Dalcy Bremin

Let the wonder never fade!

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I wonder if the following is possible to study textbooks more efficiently using LLMs:

  • Feed the entire textbook to the LLM and produce a list of summaries that increases in granularity and length, covering all the material in the textbook just at a different depth (eg proofs omitted, further elaboration on high-level perspectives, etc)
  • The student starts from the highest-level summary, and gradually moves to the more granular materials.

When I study textbooks, I spend a significant amount of time improving my mental autocompletion, like being able to familiarize myself with the terminologies, which words or proof-style usually come in which context, etc. Doing this seems to significantly improve my ability to read eg long proofs, since I can ignore all the pesky details (which I can trust my mental autocompletion to later fill in the details if needed) and allocate my effort in getting a high-level view of the proof.

Textbooks don't really admit this style of learning, because the students don't have prior knowledge of all the concept-dependencies of a new subject they're learning, and thus are forced to start at the lowest-level and make their way up to the high-level perspective.

Perhaps LLMs will let us reverse this direction, instead going from the highest to the lowest.

What's a good technical introduction to Decision Theory and Game Theory for alignment researchers? I'm guessing standard undergrad textbooks don't include, say, content about logical decision theory. I've mostly been reading posts on LW but as with most stuff here they feel more like self-contained blog posts (rather than textbooks that build on top of a common context) so I was wondering if there was anything like a canonical resource providing a unified technical / math-y perspective on the whole subject.

There's still some pressure, though. If the bites were permanently not itchy, then I may have not noticed that the mosquitos were in my room in the first place, and consequently would less likely pursue them directly. I guess that's just not enough.

Why haven't mosquitos evolved to be less itchy? Is there just not enough selection pressure posed by humans yet? (yes probably) Or are they evolving towards that direction? (they of course already evolved towards being less itchy while biting, but not enough to make that lack-of-itch permanent)

this is a request for help i've been trying and failing to catch this one for god knows how long plz halp

tbh would be somewhat content coexisting with them (at the level of houseflies) as long as they evolved the itch and high-pitch noise away, modulo disease risk considerations.

Having lived ~19 years, I can distinctly remember around 5~6 times when I explicitly noticed myself experiencing totally new qualia with my inner monologue going “oh wow! I didn't know this dimension of qualia was a thing.” examples:

  • hard-to-explain sense that my mind is expanding horizontally with fractal cube-like structures (think bismuth) forming around it and my subjective experience gliding along its surface which lasted for ~5 minutes after taking zolpidem for the first time to sleep (2 days ago)
  • getting drunk for the first time (half a year ago)
  • feeling absolutely euphoric after having a cool math insight (a year ago)
  • ...

Reminds me of myself around a decade ago, completely incapable of understanding why my uncle smoked, being "huh? The smoke isn't even sweet, why would you want to do that?" Now that I have [addiction-to-X] as a clear dimension of qualia/experience solidified in myself, I can better model their subjective experiences although I've never smoked myself. Reminds me of the SSC classic.

Also one observation is that it feels like the rate at which I acquire these is getting faster, probably because of increase in self-awareness + increased option space as I reach adulthood (like being able to drink).

Anyways, I think it’s really cool, and can’t wait for more.

i absolutely hate bureaucracy, dumb forms, stupid websites etc. like, I almost had a literal breakdown trying to install Minecraft recently (and eventually failed). God.

This shortform just reminded me to buy a CO2 sensor and, holy shit, turns out my room is at ~1500ppm.

While it's too soon to say for sure, this may actually be the underlying reason for a bunch of problems I noticed myself having primarily in my room (insomnia, inability to focus or read, high irritability, etc).

Although I always suspected bad air quality, it really is something to actually see the number with your own eyes, wow. Thank you so, so much for posting about this!!

One of the rare insightful lessons from high school: Don't set your AC to the minimum temperature even if it's really hot, just set it to where you want it to be.

It's not like the air released gets colder with lower target temperature, because most ACs (according to my teacher, I haven't checked lol) are just a simple control system that turns itself on/off around the target temperature, meaning the time it takes to reach a certain temperature X is independent of the target temperature (as long it's lower than X)

... which is embarrassingly obvious in hindsight.

God, I wish real analysis was at least half as elegant as any other math subject — way too much pathological examples that I can't care less about. I've heard some good things about constructivism though, hopefully analysis is done better there.

I think the point of having an explicit human-legible world model / simulation is to make desideratas formally verifiable, which I don't think would be possible with a blackbox system (like LLM w/ wrappers).

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