EniScien's Shortform

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)

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 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)

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)

I saw that a lot of people are confused by "what does Yudkowsky mean by this difference between deep causes and surface analogies?". I didn't have this problem, with no delay I had interpretation what he means.

I thought that it's difference between deep and surface regarding to black box metaphor. Difference between searching correlation between similar inputs and outputs and building a structure of hidden nodes and checking the predictions with rewarding correct ones and dividing that all by complexity of internal structure.

Difference between making step ... (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)

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”

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)

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)

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)