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  • It's not enough for a hypothesis to be consistent with the evidence; to count in favor, it must be more consistent with the hypothesis than its converse. How much more is how strong. (Likelihood ratios.)
  • Knowledge is probabilistic/uncertain (priors) and is updated based on the strength of the evidence. A lot of weak evidence can add up (or multiply, actually, unless you're using logarithms).
  • Your level of knowledge is usually not literally zero, even when uncertainty is very high, and you can start from there. (Upper/Lower bounds, Fermi estimates.) Don't say, "I don't know." You know a little.
  • A hypothesis can be made more ad-hoc to fit the evidence better, but this must lower its prior. (Occam's razor.)
    • The reverse of this also holds. Cutting out burdensome details makes the prior higher. Disjunctive claims get a higher prior, conjunctive claims lower.
    • Solomonoff's Lightsaber is the right way to think about this.
  • More direct evidence can "screen off" indirect evidence. If it's along the same causal chain, you're not allowed to count it twice.
  • Many so-called "logical fallacies" are correct Bayesian inferences.

I don't feel like the results of the Black Death situation generalizes to Russia's current demographics. Medieval Europe was near its carrying capacity given the technology of the day. The plague injected some slack into the system to allow for progress. That's really not the situation in Russia, is it? Food isn't the limiting factor.

Furthermore, Russia's population is aging on net, and the war is exacerbating the problem. On the contrary compared to Medieval Europe, this would tend to remove slack from the system as the working age Russians have to spend more of their resources to support the elderly while at the same time they're burning resources to fight the war and growing less than they could otherwise due to sanctions.

Did the Black Death have that effect? I couldn't find any information on age demographics during that period, but on priors, I'd expect disease to affect the old as well, if not more, in most cases. (What I did find suggested that the poor were disproportionately affected due to their living conditions.)

Answer by gilchFeb 21, 202440

I recently saw What's up with psychonetics?. It seems like a kind of meditation practice, but one focused on gaining access to and control of mental/perceptual resources. Not sure how risky this is, but the linked text had some warnings about misuse. It might be applicable to working or long-term memory, and specifically talks about conceptual understanding ("pure meanings") as a major component of the practice.

Did you see the question on Psychonetics yet? I'm wondering if these ideas can be connected. Could someone learn a savant skill through Psychonetic practice? Has the Psychonetic community tried?

Did you ever try WILD? Did it work?

I recently saw What's up with psychonetics? and thought of you.

I'm wondering if an aphantasiac would be able to work up to the final Two colored circles meditation.

(PU.CC.6.ADV) (Advanced) Creating a figure in a perceptual uncertainty

A practitioner forces the perception to see any arbitrary red figure appear on the blue surface (or blue figure on the red surface).

Because this (supposedly) works on your actual visual field instead of your internal mind's eye, you might be able to do it and learn to create mental visualizations that way. (You'd have to be staring at the figure though.)

It looked like some of the other psychonetic practices might make it easier to achieve a WILD as well. If you could learn to do that quickly and easily, it might be useful as a surrogate mind's eye, or the practice might help you find yours or develop one.

It seems pretty interesting, but also seems like it would take a lot of time to practice for uncertain benefits. I wonder about the applications. Reading through the link a bit, it mentioned learning echolocation or inducing lucid dreams, which could be fun.

I thought the exercise with crossing the red and blue circles was interesting. It said one could eventually learn to see a figure in one color with the other color as the background. I wonder if it's possible to teach an aphantasiac to visualize this way. Would they have to be staring at the circles for that to work, or could they eventually learn to visualize without them? Also, if it's possible to learn to quickly and easily enter and exit a lucid dream state, that might work even better, although only a subset of aphantasiacs even have visual dreams.

I also wonder if savant skills can be learned this way.

I've been wondering for a while if China will try that. I would not have guessed Russia would, but maybe I'm not that informed? Have the Russians actually suggested it?

It still takes decades for any new babies to grow up to working age. That might not be soon enough to save Russia. The right time to try something like that was probably 20 years ago. Immigration would be faster, in theory. Seems to be working for Canada.

Yes, maybe? That kind of thing is presumably in the training data and the generator is designed to have longer term coherence. Maybe it's not long enough for plans that take too long to execute, so I'm not sure if Sora per se can do this without trying it (and we don't have access), but it seems like the kind of thing a system like this might be able to do.

I feel that doesn't hold when at least leaving is an option. One can't avoid rulers altogether, but one who is free to go could better choose from among the least bad ones available. Russia's is not that.

Hah! I'll not dispute that some circumstances might be even worse (nor do I claim that Russia has literally zero recent immigrants), but are there enough of them to compensate for Russia's population loss? I think not, but maybe you have data?

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