This post is hard enough to get through that the original person who nominated it didn’t make it, and also I tried and gave up in order to look at more other things instead. I agree that it’s possible there is something here, but we didn’t build upon it, and if we put it in the book people are going to be confused as to what the hell is going on. I don’t think we should include.
On the other hand this post for me exemplifies something I think LessWrong is really good at, which is creating a place where people can find an audience of bleeding-edge research that is not obviously off the rails. Something like the kind of stuff you would otherwise only hear about because you work at a university and happen to go to a talk a person working on that research gave internally to solicit feedback.
Like with many posts the audience may be small for this one, but this is the same problem with many AI alignment posts and I don’t think we should hold it against this post in voting unless we plan to also vote against inclusion of most technical AI posts that were nominated.
Fair enough; the TL;DR pull-quote for this piece would be:
Annealing involves heating a metal above its recrystallization temperature, keeping it there for long enough for the microstructure of the metal to reach equilibrium, then slowly cooling it down, letting new patterns crystallize. This releases the internal stresses of the material, and is often used to restore ductility (plasticity and toughness) on metals that have been ‘cold-worked’ and have become very hard and brittle— in a sense, annealing is a ‘reset switch’ which allows metals to go back to a more pristine, natural state after being bent or stressed. I suspect this is a useful metaphor for brains, in that they can become hard and brittle over time with a build-up of internal stresses, and these stresses can be released by periodically entering high-energy states where a more natural neural microstructure can reemerge.
Furthermore: meditation, music, and psychedelics (and sex and perhaps sleep) ‘heat’ the brain up in this metaphorical sense. Lots of things follow from this—most usefully, if you feel stressed and depressed, make sure you’re “annealing” enough, both in terms of frequency and ‘annealing temperature’ (really intense emotional experiences are crucial for the emotional updating process).
Possibly the most LW-relevant part of this is the comment left by lsusr, which I’ve appended to the bottom of the version on opentheory.net, i.e. the comment that starts out “This makes sense to me because I work full-time on the bleeding edge of applied AI, meditate, and have degree in physics where I taught the acoustical and energy-based models this theory is based upon. Without a solid foundation in all three of these fields this theory might seem less self-evident.”—he said some things clearly that were only tacit in my writeup.
This post is hard enough to get through that the original person who nominated it didn’t make it, and also I tried and gave up in order to look at more other things instead. I agree that it’s possible there is something here, but we didn’t build upon it, and if we put it in the book people are going to be confused as to what the hell is going on. I don’t think we should include.
On the other hand this post for me exemplifies something I think LessWrong is really good at, which is creating a place where people can find an audience of bleeding-edge research that is not obviously off the rails. Something like the kind of stuff you would otherwise only hear about because you work at a university and happen to go to a talk a person working on that research gave internally to solicit feedback.
Like with many posts the audience may be small for this one, but this is the same problem with many AI alignment posts and I don’t think we should hold it against this post in voting unless we plan to also vote against inclusion of most technical AI posts that were nominated.
Fair enough; the TL;DR pull-quote for this piece would be:
Furthermore: meditation, music, and psychedelics (and sex and perhaps sleep) ‘heat’ the brain up in this metaphorical sense. Lots of things follow from this—most usefully, if you feel stressed and depressed, make sure you’re “annealing” enough, both in terms of frequency and ‘annealing temperature’ (really intense emotional experiences are crucial for the emotional updating process).
Possibly the most LW-relevant part of this is the comment left by lsusr, which I’ve appended to the bottom of the version on opentheory.net, i.e. the comment that starts out “This makes sense to me because I work full-time on the bleeding edge of applied AI, meditate, and have degree in physics where I taught the acoustical and energy-based models this theory is based upon. Without a solid foundation in all three of these fields this theory might seem less self-evident.”—he said some things clearly that were only tacit in my writeup.
Currently working on a follow-up piece.