Chiming in with another causal mechanism: hot soup lets off steam. Humid air in general plays nicer with our lungs, and can noticeably help when people are having a cough, or having trouble breathing. I sometimes use “just have them sit over a canteen of steaming-hot water” as a palliative for both issues.
I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.
Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans ...
I retained the ability to believe and act upon the belief that children need to be allowed the freedom to make sub-critical mistakes. I think if you were to go into it averse to smothering children, believing-in taking children seriously, etc., that those beliefs will survive the process.
I think merely taking estradiol for gender transition triggered the caring-terminally-about-children effect for me. Possibly related: my blood estradiol levels got too high for a while, and I essentially had a pregnant woman’s hormone mix, for a while.
I’d previously liked kids somewhat, enjoyed teaching, enjoyed playing with them. Now they’re aggressively cute, makes me actively happy to notice children being happy or learning with or without my involvement, etc.
Oh, the British figured this out, too?
I also put the dollars sign after the numerals, *where it belongs*.
human sexuality itself is immoral and forcibly modifies humans to not have sexual organs or desires
I must have one of my 100 morality bits missing, because this seems weird but not bad to me.
…but point taken.
Re: no human training/test separation:
Epistemic status: random thought I just had, but what if there kind of is. I think maybe dreaming is the “test” part of the training cycle: the newly updated weights run against outcome predictions supplied by parts of the system not currently being updated. The being-updated part tries to get desirable outcomes within the dream, and another network / region plays Dungeon Master, supplying scenario and outcomes for given actions. Test against synthetic test data, supplied by a partially adversarial network.
I feel like,...
Wow. Thanks a lot for that. Your depiction of brain architecture in particular makes a lot of sense to me. I also feel like I finally understand-enough-to-program-one the stable diffusion tool I use daily, after following up on “latent diffusion” from your mention of it.
Still. I feel like my brain has learned an algorithm that is of value itself apart from its learning capability, that extracting meaningful portions of my algorithm is possible, and that using it as a starting point, one could make fairly straightforward upgrades to it — for example adding ...
Huh, I’d only noticed the one instance, but now I’m noticing it even in other articles. Color me curious!
My only remaining concrete hypothesis is “overzealous autocorrect”, but I’m reasonably sure that’s not the answer.
I’d assume it’s a typo on some unfamiliar-to-me keyboard layout.
Disagree?
The version of ‘honest’ that I have would highly rank a cherry-picked or even fabricated narrative optimized specifically for improving the truth of the belief that it creates.
That’s a bit beyond my skill and indeed not something I trifle with for fear of psychic damage (I discovered many many years ago that I’m susceptible to lying addiction, and freeing myself of the addiction was long and difficult), but were I greater than I am, I would endorse strategies like that.
Indeed, that’s my personal theory as to why retrotransposons haven’t accumulated disastrously at the species level and driven us to extinction already: sperm with more DNA damage typically lose the race to an egg, and eggs with too much DNA damage are more likely to result in a failed implantation or early miscarriage or similar.
That’s more-or-less the thought process I went through when answering. I can’t pay 100$, nor could I pay 1000$, so if either case occurs, there’s a big extra cost attached in the form of “wait, now what? Do I need to get a loan? How do I do that?” [actually implement the plan] / or similar plans. +110$ is not enough to cover that extra cost, never mind the expected +5$. But +BIGNUM easily clears the ~fixed extra cost on the loss branch.
Turning hypotheticals over in my head and going only on feel, I think my point of indifference lands somewhere between a -100/+500 bet and a -100/+1000 bet, which might actually be too low. Going negative on money, even by double digits adds a lot of costs.
That was quite the interesting read, thanks for the link.
A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn't getting them wrong at random; there's something missing in their understanding
This in particular struck me, in that it harshly conflicts with my own experience, but explains a lot about other people.
When I was a kid getting arithmetic questions wrong, I really was getting them wrong at random. I’d execute the whole computation correctly and then my fingers would write a wrong numeral. Or I’d read a wrong numeral, but execute correctly from there...
thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic
In my case, the implicit intuitive version of that process seems not to be provided by my brain, so my options are: sub-LLM-quality pattern completion, or explicit conscious social simulation and strategy search. People seem to prefer the latter, even when told I’m doing that. …although I suppose if I were better at conscious people-steering I imagine that might change. Even with effort I’m pretty mediocre at it.
I feel like these three are part of a larger class of very useful questions to consider, which many people do not automatically consider, consciously or otherwise.
The version that springs to mind that wasn’t mentioned above: “What are my goals, and am I furthering them?”
I find the “how do I think I know X”, “why am I doing X”, and “what happens if I do X” versions are pretty much autopilot for me, especially the third one — but I basically never think about whether the thing I’m trying to do actually attaches to my broader goals without some kind of extern...
Will this become a sequence of essays? I'd be interested to hear your take on the fundamental questions at length.
Yeesh, yeah, the hallucination is something else. Would get very Orwellian very fast.
"What are you talking about? We've always been at war with Eastasia. I have been a very good Bing."
From personal experience, the internal Approval module does in fact seem possible to game, specifically by manipulating whose approval it's seeking.
I became very weird (from the perspective of everyone else) very fast when I replaced the abstract-person-which-would-do-the-approving with a fictional person-archetype of my choosing. That process seems to have injected a bunch of my object-level desires into my Approval system. I now find myself feeling pride at doing things with selfish benefit in expectation, which ~never happened before (absent a different...
Speaking from experience, maybe gender transition ought to raise that specific concern.
At my legal name change hearing, I was asked to affirm that I wasn’t attempting any fuckery like trying to outrun a debt or something. Which I was not. I had no debts save for whatever credit card spending from the same month, which I’d pay off in full end-of-month, same as every month.
…but since then, having an old unused name that immediately reveals the party trying to find my old name as being not-approved-by-me has been surprisingly helpful. It’s significantly downg... (read more)