CstineSublime

LESSWRONG
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CstineSublime — LessWrong

Replying toI Tried to Trick Myself into Being a Better Planner & Problem Solver

I Tried to Trick Myself into Being a Better Planner & Problem Solver

I think the lesson fron this is that it might work, but need to push yourself harder?

I'm in two minds, because it is entirely possible, that yes, I didn't spend enough time or exert enough mental effort (how one measures that, I have no idea) to cause the anchoring effects to work.

On the other hand, you can say "you need to push it harder" of virtually anything. In fact almost any situation where you don't suffer catastrophic breaking point, there's room to argue for pushing harder.

In this specific case, how would I know? How would I falsify it?

Replying toIs Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

CstineSublime3d

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

Yeah. In my opinion, an ideal system should somehow take into account that some notes are old, unreviewed, etc., and give those notes lower priority, e.g. they would be displayed in a gray color and come later in search results. So they mostly wouldn't bother you, unless you find them by a hyperlink, or you use the right keywords in search.

Oh cool. You got me thinking and I might walk-back from what i said earlier - maybe individual notes are a burden? For example, let's say I'm working on a title sequence for a sitcom, specifically it's a Dark Comedy about an Oncologist. And I need to make some decisions about what... (read 461 more words →)

I Tried to Trick Myself into Being a Better Planner & Problem Solver

CstineSublime

Yesterday I tried to see if I could “hack” problem solving skills (and optimism) – somewhat in the spirit of Challenging the Difficult. It didn’t work.

In short, extremely unscientific approach involved I would think about a real goal of mine, think about an “impossible” arbitrary task in detail, then return to the real goal and see if it was “easier” or my planning was better.

For the real goal, I set a 5 minute timer and wrote down my best guess about the steps I’d need to take to achieve a this seemingly unobtainable goal. In this case: getting commissioned by a certain billion dollar company to make a certain kind of artsy video.... (read 740 more words →)

Replying toIs Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

CstineSublime4d

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

If the note is a burden, I'd say it is a problem of the note-taking system rather than of the note itself.

In my case it's not the individual notes that are burdensome, it's the sheer volume of notes that is the burden ("the dose makes the poison"). As the notes I have to recall, digest, and pass judgement on increases, so too does the cognitive load. The kind of notes I'm talking about should aid in making decisions or improving processes: more notes and dead-end paths slows down the decision making process. That's robbing my future-self.

What's interesting is preemptive "sorting" goes against one of the core tenants of Zettelkasten which promotes this idea of connections between atomic notes arising organically.

I am curious about Gwern's Suggestion of what to do with lists one is not sure how to sort, but I cannot understand the suggestion.

CstineSublime7d

re point 2 - you say "A microbe is one cell", but the immune system has to battle against a constant onslaught or widely different invaders. I'm not sure the asymmetry is accurate. Researchers found that frail people over 60 had a low Colony Forming Unit per Gram (CFU/g) score of under 10⁴ CFU/g. At the very least people will eat one of two types of food-microial content: lactic acid bacteria, yeast molds, but there are others. This says nothing about viruses or non-dietary contact. Sauerkraut alone contains: Leuconostoc mesenteroides, Lactobacillus plantarum, Pediococcus pentosaceus, Lactobacillus brevis, Leuconostoc citreum, Leuconostoc argentinum, Lactobacillus paraplantarum, Lactobacillus coryniformis, and Weissella spp. Kimchi contains the bacteria Leuconostoc spp., Weissella spp., and Lactobacillus spp according to Wikipedia.

CstineSublime10d

Works both ways - how likeable you are can influence your status. But status tends to create a halo effect that amplifies how likable you are. But "likable" is a concert of traits anyway. For example, the Big 5 personality model has dimensions for "agreeableness" and "extroversion". However physical attractiveness (which can be modulated by things like choice of apparel and accessories) is another influence. You may disagree, but I think they could all be factors in what makes someone likable.

Narcissist people, who I would assume rate low on agreeableness but high on extroversion, actively seek and frequently do attain higher status because they are motivated to. Supply negotiators are less effective... (read more)

CstineSublime10d

Orson Welles bemoaned how the explosion in his adaptation of the Trial could interpreted as an allusion to a nuclear explosion - "because I hate symbolism". He explained they tried all afternoon to film an explosion that wasn't mushroomy and failed, he finally relented "all right, there's going to be symbolism". While the Trial was shot in France, I don't have to hand where the second unit explosion photography was done and the ambient humidity there...

(I checked, the explosion at the start of Touch of Evil isn't really an explosion: it cuts to a flaming car chassis bumping down on the ground, follow by a crash zoom)

CstineSublime10dQuick Take

Who is Moltbook for? I assume it increases revenue for the LLM companies as the agents burn through tokens. But what are the use cases for the humans that own the agents (nefarious actors aside)? Is it all a bit of fun?

Replying toPlan 'Straya

CstineSublime10d

Plan 'Straya

Stone the flaming crows, 'straya just ^[1]gonna Steven Bradbury into AI alignment? Too easy.

^{^}
The use of the word "just" by an Australian means that whatever it is you have to do, it will not be easy, as in "Just pull that sword out of the stone" or "Just split that atom." - Michael Palin

Replying toIs Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

CstineSublime10d

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

I largely disagree.

Disagree with which bits precisely?

I think, to use your taxonomy, I'm trying to formularize how to produce types 2b and 3. Take the note - "Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers". To you this might seem like a type 1 note - it's a "who did what" statement. But actually it's probably closer to type 3 in that it points to a implicit vague goal I have about appropriating the film grammar and design language used in opening title sequences of both films and television shows, which is a highly compressed and efficient form of storytelling, and making self-contained stories with it.

A way... (read more)

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

CstineSublime

11d

Notetaking isn’t just for recalling things you read in a book. I’m principally interested in recording good ideas, tactics, or facts that help me do and finish tasks well.

Although, if you’re in the habit of reading great authors, that’s a pretty good reason to take notes. Why reinvent the wheel, especially if you have access to the best ideas in history? However, the impetus for notes includes so many sources other than books. The impetus can come from conversations, lectures, your own stream of consciousness, and even dreams.^[1]

Notetaking, when successful, moves the burden of searching for information, or thinking from some point in the future to now. You’re outsourcing your future self’s... (read 255 more words →)

Replying toWord importance in text <= conditional information of the token in the context. Is this assumption valid?

CstineSublime13d

Word importance in text <= conditional information of the token in the context. Is this assumption valid?

More potential importance. Consider high entropy clauses ranging from total gibberish or jargon which, aside from revealing some information about the author/narrator, doesn't substantially change the content communicated:

This morning I opened the door and saw Aslan

This sounds incredible at first, but the underwhelming context is that they have named their domestic cat "Aslan". Is it important to know that the narrator knows the cat on a first name basis, and that this cat (who may or may not be owned by the narrator) is owned by someone with a sense of humor, a taste for ironic 'antonomasia' who has at the very least watched the Chronicle of Narnia films?

Not all surprising parts... (read more)

What are the common counterpoints to “there’s nothing I, personally, can do about p(doom) or various X-Risks so I just don’t think about it”?

For example, I have a liberal arts education, no social influence, no platform I can beat the drum about specific risks from. I feel no more likely to affect change in, say, development or policy about misaligned super intelligent A.I. than I do about something like the cost of rent in my country, or the legislation around motorized scooters.

"Araffe" is a nonsense word familiar to anyone who works with generative AI image models or captioning in the same way that "delve" or "disclaim" are for LLMs and presents yet another clear case of an emergent AI behavior. I'm currently experimenting with generative video again and the word came to my attention as I try to improve the adherence to my prompts and mess around with conditioning. These researchers/artists investigated the origin of 'arafed' and similar words: it appears to be a case of overfitting the BLIP2 vision-language pretraining framework to the COCO dataset of image and caption which always starts off with "a bed with" "a slice of cake" -... (read more)

Prompted by Raemon's article about "impossible" problems, I've been asking myself:
What do I actually mean when I say something is “very hard” or “difficult”?

I wonder if my personal usage of these words less describes the effort involved, but more the projected uncertainty. If I describe something as difficult, I tend to use it in one of these three patterns:

There is one important variable that I have little leverage over, “Can I take a few days off work? It would be difficult to get permission from my supervisor” (that is to say, I don’t believe I can convince my supervisor).
There are lots of interdependent variables, which I do have potentially sufficient leverage over,

CstineSublime

4mo

“All this time I thought I needed to learn how to prompt the LLM, but it turns out I really just needed to learn how to prompt… myself”

Don't worry, I trust you won't need a barf bag for the rest of this post, just for the above.

I’ve been making unreasonably requests of LLMs, asking for feedback on topics like Career Strategy. That was never gonna work. Lousy replies are the result of lousy prompts; which are the result of (my) lousy problem framing.

No amount of “5 simple tricks to improve your prompts” or magic words was going to improve the responses. Unlike programming or mathematics problems, which engender highly specific methods of... (read 294 more words →)

Last week I finally and at long last managed to prompt an LLM into a "Socratic^[1] Brainstormer". It's really frustrating though that it doesn't ever hit me with a real curve ball that makes me go "Oh wow, I never thought of that" or "Oh shit, everything I said is a falsehood" a la Socrates. But as far as an rubber-duck with extra bells and whistles go, it's a step forward.

It has stopped with the overt sycophancy, no more "fascinating" or "what you've just said is very significant". It just asks questions, as few or as many questions as I specify. Claude seems to rely on a few stock question formats though, such... (read more)

I feel not taken in by LLM chatbots obvious sycophancy. I'm not sure if this reflects well on me, or is a sign of low self-confidence and that skepticism of praise and compliments is my baseline.

I struggle to write cover letters for applications^[1], despite being self-aware. The obvious remedy would be to lie and make up what skills or abilities I have based on the application, and hope there's no negative repercussions later. I see my difficulty in writing cover letters as part of a wider pattern of being unable to answer the question "what am I good at - that people need enough to pay for?" which is a fundamentally different to the questions "what am I proud of?" and "what are my passions?". Writing a cover letter involves not only identifying the tasks which are easy or hard for you and skills you possess; but... (read more)

Reading this post today, I realized I don't actually know what the difference is between a belief and a model. I still don't.

Models, as I understand it, are comprised of assumptions about cause-effect relationships which are themselves beliefs. I'm thinking about decision making models - where these anticipated causal effects influence what conclusion (i.e. option) is reached by a model. So a model is basically are a cluster of beliefs. But that doesn't appear to be the idiomatically correct way to refer to both (I believe I am wrong in my usage/understanding).

Certainly in the post linked, beliefs are seen to be at odds with models. A model itself is not "believed". And I suspect some kind of internal, intuitive meta-model of self is drawing that conclusion, and producing that belief.

Does anybody here have any advice or thoughts on the "two list" approach?

I can't remember who it suggested it and I'm likely conflating different anecdotes - but the gist was you have two lists: a traditional to-do list which has tasks and actions; and a second list that I've seen described as a "to think" list - which might contain a series of problems or questions that are important but for which you are unable to progress.

In my case my "to think" or "problems" list would be as long as my arm, my to-do list would be filled obvious stuff: with whatever is the immediate next step on a project for a client, grocery lists, paying bills, booking tickets to a show etc. But on average shorter than the other list.

I'm not sure how to convert individual items from the the longer non-actionable list, into actionable things to do.

Inverting Argument from authority, when is it good practice? I saw someone watching a daytime television show where they brought in someone to do an infomercial about health-marketed products. Instinctively, I didn't listen to any of the claims, instead all I could think of was "Well they're a salesperson, everything they're going to say is biased towards selling the products they brought today. This person shouldn't be watching this".

I'm sure you see my mistake here. It's convenient, it's easy, just filter out everyone who doesn't seem credible or who you suspect of having a bias: but is it optimal?

Reflections on writing 15 daily blog posts

CstineSublime

6mo

It goes without saying this is a repost from my personal blog

The Inkhaven Residency is a program that where residents write one blog post a day, for thirty days and are provided mentorship from established bloggers. That would be extremely beneficial to me, but impractical.

30 blog posts in 30 days is a satisfyingly round number. There was nothing stopping me from doing this experiment on my own. Yesterday I hit the half-way mark of this experiment. 15 days, 15 blog posts, which is as logical milestone as any to reflect on the experiment.

It is important to note: I’m doing this without guidance. Which makes this a very different beast to the residency.... (read 972 more words →)

Closed Mouth, Open Oppurtunities

CstineSublime

6mo

Inspired by the Inkhaven Residency but unable to attend it I still intend to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. The other 29 will be on a personal blog.

I’m surprised that Harpo Marx – someone who built his career on non-verbal comedy – was bilingual. I wish I was bilingual. Understanding another language permits you to also understand another way of seeing the world and grants access to a different culture. But to be honest I’m in it sheerly for the prestige, I’d love to be that jerk who has to show off how cosmopolitan he is.

If you don’t know who Harpo Marx is, I must disappoint you. There is no... (read 1168 more words →)

Parallel Parking and possibly Instrumental Convergence

CstineSublime

7mo

I was taught two different ways to parallel park. I am sure there are more than just two methods. This strikes me as odd since it's a very common part of driving. Nevertheless,
I hate parallel parking and it was a constant source of anxiety when learning to drive. Apparently I'm not alone in this:

Over half (57%) of car owners surveyed report feeling stressed or anxious about parallel parking, with women and younger drivers reporting higher levels of anxiety.

Instrumental Convergence hypothesizes that sufficiently intelligent agents with similar to the same sub-goals will converge on those methods or instruments of achieving that. Parking your car parallel to the curb would appear to be one... (read 697 more words →)

Should you steelman what you don’t understand?

CstineSublime

7mo

While you can strawman a position you don’t understand, I’m not sure you can steelman it.

Steelmanning is a good habit to get into. Rather than dismissing something that you disagree with, you can try come up with the most cogent argument you can why it might be true. However, to disagree with a proposition, statement or a conclusion requires understanding it in the first place. I admit freely: There’s a whole lot I don’t understand. I’m in the habit of asking people to clarify when I don’t understand them but am intrigued. I’m sure this comes across as combative or borne of derision. It isn’t borne of derision; it is born of... (read 1581 more words →)

When should you read a biography?

CstineSublime

8mo

TL;DR - Do you have any theories on how essential is reading biographies of people who are masters of a given skill to mastering that skill yourself? And what qualities or properties of a biography have you identified that make it more/less effective?

I once read an autobiography of Harpo Marx the harpist and mime, so it had the cheeky title of “Harpo Speaks”.^[1] It’s entertainment value was not what drew me to it: I was hoping for practical insights into his creative process and pantomime. Was this a wise approach – should one read biographies with the intent of learning practical skills or are they best suited for inspiration?

I don’t mean to dismiss... (read 724 more words →)

We need a universal definition of 'agency' and related words

CstineSublime

And by "we" I mean "I". I'm the one struggling.

Agency with a 'y', basically means “The condition of being in action; operation.” Or the means or mode of acting, the context I hear it used most often is sociologically:

"Agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential." One's agency is one's independent capability or ability to act on one's will. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one's experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position one is born into."

People who are... (read 1409 more words →)

How do you decide to phrase predictions you ask of others? (and how do you make your own?)

CstineSublime

I'd like your practical advice and learned experience: how do you go about phrasing predictions when you ask people "Is X going to happen?" - in order to get answers that reflect the actual thing you're trying to get a read on?

Now I'll use a fictitious country with a fictious sitting president running for reelection - let's say I ask for the likelihood of:

"Will Sum Bodee^[1] win the Ruritania Presidential Election this year?"

Even this isn't as straight forward as it seems because it could be motivated by either
a. a desire to know if he will remain President of Ruritania for whatever reason
b. a desire to know what do the people you're asking believe... (read 495 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

We need a universal definition of 'agency' and related words

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

Reflections on writing 15 daily blog posts

Do you need a better map of your myriad of maps to the territory?

CstineSublime

I Tried to Trick Myself into Being a Better Planner & Problem Solver

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

Prompting Myself: Maybe it's not a damn platitude?

Reflections on writing 15 daily blog posts

Closed Mouth, Open Oppurtunities

Parallel Parking and possibly Instrumental Convergence

Should you steelman what you don’t understand?

CstineSublime

We need a universal definition of 'agency' and related words

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

Reflections on writing 15 daily blog posts

Do you need a better map of your myriad of maps to the territory?

CstineSublime

I Tried to Trick Myself into Being a Better Planner & Problem Solver

Is Note-taking a favor or a burden to my future-self?

Prompting Myself: Maybe it's not a damn platitude?

Reflections on writing 15 daily blog posts

Closed Mouth, Open Oppurtunities

Parallel Parking and possibly Instrumental Convergence

Should you steelman what you don’t understand?