Shortform Content [Beta]
Been mulling around about doing a podcast in which each episode is based on acquiring a particular skillset (self-love, focus, making good investments) instead of just interviewing a particular person.
I interview a few people who have a particular skill (e.g. self-love, focus, creating cash flow businesses), and model the cognitive strategies that are common between them. Then interview a few people who struggle a lot with that skill, and model the cognitive strategies that are common between them. Finally, model a few people who used to be bad at the skil... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Sounds interesting. I think it may be difficult to find a person, let alone multiple people on a given topic, who are have a particular skill but are also able to articulate it and/or identify the cognitive strategies they use successfully.
Regardless, I'd like to hear about how people reduce repetitive talk in their own heads - how to focus on new thoughts as opposed to old, recurring ones...if that makes sense.
I keep seeing these articles about the introduction of artificial intelligence/data science to football and basketball strategy. What's crazy to me is that it's happening now instead of much much earlier. The book Moneyball was published in 2003 (the movie in 2011) spreading the story of how use of statistics changed the game when it came to every aspect of managing a baseball team. After reading it, I and many others thought to ourselves "this would be cool to do in other sports" - using data would be interesting in every area of every... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Part of the problem was that doing the work to apply those insights and doing so in a way that beats trained humans is hard because until recently those models couldn't handle all the variables and data humans could and so ignored many things that made a difference. Now that more data can be fed into the models they can make the same or better predictions that humans can make and thus stand a chance of outperforming them rather than making "correct" but poorly-informed decisions that, in the real world, would have lost games.
If you deal with some of your problems by distracting yourself, then as long as you have those problems you'll be distracted. You can do most of the other stuff you want to do, even while being distracted. But there are some things you can't do while distracted, like some kinds of intellectual work.
Hmmm..I think personal experience tells me that distraction-avoidant behaviour will still choose intellectual work, as long as it is quicker than the alternative.
I might choose a game over writing a LW shortform but I will still choose a LW shortform over writing a novel.
Many biohacking guides suggest using melatonin. Does liquid melatonin spoil under high temperature if put in tea (95 degree Celcius)?
More general question: how do I even find answers to questions like this one?
When I had a quick go-ogle search I started with:
"melatonin stability temperature"
then
"N-Acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine"
A quick flick through a few abstracts I can't see anything involving temperatures higher than 37 C i.e. body temperature.
Melatonin is a protein, many proteins denature at temperatures above 41 C.
My (jumped to) conclusion:
No specific data found.
Melatonin may not be stable at high temperatures, so avoid putting it in hot tea.
I would appreciate an option to hide the number of votes that posts have. Maybe not hide entirely, but set them to only display at the bottom of a post, and not at the top nor on the front page. With the way votes are currently displayed, I think I'm getting biased for/against certain posts before I even read them, just based on the number of votes they have.
pretty easy to create a stylish script for it
Oh, good idea! I don't have Stylish installed, but I have something similar, and I was able to hide it that way. Thanks!
Epistemic status: Thinking out loud.
Introducing the Question
Scientific puzzle I notice I'm quite confused about: what's going on with the relationship between thinking and the brain's energy consumption?
On one hand, I'd always been told that thinking harder sadly doesn't burn more energy than normal activity. I believed that and had even come up with a plausible story about how evolution optimizes for genetic fitness not intelligence, and introspective access is pretty bad as it is, so it's not that surprising that we can't crank up our brains energy con
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postA competition on solving math problems via AI is coming. https://imo-grand-challenge.github.io/
- The problems are from the International math olympiad (IMO)
- They want to formalize all the problems in Lean (theorem prover) language. They haven't figured out how to do that, e.g. how to formalize problems of form "determine the set of objects satisfying the given property", as can be seen in https://github.com/IMO-grand-challenge/formal-encoding/blob/master/design/determine.lean
- A contestant must submit a computer program that will take a problem's descriptio
That is interesting! I should be clear that my odds ratios are pretty tentative given the uncertainty around the challenge. For example, I literally woke up this morning and thought that my 1/3 odds might be too conservative given recent progress on 8th grade science tests and theorem proving.
I created three PredictionBook predictions to track this if anyone's interested (5 years, 10 years, 20 years).
Converting this from a Facebook comment to LW Shortform.
A friend complains about recruiters who send repeated emails saying things like "just bumping this to the top of your inbox" when they have no right to be trying to prioritize their emails over everything else my friend might be receiving from friends, travel plans, etc. The truth is they're simply paid to spam.
Some discussion of repeated messaging behavior ensued. These are my thoughts:
I feel conflicted about repeatedly messaging people. All the following being factors in this conflict... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Eliezer has written about the notion of security mindset, and there's an important idea that attaches to that phrase, which some people have an intuitive sense of and ability to recognize, but I don't think Eliezer's post quite captured the essence of the idea, or presented anything like a usable roadmap of how to acquire it.
An1lam's recent shortform post talked about the distinction between engineering mindset and scientist mindset, and I realized that, with the exception of Eliezer and perhaps a few people he works closely with, all o... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Sure, but let me clarify that I'm probably not drawing as hard a boundary between "ordinary paranoia" and "deep security" as I should be. I think Bruce Schneier's and Eliezer's buckets for "security mindset" blended together in the months since I read both posts. Also, re-reading the logistic success curve post reminded me that Eliezer calls into question whether someone who lacks security mindset can identify people who have it. So it's worth noting that my ability to identify people with security mindset is itself suspect by this criteria (there's no pub
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postOver the years, I've experienced a couple of very dramatic yet rather sudden and relatively "easy" shifts around major pain points: strong aversions, strong fears, inner conflicts, or painful yet deeply ingrained beliefs. My post Identities are [Subconscious] Strategies contains examples. It's not surprising to me that these are possible, but my S1 says they're supposed to require a lot of effort: major existential crises, hours of introspection, self-discovery journeys, drug trips, or dozens of hours with a therapist.
Have recently... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Unlocking the Emotional Brain is basically about this.
Mentally crowding out possibilities gets you stuck in local maxima. To glean the benefits of temporarily inhabiting local maxima while garnering the benefits of even better points that can be discovered via higher-energy search, acquire the ability to prevent {the idea of existing forms of X} from mentally crowding out {the possibility of, specific visualizations of, and motivation to create} better forms of X.
Yeah, this is a great method.
For some instances of crowding out, this method doesn't work because you don't even get to the point of bringing the thing to attention. As an extreme example, we use a collection of mental moves to build thought-structures, and those moves are reflected in the grammar of our language; so it stands to reason that we might be able to think more difficult thoughts if we try to design further grammatical tools. It's hard to see this possibility or be motivated by it, I think in part because existing language crowds... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Selected Aphorisms from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum
I'm currently working to format Francis Bacon's Novum Organum as a LessWrong sequence. It's a moderate-sized project as I have to work through the entire work myself, and write an introduction which does Novum Organum justice and explains the novel move of taking an existing work and posting in on LessWrong (short answer: NovOrg is some serious hardcore rationality and contains central tenets of the LW foundational philosophy notwithstanding being published back in 1620, not to mentio... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
Yup – Ruby/habryka specifically found a translation that we're allowed to post.
Referential distance or referential displacement. Like inferential distance, but for reference instead of inference. Inferential distance is when one perspective holds conclusions that require many steps of inference to justify, and the other perspective hasn't gone through those steps of inference (perhaps because the inferences are unsound). Referential distance is when one perspective has a term that points to something, and that term is most easily define using many other terms, and the other perspective doesn't know what those terms are supp... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
New (image) post: My strategic picture of the work that needs to be done
Cool.
: )
I know I'll go to programmer hell for asking this... but... does anyone have a link to a github repo that tried really hard to use jQuery to build their entire website, investing effort into doing some sort of weird 'jQuery based components' thing for maintainable, scalable development?
People tell me this can't be done without turning into terrifying spaghetti code but I dunno I feel sort of like the guy in this xkcd and I just want to know for sure.
AFAICT jQuery UI is somsthing like a component library, which is (possibly) a piece of what you might build this out of, but not the thing itself (which is to say, a well functioning, maintainable, complete website).
Although I don't think it's really designed to do the sort of thing I'm talking about here.
I think it's safe to say that many LW readers don't feel like spirituality is a big part of their life, yet many (probably most) people do experience a thing that goes by many names---the inner light, Buddha-nature, shunyata, God---and falls under the heading of "spirituality". If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I'm pointing to a common human experience you aren't having.
Only, I don't think you're not having it, you just don't realize you are having those experiences.
One way some people get in ... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
There's a dynamic here that I think is somewhat important: socially recognized gnosis.
That is, contemporary American society views doctors as knowing things that laypeople don't know, and views physicists as knowing things that laypeople don't know, and so on. Suppose a doctor examines a person and says "ah, they have condition X," and Amy responds with "why do you say that?", and the doctor responds with "sorry, I don't think I can generate a short enough explanation that is understandable to you." It seem... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I agree with Wei Dai that we should use our real names for online forums, including Lesswrong. I want to briefly list some benefits of using my real name,
- It means that people can easily recognize me across websites, for example from Facebook and Lesswrong simultaneously.
- Over time my real name has been stable whereas my usernames have changed quite a bit over the years. For some very old accounts, such as those I created 10 years ago, this means that I can't remember my account name. Using my real name would have averted this situation.
- It motivates me
These days my reason for not using full name is mostly this: I want to keep my professional and private lives separate. And I have to use my real name at job, therefore I don't use it online.
What I probably should have done many years ago, is make up a new, plausibly-sounding full name (perhaps keep my first name and just make up a new surname?), and use it consistently online. Maybe it's still not too late; I just don't have any surname ideas that feel right.
Questions around Making Reliable Evaluations
Most existing forecasting platform questions are for very clearly verifiable questions:
- "Who will win the next election"
- "How many cars will Tesla sell in 2030?"
But many of the questions we care about are much less verifiable:
- "How much value has this organization created?"
- "What is the relative effectiveness of AI safety research vs. bio risk research?"
One solution attempt would be to have an "expert panel" assess these questions, but this opens up a bunch of issues. How could we know how much we could tr
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this postMaking long term predictions is hard. That's a fundamental problem. Having proxies can be convenient, but it's not going to tell you anything you don't already know.
Thoughts on impact measures and making AI traps
I was chatting with Turntrout today about impact measures, and ended up making some points that I think are good to write up more generally.
One of the primary reasons why I am usually unexcited about impact measures is that I have a sense that they often "push the confusion into a corner" in a way that actually makes solving the problem harder. As a concrete example, I think a bunch of naive impact regularization metrics basically end up shunting the problem of "get an AI to do what we want" into the problem o
... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post[ETA: This isn't a direct reply to the content in your post. I just object to your framing of impact measures, so I want to put my own framing in here]
I tend to think that impact measures are just tools in a toolkit. I don't focus on arguments of the type "We just need to use an impact measure and the world is saved" because this indeed would be diverting attention from important confusion. Arguments for not working on them are instead more akin to saying "This tool won't be very useful for building safe value aligned agents i... (Read more)(Click to expand thread. ⌘F to Expand All)Cmd/Ctrl F to expand all comments on this post
I seem to differently discount different parts of what I want. For example, I'm somewhat willing to postpone fun to low-probability high-fun futures, whereas I'm not willing to do the same with romance.