Regex

Replying toEliezer's Unteachable Methods of Sanity

> I often feel more like a disembodied observer of the world around me, rather than an active participant.
> Far more of my mental energy is spent navigating the realm of ideas than identifying with the persona that is everything that everyone else identifies with me, so I tend to think far more about what ought to be done than about how I feel about things.

This sounds pretty similar to myself, therefore I have some questions:

In the past did you have a lot of overwhelmingly intense emotions? Do you sometimes go from almost non-awareness of feeling (or feeling but weakly) to overwhelming emotion in a very short span?
Does encountering information also bring... (read more)

Replying toEliezer's Unteachable Methods of Sanity

Regex1mo*

Eliezer's Unteachable Methods of Sanity

I think I can replicate all of these just fine? What's so unteachable about these? Where do people actually run into problems trying to adopt these?

> This sense -- which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life -- is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.

If I look around at my life and try to apply it, a lot of problems immediately jump out at me like 'for that really hard problem you have, go ask... (read 1094 more words →)

Replying toWhat are your greatest one-shot life improvements?

RegexJun 05, 2025

What are your greatest one-shot life improvements?

Making my room 100% blackout (as in I cannot detect my hand waving in front of my face during daylight hours when I wake up) has reduced apparent sleep need by ~an hour. I used to need 8-9 hours, now I seem to need 7-8 hours. Some nights I'm even getting closer to 6.5 hours! Which would previously have barely felt like sleeping at all but now feels totally fine. This seems to bring me more in line with human norms. It is difficult to measure quality, but my internal 'go to sleep now' shifted forward an hour without affecting my waking time with no apparent negative consequence.

This was after already having... (read more)

Replying toOrienting Toward Wizard Power

Regex9mo*

Orienting Toward Wizard Power

Took buproprion for years and while it did help with executive function, I was also half-insane that entire time (literal years from like 2015 to 2021). I guess it was hypomania? And to expand on 'half-insane' - one aspect of what I mean is was far too willing to accept ideas on a dime, and accepted background assumptions conspiracy theories made while only questioning their explicit claims. Misinformation feels like information! Overall there was a lack of sense of grounding to base conclusions on in the first place. I will note this still describes me somewhat, but not nearly as bad. Although it is a bit hard to pin down how much... (read 583 more words →)

Replying toWhat are your greatest one-shot life improvements?

RegexSep 16, 2024

What are your greatest one-shot life improvements?

My purchase of an arduino kit at the end of highschool. This has essentially passively introduced me to a lot of basic electronics over the years without explicitly studying them. And so now I sometimes think "I want to measure my heart rate" or "I want to build a DIY custom keyboard" or "I want a physical pomodoro timer with just one button and 3 LEDs" and I can just order some parts, build the thing, and have a new tool that solves a simple problem.

I sometimes try to recommend other people build something simple with electronics occasionally, only to realize that they don't even have any kind of microcontroller. Whereas for... (read more)

Replying toWhole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years

Regex2y*

Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years

Two years later, there are now whole brain wide recordings on C. Elegans via calcium imaging. This includes models apparently at least partially predictive of behavior and analysis of individual neuron contributions to behavior.

If you want the "brain-wide recordings and accompanying behavioral data" you can apparently download them here!

It is very exciting to finally have measurements for this. I still need to do more than skim the paper though. While reading it, here are the questions on my mind:
* What are the simplest individual neuron models that properly replicates each measured neuron-activation? (There are different cell types so take that into account too)
* If you run those individually measurement-validated neuron models forward... (read more)

Replying toHammertime Day 10: Murphyjitsu

Regex6y

Hammertime Day 10: Murphyjitsu

I expanded 'shocked at failure' into:

The plans you make work.

When they fail, it is because of one of the following reasons:

a predicted reason (you took a risk / made a tradeoff, saw it as low probability or unavoidable)
violation of an explicit assumption (encryption used is secure, won't crash on the way to the airport)
a black swan (coronavirus, 9/11, stock market crash)

When they fail for reasons other than these, you are extremely surprised and can point to exactly what about your worldview and anticipations misled you.

Replying toPlan-Bot: A Simple Planning Tool

Regex6y

Plan-Bot: A Simple Planning Tool

The planbot link is down.

Replying toArchimedes's Chronophone

Regex6y

Archimedes's Chronophone

I first tried to describe rationality piece by piece, but realized that just comes out as something like: "Enumerate all the principles, fundamentals, and ideas you can think of and find about effective thinking and action. Master all of them. More thoroughly and systematically apply them to every aspect of your life. Use the strongest to solve its most relevant problem. Find their limits. Be unsatisfied. Create new principles, fundamentals, and ideas to master. Become strong and healthy in all ways. "

Non-meta attempt:

<Epistemic status: I would predict most of these are wrong. In fact, I rather recently proved I didn't understand fundamental parts of The Sequences. So I know that my

... (read 805 more words →)

Replying toHammertime Day 1: Bug Hunt

Regex6y

Hammertime Day 1: Bug Hunt

Hopefully, you came up with at least 100 bugs; I came up with 142.

I wrote 20,000 words from these prompts. Not all of those bugs, but also my reactions to them. Ended up doing not much else for about three days, but I went over basically my entire life top to bottom. I now have a thorough overview of my errors. I stopped not because I ran out of things I think I need to fix, but because I realized the list would never end. I was still finding MAJOR areas I need to improve even after all that. I see why the exercise is supposed to only be half an hour now: there are about 200 million insects per person!

Lesson learned: sample, not catalog.

Facebook, The Rodents, and The Common Knowledge Machine

Regex

"The rationalist communities use of Facebook is an inadequate scenario. A group of people put real money into making a simple tool that could enable transitions from inadequate equilibria to better, 'adequate' ones. This tool was made in the basic sense, but had none of the necessary polishing or marketing work done because the money only stipulated raw tool creation. Better planning and project management could have avoided this outcome. The fact that this outcome was collectively allowed to stand implies serious issues with the foundational makeup of the people within the rationalist community."

Machine Learning Group

Regex

After signing up for this post, those of us that want to study machine learning have made a team.

In an effort to actually get high returns on our time we won't delay, and instead actually build the skills. First project: work through Python Machine Learning by Sebastian Raschka, with the mid-term goal of being able to implement the "recognizing handwritten digits" code near the end.

As a matter of short term practicality currently we don't have the hardware for GPU acceleration. This limits the things we can do, but at this stage of learning most of the time spent is on understanding and implementing the basic concepts anyway.

Here is our... (read more)

Online Social Groups?

Regex

11y

Are there any LessWrong Skype groups, or active live chatrooms? I've been looking around and found nothing. Well, with the exception of the LW Study Hall, but it doesn't quite fit since it is primarily for social work/study facilitation purposes with only minor breaks. This would fulfill a primarily social function.

But you ask, wouldn't a regular Skype chat reduce effectiveness by distracting people from their work? A little bit, but I'd rather the distracting thing be increasing my rationality by getting me engaging in the ideas with other people who are actively trying to do the same. I expect it to have an overall positive effect on productivity since I am bound... (read more)

Informing Others: Maximally Efficient?

Regex

11y

I want to help the world as much as possible: lets define that as reduction of suffering¹ of the human race.

I am an engineering student. It would be very simple to spend the rest of my life working on engineering problems, thereby making humanity more effective, and so reducing suffering: Pretty acceptable in terms of benefit to the world, and also given my skill set it makes sense. The issue here is that it may be a local maximum.

Now, what if instead of directly solving problems I focus my efforts on other people? Directing others down a more rational path. This may include things like telling people about Less Wrong, specifically... (read 539 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Facebook, The Rodents, and The Common Knowledge Machine

Machine Learning Group

Informing Others: Maximally Efficient?

Online Social Groups?

Regex

Regex

Facebook, The Rodents, and The Common Knowledge Machine

Machine Learning Group

Online Social Groups?

Informing Others: Maximally Efficient?

Regex

Facebook, The Rodents, and The Common Knowledge Machine

Machine Learning Group

Informing Others: Maximally Efficient?

Online Social Groups?

Regex

Regex

Facebook, The Rodents, and The Common Knowledge Machine

Machine Learning Group

Online Social Groups?

Informing Others: Maximally Efficient?