Mart_Korz

Thanks for a great post!

Once I was discussing with a friend about the question "what is the meaning of life?" - and I think I made progress on how I approached the question in a similar manner: At some point of turning this question over in my mind, I realized that "suppose someone gives me a text which has The Answer, would I actually feel satisfied? -> No, I would not". My conclusion was that "what is the meaning of life?" is not a question that can be answered in this manner at all. Today, my perspective on this is close to what Vervaeke describes: m... (read more)

I think this is a little tricky as the theory uses the actual continuum for wave functions such that the amount of information is and remains infinite whether we remove far-away branches or not. On the other hand, we can only ever calculate finite approximations of the true thing and here we definitely can be more or less efficient.

When we "collapse the wave function" during a measurement process, we decide to remove the other branches from our description such that in some sense a pragmatic version of hardly computing any of the pilot wave is the standard... (read more)

I love the mood that you are describing. I do think that it would still be valuable to have some amount of pressure towards shared concepts and symbols, but it really could be a lot less.

One already common example is that in the past decades many small languages and cultures have been on the decline due to shared concepts just being too useful such that most young people just don't learn the local language in the first place. I am also reminded of the quote (not sure of the origin), "nowadays, walking around in any big city across the world kind of feels the same", and now I start to imagine how much more vibrant culture could be and feel if interfaces were fluid.

I could also get used to saying "cGive" pronounced similar to "sea Give" which has nice connotations spoken aloud and has c as coefficient right in the written version. But I agree that "Coefficient" has a good sound compared to which "cGive" seems more generic

Maybe the secretions on the contaminated coffee mug handles and plastic tiles took longer to dry than those on the playing cards & poker chips.

Wild guess: air temperature and humidity should make a big difference in how quickly things dry. As hands are constantly sweating, I could imagine that there is a kind of threshold humidity/temperature beyond which hands have enough moisture to sustain viruses?

Deeply relatable, I can't wait to be genemodded to be able to photosynthesize.

I sometimes wonder whether I should want to be a digital mind at some point as this would definitely simplify the problem of suffering created by how I eat. I prefer your solution :)

I was also confused by this, and think that it does work out with the usual 'given that' (I'll write $P\left(A\right)$ instead of $A$ as I get confused with the other notation):

The statement becomes

If $A$ is evidence of $B$, then $P\left(A|B\right)>P\left(A\right)$

where I would have intuitively phrased this as $B$ being evidence of $A$. But this turns out to be the same thing: If knowing $A$ makes $B$ more likely, finding out that $B$ is true also makes $A$ more likely.

If we already know Bayes theorem, this becomes clear: $$P\left(A|B\right)=\frac{P\left(B|A\right)}{P}$$... (read more)

I call these little '>' referring to other cards 'handles' and I use them all the time to keep cards short.

Do you use any technological method for making it easy to look up these handles? I am a long-time user of Obsidian for note-taking, and there is a great Obsidian_to_Anki plugin which allows for creating and managing Anki cards as part of one's Obsidian notes and it inserts functional links on both Desktop and Android.
It might also integrate well with the AutoHotkey script that you use.

I have not kept up my Anki usage after setting it up once and wi... (read more)

A reasonable prior does not put zero mass on the hypothesis that the literally infinite characters in our stories are moral patients. A reasonable protocol does not therefore let this hypothesis dominate its decisions regardless of evidence.

I do agree that we need some distinction in our decision-making for uncertain ethical problems where a simple expected value is the right solution and uncertain ethical problems where the type of the uncertainty requires handling it differently.

And I do agree that insect suffering is deep enough in the territory of f... (read more)

Grok 3 told me 9.11 > 9.9. (common with other LLMs too), but again, turning on Thinking solves it.

This is unrelated to Grok 3, but I am not convinced that the above part of Andrej Karpathy's tweet is a "gotcha". Software version numbers use dots with a different meaning than decimal numbers and there 9.11 > 9.9 would be correct. 
I don't think there is a clear correct choice of which of these contexts to assume for an LLM if it only gets these few tokens.

E.g. if I ask Claude, the pure "is 9.11>9.9" question gives me a no, whereas
"I am trying to install a python package. Could you tell me whether `9.11>9.9`?" gives me a yes.

For me, a strong reason why I do not see myself^[1] doing deliberate practice as you (very understandably) suggest is that, on some level, the part of my mind which decides on how much motivational oomph and thus effort is put into activities just in fact does not care much about all of these abstract and long-term goals.

Deliberate practice is a lot of hard work and the part of my mind which makes decisions about such levels of mental effort just does not see the benefits. There is a way in which a system that circumvents this motivational barrier is w... (read more)

Thank you for another beautiful essay at real thinking! This time about the mental stance itself.

But I’ll describe a few tags I’m currently using, when I remind myself to “really think.” Suggestions/tips from readers would also be welcome.

I think there is a strong conceptual overlap with what John Vervaeke describes as Relevance Realisation and wisdom. 

I'll attempt a summary of my understanding of John Vervaeke's Relevance Realisation. 

A key capability of any agentic/living beings is to prune the exponentially exploding space of possi... (read more)

It happens to be the case that 1 kWh = 3,600,000 kg/s². You could substitute this and cancel units to get the same answer.

This should be kg m²/s².^[1] On the other hand, this is a nice demonstration of how useful computers are: it really is too easy to accidentally drop a term when converting units

1. ^{^}

   I double checked

I read

to have a dude clearly describe a phenomenon he is clearly experiencing as “mostly female”

as "he makes a claim about a thought pattern he considers mostly female", not as "he himself is described by the pattern" (QC does demonstrate high epistemic confidence in that post). Thus, I don't think that Elizabeth would disagree with you.

Thanks for the guidance! Together with Gwern's reply my understanding now is that caching can indeed be very fluidly integrated into the architecture (and that there is a whole fascinating field that I could try to learn about).

After letting the ideas settle for a bit, I think that one aspect that might have lead me to think

In my mind, there is an amount of internal confusion which feels much stronger than what I would expect for an agent as in the OP

is that a Bayesian agent as described still is (or at least could be) very "monolithic" in its world mo... (read more)

What a reply, thank you!

We are sitting close to the playground on top of red and blue blankets

Hmm.. . In my mind, the Pilot wave theory position does introduce a substrate dependence for the particle-position vs. wavefunction distinction, but need not distinguish any further than that. This still leaves simulation, AI-consciousness and mind-uploads completely open. It seems to me that the Pilot wave vs. Many worlds question is independent of/orthogonal to these questions.

I fully agree that saying "only corpuscle folk is real" (nice term by the way!) is a move that needs explaining. One advantage of Pilot wave theory is that one need not wonder abou... (read more)

I am not too familiar with how advocates of Pilot wave theory usually state this, but I want to disagree slightly. I fully agree with the description of what happens mathematically in Pilot wave theory, but I think that there is a way in which the worlds that one finds oneself outside of do not exist.

If we assume that it is in fact just the particle positions which are "reality", the only way in which the wave function (including all many worlds contributions) affects "reality" is by influencing its future dynamics. Sure, this means that the many worlds co... (read more)