Shortform Content [Beta]
Strategy mini-post:
One thing that tends to be weak in strategy games is "opponent's choice" effects, where an ability has multiple possible effects and an opponent chooses which is resolved. Usually, each effect is stronger than what you would normally get for a card with that price, but in practice these cards are often quite weak.
For instance, the Magic: the Gathering card "Book Burning" looks quite strong in theory, as it either does 6 damage or mills 6 cards (both strong effects that might well be worth more than the card'... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I remember seeing a deal from a bank where the bank got to chose whether to pay a fixed interest rate or a variable one and either path looked like a good deal but the fact that the bank would chose meant you would always end on the wrong side of the market. I wish I could remember the exact promotion.
I generally agree with the heuristic that we should "live on the mainline", meaning that we should mostly plan for events which capture the dominant share of our probability. This heuristic causes me to have a tendency to do some of the following things
- Work on projects that I think have a medium-to-high chance of succeeding and quickly abandon things that seem like they are failing.
- Plan my career trajectory based on where I think I can plausibly maximize my long term values.
- Study subjects only if I think that I will need to understand them at som
Some random thoughts:
- Startups and pivots. Startups require lots of commitment even when things feel like they're collapsing – only by perservering through those times can you possibly make it. Still, startups are willing to pivot – take their existing infrastructure but change key strategic approaches.
- Escalating commitment. Early on (in most domains), you should pick shorter term projects, because the focus is on learning. Code a website in a week. Code another website in 2 months. Don't stress too much on multi-year plans until you're reas
Some thoughts on Buddhist epistemology.
This risks being threatening, upsetting, and heretical within a certain point of view I commonly see expressed on LW for reasons that will become clear if you keep reading. I don't know if that means you shouldn't read this if that sounds like the kind of thing you don't want to read, but I put it out there so you can make the choice without having to engage in the specifics if you don't want to. I don't think you will be missing out on anything if that warning gives you a tinge of "maybe... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I agree with KaJ Solata and Viliam that episteme is underweighted in Buddhism, but thanks for explicating that world view
One thing I'm finding quite surprising about shortform is how long some of these posts are. It seems that many people are using this feature to indicate that they've just written up these ideas quickly in the hope that the feedback is less harsh. This seems valuable; the feedback here can be incredibly harsh at times and I don't doubt that this has discouraged many people from posting.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t have the time to write you a short email, so I wrote you a long one instead.”
I'm going to start writing up short book reviews as I know from past experience that it's very easy to read a book and then come out a few years later with absolutely no knowledge of what was learned.
Book Review: Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope
To be honest, the main reason why I read this book was because I had enjoyed his first and second books (Models and The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck) and so I was willing to take a risk. There were definitely some interesting ideas here, but I'd already received many of these through other s... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I often don't feel like I'm "doing that much", but find that when I list out all of the projects, activities, and thought streams going on, there's an amount that feels like "a lot". This has happened when reflecting on every semester in the past 2 years.
Hyp: Until I write down a list of everything I'm doing, I'm just probing my working memory for "how much stuff am I up to?" Working mem has a limit, and reliably I'm going to get only a handful of things. Anytime when I'm doing more things th... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Relatedly, the KonMari cleaning method involves taking all items of a category "e.g. all books" and putting them in on big pile, before clearing them out. You often feel like you don't own "that much stuff" and are almost always surprised by the size of the pile.
There are a pair of things in the rationalist community which I like to call "The Two Bad Polys" -- polyphasic sleep and polyamory. Both seem appealing to many people and have been experimented with pretty widely in the community despite being quite harmful; I strongly advise against trying either. In practice they seem to lead to lots of problems for most people who try them.
(Attribution note: I'm not sure whether I was the first to come up with this term to describe the pair -- I think the two were first referred to as a dangerous pair by ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
1. Sure, happy to chat
2. Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it's in direct contradiction, just that I have the most data about actually abusive relationships, and some broad implication that I do think that's where most of the variance comes from, though definitely not all of it.
Here are some of the common criticisms I get of myself. If you know me, either in person, through secondhand accounts feel free to comment with your thoughts on which ones feel correct to you and any nuance or comments you'd like to make. Full license for this particular thread to operate on Crocker's rules and not take my feelings into account. If you don't feel comfortable commenting publicly, also feel free to message with your thoughts.
- I have too low epistemic rigor.
- Too confident in myself
- Not confident enough in myself.
- Too focused on st
There's been a lot of noise lately about affirmative consent, a standard of consent which requires explicit verbal confirmation for every escalation of romantic or sexual interaction. It has been adopted as a standard by many college campuses, and efforts have been made to turn it into actual law.
Most of the discussion has centered around the use of affirmative consent as a legal standard, and as such it is quite terrible: unfair, unjust, and impossible to interpret in a consistent way that stops bad behavior without criminalizing normal conduct. But,... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I'm curious if you'd reprimand both friends if two of your friends kissed, escalated, and then had sex, both enthusiastically, but without any verbal consent in either direction. (Obvious conclusion I'm jumping to: that we generally mean that men must get consent, even if we state that it goes both ways.)
Crossposted from my Facebook timeline (and, in turn, crossposted there from vaguely secret, dank corners of the rationalsphere)
“So Ray, is LessLong ready to completely replace Facebook? Can I start posting my cat pictures and political rants there?”
Well, um, hmm....
So here’s the deal. I do hope someday someone builds an actual pure social platform that’s just actually good, that’s not out-to-get you, with reasonably good discourse. I even think the LessWrong architecture might be good for that (and if a team wanted to fork the codebase, they’d be welcome t... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
A couple weeks ago I spent an hour talking over video chat with Daniel Cantu, a UCLA neuroscience postdoc who I hired on Wyzant.com to spend an hour answering a variety of questions about neuroscience I had. (Thanks Daniel for reviewing this blog post for me!)
The most interesting thing I learned is that I had quite substantially misunderstood the connection between convolutional neural nets and the human visual system. People claim that these are somewhat bio-inspired, and that if you look at early layers of the visual cortex you'll find that it operates k
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI think that an extremely effective way to get a better feel for a new subject is to pay an online tutor to answer your questions about it for an hour.
It turns that there are a bunch of grad students on Wyzant who mostly work tutoring high school math or whatever but who are very happy to spend an hour answering your weird questions.
For example, a few weeks ago I had a session with a first-year Harvard synthetic biology PhD. Before the session, I spent a ten-minute timer writing down things that I currently didn't get about biology. (This is an exercise wo
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postI recommend looking on Wyzant.
Magic colors and errors
Reading Writers guild policy doc there was a principle of "the vase is already broken". The whole document is a lot how you make a red organization and most of the princples are anti-white.
The principle makes sense but I found it be foregin to my culture. Things are made to be replaced. And if something is done wrong today we will try to do right the next day.
In contrast the blue way is much more familiar with me. Accept only true things, set up things for perpetuity. In the contrast I noticed that the blue thing is focused... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
More on green errors, I think they do exists. There is a difference between an invasive species and a predator. Green probably allows for predators easier than white or black that would call them murderes. But being disruptive to the harmony is an actual violation green registers.
Imagine you have a snake problem in your houses yard. You could get angry and kill every snake you see (haphazard, random and laboursome the red way to address it). You could poison your yard (but then your flowers might die or your food supply gets fouled, the black way). For whe... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Fiction writing ramble, #2: Worldbuilding.
This is an attempt to walk through the mental process I follow when writing fiction. [Goals: I'd like to better understand what my brain is doing, and put out ideas for other people who might be interested in writing fiction.]
Historically, worldbuilding (I'm talking mainly about fantasy settings here, but sci-fi as well; earthfic applies less) has been one of the planning steps that I most struggle to do alone; I've tended to do it via brainstorming with friends. Figuring out how magic systems and s... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
(don't write fiction, but have run and playtested a lot of RPGs, which share many of the worldbuilding elements).
Among the hard parts is figuring out how much suspension of disbelief your audience will willingly bring, on what topics. This _is_ fiction, so we're not generally trying to truly predict a hypothetical "possible" outcome, we're trying to highlight similarities and differences from our own. This VERY OFTEN implies assuming a similarity (where the point of departure has less effect that is likely) and then justifying it... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Old post: A mechanistic description of status
[This is an essay that I’ve had bopping around in my head for a long time. I’m not sure if this says anything usefully new-but it might click with some folks. If you haven’t read Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole on Kevin Simler’s excellent blog, Melting Asphalt read that first. I think this is pretty bad and needs to be rewritten and maybe expanded substantially, but this blog is called “musings and rough drafts.”]
In this post, I’m going to outline how I think about status. In particular, I want to give a mec... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Related: The red paperclip theory of status describes status as a form of optimization power, specifically one that can be used to influence a group.
The name of the game is to convert the temporary power gained from (say) a dominance behaviour into something further, bringing you closer to something you desire: reproduction, money, a particular social position...
New post: Napping Protocol
Some of these seem likely to generalize and some seem likely to be more specific.
Curious about your thoughts "best experimental approaches to figuring out your own napping protocol."
Related to: Realism about rationality
I have talked to some people who say that they value ethical reflection, and would prefer that humanity reflected for a very long time before colonizing the stars. In a sense I agree, but at the same time I can't help but think that "reflection" is a vacuous feel-good word that has no shared common meaning.
Some forms of reflection are clearly good. Epistemic reflection is good if you are a consequentialist, since it can help you get what you want. I also agree that narrow forms of reflection can also be ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
The vague reflections you are referring to are analogous to somebody saying "I should really exercise more" without ever doing it. I agree that the mere promise of reflection is useless.
But I do think that reflections about the vague topics are important and possible. Actively working through one's experiences, reading relevant books, discussing questions with intelligent people can lead to epiphanies (and eventually life choices), that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
However, this is not done with a push of a button and these things don't happen randomly
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postOne of the major problem with getting marketing emails is that we lack good feedback mechanisms to incentivize companies whom we do give our emails because we do want to get some information not to spam us with other information that we don't want to receive.
At the moment we have two options to punish companies who abuse the relationship. We can click on “mark as spam" or we can unsubscribe.
The first version is a punishment as it means that more emails of the company end up in spam folders. Unfortunately, the company usually doesn't know th... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
In the end they do care about the fact that people buy, but the fact that marketers care about metrics like open rates suggest that it's useful for them to have more information.
A lot of emails are send out as a form of content marketing where the goal of the company is to create a trusted relationship which can be later monetized. In those cases it's not easy to measure the effects of an email on sales months down the road.
The fact that the marketing platforms have a spam score doesn't mean that the spam score accurately captures the spam... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Memex Thread:
I've taken copious notes in notebooks over the past 6 years, I've used evernote on and off as a capture tool for the past 4 years, and for the past 1.5 years I've been trying to organize my notes via a personal wiki. I'm in the process of switching and redesigning systems, so here's some thoughts.
Concepts and Frames
Association, linking and graphs
A defining idea in this space is "Your memory works my association, get your note taking to mirror that." A simple version of this is what you have in a wiki. Every concept mentioned that has it's own page has a link to it. I'm a big fan of graph visualizations of information, and you could imagine looking at a graph of your personal wiki where edges are links. Roam embraces links with memory, all your notes know if they've been linked to and display this information. My idea for a ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
In discussions about consciousness I find myself repeating the same basic argument against the existence of qualia constantly. I don't do this just to be annoying: It is just my experience that
1. People find consciousness really hard to think about and has been known to cause a lot of disagreements.
2. Personally I think that this particular argument dissolved perhaps 50% of all my confusion about the topic, and was one of the simplest, clearest arguments that I've ever seen.
I am not being original either. The argument is the same one that has b... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
That's an argument against dualism not an argument against qualia. If mind brain identity is true, neural activity is causing reports, and qualia, along with the rest of consciousness are identical to neural activity, so qualia are also causing reports.