MSRayne — LessWrong

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MSRayne — LessWrong

Replying toDon’t ignore bad vibes you get from people

Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people

Vibes tend to be based on pattern matching, and are prone to bucket errors, so it's important to watch out for that - particularly for people with trauma. For instance, I tend to automatically dislike anyone who has even one mannerism in common with either of my parents, and it takes me quite a while to identify exactly what it is that's causing it. It usually isn't their fault and they're quite nice people, but the most annoying part is it doesn't go away just because I know that. This drastically reduces the range of people I can feel comfortable around.

Replying toDon’t ignore bad vibes you get from people

MSRayne1y

Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people

I learned a lot from him and I STILL have a bad vibe about him. People can be correct, useful, and also unsafe. (Primarily, I suspect him to be high on scales of narcissism, to which I'm very sensitive. Haven't met the guy personally, but his text reeks of it. Doesn't negate his genius; just negates my will to engage with him in any other dimension.)

Replying toIf Clarity Seems Like Death to Them

MSRayne2y

If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them

I am not the best at writing thorough comments because I am more of a Redditor than a LessWronger, but I just want you to know that I read the entire post over the course of ~2.5 hours and I support you wholeheartedly and think you're doing something very important. I've never been part of the rationalist "community" and don't want to be (I am not a rationalist, I am a person who strives weakly for rationality, among many other strivings), particularly after reading all this, but I definitely expected better out of it than I've seen lately. But perhaps I shouldn't; the few self-identified rationalists I've interacted with one on one... (read more)

Replying toThe Rationalist Guide to Hinduism

MSRayne2y

The Rationalist Guide to Hinduism

Well, as I attempted to express in the original comment, I am not a Shaiva, but rather I had mystical experiences and things as a teen that led me to invent my own religion from scratch which has similarities with various other belief systems, and Kashmir Shaivism is one of them. For the most part however it's just a kind of background element of my existence, part of my ontology, and not something I put much attention towards actively anymore. In practice I'm effectively an atheist physicalist like everyone else here. It's just... there's also something that lurks beneath. Or there used to be. I've gotten more disillusioned, more empty-souled and this-worldly as I've gotten older, and I don't really know how to get back the way I used to feel. Probably psychedelics is the only way; meditation doesn't do anything for me.

Replying toA Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels

MSRayne2y

A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels

I think you're wrong that Level 4 is rare. It describes everyday reality in the upper strata of any cult - the psychopathic leadership class who make up shit for everyone else to believe, or claim to believe for status, or etc, and compete for status among those followers. And there are a LOT of cults in modern society, including organizations not traditionally perceived as cults, such as political ideologies.

Replying toSignificantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible

MSRayne2y

Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible

I'm sure you've already thought of this, and I know nothing about this area of biology, but isn't it possible that the genes coding for intelligence more accurately code for the developmental trajectory of the brain, and that changing them would not in fact affect an adult brain?

Replying to"The Heart of Gaming is the Power Fantasy", and Cohabitive Games

MSRayne2y

"The Heart of Gaming is the Power Fantasy", and Cohabitive Games

I think people have "criticized" Minecraft for being unclear what the point is, and being more of a toy or sandbox than a "game."

Myself included. I can't play Minecraft; it's far too open-ended, and makes me feel anxious and overwhelmed. "Wtf am I supposed to do??" I want a game to give me two or three choices max at every decision point, not an infinite vector space of possibilities through which I cannot sort or prioritize.

This post though is about one of my big obsessions: trying to figure out how to design a game (computer or tabletop or both) which makes cooperation fun. And I mean, fun in the way Diablo is... (read more)

Replying toSexual Abuse attitudes might be infohazardous

MSRayne2y

Sexual Abuse attitudes might be infohazardous

I never actually said that all these notions are constructed and fake, only that some are. Clearly some aren't. There are false positives and false negatives. I feel as if you're arguing against a straw man here.

-2

Replying toWould You Work Harder In The Least Convenient Possible World?

MSRayne2y

Would You Work Harder In The Least Convenient Possible World?

If I were Bob I'd have told her to fuck off long ago and stopped letting some random person berate me for being lazy just like my parents always have. This is basically guilt-tripping, not a beneficial way of approaching any kind of motivation, and it is absolutely guaranteed to produce pushback. But then, I'm probably not your target audience, am I?

Btw just to be clear, I think Said Achmiz explained my reaction better than I, who habitually post short reddit-tier responses, can. My specific issue is that Alice seems to be acting as if it's any of her business what Bob does. It is not. Absolutely nobody likes being told they're... (read more)

Replying toUnifying Bargaining Notions (2/2)

MSRayne2y

Unifying Bargaining Notions (2/2)

Holy heck I have been enlightened. And by contemplating nothingness too! Thanks for the clarification, it all makes sense now.

Any tips for eliciting one's own latent knowledge?

MSRayne

I struggle to write. I cannot figure out how to access my own thoughts and ideas. They come in non-linguistic forms - vague feelings, 3D images, animations - with a verbal narrator on top, but my very bad memory, and the fact that my best thinking is done in the middle of the night when I ought to be asleep, means that I end up forming intuitions about things based upon my prior thoughts, but I'm unable to remember what those thoughts were, or even what intuitions have recently formed how. Instead, when something reminds me of a topic, I remember whatever is salient that I've already thought of at some unknown... (read 303 more words →)

Nature abhors an immutable replicator... usually

MSRayne

Epistemic status: Popped into my head yesterday and I am trying to clarify my reasoning about it out loud. I expect that I am overestimating the universality of this principle to at least some degree, and there is some chance that it's altogether wrong, but I think it may be a potentially useful framing.

The claim in a nutshell

Replicating information patterns tend to maintain a significant rate of mutation, even when near-perfect replication is possible in principle, as a result of coopetition between sub-patterns with their own interests, which are not always perfectly aligned with the interests of the whole pattern.

The argument

To the extent that an information pattern is a replicator, its sub-patterns

... (read 728 more words →)

Note to self (and anyone else who thinks this is a good idea): privately write down predictions upon publishing every post and possibly also every comment. Specifically, predict:

number of upvotes the post will have after a week
number of comments it will have after a week
average valence of comments (proportion which agree with or are otherwise in favor of the post)
probability that some comment will cause me to change my mind about what I wrote

Then every day I should look back at everything I posted a week before and use it to calibrate my predictions. This should gradually improve my ability to determine if what I want to post is worth saying and how it will be received. That will be particularly useful if I can actually manage to trust this data during periods of low mood and warped cognition... but my current credence that I will be able to do that with significant regularity is about 40%.

Who is this MSRayne person anyway?

MSRayne

I've been on this site as a lurker for a few years now, and started interacting more heavily the past month or so. I've been reluctant to engage much, because, to be honest, I'm a very unusual person - even by the standards of LessWrong - and I don't feel like I fit in or have any idea how to contribute effectively. So I'm writing this both to introduce myself as a member of the community (so you can get a sense of who this MSRayne weirdo is who keeps commenting on your posts), and to ask: how can someone like me contribute?

(Warning: I'm very long winded and if I had stopped... (read 3039 more words →)

MSRayne's Shortform

MSRayne

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

My cognitive inertia cycle

MSRayne

I seem to have a kind of "mental momentum". Or maybe "cognitive inertia" is a better word.

When I feel as if I've lately been doing things worth doing, I feel curious and open and interested in things and seek more things to do, and have a good chance of actually doing them. But when I feel as if I haven't been doing things worth doing, or when my perception of the worth of the things I've been doing flips to them having been useless wastes of time (and thus, actively counterproductive as a result of the opportunity cost, since I could have been doing something useful, but stupid past-me was deluded and... (read 1163 more words →)

Mitigating the damage from unaligned ASI by cooperating with aliens that don't exist yet

MSRayne

Epistemic status: Pretty sure the idea is sound, but its feasibility is unfortunately a bit questionable.

Basic idea

Humanity must as soon as possible send a message to civilizations beyond Earth containing the following:

Everything we currently know about the alignment problem, together with the bare minimum of AI knowledge necessary to understand it without drastically increasing capabilities as well;
Our precommitment that, if we solve it and create an aligned ASI, and later on in the future while expanding through the cosmos meet the expansion bubble of another ASI:
1. if the ASI is not aligned with the values of the civilization that created it, we will "defect" against it;
2. if the ASI is aligned, but the civilization

... (read 1748 more words →)

-8

Perfectionism as depth-first search

MSRayne

Perfectionism could be generally defined as an approach to solving problems and completing tasks fixated primarily on minimizing perceived imperfection.

Depth-first search, meanwhile, is an algorithm for traversing tree structures, which starts at the root, then goes down a single branch until it hits a leaf. Upon reaching a leaf, it backtracks to the last node whose descendants aren't fully searched, and goes down a new branch. This process repeats until the whole tree is explored.

Recently, I realized, in a flash of insight while struggling to stop tweaking tiny flaws long enough to complete a project, that there is a possibly fruitful analogy between these two things.

Every task can be thought of as... (read 660 more words →)