Music Video maker and self professed "Fashion Victim" who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
On the scale between "pseudoscience that provides either completely random results or exactly what its operator wants to hear" and "always provides the correct answer", there are some uncomfortable points where we probably get first, such as "provides the correct answer 99% of the time" (and with the 1% chance you are unlucky, and you are screwed because no one is going to believe you) or "provides the correct answer for neurotypical people" (and if you are an autist, you are screwed).
I'm afraid I need you to rephrase or elaborate on what you meant by this - are you saying, aware of a technique or method which is right 99% of the time or thereabouts. Or are you saying human variability makes such a technique impossible for anything but the most narrow populations? Or have I likely (and in a meta-way appropriately) completely missed the point? What do you think of more generally - as I explicate in the second half - revelations about a person's internalized belief structures, including their hero's and related moral system, but also the idea of idiolect being a symptom of their thinking and model of the world even if it is not a mechanism for directly ascertaining their personal belief in this or that specific statement?
The promise of mind reading techniques whether it is a former FBI analyst or one of Paul Ekman's microexpression reading human lie detectors. I become aware of this cottage industry during every trial-by-media where suspicion piles upon someone not yet charged with murder.
I have to admit I am skeptical that anyone has such an amazing power to see through the facade of a stranger and with a greater-than-chance determine if they are telling the truth or not. Doubly so because I am someone who is constantly misinterpreted, I have to manage my gestures and facial expressions because my confusion is often misread as disagreement; my approval for disapproval; even a simple statement like "I'm not hungry right now" is wrongly generalized as not liking the particular cuisine... and not that I just don't want to eat anything right at this moment.
However if placed under the microscope by one of these former FBI body language experts would I feel a intense sense of validation ? Would I exclaim "yes, I feel seen, heard... you get me!"?
I have no doubt some people are more perceptive about emotional nuances than others: film and theatre actors who are trained to observe and mimic, people who have grown up in abusive or emotionally unstable households and are hyper sensitive to small changes in the mood of others (which of course may make them prone to more 'false positives' and paranoia), and of course mentalists like cold readers and palmists.
However being more emotionally perceptive doesn't necessarily mean you can tell if someone is lying - or a particular statement is false, especially if that person is especially good at telling the truth, or like me - their natural body language and expression doesn't express what you'd expect.
What I have greater faith in is that given even a small but emblematic example of a person's extemporaneous speech you could derive an accurate personality and world-view portrait of them. In the same way that an accent can help you pinpoint the geographical and economic origin of a person (think of comedies like The Nanny that play up on this convention). Harry Shearer once explained that to play Richard Nixon he channeled Jack Benny - believing that Nixon's persona and particularly his way of telling jokes was consciously or unconsciously modelled on that of Benny. Likewise Vladimir Putin's distinctive gait has been attributed to a prenatal stroke, or that his subordinates including Dmitry Medvedev have "copied the boss", the more persuasive explanation is that they all picked up the habit from watching Soviet Spy films as youngsters and wanting to emulate the hero.
The kinds of films, television, and role models, books, music and lyrics that someone has absorbed would also influence or at least be indicative of their world view. Given enough of these tells, while I am not sure that you could tell if someone is or isn't a murderer, you could certainly gain a accurate insight into their worldview, the mental models they have about the world, what they value, what their ethics system is like etc. etc.
How much information can you extract about a person from a written transcript that they aren't aware they are sharing is probably startling, but rarely or predictably "he's a murderer" level.
I think they are just using that as an example of a strongly opinionated sub-agent which may be one of many different and highly specific probability assessments of doom.
As for "survival is the default assumption" - what a declaration of that implies on the surface level is that the chance of survival is overwhelming except in the case of a cataclysmic AI scenario. To put it another way:
we have a 99% chance of survival so long as we get AGI right.
To put it yet another way - Hollywood has made popular films about the human world being destroyed by Nuclear War, Climate Change, Viral Pandemic, and Asteroid Impact to name a few - different sub-agents could each give higher or lower probabilities to each of those scenarios depending on things like domain knowledge and in concert it raises the question of why we presume that survival is the default? What is the ensemble average of doom?
Is doom more or less likely than survival for any given time frame?
I have some hard data that disproves I'm a realist, but suggests I'm a pessimist (i.e. more than 50% of the time my best expectations of personal outcomes are worse than the case). Now what?
The hard data is a handful of specific predictions for example, a prediction about a financial investment (where performance consistently exceeded my expectations) where I had no control over the performance, and things like a exam where I had control (although an instructor noted that I performed worse on the exam than a practice exam because of 'nerves').
Arguably the most immediate step is "just get more data: make sure this isn't an aberration, or at the least see which specific types of predictions or expectations you're more prone to systematic pessimism".
Sure and then what? Should I change my investment style to allow more upside? If it means revising my models of the world - what shape does that take? What beliefs or habits are the cause of my pessimism?
In biological organisms, physical pain [say, in response to limb being removed] is an evolutionary consequence of the fact that organisms with the capacity to feel physical pain avoided situations where their long-term goals [e.g. locomotion to a favourable position with the limb] which required the subsystem generating pain were harmed.
How many organisms other than humans have "long term goals"? Doesn't that require a complex capacity for mental representation of possible future states?
Am I wrong in assuming that the capacity to experience "pain" is independent of an explicit awareness of what possibilities have been shifted as a result of the new sensory data? (i.e. having a limb cleaved from the rest of the body, stubbing your toe in the dark). The organism may not even be aware of those possibilities, only 'aware' of pain.
Note: I'm probably just having a fear of this sounding all too teleological and personifying evolution
How often is signalling a high degree of precision without the reader understanding the meaning of the term more important than conveying a imprecise but broadly within the subject matter understanding of the content?
I'm confused, is the death to discomfort comparison based on the cumulative experience that the loved ones and friends of a person who has died might experience in grief and despair that someone they cared about died? Or are you suggesting that a death is a superlatively uncomfortable event for the individual who is dying?
I can't see a way of making discomfort to death fungible, at least partly because to experience discomfort requires someone to continue on living.
Does "normie" crossover with "(I'm) just a regular guy/girl"? While they are obviously have highly different connotations, is the central meaning similar?
I tend to assume, owing to Subjectivism and Egocentric Bias, that at times people are more likely to identify as part of the majority (and therefore 'normie') than the minority unless they have some specific reason to do so. What further complicates this like a matryoshka doll is not only the differing sociological roles that a person can switch between dozens of times a day (re: the stereotypical Twitter bio "Father. Son. Actuary. Tigers supporter") but within a minority one might be part of the majority of the minority, or the minority of the minority many times over. Like the classic Emo Phillips joke "Northern Conservative Baptist, or Northern Liberal Baptist" "He said "Northern Conservative Baptist", I said "me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist..."" itself a play on "No True-Scotsman".
I'm not sure what actually constitutes the Renaissance? Is just an art movement, or does it describe the totality of what was happening in European courts at the time? Is it just a propagandistic term? However two major trends that are associated with it - linear perspective paintings, and the rediscovery of Greco-Latin Literature both are at least partly indebted to developments in the Middle East.
The Book of Optics by Ibn al-Haytham appears to be particularly important in the developments of painting and the understanding of how light transmits. It contains a rejection of the emission theory of optics (rays come from the eyes) in favour of the intromission theory that light bounces off of objects before entering the eye. And translated into Latin in the late 12th century. I would surmise that it had at least an influence in the popularity and use of Linear Perspective in Renaissance Art.
Greco-Latin Literature was preserved, albeit in various translated forms, across the Islamic World and highly popular. As Wikipedia puts it:
The line between Greek scholarship and Arab scholarship in Western Europe was very blurred during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Sometimes the concept of the transmission of Greek Classics is often used to refer to the collective knowledge that was obtained from the Arab and Byzantine Empires, regardless of where the knowledge actually originated.
It is important to note that like the Renaissance itself, this was not some single catalytic moment, but both serial and parallel transmissions that happened over a number of centuries. Most interestingly at first these texts arrived in Europe being translated from some intermediary language like Syriac or Arabic. A Greek classic may have reached early modern Europeans only after being translated into Latin, then Syriac, and back into Latin.
Andalusian scholars began translating from Islamic sources from at least the early 10th century. Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) set out to learn Arabic so he could read Ptolemy's Almagest and later translated works of Aristotle, Euclid, Jabir ibn Aflah and Al-Khwarizmi. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) eventually facilitated Dutch scholar Willem van Moerbeke coming into contact and translating works of Aristotle, Hero of Alexandria, and Archimedes.
I assume these developments culminated in the artistic trademarks of the Renaissance.
"Babbling Better" this is a work in progress -and still requires more thinking
In short - need a methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the "right problem" to solve, and noticing when one is solving the "wrong problem". Better problem framing leads to better and more focused answers to questions and hopefully eventual resolving of problems. I've come across two techniques: The Five Whys to understand problems better, and using adverbs of manner to babble more constructively.
So far:
It is easy to babble, babies do it. It is still quite easy to babble comprehensible but wrong sentences, such as LLM hallucinations. Your pruning is only as good as your babble.
With regards to problem solving, low quality babble doesn't contribute to resolving the problem. For example, let's say the problem is "camera autofocus doesn't focus on eyes" a low quality "babble" answer might be "Burn a stick of incense and pray to Dionysius". The acts themselves are feasible and the sentence is comprehensible. But any desired change in the camera's autofocus performance will be pure coincidence.
Yet, sometimes low quality babble appears to be high quality babble because we simply are not solving the right problem but it appears to be perfectly suited for the problem. Especially if incentives are involved.
My hunch is that to babble better not only do you need better methods of babbling, but you need to better understand what goals you are trying to babble towards. And that requires better understanding of why the problem is a problem.
5 Why's on yourself: Asking "why I think this is a problem?" to at least 5 levels
Not to be mistaken for the Burger joint. The "Five Whys" technique was apparently invented at the Toyota Corporation as a system for uncovering the root causes of production faults.
The choice of "why" falls into broader pattern which takes me back to documentary filmmaking and interviewing: you learn more through open ended questions, usually those where the key interrogative is "why" or "how" than through close ended questions. These, as Wittgenstein pointed out, basically seek to affirm or negative a proposition or conditional: "Do you like him?" "Is he still there?" "Would you call that green or turquoise?".
If I am a manager or investigator, trying to ascertain the cause of a fault on a production line, open ended questions make sense since I will not be in possession of all known or knowable facts.
This still holds if I am a novice or just someone enquiring to an expert for help in achieving some goal. If I ask an experienced cinematographer "how would that scene be light?" even if they don't know specifically, they have a large body of experience and knowledge that would mean they could probably make useful guesses on how to replicate the effect.
If i intend on asking for advice from an expert, I can't give them the responsibility of figuring out the kind of help I need. The better I can define the problem myself the better and more informative the question I can ask them. Be too vague about your problem and you can only hope to get generic responses like "be confident".
It seems ridiculous though, doesn't it? Socratic or even from Yes, Minister: Why should I ask myself open ended questions if I don't know what I don't know? While I may not understand the problem, what I can do is at least explain why it's a problem and how I see it. And one effective way to do that I've found is to use the Five Whys Technique.
It is often exceedingly difficult to know what the right problem to solve is, what we may have a better chance of defining is why we perceive it as a problem and why we expect it to cause conflict.
To - Do: add more techniques to my arsenal to better defined problems... the step before babbling
Adverbs and Creativity?
Strategically EfficaciouslyProductively BabblingI have recently come across a technique for higher-quality babble, at least for creative purposes. It is as simply as employing a Adverb of Manner to modify a verb. This is a minor variation on a technique used to allow mime artists to create a character - you take a situation or process like "make breakfast" and do it with an attitude: happy, hungover, lovelorn.
It is surprisingly easy to come up with scenarios and even stories with arcs - goals, conflict, and comedic pay-offs complete with a character who has distinct mannerisms - by just cycling through adverbs. Compare these three adverbs: grumpily, overzealously, nervously.
These scenarios appear to "write themselves" for the purposes of short pantomime bits. This is the exact type of technique I have spent years searching for.
To do - Does this technique of better babbling through adverbs of manner apply to non-creative applications? If not then develop methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the right problem, noticing a "wrong problem"