papetoast

Year 1 Computer Science Student, trying to become more rational

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In that case, tabooing the word is probably better than bringing the dictionary to show that the other person's use of words are against common sense (assuming you want to actually reach a consensus, but if youre more about winning the argument then bring the dictionary is probably better?)

Documenting a specific need of mine: LaTeX OCR software

tl;dr: use Mathpix if you use it <10 times per month or you are willing to pay $4.99 per month. Otherwise use SimpleTex

So I have been using Obsidian for note taking for a while now and I eventually decided to stop using screenshots but instead learn about LaTeX so the formulas look better. At first I was relying on the website to show the original LaTeX commands but some websites (wiki :/) doesn't do that, and also I started reading math textbooks as PDF. Thus started my adventure to find a good and ideally free LaTeX OCR software.

An initial google search takes me to Mathpix, it honestly is pretty good except for the limit of 10 free OCRs per month ($4.99/month subscription). But for the worry that I will exceed the 10 free snips soon (it actually haven't happened for 3 months now), I started finding free ones on github, including LaTeX-OCR and Pix2Text, but their GUI kind of suck. Then I also tried SimpleTex and this is the one I will probably use when I run out of free snips on Mathpix.

(I am currently on the path of learning how values actually work and figuring out what I should really do.)

It has been a few days since I read this post so I may be misrepresenting you, but I think this post committed a similar mistake to people who think that arguing with another person to change their mind is meaningless given that we don't have free will, because given a deterministic future, that person will just automatically change their mind. But it doesn't work like that, because the act of arguing is part of the deterministic process that eventually causes the person to change their mind. (I could not find the exact EY post that this appeared on: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will-solution) Similarly, even though we can let our values drift freely, controlling how the values drift is also part of the drifting process.

Cooperation may incur different costs on different participants.

Related: The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag"

It does not apply to this game where punishing cooperators are purely worse off for everyone, but it does talk about how for poor people the best choice may be to do the low risk, low reward action.

It is really annoying that if you use footnotes from the LW Docs Editor, and then switches to the Markdown editor, the footnotes get irrevertably messed up like this[[1]](#fnhqkg4lye79s)

  1. **[^](#fnrefhqkg4lye79s)**

    this is an example footnote

^the above is a reply to a slightly previous version

Agree with everything here, and all the points the first paragraph I have not thought about. I'm curious if you have a higher resolution model to different dimensions of learning though, feels like I can improve my post if I have a clearer picture.

Btw, your whole reply seem to be a great example of what do you mean by "it's probably best to acknowledge it and give the details that go into your beliefs, rather than the posterior belief itself."

A real conversation gives me 1 datapoint that people use the word wisdom for the concept intelligence

I think people (myself included) really underestimated this rather trivial statement that people don't really learn about something when they don't spend the time doing it/thinking about it. People even measure mastery by hours practiced and not years practiced, but I still couldn't engrave this idea deep enough into my mind.

I currently don't have much writable evidence about why I think people underestimated this fact, but I think it is true. Below are some things that I have changed my mind/realised after noticing this fact.

  • cached thoughts, on yourself

Personally, I am a huge procrastinator and I can really flinch away from doing something even when it is weeks overdue. I was trying out BaaS and Beeminder to build up some good habits, but even with the tools I still somethings have procrastination episodes. Only after quite a lot of cycles of the procrastination episodes, I realised that I basically completely wasted the time when I was procrastinating, and I was overall actually worse than before I started the procrastination episode.

Therefore, what I concluded is that you should expect yourself to be the exact same if you haven't put in the time to think about that topic, especially high-level topics like math. (I acknowledge that motor skills require less thinking) It is a mere wish to be a different person since the last time; You don't just learn a new theorem automatically.

  • cached thoughts, on modelling human

There was this bias that you assume other people are at around the same level as you, that is obviously false, but it is quite hard to internalize this. People really don't automatically improve themselves either, there must be a push for that to happen. Also you can probably see many of those people that just stopped changing themselves.

  • there's a very limited amount you can learn by just reading a few summaries:

Some texts are better than others, but even if you only read the best text on the topic you are trying to learn, with the text being paraphrased by a magical AI to maximize for your learning efficiency, there is still a maximum bandwidth on learning. Don't expect to replicate what other people is able to do in just a few hours. Though I should acknowledge that there are actually very short texts that can change your mind greatly, I suspect that growth mindset is one of them but I'm not sure.

Alternatively, if the questions you ask are specific enough, then you may just be able to somewhat master that concept in a short amount of time. This seems to be how the "Learn in <very short amount of time>" courses out there do.


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