I successfully use Claude web interface to:
I tried to also use Claude to explain to me some parts of set theory, but it hallucinates so much that it is unusable for this purpose. Practically every mathematical argument contains an error somewhere in the middle. Asking the same question in two chats will give me "yes - here is the proof" in one, and "no - here is a counterexample" in another; and that's after I've already turned on the extra careful mathematical reasoning.
My wife tried to use Claude for biochemical research, but again, too many hallucinations to be useful. Anything you ask, "yes, this is correct, you are so smart, let me give you a few scientific references for that..." (all made up).
But then I heard it recast as the adhd tax
I suspect I have some ADHD or something similar too, and I observed that difficult things stop being difficult when I develop a habit around them. Basically, "doing it for the first time" and "doing it after I haven't been doing it for months" are super hard. But "doing the same thing I did yesterday" is easy.
In context of cooking, it means it is easier for me to cook the same two or three meals over and over again. Choices are bad, mindless repetition is good. I mean, I should think about the things that I want to do, but at a different time than when I am actually supposed to do them -- at that moment, thinking just leads to procrastination.
Precise plans are easier to do. "Cut some vegetables" is too abstract. "Cut 1/3 of iceberg lettuce, 1/3 of Chinese cabbage, a few cherry tomatoes, and put some dressing on top of that, maybe add some meat" is a plan I can do reliably.
I made the same mistake when I was young. And it is difficult in retrospect to find out exactly why. I don't remember hearing or reading this explicitly, but somehow I got the idea that first you need to figure out who is your "true love" and then you need to ask them out and... hope that the feeling is reciprocated?
Which is why I have wasted lots of time worrying about how I truly feel about some person, and when I finally felt sure this was the right choice, I got rejected and was emotionally devastated.
And when I put it like this, of course it sounds completely stupid. If you want to figure out whether someone is a good fit for you, you need to interact with them, preferably in many different situations. And you should also interact with people who maybe don't seem like a good fit but also don't have any obvious red flags, because maybe you will change your opinion after you learn more about them.
The very concept of "true love" probably needs to be thrown away, because liking/wanting another person is not necessarily a symmetric thing, so there is a high chance of getting rejected; a better concept would be something like having a pool of "potential loves", people you feel you could be happy with, and if a few of them reject you it's perfectly okay because you only need one of them anyway. (Unless you are poly.) Plus, as you meet new people, he pool of "potential loves" can grow.
Another thing I wish I had understood better is that experimenting with romantic relations is not only ethically acceptable (as long as you do not hurt other people unnecessarily) but probably also necessary. You may sincerely think that someone is a good match for you based on the data you have at the moment... but as you start dating, you find out more about the person, and maybe you learn that they are actually not a good match. It may feel like tricking them, and you may actually get accused of having tricked them, but it's just learning things that you probably could not have learned different way, e.g. because people are different in public and in private.
Rejections are an indicator of progress.
You can make the same mistake hundred times and get rejected hundred times, that is no progress.
Also, you can use an approach that works in 10% of situations, you try it 10 times, get rejected 9 times and succeed once. Here, persistence led to success, but calling it "progress" feels kinda incorrect.
each rejection is valuable new data on what to do better next time.
People are different; sometimes two people want different (or even opposite) things.
I guess it makes sense to distinguish between improving in general, and adapting to a subculture. Some things seem to be always good, except some people care about them more, and some care less. (For example, I spent a lot of time and effort improving my dancing skills -- some women were highly impressed, some didn't care at all, but I haven't met anyone who would consider dancing skills a bad thing.) Other things can be admired by some people, and hated by other people, so if you do more of that, you increase your changes with the former, and decrease your chances with the latter. Here you need to figure out which type of people you want to impress. It probably helps to be flexible, to be able to do something, but also to stop doing that, but you still risk accidentally making a wrong first impression. This is further complicated by the fact that some people are in denial about what attracts them.
Also, I'm new here so feedback/criticism would be welcomed, and direction on whether this is an appropriate "quick take" would be great as well.
I think it's okay, as in: you are not violating the local norms, but also there is a high risk of not getting any interaction, so don't be too disappointed.
On topic:
This is an interesting thought that I don't have a clear opinion on. Television is quite addictive to many people, but there is almost no interaction... except for switching channels. Smartphones are also quite addictive to many people, and there is constant interaction. TikTok seems more addictive than Facebook, but requires less interaction? (I am not sure actually; never used TikTok.) I think YouTube got slighty more addictive when they added automatic switch to a new video after you finished one. So... I don't know.
Perhaps the optimal (from the perspective of someone who wants to get you addicted) amount of control is "very little but non-zero"? A repetitive mindless movement, which still creates some illusion of control? Importantly, you do not need to do anything to get new content; the medium is pushing new content at you automatically. Your choice is only between Content A and Content B -- both options are okay from the perspective of the addictive medium, the only unwanted option is you turning it off, so it is better if it redirects your attention away from that.
That would explain why TV gets more addictive when you have a remote control for switching channels (more interaction), but YouTube gets more addictive when you run the next video automatically (less interaction needed). Endlessly scrolling pages are more addictive than clicking to see the next page, but TikTok is more addictive than scrolling.
I like the relative simplicity of this approach, but yeah, there is a risk that a tiling agent would produce (a more sophisticated version of) humans that have a permanent smile on their faces but feel horrible pain inside. Something bad that would look convincingly good at first sight, enough to fool the forecasting AI, or rather enough to fool the people who are programming and testing the forecasting AI.
Part of the problem is that people are bad at going to a place like that and only buying the healthy stuff because we are generally already compromised...
Also, we are all compromised in different ways, so we probably couldn't agree on what is okay and what is not. Some people want to avoid sugar, some want to avoid food additives, some want to avoid meat, some want to avoid alcohol, etc., and that would require you to have N different shops, or perhaps 2^N different shops.
Which is why I am thinking about the online solution, which might allow you to create your personal blacklist, and maybe also use blacklists provided by others... for example, it is not necessary to every vegetarian to maintain their own blacklist, you could have someone maintain a public vegetarian blacklist and everyone else could choose to use it.
I'd say the closest equivalent are meal planning companies that ship out fully made meals every day for quite a fee, but they can be carefully tuned for health and ensuring the brain isn't wrecked by temptations.
Yeah, I tried those, but (at least in my area) they are quite expensive. Also, there is little choice there, often only one option or maybe two (vegetarian and omnivore); but there are some meals that I hate, and I would feel really stupid paying lots of money to have that food delivered to me.
But if they had e.g. 4 options every day that you could conveniently choose on a smartphone, and if the delivery was less expensive, it could be a great solution.
Another great service I could imagine is buying vegetables that are already washed and cut. There is so much junk food out there; I wish there was a place where I could bring my own food box and buy some lettuce and tomatoes that are already washed and cut, so I would just add some dressing at home and eat it. If that existed, I would probably eat much more vegetables than now. The unhealthy food is often ready to eat, but the healthy food often requires lots of work, and sometimes I am just tired or busy.
I am not even sure some things can be meaningfully attributed to nature or nurture. Consider the following hypothesis:
What we would observe in this world is men being better chess players. But saying that it is "by nature" is slightly misleading. There is a causal chain, and only a small part of it is different by nature. Fixing that small part -- e.g. by making chess your family hobby with local high status and lots of fun -- can dramatically change the outcome. While it remains true that such things practically never happen in normal life. Also that men can naturally be highly motivated without so highly supportive families.
Shortly, if you ask "are men biologically better at chess?" it feels like both saying "yes" and "no" is highly misleading. "No" in theory and in some very rare experiments; but also "yes" in practice, if you let the nature have its way... even in an environment that would be 100% free of sexism, it's just that no one would optimize their household to make their children play lots of chess.
It's not just nitpicking for the sake of online debate -- the more detailed model allows making better predictions. Society can change, if for some reason (not necessarily wokeness, it could also be e.g. fashion) you made lots of chess clubs for little girls, with lots of fun an emotional support, the results could change. I could even imagine this becoming a social attractor, for example at one day for random reasons rich people would start sending their daughters to chess clubs, and suddenly "send your daughter to chess club" would become a symbol of prestige and many parents would want to do that. And then you would get generations of great female chess players. Maybe.
(Personally, I don't think that chess is worth doing this, but maybe math or computer science is.)
When I tell people about food like Soylent, they often ask "but isn't it boring to eat the same thing every day"? From my perspective, that is actually a good thing. I don't want my food to be too exciting, because then I will eat too much of it. (Actually, I want, but I don't want to want.)
I would be happy to have a grocery store nearby that doesn't sell any superstimuli. Something that would have shelves full of vegetables and other boring stuff, but no sweets etc. I would be happy to always buy there, to avoid the temptation. But I realize that for the owner, there would be constant temptation to increase their profits by slightly expanding the selection. (Which by the way is something that already happened with Soylent-like products. The first ones, they tried to copy the nutrition recommendations. The next ones, they... tried to join the wave by offering a product very similar but slightly sweeter than their competitors. Keep going this way for a few decades and see where it gets you.)
I wonder how difficult it would be to have the kind of grocery store I imagine by simply buying online, and using some mechanism to filter the healthy foods. The simplest implementation could simply be a blacklist -- if I ever regret buying something, or if I predict that I would, there should be a "hide" button that forever removes the product from my screen without a trace. (Could this be implemented as a GreaseMoney script?) I suspect that if many people started using it, the shops would start fighting back, but it would work for some time.
The part about misinformation is very important, and unlike assassination markets it seems to be in a blind spot of the rationalist community.
I suspect that most people here perceive the prediction markets through the mistake theory perspective: "people try to do their best at predicting outcomes, some of them make honest mistakes, prediction markets create a financial incentive to get it right (or to become less confident about your predictions)". A collective effort similar to scientific research, but distributed, open for everyone, and allocating money to the best researchers.
And that is true... kind of. In the same sense as the traditional market is a collective effort to produce goods for everyone at an affordable price, if possible.
That also is kinda true, but it also fundamentally misinterprets the gears of the situation by conflating "what typically happens at a free market" with "what motivates the participants in the market". Some of them might be motivated by the desire to provide cheap goods for everyone, but most of them are probably there in order to make money, preferably lots of money. The fact that free markets often make things cheap is a good news for the customers, but the producers are not necessarily happy about it, any many use various tricks to avoid this outcome.
Free market is great for the new entrepreneurs, because it allows them to join the game. Free market is bad for the established entrepreneurs, because it allows their competitors to join the game. This is why established entrepreneurs often looks for ways to keep their dominance on the market (other than merely providing better products at lower costs), such as regulatory capture. Instead of collective effort, free market would be better described as an impersonal force pushing the participants towards the outcomes they do not really prefer.
Now apply the same logic to the prediction markets.
The fact that prediction markets provide good predictions is nice, but the true motivation of many participants is simply to make lots of money. This will be even more true than today if prediction markets become more popular. If at some moment anyone will be able to spend their savings on prediction markets, we could expect that most people will be there for the money, and from their perspective "providing correct prediction" will be like "providing cheap goods" -- maybe something that can't be avoided, but not their ideal outcome.
On the prediction market, you make money when people vote against you. Therefore, even if you are a super-forecaster and regularly make correct bets, your profit is maximized when other people are wrong. If your budget is large enough so that you could make millions (or even billions) on the prediction market (in the hypothetical future with trillions of dollars in prediction markets), it would be rational for you to spend lots of money to make sure that as many people as possible are wrong.
The tobacco companies tried to make people wrong about the dangers of smoking. Now imagine companies just as rich, and just as evil, trying to make you wrong about... well, everything they can bet on. They don't even have to grow the tobacco and make the cigarettes in order to get rich; they can just as conveniently bet on other people's tobacco, cigarettes, vaccination, autism, whatever.
In theory, prediction markets can push people towards sanity, by rewarding correct predictions and punishing incorrect predictions. In practice, prediction markets would also create huge financial incentives for unethical companies to push people in the opposite direction (so that they can then take their money in the market). It is not obvious to me which force would turn out to be stronger in real life.
"But won't people stop betting on the prediction markets if they lose predictably?" No they won't. First, gamblers already keep losing and they don't stop. Second, if betting on a wrong but strongly held belief will feel emotional good at the moment of betting, even if it loses some money later, it may be worth it, emotionally. Not everything needs to be profitable: whenever you buy a cookie, you lose some money, but you still enjoy the cookie; perhaps the irrational people will enjoy placing their predictably wrong bets the same way.
The current prediction markets are systematically biased, because many forecasters there are motivated by the prestige, instead of / in addition to money. People willing to sacrifice prestige for money would bet slightly differently. They would actually probably often create new accounts, just to reduce the effect of "I know that this person is almost always right, so I hesitate to bet against them". They would want you to perceive them as idiots instead, because that will encourage you to bet against them. They would want you to believe that they are acting completely stupid.
As a hypothetical scenario, imagine a super-forecaster who predicts that something will happen with probability X, and then creates a new account to make that bet with $1000000, adding some insane comment such as: "I prayed to Jesus to make me rich, and Jesus told me to bet that the value is 12.34, because chapter 12 verse 34 in the Bible mentions money, and I trust Jesus enough to put my lifetime savings here". Then they would create another new account that bets $100 dollars against the position, saying "come on, this is so silly that this is practically free money!" And they they would share that screenshot on social networks. In my opinion, as a profit maximizing move, this would be more instrumentally rational than what participants in the prediction markets are doing these days (except for this guy).
Thank you for doing the epistemic hard work in difficult, potentially high-stakes situations!
Our usual heuristics stop working when the numbers get high. For example, there is a small but nonzero probability that a random mentally ill person will conclude that you are a leader of the worldwide conspiracy against them, and therefore it is necessary to kill you. In normal situations, the probability is small enough that you simply ignore it; you are not going to include this possibility in your decisions about how to live your everyday life.
Then, by your hard work and lots of luck, your project succeeds, and you become a famous person, known by millions of people. Congratulations! Also, a few weeks later, a mentally ill person breaks into your home and murders you. They explain to the police that you were a leader of the worldwide conspiracy against them. The probability of any specific mentally ill person doing this is too small, but once you are known to millions of people, which includes thousands of seriously mentally ill people, the small probabilities can quickly add up.
Every time your organization scales 10x, it exposes itself to yet another magnitude of weirdness. If you have 10 members, one of them will be really annoying. If you have 100 members, one of them will steal something from another member. If you have 1000 members, one of them will rape another member. If you have 10000 members, one of them will murder another member. If you have 100000 members... I don't know what happens at that scale, but it is certainly a horrible thing. The shields of "yes, this is technically possible, but come on, the probability of that happening in real life is extremely small" are falling apart one by one.
Then you have the noise which makes it impossible to figure out things already on the scale of 100 people.