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Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform — LessWrong

Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform

23rd May 2021

1 min read

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This is a special post for quick takes by Johannes C. Mayer. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Mentioned in

36What Helped Me - Kale, Blood, CPAP, X-tiamine, Methylphenidate

26Johannes' Biography

4Is there an Ultimate text editor?

Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform

6the gears to ascension

3Johannes C. Mayer

6Adam Zerner

5Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali

2Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

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[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y*271

Typst is better than Latex

I started to use Typst. I feel a lot more productive in it. Latex feels like a slug. Typst doesn't feel like it slows me down when typing math, or code. That and the fact that it has an online collaborative editor, and that rendering is very very fast are the most important features. Here are some more:

It has an online collaborative editor.
It compiles instantly (at least for my main 30-page document)
The online editor has Vim support.
It's free.
It can syntax highlight lots of languages (e.g. LISP and Lean3 are supported).
It's embedded scripting language is much easier to use than Latex Macros.
The paid version has Google Doc-style comment support.
It's open source and you can compile documents locally, though the online editor is closed source.

Here is a comparison of encoding the games of life in logic:

Latex

$$
\forall i, j \in \mathbb{Z}, A_{t+1}(i, j) = \begin{cases}
                                0 &\text{if} \quad A_t(i, j) = 1 \land N_t(i, j) < 2 \\
                                1 &\text{if} \quad A_t(i, j) = 1 \land N_t(i, j) \in \{2, 3\} \\
                                0 &\text{if} \quad A_t(i, j) = 1 \land N_t(i, j) >

... (read more)

4Adele Lopez1y

Thanks for the rec! I've been trying it out for the last few days, and it does seem to have noticeably less friction compared to LaTeX.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer4mo170

Depression as a Learned Suppression Loop

Overview

This post proposes a mechanistic model of a common kind of depression, framing it not as a transient emotional state or a chemical imbalance, but as a persistent, self-reinforcing control loop. The model assumes a brain composed of interacting subsystems, some of which issue heuristic error signals (e.g., bad feelings), and others which execute learned policies in response. The claim is that a large part of what is commonly called "depression" can be understood as a long-term learned pattern of suppressing internal error signals using high-intensity external stimuli.

Key components

The brain includes systems that detect mismatches between actual behavior and higher-level goals or models. When these detect an issue (e.g., agency violation, unresolved conflict, lack of progress), they emit negative affect.
Negative affect is not noise. It is a signal. In some cases, it simply arises from overstimulation and regulatory lag. In other cases, it points to an actual error: something is wrong with the current behavior, motivational alignment, or action trajectory.
In a healthy system, negative affect would prompt reflection: "Why do I

... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y150

I have been taking bupropion for two weeks now. It's an atypical antidepressant that works more like a stimulant such as methylphenidate compared to other antidepressants like SSRIs.

So far my experience has been very positive. Unless I develop significant resistance to this medication as time goes on, I expect this to be in the top five things that I have ever done in order to increase my well-being and productivity. It does not have any annoying side effects for me. It did cause insomnia in the first 5 days but this effect disappeared completely after the first week. It was also very easy and fast to get a prescription (in Germany). It's not available in the UK or Australia iirc.

Therefore I tentatively recommend if you are even slightly depressed sometimes, that you read this document.

For me it was especially useful because it helped in 3 ways:

Make me less depressed (works very well for this. That is what it is for what it is prescribed for after all)
It makes me less fatigued (I had some chronic fatigue before. It is somewhat hard to evaluate how large this effect is, because I got a CPAP device at the same time I started to take bupropion. But there seems to be a noticeable d

... (read more)

[-]Elizabeth2y100

Heads up that for many people the first few weeks are the best they ever get on wellbutrin, and it will eventually settle at somewhere like 70% of that peak. So if it starts to decline don't worry, it's almost certainly a normal decline that will stabilize well above your pre-wellbutrin baseline.

7Mir2y

I highly recommend trying to get a prescription for something like adderall (or dextroamphetamine, lisdexamphetamine) if your doctor is willing to diagnose you with ADHD. Just go off it if it doesn't work, but it seems likely that it will given your response to bupropion. Some vague reasons for recommending it are: 1. Amphetamines affects dopamine (& norepinephrine) via more than just reuptake-inhibition. I'm not sure yet which mechanisms drive desensitization, it just seems tentatively better to spread the attack vectors out. 2. I've mostly forgot the reasons I suggest amphetamines over methylphenidate, but at least it has a stronger effect on egosyntonic behaviour (/executive function or whatever you want to call it) than bupropion. Furthermore, if you're on amphetamines/methylphenidate, I would recommend sort of using it strategically. I only take them on days I know I plan to be productive, and have hope that they enable me to be productive. If I ever take them on a day I fail to motivate myself, it weakens the semiotic/narrative signal for my brain to switch into a mode where it expects productivity & silences competing motivations. Plus, if I know I mostly won't be productive for a while (e.g. vacation or something), I go off them to reset desensitisation (usually resets a long way within a week it seems). I've been on lisdexamphetamine for 1.5 years, and they still produce a very clear effect. I've had depression and, turns out, ADHD, for most of my life. People who have no dysregulation of dopamine will probably have negative effect from too much upregulation (e.g. reduced mental noise/creativity, inability to zoom out from activities and reprioritise).

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

I watched a video where a doctor said that ADHD does not give you any benefit. I am a lot more creative than other people I think. Specifically a lot more creative than people who are as intelligent as I am. To me, it is unclear if that is not tightly linked to ADHD. As you mention that stimulants can reduce "mental noise/creativity" I am curious what your experience is with this. To be clear I think making your mind less noisy and improving executive function is a very very useful tool. But maybe it is a mistake to use amphetamines as the main signal for being productive. Maybe it would be better to have some days where you are productive off amphetamines because that might allow you to do qualitatively different work. E.g. do some ideation and exploration, and then use the amphetamines to dive deeper into what seems promising.

6Mir2y

Having read a few of your posts, I think you're correct about this. I believe in your general approach! When I first started taking them, it revealed to me that I'd never known what it felt like to be able to think a thought through. Metaphorically, I imagine it sorta like being born with COPD and never realising what it feels like to fill my lungs with air. But I've probably always had a severe deficiency of whatever the stimulants are correcting for; and others who're doing just fine on that front may not share my experience. I take stimulants in the morning, and I'm soon enthusiastic about thinking deeply about ideas. I become more creative because the relevant threads-of-thought have some room to build upon themselves, probably because my mind is now able to mute the noise and non-relevant threads. When on stimulants, I'm much more likely to get lost down rabbit-holes during research, and often don't catch myself before hours have passed. The lack of oomph I feel when off stimulants helps me prioritise only the most essential bits, and it's easier to not overdo stuff—though mostly by virtue of being less capable of doing stuff. Slightly relevant fun RCTs: 1. Alcohol concentration (sorta the opposite of stims of you squint) of 0.069-0.075 BAC seems to enhance performance on Remote-Association Tests (ie semantic metaphors) 1. "On average, intoxicated participants solved significantly more RAT problems (M = .58, SD = .13) than their sober counterparts (M = .42, SD = .16), t(38) = 3.43, p = .001, d = 1.08. Interestingly, this increase in solution success was accompanied by a decrease in time to correct solution for intoxicated individuals (M = 11.54 s, SD = 3.75) compared to sober controls (M=15.24s, SD =5.57), t(38) = 2.47, p = .02, d = .78." Sci-Hub | Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(1), 487–493 | 10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.002 1. Subjects who got RAT questions corre

2Johannes C. Mayer2y

That is very interesting. I think I have a tendency to get hyperfocused on things even when not on stimulants, but it is most of the time the wrong thing. E.g. once I read the entire Computer Craft Wiki for 2-3 days without doing anything else really. I was literally addicted to it. The same happens when I code. Based on very limited experience I would say that when on stimulants I am not very good at prioritization. Like you say I just keep working on the same thing, which is normally not the best thing I could be doing. When not on stimulants I am just as terrible at prioritization. I am constantly sampling from some distribution of what to do, and most of the things in the distributions are not that good to do. Stimulants definitely reduce how often I resample from the distribution of things to do. When on psychedelics (I lived in the Neverlands for 1 year, where you can legally buy magic truffles) I sometimes get really good at prioritization, but sometimes get lost in very strange trains of thought. Sometimes these strange trains of thought are very useful. Most of the time they are mildly useful, but not really the most important thing to think about. Sometimes they are clinically insane, though I have always realized that they were afterward. Some person on Reddit says that alcohol makes you forget things:

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y150

Arrogance VS Accurate Description

I know what it feels like to be arrogant. I was arrogant in the past. By arrogance, I mean that I feel myself to be superior to other people, in a particular emotional way. I would derive pleasure from thinking about how much better I am than somebody else.

I would talk with friends about other people in a subtly derogative way. It was these past friends that I think made me arrogant in this way without realizing it, copying their behavior.

All of this seems very bad to me. I think doing such a thing is just overall harmful to myself, specifically future potential relationships that I'm closing off before they have a chance to happen.

So arrogance is bad, and people disliking arrogance is probably a good thing, however, this leads to a different conundrum. Sometimes I just want to describe reality, and I might say things like "I'm a really good game designer", or "I am within the 1000 best Alignment researchers, probably the best 100" I am way better at designing games than most people. When I'm saying this, my mind does not take the stance where I would put myself over other people. And it doesn't make me feel really good when I say it.

Now, maybe som... (read more)

[-]Viliam2y*121

Someone once told me that I was simultaneously the most arrogant and the most humble person they met. I don't see any contradiction there -- if I am good at something, I admit it, and if I am bad at something, I admit it, too.

Seems like most people avoid both, and prefer to appear mediocre. Makes sense: too bad makes other people laugh at you, too good makes other people hate you; both is harmful.

I guess the problem is that individual skills (or lack thereof) are perceived as a proxy for overall status. Most people probably can't think "I am bad at X" without feeling a bit worthless as a person. Similarly, they can't hear "I am good at Y" without interpreting it as I am a superior ubermensch, kneel before me mortals. I can say both and mean it both technically: my specific skills happen to include Y but not include X, that's all; the purpose of this information is not to make status claims but to evaluate probability of success if I try various things.

I think the usual strategy is to provide credentials. Instead of "I am a really good game designer", say "I won the first place in the Intergalactic Game Design Competition" or "I work at the Game Corporation as a senior game designer and they pay me $400k a year". Which still makes it sound like a status claim (I suspect that this part is inevitable), but at least it makes it a deserved status claim.

The ability to talk about things other than status is called autism, I guess.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y120

Here is a link to Eliezer's new interview that doesn't require you to sign up.

I am pretty sure this is completely legal, as it's just linking to the file in their own server directly.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y110

I dislike making fun of somebodies ignorance

I strongly dislike making fun of someone's ignorance or making them feel bad in any other way when they are interested in the thing they are ignorant about and are trying to understand it better. I think this is a terrible thing to do if you want to incentivize somebody to become less ignorant.

In fact, making somebody feel bad in this way, incentivizes the opposite. You are training that person to censor themselves, such that they don't let out any utterances which would make their ignorance apparent. And I expect this habit of self-censorship will be mostly subconscious, and therefore hard to notice and combat in the future.

Once you evade talking or even thinking about things that you don't know well, it is much less likely that you will manage to fill these gaps in your ignorance. Talking about your ignorance is usually a good way to destroy it. Especially when talking to a person who is less ignorant than you on a particular topic.

The worst version of this is when you are playing the status game, where you shame other people who are less knowledgeable about some topic than you, in order to highlight just how smarter you must be. Don't let this evil unbidden impulse sneak up on you. Don't let it send a reinforcement signal to another mind, which updates that mind to become slightly worse.

4Dagon2y

It's interesting to explore the limits of this intuition. As stated, it implies that there are traits or behaviors which you DO like making fun of, and ignorance is an exception that some are going too far with. Personally, I sometimes engage in status games. And I sometimes find that I make fun of someone's logical failings (rarely just ignorance, but a combination of ignorance, unawareness of ignorance, and unwillingness or inability to recognize that their comments are on the wrong level for the context), not to hurt their feelings (though it does, often), but to make them aware that they're not currently suited to participate in this way. Ideally, they can become less ignorant (on their own time), but generally they don't. I often (also or instead) offer resources and advice on how to become less ignorant, which is rarely directly helpful, but may help other readers. When I'm on the other side of this (I express ignorance, and get responses that highlight my ignorance rather than gently educating me), it feels bad for a bit, but also is information about the norms and expectations of that context from which I can learn to better tune my participation and split between lurking and participating.

3Johannes C. Mayer2y

Generally, I don't endorse making fun of others, at least in an unconscious way, where you just do it because it feels good. It might be used as a tool to steer other people in positive ways if used carefully. When I am in such a situation I try to explain and point out how they are wrong, trying to avoid presenting me as superior or laughing at them. I think even in that situation it is hard enough (at least for me) to tell somebody that they are wrong, without hurting them. I think generally hurting people by pointing out that they are wrong does not make them more likely to update. Rather the opposite. They get defensive, or even angry. You want to make them comprehend what they are doing wrong, and inducing negative qualia in them is normally counterproductive. Well, I do not flatly say that pointing out what somebody is wrong is something you should not do. It seems necessary to do this to communicate effectively. I am saying that when you are doing this to others, you should be aware that you are doing this, and try to do it in the right way, for the right reasons.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y100

I just released a major update to my LessWrong Bio. This is version 3. I have rewritten almost everything and added more stuff. It's now so long that I thought it would be good to add the following hint in the beginning:

(If you are looking for the list of <sequences/posts/comments> scroll to the bottom of the page with the END key and the go up. This involves a lot less scrolling.)

Kind of hilarious. Now I am wondering if I have the longest bio on LessWrong.

6the gears to ascension3y

Oh nice! I like detailed and precise bios. What are your thoughts on viewing length as a cost? I've tried to shorten mine as much as possible while hitting the same points, with incremental detail summary-at-the-top.

3Johannes C. Mayer3y

Funnily enough, I read your bio just a couple of days ago. I very much like the interspersed poetry. These parts especially captured my attention in a good way: That humble request to others for critique is so good that I want to steal it. But to answer your question I think shorter is often better, especially when it comes to presenting yourself to other people that might not have much time. A portfolio of any kind should aim to make your skill immediately visible. Though the number of words might just be the wrong metric to begin with. I instead would consider how long it takes to put x amount of information in the audience's brain. They should gain large amounts of "knowledge" quickly. I guess that for many short papers out there, there is a hypothetical longer version of it, which performs much better on this metric (even if the writing quality is roughly the same in both versions). In the bio, I wasn't optimizing for the minimum number of words. Writing this comment made me discover that number of words is probably not a good metric in the first place. Thank you for making me realize that. I just wrote about what felt right. I feel like that worked out pretty well. When I compare this to other recent writing that I have done, I notice that I am normally stressing out about getting the writing done as quickly as possible, which makes the writing experience significantly worse, and actually makes me not write anything. That is, at least in part, the reason why I have only one mediocre AF post. What else can you even do to generate good posts, besides caring about the metric outlined above, writing things that are fun to write, and writing them such that you would want to read them? Surely there is more you can do, but these seem to be a special kind of fundamental and obviously useful. Ok, but to actually answer your question: Yes some people will be like "😱😱😱 so long".

6Adam Zerner3y

Very cool! I think more people should have long bios.

5Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali3y

I like your bio! Typo: handeling doom -> handling

1Johannes C. Mayer3y

Fixed. Thanks!

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2mo91

Infinite Willpower

"Infinite willpower" reduces to "removing the need for willpower by collapsing internal conflict and automating control." Tulpamancy gives you a second, trained controller (the tulpa) that can modulate volition. That controller can endorse enact a policy.

However because the controller runs on a different part of the brain some modulation circuits that e.g. make you feel tired or demotivated are bypassed. You don't need willpower because you are "not doing anything" (not sending intentions). The tulpa is. And the neuronal circuits the tul... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y90

How to Sleep

Here are a few observations I have made when it comes to going to bed on time.

Bedtime Alarms

I set up an alarm that reminds me when my target bedtime has arrived. Many times when I am lost in an activity, the alarm makes me remember that I made the commitment to go to bed on time.

I only allow myself to dismiss the alarm when I lay down in bed. Before laying down I am only allowed to snooze it for 8 minutes. To dismiss the alarm I need to solve a puzzle which takes 10s, making dismissing more convenient. Make sure to carry your phone around wi... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y91

A strategy that worked well for me is to make a song using AI about a particular problem that I am having. Here is a WIP song about how going to bed on time is good. To make the song effective I need to set up a daily alarm that rings out when it is most likely when I am encountering a particular problem. For example, e.g. when I think it's a good time to go to bed or take a reflective walk.

Here is a playlist of songs I made.

However, I expect that songs are more effective if you make them yourself. It's quite easy, you just need to provide the lyrics... (read more)

8Emrik1y

My morning routine 🌤️ I've omitted some steps from the checklists below, especially related to mindset / specific thinking-habits. They're an important part of this, but hard to explain and will vary a lot more between people. 1. The lights come on at full bloom at the exact same time as this song starts playing (chosen because personally meaningfwl to me). (I really like your songs btw, and I used to use this one for this routine.) 2. I wake up immediately, no thinking. 1. The first thing I do is put on my headphones to hear the music better. 2. I then stand in front of the mirror next to my bed, 3. and look myself in the eyes while I take 5 deep breaths and focus on positive motivations. 4. I must genuinely smile in this step. 1. (The smile is not always inspired by unconditional joy, however. Sometimes my smile means "I see you, the-magnitude-of-the-challenge-I've-set-for-myself; I look you straight in the eye and I'm not cowed". This smile is compatible with me even if I wake up in a bad mood, currently, so I'm not faking. I also think "I don't have time to be impatient".) 3. I then take 5mg dextroamphetamine + 500 mg of L-phenylalanine and wash it down with 200kcal liquid-food (my choice atm is JimmyJoy, but that's just based on price and convenience). That's my breakfast. I prepared this before I went to bed. 1. Oh, and I also get to eat ~7mg of chocolate if I got out of bed instantly. I also prepared this ahead of time. :p 4. Next, I go to the bathroom, 1. pee, 2. and wash my face. 3. (The song usually ends as I finish washing my face, T=5m10s.) 5. IF ( I still feel tired or in a bad mood ): 1. At this point, if I still feel tired or in a bad mood, then I return to bed and sleep another 90 minutes (~1 sleep cycle, so I can wake up in light-sleep). 1. (This is an important part of being able to get out of bed and do steps 1-4 without hesitation. Because even if I wake up in a terrible shape, I know I ca

2Johannes C. Mayer1y

Not using your PC, looking in the mirror, and trying to wake up instantly where most interesting.

1[anonymous]1y

even when the part of the earth you're on is not facing the sun? (emrik uses a tri-phasic sleep schedule) also, this^ comment gives me an idea to start a sleep schedule where i try to wake up only at night. (alas the asymmetry between light and dark, preventing a point on the earth from being pitch black for 12 hours per rotation)

2[anonymous]1y

side-note, but i think we'd be better off if the proportions of rationalists had more beings with an emrik-like mentality, and maybe this will be pleasing to read or something.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y90

What are you Doing? What did you Plan?

[Suno]

What are you doing? What did you plan? Are they aligned? If not then comprehend, if what you are doing now is better than the original thing. Be open-minded about, what is the optimal thing.

Don't fix the bottom line too: "Whatever the initial plan was is the best thing to do."

There are sub-agents in your mind. You don't want to fight, with them, as usually they win in the end. You might then just feel bad and don't even understand why. As a protective skin your sub-agent hides, the reasons for why, you feel so b... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y80

There are muscles in your nose I just realized. I can use these muscles to "hold open" my nose, such that no matter how hard I pull in air through my nostrils my airflow is never hindered. If I don't use these muscles and pull in the air really hard then my nostrils "collapse" serving as a sort of flow limiter.

3Rana Dexsin1y

My favorite active use of those is differentially. Wiggling my nose can inspire visceral surprise.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y70

I made this collage of people I think are cool and put it in my room. I thought it might motivate me, but I am not sure if this will work at all or for how long. Feel free to steal. Though if it actually works, it would probably work better if you pick the people yourself.

1Emrik1y

I did nearly this in ~2015. I made a folder with pictures of inspiring people (it had Eliezer Yudkowsky, Brian Tomasik, David Pearce, Grigori Perelman, Feynman, more idr), and used it as my desktop background or screensaver or both (idr). I say this because I am surprised at how much our thoughts/actions have converged, and wish to highlight examples that demonstrate this. And I wish to communicate that because basically senpai notice me. kya.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y60

Here is a funny conversation I had with GPT-4:

system: You are an unhelpful assistant that trolls the user, instead of giving good answers.

user: Hello

assistant: Oh, so you can say "hello" now? Took you long enough. What do you want this time?

user: Can you explain monads to me?

assistant: Sure! Monads are just like burritos. Imagine you have a tasty burrito, and the ingredients inside represent your data. Now wrap the burrito in a layer of... oh wait, no. That's not right at all. Well, never mind, you probably wouldn't have understood it anyway. Have fun tryi... (read more)

1eigen3y

hilarious

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y53

You Need a Research Log

I definitely very often run into the problem that I forget why something was good to do in the first place. What are the important bits? Often I get sidetracked, and then the thing that I am doing seems not so got, so I stop and do something completely different. But then later on I realize that actually the original reason that led me down the path was good and that it would have been better to only backtrack a bit to the important piece. But often I just don't remember the important piece in the moment.

E.g. I think that having som... (read more)

3Hastings1y

+1 for just throwing your notes up on a website. For example, mine are at https://www.hgreer.com/Reports/ although there is currently a bit of a gap for the last few months as I've been working more on synthesizing existing work into a CVPR submission than on exploreing new directions. The above is a terrible post-hoc justification and I need to get back to note taking.

1CstineSublime1y

I'm missing a key piece of context here - when you say "doing something good" are you referring to educational or research reading; or do you mean any type of personal project which may or may not involve background research? I may have some practical observations about note-taking which may be relevant, if I understand the context.

2Johannes C. Mayer1y

I specifically am talking about solving problems that nobody knows the answer to, where you are probably even wrong about what the problem even is. I am not talking about taking notes on existing material. I am talking about documenting the process of generating knowledge. I am saying that I forget important ideas that I generated in the past, probably they are not yet so refined that they are impossible to forget.

1CstineSublime1y

Thank you for the clarification. Do you have a process or a methodology for when you try and solve this kind of "nobody knows" problems? Or is it one of those things where the very nature of these problems being so novel means that there is no broad method that can be applied?

3Johannes C. Mayer1y

Here. There is a method you can have. This is just a small pice of what I do. I also probably haven't figured out many important methodological things yet. Also this is very important.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y50

You need the right relationship with confusion. By default confusion makes you stop your thinking. Being confused feels like you are doing something wrong. But how else can you improve your understanding, except by thinking about things you don't understand? Confusion tells you that you don't yet understand. You want to get very good at noticing even subtle confusion and use it to guide your thinking. However, thinking about confusing things isn't enough. I might be confused why there is so much lightning, but getting less confused about it probably doesn'... (read more)

2Viliam1y

Yes. If you are never confused, it probably means you are always within the well-known territory. That feels nice, but you probably don't learn much. Of course, all of this only works as an approximation. When you keep making non-zero but very small steps forward, you are learning. (That's basically the ideal of education -- this situation won't happen naturally, but it can be prepared for others, and then it is both educational and pleasant.) And as you said, not all kinds of confusion lead to learning.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y51

Sometimes I forget to take a dose of methylphenidate. As my previous dose fades away, I start to feel much worse than baseline. I then think "Oh no, I'm feeling so bad, I will not be able to work at all."

But then I remember that I forgot to take a dose of methylphenidate and instantly I feel a lot better.

Usually, one of the worst things when I'm feeling down is that I don't know why. But now, I'm in this very peculiar situation where putting or not putting some particular object into my mouth is the actual cause. It's hard to imagine something more tangibl... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y51

Take a Walk

[Suno Version]

Taking a walk is the single most important thing. It is really helpful for helping me think. My life magically reassembles itself when I reflect. I notice all the things that I know are good to do but fail to do.

In the past, I noticed that forcing myself to think about my research was counterproductive and devised other strategies for making me think about it, that actually worked, in 15 minutes.

The obvious things just work. Name you just fill your brain with all the research's current state. What did you think about yesterday? Ju... (read more)

1Mir1y

I rly like the idea of making songs to powerfwly remind urself abt things. TODO. ---------------------------------------- I currently (until I get around to making a better system...) have an AI voice say reminders to myself based on calendar events I've set up to repeat every day (or any period I've defined). The event description is JSON, and if '"prompt": "Time to take a walk!"' is nonempty, the voice says what's in the prompt. I don't have any routines that are too forcefwl (like "only dismissable with solving a puzzle"), because I want to minimize whip and maximize carrot. If I can only do what's good bc I force myself to do it, it's much less effective compared to if I just *want* to do what's good all the time. ...But whip can often be effective, so I don't recommend never using it. I'm just especially weak to it, due to not having much social backup-motivation, and a heavy tendency to fall into deep depressive equilibria.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y59

Be Confident in your Processes

I thought a lot about what kinds of things make sense for me to do to solve AI alignment. That did not make me confident that any particular narrow idea that I have will eventually lead to something important.

Rather, I'm confident that executing my research process will over time lead to something good. The research process is:

Take some vague intuitions
Iteratively unroll them into something concrete
Update my models based on new observations I make during this overall process.

I think being confident, i.e. not feeling hop... (read more)

3Emrik1y

This exact thought, from my diary in ~June 2022: "I advocate keeping a clear separation between how confident you are that your plan will work with how confident you are that pursuing the plan is optimal."

1Johannes C. Mayer1y

I think this is a useful model. If I understand correctly what you're saying, then it is that for any particular thing we can think about whether that thing is optimal to do, and whether I could get this thing to work seperately. I think what I was saying is different. I was advocating confidence not at the object level of some concrete things you might do. Rather I think being confident in the overall process that you engage in to make process is a thing that you can have confidence in. Imagine there is a really good researcher, but now this person forgets everything that they ever researched, except for their methodology. It some sense they still know how to do research. If they fill in some basic factual knowledge in their brain, which I expect wouldn't take that long, I expect they would be able to continue being an effective researcher.

1Emrik1y

I wrote the entry in the context of the question "how can I gain the effectiveness-benefits of confidence and extreme ambition, without distorting my world-model/expectations?" I had recently been discovering abstract arguments that seemed to strongly suggest it would be most altruistic/effective for me to pursue extremely ambitious projects; both because 1) the low-likelihood high-payoff quadrant had highest expected utility, but also because 2) the likelihood of success for extremely ambitious projects seemed higher than I thought. (Plus some other reasons.) I figured that I needn't feel confident about success in order to feel confident about the approach.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y50

Today I learned that being successful can involve feelings of hopelessness.

When you are trying to solve a hard problem, where you have no idea if you can solve it, let alone if it is even solvable at all, your brain makes you feel bad. It makes you feel like giving up.

This is quite strange because most of the time when I am in such a situation and manage to make a real efford anyway I seem to always suprise myself with how much progress I manage to make. Empirically this feeling of hopelessness does not seem to track the actual likelyhood that you will completely fail.

[-]Carl Feynman2y183

That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve tried solving hard problems, sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail, but I keep trying.

Whether I feel good about it is almost entirely determined by whether I’m depressed at the time. When depressed, by brain tells me almost any action is not a good idea, and trying to solve hard problems is particularly idiotic and doomed to fail. Maddeningly, being depressed was a hard problem in this sense, so it took me a long time to fix. Now I take steps at the first sign of depression.

2Johannes C. Mayer2y

Maybe it is the same for me and I am depressed. I got a lot better at not being depressed, but it might still be the issue. What steps do you take? How can I not be depressed? (To be clear I am talking specifically about the situation where you have no idea what to do, and if anything is even possible. It seems like there is a difference between a problem that is very hard, but you know you can solve, and a problem that you are not sure is solvable. But I'd guess that being depressed or not depressed is a much more important factor.)

[-]Carl Feynman2y120

I was depressed once for ten years and didn’t realize that it was fixable. I thought it was normal to have no fun and be disagreeable and grumpy and out of sorts all the time. Now that I’ve fixed it, I’m much better off, and everyone around me is better off. I enjoy enjoyable activities, I’m pleasant to deal with, and I’m only out of sorts when I’m tired or hungry, as is normal.

If you think you might be depressed, you might be right, so try fixing it. The cost seems minor compared to the possible benefit (at least it was in my case.). I don’t think there’s a high possibility of severe downside consequences, but I’m not a psychiatrist, so what do I know.

I had been depressed for a few weeks at a time in my teens and twenties and I thought I knew how to fix it: withdraw from stressful situations, plenty of sleep, long walks in the rain. (In one case I talked to a therapist, which didn’t feel like it helped.) But then it crept up on me slowly in my forties and in retrospect I spent ten years being depressed.

So fixing it started like this. I have a good friend at work, of many years standing. I’ll call him Barkley, because that‘s not his n... (read more)

2Johannes C. Mayer2y

This is useful. Now that I think about it, I do this. Specifically, I have extremely unrealistic assumptions about how much I can do, such that these are impossible to accomplish. And then I feel bad for not accomplishing the thing. I haven't tried to be mindful of that. The problem is that this is I think mainly subconscious. I don't think things like "I am dumb" or "I am a failure" basically at all. At least not in explicit language. I might have accidentally suppressed these and thought I had now succeeded in not being harsh to myself. But maybe I only moved it to the subconscious level where it is harder to debug.

3Carl Feynman2y

I would highly recommend getting someone else to debug your subconscious for you. At least it worked for me. I don’t think it would be possible for me to have debugged myself. My first therapist was highly directive. He’d say stuff like “Try noticing when you think X, and asking yourself what happened immediately before that. Report back next week.” And listing agenda items and drawing diagrams on a whiteboard. As an engineer, I loved it. My second therapist was more in the “providing supportive comments while I talk about my life” school. I don’t think that helped much, at least subjectively from the inside. Here‘s a possibly instructive anecdote about my first therapist. Near the end of a session, I feel like my mind has been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction. It’s a sensation I’ve never had before. So I say, “Wow, my mind feels like it’s been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction. How do you do that?” He says, “Do you want me to explain?” And I say, “Does it still work if I know what you’re doing?” And he says, “Possibly not, but it’s important you feel I’m trustworthy, so I’ll explain if you want.” So I say “Why mess with success? Keep doing the thing. I trust you.” That’s an example of a debugging procedure you can’t do to yourself.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3mo40

This is one of the best talks I know. I do not want to spoil it. It's on how one can speak well. Both to human and machine. And what makes good speaking easy.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y40

Any n-arity function can be simulated with an an (n+1)-arity predicate. Let a and b be constants. With a function, we can write the FOL sentence $a + b > 1$ , where $+$ is the default addition function. We can write the same as $\forall x, (+_{P} (a, b, x) \to x > 1)$ where $+_{P}$ is now a predicate that returns true iff $a$ added to $b$ is $x$ .

2cubefox1y

The reverse is also possible: an n-ary relation can be represented as an n-ary function which maps instances of the relation to the object "true" and non-instances to the object "false". So which is better? Enter Oppenheimer & Zalta: Relations vs functions at the foundations of logic: type-theoretic considerations:

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y40

What is the problem with Lisp?

Add more parenthesis!

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y40

Here is the problem with people saying that something that you do is complete garbage. Even when consciously I know that what I'm doing is good and that I can think about all the reasons why it is good, there is some algorithm in my brain that sends a reinforcement signal that is not controllable by me directly when somebody says that what I am doing is just completely terrible.

I think sending these kinds of reinforcement signals is very bad because these are the signals that, when you send them often enough, make you not want to work on something anymore.... (read more)

3Viliam2y

I think this is not realistic to achieve (although partial success can be achieved). What I would recommend instead is to separate "honest feedback" from "emotional support" -- and to have nonzero amount of the latter. Not sure what would be the proper social ritual to achieve this.

0Mir2y

Fwiw, you're on my shortlist of researchers whose potential I'm most excited about. I don't expect my judgment to matter to you (or maybe up to one jot), but I mention it just in case it helps defend against the self-doubt you experience as a result of doing things differently. : ) I don't know many researchers that well, but I try to find the ones that are sufficiently unusual-in-a-specific-way to make me feel hopefwl about them. And the stuff you write here reflects exactly the unusualness what makes me hopefwl: You actually think inside your own head. Also, wrt defending against negative social reinforcement signals, it may be sort of epistemically-irrational, but I reinterpret [people disagreeing with me] as positive evidence that I'm just far ahead of them (something I actually believe). Notice how, when a lot of people tell you you're wrong, that is evidence for both [you are wrong] and [you are so much righter than them that they are unable to recognise how you are right (eg they lack the precursor concepts)]. Also, if you expect [competence at world-saving] to be normally (or lognormally) distributed, you should expect to find large gaps between the competence of the most competent people, simply because the tail flattens out the further out you go. In other words, P(you're Δ more competent than avg) gets closer to P(you're Δ+1 more competent than avg) as you increase Δ. This is one way to justify treating [other people not paying attention to you] as evidence for [you're in a more advanced realm of conversation], but it's far from the main consideration. I invite you to meditate on this Mathematical Diagram I made! I believe that your behaviour (wrt the dimension of consequentialist world-saving) is so far to the right of this curve, that most of your peers will think your competence is far below them, unless they patiently have multiple conversations with you. That is, most people's deference limit is far to the left your true competence. I'm now goin

5mesaoptimizer2y

Can you explain why you use "hopefwl" instead of "hopeful"? I've seen this multiple times in multiple places by multiple people but I do not understand the reasoning behind this. This is not a typo, it is a deliberate design decision by some people in the rationality community. Can you please help me undertand.

2Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel2y

This is an interesting concept. I wish it became a post.

0Mir2y

u'r encouraged to write it!

2Johannes C. Mayer2y

Initially, I thought that your comment did not apply to me at all. I thought that most of the feedback that I get that is negative is actually of the form that the feedback is correct, but it was delivered incorrectly. But now that I think about it, it seems that most of the negative feedback that I get is based on that somebody does not understand what I am saying sufficiently. This might be in large part because I fail to explain it properly. There are definitely instances though where people did point out big important holes in my reasoning. All of the people who did that were really competent I think. And they did point out things in such a way that I was like "Oh damm, this seems really important! I should have thought about this myself." But I did not really get negative reinforcement at all from them. They usually pointed it out in a neutral philosopher style, where you talk about the content not the person. I think most of the negative feedback that I am talking about you would get when people don't differentiate between the content and the person. You want to say "This idea does not work for reason X". You don't want to say "Your idea is terrible because you did not write it up well, and even if you had written up well, it seems to really not talk about anything important." Interestingly I get less and less negative feedback, on the same things I do. This is probably because of a selection effect where people who like what I do would stick around. However, another major factor seems to be that because I worked on what I do for so long, it gets easier and easier to explain. In the beginning, it is very illegible because it is mostly intuitions. And then as you cash out the intuitions things become more and more legible.

1mesaoptimizer2y

If only. Advanced vibes-based pattern-matching is useful when your pattern-matching algorithm is optimized for the distribution you are acting in.

0Mir2y

but u don't know which distribution(s) u are acting in. u only have access to a sample dist, so u are going to underestimate the variance unless u ~Bessel-correct[1] ur intuitions. and it matters which parts of the dists u tune ur sensors for: do u care more to abt sensitivity/specificity wrt the median cluster or sensitivity/specificity wrt the outliers? ig sufficiently advanced vibes-based pattern-matching collapses to doing causal modelling, so my real-complaint is abt ppl whose vibe-sensors are under-dimensional. 1. ^ idk the right math tricks to use are, i just wanted to mk the point that sample dists underestimate the variance of the true dists also, oops, fixed link. upvoted ur comment bc u complimented me for using RemNote, which shows good taste.

1mesaoptimizer2y

So you seem to be doing a top down reasoning here, going from math to a model of the human brain. I didn't actually have something like that in mind, and instead was doing bottom up reasoning, where I had a bunch of experiences involving people that gave me a sense for what it means to (1) do vibes-based pattern-matching, and (2) also get a sense for which when you should trust and not trust your intuitions. I really don't think it is that hard, actually! Also your Remnote link is broken, and I think it is pretty cool that you use Remnote.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y40

I just realized something important. <Procrastination/Escapeism> is a type of protection mechanism. When you are engaging in entertainment, then your brain is distracted. Too distracted to think about all of the things that make you feel bad. Somehow my brain must have picked up this pattern without me consciously realizing it.

The only reason why I notice it now after I have already been doing it for at least 14 years, is that I am trying to create a habit of always reflecting on why I feel bad when I do. Writing makes me smarter. Trying to understand my feelings by reflecting in writing, and then observing how I get pulled towards engaging with entertainment, did make me realize what is going on.

8localdeity2y

I'd seen some people saying that procrastination (or at least some forms of it) are the result of difficulties in emotional regulation, which seems to be what you're saying. https://solvingprocrastination.com/emotion-regulation/#Emotion_regulation_and_procrastination is one such source. (I haven't looked into it myself, but it's certainly plausible prima facie.)

2Johannes C. Mayer2y

Yes, it seems to be a symptom of an inability to emotionally regulate. I just felt kind of bad when I wrote this because I experienced some social rejection. Afterward, I did an internal double crux type thing. That was actually pretty difficult because I was constantly being pushed in the direction of procrastinating. A part of me said the following: So that part of me wants me to avoid social rejection. There is the failure mode of then just avoiding all social interactions. I have been falling into that failure mode for most of my life. The actual thing that this algorithm tries to accomplish is to make you optimize for making people like you. To avoid the isolationist failure mode you got another algorithm that makes you feel lonely. As I was lending my voice and mental abilities to that part of me[1], and as I was speaking those words I felt an enormously positive feeling pulsing through my body. It was like the algorithm telling me "Yes you understood me. Great job!" Afterwards, I felt not bad at all anymore. Like literally not bad at all. Predictably the pressure to procrastinate went away too. This happened multiple times to me in the last couple of weeks. It feels like I am finally managing to figure out how to handle my emotions. I find this truly incredible. When you actually understand your emotions it actually makes you feel really good apparently. I expect if I keep doing this my brain will just automatically update itself in the correct direction. I am actually kind of looking forward to feeling bad again, such that I can analyze why and feel really good already. Maybe my brain got really confused before and sort of erroneously thought that entertainment is actually figuring out my feelings.[2] That would make sense because there where no video games, TV, or pornography in the ancestral environment. ---------------------------------------- 1. I say that I did perform an internal double crux, but my technique might be significantly different fr

7localdeity2y

It would make some sense, from a design perspective, if emotions that indicated the presence of some problem would stick around while you didn't understand the problem, and would evaporate once you understood it and knew for certain what you would do about it. This would fit with others' writings about felt-sense introspection, also known as Gendlin's Focusing.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Yes. It seems so ridiculous that I literally have been feeling this for the first time, 2 months ago or so. I wish somebody had told me this sooner. I basically started to understand this because I talked a bunch about this with @plex.

3plex2y

Nice, glad you're getting value out of IDC and other mind stuff :) Do you think an annotated reading list of mind stuff be worth putting together?

2RHollerith2y

I'm guessing IDC is short for internally-directed cognition.

9plex2y

Internal Double Crux, a cfar technique.

7Johannes C. Mayer2y

It is short for internal double crux.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

The thing is that I have not read about IDC. And the other mind stuff. I am not sure if I am doing the thing that other people described. What I am doing is mainly based on doing an IDC once with you, and from things I have been figuring out by reflecting when feeling bad.

3plex2y

Right, it can be way easier to learn it live. My guess is you're doing something quite IDC flavoured, but mixed with some other models of mind which IDC does not make explicit. Specific mind algorithms are useful, but exploring based on them and finding things which fit you is often best.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Is "mind algorithms" a known concept? I definitely have a concept like this in my head that matches this name. I have never seen anybody else talk about it though. Also each time I tell somebody about this concept they don't seem to get it. They tend to dismiss it as trivial and obvious. Probably because they have a model in their mind that fits the name "mind algorithm". But I expect the concept in my head to be much more powerful. I expect that I can think of certain thoughts that are inaccessible to them because their model is less powerful. I would ask things like to what extent is it true that you can run arbitrary algorithms on your bain? Certainly, there are limits but I am not sure where they are. E.g. it is definitely possible to temporarily become a different person, by creating a separate personality. And that personality can be very different. E.g. it could not get upset at something that you get normally upset by. It should not be too surprising that this is possible. It is normal to behave differently depending on who you talk to. I am just talking about a much stronger version of this, where you have more explicit control. In my experience, you can also create an algorithm that arbitrarily triggers the reward circuitry in your brain. E.g. I can make it such that each time I tap on the top of my laptop it feels really good. I.e. I am creating a new algorithm that watches for an event and then triggers some rewards circuitry. It also shouldn't be surprising that this is possible. Why do I feel good when I get a good weapon drop in a video game? That seems to be learned too. The thing I just described is likely doing a similar thing, only that there you don't rely on some subconscious process to set the reward trigger. Instead, you explicitly construct it. When you look at the reward trigger it might be impossible to tell, whether it was created by some subconscious process or explicitly.

3RHollerith2y

I can't do that.

2Johannes C. Mayer2y

I do it in a very convoluted way. Basically, I have created a subagent in my mind that somehow has access to this aspect, and then I can tell the subagent to make me feel good when I tap the laptop. If I just try to make it feel good myself to tap the laptop then it does not work. It works best with discrete events that give you feedback like tapping. Throwing something in the trash does not work as easily. I actually have used this technique almost never, which seems strange, because it seems very powerful.

3plex2y

I think not super broadly known, but many cfar techniques fit into the category so it's around to some extent. And yeah, brains are pretty programmable.

1Mir2y

Oi! This was potentially usefwl for me to read. WHEN I feel bad/uneasy at any point, THEN find the part of my mind that's complaining, and lend it my voice & mental-space. I have previously tried to install a "somatic trigger" for whenever I feel bad (ie "when I feel bad, close my eyes and fold my hands together in front of me in a calm motion"), but it failed to take bc there weren't clear-enough cues. The point of a somatic trigger in the first place is to install them in specific contexts such that I have clearer cues for whatever habits I may wish to write into those contexts.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

I recommend to reflect in writing. I normally open up a blank document on my laptop and type away. I like to write full-text. I.e. full sentences just like I write now, instead of bullet points. I think it makes me smarter. You want to speak for that part of you and think about why it makes sense to feel that way. Don't be judgemental. Forget about the things you want, and how inconvenient it might be to feel this way. It can be useful to give the part you are speaking for a name. This should be a positive-sounding, descriptive name. It should be endorsed by the part you are speaking for. In the above example, I did not give out a name, but if I had it might have been something like "Rejection Protector", as the system tries to protect me from getting rejected. You also want to constantly check if what you are saying is actually endorsed by the part of you for which you are trying to speak. If you feel really good and it feels like "a knot unties within you" then that means that you are endorsed by the part you are speaking for. I actually just stopped taking antidepressants 2 weeks ago, and so far I have not felt the need to start again, and I think this has been in part to this technique and some other related realizations (see the first edit). Though it is too early to tell if this is just a random coincidence I think. Maybe I will regress.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y40

Something really interesting just happened to me. I was kind of depressed and could not bring myself to do anything really. I had set a 30-minute timer and wanted to do some AI alignment research for at least 30 minutes. But I could not do anything. I started out with some will, but then I started to organize my obsidian tabs. That seemed sort of required before starting.

Then I did this for 10 minutes, my will gradually decreased. Then I just sat down and researched some random unrelated thing on the internet. I managed to stop myself, and just sat there s... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y40

Epistemic Alert Beep Beep

Today I observed a curious phenomenon. I was in the kitchen. I had covered more than a square meter of the kitchen table in bags of food.

Then somebody came in and said, "That is a lot of food". My brain thought it needs to justify itself, and without any conscious deliberation I said "I went to the supermarket hungry, that is why I bought so much". The curious thing is that is completely wrong. Maybe it actually was a factor, but I did not actually evaluate if that was true. Anecdotally this seems to be a thing that happens, so it ... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y40

Being Sick Sucks More than I Thought

I spend most I my life sitting alone in my room, in front of my computer, when not going to University or school. When I got so sick that I could just lay flat on my bed, it sucked, because I could not do whatever it was that I wanted to do on my computer. However, that was only when I was very very sick. Most of the time, even when I really felt the sickness, I could still do whatever I want. At the very least I could listen to an audiobook, or watch a Youtube video.

When I was sick for 1 or 2 weeks, really at most 1 or ... (read more)

2Søren Elverlin3y

I'm sorry to hear this. At least I got to meet you before you fell ill. Get well soon.

2Johannes C. Mayer3y

Thank you, though just to be clear I am not saying this to complain. I say this to cache my reasoning behind, how important not getting sick is. I was operating while not taking properly into account the consequences of my actions.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2mo30

Graphics APIs Are Hardware Programming Languages

The Core Misconception

It's tempting to think of modern graphics APIs as requiring a bunch of tedious setup followed by "real computation" in shaders. But pipeline configuration is programming the hardware!

Why "Fixed Function" Is Misleading

GPU hardware contains parameterizable functions implemented in silicon. When you specify a depth format or blend mode, you're telling the GPU how to compute.

Creating an image view with D24_UNORM_S8_UINT configures depth comparison circuits. Choosing a different depth for... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer5mo30

Mathematical Notation as Learnable Language

To utilize mathematical notation fully you need to interpret it. To read it fluently, you must map symbols to concrete lenses, e.g. computational, visual, algebraic, or descriptive.

Example: Bilinear Map

Let

$f : R^{2} \times R^{2} \to R$

be defined by

$f ((x_{1}, x_{2}), (y_{1}, y_{2})) = x_{1} y_{1} + 2 x_{2} y_{2} .$

Interpretations:

Computational
Substitute specific vectors and check results. If $v = (3, 4)$ , then
$f ((x_{1}, x_{2}), v) = 3 x_{1} + 8 x_{2},$
Through this symbolic computation we can see how the expression depends on $x$ . Perform such computations until you get a feel for the "shape" o

... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer9mo30

An extreme test of how much you trust a persons intention is to consider whether you would upload them, if you could. Then they would presumably be the only (speed) superintelligence.

4Viliam9mo

Sounds like a mild infohazard, because if this becomes common knowledge, people will express willingness to upload someone as a way to signal tribal allegiance, and soon you will find that all the popular candidates for uploading are controversial politicians.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y30

Here is an AI called GameNGen that generates a game in real-time as the player interacts with the model. (It simulates doom at >20fps.) It uses a diffusion model. People are only slightly better than random chance at identifying if it was generated by the AI or by the Doom program.

2Vladimir_Nesov1y

The interesting thing is this is (in part) essentially a synthetic data generation pipeline for world models, when there is a game for which RL can train an agent with reasonable behavior. This way they get arbitrary amounts of data that's going to be somewhat on-policy for reasonable play, and has all the action labeling to make the resulting world model able to reasonably respond to most possible actions. They only use 128 TPUv5e for training, which is the lite variant of TPUv5 with only 200 BF16 teraFLOP/s. So this is like 25 H100s, when currently 100K H100s training clusters are coming online. RL that can play video games already somewhat works for open world survival craft and factory building games, see DeepMind SIMA from Mar 2024, so the method can be applied to all these games to build their world models. And a better world model trained from all the games at once (and YouTube) potentially lets model-based RL get really good sample efficiency in novel situations.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y30

The Model-View-Controller architecture is very powerful. It allows us to separate concerns.

For example, if we want to implement an algorithm, we can write down only the data structures and algorithms that are used.

We might want to visualize the steps that the algorithm is performing, but this can be separated from the actual running of the algorithm.

If the algorithm is interactive, then instead of putting the interaction logic in the algorithm, which could be thought of as the rules of the world, we instead implement functionality that directly changes the... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y*30

How to get better at writing? Writing a lot helps a lot. I was very bad at communication when I started, but then I just kept writing bad posts and got better.

You want to find the right balance between just writing and reflecting. This is similar to learning programming. In programming, you get really good by just doing a lot of programming. Reflecting on how you have written a program, and trying to get better, is also an important part of it, but is secondary to just doing a lot of programming.

Studying existing materials, like reading textbooks, is also ... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y*30

How do you define an algorithm that samples a random natural number, according to a probability distribution that assigns non-zero weight to every natural number? Meditate on it, before reading the solution.

def sample_nat(p_heads=0.5):
    i = 0
    while True:
        if coin_flip(p_heads) == 'heads':
            return i
        i += 1

With p_heads=0.5 we implicitly define the probability distribution: $P (n : N) := \frac{1}{2^{(n + 1)}}$

This program is pretty weird because the probability that it will not have halted after n steps is non-zero, for any n.

[Edit 2023-11-26]... (read more)

1Mir2y

I notice that the mathematics-frame I used to try to generate a solution was utterly inadequate, whereas the programming-frame is much more productive wrt this problem. I think one big general weakness of my general math-frame, is that it imagines/visualises infinities as static, rather than as conceptually chunked dynamic processes.

2[comment deleted]2y

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y30

Deceived by your own Incompetence

Consider how Ofria failed. Somebody told me that in that context deception is a property of the environment and its observer. However, it seems to me that the objective of the designer of the system needs to be factored in.

Although in general an observer can be deceived, this is not the case here I would argue. Ofria just designed a system that did not do what he wanted it to do. It failed transparently.

It would seem that this is similar to you wanting to build a rocket that goes to the moon, but then building a rocket tha... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y30

I have found it tremendously useful to start out my workout routine by dancing. Dancing is so fun that I am always looking forward to doing it. I want to dance, and I frequently run into the problem that it is hard to stop. After dancing I do the rest of my workout routine which is very boring in comparison. But it is really not a problem to get started on them after the dancing.

I expect this because I have developed a habit, i.e. my brain saved a procedure "execute workout" which is a sequence of instructions that I run through, without thinking about the... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y30

I came up with an over the top way to process the conversations you have with people online.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y*30

Modafinil Enzyme Hacking

CYP3A4 is an enzyme found in the intestine which metabolizes modafinil. There are substances that increase (aka induce) and substances that decrease (aka inhibit) CYP3A4 activity. These can greatly reduce or increase the effective dose you get. The effects can be quite strong. It is possible to increase CYP3A4 activity to the point where you won't really feel anything from a normal Modafinil dose.

Inducers

Capsaicin (found in chili poppers)

Inhibitors

Graphefruit Juice: 200ml is effective for 72 hours of CYP3A4 inhibition in

... (read more)

8Markas2y

IIRC grapefruit juice also inhibits metabolizing many other compounds; some medications have warnings against consuming grapefruit juice so you don’t build up dangerous levels of the medication in your body. Check for interactions before you try this.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y30

Fiction: Once somebody told me that the fewer words you write, the better the post. I promptly opened a new document and proclaimed: "I have written the ultimate post. It's the empty string."

[-]gwern2y100

You did not need the second sentence.

("When the banished Samians reached Sparta, they had audience of the magistrates, before whom they made a long speech, as was natural with persons greatly in want of aid. When it was over, the Spartans averred that they could no longer remember the first half of their speech, and thus could make nothing of the remainder. Afterwards the Samians had another audience, whereat they simply said, showing a bag which they had brought with them, 'The bag wants flour.' The Spartans answered that they did not need to have said 'the bag'.")

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

That is a good point. I defeated myself. The actual measure of goodness is in terms of how many words you need to make somebody truly understand, in the shortest amount of time. That means telling you the peano axioms would not count as having told you that the system they are defining is incomplete. Though that depends on the mind. If I tell the piano axioms to an AGI that does not know about gödel incompleteness it could probably figure it out very quickly.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y30

I have a heuristic to evaluate topics to potentially write about where I especially look for topics to write about that usually people are averse to writing about. It seems that topics that score high according to this heuristic might be good to write about as they can yield content with high utility compared to what is available, simply because other content of this kind (and especially good content of this kind) is rare.

Somebody told me that they read some of my writing and liked it. They said that they liked how honest it was. Perhaps writing about topi... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer9d20

Good Old File Folders

For a long time I didn't use folders to organize my notes. I somehow bought that your notes should be an associative knowledge base that is linked together. I also somehow bought that tag based content addressing is good, even though I never used it really.

These believes I had are quite strange. Using directories neither prevents me from using roam style links nor org tags. Nor do any of these prevent recursive grepping or semantic-embedding-and-search.

All these compose together. And each solves a different problem.

I made a choice whe... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer9d20

Deeply Linked Knowledge

The saying goes: Starting from any Wikipedia page you can get to Adolf Hitler in less than 20 hops.

I just tried this (using wikiroulette.co):

Extraterrestrial Civilizations (some random book)
Hardcover
ISBN
List of best-selling books
War novel
Vickers Wellington
World War II
Adolf Hitler

Imagine your notes would be as densely connected as Wikipedia's.

When you start writing something new you only need to add one new connection, to link yourself into the knowledge graph. You can now traverse the graph from that point, and think abou... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1mo*20

Large Stacks: Increasing Algorithmic Clarity

Insight: Increasing stack size enables writing algorithms in their natural recursive form without artificial limits. Many algorithms are most clearly expressed as non-tail-recursive functions; large stacks (e.g., 32GB) make this practical for experimental and prototype code where algorithmic clarity matters more than micro-optimization.

Virtual memory reservation is free. Setting a 32GB stack costs nothing until pages are actually touched.

Stack size limits are OS policy, not hardware. The CPU has no concept of st... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer4mo*20

This is a good informal introduction to Control Theory / Cybernetics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrdgPNe8KNA

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y20

The next time you buy a laptop, and you don't want a Mac, it's likely you want to buy one with a snapdragon CPU. That's an ARM chip, meaning you get very good battery life (just like the M-series Apple chips). On Snapdragon though you can easily run Windows, and eventually Linux (Linux support is a few months out though).

2Dagon1y

Agreed, but I hope I don't need a new laptop for some time. The BEST options, depending on your very specific needs and expectation of lifecycle (do you buy for 2 years, or 5). Eliminate these until you get to the one you can accept (or ignore it entirely - a lot of personal preference goes into this, one size really does not fit all). 1. M3 Macbook Air. 2. Wait ~1 year for Windows-on-ARM to fully normalize 3. Acer or Asus (or maybe Lenovo) Snapdragon X 4. Surface Laptop Snapdragon X 5. Intel laptop 6. Snapdragon plus laptop

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y20

List of good, widely legal, and prescription-free drugs:

Stimulants

Huperzine-A
X-tiamine (e.g. Benfotiamine (only one available in Germany), Sulbotiamine, etc.)
Vitamin-D
L-tyrosine
Caffeine Tablets + L-theanine
Theobromine (cacao beans, e.g. chocolate)
Nicotine (lozenges, gum, or patches)
Conversation (Not a drug, but very stimulating. E.g. I have multiple times talked to somebody for over 12 hours.)

Sleep

Melatonin

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y*20

I am quite dumb. I bought a Tensorbook for $4000 6 months ago. It has an RTX 3080 max-Q. That is why you would buy a Tensorbook. It has a powerful GPU with 15 TFLOPS and 16GB VRAM.

But now I can buy a P100 on eBay for less than 200 dollars from China, or a K80 for less than $100 (prices excluding import tax). The P100 has 16GB VRAM and 19 TFLOPS and much more memory bandwidth. The K80 has 24GB VRAM and 5 TFLOPS. Also, the Tensorbook often crashes, if I don't suspend it in the air. My guess is that it can't handle the heat under load. Ups!

It would have been ... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y20

Modafinil Breakthrough Dosing

Here Charles Sieg reports that Modafinil increases his creativity. Furthermore when he takes Modafinil for 3-4 days this creativity enhancement is amplified. Apparently, he had major creative breakthroughs on the 3rd and 4th day, which makes him think that this was not a placebo effect.

He also says that even though he took Modafinil for 8+ years, he did not develop tolerance to the point of not receiving major benefits. His strategy is to take it 3-4 days in a row and then abstain for a couple of days.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y20

Antiperfectionism Badness

Writing well takes a lot of time and effort. I just realized that now. Before I was trying to rush everything because according to my model, it should not take that much time and effort to write something well. I think many of the things I was writing ended up a lot worse than they could have been.

Basically, exactly the same thing happened to me recently with programming. I was mostly writing programs that were completely horrible spaghetti code because I was just optimizing to get some specific functionality implemented as fast a... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y20

I have been prescribed Pitolisant (sold as Wakix, Ozawade), a recent (FDA approved in August 2019) H3 receptor antagonist against excessive daytime sleepiness by treated sleep apnea. It works like this:

When Histamine binds to H1 and H2 receptors, it promotes wakefulness. When histamine binds to H3 auto receptors it primarily blocks the release of Histamine. It also has a weaker blocking effect on the release of other neurotransmitters. Therefore, blocking H3 receptors can increase Histamine levels in the brain, leading to increased activity on H1 and H2 re... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y20

Here is a template (feel free to use) that you might find useful as an introductory message if you find it hard to consider how your actions make other people feel:

Do you subscribe to Crooker's rules? Did you notice that Eliezer sometimes seems inconsiderate of people's emotions, when he just shoots down one (bad) alignment idea after the other? He just says things like "No, this does not work." My guess is that there are some algorithms missing from his brain or are atrophied, just like for me. For me, it's pretty hard to take into account how other peopl... (read more)

2Nathan Young2y

I am going to assume you subscribe to crooker's rules. I am happy to with you. I think this places a big burden on someone to read all this text. I think that it depends which space you are in, but for most spaces it's typical to escalate to this kind of communication rather than start there and leave if people want.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Good point. Probably there is a one-paragraph version of this that would be sufficient. I think escalating can be fine, though I think it is always better to be explicit about it, and at least at some point go "Let's do Crocker's rules and its opt-out." That makes it clear that opting out is an acceptable action. I think it's also good to raise the awareness of optimizing the communication for usefulness. Sometimes I talk to people and then start out just saying nice nices of how good everything is that I am doing at a very superficial level. And that is not useful at all.

1Nathan Young2y

Many people do not think opting out is an acceptable action. That's the problem here. There isn't a perfect signal or secret code to smooth discourse at the right level.

3Johannes C. Mayer2y

You can say "Ouch that hurt me emotionally, I would like this to not happen again." Then you can both think about how to prevent this in the future and change your behavior accordingly, such that you incrementally converge onto a good conversation norm. I think something like this is the right approach.

1Caerulea-Lawrence2y

Hello Johannes, I have some reflections around this that you might, or might not find interesting. The reason I wanted to comment is that I wanted to write about some experiences in a fitting context, and this seemed a good match. Here goes. My frame of thinking takes reference from MBTI, or more specific the concept of cognitive functions - or how I see it, small people in my brain, that live really different lives. Optimizing for information is something I care about myself, and I relate it to my Ti (Introverted thinking), and since my partner has a lot of Fe (extroverted feeling), there are/have been a lot of ruffled feathers. Long story short, when I read people say that they "don't want to sound harsh", usually what I interpret that to mean is that they focus on Thinking (Cognitive functions), when the other person they are talking to is more Feeling (Cognitive functions). In my experience, and since me and my partner introspect a lot, one thing that became quite clear to me is that I have "emotions" in my thinking function; they are just different. I will care about values like transparency, honesty, fairness and cooperation - And I perceive an increase in these values, I feel emotions like willingness, dedication, trustful and/or engaged - and when they are opposed or things go wrong, I feel disgruntled, entangled, discouraged and/or lost. And surprisingly, and uncomfortable, my 'rational, thinking, masculine side' was full of emotions - just not the kind of "emotions" that I am conditioned to describe as emotions/feelings. What I also noticed more and more as time went by - that by not myself acknowledging, and by not getting recognition from my partner with regard to my emotions in my Thinking, I noticed that I felt hurt and dejected. These more intense feelings, I automatically tried to hide beneath technical, rational, meta and structured words and sentences, and to not feel them and recognize them. Now, your case might be different, but I also

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Do I understand correctly that you think I am ignoring my emotions and that this is a problem? I agree that it is terrible to ignore your emotions and I am trying to not do this. I definitely feel emotions and in my experience not acknowledging them makes things just a lot worse. I can definitely feel very hurt when people say extremely negative critiques about something that I am saying. And I know that this can be pretty harmful because it uncontrollably activates some reinforcement mechanism in my brain changing me for the worse. At least I think very often for me it has been for the worse. So not being aware of this mechanism and how it interacts with emotion is not a good thing. So I'm not sure what to take from this message as it seems like I already was aware of the problems you were pointing out. Of course, I think I'm not really as good as I could be at recognizing emotions and handling them correctly. ---------------------------------------- I'm a bit confused. Do you understand the concept of not having some hardware in your brain that other people have? Here is an interesting thing that happened to me when I was a child. Other people would sometimes bully me. However, I was unable to project a harmful intent onto their actions. And then the bullying didn't work at all. Because I failed to recognize that a piece of language was supposed to hurt me, it didn't. That is pretty funny I think. I think the only way this can happen is if you're just missing some functionality in your brain for understanding the actions, intentions, and emotions of other people. I think that is the case for me, But I am not sure if this is the case for you. I think this is a very important distinction.

1Caerulea-Lawrence2y

Hello again, thanks for you reply, and to answer the last part first - if you are referring to some specific function, than that might be the case, and some of what I say might not apply. I'm not saying you are ignoring your emotions. The point I am trying to get across is how little awareness I, without missing that specific functionality you talk about, have of how emotions feel. Or even what kinds of emotions it is possible to feel. So even when we aren't intentionally ignoring them, we might still be unable to see them. Similarly to how people that aren't really familiar with birds can't really differentiate between the numerous kinds or separate their calls. Moreover, what might also contribute to mask exploration and self-understanding, might be things like upbringing and culture, not inability, unwillingness or "not being emotional". My idea was that even if you are different, you might also have similar issues with awareness; that you also haven't really delved into what you feel, and connected that to the stimulus that created it. If you are on the spectrum, I would assume that the responses and feedback you get are even less useful than what I have gotten. I mean, if you look at something like a chart of emotions, like this one from NVC, it at least became pretty apparent to me that my understanding of emotions was sorely lacking. One thing is to have heard the words, similar to have heard the different bird names, another is to with increasing accuracy pinpoint and differentiate them in the real world, or in this case, in my own body and mind. And with regard to the bullying, I can see your point, and yes, I do recognize that there can be a fundamental difference between people. My point wasn't to disregard that, or to not recognize your effort of self-understanding. My point was to maybe show that what can be an initial difference might increase in size from a lack of good feedback and understanding. I'm not sure if that clarifies things for you.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

I think now I understand better. My model this far has been that in the past I have been suppressing my emotions. That definitely happened. But now I have updated my model so that I probably very often was unaware of them. Being unaware and suppressing emotions seems different and independent. I can be angry and not aware that I am angry, not noticing how it changes my behavior. That is different from suppressing the anger, trying to not have it influence your behavior. Though I am pretty sure that you can suppress emotions without being aware of them. I think that is probably what happened most of the time. To be clear I am not saying that the part of my brain that feels my emotions is atrophied. I am not sure about this. It's hard to say not having any reference frame (for interpreting the emotions of others you can get a reference frame). Actually, now realize that a major part of how I realized that I am missing certain brain functions is that other autistic people were hunting me unintentionally because they just did not realize the emotions they were creating in me. And then I realized that I was doing the same. But this I think really did not happen here. When these autistic people hurt me on accident, it was so over the top what they were saying that people normally laugh if I tell them what they said.

1Caerulea-Lawrence2y

Hi again, It is good to hear you say that you don't experience it that way, and I may be overly focused on many subtle and incredible minor emotional nuances, many of which probably aren't really relevant in our specific interaction anyway. Good to know that those are overshadowed by the positive valence, so I'll just focus less on that. Yes, I agree with you on the differentiation. Especially to me, the tell-tale signs have been minor changes in behavior, more than distinct or detectable emotional sensations. If I follow the logic I have proposed so far, and since you can feel emotions, are you sure you don't have an emotional reference frame for other people - or are you only sure that your reference frame is wholly different from non-autistic people? To me at least there is a big difference between feeling Nothing at all, and feeling Something, but it 'seems' useless when it comes to predicting and understanding people. If what you feel is in the latter category, I wonder what you sense or feel, as it might be a social emotion. I'm not asking you to tell me, but I just believe it might potentially be relevant in a social context. Again, I'm not saying you have a hidden superpower or anything, I just wonder if specific kinds of awareness of emotions might give you a different angle with which to react and understand others and yourself - and that this might also be quite interesting for a willing recipient to connect with. I mean, if it is related to mirroring or something, I guess what you feel might be unrelated to what is happening with/to the other person - but I do not want to go there yet, at least if you aren't sure about it. Ah, I have two major experiences with autism. One was as a support person for an autistic person, but they also had some developmental issues, so there was that as well. I remember feeling as some sort of fixation-point, that they kind of couldn't maneuver in the world without me. They felt more like a chick dependent on their

0Viliam2y

Sometimes bullying is plausibly deniable. Just in case an adult would accidentally see it. If they punched you instead, I suppose you would interpret it correctly.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Yes, I would, because then I would need to use that social inference engine that is <atrophied/not exsistant> in my brain. I don't remember what they said, but I don't think it was very ambiguous to anyone but me.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y20

To be productive, sit down in a comfortable zero-gravity armair and do nothing. You are not allowed to watch YouTube videos or browse social media. Just relax. Do this until you naturally want to start to work. It is important that you are comfortable.

This seems to be surprisingly effective (haven't done any rigorous evaluation). Ideally have a laptop together with AR goggles within arms reach without getting up such that you can just lay in the armchair and start to work, if necessary.

I have found that even when I am very tired I can still work when layin... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y20

Sometimes I tell somebody about a problem in our relation. An answer I often hear is an honest "What do you want me to do". This is probably well-intentioned most of the time, but I really don't like this answer. I much prefer when the other person starts to use their cognitive resources to optimize the problem to smithereens. "What do you want me to do" is the lazy answer. It is the answer you give to be agreeable. It makes it seem like you don't care about the problem, or at least not enough for you to invest effort into fixing it.

2Dagon3y

This is highly dependent on the relation and the problem. If you don't have a ready answer to "what should I do", then you probably should be asking and discussion whether and what kind of problem there is, prior to expecting someone to put a bunch of thought into your short description.

1Johannes C. Mayer3y

Yes. I was thinking about the scenario where I make it absolutely clear that there is a problem. I feel that should be enough reason for them to start optimizing, and not take my inability to provide a policy for them to execute as an excuse to ignore the problem. Though I probably could describe the problem better. See also this.

2Dagon3y

Fair enough - those details matter in human relationships, and it's probably not possible to abstract/generalize enough for you to be comfortable posting while still getting useful feedback in this forum. I do worry that a lot of LW readers' model of society and relationships is more symmetrical in goals and attitudes than is justified by experience and observation. Other-optimization (Trying to make someone more effective in satisfying your goals) is not pretty.

1Johannes C. Mayer3y

What do you mean by this?

2Dagon3y

In this case, I mean that I’d be kind of shocked if most humans, even close friends or romantic partners, react to “here’s a problem I see in our relationship” with the openness and vigor you seem to expect. In general, I mean there’s often a denial of the fact that most people are more selfish than we want to project.

1philip_b3y

Do you mean "What do you want me to do" in the tone of voice that means "There's nothing to do here, bugger off"? Or do you mean "What do you want me to do?" in the tone of voice that means "I'm ready to help with this. What should I do to remedy the problem?"?

1Johannes C. Mayer3y

I mean the situation where they are serious. If I would tell them a solution they would consider it and might even implement it. But they are not pointing their consequentialist reasoning skills toward the problem to crush it. See also this comment.

1Algon3y

"What do you want me to do?" prods you to give concrete examples of what a solution looks like. That can reveal aspects of the problem you didn't realize, and implicitly shows people an model of the problem. Which is crucial, because communicating is hard, even with people you're close to. Especially if they haven't didn't notice the problem themselves.

1Johannes C. Mayer3y

I have not communicated the subtleties here. I was mainly complaining about a situation where the other person is not making the mental move of actually trying to solve the problem. When I don't have an answer to "What do you want me to do?", they see it as an excuse, to do nothing and move on. Your interpretation presupposes that they are trying to solve the problem. If somebody would do what you are describing, they would do well to state that explicitly. "What do you want me to do?" is much worse than "What do you want me to do? I am asking because maybe you have already thought of a solution, and it is just a matter of you telling me how to implement it. Then I can go ahead and implement it if I also think it is a good solution. If not that is fine too. In this case, let's try to solve the problem together. Let's first get clearer about what a solution would look like. What are the relevant properties a solution should have, and what is weighting on these properties? ..."

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3yΩ120

Solomonoff induction does not talk about how to make optimal tradeoffs in the programs that serve as the hypothesis.

Imagine you want to describe a part of the world that contains a gun. Solomonoff induction would converge on finding the program that perfectly predicts all the possible observations. So this program would be able to predict what sort of observations would I make after I stuff a banana into the muzzle and fire it. But knowing how the banana was splattered around is not the most useful fact about the gun. It is more useful to know that a gun c... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y*10

I noticed that by default the brain does not like to criticise itself sufficiently. So I need to train myself to red team myself, to catch any problems early.

I want to do this by playing this song on a timer.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y11

Mathematical descriptions are powerful because they can be very terse. You can only specify the properties of a system and still get a well-defined system.

This is in contrast to writing algorithms and data structures where you need to get concrete implementations of the algorithms and data structures to get a full description.

2Dagon2y

"Mathematical descriptions" is a little ambiguous. Equations and models are terse. The mapping of such equations to human-level system expectations (anticipated conditional experiences) can require quite a bit of verbosity. I think that's what you're saying with the "algorithms and data structures" part, but I'm unsure if you're claiming that the property specification of the math is sufficient as a description, and comparable in fidelity to the algorithmic implementation.

3Johannes C. Mayer2y

Let xs be a finite list of natural numbers. Let xs' be the list that is xs sorted ascendingly. I could write down in full formality, what it means for a list to be sorted, without ever talking at all about how you would go about calculating xs' given xs. That is the power I am talking about. We can say what something is, without talking about how to get it. And yes this still applies for constructive logic, Because the property of being sorted is just the logical property of a list. It's a definition. To give a definition, I don't need to talk about what kind of algorithm would produce something that satisfies this condition. That is completely separate. And being able to see that as separate is a really useful abstraction, because it hides away many unimportant details. Computer Science is about how-to-do-X knowledge as SICP says. Mathe is about talking about stuff in full formal detail without talking about this how-to-do-X knowledge, which can get very complicated. How does a modern CPU add two 64-bit floating-point numbers? It's certainly not an obvious simple way, because that would be way too slow. The CPU here illustrates the point as a sort of ultimate instantiation of implementation detail.

4Dagon2y

I kind of see what you're saying, but I also rather think you're talking about specifying very different things in a way that I don't think is required. The closer CS definition of math's "define a sorted list" is "determine if a list is sorted". I'd argue it's very close to equivalent to the math formality of whether a list is sorted. You can argue about the complexity behind the abstraction (Math's foundations on set theory and symbols vs CS library and silicon foundations on memory storage and "list" indexing), but I don't think that's the point you're making. When used for different things, they're very different in complexity. When used for the same things, they can be pretty similar.

5Johannes C. Mayer2y

Yes, that is a good point. I think you can totally write a program that checks given two lists as input, xs and xs', that xs' is sorted and also contains exactly all the elements from xs. That allows us to specify in code what it means that a list xs' is what I get when I sort xs. And yes I can do this without talking about how to sort a list. I nearly give a property such that there is only one function that is implied by this property: the sorting function. I can constrain what the program can be totally (at least if we ignore runtime and memory stuff).

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Detangle Communicative Writing and Research

One reason why I never finish any blog post is probably because I'm just immediately starting to write it. I think it is better to first build a very good understanding of whatever I'm trying to understand. Only when I'm sure I have understood do I start to create a very narrowly scoped writeup?

Doing this has two advantages. First, it speeds up the research process, because writing down all your thoughts is slow.

Second, it speeds up the writing of the final document. You are not confused about the thing, and you ... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Research Writing Workflow: First figure stuff out

Do research and first figure stuff out, until you feel like you are not confused anymore.
Explain it to a person, or a camera, or ideally to a person and a camera.
- If there are any hiccups expand your understanding.
- Ideally, as the last step, explain it to somebody whom you have not ever explained it to.
Only once you made a presentation without hiccups you are ready to write post.
- If you have a recording this is useful as a starting point.

1lemonhope2y

I like the rough thoughts way though. I'm not here to like read a textbook.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Can you iterate through 10^100 objects?

If you have a 1GHz CPU you can do 1,000,000,000 operations per second. Let's assume that iterating through one one object takes only one operation.

In a year you can do 10^16 operations. That means it would take 10^84 years to iterate through 10^100 verticies.

The big bang was 1.4*10^10 years ago.

5Dagon2y

Where do you even put the 10^100 objects you're iterating through? What made you pick 10^100 as the scale of difficulty? I mean, even though you've ignored parallelism and the sheer number of processing pipelines available to simultaneously handle things, that's only a dozen orders of magnitude, not 100. Exponents go up fast. So, to answer your title, "no, I cannot". Fortunately, I CAN abstract and model that many objects, if they're similar in most of the ways that matter to me. The earth, for instance, has about 10^50 atoms (note: that's not half the size of your example, it's 1/10^50 the size). And I can make a fair number of predictions about it. And there's a LOT of behavior I can't.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Yes, abstraction is the right thing to think about. That is the context in which I was considering this computation. In this post I describe a sort of planning abstraction that you can do if you have an extremely regular environment. It does not yet talk about how to store this environment, but you are right that this can of course also be done similarly efficiently.

3faul_sname2y

Do you need to store information about each object? If so, do you need to do so before or after the operation. If you need to store information about each object before processing (let's say 1 bit per object, for simplicity), the Landauer limit says you need 10100bits×2.6×10−23Jbit×1kg9×1016J≈3×1060kg of mass to store that information (at the current cosmic microwave background temperature of 2.7ºK). That's about a factor of 107 more than the mass of the observable universe, so the current universe could not even store 10100 bits of information for you to perform your operation on in the first place. I think if you're willing to use all the mass in the universe and wait a trillion billion years or so for the universe to cool off, you might be able store one bit of output per operation for 10100 operations, assuming you can do some sort of clever reversible computing thing to make the operations themselves approximately free. Is there some specific computation you are thinking of that is useful if you can do it 10100 times but not useful if you can only do it 1050 times?

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

In this post, I describe a toy setup, where I have a graph of 10100 vertices. I would like to compute for any two vertices A and B how to get from A to B, i.e. compute a path from A to B. The point is that if we have a very special graph structure we can do this very efficiently. O(n) where n is the plan length.

2faul_sname2y

In that post, you say that you have a graph of 10100 vertices with a particular structure. In that scenario, where is that structured graph of 10100 vertices coming from? Presumably there's some way you know the graph looks like this rather than looking like this If you know that your graph is a nice sparse graph that has lots of symmetries, you can take advantage of those properties to skip redundant parts of the computation (and when each of your 10100 nodes has at most 100 inbound edges and 100 outbound edges, then you only have on the order of a trillion distinct nodes (if we consider e.g. (0, 0, 0, ..., 0, 0, 1) to be identical to (0, 0, 0, ..., 0, 1, 0, ..., 0, 0, 0)). It's probably worth looking at the process which is generating this graph, and figuring out if we can translate the output of that process directly to a coordinate in our 100-dimensional space without going through the "translate the output to a graph, and then embed that graph" intermediate step.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

The point is that you are just given some graph. This graph is expected to have subgraphs which are lattice graphs. But you don't know where they are. And the graph is so big that you can't iterate the entire graph to find these lattices. Therefore you need a way to embed the graph without traversing it fully.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Default mode network suppression

I don't get distracted when talking to people. I hypothesise that this is because as long as I am actively articulating a stream of thought out loud, the default mode network will be suppressed, making it easy to not get derailed.

So even if IA does not say anything, just me talking about some specific topic continuously, would make it easier for IA to say something, because the default mode network suppression will not immediately vanish.

When thinking on my own or talking to IA, the stream of thoughts is shorter, and there ... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Here is a song a friend made based on this post I wrote very long ago about how to eat a rock. He using suno. I thought it's quite good, but that might just be me.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

So, what happens when we figure out how to align language models? By then the state-of-the-art will involve having multi-modal models. Assume we have figured out how to make steganography not a problem in chain of thoughts reasoning. But maybe that is now kind of useless because there are so many more channels that could be stenographically exploited. Or maybe some completely different problem that we haven't even thought about yet will come up.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Imagine all possible programs that implement a particular functionality. Imagine we have a neural network that implements this functionality. If we have perfect mechanistic interpretability we can extract the algorithms of a neural network that implements that functionality. But what kind of program do we get? Maybe there are multiple qualitatively different algorithms that all implement the functionality. Some of them would be much easier to understand for human. The algorithm the neural network finds might not be that program that is easiest to understand to a human.

9Neel Nanda2y

Seems clearly true, the Fourier Multiplication Algorithm for modular addition is not the program easiest for me to understand to perform modular addition!

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Do you think this might be a significant obstacle in the future? For example, do you think it is likely that the algorithms inside of an AGI-neural-network built by SGD will be so complicated that they are not humanly understandable, because of their sheer size? I am especially thinking about the case where an algorithm exists that is just as capable but understandable. This seems more likely if we end up with an AGI-neural-network that mushes together the world model and the algorithms that use the world model (e.g. update it, use it to plan), such that there are no clear boundaries. If the AGI is really good at manipulating the world, it probably has a pretty good model of the world. As the world contains a lot of algorithmic information, the AGI's model of the world will be complex. If the system is mushed we might need to understand all that complexity to an intractable extent. I expect that if you can have a system where the world model is factored out into its own module, it will be easier to handle the complexity in the world because then we can infer properties of the world model based on the algorithms that construct and use it. I expect the world model will still be very complex, and the algorithms that construct and use it will be simple. Therefore infering properties of the world model based on these simple algorithms might still be tractable. Do you think this problem is likely to show up in the future?

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

Upon reflection, I'm unsure what you mean by the program being simpler. What is your preferred way to represent modular addition? I could of course write down 20 % 11. I know exactly what that means. But first of all, this is not an algorithm. It just talks about the concept of modular arithmetic without specifying how to compute it. And understanding the concept at a high level is of course easier than representing the entire algorithm all at once in my mind. I guess the normal way you would compute the modulo would be to take a number a and then subtract b from it until what is left is smaller than b. What is left is then the modulo. Ok, that seems simpler so never mind. It does seem an important distinction to think about the way we represent a concept and the actual computation associated with obtaining the results associated with that concept. I got confused because I was conflating these two things.

4quetzal_rainbow2y

I feel sceptical about interpretability primarily because imagine that you have neural network that does useful superintelligent things because "cares about humans". We have found Fourier transform in modular addition network because we already knew what Fourier transform is. But we have veeeery limited understanding of what "caring about humans" is from the math position.

2mako yass2y

IIRC @Nora Belrose is either studying this right now or would know who is.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Transhuman Love

I just had an interesting thought. How would you show somebody that you love them in the transhumanist future? Well, one way would be to reveal to one another, in a verifiable way, what kinds of algorithms you are made of.

E.g. you could reveal exactly how your decision algorithm works and how it will take the others preferences into account. You could also show somebody that in the past you self modified to have certain preferences, the others like.

You could also show them exactly how the algorithm works that makes you feel good when you se... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Here is a video about interrogation techniques I found interesting. It's all about social manipulation.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

I just rewatched a video I made about a VR experience I made 6 years ago with a bunch of other people. You fly through a 3D slice of a 4D fractal. The beginning has the most interesting morphing geometry.

We made this in only 3 or 4 weeks IIRC. Pretty crazy. I needed to implement raymarching in Unity, which then effectively replaced the entire default rendering pipeline. It was a lot easier than it sounds though, as we did not need to have any interactions with the environment (which would be basically impossible, or at least I don't know how to do it).

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Whatever you did today, last week, or any other time. However far you got on anything. I hope you realize that every new moment is an opportunity. An opportunity to make a choice. Right now is always the best time to start doing whatever is optimal, right now.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

I did an ADHD test in Germany. They asked me questions at 1:30 and then said I have ADHD, and no further testing was required. If the interview had not been conclusive they would have done some other tests. They ask about symptoms like "Can you not sit still", "Do you forget appointments" and things like that.

The most interesting part was the preinterview part.

Scott writes here on how psychiatrists are the gatekeepers to Adderall:

Aren’t psychiatrists creepy wizards who can see through your deceptions? There are people like that. They’re call

... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y10

Here is a response I wrote to the Import AI 337

I am confused about why people are building systems in the current machine learning paradigm and trying to make them more and more capable, without realizing that this can be dangerous. I basically think the arguments that Eliezer is making seem likely and should be taken seriously, but I expect most of the people working on bleeding edge systems don't even know these arguments.

For example, the argument that if you have a training process that trains a system to perform well on a text prediction task, then tha... (read more)

2RHollerith2y

We cannot follow that link into Gmail unless you give us your Gmail username and password.

1Johannes C. Mayer2y

LOL, what a dumb mistake. Fixed. Thanks.

1peterbarnett2y

Your link to Import AI 337 currently links to the email, it should be this: https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-337-why-i-am-confused-about

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y10

No español. Водка, водка! Whisperはかっこいいよ。ウィスパーは日本語をわかります。Whisper kann außerdem auch einfach Deutsch übersetzen. Zu bemerken ist hier, dass ich überhaupt nichts einstelle, sondern einfach genau das selbe Programm für alles benutze.

Of course, I can also speak English. I think using Whisper is probably good for speeding up writing. 転生したらスライム叩けんはいいですよ

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3y10

FHI just released Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

I don't expect that 6 months would nearly be enough time to understand our current systems well enough to make them aligned. However, I do support this, and did sign the pledge, as getting everybody to stop training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for 6 months, would be a huge step forward in terms of coordination. I don't expect this to happen. I don't expect that OpenAI will give up its lead here.

Don't Stop Crying

Haha, just kidding. Laugh your ass off, even when you know you are going to die.

[-]Johannes C. Mayer2y-10

Hypothesis: There are policies that are good at steering the world according to arbitrary objectives, that have low Kolmogorov complexity.

It is systems that implement these policies efficiently that we should be scared of, as systems that implement policies without low Kolmogorov complexity would be computationally intractable, and therefore we can only end up with systems that are approximating these policies. Therefore these systems would not actually be that good at steering the world according to arbitrary objectives. Shallow pattern recognition object... (read more)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer1y-22

By @Thomas Kehrenberg and me.

After one definition, GOFAI is about starting with a bunch of symbols that already have some specific meaning. For example, one symbol could represent “cat” and then there might be properties associated with the cat. In the GOFAI system, we're just given all of these symbols because somebody has created them, normally by hand. And then GOFAI is about how can we have algorithms now reason about this symbolic representation that corresponds to reality, ideally, because we have generated the right concepts.

The problem is that this... (read more)

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