This is a special post for short-form writing by EniScien. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Shortform Page and All Posts page.
In HPMOR, Draco Malfoy thinks that either Harry Potter was lucky enough to be able to come up with a bunch of great ideas in a short period of time, or he, for some unimaginable reason, has already spent a bunch of time thinking about how to do it. The real answer to this false dilemma is that Harry just read a book as a kid where its author came up with all these for the book's needs.
In How to Seem (and Be) Deep Thought, Eliezer Yudkowsky says that the Japanese often portray Christians as bearers of incredible wisdom, while the opposite is true of the "eastern sage" archetype in the western midst. And the real answer is that both cultures have vastly different, yet meaningful sets of multiple ideas, so when one person meets another, and he immediately throws at him 3 meaningful and highly plausible thoughts that the first person has never even heard of, and then does so again and again, the first person concludes that he is a genius.
I've also seen a number of books and fanfics whose authors seemed like incredible writing talents and whose characters seemed like geniuses, fountaining so many brilliant ideas. And then each time it turned out that they really just came from a cultura... (read more)
I noticed here that Eliezer Yudkowsky in his essays (I don't remember exactly which ones, it would be nice to add names and links in the comments) says that the map has many "levels", and the territory has only one. However, this terminology itself is misleading, because these are not close to "levels", these are "scales". And from this point of view, it is quite obvious that the scale is a purely property of the map, the territory does not just have one scale, the smallest, and it cannot even be said that it has all the scales in one, it simply does not... (read more)
"Map isn't the territory" comes out of Science and Sanity from Alfred Korzybski.
Korzybski speaks about levels of abstraction.
In the photography case, there's the subject, then there's light going from the
subject to the camera (which depends on the lighting conditions), then the
camera sensor translates that light into raw data. That raw data then might be
translated into a png file in some color space. These days, the user might then
add an AI based filter to change the image. Finally, that file then gets
displayed on a given screen to the user.
All those are different levels of abstraction. The fact that you might take your
photo from different distances and thus have a different scale is a separate
one.
1EniScien5mo
But does Yudkowsky mention the word "abstraction"? Because if not, then it is
not clear why the levels. And if you mention it, then as in the case of scale, I
don’t really understand why people would even think that different levels of
abstraction exist in the territory.
Edited: I've searched in Reductionism 101 and Physicalism 201 and didn't find
mention of "abstraction", so I save my opinion that using just word "level"
doesn't create right picture in the head.
2the gears to ascension5mo
for one major way scale is in the territory, search for "more is different".
2ChristianKl5mo
The main issue is that people often make mistakes that come out of treating maps
like they have one level.
Yudkowsky, doesn't go much into the details of levels but I don't think "scale"
gives a better intuition. It doesn't help with noticing abstraction. Level might
not help you fully but scale doesn't either.
Some time ago, I noticed that the concepts of fairness and fair competition were breaking down in my head, just as the concept of free will once broke down. All three are not only wrong, they are meaningless. If you go into enough detail, you will not be able to explain how this should work in principle. There is only determinism and chance, only upbringing and genetics, there is simply no place for free will. And from this it follows that there is also no place for fair punishment and fair competition, because either your actions and achievements are ... (read more)
Be careful with thinking a phenomenon is meaningless or nonexistent just because
it's an abstraction over an insanely complex underlying reality. Even if you're
unsure of the mechanism, and/or can't calculate how it works in detail, you're
probably best off with a decision theory that includes some amount of volition
and intent. And moral systems IMO don't have an objective real cause, but they
can still carry a whole lot of power as coordination points and shared
expectations for groups of humans.
1EniScien5mo
It seems that you didn’t understand that my main problem is that every time in
my thoughts I rest on the fact that within the framework of a better
understanding of the world, it becomes clear that the justifications why
competitions are good do not make any sense. It is as if you have lived well all
your life because you were afraid of hell, and now the previous justifications
why it is worth living well do not make sense, because you have learned that
hell does not exist, now it is not clear what is the point of behaving well and
whether in general, is it worth it to continue to honor his father, not to steal
other people's things and other people's slaves, to stone women for betraying
her husband and burn witches? Maybe these rules make sense, but I don't know if
they have it, and if so, which one. I mean, I wondered what role do, say, sports
olympiads play, but my only answer was that they force athletes to overexert
their bodies or dope, and also spend a lot of money on such extremely expensive
entertainment in exchange for releasing better films or let's say the scientific
race "who will be the first to invent a cure for aging." Well, I've been
recently thinking about how to organize the state according to the principle of
"look at the economic incentives" and I seem to finally understand what sense
competition can sometimes have. Those incentives. Competitions are one of the
types of competition, so they allow not only to give an incentive to someone to
go towards a certain goal, they can create an arms race situation when you need
to not only achieve the goal, but do it faster/better than other participants.
However, the key word is "goal", and in sports olympiads the goal clearly does
not make sense, like beauty contests, in science olympiads with a better goal,
they allow you to determine the smartest participants for further use of their
intellect, which does not make sense in sports olympiads, because machines have
long been faster, stronger and more res
Despite the fact that this is only an "outward attribute of a smart character", and not something rational, but I calculated that if you study for 15 minutes a day (in the morning, in the evening and at lunch, one lesson, 5 minutes), then for You can learn a language in 5 years, which is 12 languages in a lifetime, which is usually perceived as something incredibly big that only a polyglot genius can do. Yes, given the development of AI, languages are far from being needed, but it seems that constantly learning something new develops the brain and ... (read more)
Maybe. I just thought that LessWrong doesn’t just turn into a standard site with
“ten tips on how to improve your life”, on the other hand, explicitly posing the
question gives at least two answers: send about ready-made to other sites, and
here give non-standard / new tips, talk about things that no one has noticed
yet.
2Pattern2y
The obvious upgrade is having 'life improvement' be more experimental. People
try things out and see how well they work, etc. (I'm not saying there has to be
'peer review' but 'peer experimentation' does seem like a good idea.)
Another approach is grouping things together, and having tools so that those
things can be filtered out. (This won't be perfect because short form 'posts'
don't have tags.) Also issues around content sticking around, versus floating
down the river of time.
1EniScien5mo
I must say, I made the mistake of thinking that it was enough to make a habit to
get a result. At that time, I was interested, so I did not notice that interest
was required here. But now I realize that only some part of the crystallized
intellect, and not dynamic, can be made into a habit, learning anything,
including languages, is not the activation of already learned neural
connections, but the creation of new ones, this requires straining the intellect
and this cannot be to do purely out of habit, some kind of emotional motivation
is needed, for example, interest. So now I don’t study any one particular
language, but switch between English, German, Greek, Latin and Italian as my
interest fades / grows, in order to constantly keep it at a high level for at
least one language.
Some time ago I was surprised that narrow professional skills can significantly change your thinking, and not just give you new abilities to specialize. Changes you, not just allowing you to cast a new spell. Something like not scientific, but professional rationality, but definitely not just the ability to make origami. (Specifically, I had this with the principles of good code, including in object-oriented programming) I had never heard of this before, including here on LessWrong. But it makes me think that the virtue of learning is more than being a... (read more)
I've read, including on lesswrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence), that often listening to those who failed is more useful than those who succeeded, but I somehow missed if there was an explanation somewhere as to why? And the fact is that there are 1000 ways to be wrong and only 1 way to do something right, so if you listen to a story about success, it should be 1000 times longer than a story about failure, because for the latter it is enough to make one fatal mistake, while for the former you have to not make th... (read more)
fwiw I don't think I've heard this particular heuristic from LessWrong. Do you
have a link for a place this seemed implied?
I think there's a particular warning flag about "selection effects from
successes" (i.e. sometimes a person who succeeded just did so through luck). So,
like, watch out for that. But I remember hearing a generalized thing about
learning more from failure than from success.
1EniScien4mo
I added link to comment:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence
2Dagon5mo
In truth, listen to everybody. But recognize that different stories have
different filters and distortions. Neither success nor failure storytellers
actually understand the complexity of why things worked or didn’t - they will
each have a biased and limited view.
Somewhere in the comments it was written that rationality is not building a house, where the main thing is to lay a good foundation, no, it's more like trying to patch a hole in a sinking ship. In my opinion, this should be included in the fund of golden quotes
This phrase can also be called something like a projection of the concept of
inadequate equilibria in civilization on a particular person or decision-making
process. In other words, the process of attempting a better self-modification
runs into self-reference, trying to test each of its elements with each of its
elements, for an external object you can test it without prejudice, but you
cannot test yourself, because prejudices can hide themselves.
I am extremely dissatisfied with the phrase "he lives in another world" to understand him that he does not agree with you, because we all live in the same world. But a good option is "he sees that the world is different (perhaps falsely)", exactly so, because "he sees the world differently / in a different way" has connotations of just an opinion to which everyone is entitled, and "he sees a different world" again creates the feeling that there are other worlds in which some people may not live, but look exclusively at them. The same glasses of percepti... (read more)
Perhaps somewhere on LessWrong this is already noticed, but judging by how much space there is not occupied by life, how much useless particles there are in physics, it seems that our universe is just one of the random options in which intelligence appears somewhere in order to you could see the universe. And how different it is from the universe, which was specially designed for life, even more than one planet would be enough, only 100 meters of the earth's crust would be enough. As primitive people actually imagined, until science appeared, so that re... (read more)
One of my most significant problems is that I do not like to read, although it is generally believed that all "smart" people must adore it. And accordingly to overcome my dislike of reading, the book itself has to be very interesting for me, and such are rare and difficult to find them for me (I was thinking that it would be nice to have some kind of recommendation service on your previous evaluations, which there are for movies, but for books I do not know such).
And accordingly, another problem follows from this. I didn't read a collection of science fict... (read more)
I thought about the phenomenon when the monuments of all the great people are taken down, because they were slave owners. And I formulated why I do not like this trend. The fact is that the past will look extremely terrible from the point of view of the future anyway. That is, virtually anyone in the past has done at least one absolutely terrible thing by today's standards.
If you continue this trend, it is very likely that in the future you will already be considered a monster, for some strange reasons from the point of view of today, such as the fact ... (read more)
Does the LessWrong site use a password strength check like the one Yudkowsky talks about (I don't remember that one)? And if not, why not? It doesn't seem particularly difficult to hook this up to a dictionary or something. Or is it not considered worth implementing because there's Google registration?
It occurred to me that on LessWrong there doesn't seem to be a division of posts in evaluations into those that you want to promote as relevant right now, and those that you think will be useful over the years. If there was such an evaluation... Or such a response, then you could take a list not of karma posts, which would include those that were only needed sometime in a particular moment, but a list of those that people find useful beyond time.
That is, a short-term post might be well-written, really required for discussion at the time, rather than just r... (read more)
On the one hand, I really like that on LessWrong, unlike other platforms, everything unproductive is downgraded in the rating. But on the other hand, when you try to publish something yourself, it looks like a hell of a black box, which gives out positive and negative reinforcements for no reason at all.
This completely chaotic reward system seems to be bad for my tendency to post anything at all on LessWrong, just in the last few weeks that I've been using EverNote, it has counted 400 posts, and by a quick count, I have about 1500 posts lying in Google Ke... (read more)
A. I saw a post that reactions were added. I was just thinking that this would
be very helpful and might solve my problem. Included them for my short forms. I
hope people don't just vote no more without asking why through reactions.
Yudkowsky says that public morality should be derived from personal morality, and that personal morality is paramount. But I don't think this is the right way to put it, in my view morality is the social relationships that game theory talks about, how not to play games with a negative sum, how to achieve the maximum sum for all participants.
And morality is independent of values, or rather, each value system has its own morality, or even more accurately, morality can work even if you have different value systems. Morality is primarily about questions of jus... (read more)
There is convergently useful knowledge, and parameters of preference that could
be anything, in a new mind. You don't need to align the former. There are no
compelling arguments about the latter.
I haven't encountered this technique anywhere else, so I started using it based on how associations work in the brain:
If I can't remember a word, instead of just continuing to tell myself "think, think, think," I start going through the letters alphabetically and make an effort over each one "what are the words for that letter, is that word by any chance?" And that almost always helps.
I've noticed that in everyday life, when you're testing some habit choices to see if they're working for you, it's better to leave a habit that doesn't seem to be working for you, to make it easier to determine that, because otherwise you won't be sure later if it turned out to work otherwise, habit one or habit two or habit three.
This reminds me of how I used to do mod compilations, it might seem like a good idea to add all the desired ones at once, but then if some mod is missing or some extra, you won't be able to figure out which one. So they should on... (read more)
Yudkowsky says in one of his posts that since 0 and 1 for probabilities mean -∞ and +∞, you can't just add up all the hypotheses to get one. However, I don't see why this should necessarily follow. After all, to select one hypothesis from the hypothesis space, we must get the number of bits of evidence corresponding to the program complexity of that hypothesis.
And accordingly we don't need to have an infinite number of proofs to choose, as many as the number of bits in the longest hypothesis is sufficient, since any longer hypotheses will compete with shor... (read more)
Human language works primarily due to recognition in context, this works with individual words, but it can also work with whole phrases, the same word can be completely determined by its morphemes and only morphemes will have to be known from the context, but also a word can be and a single morpheme, and of course here you should also take into account words borrowed from other languages, which in the original language can be broken into morphemes, and in yours be known only from the context, and the same thing works not with whole words, but also with ph... (read more)
I used to have conflicting thoughts about death.
Does death nullify the value of life, because you yourself are destroyed? Or maybe, on the contrary, immortality, because you will ever achieve everything? The first is false, because a person has other values besides the state of his own brain. The second has nothing to do with life, because really by immortality we mean "not dying of old age" and not "living infinity of years", so you only have a trillion years ahead of you, and this is a very limited time. And any other finite time too. Thus, one s... (read more)
I recently read Robin Hanson saying that small groups that hold counter-intuitive beliefs tend to come from very specific arguments, some even invent their own terminology, and outsiders who reject those beliefs often they don't even bother to learn the terminology and review the specific arguments because they reject these beliefs on purely general grounds.
And this is what I myself noticed, however, only from within such a group, I was outraged and annoyed by the fact that usually the arguments of those who reject FOOM or the danger of AI / AGI in gener... (read more)
I have never heard of this before, either here or elsewhere, but I myself notice that usually even the most unreasonable thing like religion has its grain of truth. Or rather, a lot of grains of truth. That is, knowledge, even in human society, almost never has a purely negative utility, a person who knows a certain cultural cluster will almost always have an advantage over a purely ignorant one.
However, an important nuance, while a more knowledgeable one may turn out to be worse when they are both taught the correct rational methods, a pure mind will a... (read more)
An interesting consequence of combining the logical space of hypotheses, Bayes' theorem, and taking priors from Kolmogorov complexity is that any hypothesis of a certain level of complexity will have at least two opposite child hypotheses, which are obtained by adding one more bit of complexity to the parent hypothesis in one of two possible states.
And, conversely, you can remove one bit from the hypothesis, make it ambiguous with respect to which child hypothesis will fit your world, but then you will need fewer bits of evidence to accept it a priori.
I thought for a long time about what "contradictions" mean at all and how they can not exist in any world, if here they are, they can be written down on paper. And in the end, I came to the conclusion that this is exactly the case when it is especially important to look at the difference between the map and the territory.
Thus an inconsistent map is a map that does not correspond to any territory. In other words, you usually see the area and then you make a map. However, the space of maps, the space of descriptions, is much larger than the space of terr... (read more)
I don't remember if I already wrote about this, but I was thinking about the space of hypotheses from first and second order logic, about where recursive reasoning hits the bottom and so on, and I came to the conclusion that if you actually find some mathematical formulation of the falsifiability criterion Popper, then it must be deeper than Bayes' Theorem.
In other words, Bayes' Theorem shows not that positive cognition also exists, it's just weaker, but that negative cognition has indirect effects that can be mistaken for weak positive cognition.
If we ... (read more)
Some time ago I saw an article here on the topic, but what do the words "deep causality" and "surface analogy" mean. For me personally, at that time it was intuitively obvious what the difference was, including for me it was obvious that the article was not about deep analogies, but only about the concentration of the probabilistic mass, which of course is a very important skill for a rationalist, actually key, but that's just not what I mean by deep causes, at least.
However, despite this, I could not express my intuition in words at that time. I wasn'... (read more)
It occurred to me that looking through first-order logic could be the answer to many questions. For example, the choice of complexity by the number of rules or the number of objects, the formulas of quantum mechanics do not predict some specific huge combination of particles, they, like all hypotheses, limit your expectations compared to the space of all hypotheses/objects, so for at least complexity according to the rules, at least according to objects will be given one answer. At the same time, limiting the complexity of objects should be the solution... (read more)
The more I learn about the brain, the more the sense of integrity dissipates. Apparently, although we look at our mind from the inside, it, just like the body from the outside, at the same time ceases to be mysterious and also ceases to seem like something whole, a kind of fluid thinking. Ignorance creates not only a sense of derivativeness (chaos), but also a sense of wholeness.
I remember when I was a kid, if I heard two apparently conflicting opinions from two sources I liked, I would take great pains to suppress the cognitive dissonance, pull an owl on the globe, and convince myself that both were right. It seems that I was even proud of the work I did. So I can understand why some believers try to combine the theory of evolution with the idea of divine creation. For them, there are simply two sources associated with positive emotions, and they do not want to experience unpleasant sensations, admitting that one of them is wrong at best.
My feeling is that people's planning error stems from the illusion of control. When a person plans, it seems to him on a subconscious level that as he draws up a plan, it will be so, so a person tends to draw up a plan, taking into account the fact that everything went the worst way. You don't want to create a plan that says "I'm going to be wrong at this point" do you? After all, who will specifically plan to commit a mistake if he can plan that no mistake will be made? It's like writing a book. There, if you do not plan for the character to make a m... (read more)
In fact, I'm both worried and happy that in LessWrong I can influence the ratings of so many posts so much. That is, I can make the difference between two messages 6 points. And this means that not many people read the site and it will not be balanced. The factor of individuals with ordinary karma gets too much influence. But on the other hand, it is psychologically good for the voters themselves, since you can see that your votes are important, there is no feeling of “I don’t influence anything” and “a bunch of other smart people will decide better”
It's hard to articulate why I dislike so much the views that change depending on what family you were born into (religion, nationalism, patriotism, etc.). It's like priors of one, fallacy of favoring an arbitrary hypothesis, lack of stability of your views under self-changes as in AI alignment, floating beliefs, and what is not truly part of you, unrecoverable knowledge instead of a knowledge generator. And it seems that all these points are connected, which is why Yudkovsky wrote about them all when trying to teach the creation of safe AI. Well, just a... (read more)
Do you dislike the meta-view that an individual cares about their family more
than they care about distant strangers? The specific family varies based on
accident of birth, but the general assumption is close to universal.
How many of the views you dislike are of that form, and why are they different?
1EniScien1y
I didn't quite understand what you mean. The family is not entirely relevant to
the topic of that post. Usually it is treated somewhat more logically. And in
the post, the conversation was more about beliefs than about duty. I am ready to
pay the debt to the family or even the state, but only for what they really did
good and partly how much it cost them, and not just for the fact of birth.
"Honor your father" clearly does not deserve a place in the 20 commandments,
because I was lucky, but my father could beat someone else. Your friends are not
only just useful tools, you can also be grateful for what they have done in the
past. But no unjustified unconditional love. Somewhere in here, it seems to be
Scott Alexander, there was a chain where a person woke up in a virtual reality
capsule in a world without a family, having failed his exam for excessive
conformity. It largely reflects my views. It might make sense to prefer one's
home country/family/gender/race/species, all other things being equal, but
obviously not if the other option gives MORE (if expressed in numbers, then this
is certainly not 0.01%, but let's say 3%).
1EniScien5mo
More specifically, what I mean is that I find it extremely pointless to make
something a moral value such as duty rather than a preference value such as
taste if that attitude varies by region of birth. Which can probably be
expressed as something like "I think it's a mistake to list anything other than
the direct conclusions of game theory in the list of moral values of duty."
Well, or else you can say that I believe that interpersonal relationships should
not be regulated by someone's personal preferences, only by ways of finding a
strategy for the game to achieve the maximum total. Well, maybe it's just a
longer and more pompous way of saying "do not impose your preferences on others"
or "the moral good for the other person should be determined by preferential
utilitarianism."
Surely someone has already pointed out this, but I have not seen such indications. It seems that humanism follows science, because the idea of progress shows that everyone can win, there is enough for everyone, life is not a zero-sum game, where if you do not harm someone, then you yourself live worse. And the lack of discrimination probably comes from the greater consistency of your reasoning, you see that hating a certain group is a completely arbitrary thing that has nothing to do with it, and just as you could hate any other group. It can be said that you are aware that you cannot be said to be special just because you are, because everyone else may think the same, you have no special reason.
(I can’t find where it was, if I find it, I’ll move it there) Someone suggested in light of the problems with AI to clone Yudkowsky, but the problem is that apparently we don’t have the 18 years it takes for the human brain to form, so that even when solving all the other problems, it's just too slow. Well, with any means of accelerating the development of the brain, the problem is already clear.
I came up with the idea that people can cheer for the protagonist of the book, even if he is a villain, because the political instincts of rationalizing the correctness of your tribe's actions are activated. You are rooting for Main Character, as for your group.
It seems that in one of the chains Yudkovsky says that Newtonian mechanics is false. But in my opinion, saying that Newton's mechanics is false is the same as saying that Einstein's theory of relativity is false, well, we know that it does not work in the quantum world, so sooner or later it will be replaced by another theory, so you can say in advance that it is false. I think that this is generally the wrong question, and either we should indicate how much the percentage is false, somehow without confusing it with the probability that it is false. Or... (read more)
It occurred to me (didn't finish reading Inadequate Equilibria, I don't know if that comparison is made there) that the unusability of markets is similar to that very mutual entropy, thanks to which you can put your finger in boiling water and not get burned if you know the movements of atoms.
I'm not sure I get the analogy. And in fact, I don't think that KNOWING the
movements of atoms is sufficient to allow you to avoid heat transfer to your
finger. You'd need it to be true that there exists a place and duration
sufficient to dip your finger that would not burn you. I don't think this is
true for any existing or likely-to-exist case.
If you can CONTROL the movements of atoms, you certainly can avoid burning.
This is common and boring - either a barrier/insulator or just cooling the
water first works well.
1EniScien5mo
I expressed myself inaccurately. Firstly, of course, simple knowledge will not
make water cold for you, you also need to move your finger very accurately and
quickly in order to avoid hotter molecules, I just considered this
insignificant, since you initially physically cannot fit into your brain
weighing 1.5 kg information about 0.25 kg of water molecules. Secondly, to put
it with my current best understanding, these systems are similar in that it is
generally believed that the glass just has high entropy, so you can't help but
get burned, so it is generally believed that the market is just efficient, just
unpredictable, although in general - then these are all human-centric, relative
categories (I don’t remember, they should be called “magical” or “unnatural” in
Lessvrong), one way or another, the point is that you can’t talk about the
entropy of the order book or the predictability of the market, as about
object.property, just like subject.function(object), otherwise it would be
support for making a mind projection error, there is no entropy of an object,
there is only mutual entropy of two objects, and it doesn't matter if you are
talking about heat dissipation or information prediction. (Then it just occurred
to me that there is a difference in vision between an informed and an uninformed
subject in both cases, that for one impenetrable chaos, for the other a
transparent order)
For some reason until recently, nowhere I heard about programming did it explain that object-oriented programming is essentially a reverse projection of the human brain, everywhere I heard about programming before it said something like, at best, that procedural programming is ugh and object-oriented is cool, it did not explain that procedural programming is much closer to the language that reality thinks in, and inventing "objects" is just a crutch for the imperfect monkey brain
All this came to my mind when I noticed that people tend to think of drugs as ... (read more)
I was once very interested in the question of what "time" is and what "entropy" is. The thing is, I watched popular science videos on YouTube, and nowhere was there a normal answer, at best it was some kind of circular argumentation. Also, nowhere was there a normal explanation of what entropy was, only vaguely stating that it was a "measure of disorder in the system".
In my head, however, the idea swirled around that it had something to do with the fact that there are more directions outward than inward in space. And I also twirled that it must be connecte... (read more)
Again, I'm not sure if I already wrote, but when it comes to quantum mechanics, Born probabilities and why a square, then it's spinning in my head that if you square and take the root in the form of an equation back, then you will have from one square branching into two possible answers, positive and negative, in other words, with this operation you erase exactly one bit of information, the sign bit.
And in turn, if you took a number to the first power, then you could directly compare each point of the past with each point of the future and then there wou... (read more)
It seems to me that the standard question on the conjunction error about "the probability of an attack by the USSR on Poland as a result of conflict X" and "the probability of an attack by the USSR on Poland" is inaccurate for this experiment, since it contains an implicit connotation that once in the first reason X is named, and in the second case, Y or Z is not indicated, then in the second case we evaluate the attack for no reason, and if we continue to show the person himself his answers to this question, the effect of hindsight comes into play, like ... (read more)
It occurred to me that the essence of the calculation process is optimization / removal of unnecessary information, because "shape transformation" is not the answer. Not only when you reduce the fraction, but also when you find the result of the equation, because, paradoxically, it carries more information, because it allows you to calculate all the other results. Does this mean that the calculation is just "entropy"? This would be "the answer to all the questions of the universe", but it looks wrong, too much of a fix idea. But it would explain why in the world of mathematics these things are the same, but in our world they are not, it's all about the presence of entropy and the passage of time.
ooh this was starting to make sense at the beginning and then didn't - I was
getting excited at the first line though. seems like if I had to guess, you're
working on integrating concepts - try rephrasing into more formal terminology
perhaps? I feel like if this is anything like how I think, you may have made
reasonable jumps but not showed enough of your mental work for me to follow.
calculation process of what? what do you refer to with "shape transformation"?
what is it not the answer to? what fraction? result of what equation? etc etc.
1EniScien5mo
Or, if I haven't written it down anywhere else, it occurred to me that since we
live inside the Tegmark mathematical universe, in which case the universe is
just a giant formula and the process of solving it step by step, each next part
after the equal sign is the next moment in time, and the value of the expression
itself, what is stored between the equal signs, is energy. The superposition is
the subtraction inside the parentheses, which with each step adds another
multiplier to both parts of the difference, and the different Everett branches
are the same two halves of each difference, just with the parentheses open.
Well, now it's not that I think this is wrong, but rather the opposite, too
obvious, and therefore useless.
Besides, it can also be presented in another form, in terms of the intersection
of computer science and quantum mechanics, the universe, or rather, all
universes in mathematics, is a bit string, which diverges into Everett branches,
in the first sign you have 2 branches for 0 and 1, in the second you already
have 4, in the third 8 and so on, each branch is a standard particular bit
string, with each branch division the amount of information in this string
grows, that is, entropy grows, and this direction of entropy growth in each
individual branch is time.
The law of conservation of energy, or even more broadly the law of conservation,
common to all mathematics, is that at each step you have for 0 you have 1 and
vice versa, each time you divide this into two bit options and each time you
have the opposite option, so the total entropy of all mathematics is also in
some way zero, if you look from inside it is infinite, but to write this down,
you do not need any length formula, zero length is enough for you.
So from the inside mathematics is infinite, but from the outside it adds up to
zero. That's sort of the answer to the question "why is there something and not
nothing?" and that answer is that "something" refers to a piece of "everything"
1EniScien5mo
I seem to have a better understanding of timeless physics since then, and if we
talk more clearly about the regularity that I had in mind, then ... point in
time of the book or all at once, for there is no answer to the question "what
day is it in Middle-earth?", but all because our timeline has nothing to do with
that one. And when we look at any mathematical object, its timeline, like the
book's timeline, is also not connected to ours, which is why they look outside
of time. That is, because the timeline is not the same for the entire universe,
there are many timelines, and we are inside our own, but not inside the timeline
of some object like a book or something else. And you can also say that if you
usually say something like "we see the passage of time when entropy grows" and
"entropy is something that grows with time", then outside of time physics
reduces / reduces time to entropy. You link into a timeline chain those
fragments of mathematical descriptions between which there is the least mutual
entropy. This model of time also says that in addition to the standard linear
time scale, there should be all non-standard time scales like different types of
Everett branches, past, future and parallel, different types of time loops, like
rings and spirals, and so on. And this can be called a calculation, because the
calculation leads to a change in shape, another piece of information, and
between it and the original one there will always be some kind of mutual
entropy. It seems that everything, in short, did not work out, because although
I myself understand what I meant then, I see that I expressed myself extremely
unclearly. The answer question is, what does "working on the integration of
concepts" mean? I don't understand what is meant by this expression.
Based on Yudkovsky's post about the aura of menacingness and the Level Above Yours, it would probably be nice to make some kind of rating with examples of books (like that list of the best textbooks, compiled from the comments of people who have read at least 3 pieces), so that you can assess what level you yourself are . At the same time, it will be possible to understand how objective this measure is. It seemed to me that, among other things, a community, lessvrong, is needed for such purposes.
This is not the first time it seems to me that Yudkowsky is hinting for us to understand this instead of writing directly. But on the other hand, he seems to write as if he doesn't really know the answer. Specifically in this case he says about qualia, that we should ask the question "what makes us think we have qualia?" At first I got that wrong, in the sense that qualia is just an illusion. But then I did a mental experiment about a neural network. What if we created a neural network that could similarly answer questions about the picture it recognized f... (read more)
If you think about it, there is nothing wrong with every person knowing everything that civilization knows now, on the contrary, this return to normality has already accumulated, it is overdue. Previously, there was just a scientist who was aware of all the achievements of science. Now two physicists will not understand each other, because they are from different fields. No one in the world knows how things are, no one sees the whole picture even remotely. One can imagine the horror of the post of a person who met someone who does not even fully know either the history of his planet or the laws of physics.
I must say, I wonder why I did not see here speed reading and visual thinking as one of the most important tips for practical rationality, that is, a visual image is 2 + 1 d, and an auditory image is 0 + 1 d, plus auditory images use sequential thinking, in which people are very bad, and visual thinking is parallel. And according to Wikipedia, the transition from voice to visual reading should speed you up 5 (!) times, and in the same way, visual thinking should be 5 times faster compared to voice, and if you can read and think 5 times in a lifetime mor... (read more)
In HPMOR, Draco Malfoy thinks that either Harry Potter was lucky enough to be able to come up with a bunch of great ideas in a short period of time, or he, for some unimaginable reason, has already spent a bunch of time thinking about how to do it. The real answer to this false dilemma is that Harry just read a book as a kid where its author came up with all these for the book's needs.
In How to Seem (and Be) Deep Thought, Eliezer Yudkowsky says that the Japanese often portray Christians as bearers of incredible wisdom, while the opposite is true of the "eastern sage" archetype in the western midst. And the real answer is that both cultures have vastly different, yet meaningful sets of multiple ideas, so when one person meets another, and he immediately throws at him 3 meaningful and highly plausible thoughts that the first person has never even heard of, and then does so again and again, the first person concludes that he is a genius.
I've also seen a number of books and fanfics whose authors seemed like incredible writing talents and whose characters seemed like geniuses, fountaining so many brilliant ideas. And then each time it turned out that they really just came from a cultura... (read more)
I noticed here that Eliezer Yudkowsky in his essays (I don't remember exactly which ones, it would be nice to add names and links in the comments) says that the map has many "levels", and the territory has only one. However, this terminology itself is misleading, because these are not close to "levels", these are "scales". And from this point of view, it is quite obvious that the scale is a purely property of the map, the territory does not just have one scale, the smallest, and it cannot even be said that it has all the scales in one, it simply does not... (read more)
Some time ago, I noticed that the concepts of fairness and fair competition were breaking down in my head, just as the concept of free will once broke down. All three are not only wrong, they are meaningless. If you go into enough detail, you will not be able to explain how this should work in principle. There is only determinism and chance, only upbringing and genetics, there is simply no place for free will. And from this it follows that there is also no place for fair punishment and fair competition, because either your actions and achievements are ... (read more)
Despite the fact that this is only an "outward attribute of a smart character", and not something rational, but I calculated that if you study for 15 minutes a day (in the morning, in the evening and at lunch, one lesson, 5 minutes), then for You can learn a language in 5 years, which is 12 languages in a lifetime, which is usually perceived as something incredibly big that only a polyglot genius can do. Yes, given the development of AI, languages are far from being needed, but it seems that constantly learning something new develops the brain and ... (read more)
Some time ago I was surprised that narrow professional skills can significantly change your thinking, and not just give you new abilities to specialize. Changes you, not just allowing you to cast a new spell. Something like not scientific, but professional rationality, but definitely not just the ability to make origami. (Specifically, I had this with the principles of good code, including in object-oriented programming) I had never heard of this before, including here on LessWrong. But it makes me think that the virtue of learning is more than being a... (read more)
I've read, including on lesswrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence), that often listening to those who failed is more useful than those who succeeded, but I somehow missed if there was an explanation somewhere as to why? And the fact is that there are 1000 ways to be wrong and only 1 way to do something right, so if you listen to a story about success, it should be 1000 times longer than a story about failure, because for the latter it is enough to make one fatal mistake, while for the former you have to not make th... (read more)
Somewhere in the comments it was written that rationality is not building a house, where the main thing is to lay a good foundation, no, it's more like trying to patch a hole in a sinking ship. In my opinion, this should be included in the fund of golden quotes
I am extremely dissatisfied with the phrase "he lives in another world" to understand him that he does not agree with you, because we all live in the same world. But a good option is "he sees that the world is different (perhaps falsely)", exactly so, because "he sees the world differently / in a different way" has connotations of just an opinion to which everyone is entitled, and "he sees a different world" again creates the feeling that there are other worlds in which some people may not live, but look exclusively at them. The same glasses of percepti... (read more)
Perhaps somewhere on LessWrong this is already noticed, but judging by how much space there is not occupied by life, how much useless particles there are in physics, it seems that our universe is just one of the random options in which intelligence appears somewhere in order to you could see the universe. And how different it is from the universe, which was specially designed for life, even more than one planet would be enough, only 100 meters of the earth's crust would be enough. As primitive people actually imagined, until science appeared, so that re... (read more)
One of my most significant problems is that I do not like to read, although it is generally believed that all "smart" people must adore it. And accordingly to overcome my dislike of reading, the book itself has to be very interesting for me, and such are rare and difficult to find them for me (I was thinking that it would be nice to have some kind of recommendation service on your previous evaluations, which there are for movies, but for books I do not know such).
And accordingly, another problem follows from this. I didn't read a collection of science fict... (read more)
I thought about the phenomenon when the monuments of all the great people are taken down, because they were slave owners. And I formulated why I do not like this trend. The fact is that the past will look extremely terrible from the point of view of the future anyway. That is, virtually anyone in the past has done at least one absolutely terrible thing by today's standards. If you continue this trend, it is very likely that in the future you will already be considered a monster, for some strange reasons from the point of view of today, such as the fact ... (read more)
Does the LessWrong site use a password strength check like the one Yudkowsky talks about (I don't remember that one)? And if not, why not? It doesn't seem particularly difficult to hook this up to a dictionary or something. Or is it not considered worth implementing because there's Google registration?
Hmm. Judging from the brief view, it feels like I'm the only one who included reactions in my brief forms. I wonder why?
It occurred to me that on LessWrong there doesn't seem to be a division of posts in evaluations into those that you want to promote as relevant right now, and those that you think will be useful over the years. If there was such an evaluation... Or such a response, then you could take a list not of karma posts, which would include those that were only needed sometime in a particular moment, but a list of those that people find useful beyond time.
That is, a short-term post might be well-written, really required for discussion at the time, rather than just r... (read more)
On the one hand, I really like that on LessWrong, unlike other platforms, everything unproductive is downgraded in the rating. But on the other hand, when you try to publish something yourself, it looks like a hell of a black box, which gives out positive and negative reinforcements for no reason at all.
This completely chaotic reward system seems to be bad for my tendency to post anything at all on LessWrong, just in the last few weeks that I've been using EverNote, it has counted 400 posts, and by a quick count, I have about 1500 posts lying in Google Ke... (read more)
Yudkowsky says that public morality should be derived from personal morality, and that personal morality is paramount. But I don't think this is the right way to put it, in my view morality is the social relationships that game theory talks about, how not to play games with a negative sum, how to achieve the maximum sum for all participants.
And morality is independent of values, or rather, each value system has its own morality, or even more accurately, morality can work even if you have different value systems. Morality is primarily about questions of jus... (read more)
I haven't encountered this technique anywhere else, so I started using it based on how associations work in the brain:
If I can't remember a word, instead of just continuing to tell myself "think, think, think," I start going through the letters alphabetically and make an effort over each one "what are the words for that letter, is that word by any chance?" And that almost always helps.
I've noticed that in everyday life, when you're testing some habit choices to see if they're working for you, it's better to leave a habit that doesn't seem to be working for you, to make it easier to determine that, because otherwise you won't be sure later if it turned out to work otherwise, habit one or habit two or habit three.
This reminds me of how I used to do mod compilations, it might seem like a good idea to add all the desired ones at once, but then if some mod is missing or some extra, you won't be able to figure out which one. So they should on... (read more)
Yudkowsky says in one of his posts that since 0 and 1 for probabilities mean -∞ and +∞, you can't just add up all the hypotheses to get one. However, I don't see why this should necessarily follow. After all, to select one hypothesis from the hypothesis space, we must get the number of bits of evidence corresponding to the program complexity of that hypothesis.
And accordingly we don't need to have an infinite number of proofs to choose, as many as the number of bits in the longest hypothesis is sufficient, since any longer hypotheses will compete with shor... (read more)
Human language works primarily due to recognition in context, this works with individual words, but it can also work with whole phrases, the same word can be completely determined by its morphemes and only morphemes will have to be known from the context, but also a word can be and a single morpheme, and of course here you should also take into account words borrowed from other languages, which in the original language can be broken into morphemes, and in yours be known only from the context, and the same thing works not with whole words, but also with ph... (read more)
I used to have conflicting thoughts about death. Does death nullify the value of life, because you yourself are destroyed? Or maybe, on the contrary, immortality, because you will ever achieve everything? The first is false, because a person has other values besides the state of his own brain. The second has nothing to do with life, because really by immortality we mean "not dying of old age" and not "living infinity of years", so you only have a trillion years ahead of you, and this is a very limited time. And any other finite time too. Thus, one s... (read more)
I recently read Robin Hanson saying that small groups that hold counter-intuitive beliefs tend to come from very specific arguments, some even invent their own terminology, and outsiders who reject those beliefs often they don't even bother to learn the terminology and review the specific arguments because they reject these beliefs on purely general grounds. And this is what I myself noticed, however, only from within such a group, I was outraged and annoyed by the fact that usually the arguments of those who reject FOOM or the danger of AI / AGI in gener... (read more)
I have never heard of this before, either here or elsewhere, but I myself notice that usually even the most unreasonable thing like religion has its grain of truth. Or rather, a lot of grains of truth. That is, knowledge, even in human society, almost never has a purely negative utility, a person who knows a certain cultural cluster will almost always have an advantage over a purely ignorant one. However, an important nuance, while a more knowledgeable one may turn out to be worse when they are both taught the correct rational methods, a pure mind will a... (read more)
An interesting consequence of combining the logical space of hypotheses, Bayes' theorem, and taking priors from Kolmogorov complexity is that any hypothesis of a certain level of complexity will have at least two opposite child hypotheses, which are obtained by adding one more bit of complexity to the parent hypothesis in one of two possible states.
And, conversely, you can remove one bit from the hypothesis, make it ambiguous with respect to which child hypothesis will fit your world, but then you will need fewer bits of evidence to accept it a priori.
And ... (read more)
I thought for a long time about what "contradictions" mean at all and how they can not exist in any world, if here they are, they can be written down on paper. And in the end, I came to the conclusion that this is exactly the case when it is especially important to look at the difference between the map and the territory. Thus an inconsistent map is a map that does not correspond to any territory. In other words, you usually see the area and then you make a map. However, the space of maps, the space of descriptions, is much larger than the space of terr... (read more)
I don't remember if I already wrote about this, but I was thinking about the space of hypotheses from first and second order logic, about where recursive reasoning hits the bottom and so on, and I came to the conclusion that if you actually find some mathematical formulation of the falsifiability criterion Popper, then it must be deeper than Bayes' Theorem. In other words, Bayes' Theorem shows not that positive cognition also exists, it's just weaker, but that negative cognition has indirect effects that can be mistaken for weak positive cognition. If we ... (read more)
Some time ago I saw an article here on the topic, but what do the words "deep causality" and "surface analogy" mean. For me personally, at that time it was intuitively obvious what the difference was, including for me it was obvious that the article was not about deep analogies, but only about the concentration of the probabilistic mass, which of course is a very important skill for a rationalist, actually key, but that's just not what I mean by deep causes, at least. However, despite this, I could not express my intuition in words at that time. I wasn'... (read more)
It occurred to me that looking through first-order logic could be the answer to many questions. For example, the choice of complexity by the number of rules or the number of objects, the formulas of quantum mechanics do not predict some specific huge combination of particles, they, like all hypotheses, limit your expectations compared to the space of all hypotheses/objects, so for at least complexity according to the rules, at least according to objects will be given one answer. At the same time, limiting the complexity of objects should be the solution... (read more)
The more I learn about the brain, the more the sense of integrity dissipates. Apparently, although we look at our mind from the inside, it, just like the body from the outside, at the same time ceases to be mysterious and also ceases to seem like something whole, a kind of fluid thinking. Ignorance creates not only a sense of derivativeness (chaos), but also a sense of wholeness.
I remember when I was a kid, if I heard two apparently conflicting opinions from two sources I liked, I would take great pains to suppress the cognitive dissonance, pull an owl on the globe, and convince myself that both were right. It seems that I was even proud of the work I did. So I can understand why some believers try to combine the theory of evolution with the idea of divine creation. For them, there are simply two sources associated with positive emotions, and they do not want to experience unpleasant sensations, admitting that one of them is wrong at best.
My feeling is that people's planning error stems from the illusion of control. When a person plans, it seems to him on a subconscious level that as he draws up a plan, it will be so, so a person tends to draw up a plan, taking into account the fact that everything went the worst way. You don't want to create a plan that says "I'm going to be wrong at this point" do you? After all, who will specifically plan to commit a mistake if he can plan that no mistake will be made? It's like writing a book. There, if you do not plan for the character to make a m... (read more)
In fact, I'm both worried and happy that in LessWrong I can influence the ratings of so many posts so much. That is, I can make the difference between two messages 6 points. And this means that not many people read the site and it will not be balanced. The factor of individuals with ordinary karma gets too much influence. But on the other hand, it is psychologically good for the voters themselves, since you can see that your votes are important, there is no feeling of “I don’t influence anything” and “a bunch of other smart people will decide better”
It's hard to articulate why I dislike so much the views that change depending on what family you were born into (religion, nationalism, patriotism, etc.). It's like priors of one, fallacy of favoring an arbitrary hypothesis, lack of stability of your views under self-changes as in AI alignment, floating beliefs, and what is not truly part of you, unrecoverable knowledge instead of a knowledge generator. And it seems that all these points are connected, which is why Yudkovsky wrote about them all when trying to teach the creation of safe AI. Well, just a... (read more)
Surely someone has already pointed out this, but I have not seen such indications. It seems that humanism follows science, because the idea of progress shows that everyone can win, there is enough for everyone, life is not a zero-sum game, where if you do not harm someone, then you yourself live worse. And the lack of discrimination probably comes from the greater consistency of your reasoning, you see that hating a certain group is a completely arbitrary thing that has nothing to do with it, and just as you could hate any other group. It can be said that you are aware that you cannot be said to be special just because you are, because everyone else may think the same, you have no special reason.
(I can’t find where it was, if I find it, I’ll move it there) Someone suggested in light of the problems with AI to clone Yudkowsky, but the problem is that apparently we don’t have the 18 years it takes for the human brain to form, so that even when solving all the other problems, it's just too slow. Well, with any means of accelerating the development of the brain, the problem is already clear.
I came up with the idea that people can cheer for the protagonist of the book, even if he is a villain, because the political instincts of rationalizing the correctness of your tribe's actions are activated. You are rooting for Main Character, as for your group.
It seems that in one of the chains Yudkovsky says that Newtonian mechanics is false. But in my opinion, saying that Newton's mechanics is false is the same as saying that Einstein's theory of relativity is false, well, we know that it does not work in the quantum world, so sooner or later it will be replaced by another theory, so you can say in advance that it is false. I think that this is generally the wrong question, and either we should indicate how much the percentage is false, somehow without confusing it with the probability that it is false. Or... (read more)
It occurred to me (didn't finish reading Inadequate Equilibria, I don't know if that comparison is made there) that the unusability of markets is similar to that very mutual entropy, thanks to which you can put your finger in boiling water and not get burned if you know the movements of atoms.
For some reason until recently, nowhere I heard about programming did it explain that object-oriented programming is essentially a reverse projection of the human brain, everywhere I heard about programming before it said something like, at best, that procedural programming is ugh and object-oriented is cool, it did not explain that procedural programming is much closer to the language that reality thinks in, and inventing "objects" is just a crutch for the imperfect monkey brain
All this came to my mind when I noticed that people tend to think of drugs as ... (read more)
I was once very interested in the question of what "time" is and what "entropy" is. The thing is, I watched popular science videos on YouTube, and nowhere was there a normal answer, at best it was some kind of circular argumentation. Also, nowhere was there a normal explanation of what entropy was, only vaguely stating that it was a "measure of disorder in the system".
In my head, however, the idea swirled around that it had something to do with the fact that there are more directions outward than inward in space. And I also twirled that it must be connecte... (read more)
Again, I'm not sure if I already wrote, but when it comes to quantum mechanics, Born probabilities and why a square, then it's spinning in my head that if you square and take the root in the form of an equation back, then you will have from one square branching into two possible answers, positive and negative, in other words, with this operation you erase exactly one bit of information, the sign bit. And in turn, if you took a number to the first power, then you could directly compare each point of the past with each point of the future and then there wou... (read more)
It seems to me that the standard question on the conjunction error about "the probability of an attack by the USSR on Poland as a result of conflict X" and "the probability of an attack by the USSR on Poland" is inaccurate for this experiment, since it contains an implicit connotation that once in the first reason X is named, and in the second case, Y or Z is not indicated, then in the second case we evaluate the attack for no reason, and if we continue to show the person himself his answers to this question, the effect of hindsight comes into play, like ... (read more)
It occurred to me that the essence of the calculation process is optimization / removal of unnecessary information, because "shape transformation" is not the answer. Not only when you reduce the fraction, but also when you find the result of the equation, because, paradoxically, it carries more information, because it allows you to calculate all the other results. Does this mean that the calculation is just "entropy"? This would be "the answer to all the questions of the universe", but it looks wrong, too much of a fix idea. But it would explain why in the world of mathematics these things are the same, but in our world they are not, it's all about the presence of entropy and the passage of time.
Based on Yudkovsky's post about the aura of menacingness and the Level Above Yours, it would probably be nice to make some kind of rating with examples of books (like that list of the best textbooks, compiled from the comments of people who have read at least 3 pieces), so that you can assess what level you yourself are . At the same time, it will be possible to understand how objective this measure is. It seemed to me that, among other things, a community, lessvrong, is needed for such purposes.
This is not the first time it seems to me that Yudkowsky is hinting for us to understand this instead of writing directly. But on the other hand, he seems to write as if he doesn't really know the answer. Specifically in this case he says about qualia, that we should ask the question "what makes us think we have qualia?" At first I got that wrong, in the sense that qualia is just an illusion. But then I did a mental experiment about a neural network. What if we created a neural network that could similarly answer questions about the picture it recognized f... (read more)
If you think about it, there is nothing wrong with every person knowing everything that civilization knows now, on the contrary, this return to normality has already accumulated, it is overdue. Previously, there was just a scientist who was aware of all the achievements of science. Now two physicists will not understand each other, because they are from different fields. No one in the world knows how things are, no one sees the whole picture even remotely. One can imagine the horror of the post of a person who met someone who does not even fully know either the history of his planet or the laws of physics.
I must say, I wonder why I did not see here speed reading and visual thinking as one of the most important tips for practical rationality, that is, a visual image is 2 + 1 d, and an auditory image is 0 + 1 d, plus auditory images use sequential thinking, in which people are very bad, and visual thinking is parallel. And according to Wikipedia, the transition from voice to visual reading should speed you up 5 (!) times, and in the same way, visual thinking should be 5 times faster compared to voice, and if you can read and think 5 times in a lifetime mor... (read more)