answer your questions about it for an hour.
It turns that there are a bunch of grad students on Wyzant who mostly work
tutoring high school math or whatever but who are very happy to spend an hour
answering your weird questions.
For example, a few weeks ago I had a session with a first-year Harvard synthetic
biology PhD. Before the session, I spent a ten-minute timer writing down things
that I currently didn't get about biology. (This is an exercise worth doing even
if you're not going to have a tutor, IMO.) We spent the time talking about some
mix of the questions I'd prepared, various tangents that came up during those
explanations, and his sense of the field overall.
I came away with a whole bunch of my minor misconceptions fixed, a few pointers
to topics I wanted to learn more about, and a way better sense of what the field
feels like and what the important problems and recent developments are.
There are a few reasons that having a paid tutor is a way better way of learning
about a field than trying to meet people who happen to be in that field. I
really like it that I'm paying them, and so I can aggressively direct the
conversation to wherever my curiosity is, whether it's about their work or some
minor point or whatever. I don't need to worry about them getting bored with me,
so I can just keep asking questions until I get something.
Conversational moves I particularly like:
* "I'm going to try to give the thirty second explanation of how gene
expression is controlled in animals; you should tell me the most important
things I'm wrong about."
* "Why don't people talk about X?"
* "What should I read to learn more about X, based on what you know about me
from this conversation?"
All of the above are way faster with a live human than with the internet.
I think that doing this for an hour or two weekly will make me substantially
more knowl
245d Fiction writing ramble, 1 of ??:
I've been trying to introspect lately on my fiction writing process. My brain is
opaque about what it's doing, which I guess makes sense – I've been telling
stories since literally before I knew how to write, and I've never had any
formal instruction in it.
Current question: why is it so intensely a superstimulus for me? Writing fiction
is pretty much the only thing I will eagerly and endorsedly do for 16 hours
straight. My best and most enjoyable writing periods feel very much like
"chasing the shiny" – what "the shiny" is, is hard to describe, but it feels
more "substantial" than other second-to-second dopamine-hit-seeking behaviours
like chasing links on Wikipedia or TV Tropes. Somewhere between pushing towards
an exercise high, and drinking water when I'm thirsty, whereas Internet
dopamine-seeking is more like eating sugar.
Thinking about a story I'm writing, and especially talking meta about it with
friends, is also extremely rewarding, to the point that sometimes I'll find
myself off in daydreams or having a chat conversation instead of, you know,
actually writing. Reaching the shiny thing on the page is effortful, much of the
time – the feeling is often that it's "far away", and I'm sort of hill-climbing
towards it, but often spotting smaller shiny things along the way. The big shiny
thing can be a particularly clever or cool plot event that I'm setting the
groundwork for, a felt sense theme-shaped-thing I'm groping towards, a lesson I
want to convey, or the resolution of foreshadowing I've been setting up for
dozens of chapters. (Or, let's be honest, my biggest self-indulgence in writing:
gratuitous medical emergencies). The opportunities snatched up along the way can
be an amusing interaction between characters, a bit of neat worldbuilding my
brain generated on the spot, a snippet of dialogue that feels deliciously
in-character, or just a sentence or word use that feels poetic and satisfying.
(Things I'm not chasing t
125d Memex Thread:
I've taken copious notes in notebooks over the past 6 years, I've used evernote
on and off as a capture tool for the past 4 years, and for the past 1.5 years
I've been trying to organize my notes via a personal wiki. I'm in the process of
switching and redesigning systems, so here's some thoughts.
125d I'm told that there was a period of history where only the priests were literate
and therefore only they could read the Bible. Or maybe it was written in Latin
and only they knew how to read it, or something. Anyway, as a result, they were
free to interpret it any way they liked, and they used that power to control the
masses.
Goodness me, it's a good thing we Have Science Now and can use it to free
ourselves from the overbearing grip of Religion!
Oh, totally unrelatedly, the average modern person is scientifically illiterate
and absorbs their knowledge of what is "scientific" through a handful of big
news sources and through cultural osmosis.
Hmm. [https://i.imgur.com/yw4hlST.png]
Moral: Be wary of packages labeled "science" and be especially wary of social
pressure to believe implausible-sounding claims just because they're
"scientific". There are many ways for that beautiful name to get glued onto
random memes.
95d I've had a draft sitting in my posts section for months about shallow, deep, and
transfer learning. Just made a Twitter thread that gets at the basics. And
figured I'd post here to gauge interest in a longer post with examples.
Love kindle, love Evernote. But never highlight good ideas. It's level one
reading. Instead use written notes and link important ideas to previous concepts
you know.
Level 1: What's important? What does this mean?
Level 2: How does this link to compare/contrast to previous concepts or
experiences? Do I believe this?
Level 3: How is this a metaphor for seemingly unrelated concepts? How can this
frame my thinking?
4 questions to get to level 2:
* How is this similar to other things I know?
* How is this different from other things I know?
* What previous experiences can I relate this to?
* In what circumstances would I use this knowledge? How would I use it?
3 Questions to ask to get to level 3:
* How does it feel to view the world through this lens?
* How does this explain everything?
* What is this a metaphor for?
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207d I've posted this on Facebook a couple times but seems perhaps worth mentioning
once on LW: A couple weeks ago I registered the domain LessLong.com and
redirected it to LessWrong.com/shortform. :P
147d One concept people talk about in game design is "pendulum swing", where
something that is too powerful or too weak is overcorrected in balance patches
and becomes the opposite -- something too powerful becomes too weak, while
something too weak becomes too powerful.
A similar concept can be present in other sectors as well -- often, noticing one
problem can lead to an overcorrection that brings you the opposite problem. For
instance, an early stage organization might notice that they aren't systematic
enough in their processes, overcorrect, and become too rigid and doctrinaire.
(Duncan Sabien uses this concept of pendulum swing a lot, and while I was aware
of it prior to his use he's done a lot to bring it to attention as a relevant
rationality concept.)
127d I block all the big social networks from my phone and laptop, except for 2 hours
on Saturday, and I noticed that when I check Facebook on Saturday, the
notifications are always boring and not something I care about. Then I scroll
through the newsfeed for a bit and it quickly becomes all boring too.
And I was surprised. Could it be that, all the hype and narrative aside, I
actually just wasn’t interested in what was happening on Facebook? That I could
remove it from my life and just not really be missing anything?
On my walk home from work today I realised that this wasn’t the case. Facebook
has interesting posts I want to follow, but they’re not in my notifications.
They’re sparsely distributed in my newsfeed, such that they appear a few times
per week, randomly. I can get a lot of value from Facebook, but not by checking
once per week - only by checking it all the time. That’s how the game is played.
Anyway, I am not trading all of my attention away for such small amounts of
value. So it remains blocked.
106d There's been a lot of noise lately about affirmative consent, a standard of
consent which requires explicit verbal confirmation for every escalation of
romantic or sexual interaction. It has been adopted as a standard by many
college campuses [https://endrapeoncampus.org/yes-means-yes], and efforts have
been made to turn it into actual law
[https://www.city-journal.org/affirmative-consent].
Most of the discussion has centered around the use of affirmative consent as a
legal standard, and as such it is quite terrible: unfair, unjust, and impossible
to interpret in a consistent way that stops bad behavior without criminalizing
normal conduct. But, what I haven't seen mentioned, is that adopting affirmative
consent as a loosely enforced social norm is really good for nerds. If you're
not great at reading body language and subtle signs, the expectation that you'll
ask for verbal consent makes flirting much easier. You're no longer an awkward
geek, you're hip to the times!
I've personally erred on the side of asking explicitly in the past, and I think
it has worked out great for me. Most women were happy to give consent when
asked, the momentary awkwardness of asking quickly forgotten. A few said "no",
in which case it's a good thing I asked! And I doubt that even a single one was
poised so evenly on the fence that asking for verbal consent turned her off me.
What do y'all think? And is this actually making life better or worse for women
who date nerds?
86d I think there's a preformal / formal / post-formal thing going on with Double
Crux.
My impression is the CFAR folk who created the doublecrux framework see it less
as a formal process you should stick to, and more as a general set of guiding
principles. The formal process is mostly there to keep you oriented in the right
direction.
But I see people (sometimes me) trying to use it as a rough set of guiding
principles, and then easily slipping back into all the usual failure modes of
not understanding each other, or not really taking seriously the possibility
that they might be the wrong one.
Right now in some contexts I've come across as a bit anal about sticking to
"Formal Doublecrux rules". Model share. Check for cruxes. Recurse until you find
common cruxes. Look for experiments you can actually run to gain new evidence.
Aim to converge on truth.
And it does clearly seem that these steps aren't always the best approach for a
given conversation. But I often perceive what feel like basic errors, which
would have been caught if you were following the formal rules.
So I'm currently, like, on a crusade to make sure the people around me that I
end up in the most disagreements with are able to nail the Formal Doublecrux
Framework, and once we're all roughly on that page I'll trust us to do a
post-formal version of it where we trust each other to get the basics right, so
we can relax about the rules.
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177d I get the feeling that for AI safety, some people believe that it's crucially
important to be an expert in a whole bunch of fields of math in order to make
any progress. In the past I took this advice and tried to deeply study
computability theory, set theory, type theory -- with the hopes of it someday
giving me greater insight into AI safety.
Now, I think I was taking a wrong approach. To be fair, I still think being an
expert in a whole bunch of fields of math is probably useful, especially if you
want very strong abilities to reason about complicated systems. But, my model
for the way I frame my learning is much different now.
I think my main model which describes my current perspective is that I think
employing a lazy style of learning is superior for AI safety work. Lazy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation]is meant in the computer science
sense of only learning something when it seems like you need to know it in order
to understand something important. I will contrast this with the model that one
should learn a set of solid foundations first before going any further.
Obviously neither model can be absolutely correct in an extreme sense. I don't,
as a silly example, think that people who can't do basic arithmetic should go
into AI safety before building a foundation in math. And on the other side of
the spectrum, I think it would be absurd to think that one should become a world
renowned mathematician before reading their first AI safety paper. That said,
even though both models are wrong, I think my current preference is for the lazy
model rather than the foundation model.
Here are some points in favor of both, informed by my first-person experience.
Points in favor of the foundations model:
* If you don't have solid foundations in mathematics, you may not even be aware
of things that you are missing.
* Having solid foundations in mathematics will help you to think rigorously
about things rather than having a vague non-reductionis
57d Sometimes people will propose ideas, and then those ideas are met immediately
after with harsh criticism. A very common tendency for humans is to defend our
ideas and work against these criticisms, which often gets us into a state that
people refer to as "defensive."
According to common wisdom, being in a defensive state is a bad thing. The
rationale here is that we shouldn't get too attached to our own ideas. If we do
get attached, we become liable to become crackpots
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qRWfvgJG75ESLRNu9/the-crackpot-offer]who can't
give an idea up because it would make them look bad if we did. Therefore, the
common wisdom advocates treating ideas as being handed to us by a tablet from
the clouds rather than a product of our brain's thinking habits. Taking this
advice allows us to detach ourselves from our ideas so that we don't confuse
criticism with insults.
However, I think the exact opposite failure mode is not often enough pointed out
and guarded against. Specifically, the failure mode is being too willing to
abandon beliefs based on surface level counterarguments. To alleviate this I
suggest we shouldn't be so ready to give up our ideas in the face of criticism.
This might sound irrational -- why should we get attached to our beliefs? I'm
certainly not advocating that we should actually associate criticism with
insults to our character or intelligence. Instead, my argument is that the
process of defensively defending against criticism generates a productive
adversarial structure.
Consider two people. Person A desperately wants to believe proposition X, and
person B desperately wants to believe not X. If B comes up to A and says, "Your
belief in X is unfounded. Here are the reasons..." Person A can either admit
defeat, or fall into defensive mode. If A admits defeat, they might indeed get
closer to the truth. On the other hand, if A gets into defensive mode, they
might also get closer to the truth in the process of desperately for evidence
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219d I'm really noticing how the best life improvements come from purchasing or
building better infrastructure, rather than trying permutations of the same set
of things and expecting different results. (Much of this results from having
more money, granting an expanded sense of possibility to buying useful things.)
The guiding question is, "What upgrades would make my life easier?" In contrast
with the question that is more typically asked: "How do I achieve this hard
thing?"
It seems like part of what makes this not just immediately obvious is that I
feel a sense of resistance (that I don't really identify with). Part of that is
a sense of... naughtiness? Like we're supposed to signal how hardworking we are.
For me this relates to this fear I have that if I get too powerful, I will break
away from others (e.g. skipping restaurants for a Soylent Guzzler Helmet,
metaphorically) as I re-engineer my life and thereby invite conflict. There's
something like a fear that buying or engaging in nicer things would be an
affront to my internalized model of my parents?
The infrastructure guideline relates closely to the observation that to a first
approximation we are stimulus-response machines reacting to our environment, and
that the best way to improve is to actually change your environment, rather than
continuing to throw resources past the point of diminishing marginal returns in
adaptation to the current environment. And for the same reasons, the
implications can scare me, for it may imply leaving the old environment behind,
and it may even imply that the larger the environmental change you make, the
more variance you have for a good or bad update to your life. That would mean we
should strive for large positive environmental shifts, while minimizing the risk
of bad ones.
(This also gives me a small update towards going to Mars being more useful for
x-risk, although I may need to still propagate a larger update in the other
direction away from space marketing. )
Of course
168d I think there are some serious low hanging fruits for making people productive
that I haven't seen anyone write about (not that I've looked very hard). Let me
just introduce a proof of concept:
Final exams in university are typically about 3 hours long. And many people are
able to do multiple finals in a single day, performing well on all of them.
During a final exam, I notice that I am substantially more productive than
usual. I make sure that every minute counts: I double check everything and think
deeply about each problem, making sure not to cut corners unless absolutely
required because of time constraints. Also, if I start daydreaming, then I am
able to immediately notice that I'm doing so and cut it out. I also believe that
this is the experience of most other students in university who care even a
little bit about their grade.
Therefore, it seems like we have an example of an activity that can just
automatically produce deep work. I can think of a few reasons why final exams
would bring out the best of our productivity:
1. We care about our grade in the course, and the few hours in that room are the
most impactful to our grade.
2. We are in an environment where distractions are explicitly prohibited, so we
can't make excuses to ourselves about why we need to check Facebook or whatever.
3. There is a clock at the front of the room which makes us feel like time is
limited. We can't just sit there doing nothing because then time will just slip
away.
4. Every problem you do well on benefits you by a little bit, meaning that
there's a gradient of success rather than a binary pass or fail (though
sometimes it's binary). This means that we care a lot about optimizing every
second because we can always do slightly better.
If we wanted to do deep work for some other desired task, all four of these
reasons seem like they could be replicable. Here is one idea (related to my own
studying), although I'm sure I can come up with a better one if I thought deeply
89d Draft/WIP: The Working Memory Hypothesis re: Intellectual Progress
Strong claim, medium felt
So I'm working with the hypothesis that working memory (or something related) is
a major bottleneck on progress within a given field. This has implications on
what sort of things fields need.
Basic idea is that you generally need to create new concepts out of existing
sub-concepts. You can only create a concept if you can hold the requisite
sub-concepts in your head at once. Default working memory limits is 4-7 chunks.
You can expand that somewhat by writing things down on whiteboards. I'm not sure
exactly what the practical limits are.
But there is some upper limit on how complex a concept people can work with,
even the smartest people in the field. So there are some ideas you just can't
invent, if they require 30 moving parts to consider at once. If an idea has 30
moving parts, it's necessary to find some way to conceptualize it as having
fewer parts.
Fortunately, this is possible. When I first learn a new concept, it's
unfamiliar, and I have to track all of it's individual pieces separately – if it
has 5 sub-concepts it takes 5 chunks of working memory.
But eventually I learn to think of it as a single concept, and then it only
takes 1.
So, an important aspect of a field is distillation – improving explanations to
help people think of clusters-of-ideas as a single concept they can reason about
as if it took up only one chunk.
Distillation is a sort of tedious process though. So part of why Bell Labs is a
great idea is that you can have all these specialists of different fields
working in the same building, and whenever one of them wants to learn something
they can just walk down the hall and ask the guy who invented it "hey, how does
this work", and they get an explanation. And if they don't understand it fully,
they can immediately, frictionlessly, ask followup questions.
This doesn't just help them understand new ideas – it reduces those ideas in
conceptual
48d I notice that there's a fair bit of "thread necromancy" on LessWrong. I don't
think it's a bad thing, but I think it would be cool to have an option to filter
comments based on the time gap between when the post was made and when the
comment was made. That way it's easier to see to see what the discussion was
like around the time when the post was made.
On a related note, does LessWrong record when upvotes are made? It would also be
cool to have a "time-machine" to see how up-votes and down-votes in a thread
evolve over time. Could be good for analysing the behaviour of threads in the
short term, and a way to see how community norms change in the long term.
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1310d What important book that needs fact-checking is nobody fact-checking?
89d Noticing an internal dynamic.
As a kid I liked to build stuff (little catapults, modify nerf guns, sling
shots, etc). I entered a lot of those projects with the mindset of "I'll make
this toy and then I can play with it forever and never be bored again!" When I
would make the thing and get bored with it, I would be surprised and mildly
upset, then forget about it and move to another thing. Now I think that when I
was imagining the glorious cool toy future, I was actually imagining a having a
bunch of friends to play with (didn't live around many other kids).
When I got to middle school and highschool and spent more time around other
kids, the idea of "That person's talks like they're cool but they aren't." When
I got into sub-cultures centering around a skill or activity (magic) I
experienced the more concentrated form, "That person acts like they're good at
magic, but couldn't do a show to save their life."
I got the message, "To fit in, you have to really be about the thing. No half
assing it. No posing."
Why, historically, have I gotten so worried when my interests shift? I'm not yet
at a point in my life where there are that many logistical constraints (I've
switched majors three times in three years without a hitch). I think it's
because in the back of my head I expect every possible group or social scene to
say, "We only want you if you're all about doing XYZ all the time." And when I'm
super excited about XYZ, it's fine. But when I feel like "Yeah, I need a break"
I get nervous.
Yeah, there is a hard underlying problem of "How to not let your culture become
meaningless", but I think my extra-problem is that I gravitated towards the
groups that defined themselves by "We put in lots of time mastering this
specific hard skill and applying it." Though I expect it to be the case that for
the rest of my life I want to have thoughtful engaging discussion with
intellectually honest people (a piece of what I want from less wrong), I feel
less reason to be sure th
59d Magic colors and errors
Reading Writers guild policy doc there was a principle of "the vase is already
broken". The whole document is a lot how you make a red organization and most of
the princples are anti-white.
The principle makes sense but I found it be foregin to my culture. Things are
made to be replaced. And if something is done wrong today we will try to do
right the next day.
In contrast the blue way is much more familiar with me. Accept only true things,
set up things for perpetuity. In the contrast I noticed that the blue thing is
focused on avoiding to making mistakes. You slow down enough that everything can
be verified. In the red way you speed up so things can be corrected.
In blue if you make a mistake you will build a machine that will do damage for
to the forseeable future. In contrast in red if you feel the wrong way today you
will not be inspired to feel so tomorrow and the energy will whimper. "Energy
denial" seemed like a new perpective that I hadn't considered.
Other colors probably also have ways to treat errors. Green probably adapts,
there are no "mistakes" only "happy little accidents". Oxygen catastrophe is not
armageddon but new conditions to build upon. Never say "no" but always "yes and"
and just keep the harmony in front of your mind, keep the scene going.
Black is proably ready to backstab their friends to death should they turn on
them. It's not about what damage the mistake does but whether it proves your
character whether you are safe to keep around. On the flip side having good
enough goals means arbirarily bad means can be swallowed.
White probably does courts and maybe a balance of rights: even if we set a
monumentally bad law it will need to resolve itself against other core
principles. A bad nomination is limited by the powers of the position being
limited.