ErioirE

Karma: 160

ErioirE 16 May 2024 3:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: How can I make the most of Less Online/Camp/Manifest?
Haha makes sense. I wasn’t sure what the demographic distribution was likely to be.

[Question] How can I make the most of Less Online/Camp/Manifest?

ErioirE16 May 2024 2:19 UTC

13 points

2 comments1 min readLW link

ErioirE 14 May 2024 22:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?
You’re right, “objectively” doesn’t fit as well in that statement as I thought.

That is how I intended ‘convincing’ to be interpreted.
For almost every category of X, you’ll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn’t consciously choose any of them.
It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. “I don’t want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]” sounds a lot less politically correct than “I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction.” because you don’t have to explain your criteria to everyone.
I admit that’s more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.

ErioirE 14 May 2024 20:56 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?
The rule “90% of everything is garbage” applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.
When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases?
If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.

ErioirE 14 May 2024 16:56 UTC
1 point
0
on: Questions are usually too cheap
I think a significant contributing factor that makes ‘simple’ questions in some contexts prohibitively difficult to answer is the lack of True Availability of the information being requested.

In this case, I’m defining True Availability^[1] as the requested content being already prepared and organized into the correct format and grouped together, needing no further processing other than finding it. Conditional Availability would be when you know how to obtain the information, but it requires some degree of processing and filtering to be ready for consumption.

In computer science, this is similar to a lookup table. Lookup tables typically contain a collection of pre-calculated results for common computations, because looking up a result in a table is generally faster than calculating it from scratch.
Anything you have in a LT is Truly Available, whereas anything you have to calculate is Conditionally Available.
In your example of freedom of information requests, the questions are hard to answer because they are only available on the condition that someone filters the requested information from everything else and then prepares it into a usable format for releasing.

If I was tasked with refining the information availability of a large organization, I would attempt to prepare publicly-releasable copies of everything that COULD legally be requested via freedom of information act and publish a public database of that. Let them knock themselves out. Individual request processing and answering sounds like a terribly inefficient method of sharing information.
There are probably legal/bureaucratic/practical difficulties to my proposed solution, but my point is merely that there are in some contexts systemic barriers making answers disproportionately expensive rather than answers being intrinsically more difficult in every case.
1. ^
  I suspect there already exist more conventional terms for the concepts I’m referring to, but I’m making do with what I already have Available.

ErioirE 13 May 2024 18:25 UTC
2 points
0
on: How do I get better at D&D Sci?
If you want to be generally skilled at the type of challenges D&D Sci provides, putting some points into the data science and statistics proficiencies would be a good way to start.
In particular, some related skills:
- SQL—Easy to pick up for someone with good technical skills. Challenging to master. Before going too deep on relational databases I also recommend learning good theory and practices behind it like the different design forms and why they’re important.
- R programming language
- Familiarization with various statistical analysis methods and what use cases they are intended for

ErioirE 13 May 2024 18:09 UTC
3 points
1
on: What you really mean when you claim to support “UBI for job automation”: Part 1
As a software developer who works on object-level automation every day, I’m intimidated by the difficulty of attempting to definitively quantify ‘profit from automated tasks’ in a useful way.

For example, how do we define ‘automation’? “A task that formerly needed to be done by a human that now doesn’t need to be”? A printing press is automation by some interpretations of that insufficient definition.
Some changes in efficiency also have similar effects on productivity without being ‘automation’ (although much less scalable), for example a user that becomes highly proficient in the hotkeys of a complex platform may see massive improvements in their productivity, and subsequently eliminate jobs that would have been needed if they hadn’t become more productive.
I suspect if additional taxes were levied on ‘job automation’ it would merely create large incentives for companies to skirt around whatever the legal definition of automation was, and potentially hide it in things like the above example.

In the case where there was no ‘automation tax’ created, I would anticipate a NIT to be reasonable but not sustainable because I expect automation to continue to remove jobs at an accelerating rate in years to come. I do not expect tax revenue to increase at the same rate because my current understanding is that the most wealthy tend to also be those most proficient at exploiting loopholes in the tax system to evade as much as possible.

My takes here are almost entirely conjecture and I’d appreciate someone more informed to correct and/or clarify.

ErioirE 13 May 2024 17:25 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Slapstick’s comment on: Benefitial habits/personal rules with very minimal tradeoffs?
I’m in a similar situation. I have very little self control with sweets/candy if I have them available. I can far more easily stop myself from buying them in the first place.
If I allow myself to buy a bag of candy I’ve already lost and I will consume all of it in a matter of hours/days.

ErioirE 9 May 2024 19:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: ErioirE’s Shortform
How much of the developed world’s economy is devoted to aesthetic personalization of products rather than accomplishing the essential functions of [product here]?
I am not saying aesthetics or personalization are ‘bad’, however I suspect that if the cost were quantified and demonstrated to people along with examples of more productive things that could be done with that money, many people might prefer forgoing some of our more wasteful things.

Example:
The cost of having thousands of different styles of sink faucet, instead of a small number of highly efficient and optimized faucet designs for distinct use cases [small household kitchen, large household kitchen, small form factor, high throughput restaurant]. These costs are created via the overhead caused by the redundant costs of engineering, design, manufacturing, and logistics.
These same factors apply more or less to every product where variations are sold primarily for aesthetic rather than functional purposes, particularly when they replace existing functional versions.

I believe the root cause of this inefficiency is our psychological tendency to overvalue ephemeral utility such as using possessions as social status tools rather than trying to optimize how we collectively use our limited economic output. For example, if a sizeable portion of the money in the market for functionally useless decorations were able to go towards medical research.

I do not know how a more efficient allocation of resources could be practically enacted. According to my understanding most attempts at centrally planned economies have even less success than the free market, as inefficient as it is.

If a large portion of people decided to prioritize their purchases better that would work, but that’s obviously a very challenging coordination problem.

ErioirE 9 May 2024 16:10 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Deep Honesty
There’s soft skills in “communicating to others without hurting them”, (i.e. “tact”)
What about the situation in which:
- One has highly religious relatives who are somewhat less cognitively functional that oneself
- You wish you could help them have a map more closely coupled to reality
- You are confident that you have a good chance of convincing them of reality, but not that the knowledge would actually be a net gain for them to have, since:
- They are so invested in their beliefs that the realization of falsehood might do irreparable psychological damage

ErioirE 4 May 2024 23:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: My hour of memoryless lucidity
Yes, but it thankfully for me only lasted a couple of hours and they didn’t start keeping track until near the end.

ErioirE 4 May 2024 3:41 UTC
31 points
2
on: My hour of memoryless lucidity
I had a very similar experience as a teenager after a mild concussion from falling on ice. According to my family, I would ‘reboot’ every few minutes and ask the same few questions exactly. It got burdensome enough that they put up a note on the inside of my bedroom door with something along the lines of:
”You are having amnesia”
“You hit your head and got a mild concussion”
”You’ve already been to the ER, they said you’re likely to be fine after a few hours and it is safe to sleep.”

The entire experience was (reportedly) very stressful to me due to disorientation.

ErioirE 3 May 2024 22:49 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: localdeity’s Shortform
Yes.

For example: The common saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing [well/poorly]” needs more qualifiers. As it is, the opposite respective advice can often be just as useful. I.E. not very.

Better V1: “The cost/utility ratio of beneficial actions at minimum cost are often less favorable than they would be with greater investment.”

Better V2: “If an action is beneficial, a flawed attempt may be preferable to none at all.”

However, these are too wordy to be pithy and in pop culture transmission accuracy is generally sacrificed in favor of catchiness.

ErioirE 3 May 2024 20:36 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: zeshen’s comment on: Why is AGI/ASI Inevitable?
Yeah, many people, like the majority of users on this forum, have decided to not build AGI.
Not to build AGI yet.
Many of us would love to build it as soon as we can be confident we have a realistic and mature plan for alignment, but that’s a problem that’s so absurdly challenging that even if aliens landed tomorrow and handed us the “secret to Friendly AI”, we would have a hell of a time trying to validate that it actually was the real thing.

If one is faced with a math problem where you could be staring at the answer and know no way to unambiguously verify said answer, you are likely not capable of solving the problem until you somehow close the inferential distance separating you from understanding. Assuming the problem is solvable at all.

ErioirE 1 May 2024 21:47 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: ErioirE’s Shortform
Yes, thanks!

ErioirE 30 Apr 2024 21:19 UTC
3 points
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on: ErioirE’s Shortform
What would the minimal digital representation of a human brain & by extension memories/personality look like?

I am not a subject matter expert. This is armchair speculation and conjecture, the actual reality of which I expect to be orders of magnitude more complicated than my ignorant model.

The minimal physical representation is obviously the brain itself, but to losslessly store every last bit of information —IE exact particle configurations— as accurately as it is possible to measure is both nigh-unto-impossible and likely unnecessary considering the moment-to-moment changes living causes to the particles, while “self” appears constant.
So would the detailed information of cell positions and compositions be sufficient granularity? How practical would it be? I don’t know of any existing technology that is able to achieve the level of detail that would likely be required. MRI is very impressive, but while structure can be viewed (at least down to a 0.2mm resolution as of 2024-04-02), chemical composition cannot (as far as I know).
Do we know what the important variables are, and do we know what tolerances within which the hypothetical “Mind of Theseus” is still the same mind? (I suspect this is a philosophical question and the answer is fully subjective and we have no way of knowing.)

ErioirE 23 Mar 2024 7:06 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: A Teacher vs. Everyone Else
Unfortunately that only helps for those with the necessary experience to discern good work, and also the time and desire to inspect it.

ErioirE 23 Mar 2024 6:03 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: wassname’s comment on: The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We’ve Tried)
It’s unfortunate that monetary incentives are notoriously vulnerable to being Goodharted into uselessness or worse. You try to offer a bounty on X [undesirable thing], people start [building/breeding] more of them and making a killing.
This is not to say incentives and/or subsidies can never work, only that implementing them effectively is a non-trivial task.

ErioirE 21 Mar 2024 18:22 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: I was raised by devout Mormons, AMA &| Offer Advice
While they don’t expect to literally see Jesus in person, there’s a lot of emphasis on ‘personal revelation’ which is for the most part just conditioning to get believers to interpret their own regular ol’ intuition/emotions as communication from the Holy Spirit. If someone believes that strongly enough, the brain provides whatever thoughts/feelings they subconsciously expect to ‘receive’. It’s both impressive and disturbing how well this cycle can work. Anticipation can easily function as a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as the anticipated experience is fully mental and emotional.

And because this ‘evidence’ has been accepted by them, they also expect their prayers to be able to miraculously heal sickness/disease (except for when it doesn’t of course; “God’s will” etc etc.)

ErioirE 15 Mar 2024 22:09 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: I was raised by devout Mormons, AMA &| Offer Advice
I think they are genuinely unvaccinated. They believe (or profess to believe) in tons of quack medicine but AFAIK they don’t spend loads of money on it. If they had a health emergency they’d still go to an ER, so they’re not completely in denial of modern medicine.

ErioirE

[Question] How can I make the most of Less On­line/​Camp/​Man­i­fest?

[Question] How can I make the most of Less Online/Camp/Manifest?