https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8122027/
What are some of your favorite search terms to use on LessWrong (or any site with lots of "interesting" content) to find important/interesting things/or things whose patterns self-recur at the most fascinating intervals?
(the best terms are terms that often mix the technical in soulful contexts). Most technical work completely lacks soul/vitality and that's why many of the most enlightened people hate academic papers with vicious intensity
I'll start with some:
higher specificity [you know it's good when it's usdd, common enough to try w/o frustration, and they're not common enough to be incorrectly used too often, but rare in most corpuses]: deconvolute, perplexity, Lyapunov time, fractal, td-idt, wavelet, Markov boundary/blanket, friston, Hamiltonian
maybes: Perlin Noise, Nyquist sampling, hypergeometric, postsynaptic density, calmodulin, neuregulin
just for LW: Hierarchical temporal memory
higher-sensitivity [above-average chance of being interesting]:
above-average chance at detecting neurodivergence: Laurens Gunnarsen, gwern, nickcammarata, Adderall, 2CB, 2CT7 [the latter 3 are interesting on "dry nerd" forums, but low-signal on reddit]. Searching for specific MBTI or Enneagram types can be interesting on LW or high-signal discords/FB groups
maybes: speculative decoding
sites to mine for good neologisms: qualiacomputing, cyborg wiki, Stephen Wolfram's blog, Anders Sandberg, Taleb (eg fat tails), Robin Calhart Harris. information theory terms like suspense/surprisal/KL divergence/mutual information, the spin glasses literature (eg ising model), some models of game theory [carl bergstrom has some cool neologisms..] also John Conway
Theoretically: compiler engineering, functional programming, category theory, quantum computing, and systems people. It is not common for people to come up with the most important neologisms from these fields, but someone skilled could do it really well (especially in capturing common patterns in data access patterns as more and more of the Internet is made of human-free compute)
specific to LW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory
https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1769890642652803460
Sometimes, people generically hate on the general principle of virtue-signalling as an indirect way of signalling which virtues they disagree with OR which virtues are policed - eg polarizing virtues (while being able to maintain plausible deniability on what specific virtue signals they disagree on). Sometimes, this generic hatred of "virtue signalling" is also a generic hatred/dislike of "lawful good" [or "those more successful than them"], or those they perceive as having "higher pain tolerance than them" (a generalized hatred of all associated with virtue signalling led to the backlash culminating in the 2016 election, as Trump epitomized the intense hatred of BOTH republican and democrat forms of virtue-signalling - "signals" that the working class was unusually receptive to b/c there seems to be a difference in the capacity between "privileged" and "less privileged" in bearing the costs of virtue-signalling.) Trump once said "I LOVE the uneducated".
[Moloch-worship is another form of virtue-signalling, esp among those who always did better in the system than everyone else - eg seen by those who consistently "defend the administration" - eg BG at Caltech lol - see https://www.quora.com/What-do-people-think-of-this-2007-Thoughts-on-Finishing-Caltech-thread-on-AutoAdmit for counterpoint POV]. When I was surrounded with the noise of middle school/high school, I used to bond with Moloch-worshippers b/c I thought they were the ONLY people who had any intelligence or straightforwardedness in them...... (that was way way way before I finally discovered the "chaotic"/edgy technologists in elite universities/the SF Bay Area, who have since then become the base of my friend group.[1])
The "felt costliness" of "virtue-signalling" is higher in the working class than it is in richer elites. Those "privileged dems" can afford to Zahavi-handicap-signal (boi, from the POV of a working class white does seeing those libs [ESP EAs] Zahavi-handicap-virtue-signal by helping everyone in the out-outgroup who IS NOT THEM [esp immigrants! esp wild animals!] REALLY sting)
[it should be said that the biggest explicit haters on virtue-signalling tend not to be working-class-voters, where the term "virtue-signalling" isn't popular" [though they definitely feel a NOTION of the thing that Trump felt]. Explicitly stated intense hatred of "virtue signalling" is SUPER-COMMON among those who obsess with Peter Thiel.
(hatred of virtue signalling also can come from outsiders, as "virtue-signalling" is often a mesa-optimizing strategy to get "acceptance within the group", especially the more authoritarian members of the group).
I also think the choice of "vegetarianism/veganism" as an interesting choice in the OP of "virtue-signalling", because vegetarian/vegan virtue-signalling is the LEAST Moloch-aligned form of virtue-signalling, and thus different from ALL other forms of virtue-signalling. It's also the form of "virtue signalling" I'm most guilty of (whereas I historically had "thieltard" reactions to its other forms).
as of 2024, it really does seem that Trump represents a backlash to all the "woke/virtue signaling" in the US again, and unless we address people's collective anger on this [rural white rage, yes, but the rage has become multiracial in its manifestation too - many disaffected people go to Trump as the purest expression of rage against "the system"], we will have the existential catastrophe of the next Trump administration... People feel rage because this virtue-signaling "picks out winners [0] and losers", and the "losers" of this game (those not in what Laurens Gunnarsen describes as "the cult of conscientiousness" )have pure pure rage and no one to turn to, except Trump. Trump called out the entire system for what it was - "rigged". Maybe the 2020 election was not rigged, but everything upstream of it was.
And this backlash also is why many in that group hate the virtue-signally Mitch McConnell (and ESPECIALLY Mitt Romney) as much as the "woke Democrats", just as Trump turned on McConnell
And as LLMs become more open-source, these losers figure out how to integrate thie rage into the LLMs. Maybe this can be stopped, maybe not, but in the likelier possibility that the open-sourcing of rage-filled LLMs like GPTchan, why not try to do some trade where you actually respond to their rage in a more understanding matter? Understanding them matters for reducing all the risk of existential catastrophe, especially as they have all the free-time to fill up the world with [and... LLMs will become even more addicting and cause more people to fill themselves up with screentime]. The disaffected think that only "Trump can hear their unheard voices" - after all, he constantly yells [unless we can get sympathetic GPT to hear them BEFORE he does]
Virtue signalling will cost Democrats the 2024 election... unless
[related -http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/why-i-am-no-longer-anti-trump/ ]
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/the-human-nature-election
2024-09-29 edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/opinion/kamala-harris-gun-vice-signalling.html
(it looks like Kamala's strategy is to do the opposite - to signal that she is NOT one of those "holier-than-thou" dems). this is how she ultimately saved an election whose outcome could otherwise become catastrophic. she, at least, was able to read some of the signals the electorate sent. If you read the book "White Rural Rage", you'll note that much of the working-class white electorate votes against its own interests just to express all its rage, and while it seems "irrational" or "dumb", maybe there was a game-theoretic strategy realized in this self-destructive act (I practice self-destructive acts just for attention too, sometimes just to signal rage at how others don't realize how "unfair" the playing field is to those who weren't born in the right place...) Maybe it's okay if those damn virtue-signalling BG libs failed at self-control/moral purity or intellectual rigor or life from time to time!
[0] eg goody two-shoes people who succeed in all the g-and-conscientiousness mini-games of school [what one describes as "the cult of conscientiousness"]
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[1] a lot of intense visceral strong emotion/anger/trauma/edginess in this history has been removed from this post... which is like.. a LONG FASCINATING STORY... I had a uniquely high level of hatred against the system for denying me entrance to the gifted program. The system assigns "winners and losers" based on the dumbest criteria ever, this system affects your entire life, and only the disaffected feel this, and their rage against this is why they would uniquely vote for Trump over anyone else - b/c Trump is the biggest most virtue-free loser ever, and yet has still "won in the most important way". And people need this shoved in the face of the "woke elites" - if only the "woke elites" could be neuroplastic or open-minded enough to recognize this, unless... [who is it who can convince @sama to actually enlighten them? Is No Labels enough to wake the Dems up? It's a step in the right direction, but it still is not]
So also I feel other people's anger/rage at schooling (or anything associated with "virtue signalling" that is associated with the system). Michael Gibson does, too, but his book just does not have reach. What if... his book could be an easter egg in a video game like The Elder Scrolls Skyrim..?
it also hasn't quite ended, because a new force came out that has a small but emotionally salient enough chance to completely obliterate the hierarchy of how I emotionally factor ALL of Moloch/techno-progressivism/edginess/elite universities/drugs/ADHD/"narcisssism"/Bryan Caplan/Thiel Fellowship [and the person who turned out to become my ALL TIME FAVORITE THIEL FELLOW]/Hillybilly Elegy/insecurities/intelligence/Stanford Duck Syndrome/Michael Faraday/Michael O Church/CP Snow's "two cultures"/cancel culture/"narcissism"/trauma/Sarah Constantin/Stephen Hsu/two of my friends who dated each other for several years and then had the most epic breakup ever..... => ALL WHICH HAVE ELEMENTS RELATED TO HOW PEOPLE EMOTIONALLY INTERACT TO VIRTUE-SIGNALLING
[but much of my intense historical trauma came from me TRYING TO mesa-optimize/virtue-signal, and failing at it because I came from a shitty school. Then I FINALLY found and sought out the edgelords at elite universities + finally turned someone into a Thiel Fellow, and NOTHING EVER WAS THE SAME EVER AGAIN]
(so much emotional intensity was factored out of this post, but one has told me I have a moral duty to write out the story at last).
(part of the reason roon is so popular on X is b/c he doesn't virtue-signal - he once said that the best humor comes from those who combine "high-brow" and "low-brow" [stephen hsu is a little like this tho - he vicesignals partly by saying what the CCP likes to hear - is too obvious about his IQism])
PS: part of the reason why many Slavs are so endearing is that they are the most nihilistic/most self-ironic/least-PC/least virtue-signally population EVER.
#MyFavoritePostEver
related: peter turchin's elite oversocialization
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2025 edit: this post has held up well, Trump even called Harvard "a breeding ground for virtue signallers"... Sadly, this has consequences for the rest of the nation due to weird social dynamics, even if "virtue-signallers" are on average better behaved.
>I think there's still a substantial chance of something 10x large being revealed within 18 months (which I think is the upper bound on 'timeline measured in months')
So did that happen?
Upper bound so there's a high chance that it will come more quickly than that.
I know. I still feel psychologically wrecked/burned by it all and afraid to be proud of expressing myself (my strengths and weaknesses), and still overly judged by other people's notion of what it means to make proper progress. It defines and tracks *everyone*, it limits our social circles (and confines us to permanent bubbles), and it makes us feel guilty over doing anything that's different. I frequently feel like I'm on the defensive. I wish I could have a childhood I was fully proud of - that I want to show off to the rest of the world (and create value for others), but it has all been destroyed by my desire to please others. I also wish I could have an Internet history I was fully proud of.. rather than one I'm defensive about..
And because of the system, I still feel constantly on the defensive for justifying my current life path.
People should be proud of what they learn - they should want to show it off to the rest of the world, rather than throw all their assignments away. They should also be proud of how they're unique/different from others (including their weaknesses that *others* can fill them up in), especially if they process the world in a weird/neurodivergent way (and can't necessarily learn the same way that others do) or if they work best in a "support role" who make smart people feel comfortable. They should be unashamed of showing how they might be wrong (and how their thinking can be fixed in the future). They overrate independence and ability to be seen as "better than others".
And they should take advantage of their comparative strengths when their neuroplasticity/fluid intelligence is at its *highest*, and receive feedback from older people who actually have experience interacting with the rest of the world (rather than in their own bubbles)
BTW - I took a unique extreme in going for maximizing my own knowledge rather than optimizing for the meta-game of figuring out what knowledge I should learn and what knowledge is best left in the heads of others (and I seem to have better memory for knowledge in the heads of others than most people do).
Recording the set of one's past games would help a lot with relieving the availability heuristic.
Does anyone know if these tradeoffs occur in organic brain variation between people? It almost seems that the g-factor is so strong as to overwhelm these tradeoffs without tDCS...
Now with people posting more of their gaming online, many of their gaming experiences don't necessarily go away once they quit the game. In fact, how one plays video games says a lot about one's personality.
I still stay emotionally involved with some of my old AOE2 games many years later (because I record them all), and I still sometimes reel over certain really irrational decisions I made in them.
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it's vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...