Viliam

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Answer by ViliamJun 13, 202380

Not sure if there is an "objective" definition of hypomania, or if it just means: slightly more manic than your usual state. Like, whether my hypomania could be someone else's normal. So I'm going to ignore this part and assume that your question meant: "How to increase your energy levels?"

(The following are just my guesses; I didn't do any research.)

First, check whether you have some known problem that causes low energy, such as depression, anemia, sleep apnea, etc. Get diagnosed, use the standard solutions.

(People will recommend experimenting with drugs. I suggest caution, because of selection effect: those who survive are more likely to talk about how perfectly safe it is.)

Get fit: exercise regularly, lose weight. Get enough sleep. Eat healthy food.

Spend more time outside. Install stronger lights at home.

Remove trivial inconveniences at your home and workplace. Clean up your room. Buy things that can help you be more productive. (Buy cheap things if you merely suspect that they could make you more productive. If you think that writing things using pens of three different colors can help you, you may be right or you may be wrong, but the time you would spend thinking about it is definitely more expensive than those pens.)

Having a support group can help a lot. Try pair programming. Socialize with people who share your goals. Find an accountability buddy. Discuss your dreams with friends.

...sometimes: Do a different thing. Sometimes the problem is not you, but the thing you wanted to achieve, or the environment where you wanted to achieve it.

Consider the following sets:

  • A = natural numbers, written in blue ink
  • B = natural numbers, written in green ink
  • C = even numbers, written in green ink

Would it mean that C is smaller than B, but equal to A (which is equal to B)?

Maybe it's some legal hack, like maybe in some situations you can't dismiss unethical research, but you can dismiss fraudulent research... and a research where people were forced to falsely write that their participation was voluntary, is technically fraudulent.

For me, one important realization was that my original emotions around this kind of assumed a competition where not-winning was actually negative.

Isn't that what we were trained for? I mean, school is a competition, capitalism is a competition; even many forms of cooperation include a hidden threat that you might be replaced by someone who is better to cooperate with.

(Uh, I am not really satisfied with what I wrote here, but I cannot improve it at the moment, at it feels to me that it's pointing towards something important, so I am leaving it here.)

Ignoring the author, the article seems to me mostly okay. There is a lot to nitpick, of course, but given my general low opinion on journalism, this seems exceptionally good.

Called rationalists or effective altruists, this community became enormously influential in academia, government think tanks and the tech industry.

This sounds like "rationalists" and "effective altruists" are synonyms. (Makes it difficult to decipher whether author means that it's the rationalists or the EAs being enormously influential in academia, etc.)

Reading the tweets...

GH: In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.

Someone Else: I read and interpreted Care Metz NY Times article the way you meant: you left Google to speak more freely about AI and its potential dangers, and at no point, I felt you criticised Google. For what it's worth.

GH: Maybe I over-reacted. When I read it I thought it could easily be interpreted as implying that I left so that I could criticize Google and that is certainly not the case.

...it seems to me like this specific case is not a strong evidence, if even GH thinks he might have overreacted.

(I don't want to defend NYT or Metz, and there is a lot of other evidence against them; I am just unimpressed by this one specific piece of evidence you chose to link.)

(I haven't read the article itself, only the tweets.)

I think that flagging new users is a good idea. Less Wrong often seems harsh to beginners. If I see someone with the green flag saying something wrong, I may be more likely to explain rather than downvote.

That said, I agree that the flag should not apply to old users with low karma.

This sounds to me like: "I believe the same things as you do, but on top of that I also believe that you are wrong (but I am not)."

Which in turn sounds like: "I do not want to be associated with you, regardless of how much our specific beliefs match".

What are the new predictions that post-reductionism makes?

Reductionist: "Apples are made of atoms."

Post-reductionist: "I agree. However, it often makes sense to think about 'apples' instead of 'huge sets of atoms', when we are saying things such as 'if you plant an apple seed to the ground, an apple tree will grow out of it'. Trying to express this in the terms of individual atoms would require insane computational capacity. The patterns at high level are repeating sufficiently regularly to make 'apple' a useful thing to talk about. Most of the time, it allows us to make predictions about what happens at the high level, without mentioning the atoms."

Reductionist: "Yes, I know. I think this is called 'a map and the territory'; the territory is made of atoms, but apples are a useful concept."

Post-reductionist: "From your perspective, apples are merely a useful fiction. From my perspective, atoms are real, but apples are real too."

Reductionist: "Let's taboo 'real'. I already admitted that apples are a useful abstraction, in everyday situations. There are also situations where the abstraction would break. For example if we asked 'how many DNA bases can we change before the apple stops being an apple?', there is no exact answer, because the boundary of the concept is fuzzy; the objects currently existing in our world may be easy to classify, but it is possible to create new objects that would be controversial. By the way, talking about the 'apple DNA' already brings the atomic level back to the debate.

On the other hand, a hypothetical superintelligent being with an insane computing capacity (probably would need to exist in a different universe) might be able to describe the apple in the terms of atoms, something like 'apple is a set of atoms that has this super-complicated mathematical property'; it might also be able to describe in terms of atoms how the apple trees grow. If it did many computations regarding apples, it might develop an abstraction for 'apple', in a similar sense how humans have an abstraction for 'prime numbers'. However, we are not such beings, and I am definitely not pretending to be one. Just saying that it is possible in principle."

Post-reductionist: ...well, I don't know what to write here to pass the ITT.

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