All of romeostevensit's Comments + Replies

I have found a lot of online summaries of deliberate practice frustratingly vague. So I bought a well reviewed out of print manual on deliberate practice in music called The Practiceopedia. The chapter headings give some ideas about the sort of resolution being gone for. I might do a book review at some point.

Chapter guide

Beginners: curing your addiction to the start of your peace

Blinkers: shutting out the things you shouldn't be working on

Boot camp: where you need to send passages that won't behave

Breakthroughs diary: keeping track of your progress

Bridgin... (read more)

different constraints, different development search algo.

I don't think drift would necessarily be the same for humans and a wildly different intelligence architecture, but it's an interesting way to think about it.

3bhauth18h
Why do you think AGI would have a very different architecture from what humans do? I'd expect a lot of similarities, just with different hardware.

From Colby who wrote a post also examining such considerations several years ago comments:

"I'm not familiar with this dataset but eyeballing the data and others I've seen of international comparisons it seems there's a pretty tight correlation between price/income and population density, which seems intuitive, and America remains a rather sparsely populated country. The more relevant metric for investment purposes would probably be rental yield, and the figure I see here for US city centers of 10.5% as of 2019 seems totally out of whack with other dat... (read more)

After six weeks, the IMST group saw their systolic blood pressure (the top number) dip nine points on average

Even six weeks after they quit doing IMST, the IMST group maintained most of that improvement.

that's pretty impressive! Thanks for the update.

oh yeah, I mostly do dumbbell rows instead, and then face pulls as an accessory.

Indeed, it looks like property taxes average a third of US rates in the EU. Calculating the real cost of ownership over a length of time (thirty years, say) would be interesting.

I've done some of it because of reduced lung capacity from childhood asthma, but am not under the impression that it replicates any of the benefits of cardio.

4gilch2d
source [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210630135033.htm]

Weighted step ups instead of squats can be loaded quite heavy. Hyperextensions, one-legged hypers, and reverse hyperextensions can work the posterior chain with 1/2-1/3 the load on the spine as deadlifts. Bench doesn't exactly load the spine but it is the most dangerous lift going by statistics (dropping the weight on yourself is the most common severe gym accident) and can be replaced with incline bench, dumbbell shoulder presses, and/or dips.

2gilch2d
OK, that's the lift and the push. Is it still bent rows for the pull? That still seems like load on the spine, but I'm really not an expert here.

I think this is a reasonable hypothesis, as someone who has experienced some similar things, though not as distinctly as yours it sounds like. More generally, the whole sensate volume occurs 'inside your brain', so there's no reason other than practical usefulness that the mind can't render physical sensations as 'over there' the same way it renders sounds as 'over there', after all, you don't experience sounds as occurring at your ears.

An interesting related phenomena is that the body map can be weird compared to our visual and kinesthetic map of where th... (read more)

I think spinal injuries can be degenerative. I don't know of many serious studies on exercise selection.

What do we expect to see at year 5 for the prediction to be true at year 10?

WRT olympic: don't like loading the spine dynamically for newbies whose muscular strength is outpacing their joint and stabilizing muscle conditioning.

Kettlebells can be okay. Hip hinges really depends on the person and how they're doing them.

Can't, don't have access to my pre LW 2.0 account due to an email collision

Peer review and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

4Sune5d
In case you didn’t see the author’s comment below: there is now a patreon button!

There seem to be sharp negentropy gradients like cell walls, so I think having things as a structure in our map makes sense as a correspondence to structures out there. Nervous systems (and brains) seem to be loci of intense information processing.

1Aorou5d
So you're saying that for running, it's better to do a more intense (uphill) shorter duration run, than a less intense (flat terrain) longer duration run? If I understand that correctly, it would imply that, for cardio, the rule is reverse the one for weights: "heavier" for "less reps"?

it seems to be extremely valuable to focus on fitness for, say, six months and gain some appreciable LBM that then becomes very easy to maintain.

I used to be pretty anti machine. I still think 100% machines is a bad plan, but they're useful training wheels.

Yeah ~1k intervals are probably the next step. You can start working them in gradually with just a single interval at somewhat greater than your easy pace then start increasing the number and intensity as feels good and you spot milestones that feel personally meaningful in the distance.

There are various psychological pushes to run more in order to run better and faster, but this pushes against your recovery abilities pretty quickly such that much of serious running is about managing recovery. This isn't great if it isn't a primary hobby.

Good point, I can briefly outline how the research on volume has informed how I lift these days.

It used to be believed that intensity was basically irreplaceable, but more and better studies have shown extremely similar effects from lower intensity, approximately down to 60-65% of your 1 rep max, whereas a 4 or 5 rep scheme is going to be around 80-85% your 1 rep max. So I tend to work the listed exercises in the 8-12 rep range. This further reduces injury risk. The exercise choices are good, and I also add in an accessory or two, defaulting to face pulls ... (read more)

1Aorou6d
  What do you mean by 'impact' in this context?

or strap any hepa filter available to any fan available. Increase pressure by taping so that the air focuses on being pushed through the filter.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/#FunEva

(Hassabis' PhD advisor co-wrote the relevant paper with Marr, and Hassabis has cited it on slides in talks)

This seems to be recreating something like David Marr's levels of abstraction?

2Eli Tyre13d
What's that? Do you have a link to a good overview?

Strong upvote for making detailed claims that invite healthy discussion. I wish more public thinking through of this sort would happen on all sides.

A nice compression I hadn't thought of before is that moral categories and group categories are not type safe within the brain.

How identification works, afaict: one of the ways alienation works is by directly invalidating people's experiences or encouraging preference falsification about how much they prefer being in the shape of a good, interchangeable worker, which is a form of indirectly invalidating your own experience, especially experiences of suffering. People feel that their own experience is not a valid source of sovereignty and so they are encouraged to invest their experience into larger, more socially legible and accepted constructs. This construct needs to be immutabl... (read more)

4romeostevensit20d
A nice compression I hadn't thought of before is that moral categories and group categories are not type safe within the brain.

Bostrom's Superintelligence was a frustrating read because it makes barely any claims, it spends most of the time making possible conceptual distinctions, which aren't really falsifiable. It is difficult to know how to engage with it. I think this problem is underlying in a bunch of the LW stuff too. In contrast, The Age of Em made the opposite error, it was full of things presented as firm claims, so many that most people seemed to just gloss the whole thing as crazy. I think most of the highly engaged with material in academia goes for a specific format along this dimension whereby it makes a very limited number of claims and attempts to provide overwhelming evidence for them. This creates many foot holds for engagement.

3Portia1mo
Thank you - I do think you are pinpointing a genuine problem here. And it is also putting into context for me why this pattern of behaviour so adored by academia is not done here. If you are dealing with long term scenarios, with uncertain ones, with novel ones with many unknowns, but where a lot is at stake - and a lot of the things Less Wrong is concerned with are just that - then if you agree to only proclaim what is certain, and to only restrict yourself to things you can, with the tools currently available, completely tackle and clearly define, carving out tiny portions of this that are already unassailable, to enter into long-term publication processes... you will miss the calamity you are concerned about entirely. There is too much danger with too little data and too little time to be perfectly certain, but too much seems highly plausible to hold off on. But as a result, what one produces is rushed, incomplete, vague, full of holes, and often not immediately applicable, or published, so it can be dismissed. Yet people who pass through academia have been told again and again to hold off on the large questions that led them there, to pursue extremely narrow ones, and to value the life-saving, useful and precise results that have been so carefully checked; pursuing big questions if often weeded out in the Bachelor degree already, so doing so seems unprofessional. I wonder if there is a specific, small thing that would make a huge impact if taken seriously by academia, but that is itself narrow enough that it can be completed with a sufficient amount of certainty and rigour and completeness, with the broader implications strongly implied in the outlook after that firm base has been established. Or rather, which might be the wisest choice here. - Thanks a lot, that was really insightful.

Idea: an app for calculating Shapley values that creates an intuitive set of questions from which to calibrate people's estimates for the inputs, and then shows you sensitivity analysis so that you understand what the most impactful inputs are. I think this could popularize Shapley values if the results were intuitive and graphically pretty. I'm imagining this in the same vein that the quizzes financial advisors give helps render legible the otherwise difficult for most concepts of risk tolerance and utility wrt money being a function that varies wrt both money and time.

Some EA adjacent person made a bare bones calc: http://shapleyvalue.com/

Here are Gendlin's videos on Thinking at the Edge (three parts, around 20 minutes total)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv7rXHHBXDU

And inspired by the post I decided to try to come up with a better word for a thing I've been trying and repeatedly failing to communicate. I'll try this by using oobleck as a hyphenation for concepts that are able to be soft and flexible but firm up the more force you apply to them. So oobleck-boundaries is being soft enough to be open for anything but firm up if you get pushed too hard.

4TsviBT25d
Oh, I ended up (through "non-Newtonian") with the same word for a similar idea! (I can't find any substantial notes, just a message to myself saying "mind as oobleck"; I think I was thinking about something around how when you push against an idea, test it, examine it, the idea or [what the idea was supposed to be] is evoked more strongly and precisely.)

I'm personally more excited about #2 due to room for more funding considerations and correlations in search and evaluation among existing projects, where independent grantors can find the weirder bets we need.

2Ruby1mo
Also a fan of #2.

Is there a good primer somewhere on how causal models interact with the standard model of physics?

I really like that this provides a framework to start thinking about when X is not random but adversarially selected.

What happens under high defense cost low attack cost regimes? Among other things centralization of whatever remains defensible. I expect conglomeration among digital services to continue or increase in pace.

Schindler had a concrete thing he was able to do. He had a money->people pipeline. I think most of the ways rationalists are feeling smug about being ahead of the curve here boils down to an error that we are still making: okay you've made the update, now how does it propagate through the world model to generate meaningfully different actions? Who has taken action? Has anyone who has taken action talked about it anywhere? Do any of the proposed or taken actions look remotely helpful?

for people who want to test the cheaper alternative this baby sleep aid seems to have reviews that suggest it starts strong and then tapers off before auto shutting down in a way that seems practically useful. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009UPUFCY/

tempted to test this myself but I already sleep pretty well so I'm not sure I could discern signal.

2Elizabeth1mo
The Apollo Sleep setting tapers down but it's much too fast for my tastes, if I start at a reasonable intensity it's undetectable long before I'm asleep.

I wrote a short post on my favorite technique, but lots of therapy modalities talk about similar ideas. http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html

Routine practice of certain schemas, such as rerouting from negative motivation to the isomorphic positive representation of the same contents.

1Caridorc Tergilti2mo
Very interesting, could you elaborate or give some links?

Be ready and willing to talk and listen, on levels so basic that without context they would seem condescending. "I know the basics, stop talking down to me" is a bad excuse when the basics are still not known.

The number of defenses people have against this sort of thing is pretty obvious in other difficult areas like phenomenology.

An important dimension of previous social movements involved giving concerned people concrete things to do so that emotional energy doesn't get wasted and/or harm the person.

Easiest is a fictional dialog between a pro and anti position person. The anti person brings counter evidence and then gets to see how the pro position responds. If they respond by remapping the moving parts of the model in a different way, that indicates extra degrees of freedom. Then you can have an easier time noticing when you are doing this same move, ie back peddling and trying to 'save' a position when someone gives you push back on it.

Compulsive deconstructors shouldn't be handed a full toolbox is one way I have thought of it.

I meant that emotional integration (like focusing) is helpful for avoiding destabilization.

I would say the signs are the normal sort you 'd see in mental health breakdowns:

Depression, social withdrawal
Hostility or suspiciousness, extreme reaction to criticism
Deterioration of personal hygiene
Flat, expressionless affect
Inability to cry or express joy or inappropriate laughter or crying
Oversleeping or insomnia; forgetful, unable to concentrate
Odd or irrational statements; seeming difficulty with communicating in a normal way

Worth noting that both this and the fixing the motor cortex skill they advocate are very closely related to traditional buddhist insight practices and that without supporting emotional integration (Tune Your Emotional Processing, with Focusing as the particular version that Squirrelinhell advocated though a variety of self therapy modalities can work) it can be destabilizing.

6Raemon2mo
I'm interested in more details about the failure modes to watch out for here. i.e. what sort of things might you notice happening to you if you were en route to being destabilized? The post does explicitly warn about this, but I happened to a) already have some flavor of focusing by the time I started, and b) never actually ran at it that hard, so, I might still be underestimating how worried to be about it despite the warnings.

I didn't know them and can only speak to how I did the tuning ontology thing. For about 2 weeks, I noted any time I was chunking reasoning using concepts. Many of them familiar LW concepts, and lots of others from philosophy, econ, law, common sense sayings, and some of my own that I did or didn't have names for. This took a bit of practice but wasn't that hard to train a little 'noticer' for. After a while, the pace of new concepts being added to the list started to slow down a lot. This was when I had around 250 concepts. I then played around with the on... (read more)

9Raemon2mo
This seems like a potentially quite helpful concept to me. I'd be interested in more details of how you go about checking for degrees of freedom. I think when I do this sort of sanity-checking for myself, things I sometimes do include "wait, why do I believe this in the first place?" and "consider the world where the opposite is true, how would I know?" but those seem like different mental motions.
1qvalq2mo
I think that list would be very helpful for me. Can you form a representative sample of your "list"? Or send the whole thing, if you have it written down.
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