brook
“This is an internal document written for the LessWrong/Lightcone teams. I’m posting as “available by link only” post to share in a limited way, because I haven’t reviewed the post for making sense to a broader audience, or thoroughly checked for sensitive things.”
This post appears in search results and to people who have followed you on LW. I didn’t read it, but you may want to take it down if this is unwanted enough.
ShareX does look like a more powerful (for some use-cases) version! I think the key benefits of Loom are it’s extreme ease of use & its automatic upload of the video, which makes sharing feel very streamlined.
Unfortunately, I’m on macOS currently, so I can’t test ShareX myself.
Really great post! The concept I have in my head looks broadly-applicable though slippery
The section below sounded a lot to me like “you form a model from a set of words, and then later on you Directly Observe the Territory™, and this shifts the mental model associated with the words in an important way”.
Running on this model, I think a lot of the sequences was like this for me—it wasn’t until 1-2 years after reading them that I noticed concrete, major changes in my behaviour. Possibly this time was spent observing the part of the territory I call my brain.
But in fact, there really is a kind of deeper, fuller, contextualized understanding, a kind of getting-it-in-your-bones, that often doesn’t show up until later. Because when you first hear the wisdom, it doesn’t really matter to you. You’re usually not in the sort of situation where the wisdom applies, so it’s just this random fact floating around in your brain.
Often, it’ll be years later, and you’ll be in the middle of a big, stressful situation yourself, and that little snippet of wisdom will float back up into your thoughts, and you’ll go “ohhhhhhhh, so that’s what that means!”
You already knew what it meant in a sort of perfunctory, surface-level, explicit sense, but you didn’t really get it, on a deep level, until there was some raw experiential data for it to hook up to.
Thanks for running this survey! I’m looking to move into AI alignment, and this represents a useful aggregator of recommendations from professionals and from other newcomers; I was already focussing on AGISF but it’s useful to see that many of the resources advertised as ‘introductory’ on the alignment forum (e.g. the Embedded Agency sequence) are not rated as very useful.
I was also surprised that conversations with researchers ranked quite low as a recommendation to newcomers, but I guess it makes sense that most alignment researchers are not as good at ‘interpreting’ research as e.g. Rob Miles, Richard Ngo.
I think “speech of appropriate thought-like-ness” is, unfortunately, wildly contextual. I would have predicted that the precise lengthy take would go down well on LW and especially with ACX readers. This specific causal gears-level type of explanation is common and accepted here, but for audiences that aren’t expecting it, it can be jarring and derail a discussion.
Similarly, many audiences are not curious about the subject! Appropriate is the operative word. Sometimes it will be appropriate to gloss over details either because the person is not likely to be interested (and will tune out lengthy sentences about causal models of how doctors behave), or because it’s non-central to the discussion at hand.
For instance, if I was chatting to a friend with a medical (but non-rationalist) background about marijuana legalisation, the lengthy take is probably unwise; benzodiazepines are only peripherally relevant to the discussion, and the gears-level take easily leads us into one of several rabbit holes (Are they actually unlikely to cause withdrawal symptoms? What do you mean by unlikely? Does psychological addiction mean precisely that? Is that why those guidelines exist? why are you modelling doctors in this way at all, is that useful? should I be using gears-level models?).
Any of these questions can lead to a fruitful discussion (especially the last few!), but if you have specific reason to keep discussions on track I would save your gears-explanations for cruxes and similar.
This is good for some formats; I think in verbal communication I like to track this because the key variable I’m optimising on is listener attention/time; giving both loses a lot. I find it can be useful to save the gears-level stuff for the cruxes and try to keep the rest brief.
I strongly agree with the Johnswentworth’s point! I think my most productive discussions have come from a gears-level/first-example style of communication.
What I’m arguing in this post is very much not that this communication style is bad. I’m arguing that many people will stop listening if you jump straight to this, and you should explicitly track this variable in your head when communicating.
Obviously ‘know your audience and adjust complexity appropriately’ is quite a trivial point, but to me thinking about it with a ‘thought-like-ness’ frame helps me to actually implement tis by asking “how much translating do I need to do for this audience?”
Maybe I should rewrite the post as “Gears in Conversation” or so.
I think it’s good to experiment, but I actually found the experience of being on the site over the last week pretty unpleasant, and I’ve definitely spent much less time here. I initially went through some old ideas I had and tried posting one, but ended up just avoiding LessWrong until the end of the week.
I’m not totally sure right now why I felt this way. Something-like I’m very sensitive to feeling like my normal motivation system is being hijacked? I spent all of my time thinking about the best way to act differently given GHW, rather than just reading the content and enjoying it. This was pretty uncomfortable for me.
I’m sure this happens in many areas (maths, for one), but medical language is a pretty well-optimised system I know well. You might like to use it for inspiration:
Medicine: “72yo F BIBA with 3⁄7 hx SOB, CP. Chest clear, HS I+II+0. IMP: IECOPD”
English: 72 year old woman brought in by ambulance because she’s been short of breath and had chest pain for the past 3 days. No noises were audible over her lungs with a stethoscope, both of her heart sounds were clearly audible with no added sounds. I think it’s most likely this is being caused by an infection on top of a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Guess who read more about what exactly people are pointing at when they say ‘be agenty’ and figured out that’s what I’m trying to point at! That’s right, it’s me. Post cancelled, everybody go home.
Good post! Stop assuming things are/aren’t good and go and look.
Is it worth making live-call-reviews a feature request for the LW feedback system? (Possibly limited to higher karma than the 100 required for text feedback, as I imagine this would have a smaller bottleneck with timezones etc.?). I imagine this would encourage a lot more people to say “I’ve got to do this now!”.
If they’re interested in studying confusion, I ask them to tap their leg every time they notice they’re confused.
I tried this! It was enlightening. I didn’t realise it, but I don’t quite understand what my ‘confusion’ label is actually pointing at. I found myself confidently tapping my leg and then pausing, unsure of whether what was going on was truly confusion.
After a couple of days of this, what I think is going on is that I both did and didn’t have separate labels for ‘ignorance’ and ‘predictive error’. Some part of me was confidently tapping my leg whenever I didn’t know something, and another part was saying “I don’t feel confused, though. I just don’t know, and I know that I don’t know”.
I already knew intellectually that the territory is stranger than I give it credit for, but I think this is one of the best examples of observing that first hand. It’s more qualitatively different to listening to somebody say “Here’s a label that confuses me” than I would ever have dreamt.
Basically any “Beginners set” online should set you right as a cheap way to try it out (though most pros say it’s not worth your time. YMMV).
You will probably find it’s hard with cheap shitty picks, but you’ll (for fairly cheap) get a feel for which different shapes do what, and which you find most intuitive/useful. If you find it useful/fun, you could then either scour Ebay for cheap locks (with no guarantee of ease, but locks-without-keys is niche enough you can sometimes get good deals) or buy an Abus 45 or Masterlock. If I remember correctly, both of those should be 4 or 5-pin with no security pins, so about as easy as real locks get.
Once you feel you’ve graduated from your beginners set and want to splash some cash, you probably want to pick 1-2 pick shapes you got on well with and get really nice ones, or get a nice pick set. Here are some well-regarded vendors. You might also want to look into a practice lock, which seems like pretty good value for money.
Regarding learning, Reddit is pretty good for this one (as seems to often be the case with metis-skills). In particular, the Belts stuff seems like a pretty good curriculum. I don’t expect sitting reading about lockpicking will be very useful compared to, well, picking locks (this is the whole point of this post!).
If you want to feel inspired (and never trust a lock again), LockPickingLawyer is a personal favourite with some educational stuff. He also has an excellent sense of comedic timing.
Let me know what you found useful & how you get on!!
This is exactly what I’m saying. Using machines in ways they’re not made for is especially risky when the machine controls access to your house.
I’m not sure if this tag should be about the general concept of past and future selves, or about coordination problems with past and future selves & TDT. Either seems valuable to me, but it seems like the latter was intended at creation, so I’ve continued in that vein.
I am also unsure of exactly what it is, but I used to fairly consistently induce a similar feeling in myself with ‘mindful walks’, also inspired by Original Seeing. For me, it was closely bound up with getting curious about things I’m used to looking at without seeing—what are those marks on pavements? A lichen? Are they raised above the pavement? What do the different colours and shapes look like? Why are they round-ish and spaced out, rather than covering the whole surface, or some other shape?
This might not be ‘true’ curiosity—I never looked up other people’s maps for an explanation of the marks on pavements, for instance—but it does fairly often give me a feeling of ‘realness’. I was struck by how similar your not-a-SIM-key experience was.
Your example of a friend saying ‘let me be real with you’ reminded me of the concept of the ‘press secretary’. Asking the right questions, and having a certain emotional quality, seems to trip up my press secretary for long enough that I can query the things behind her a little.
EDIT 19/03/22: Maybe in future I should finish sequences before I leave comments on them
“The thing about those distinctions is that they are a) useful, and b) curiosity-stoppers. They tell us “don’t worry, you already know this” so you can get back to building a tower of interconnected concepts. Which is a good thing, most of the time, but it is a bad thing some of the time”
I liked this footnote, but I’m not sure why. I’m going to say some things to try to think about it more clearly.
What this footnote seems to me to be about (in part) is something like:
Stop attaching string to your insane-person cork board
Notice that the things you are connecting with string are sketches, not photos
Remain stopped for long enough to fill in your sketches a bit, erase some bits, and add a little colour
On this model, I am truly appalling at [1], and therefore rarely get the opportunity to practice [2] and [3]. I actually quite enjoy the feeling of remaining stopped on its own, but I think adding string feels to me too much like ‘learning things’ for me to look past it very often.
This model is (of course) wrong, but it feels closer to me than other words I have to point to it.
I also noticed that my brain likes first-things to cause (be required by?) second-things, so my initial model of the main text was something like familiarity → facts → identification → models → mastery. This could be intended, and does reflectively seem fairly sensible, but I can imagine having practical mastery over something without a complex (or even correct) model of it. Exercising seems like a good example where I think sufficient experience could create practical mastery without a strong model or many facts.
However, I was surprised when you picked out driving as an example, as I wouldn’t have said I have a strong model of how a car works. This probably means I’ve misunderstood what you mean by ‘models’ and ‘facts’.
I think what’s going on is that I’m getting distracted by the context I usually hear the words ‘model’ and ‘fact’ in, next to words like ‘science’, ‘engineering’ and ‘textbook’. This is getting in the way of me thinking about things like ‘if I exercise when I haven’t in a long time, my arms and legs will feel sore afterwards’ as facts.
This elicited in me a very specific kind of joy I first experienced reading ZAMM, and for which I have made all too little time ever since. I have nothing substantial to say beyond that I find your prose delightful in the same way I find delight in Original Seeing. Thank you!
with hindsight, I can say with some confidence that this was roughly the right advice. Whilst I did need to read most of the university content (and fast), ‘slow’ is definitely the right way to engage with the most content on LessWrong. Thanks!
Quick thoughts:
I’d say it looks a shade long, but I could well be wrong about the length of survey people will answer. Some suggestions for cutting it down a little:
Questions 2-4 in section 1 seem somewhat redundant with one another to me (i.e. you could probably have just one or at most two of them).
The list in question 1 (section 2) seems long to ask people to rate all of. Could you drop a few? (I’m thinking “self-help” is too broad, epistemics & uncertainty could maybe be merged, etc.).
You might also want to ask people to rate different parts of the course (moderation, content, structure, etc.) so you have an idea of what needs improving.
Overall, looks good! Thanks for running the project, strongly believe that evaluation is a really important part of any course/organisation/whatever.