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Morpheus's Shortform — LessWrong

Morpheus's Shortform

7th Aug 2020

1 min read

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[-]Morpheus1y*842

I went through Gwern’s posts and collected all the posts with importance 8 and higher as of 2024-09-04 in case someone else was searching for something like this.

... (read more)

3[anonymous]1y

This could have been a post so more people could link it (many don't reflexively notice that you can easily get a link to a Lesswrong quicktake or Twitter or facebook post by mousing over the date between the upvote count and the poster, which also works for tab and hotkey navigation for people like me who avoid using the mouse/touchpad whenever possible).

4Morpheus1y

It not being linked on Twitter and Facebook seems more like a feature than a bug, given that when I asked Gwern why a page like this doesn't already exist, he wrote me he doesn't want people to mock it.

[-]Morpheus1y*330

Things I learned that surprised me from a deep dive into how the medication I've been taking for years (Vyvanse) actually gets metabolized:

It says in the instructions that it works for 13 hours, and my psychiatrist informed me that it has a slow onset of about an hour. What that actually means is that after ~1h you reach 1/2 the peak concentration and after 13 hours you are at 1/2 the peak concentration again, because the half-life is 12h (and someone decided at some point 1/2 is where we decide the exponential starts and ends?). Importantly, this means 1/4 of the medication is still present the next day!

Here is some real data, which fit the simple exponential decay rather well (It's from children though, which metabolize dextroamphetamine faster, which is why the half-life is only ~10h)

If you eat ~1-3 grams of baking soda, you can make the amount of medication you lose through urine (usually ~50%) go to 0^[1] (don't do this! Your body probably keeps its urine pH at the level it does for a reason! You could get kidney stones).
I thought the opposite effect (acidic urine gets rid of the medication quickly) explained why my ADHD psychologist had told me that the medicatio

... (read more)

4keltan1y

This seems like it will be useful for me in the future. I’ve been wondering for a while how the long half life of ADHD meds impact sleep. Any data on that?

4Morpheus1y

There is probably a lot of variation between people regarding that. In my family meds across the board improved people's sleep (by making people less sleepy during the day, so more active and less naps). When I reduced my medication from 70mg to 50mg for a month to test whether I still needed the full dose, the thing that was annoying the most was my sleep (waking up at night and not falling asleep again increased. Falling asleep initially was maybe slightly easier). Taking it too late in the afternoon is really bad for my sleep, though.

2keltan1y

That matches with what my psychiatrist told me. I find it surprising how large the variation between individuals can be with these meds. I have met people who can drink an espresso before bed and it actually helps their sleep. But I find those people to be rare. I see much more variance in amphetamines. My mental data set isn’t large enough to make any sold predictions. But I am unable to point to a clear “most people's sleep is (X)ed by amphetamines”.

1Morpheus1y

One confounder: depression/mania. Recently (the last ~two weeks) I have been having bad sleep (waking up 3-7 am and not feeling sleepy anymore (usually I sleep from midnight to 9). My current best guess is that the problem is that my life has been going too well recently, leading to a self-sustaining equilibrium where I have little sleep and mania. Reduced my medication today (~55mg instead of 70mg) which seems to have helped with the mania. I had another day with slight mania 1 month ago when sleeping little in order to travel to a conference, so in the future I'll probably reduce my medication dose on such days. Took a friend describing his symptoms on too much medication for me to realize what is going on.

[-]Morpheus3mo2714

I am in the waiting room at the doctor and the ~1 year old child next to me is scrolling through YouTube shorts on his mother's phone with the mom watching along. Incredibly incoherent AI slop. Not an expert at early development, but this seems very suboptimal. I know that scrolling is not good for my reward system, but a 1-year old? At least put some random video on instead of letting the child scroll? If I was in charge at Google and was living by "don't be evil", I would maybe make a classifier to identify children scrolling like this and giving a reminder once in a while to suggest some alternative activities to the parent?

[-]TsviBT3mo2010

Something like this has been happening for at least a decade. See "Something is wrong on the internet ". There should be enough data at this point for someone to do good studies on whether this behavior has noticeable effects later on.

4Erich_Grunewald2mo

Adding to that, there's the brainrot (aka sludge) genre of TikTok and YT Shorts content, which is really weird and often AI-generated, and often has Roblox or Subway Surfer content in the background and stuff like that.

[-]Morpheus1y122

If legibility of expertise is a bottleneck to progress and adequacy of civilization, it seems like creating better benchmarks for knowledge and expertise for humans might be a valuable public good. While that seems difficult for aesthetics, it seems easier for engineering? I'd rather listen to a physics PhD, who gets Thinking Physics questions right (with good calibration), years into their professional career, than one who doesn't.

One way to do that is to force experts to make forecasts, but this takes a lot of time to hash out and even more time to resolve.

One idea I just had related to this: the same way we use datasets like MMLU and MMMU, etc. to evaluate language models, we use a small dataset like this and then experts are allowed to take the test and performance on the test is always public (and then you make a new test every month or year).

Maybe you also get some participants to do these questions in a quiz show format and put it on YouTube, so the test becomes more popular? I would watch that.

The disadvantage of this method compared to tests people prepare for in academia would be that the data would be quite noisy. On the other hand, this measure could be more robust to g... (read more)

2ChristianKl1y

If you have a best that actually measures expertise in engineering well, it's going to be valuable for those who make hiring decisions. Triplebyte essentially seems to have found a working business model that is about testing for expertise in programming. If you can do something similar as Triplebyte for other areas of expertise, that might be a good business model. As far as genius hedgehog's in academia go, currently they find it very hard to get funding for their ideas. If you would replace the current process of having to write a grant proposal with having to take a test to measure expertise, I would expect the diversity of ideas that get researched to increase.

7bhauth1y

Triplebyte? You mean, the software job interviewing company? 1. They had some scandal a while back where they made old profiles public without permission, and some other problems that I read about but can't remember now. 2. They didn't have a better way of measuring engineering expertise, they just did the same leetcode interviews that Google/etc did. They tried to be as similar as possible to existing hiring at multiple companies; the idea wasn't better evaluation but reducing redundant testing. But companies kind of like doing their own testing. 3. They're gone now, acquired by Karat. Which seems to be selling companies a way to make their own leetcode interviews using Triplebyte's system, thus defeating the original point.

[-]Morpheus1y*8-1

Has anyone here investigated before if washing vegetables/fruits is worth it? Until recently I never washed my vegetables, because I classified that as a bullshit value claim.

Intuitively, if I am otherwise also not super hygienic (like washing my hands before eating) it doesn't seem that plausible to me that vegetables are where I am going to get infected from other people having touched the carrots etc... . Being in quarantine during a pandemic might be an exception, but then again I don't know if I am going to get rid of viruses if I am just lazily rinsi... (read more)

5jmh1y

Cannot say this is a good source, but was a quick on. It does seem to speak to the question you're asking though so might be of interest. Might support the view that the additional produce you eat if not washing could out weigh the costs of the increased pesticide comsumption. But, I suspect that might be a very uncertain conclusion given the potential variability in factors regarding your specific situation -- where are the produce grown (what's in the soil), what pesticides, and what quantity, might be in use, what is the post harvesting process (any washing at all). The other aspect might be what consumption levels you have with and without washing. I am sure there is a level over which additional intake is adding little value. So if you're still eatting plenty of fresh produce even with the additional effor of washing you probably don't really need the additional nutriants (concentration levels in your body are already sufficient for the needed chemical reactions) but are avoiding things we know are not helpful to human biology.

4the gears to ascension1y

water washing with slight rubbing is likely sufficient to get rid of most of the pesticide imo

2hypnos1y

good argumend for organic food if You're on the: I don't wash my fruits side.

[-]Morpheus2y81

While there is currently a lot of attention on assessing language models, it puzzles me that no one seems to be independently assessing the quality of different search engines and recommender systems. Shouldn't this be easy to do? The only thing I could find related to this is this Russian site (It might be propaganda from Yandex, as it is listed as the top quality site?). Taking their “overall search quality” rating at face value does seem to support the popular hypothesis that search quality of Google has slightly deteriorated over the last 10 years (alt... (read more)

[-]Morpheus5mo60

One reason why I find Lesswrong valuable is that it serves as a sort of "wisdom feed" for myself, where I got exposed to a lot of great writing. Especially writing that ambitiously attempts to build long-lasting gears. Sadly, for most of the good writers on Lesswrong, I have already read or at least skimmed all of their posts. I wonder, though, to which extent I am missing out on great content like that on the wider internet. There are textbooks, of course, but then there's also all this knowledge that is usually left out of textbooks. For myself, it proba... (read more)

[-]Morpheus6mo62

It is time that I apply the principle of more dakka and just start writing (or rather publishing) more. I know deliberate practice works for writing. If you want to be good at something, you need to do it badly and then just keep going with doing the thing is very common advice. I still find it very hard to do.

Things I ran into when writing before that stopped me:
- It's hard to decide what to write about
- I get anxiety about writing something that is not good enough
- Topics that go into my head about what to write about revolve mostly about how it is

... (read more)

3Viliam6mo

Ah, there is that weird relation between writing and publishing. On one hand, publishing gives you the incentive to write. On the other hand, publishing gives you the anxiety about writing. I have an intuition that a good solution to this would be some kind of multi-layered publishing system. Where you publish the article first to your close friends, and then if you feel okay about it, you promote it to larger audiences. At each step you can update the article; generally because you want to impress the larger audience more, but also based on the feedback from the previous audience. Probably each audience would have a separate comment section. At the first step, there would be no anxiety, because only your close friends will see it; and the next step, you would be encouraged by the feedback from the previous step. Something similar could be achieved by having two blogs, one only accessible for friends. Maybe as a mutual help, for a small group of bloggers who want to overcome their writing blocks. Yeah, that is a trap. Although you might write an article like that, without publishing it, as a therapy. By the way, some of my LW posts started as shortforms that grew too long, so I decided to publish them separately. This reduces the anxiety a lot, because as long as I am writing in the shortform editor, I don't really try to make it perfect. And when I switch to article form, I already have a large part of it written. I wonder, maybe I should try writing all my article ideas as shortforms. To start writing, and commit to publishing it today, either as a shortform or as an article, depending on how well the shortform writing will go.

3cubefox6mo

I think more posts should be formatted as a nested list. They are especially clear, since indentation ≈ elaboration, which is not visible in continuous text.

2JustisMills6mo

Weekly has been feeling good to me, in terms of publishing! I write every day, but maybe 90% of it stays ~private lately. Weirdly, the most painful experience in a year of weekly posting is when a post of mine DID blow up! Attention ain't all you need after all. I am not sure if this random other person's experience is welcome, but I often struggle with little local peer group to viscerally ground what I should be doing, so, here's hoping it's nice for you (and bystanders!) to see.

[-]Morpheus1y40

I feel like there should exist a more advanced sequence that explains problems with filtered evidence leading to “confirmation bias”. I think the Luna sequence is already a great step in the right direction. I do feel like there is a lack of the equivalent non-fiction version, that just plainly lays out the issue. Maybe what I am envisioning is just a version of What evidence filtered evidence with more examples of how to practice this skill (applied to search engines, language models, someone’s own thought process, information actively hidden from you, ra... (read more)

[-]Morpheus2y*40

If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.

TLDR: I looked into how much it would take to fine-tune gpt-4 to do Fermi estimates better. If you liked the post/paper on fine-tuning Language models to make predictions you might like reading this. I evaluated gpt-4 on the first dataset I found, but gpt-4 was already making better fermi estimates than the examples in the dataset, so I stopped there (my code).

First problem I encountered: there is no public access to fine-tuning gpt-4 so far. Ok, we might as well just do gpt-3.5 I guess.

First, I foun... (read more)

[-]Morpheus3y40

Probably silly

Quantifying uncertainty is great and all, but also exhausting precious mental energy. I am getting quite fond of giving probability ranges instead of point estimates when I want to communicate my uncertainty quickly. For example: “I'll probably (40-80%) show up to the party tonight.” For some reason, translating natural language uncertainty words into probability ranges feels more natural (at least to me) so requires less work for the writer.

If the difference is important, the other person can ask, but it still seems better than just saying 'probably'.

2Dagon3y

Interesting. For me, thinking/saying "about 60%" is less mental load and feels more natural than "40 to 80%". It avoids the rabbit-hole of what a range of probabilities even means - presumably that implies your probability estimates are normal around 60% with a standard deviation of 20%, or something. Is there anything your communication recipient would do differently with a range than a point estimate? presumably they care about the resolution of the event (will you attend) rather than the resolution of the "correct" probability estimate. There's a place for "no", "probably not", "maybe", "I hope to", "probably", "I think so", "almost certainly", and "yes" as a somewhat ambiguous estimate as well, but that's a separate discussion.

3Morpheus3y

Agree that the meaning of the ranges is very ill-defined. I think I am most often drawn to this when I have a few different heuristics that seem applicable. Example of internals: One is just how likely this feels when I query one of my predictive engines and another is just some very crude "outside view"/eyeballed statistic that estimates how well I did on this in the past. Weighing these against each other causes lots of cognitive dissonance for me, so I don't like doing it.

1Morpheus1y

I think from the perspective of a radical probabilist, it is very natural to not only have a word of where your current point estimate is at, but also have some tagging for the words indicating how much computation went into it or if this estimate already tries to take the listeners model into account also?

[-]Morpheus3y40

I am not sure how much this was a problem, but I felt like listening more to pop music on Spotify slowly led to value drift, because so many songs are about love and partying.

I felt a stronger desire to invest more time to fix the fact that I am single. I do not actually endorse that on reflection. The best solution I've found so far is starting to listen to music in languages I don't understand, which works great!

2Yitz3y

I hope the fact I like listening to songs where the singer role-plays as a supervillain isn’t affecting me that way lol

[-]Morpheus2mo30

I stopped using google as my default search engine and use brave search instead now. Googles AI summary is worse than useless. The first example I tried perfectly illustrates my point. The first paragraph of their AI summary links to 8 different sources. How do those 8 sources relate to the claim? I have no way of knowing without reading all 8 sources. Also, the AI summary takes a longer time to load than the main search results, and it's lazy loading animation is distracting. I could not find any way to turn it off. Google AI Summary Example Meanwhile, with brave search I can tur... (read more)

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1Morpheus2mo

I noticed the following paragraphs go into more detail about how the sources relate to the claim. So my example wasn't well chosen.

[-]Morpheus1y*30

Hypothesis based on the fact that status is a strong drive and people who are on the outer ends of that spectrum get classified as having a "personality disorder" and are going to be very resistant to therapy:

weak-status-fear==psychopathy: psychopathy is caused by the loop leading to fear of loosing status, being less strong than average or possibly broken. (psychopathy is Probably on a spectrum. I don't see a reason why little of this feeling would be less optimal than none.)
strong-status-fear==(?histrionic personality disorder)
weak-status-seeking-loo

... (read more)

1Morpheus1y

I don't know where anger fits into this. Also I should look at how these behaviors manifest in other animals.

[-]Morpheus2y*30

Can anyone here recommend particular tools to practice grammar? Or with strong opinions on the best workflow/tool to correct grammar on the fly? I already know Grammarly and LanguageTool, but Grammarly seems steep at $30 per month when I don’t know if it is any good. I have tried GPT-4 before, but the main problems I have there, is that it is too slow and changes my sentences more than I would like (I tried to make it do that less through prompting, which did not help that much).

I notice that feeling unconfident about my grammar/punctuation leads me to wri... (read more)

2ChristianKl2y

Practicing grammar and correcting grammar on the fly seem to be two different things. If you want to improve, then I would prompt GPT-4 with something like "I'm a student looking to improve my writing and grammar ability, here's an essay I wrote. Given that writing, please teach me about grammar."

[-]Morpheus2y30

Metaculus recently updated the way they score user predictions. For anyone who used to be active on Metaculus and hasn't logged on for a while, I recommend checking out your peer and baseline accuracy scores in the past years. With the new scoring system, you can finally determine whether your predictions were any good compared to the community median. This makes me actually consider using it again instead of Manifold.

By the way, if you are new to forecasting and want to become better, I would recommend past-casting and/or calibration games instead, becaus... (read more)

[-]Morpheus7mo20

Not sure what's going on, but gpt-4o keeps using its search tool when it shouldn't and telling me about either the weather, or sonic the hedgehog. I couldn't find anything about this online. Are funny things like this happening to anyone else? I checked both my custom instructions and the memory items and nothing there mentions either of these.

[-]Morpheus2y*20

Epistemic Status: Anecdote

Two weeks ago, I’ve been dissatisfied with the amount of workouts I do. When I considered how to solve the issue, my brain generated the excuse that while I like running outside, I really don’t like doing workouts with my dumbbells in my room even though that would be a more intense and therefore more useful workout. Somehow I ended up actually thinking and asked myself why I don’t just take the dumbbells with me outside. Which was of course met by resistance because it looks weird. It’s even worse! I don’t know how to “properly” ... (read more)

[-]Morpheus3y*20

I was just thinking that there is actually a way to justify using occams razor, because by using it, you will always converge on the true hypothesis in the limit of accumulating evidence. Not sure if I've seen this somewhere else before, or if I gigabrained myself into some nonsense:

Let's say the true world is some finite state machine M'∈M with the input alphabet {1} and the output alphabet {0,1}. Now I feed into this an infinite sequence of 1s. If I use a uniform prior over all possible finite state automatons, then at any step of observing the output, t... (read more)

2Morpheus3y

I rechecked Hutter on induction https://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5721.pdf and the convergence stuff seems to be already known. Going to recheck logical induction. I think maybe Occam's razor is actually hard to justify. What is easier justify is using a prior that will actually converge, if there is any explanation at all (your observations aren't random noise)

1Morpheus3y

Ok yeah. Logical induction just works then because you don't expect any adversaries in math truths.

1Morpheus3y

All of this is just getting annoyed at the NFL theorem trying to be objective, but one thing that I'd find interesting is what happens if you start out with very different priors.

[-]Morpheus3y20

I like the agreement voting feature for comments! Not only does it change incentives/signals people receive, I also notice how looking at whether to press this button I am more often actually asking myself whether I actually just endorse a comment or whether I actually belief it. Which seems great. I do feel the added time considering to press a button costly, but for this particular one that seems more like a feature than a bug.

2Morpheus3y

I also notice my disappointment that this is not possible for shortforms... yet?

2Vladimir_Nesov3y

The feature works for newer posts created after it was released, including newer shortforms. If multiple posts could take on the role of shortform repositories, agreement voting would work for the newer ones.

3Raemon3y

yeah it does seem like we should just fix this.

[-]Morpheus5y*20

Summary: I have updated on being more conscientious than I thought.

Since most of the advice on 80.000 hours is aimed at high performing college students, I find it difficult how much this advice should apply to myself, who just graduated from high school. Previously I had thought of myself as talented in math (I was the best in my class with 40 students, since first grade), but mid- to below average in conscientiousness. I also feel slightly ashamed of my (hand-)writing: most of my teachers commented that my texts were too short and my writing is not ... (read more)

2Viliam5y

To say the obvious: make notes about what you learn. (I am not recommending any specific note-taking method here, only the general advice that a mediocre system you actually start using today is better than a hypothetically perfect system you only dream about.) It really sucks to spend a lot of time and work learning something, then not using it for a few years, then finding out you actually forgot everything. This usually doesn't happen at high school, because the elementary and high school education is designed as a spiral (you learn something, then four years later you learn the more advanced version of the thing). But at university: you may learn a thing once, and maybe never again. How much this means, you will only find out later, because it depends a lot on your specific school and classmates. I mean, it definitely means that you are good... but is it 1:100 good or 1:1000000 good? At high school both are impressive, but in later life you are going to compete against people who often also were the best in their classes.

3Morpheus4y

Update after a year: I am currently studying CS and I feel like I got kind of spoiled by reading "How to be a straight A student" which was mostly aimed at us-college students, and it was kind of hard to sort out which kinds of advice would apply in Germany and made the whole thing seem easier than it actually is. I am doing ok, but my grades aren't great (my best guess is that in pure grit+IQ I'm somewhere in the upper 40%). In the end, I decided that the value of this information wasn't so great after all, and now I am focusing more on how to actually gain career capital and getting better at prioritizing on a day-to-day basis.

[-]Morpheus2mo10

In the spirit of "All stable processes we shall predict, all unstable processes we shall control." I was thinking about how you would control the weather and earthquakes. One big problem for both of these is convection. For example, earthquakes are powered by hot material from inside the earth being transported out. I noticed my day-to-day intuition had been really confused by convection in solids. Intuitively, moving mass around feels much more inefficient than conduction. I still don't have great intuition for this, but one thing that helped was learning... (read more)

[-]Morpheus4mo1-2

If every private message on lesswrong or every cold email you ever wrote has received a response, you are either spending too much time writing them, are very young or aren't sending enough of them.

2Mo Putera4mo

Is this an Umeshism?

1Roman Malov4mo

I would also add: if in the group chat your messages spark lots of conversation every time, this chat is underexploited (you are not sending enough/thinking too much). (Conversely, if your messages are ignored, spend a little bit more time on them)

1Roman Malov4mo

Why would that affect the frequency of the responses? How would receivers even deduce the age of the sender?

4Morpheus4mo

I was just trying to adjust a loophole that often seemed to be missing in Umeshisms, but I think this made my statement more confusing: if you are 15 years old (the particular age is irrelevant, I am just saying an age exists), then you having sent 1-2 cold emails is not too little, nor did you invest too much time, you are just young and there weren't that many worthy occasions yet. If you have just taken a single flight in your life and missed 0, this is not large evidence that you spend too much time at airports.

[-]Morpheus5mo10

Thinking about this thread on "How could I have thought of that faster?". In practice, I noticed the phrasing doesn't work well for me and I prefer "How could I have seen this faster"? I especially like this framing for when I have identified a "blindspot", "developmental milestone" or noticing someone's wizard power is clearly hinting at a powerful learnable skill or concept I wasn't aware of and that I don't yet possess.

I feel this frame helps me to better find areas where there are cached beliefs to correct, and remember hints at the shape of the thing ... (read more)

[-]Morpheus1y10

The recent post on reliability and automation reminded me that my "textexpansion" tool Espanso is not reliable enough on Linux (Ubuntu, Gnome, X11). Anyone here using reliable alternatives?

I've been using Espanso for a while now, but its text expansions miss characters too often, which is worse than useless. I fiddled with Espanso's settings just now and set the backend to Clipboard, which seems to help with that, but it still has bugs like the special characters remaining ("@my_email_shorthand" -> "@myemail@gmail.com").

[-]Morpheus1y10

I noticed some time ago there is a big overlap between lines of hope mentioned in Garret Baker's post and lines of hope I already had. The remaining things he mentions are lines of hope that I at least can't antipredict which is rare. It's currently the top plan/model of Alignment that I would want to read a critique of (to destroy or strengthen my hopes). Since no one else seems to have written that critique yet I might write a post myself (Leave a comment if you'd be interested to review a draft or have feedback on the points below).

if singular learning

... (read more)

[-]Morpheus2y10

Testing a claim from the lesswrong_editor tag about the spoiler feature: first trying ">!":

! This should be hidden

Apparently markdown does not support ">!" for spoiler tags. now ":::spoiler ... :::"

It's hidden!

works.

[-]Morpheus2y10

Inspired by John's post on How To Make Prediction Markets Useful For Alignment Work I made two markets (see below):

I feel like there are pretty important predictions to be made around things like whether the current funding situation is going to continue as it is. It seems hard to tell, though what kind of question to ask that provides someone more value, than just reading something like the recent post on what the marginal LTFF grant looks like.

[-]Morpheus3y10

Has someone bothered moving the content on Arbital into a format where it is (more easily) accessible? By now I figured out that and where you can see all math and ai-alignment related content, but I only found that by accident, when Arbitals main page actually managed to load not like the other 5 times I clicked on its icon. I had already assumed it was nonexistent, but it's just slow as hell.

5Vladimir_Nesov3y

It mostly works lately (after a months/years period of mostly not working), but the greaterwrong viewer seems more reliable.

1Morpheus3y

Thanks! This looks like the solution I was looking for!

1Morpheus2mo

For all Arbital content, there is the Arbital scrape index. Most (all?) of that material has been incorporated into Lesswrong’s concept pages.

1Johannes C. Mayer3y

Would this not be better as a Question post?

[-]Morpheus3y10

I wonder if you could exploit instrumental convergence for IRL. For example, with humans that we lack information about, we would still guess that money would probably help them. In some sense, most of the work is probably done by the assumption that the human is rational.

[-]Morpheus3y*10

Epistemic status: Speculation

"Everyone" is misinterpreting the implications of the original "no-free-lunch theorems". Stuart Armstrong is misinterpreting the implications of his no-free-lunch theorems for value learning.

The original no-free-lunch theorems show, that if you use a terrible prior over your hypothesis, then it will not converge/learning is impossible. In practice, this is not important, because we always make the assumption that learning is possible. We call these priors "simplicity priors", but the actually important bit about these is not th... (read more)

[-]Morpheus4y10

While reading p vs. np for dummies recently, I was really intrigued by Scott's probabilistic reasoning about math questions. It occurred to me that of all science areas, math seems like a really fruitful area for betting markets, because compared to areas like psychology where you have to argue with people what results of studies actually mean, it seems mathematicians are better at getting at a consensus (it could potentially also help to uncover areas where this is not the case?) I also just remembered that There are a few math-related questions on Metacu... (read more)

[-]Morpheus3y-10

“Causality is part of the map, not the territory”. I think I had already internalized that this is true for probabilities, but not for “causality”, a concept that I don't have a solid grasp on yet. This should be sort of obvious. It's probably written somewhere in the sequences. But not realizing this made me very confused when thinking about causality in a deterministic setting after reading the post on finite factored sets in pictures (causality doesn't seem to make sense in a deterministic setting). Thanks to Lucius for making me realize this.

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3TAG3y

There isnt any strong reason to believe either "probability is in the map" or "causation is in the map", mainly because there aren't good reasons to believe it's a dichotomy.

1Morpheus3y

Hm… maybe? Do you have a specific example, or links you have in mind when you say this? I am still having trouble wrapping my head around this and plan think more about it.

1TAG3y

if you didn't get the idea from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f6ZLxEWaankRZ2Crv/probability-is-in-the-mind ...where did you get it from?

1Morpheus3y

Yeah, I know, that post. I give Jaynes most of the credit for further corrupting me. Was mostly hoping for good links for how to think about causality. Something pointing towards the solution to the problems mentioned in this post. I kinda skimmed "The book of why", but did not feel like I really understood the motivation behind do-calculus. I still don't really understand the justification between saying that xyz are random variables. It seems like saying "these observations should all be bagged into the same variable X" is already doing huge legwork in terms of what is able to cause what. I kinda wonder whether you could do a thing similar to implications in logic where you say, "assuming we put these observations all in the same bag, that implies this bag causes this other bag to have a slightly different composition", but say we bag them a bit differently, and causation looks different.

4TAG3y

Well, I responded to That Post, and you can tell it was good , because it was downvoted. Do you read the comments? Do you read non-rationalsphere material? It's not like the topic hasn't been extensively written about Its likely that mainstream won't tell you The Answer, but if there isn't an answer, you should wish to believe there is not an answer. You should not force yourself to "internalise" an answer you can't personally understand, and that has objections to it.

1Morpheus3y

Wups...that might be a bug to fix. My excuse might be that I read the post before you made the comment, but I am not sure if that is true. I think you are definitely pointing out a failure mode I've fallen into recently, a few times. But mostly I am not sure if I understood what you mean. I also think my original comment failed to communicate how my views have actually shifted, which is mostly that after fidling with binary strings a bit and trying to figure out how I would model any causal chains in that, I noticed that the simple way I wanted to do that didn't work and my naive notion for how causes work broke down. I now think, when you have a system that is fully deterministic and that in such worlds "probabilistic causality" is a property of maps of such agents, but mostly I am still very confused. I don't actually have anything that I would call solution actually.

1TAG3y

I made the comment over a year ago ... and the question was whether you read the comments in general. It should be obvious that if the territory is deterministic, the only remaining place for possibilities/probabilities to reside is in the map/mind. But it isn't at all obvious that the territory is deterministic.

1Morpheus3y

I often do read the comments, though I don't really read that intentionally, so I don't have a good estimate of how often I read comments or how many I read (probably read most comments if I find the topic interesting, and I feel like the points in the post wasn't obvious before I read it). I scroll through the "Recent discussion" stuff almost never. So I miss a lot of comments if I read a post early on and then people make comments later that I never see.

2TAG3y

The point is that there is often a good counterargument to whatever is being asserted in a post. Sometimes it's in a comment to the post itself -- which is easy and convenient-- and sometimes it's on another website,.or in a book. Either way,.rationality does not consist of forcing yourself to adopt a list of "correct" beliefs.

[+][comment deleted]4y10

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