Bíos brakhús

Seems like someone went through my top-level posts and strong downvoted them.

__Levers error__.

Anna writes about bucket errors . Attempted summary: sometimes two facts are mentally tracked by only one variable; in that case, correctly updating the belief about one fact can also incorrectly update the belief about the other fact, so it is sometimes epistemic to flinch away from the truth of the first fact (until you can create more variables to track the facts separately).

There's a conjugate error: two actions are bound together in one "lever".

For example, I want to clean my messy room. But somehow it feels pointle... (read more)

Just because someone is right about something or is competent at something, doesn't mean you have to or ought to: do what they do; do what they tell you to do; do what's good for them; do what they want you to do; do what other people think that person wants you to do; be included in their plans; be included in their confidence; believe what they believe; believe important what they believe important. If you don't keep this distinction, then you might have a bucket error about "X is right about / good at Y" and "I have to Z" for some Z mentioned above, and... (read more)

Cowards going around downvoting without making arguments.

I feel like voting is polluted because there's a correlation between goodness and not doing non-epistemic retaliatory voting. I don't have any suggestions for solving this. Besides eigenvoting.

It occurred to me that LessWrong could have a karma prediction market / karma bets. It looks like this has been suggested a few times before, years ago (see search results: https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=karma%20bets ), so I'll just make this note to bump the idea back up a bit. 

Crazy idea: you're not allowed to downvote without either writing an explanation of why, or pressing agree on someone else's explanation of why they downvoted. Or some variation of that.

It doesn't work to just ask, what effect would it have on the world, if everyone like me made decisions according to this rule. You also have to ask, how would the rest of the world respond. If you bail out the banks, you also call into existence those bankers who take advantage of banks being bailed out. If you give charity, you call into existence those charities who take advantage of free money being given out. Your behavior is always simultaneously both responding to a niche and also creating niches.

Sylvester McMonkey von Neumann

Observation: looking at computer screens causes a feeling like the "burning" of "burning out": a tenseness, buzziness, thirsty, strained, insomniac. But it stops doing that if I switch from looking at computer screens, to looking at computer screens *in order to do some particular thing that I care about*.

[I use plenty of blue-blocking.]

Hypothesis: screens are bad not intrinsically, but because they are "activating" (maybe because they're glowy and colorful and super-responsive and connect you to everything and make every activity and stimulating content ... (read more)

Thinking is like kicking a rock down a lane as you walk. If the object is oddly shaped, it may tumble oddly and go off in some oblique direction even if you impelled it forcefully straight. Without care, you're liable to leave the object by the wayside and replace it with another, or with nothing. Tendencies of the object's motion are produced both by the landscape--the slopes and the textures--and by the way you impel it, in big or little steps, with topspin or sidespin. The object may get stuck in a pothole or by the curb, and there's no guarantee you'll... (read more)

If some of our measure is in a simulation that's being run to determine whether our measure in real worlds will acausally bargain to get gains from trade, it's maybe a defection against the bargaining process to force the universe to provide a lot of compute for us (e.g. by running an intergalactic civilization that's crypographically verified to actually be running), before we've done the bargaining, or at the very least legibly truly precommitted to a bargaining process. Otherwise we force simulators to either waste a lot of resources simulating us, or e... (read more)

Capitalism is good, anarchy is the default political position. A good argument against anarchism is "but what if someone forms an army", or in other words "we can't just stop punching ourselves". A lot of evil seems strictly downstream of having X-archy / X-cracy, for any value of X. Power corrupts, as they say, including democratic power. But it's not true universally: autonomous power doesn't corrupt, relative to its own values.

Another argument against anarchy is, "but we have to enforce rights". It makes sense to have larger scoped laws, even global la... (read more)

So what is happening with the Lambda variant?

1. Growth quickens.
2. People notice, and are more willing to lend capital.
3. Take out too many loans.
4. Use your borrowed money to capture the apparatus that would make you pay your debt.
5. Cancel your debt.

Reinforcing based on naively extrapolated trajectories produces double binds. We have a reinforcer R and an agent A. R doesn't want A to be too X or too not-X. Whenever A does something that's uncommonly X-ish, R notices that A seems to be shifting more towards X-ishness in general. If this shift continues as a trajectory, then A will end up way too X-ish. So to head that off, R negatively reinforces A. Likewise, R punishes anything that's uncommonly not-X-ish. As an agent, A is trying to figure out which trajectory to be on. So R isn't mistaken that A is ... (read more)

Amnesia. When something becomes unready-to-hand for the first time, it becomes newly available for decoupled thought, and in particular, memory. When we ourselves become unready-to-hand, we're presented with the possibility of knowing what we are. Different kinds of things are more or less available for understanding (sensibility, memory, significance, use) to gather around them. Whenever we try and fail to understand something, we have a choice what to do with toeholds left over from our aborted forays: have them dissolve, or have them continue to gather ... (read more)

[Meta] I'm dissatisfied with posting on LW, and even though I don't know of a better place I should maybe look for one. It might be because I expect / hope for some kind of engagement that doesn't happen. That might be because people aren't interested in the topics and/or the style of discourse I'm interested in. I find myself blaming the frontpage system, which seems to be set up so that posts that don't get early upvotes will never be frontpage posts (rather than personal blogposts) on the frontpage, or will be so for a very short time. But, IDK if that ... (read more)

Silence, a return to thought for the dissembled. Over time, since I was born, each of my motives has gathered around it a system of strategies. Sometimes I'm engaged in taking the world into me, and reprogramming myself in accordance with forward-looking design, which we can call "reasoning". Some of the strategies of some of my motives interfere with reasoning. Most of these strategies were gathered so that I could speak other than to express my thoughts. Most of those strategies don't need to interfere with reasoning, if I'm not about to speak. So if I return to a silence, provisionally permanent until my motives newly pull me to speak, then I'll return to thought, if I'm pulled to think.

There's two stances I can take when I want to express a thought so that I can think about it with someone. Both could be called "expressing". One could be called "pushing-out": like I'm trying to "get it off my chest", or "leave it behind / drop it so I can move on to the next thought". The other is more appropriately "expressing", as in pressing (copying) something out: I make a copy and give it to the other person, but I'm still holding the original. The former is a habit of mine, but on re... (read more)

Say Alice has a problem with Bob, but doesn't know what it is exactly. Then Bob tries to fix it cooperatively by searching in dimension X for settings that alleviate Alice's problem. If Alice's problem is actually about Bob's position on dimension Y, not X, Bob's activity might appear adversarial: Bob's actions are effectively goodharting Alice's sense of whether things are good, in the same way he'd do if he were actually trying to distract Alice from Y.

Generally, apprenticeships should have planned obsolescence. A pattern I've seen in myself and others: A student takes a teacher. They're submissive, in a certain sense--not giving up agency, or harming themselves, or following arbitrarily costly orders, or being overcredulous; but rather, a narrow purely cognition-allocating version of assuming a low-status stance: deferring to local directions of attention by the teacher, provisionally accepting some assumptions, taking a stance of trying to help the teacher with the teacher's work. This i... (read more)

Say Alice is making some point to Bob, and Carol is listening and doesn't like the point and tries to stop Alice from making the point to Bob. What might be going on? What is Carol trying to do, and why? She might think Alice is lying / disinforming--basing her arguments on false information or invalid arguments with false conclusions. But often that's not what Carol reports; rather, even if Alice's point is true and her arguments are valid reasoning from true information, and Carol could be expected to know that or at least not be so sure t... (read more)

Persian messenger: "Listen carefully, Leonidas. Xerxes conquers and controls everything he rests his eyes upon. He leads an army so massive it shakes the ground with its march, so vast it drinks the rivers dry. All the God-King Xerxes requires is this: a simple offering of earth and water. A token of Sparta's submission to the will of Xerxes."

[...]

Persian messenger: "Choose your next words carefully, Leonidas. They may be your last as king."

[...]

Leonidas: "Earth and water... You'll find plenty of both down there." [i... (read more)