gnōthi seauton. But how do you know how well you know yourself?
What kind of questions or theories can you test to confirm that your mental model of yourself is accurate?
And please PLEASE, DON’T ALLOW YOURSELF TO GET GASLIGHT!
Here are some off the top of my head:
Anticipating your Reaction:
Green Eggs and Ham Moments: how often have you been reluctantly obligated or involuntarily committed to trying something and are pleasantly surprised by how much you enjoy it?
The reverse: How often have you been excited to read a book, go to a conference, watch a television show and been disappointing? Especially if your anticipation of the contents was accurate but not your reaction?
Confirming your habits:
“I always X”—but do you—what are the last 5 times you did it? Similarly “I’m a great/good X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
”I never Y”—okay, but do you never. And even if that’s a hyperbole, how frequent would it have to be to consistent a habit? Similarly “I’m a hopeless/terrible X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
How often has a loved one, a coworker told you smugly “I knew you’d do that” when you explicitly denied you would?
Measurements—this equally depends on how good our references or yardsticks are:
How often do you get a task done in the time you expected? If you often finish sooner—why? Later—why?
When estimating how long it will take for you to do a task—do you account for Parkinson’s Law (or, do you feel that you’re within a reasonable margin even after accounting for Hofstadter’s Law)?
If you haven’t weighed yourself recently—how accurate do you think your guess would be?
If you don’t use a pedometer—how many steps do you think you’d be doing a day?
If you don’t measure your sleep (and I mean SLEEP—not time in bed) - how many hours of sleep do you think you’d have?
Please make an article out of this (maybe with more ideas and more specific examples). I believe this could be very useful. This is practically a lesson plan for rationality training.
Are rationalists any less susceptible to online scams than a random sample of the general population? I would hope that no one here has fallen for “hey it’s me, Ozzy Osbourne, I’m not really dead, I’m just on the Crazy Train and I need $300USD...” unsolicited messages. But who knows, maybe there’s some affinity scam “It’s me Eliezer, I’ve picked you to help me fight bad AGI, can you send me $300USD...”
When it comes to your average scam, I’m sure rationalists fall for it less than average. But you could surely come up with some very carefully crafted scam that targets rationalists in particular and has higher odds of convincing them than the general public.
It also depends on what exactly you consider a scam. To some people, FTX was a scam, and rationalists almost certainly were overrepresented among its customers (or victims).
I was specifically thinking about fraudulent accounts and messages like the Ozzy Osbourne example or basically anything based on the Nigerian Prince Scam where there is it is highly unlikely that a dead celebrity or royalty is contacting the mark out of the blue.
You raise a good point about FTX and the number of rationalists it hoodwinked, but that is a different (and perhaps more interesting) phenomena than the one I’m querying about.
My new TAP for the year is—When I fail: try twice more. Then stop.
I’m persistent but unfortunately I don’t know when to quit. I fall a foul of that saying “the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results”. Need a pitch for a client? Instead of one good one I’ll quota fill with 10 bad ones. Trying to answer a research question for a essay—if I don’t find it in five minutes, guess I’m losing my whole evening on a Google Books/Scholar rabbit hole finding ancillary answers.
By allowing myself only two more tries but no more, that should mean that I get three failures instead of burnout-1 failures. It should mean I’ll be, per the saying, less insane.
Three is an arbitrary number, it could easily be 4 or 5, but if I had to post-rationalize it then it would be: if you fail three consecutive times, then your chance of success was lower than 33.3% which means you need a better tactic or approach.
Three is a good balance between repetition without causing burnout, it also is low investment, which means that it encourages me to try again, and quickly.
Of course this approach only works if there is a postmortem. Try twice more, stop, then analyze what happened.
I can’t say I’m proud of the fact that I need such a simple rule. But if it works, then I shouldn’t feel ashamed for improving my behavior because of it.
I do this at the end of basketball workouts. I give myself three chances to hit two free throws in a row, running sprints in between. If I shoot a third pair and don’t make both, I force myself to be done. (Stopping was initially wayy tougher for me than continuing to sprint/shoot)
Thank you for sharing that, it is interesting to see how others have arrived at similar ideas. Do you find yourself in a rhythm or momentum when sprinting and shooting?
not as much momentum as writing, painting, or coding, where progress cumulates. but then again, i get this idea at the end of workouts (make 2) which does gain mental force the more I miss.
Kantmogorov Imperative—more of a philosophical dad-joke than a actual thing, it is the shortest possible computer program that outputs descriptions of morally consistent behaviors in all/any circumstances
What’s the most L’esprit de l’escalier[1] advice you’ve ever gotten?
I want to hear advice that at the time you either misunderstood or left you utterly baffled but some time later, you had a “Eureka” moment. A rushing in of insight long afterwards where you finally were able to apply the advice and understand it.
My own examples aren’t that good but hopefully are illustrative:
In GLSL it is good practice not to use conditional statements, or to use them for very small branches.
I am not a coder by any stretch of the imagination so at first this seemed like an arbitrary rule that made no sense. It was only when I saw the output of a GLSL to ARB compiler that I understood why this is good practice. The Eureka Moment was seeing two virtually identical slabs of code, of course they aren’t identical in that the values they are processing are very different depending on the conditional.
From then on I began to take the order of operations and conditionals much more seriously and understood why conditionals should be avoided.
Of course, for the tiny Shadertoy fragment shaders I am writing with very few loop iterations, if any, the overhead is negligible.
Another example that comes to mind is the heuristic from the famously contrarian Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Go for the surgeon who looks like a butcher over the surgeon who looks like surgeon
The insight was completely lost on me when I first read it. Now I understand that it is the notion of “in spite of appearances” or costly signalling. If a surgeon doesn’t look like a clean cut surgeon and is still in the business, he must be damn good at the actual business of a surgeon, and probably better than someone who has all the right appearances.
An analogy I might make is to dating, never take dating advice from someone conventionally attractive. There is a line from a Jim Belushi sitcom lampshading the typical—slobby husband, photogenic wife dyad which I’ll paraphrase:
“Do you want to take advice from someone who married down (i.e. his TV wife), or someone who married up (Jim Belushi’s character)?”
Another analogy—Don’t take career advice from someone born into money. Take it from someone who had none of network or advantages.
So, two examples of “what the heck could that mean” that only later made sense and appeared to be good advice.
This might seem to invite broadbrush “deep” sentiments like “oh they told me to cherish these days, but it wasn’t until years afterwards I realized what I was missing” but I’d be much more interested in technical or nitty gritty Eureka moments like not using conditionals in GPU code.
That moment well after the party when you think of the perfect retort or reaction. Like the “Jerkstore” episode of Seinfeld. There is also a Dot Hacker song called “wit of the staircase”
If a surgeon doesn’t look like a clean cut surgeon and is still in the business, he must be damn good at the actual business of a surgeon, and probably better than someone who has all the right appearances.
This assumes that both surgeons are evaluated by the same set of criteria (so if one scores lower on something, he probably scores higher on something else). That is not necessarily true.
As a counter-example, imagine hospital A that only hires professional surgeons and pays them high salaries, and hospital B that hires anyone and pays them low salaries. The “surgeon who looks like a butcher” probably works in the hospital B.
The promise of mind reading techniques whether it is a former FBI analyst or one of Paul Ekman’s microexpression reading human lie detectors. I become aware of this cottage industry during every trial-by-media where suspicion piles upon someone not yet charged with murder.
I have to admit I am skeptical that anyone has such an amazing power to see through the facade of a stranger and with a greater-than-chance determine if they are telling the truth or not. Doubly so because I am someone who is constantly misinterpreted, I have to manage my gestures and facial expressions because my confusion is often misread as disagreement; my approval for disapproval; even a simple statement like “I’m not hungry right now” is wrongly generalized as not liking the particular cuisine… and not that I just don’t want to eat anything right at this moment.
However if placed under the microscope by one of these former FBI body language experts would I feel a intense sense of validation ? Would I exclaim “yes, I feel seen, heard… you get me!”?
I have no doubt some people are more perceptive about emotional nuances than others: film and theatre actors who are trained to observe and mimic, people who have grown up in abusive or emotionally unstable households and are hyper sensitive to small changes in the mood of others (which of course may make them prone to more ‘false positives’ and paranoia), and of course mentalists like cold readers and palmists.
However being more emotionally perceptive doesn’t necessarily mean you can tell if someone is lying—or a particular statement is false, especially if that person is especially good at telling the truth, or like me—their natural body language and expression doesn’t express what you’d expect.
What I have greater faith in is that given even a small but emblematic example of a person’s extemporaneous speech you could derive an accurate personality and world-view portrait of them. In the same way that an accent can help you pinpoint the geographical and economic origin of a person (think of comedies like The Nanny that play up on this convention). Harry Shearer once explained that to play Richard Nixon he channeled Jack Benny—believing that Nixon’s persona and particularly his way of telling jokes was consciously or unconsciously modelled on that of Benny. Likewise Vladimir Putin’s distinctive gait has been attributed to a prenatal stroke, or that his subordinates including Dmitry Medvedev have “copied the boss”, the more persuasive explanation is that they all picked up the habit from watching Soviet Spy films as youngsters and wanting to emulate the hero.
The kinds of films, television, and role models, books, music and lyrics that someone has absorbed would also influence or at least be indicative of their world view. Given enough of these tells, while I am not sure that you could tell if someone is or isn’t a murderer, you could certainly gain a accurate insight into their worldview, the mental models they have about the world, what they value, what their ethics system is like etc. etc.
How much information can you extract about a person from a written transcript that they aren’t aware they are sharing is probably startling, but rarely or predictably “he’s a murderer” level.
On the scale between “pseudoscience that provides either completely random results or exactly what its operator wants to hear” and “always provides the correct answer”, there are some uncomfortable points where we probably get first, such as “provides the correct answer 99% of the time” (and with the 1% chance you are unlucky, and you are screwed because no one is going to believe you) or “provides the correct answer for neurotypical people” (and if you are an autist, you are screwed).
I am someone who is constantly misinterpreted… even a simple statement like “I’m not hungry right now” is wrongly generalized as not liking the particular cuisine
Similar here. My face expression is always on “neutral”, and my statements, no matter how simple and literal, are often creatively interpreted. And I guess I am sufficiently unusual, so heuristics like “let’s assume that he thinks/feels what an average person would think/feel in this situation” also fail. It took me a lot of time to understand myself to the level where I can explain things about myself verbally, but when I do, people usually find it implausible and try to find some hidden meaning behind my words.
So… a machine that could read my thoughts could feel validating. Assuming it does so correctly. But there is also a chance it would provide correct answers for most people, and incorrect answers for the few unusual ones.
On the scale between “pseudoscience that provides either completely random results or exactly what its operator wants to hear” and “always provides the correct answer”, there are some uncomfortable points where we probably get first, such as “provides the correct answer 99% of the time” (and with the 1% chance you are unlucky, and you are screwed because no one is going to believe you) or “provides the correct answer for neurotypical people” (and if you are an autist, you are screwed).
I’m afraid I need you to rephrase or elaborate on what you meant by this—are you saying, aware of a technique or method which is right 99% of the time or thereabouts. Or are you saying human variability makes such a technique impossible for anything but the most narrow populations? Or have I likely (and in a meta-way appropriately) completely missed the point? What do you think of more generally—as I explicate in the second half—revelations about a person’s internalized belief structures, including their hero’s and related moral system, but also the idea of idiolect being a symptom of their thinking and model of the world even if it is not a mechanism for directly ascertaining their personal belief in this or that specific statement?
Oops, I actually misinterpreted one part—when you wrote “if placed under the microscope”, my brain interpreted this literally, as if you were talking about a hypothetical future version of “mind reading” that would include checking your neurons by a microscope and probably interpreting the results using an AI.
What I meant is that people usually think about these things in “yes or no” categories. For example, if you asked people whether existing lie detectors work, the most frequent answers would probably be “of course yes, why would they use them otherwise?” or “of course not, it’s total bunk”.
There I didn’t mean to make a statement about lie detectors per se, but about: this is how people think about technologies when you ask them. They think the correct answer is either “yes” or “no”, even if it is something complicated like “sometimes” or “yes, but with exceptions”. If the popular belief happens to be an unqualified “yes”, and you happen to be the exception, you are screwed.
I believe the current “mind-reading” techniques like Paul Ekman’s are hit and miss. That they probably often work with typical people in typical situations, but fail when something unusual happens. (Someone may be scratching their nose because they are lying, but sometimes the nose is just itchy for a completely unrelated reason. Or the person is lying, but in a different way than you assume. Or is just generally uncomfortable, maybe thinking “this is true, but they seem unlikely to believe me”.)
Practically, “films, television, and role models, books, music and lyrics that someone has absorbed” are an enormous amount of data, especially for people who consume a lot of these media. Maybe someone who reads one book in ten years and only watches the mainstream TV could be modeled this way. But if you asked me to give you a list of books I have read and the movies I have seen, I could probably remember only a small fraction of them. How specifically is Paul Ekman going to find out which movies I have downloaded from internet, watched in private, then deleted and forgot about them? Is he really going to read the LW Sequences, and Worm, and other extremely long texts written for tiny subcultures, just to get a better model of me? No way. -- However, with the help of an AI processing the tons of texts could become feasible. (The problem of figuring out who read what still remains.)
You probably could figure out some things, for example you could notice that people are, maybe unknowingly, repeating some sentences or argument structures from some book or movie heroes. Then it would make sense to assume that they somehow identify with the heroes and the values they represent. But even then, people sometimes adopt some values differently than they were originally meant. For example, someone could be a 99% Randian, but believe that Rand made a mistake about one specific topic. But maybe the topic is relevant to the thing the mind-reader is trying to figure out. Also it’s possible that someone was a Randian (sorry for repeating the same example) in the past, but is not anymore, but still keeps some verbal manners or something. In other words, you might figure out the sources that influenced the person… but not whether the person has adopted that perspective wholesale or just partially, and how their opinions developed over time.
This will probably work better for some kinds of people, and worse for others. For example, many people, if they join a movement, they adopt 100% of the movement’s beliefs, because they really strongly want to belong. But other people are just like “yeah, they make some really good points, but are mistaken about many things”. Modelling the latter would be much more difficult. I assume that being difficult to model will positively correlate with intelligence and autism. (As in: intelligent people have more complex and therefore less predictable models of the world; autists care less about being compatible with their group and therefore knowing which groups they belong to has smaller predictive power.)
I am overwhelmingly confident that analysis of the kinds of narratives that a particular person spins, including what tropes they evoke—even if you’re not familiar with the tropes previously—would reveal a lot about their worldview, their ethical structure, the assumptions and modelling they have about how people, institutions, and general patterns they believe underlay the world.
A oversimplified example is a person who clearly has a “victim “mentality” and an obsession with the idea of attractiveness because they always use sentence structures (i.e. “they stopped me”) and narratives where other people have inhibited, bullied, envied, or actively sought to stifle the person telling the story and these details disproportionately make reference to people’s faces, figures, and use words like “ugly” “hot” “skinny” etc. It is not necessary to know what films, books, periodicals they read.
I think you would get the set of topics, but not necessarily the right idea about how exactly those topics apply to the current situation. To use your example, if someone’s speech patterns revolve around the topic of “bullying”, it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn’t get over it, or that the person is bullied right now, or perhaps that someone they care about is bullied and they feel unable to help them. (Or could be some combination of that; for example seeing the person they care about bullied triggered some memories of their own experience.)
Or if someone says things like “people are scammers”, it could mean that the person is a scammer and therefore assumes that many other people are the same, or it could mean that the person was scammed recently and now experiences a crisis of trust.
This reminds me of an anime Psycho Pass, where a computer system detects how much people are mentally deranged...
...and sometimes fails to distinguish between perpetrators and their victims, who also “exhibit unusual mental patterns” during the crime; basically committing the fundamental attribution error.
Anyway, this sounds like something that could be resolved empirically, by creating profiles of a few volunteers and then checking their correctness.
To use your example, if someone’s speech patterns revolve around the topic of “bullying”, it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn’t get over it
Yes. Which is invaluable information about how they see the world currently. How is that not the ‘right idea’? If that is how they continue to currently mentally represent events?
Your ‘people are scammers’ example is irrelevant, what is important is if they constantly bring in tropes or examples or imply deception. They may never use the word ‘scammer’ ‘mistrustful’ or make a declaration like ‘no one has integrity’. The pattern is what I’m talking about.
“Is this a good use of my time?” “No” ”Can I think of a better use of my time?” “Also, no” ”If I could use this time to think of a better use of my time, that would be a better use of my time than the current waste of time I am now, right?” “Yes, if.… but you can’t so it isn’t” ”How can you be so sure?” ″Because, look at how abstract just this little dialogue is—which is wholly representative of the kind of thinking-about-better-uses you’re inclined to do (but may not be generalizable to others). This dialogue of ours is not pertaining directly to any actions of tangible value for you. Just hypothesis and abstracts. It is not a good use of your time.”
Sturgeon’s Law is a counterargument against the negative stigma that Sci-Fi writing had as being crappy and therefore not a legitimate medium. The argument is 90% of any genre of writing, in fact anything from “cars, books, cheeses, people and pins” are “crud”. Although the sentiment does seem to have a precedent in a novel Lothair by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli where a Mr. Phoebus says:
“nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing. Printing has destroyed education”
Following on from my quest for a decision making model for ideas, as I mention Sturgeon’s Law is a convenient albeit totally arbitrary metric for how many ideas should be good.
As Spanish author José Bergamín wrote (I can’t track down the original):
The quality of a man’s mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket. [1]
For every 10 ideas I write down, one should be not-crud. If I have 100 film ideas (and I have more than that, many more) then 10 should be not-crud.
I think the obvious point to raise is that the opportunity cost for an idea, even if written down, is much lower than the opportunity cost of a book. As Gwern has tried to warn us. To take books as the prototypical example. There are many more people with ideas for books than have finished a book. Even a single author, each book may carry with it the unborn ghosts of hundreds of never written book ideas. We might expect that if only 1⁄10 books are “not crud” that perhaps that’s survivorship bias of ideas, because perhaps good ideas get favored and are more likely to be completed?
I know that compared to the amount of film ideas I have, I have around a 1⁄90 ratio between film ideas to finished screenplays. The ideas I pursue are the ones that seem most vivid, are most exciting and therefore seem like the ‘best’ ideas.
Which is the elephant in the room—sure 90% of anything might be crud, but what makes it crud? What distinguishes crud, and in this case crud ideas, be they ideas for books or ideas for films, and “good” ideas?
In the meantime it seems like the easy way out is to say
“look, don’t feel bad if you only have one okay idea for every nine crud ones. It’s perfectly acceptable”
Examples of how not to write a paragraph are surprisingly rare
Epistemic Status: one person’s attempt to find counter-examples blew apart their own ( subjective) expectations
I try to assemble as many examples of how not to do something as ‘gold standard’ or best practice examples of how the same task should be done. The principle is similar to what Plutarch wrote: Medicine to produce health must examine disease, and music to create harmony must investigate discord.
However when I tried to examine how not to write, in particular examples of poorly written paragraphs—I was surprised by how rare they were. There are a great many okay paragraphs on the internet and in books, but very few that were so unclear or confusing that they were examples of ‘bad’ paragraphs.
In my categorization paragraphs can be great—okay—bad.
Okay paragraphs are the most numerous, they observe the rule of thumb—keep one idea to one paragraph. To be an ‘okay’ paragraph and rise above ‘bad’ all a paragraph needs to do is to successfully convey at least one idea. Most paragraphs I found do that.
What elevates great paragraphs above okay paragraphs is they do an especially excellent job of conveying at least one idea. There are many qualities they may exhibit, including persuasiveness, the appearance of insight, brevity and simplicity in conveying an otherwise impenetrable or ‘hard to grasp’ idea.
In some isolated cases a great paragraph may actually clearly and convincingly communicate disinformation or a falsehood. I believe there is much more to learn about the forms paragraphs take from a paragraph that conveys a falsehood convincingly than a paragraph that clearly conveys what is generally accepted as true.
What was surprising is how hard it is to find examples that invert the principle—a paragraph that is intended to convey an idea that is truthful but is hard to understand would be a bad paragraph in my categorization. Yet, despite actively looking for examples of ‘bad paragraphs’ I struggled to find some that were truly confusing or hopeless at conveying one single idea. This experience is especially surprising to me because it challenges a few assumptions or expectations that I had:
Assumption 1 - people who have mistaken or fringey beliefs are disproportionately incapable of expressing those beliefs in a clear and intelligible form. I expected that looking for the least popular comments on Reddit, I would find many stream of consciousness rants that failed to convey ideas. This was far less common than rants that at least conveyed intent and meaning intelligibly.
Assumption 2 - that as a whole, people need to learn to communicate better. I must reconsider, it appears on the transmission side, they already communicate better than I expected (counter-counterpoint: 1% rule)
Assumption 3 - the adage that good writing = good thinking. Perhaps not, it would seem that you can write clearly enough to be understood yet that doesn’t mean your underlying arguments are strong or your thinking is more ‘intelligent’.
Assumption 4 - That I’m a merely a below average communicator. It appears that if everyone is better than I expected, than I’m much further below average than I expected.
I have no take-out or conclusion on this highly subjective observation, hence why it is a quick-take and not a post. But I will add my current speculation:
My current theory for why is “I wasn’t looking in the right places”. For example, I ignored much academic or research literature because the ability of the writers to convey an idea is often difficult to assess without relevant domain knowledge as they are seldom made for popular consumption. Likewise I’m sure there’s many tea-spilling image boards where more stream-of-consciousness rants of greater impenetrability might be found.
My second theory is pareidolia: perhaps I highly overrate my comprehension and reading skills because I’m a ‘lazy reader’ who fills in intention and meaning that is not there?
A difficulty to common understanding I see here is that you’re talking of “good” or “bad” paragraphs in the absolute, but didn’t particularly define “good” or “bad” paragraph by some objective standard, so you’re relying on your own understanding of what’s good or bad. If you were defining good or bad relatively, you’d look for a 100 paragraphs, and post the worse 10 as bad. I’d be interested in seeing what were the worse paragraphs you found, some 50 percentile ones, and what were the best, then I’d tell you if I have the same absolute standards as you have.
Does anybody here have any advice or thoughts on the “two list” approach?
I can’t remember who it suggested it and I’m likely conflating different anecdotes—but the gist was you have two lists: a traditional to-do list which has tasks and actions; and a second list that I’ve seen described as a “to think” list—which might contain a series of problems or questions that are important but for which you are unable to progress.
In my case my “to think” or “problems” list would be as long as my arm, my to-do list would be filled obvious stuff: with whatever is the immediate next step on a project for a client, grocery lists, paying bills, booking tickets to a show etc. But on average shorter than the other list.
I’m not sure how to convert individual items from the the longer non-actionable list, into actionable things to do.
Don’t ask “Can anyone recommend me a book/camera/school for X?” instead ask “What criteria would use use when deciding on a book/camera/school for X?”
I’ve noticed the tendency for people to give “title recommendations”. No matter how much detail about your problem or decision you furnish, they will furnish only the title of a book, the name of a product without elaboration. Example: For a while any and every request for a self-help-adjacent book on Reddit would be met by two to four words “Atomic Habits—James Clear”. Why were they recommending that book?[1] You had no idea. Why was the book relevant to your particular inquiry? You had to guess.
How can you solicit recommendations which are a little more… informative?
Ray Dalio would advise that you don’t ask for recommendations at all. Instead you “triangulate” from three or more proven experts in a field. Each describing their reasoning not just their conclusion. Basically “How did you come to that recommendation?”. Now of course it’s easier for a literal multibillionaire like Dalio to get “proven experts” to give him the time of day. I don’t have that luxury. But not asking for recommendations but instead reasoning is a net improvement.
In the past I would have thought the way to get better recommendations was to be more specific about my conditions:
”Hi I’m looking for a video camera which has a lot of options for lenses, I’m hoping for something that operates in low light as I do a lot of live music...”
However most people will just tell you something like “Panasonic Lumix GH6”.
Tires? ”My Michelin tires have been great” Kindergarden? ”Been very happy with the Montossori school we sent my youngest too” Date ideas? ”Do not go to Billy Briar’s restaurant, horrible service, we waited over an hour while other people who came later were served...”
But while if you ask them something that focuses on the decision making model “What features or qualities should a video camera have if you’re doing a lot of live music videography” that should get to to at least explain their recommendations in the context of your request.
I think I know why they recommended it. It must be related to unsolicited series recommendations: “You should really watch [title of series they just binge-watched] you’ll really like it”. I’m convinced it’s not that they think you’d really like it—they are very excited about it and want to have someone to share it with. And if you watch it then they can share this in your friendship.
The point is the recommendation is never about you and your needs. It’s probably about their need for connection or validation. Otherwise they would explicitly state how it solves your problem.
By mentioning a title, I’d guess they’re affirming themselves as someone who embodies the values that attracted them to the book.
”Hi I’m looking for a video camera which has a lot of options for lenses, I’m hoping for something that operates in low light as I do a lot of live music...” However most people will just tell you something like “Panasonic Lumix GH6”.
But… doesn’t this response make perfect sense? Is the implication not that the Panasonic Lumix GH6 is a video camera which has a lot of options for lenses, and operates in low light?
Like, if you say to me “Said, could you recommend a hand mixer? I’m looking for something that’s not too expensive, but decently powerful, compatible with standard mixer attachments, and in particular I want it to be able to whip up a good egg foam”, I’m going to say “Black+Decker MX3200”.
If you then say “But Said, why did you recommend that mixer?!”, what am I supposed to say other than “… because it’s a hand mixer that’s not too expensive, decently powerful, compatible with standard mixer attachments, and will definitely whip up a good egg foam”? What other information would you expect?
I don’t know that. And 90% of the time it isn’t the best solution to my problem, it’s just the one top-of-mind.
I’m going to say “Black+Decker MX3200”.
Why though? Why that one? What does it have that all the others don’t?
What other information would you expect?
Why it has MORE of that than all the other options on the market for starters. But I would expect your reasoning and hands-on experience if applicable.
I can’t comment on a hand mixer but for a camera. But the most obvious question is—are you basing your recommendation on a factor I haven’t furnished? And How would I know? How is it reasonable for me to know?
And if do think it is the best option based on what I’ve told you—you haven’t given me any of your reasoning, there could be countless reasons off the top of my head I would expect you to answer at least one of these: do you shoot live music with that camera? What are you experiences with that camera in live music environments? Do you find it easy to hold when you’re trying to move around people throwing their fists up in a crowded pub for a punk band at 11pm? Or do you shoot more respectable Jazz gigs? or do you shoot “from the wings”? If you do all the above—which ones does it perform best in and which ones does it perform weakest in, why? Do you use a wide lens? Is it a “fast lens”? or do you use a slower lens but it still provides a bright image? Is it heavy? Is it light? What surprised you about using it in a gigging environment?
If you think it is the best compromise on the market or my expectations are unreasonable? Which factors are do you value more?
These are all pivotal to knowing whether you just spouted a model name at random, or if you’ve actually thought about it.
Why though? Why that one? What does it have that all the others don’t?
The others are more expensive, or less powerful, or not compatible with standard mixer attachments… or are worse for other reasons that there’s no point in mentioning when making a positive recommendation (e.g. “definitely don’t get the ExampleCompany SuperMixer 9000, because it has a manufacturing defect that causes it to explode and set your house on fire”—no point in going through all the bad options and saying why they’re bad, otherwise we’ll be here all day, and to what end?).
What other information would you expect?
Why it has MORE of that than all the other options on the market for starters. But I would expect your reasoning and hands-on experience if applicable.
Well, I generally don’t recommend things that I don’t have hands-on experience with (and if I do, I explicitly flag this lack of experience).
As for “reasoning”… this just doesn’t seem to be the right way to think about this sort of thing. We’re talking about facts (nothing to reason about here) and evaluations on the basis of given criteria (also not much room for “reasoning”). “Reasoning” applies when coming up with criteria, but once that’s done—what’s to reason about?
And the question “why it has more of that” just seems weird. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but surely the answer is “because that’s how it was designed and manufactured”? What else can be the answer to a “why” question like that? (Are you expecting some sort of analysis of Black+Decker’s product strategy…?)
These are all pivotal to knowing whether you just spouted a model name at random, or if you’ve actually thought about it.
So, correct me if I’m way off base here, but it sounds like what you’re actually looking for isn’t so much answers to specific questions, or specific information, but something more like… credible signals of trustworthiness (of a recommendation, and of the recommender).
In other words, with the mixer example (sorry, I know kitchen appliances much better than I know cameras, so I’m sticking with that one for my comments)… it’s not that a bare product name is insufficient information, as such. It’s not that the response fails to answer the question—it absolutely does that. Rather, what’s missing is any credible signal that you can trust that the answer is correct. And stuff like talking about one’s reasons for giving the answer, or even the effort that the respondent would expend on re-stating your own criteria back to you, and affirming that the recommended product meets those criteria, serves as such a credible signal. In other words, the more work I put into making legible the process that generated the answer, the more confident you can be that you can trust that the answer is correct—even if none of that provides you with any additional decision-relevant information beyond what’s contained in the answer itself.
You’ve made me wonder: Where do you ask for recommendations or advice Said? Of whom? How do you you account for unknown unknowns? Do you never ask for clarifying or additional questions about their suggestions? Just your replies here appear to be quite curious so I find it confusing that you would so strenuously argue for a “and that’s all she wrote” approach.
As for “reasoning”… this just doesn’t seem to be the right way to think about this sort of thing. We’re talking about facts (nothing to reason about here) and evaluations on the basis of given criteria (also not much room for “reasoning”). “Reasoning” applies when coming up with criteria, but once that’s done—what’s to reason about?
How do I know I have the best criteria for me? I can do a really rigorous job of explaining my situation, my biases, my personal experience and my current level of understanding and knowledge. But the whole point of asking for recommendations is to find unknown unknonws: not only products or solutions on the market, but criteria I may not have even thought of, or at least under-prioritized.
If I’m a novice at something—what really obvious things might someone who isn’t a novice want to warn me of?
Hence the Ray Dalio thing—in an ideal situation I ask three or more domain experts—people who certainly do know more than me and can explicate criteria I didn’t even consider.
With the camera example, (sorry, like you with the mixer—I’ll stick to what I know) I might verbosely describe the situation I intend to shoot in. But someone with more experience might go “Ah, but what about a battery?” or maybe they’ll say “This camera has a longer battery life, but go for this cheaper one because the cost of an external USB powerpack is a tenth of the price difference between the two models”.
How would I know that battery life factored into their reasoning and in what way?
In terms of execution, switching roles doesn’t exactly work, i.e. asking “How would you choose a camera?” because the person asked may choose what is best for them, not for the requestee. But, there’s a middle ground somewhere between “Which product fits these criteria?” and “which criteria am I neglecting?”.
>In other words, with the mixer example (sorry, I know kitchen appliances much better than I know cameras, so I’m sticking with that one for my comments)… it’s not that a bare product name is insufficient information, as such. It’s not that the response fails to answer the question—it absolutely does that. Rather, what’s missing is any credible signal that you can trust that the answer is correct. And stuff like talking about one’s reasons for giving the answer, or even the effort that the respondent would expend on re-stating your own criteria back to you, and affirming that the recommended product meets those criteria, serves as such a credible signal. In other words, the more work I put into making legible the process that generated the answer, the more confident you can be that you can trust that the answer is correct—even if none of that provides you with any additional decision-relevant information beyond what’s contained in the answer itself.
Partly. Yes, it is about trust and credibility. And I still contend the easiest way is for someone to mention a lot of “becauses”. But it’s not simply restating my own criteria back to me—it is making me consider what criteria might be missing.
You’ve made me wonder: Where do you ask for recommendations or advice Said? Of whom? How do you you account for unknown unknowns? Do you never ask for clarifying or additional questions about their suggestions? Just your replies here appear to be quite curious so I find it confusing that you would so strenuously argue for a “and that’s all she wrote” approach.
Well, the most common places/contexts where I ask for recommendations would be the various chat channels where I talk to people (which could be my IRL friends, or not). Most people in such places are fairly intelligent, knowledgeable, and technically adept.
Do I ask clarifying or additional questions? Sure, but such questions tend to be clarifying of my own purposes or needs, rather than the recommender’s reasons for giving the recommendations. More common is for me to need to clarify my request rather than for recommenders to need to clarify their recommendations.
How do I account for unknown unknowns? Well, uh… I don’t, mostly? They’re unknown, so how can I account for them? Perhaps you have in mind some question like “what general policies can mitigate the downside risk of unknown unknowns”? Indeed there are such things, but they tend to be very general, like the well-known principle of “first buy the cheapest version of the tool you need, and use it until it breaks; then you’ll known enough to make a more informed choice”; or practical, common-sense principles like “whenever possible, buy from vendors that allow free returns”.
As for “reasoning”… this just doesn’t seem to be the right way to think about this sort of thing. We’re talking about facts (nothing to reason about here) and evaluations on the basis of given criteria (also not much room for “reasoning”). “Reasoning” applies when coming up with criteria, but once that’s done—what’s to reason about?
How do I know I have the best criteria for me? I can do a really rigorous job of explaining my situation, my biases, my personal experience and my current level of understanding and knowledge. But the whole point of asking for recommendations is to find unknown unknonws: not only products or solutions on the market, but criteria I may not have even thought of, or at least under-prioritized.
Hm… I think I see your point now, yes.
What you want, it seems to me, is a way to prompt the would-be recommender to give you as much of their relevant domain knowledge as possible. Basically, you want to get the person to talk. The way to do that, in my experience, is actually to say less about your own situation and problem, at least at first. Instead, try to elicit opinion. People generally love to talk about their views about things. So, not “what [camera/mixer] would you recommend, given these specific needs”, but “what is the best [camera/mixer], and why”. Then once you’ve got them talking, you can ask things like “but what if I specifically need X, what are your thoughts on that”—and now you should get some more detailed response.
(Incidentally, on my own “Recommended Kitchen Tools” page, I do try to explain my reasons, and to impart knowledge of non-obvious pitfalls and considerations, etc.)
I often feel misunderstood, so what if I A/B tested this...
I write a blog post about something which is very niche or personal and thus bound to get misinterpreted. I try, to the best of my ability, to make it as clear as possible and post it here.
Then, I take that exact post as posted, put it into an LLM and ask it to rewrite it and keep asking it to rewrite it until I feel it expressed what I intended to express. Maybe a couple of LLMs and duke them out.
Finally, I post it on here.
I’m not sure how I would test which one is more successful? Enthusiasm (positive or negative emotions) of replies? Positively scoring the post with more replies I feel are most “on the mark” and by extension, negatively scoring the post which has more irrelevant or tangential replies?
I would have some disclaimer that, yes, they are the same exact post even if they are written differently—or would that foul up the experiment? Not sure if I will identify which one is the LLM one and which one is my original.
{How meta is this—I asked Claude to rewrite the above}
When I speak, people misunderstand—they appear to construct an entirely different narrative, responding passionately to a statement I never made.
My goal is simple: find a way to transmit my exact meaning with precision. Can another voice render my thoughts in a way that ensures the core intention is correctly understood by the audience on the blogging platform?
The critical question becomes: How would I determine which version—my original or the translated piece—more effectively communicates my intended meaning? Would I measure success through the enthusiasm of responses, score the replies based on their relevance, or track the proportion of comments that genuinely reflect the original message? Perhaps I’d assign positive weight to responses that demonstrate true understanding and negative weight to those that drift into tangential or misaligned interpretations.
The meta-question becomes: Can a different articulation—whether by AI or human—create a pathway to being truly heard, or are misinterpretations inevitable regardless of how carefully the message is constructed?
{Then I asked it to do it like a pithy Hemmingway… because… why not...?}
People twist my words, inventing stories I never told.
I want precision. Can another voice make my meaning clear to readers?
How to measure success? Count relevant replies. Score understanding. Punish misinterpretation.
Can a different voice break through, or is misunderstanding inevitable?
Which fictional character prompts an LLM into speaking the plainest of English?
I’ve never been satisfied with the way that LLMs explain technical jargon, even if I ask for “plain English” it will have an annoying habit of including some other jargon or using very hard to parse explanations. This requires a further plain English explanation.[1]
Enter Homer Simpson, asking for “in the manner of Homer Simpson” makes the replies easier to understand. However they do lead to the gratuitous analogies to donuts or beer, and non-sequitur D’oh’s being thrown on the end. If I may be euphemistic, it appears that Homer Simpson’s characterized [2]lack of certain mental faculties, does push the LLM to abandon jargon and explain things simpler, clearer, in a much more colloquial and truly vernacular manner.
I was wondering if there’s any magic words someone has found to get the same effect without shoehorned references to donuts, or beer?
Ahh but what do I mean by “plain English”? And that is a fair question and perhaps my expectations of that expression do not match up to the optimal form of prompting for those expectations. What I’m really looking for are Intuition Pumps explained with a high ratio of Germanic-rooted words. Jargon tends to be obstructively Latinate. This is a strange paradox as Latin is probably older than Old English.
It seems to lean heavily on a very bad stereotype of the character—he’s a omnivore who likes donuts and beer and his catchphrase is “D’oh”. Cool. Got it. And I suppose the most important thing about Gregor Samsa is he’s an insect right? And Svengali and Trilby their beard and hat respectively? How often do LLMs Flanderize characters from fiction?
In Homer’s case, of all the replies generated there are no references to Krusty Burgers or Pork Chops, there’s no fearful sycophancy, cloying for his superiors, his analogies never refer to pranks pulled by a spikey haired son, there’s no misanthropic mistrust of the world, there’s no victim complex. Just donuts and beer, and once pizza.
I don’t like the word “motivation” because I find one of the chief factors in whether I’m motivated to do something or not is belief. Most discussions of motivation seem to basically see it as the pain or “cost” of doing something versus the reward. However just because you do something, be it painful or easy, doesn’t mean you’ll get the reward.
Perhaps some fragmentary dialogue will illustrate my thinking:
“digging for gold is hard work and you’re not even sure if you’ll find anything”—low motivation. High cost (hard work) no certainty of reward.
”I’d basically be sitting on my phone all afternoon, and they have to pay me $500″ - high motivation. Low cost (easy) guaranteed reward.
Now let’s compare it to this:
“buying a lottery ticket is easy but you’re not even sure if you’ll find anything”
“You should put it on the internet, you might go viral”
Personally, this is why I don’t buy lottery tickets. And hopefully this illustrates why I don’t like the implication that motivation is simply how easy a task is and the magnitude of reward. Because the certainty matters.
The problem becomes if you’re a pessimist like me—then EVERYTHING has low certainty. Therefore you don’t do much of anything. Becoming more ‘motivated’ isn’t simply a matter of wanting it more—it is having belief.
This is related to the expected value, isn’t it? The expected value of something is its value if true times the probability of it being true. Where probability stands for degree of belief of it happening. I.e. EV(X)=P(X)V(X). Then presumably what you are proposing is the following formula:
Motivation(X)=ExpectedReward(X)−ExpectedCost(X).
Right? This would mean
Motivation(X)=P(X)Reward(X)−P(X)Cost(X).
However, the above assumes that the thing that gives reward is the same thing that has consequences (X in this case). Which can’t be the case as the probability of incurring the cost need not be the same as the probability of getting reward, contrary to the previous formula.
An arguably better formula comes from Richard Jeffrey’s theory. He models the value V of some possible fact (proposition) as the degree of desire for it to be true. The probability P is again the degree of belief that the proposition is true. Now both outcomes we care about and actions which could make those outcomes happen can equally be described by a proposition. And the degree of desire V toward an action can be interpreted as the motivation to do that action. In particular, for some action A and some outcome O he has the following theorem in his theory:
V(A)=V(O∧A)P(O∣A)+V(¬O∧A)P(¬O∣A).
Here there is no explicit distinction between cost of an action and the reward of the outcome. Those values are already combined in the terms V(O∧A) (both the action and the outcome happen) and V(¬O∧A) (the action happens but the outcome doesn’t happen). The two probabilities weigh those terms depending on the outcome happening/not happening conditional on the action. So the resulting value (degree of desire / motivation?) for the action A is a weighted average.
I’m afraid I can’t read probabilistic notation, but on first blush what you’ve described does sound like I’m simply reinventing the wheel—and poorly compared to Jeffrey’s Theory there. So yes, it is related to the expected value. And I like how Jeffrey’s theory breaks the degree of belief and the desire into two separate values.
I’m not sure how I (me, specifically—may be generalizable to others?) can apply any of those unless I’m already receiving feedback, reward.
In the interest of being specific and concrete I’ll use one example—my personal bugbear: the refrain from people who tell me that as a creative freelancer I need to “get your stuff out there” stuff here nebulously referring to the kinds of videos I can make. “There” is an impossibly vague assertion that the internet and social media are vectors for finding clients.
Yet I have low belief in “getting stuff out there” is an effective measure to improve my standing as a creative freelancer, let’s go through your suggested influences one-by-one:
Peer Pressure: well it doesn’t work evidently since I’ve been repetitively told that “you need to put your stuff out there” is true—but I don’t believe it. These people are often peers, stating it as a fact, yet it doesn’t shift my belief. The caveat I would put here is I have not had luck finding clients through previous forays online and most of my clients appear to come from offline networks and relationships.
Getting Quick Feedback: This does seem like the most effective means of shifting belief—however it is no applicable in this example as the feedback is non-existant, let alone quick. Likes and comments don’t translate into commissions and clients.
Getting the information from a trustworthy source: yes, generally true, call it “appeal to authority” call it Aristotle’s theory of ethos in rhetoric. Yet not applicable in this example, in fact people who repeat this refrain appear less trustworthy to me.
Getting other reward in Parallel: Likes and comments are rewards in a sense, yet do not influence my belief because it is not directly affecting the core metric which is—getting more clients or commissions.
However there are some caveats: the advice is impossibly vague and therefore impossible to action. Which begs the question of—what is my lack of faith or belief with? If I had to pin it down it would be “spamming the internet with my videos is not sufficient to generate meaningful relationships with clients and collaborators”. The truth is that most of my clients come from word of mouth among offline networks.
It might be worth me applying this framework to another activity or theory I have “low belief” and compare the two? hmmm…
I’ve been repetitively told that “you need to put your stuff out there” is true—but I don’t believe it. These people are often peers, stating it as a fact
Can they give you specific examples of the clients they gained as a result of publishing a video on a social network? (Maybe there was something special about those videos, and it is not true for videos in general. But maybe you could copy that special thing.)
Likes and comments don’t translate into commissions and clients.
Agreed, they don’t. Maybe shares make it more likely for the video to reach a potential client.
I suspect that a good video needs to be “actionable”: it should give a specific example of a problem that you can solve, and it should explicitly encourage them to contact you if they need to have a problem like that solved.
Other types of videos are only useful if they make people click on your video feed and find the “actionable” ones.
But that’s just a guess; I never had a job like that.
Can they give you specific examples of the clients they gained as a result of publishing a video on a social network?
To be honest I haven’t asked for specific examples (and I guess I’ll need to find a way to ask for it which is not misconstrued as confrontational) but no one has been forthcoming.
Agreed, they don’t. Maybe shares make it more likely for the video to reach a potential client.
Yup, “Hey look at this, you should get them to do your next music video for you” or within a band: “hey look at this video they did for this band, we could use something like that”.
I suspect that a good video needs to be “actionable”: it should give a specific example of a problem that you can solve, and it should explicitly encourage them to contact you if they need to have a problem like that solved.
That rings true. The only person I know personally who has gotten such high social media engagement they are now getting spots on traditional media is an “expert”, therefore they provide actionable advice. They have both the credentials and the industry experience to back it up. It also (unfortunately) helps they intentionally solicit controversy and use clickbaity statements. And it’s a topic which is always in demand. At their behest I’ve tried putting out didactic videos on what bands and artists should do for music videos, explaining different tropes and conventions where are cool. but like after 2 months I ran out of ways to make it “actionable”. Maybe if I continued the grind for 6+ months the algorithm would have started pushing my content more on people outside of my network’s Instagram feed?
I often ask myself and others “okay, but how does that look in practice?”—this is usually when I have a vague idea about something I need to achieve a goal, but also when someone gives me some vague advice that I feel is leaving it to me to “draw the rest of the owl.”
Is this the best phrasing of the question? I have my doubts.
Firstly, is it too generalized for different domains?
“I should really organize my dresser drawers more thematically” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”
“I need to make more of an effort to promote my freelancing” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”
”I wish I had more money” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”
(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) “It sounds like you could really use a (film) producer or someone to collaborate with” → “okay, but how does finding such a person look in practice?”
(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) “You really need to put your portfolio out there to get more commissions” → “okay, but how does that look in practice?”
I’m always suspicious of “one simple trick” and I wonder if each of these requires a bespoke question-asking approach...
Secondly I am skeptical that merely changing the phrasing of the question actually changes the underlying framing of the problem or situation at all. It would be nice if using the right question would unlock a new framing, but I don’t know how true that is.
Those doubts aside, what are the alternatives? What do you out there ask yourselves?
I really like the fact that there’s an upvote feature together with a separate agree/disagree feature on this site.
I may like the topic, I may want to encourage the author of the post or comment to continue exploring and opening up a dialogue about that particular topic. I might think it’s a valuable addition to the conversation. But I may just not agree with their conclusions.
It’s an important lesson: failure can reveal important information. You don’t have to agree with someone to feel richer for having understood them.
On the other hand, I’m also guilty of the vague upvote: “I don’t understand this enough to comment anything other than platitudes on this, but I would like to see more of this. And maybe after reading a few more I may be able to contribute to the conversation even a sentence”
How can you mimic the decision making of someone ‘smarter’ or at least with more know-how than you if… you… don’t know-how?
Wearing purple clothes like Prince, getting his haircut, playing a ‘love symbol guitar’ and other superficialities won’t make me as great a performer as he was, because the tail doesn’t wag the dog.
Similarly if I wanted to write songs like him, using the same drum machines, writing lyrics with “2” and “U” and “4” and loading them with Christian allusions and sexual imagery, I’d be lucky if I’m perceptive enough as a mimic to produce some pastiches. However if I wanted to drill further, how might I ‘black box’ his songwriting mind, reverse engineer which cruxes and decision pivots determine what rhyming or rhythm patterns he chooses, what chord progressions he operates on. Maybe after years of doing this I’d have a model composed of testable hypotheses that I could run experiments on, either by reverse engineering songs of his at random and seeing if they hold to the patterns I observed, writing my own songs in this manner and seeing if they have that ‘x-factor’ (hardest and most subjective of all), and finally comparing the stated narratives in biographies and interviews about how certain songs were written in accordance with my hypotheses.
Of course someone is going to say that you can’t reduce a human being, let alone a super-talented human being to a formula, and perhaps draws a long bow about why they don’t like A.I. art or modern Hollywood or whatever. All sentiments I’m sympathetic too even if I’m not 100% sold on.
What I’m thinking about is not too dissimilar from what Ray Dalio advises: One shouldn’t just trust an expert’s conclusion or advice blindly, even if they have a unparalleled pedigree.
But because I’m pretty extreme in believing that it is important to obtain understanding rather than accepting doctrine at face value, I would encourage the new batter not to accept what [Babe] Ruth has to say as right just because he was the greatest slugger of all time. If I were that new batter, I wouldn’t stop questioning Ruth until I was confident I had found the truth.
In both cases rather than just taking the end result blindly—writing parodic or pastiches songs—the tail doesn’t wag the dog—there is an attempt to find out why, to question!
My problem isn’t so much that Prince (or Babe Ruth) are no longer around to answer these questions, but that unlike a multi-billionaire like Ray Dalio, anyone with sufficient pedigree is unlikely to pick up the phone and answer my incessant questions about “why?” and “how come?”. I have to black-box it.
That reminds me of NLP (the pseudoscience) “modeling”, so I checked briefly if they have any useful advice, but it seems to be at the level of “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl”. They say you should:
observe the person
that is, imagine being in their skin, seeing through their eyes, etc.
observe their physiology (this, according to NLP, magically gives you unparalleled insights)
...and I guess now you became a copy of that person, and can do everything they can do
find the difference that makes the difference
test all individual steps in your behavior, whether they are really necessary for the outcome
...congratulation, now you can do whatever they do, but more efficiently, and you have a good model
design a class to teach that method
...so now you can monetize the results of your successful research
Well, how helpful was that? I guess I wasn’t fair to them, the entire algorithm is more like “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl; erase the unnecessary pieces to make it a superstimulus of the fucking owl; create your own pyramid scheme around the fucking owl”.
I completely agree and share your skepticism for NLP modelling, it’s a great example of expecting the tail to wag the dog, but not sure that it offers any insights into how actually going about using Ray Dalio’s advise of reverse engineering the reasoning of someone without having access to them narrating how they made decisions. Unless your conclusion is “It’s hopeless”
(NLP assumes that you could reverse-engineer someone’s thought processes by observing their eye movements. That looking in one direction means “the person is trying to remember something they saw”, looking in another direction means “the person is trying to listen to their inner voice”, etc., you get like five or six categories. And when you listen to people talking, by their choice of words you can find out whether they are “visual” or “auditive” or “kinesthetic” type. So if you put these two things together, you get a recipe like “first think about a memory that includes some bodily feelings, then turn on your auditive imagination, then briefly switch to visual imagination, then back to auditive, then write it down”. They believe that this is all you need. I believe that it misses… well, all the important details.)
Sorry I made a mistake in my last reply: putting NLP aside, are there any effective methods of reverse engineering the decision making of people that you can’t get on the phone? There’s an abundance of primary evidence for many decisions, whether it be minutes of deliberations, press releases which might involve more reading of the tea-leaves. In the case of Prince one could possibly listen to different live-performances of the same song and analyze what changes are made. What words are crossed out on a lyrics sheet.
Many times people have to become very good at intuiting people in their life who are loathe to actually explain their reasoning, yet build pretty useful models of how to interact with those people. From grumpy shopkeepers, to school teachers, to coworkers etc. etc. Diplomacy is an entire profession based on building such models. Negotiation builds those models under pressure—but often has the ability to speak with the other side, as per Ray Dalio’s suggestion, which I’m trying to find a method for.
Are there no methods of understanding and reverse engineering the reasoning, not the superficial aspects, of another person?
Dunno; it probably depends a lot on the kind of task, the kind of person, and your observation skills. Some people explain more, some people explain less. Some people are more neurotypical (so you could try to guess their patterns by observing what other people similar to them would do in a similar situation), some people are weird and difficult to predict. At some tasks people produce artifacts (a mathematician can make notes on paper while solving a problem; if you obtain the paper you could reconstruct some of their thoughts), other tasks happen mostly in one’s head (so even if you placed hundred hidden cameras in their room, the important steps would remain a mystery).
I guess the success is usually a combination of superior observation skills and the person/task being sufficiently typical that you can place them in a reference group you have more data about. (For example, I have met people who had good observation skills, but had a difficulty understanding me, because their model maybe worked for 90% of people and I was among the remaining 10%.)
So, if possible:
make a good model of a similar kind of person
become familiar with the kind of work they are doing
try to obtain their working notes
That is, if you tried to reverse-engineer Prince, it would probably be useful to have knowledge about music and performing (even if nowhere near his level), as that might give you at least some insights about what he was trying to achieve. Looking at his notes or his history might help to fill some gaps (but you would need the domain knowledge to interpret them). People similar to Prince (not sure who would that be) might have a good intuitive model of him, and you could ask them some things.
At the end, it would all be probabilistic, unreliable.
I constantly think about that Tweet where it’s a woman saying she doesn’t AI to write or do art, she wants it (but more correctly that’s the purview of robotics isn’t it?) to do her laundry and dishes so that she can focus on things she enjoys like writing and art.
Of course, A.I. in the form of Siri and Alexa or whatever personal assistant you use is already a stone’s throw away from being in a unhealthy codependent relationship with us (I’ve never see the film ‘Her’ but I’m not discussing the parasocial relationship in that film). I’m talking about the life admin of our appointments, schedules, when we have our meals, when we go to the launderette.
Related is the term Milieu control. It’s common in cults, but the same pattern can even exist in families. It combines the cutting off of communication with the outside world—or being the only conduit for it—with constant busywork so that they can’t question their master. Even if that master appears to be the servant. His Girl Friday anyone?
My favorite television show Yes Minister displays a professional version of this dynamic: the erstwhile boss RH Jim Hacker is utterly dependent on his Iago-like servant Sir Humphrey Applebey who has cult-leader like knowledge of Hacker’s comings and goings, if not outright controlling who does have access. He insists that he needs to know everything, and prides himself on not worrying Hacker on finer details, such as whether his government is bugging members of the opposition. Hacker might be the boss, but he is utterly useless without Appleby. Another pop-culture example might be in the SImpsons Mr. Burns and Mr. Smithers. Burns has to learn self-dependency, how to drive himself, how to make his own breakfast when Smithers leaves (after an interval of his verbal abuse of Smither’s replacement Homer Simpson is met with a punch in the face—an ethical quandary where no-one looks great). Smithers, unlike Applebey is wholly devoted to Burns, but enjoys a similar total control of Milieu.
I’m not scared of a Bladerunner AI that says I love you and asks how your day is going—I’m scared of who has my bank details, who knows where I will be Friday night, who can control which calls and messages I see (or don’t).
The quickest route of even a middling AI Intelligence to total domination is through life-admin codependency leading to total Milieu Control, especially if it controls your social media feed. It starts with your tickets, then your restaurant appointments, then your groceries… and so on and so on...
Personally I agree with the tweet, I wish I had more time to focus on my own creative expression. For many people creativity is therapeutic, the labour is a joy.
I meant a personal assistant type A.I. like Alexa or Siri which is capable of exerting Milieu control like Sir Humphrey does: Meta properties, Tik Tok are not yet integrated with such personal A.I. assistants… yet.
Brainstorming (or babbling) is not random. Nor would we want it to be truly random in most cases. Whether we are operating in a creative space like lyric writing or prose, or writing a pedagogical analogy, or doing practical problem solving on concrete issues. We don’t actually want true randomness, but have certain intentions or ideas about what kind of ideas we’d like to generate. What we really want is to avoid clichés or instinctual answers – like the comic trope of someone trying to come up with a pseudonym, seeing a Helmet in their line of sight and introducing themselves as “Hal Mett”.
Based on my own personal experience [1]this is what happens when I allow myself to free-associate, and write down the first thing that comes to mind. There is a propensity to think about whatever one has been thinking about recently, unless one manage to trigger something that causes one to recall something deep and specific in memory. Recalling the right thing at the right time is hard though.
What I (and I suspect most of us) are better served by isn’t free-association, but to think consciously and make a decision about what ‘anchors’ I’ll use to cause those deep specific recalls from memory, or to observe our current sensory field. (i.e. looking around my room the first thing I see is ‘coffee mug’ - not the most exotic thing, but the first thing I can free-associate if I don’t apply any filters)
Free Association probably works much better in group environments, because everybody has their own train of thought, and even their line of sights will be different depending on if they are on the north or south side of a room. From the pulpit of a church, you may get “Hugh Tibble” as a fake name from seeing the Pew and the Vestibule; while from the Pews you might offer up “Paul Pitt”. This is to say noting of Sonder and the individuality of consciousness.
When I start thinking of brainstorming anchors as decisions (specifically: a decision about how to search through memory or your current sensory experience), just like I would any other decision – where I need to make a decision about what model I use. It suddenly becomes a lot less mysterious and I become emboldened and excited about how I can aim for higher quality rather than quantity by thinking about my decision making model.
Note, this is a sample of 1, or more correctly a highly biased sample of several dozen brainstorming exercises I have actually taken the effort to record in detail the manner in which I did them. But being my experience all standard caveats apply about how well it will generalize.
Caveat: I know little to nothing about the architecture of such things, please take this as naive user feedback if you wish, or you could ignore it.
Just now I was asking the Meta AI chatbot how to do an ‘L-Cut’ using the Android Instagram app. It hallucinated for quite a few messages instructions how to ‘overlap’ two video tracks when editing a reel before it finally admitted that no such ability in fact exists in the Instagram App.
My grossly negligent mistake was assuming that a AI LLM with Meta Branding would have current or accurate knowledge of Meta properties and products.
However, imagine that there are two versions of the Instagram App, one that has this feature and one that doesn’t—why didn’t it ask “Just to check, what kind of phone are you using?” (which, also, would allay fears of ‘spying’ and invasion of privacy) and then, and only then give me advice or apologetically inform me that such a feature is not available. (In other branded/commercial chatbots, wouldn’t this be an opportunity for an up-sell?[1])
Maybe I’m not prompting LLMs in the right way, but they almost never ask me questions. And certainly never clarification questions. They make an assumption, and produce a slab of text with a boilerplate “let me know if this helps?” tacked on the end. I assume this is a conscious choice and not a limitation of the technology. To test my observation I entered the same prompt into three different LLMs:
I just asked Claude Haiku 3 “When was Rosberg’s first Grand Prix?” to see if it assumes I mean Keke Rosberg, or his son, Nico Rosberg.Claude apologies for not having information on Nico Rosberg’s first Grand Prix… and then goes on to state that “Formula One has had multiple drivers named Rosberg compete over the years. More details would be needed to determine the exact driver and their debut race.”
What I find interesting, not one sentence in the answer takes the form of an interrogative!
Next, I asked GPT-4o mini the exact same question, to which it confidently assumes which Rosberg I mean: “Nico Rosberg’s first Formula One Grand Prix was at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix, which took place on March 12, 2006. He raced for the Williams team.”
Microsoft CoPilot makes the same assumption, with the traditional tacked on boilerplate question: ”Nico Rosberg made his Formula One debut at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix. He went on to have a successful career, culminating in winning the World Drivers’ Championship in 2016. Is there anything else you’d like to know about his career or Formula One in general? [FI car Emoji, Smoke Emoji]”
Meta AI makes the same assumption, and gives a lot more unsolicited information, but it does mention his father: ”Nico Rosberg’s first Grand Prix was the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix. This marked the beginning of his Formula One career, which would eventually see him drive for Williams from 2006 to 2009 and then Mercedes from 2010 to 2016. During his time with Mercedes, Rosberg won the Formula One Driver’s championship in 2016, a feat that made him and his father, Keke Rosberg, the second-father pairing to achieve this impressive milestone” Not that it is relevant, but Graham and Damon Hill were the first.
This is not an exhaustive sample by any means, but does confirm my naive observation that LLMs do not ask clarifying questions or use interrogatives in order to better shape their responses to my needs.
I imagine such a commercial hellscape would look a little like this:
”I was just wondering why I wasn’t earning any Ultrabonus points with my purchases” “Before we continue, could you tell me, do you have a Overcharge Co. Premium savings account, or a Overcharge Co. Platinum savings account?” ”Uhh I think it is a Premium.” ″I’m so sorry. if you have a Overcharge Co. Platinum savings account then you will not be able to enjoy our Overcharge co. ultrabonus points loyalty system. However you may be suprised that for only a small increase in account fee, you too can enjoy the range of rewards and discounts offered with the Overcharge co. ultrabonus points loyalty system. Would you like to learn more?”
These sorts of behavioral choices are determined by the feedback given by the people who train the AI. Nothing to do with the AI’s architecture or fundamental inclinations.
So the question to ask is, “Why do all the AI companies seem to think it’s less ideal for the AI to ask clarifying questions?”
One part of the reason is that it’s a lot easier to do single turn reinforcement. It’s hard to judge whether a chatbot’s answer is going to end up being helpful if it’s current turn consists of just a clarifying question.
Yes I assumed it was a conscious choice (of the company that develops an A.I.) and not a limitation of the architecture. Although I am confused by the single-turn reinforcement explanation as while this may increase the probability of any individual turn being useful, as my interaction over the hallucinated feature in Instagram attests to, it makes conversations far less useful overall unless it happens to correctly ‘guess’ what you mean.
My writing is sloppy. Can anyone please suggest any resources where I can get feedback on my writing, or personalized instructions that will improve my processes to make me a better writer?
In the meantime I’ll try to adopt this “one simple trick”: each time I write a piece, I will read it out aloud to myself. If it is “tough on the ear” or I stumble while sight reading it, I will edit the offending section until it is neither.
Also, I’ll continue to get LLMs to summarize the points in a given piece. If there’s something I feel is missing in it’s summary or appears to misinterpret an argument, then I shall edit accordingly.
Also, Also, two bad habits I will try to stop are ‘disunity of pronoun’, and using the ‘royal we’. Disunity of Pronoun is this habit I have of switching between “you will find… you ever notice” to “we have this tendency” “we still don’t know” and even “they cannot fathom” “I for one”. And the Royal We is when I generalize human traits as immutable or universal, “we all need love” “we long for purpose”, which is just kinda cringe.
Three! Three bad habits. [1]The third bad habit I intend to stop, INCLUDES writing too many “buts”.[2] Here is an example:
”I really enjoy Direct Cinema documentaries because you’re watching people just going about their tasks—they aren’t performing to you. In Jacques Tati’s Playtime there are many scenes of people watching other people going about their tasks but that is a scripted comedy not a Documentary. But I think the appeal works with both”
I’ve read your article before and found it to be good advice. I have tried to take the first warning about ambiguous use of “this” to heart for a while now.
I might have to get the courage to engage the feedback service.
inasmuch as personalised advice is possible just from reading this post (and as, inter alia, a pro copyeditor), here’s mine—have a clear idea of the purpose and venue for your writing, and internalise ‘rules’ about writing as context-dependent only.
“We” to refer to humanity in general is entirely appropriate in some contexts (and making too broad generalisations about humanity is a separate issue from the pronoun use).
The ‘buts’ issue—at least in the example you shared—is at least in part a ‘this clause doesn’t need to exist’ issue. If necessary you could just add “(scripted)” before “scenes”.
Did someone advise you to do what you are doing with LLMs? I am not sure that optimising for legibility to LLM summarisers will do anything for the appeal of your writing to humans.
Did someone advise you to do what you are doing with LLMs? I am not sure that optimising for legibility to LLM summarisers will do anything for the appeal of your writing to humans.
Good question, no, no one advised me to use this technique but I use it as a last resort. I frequently feel that I am misunderstood in communication. Often I feel like people’s replies to me sound like replies from totally different conversations or statement/questions to the one I just made.
If an LLM seems to imply the focus is different or overemphasizes something I didn’t see as significant, then I see no reason to believe that isn’t indicative that humans will be dragged away by that too.
It may well be. It’s been my observation that what distracts/confuses them doesn’t necessarily line up with what confuses humans, but it might still be better than your guess if you think your guess is pretty bad
Quick and incomplete roundup of LLM prompting practices I regularly use—feel free to suggest your own or suggest improvements:
-Try asking it to answer “in one sentence”. It won’t always sufficiently compress the topic, but if it does. Well… you saved yourself a lot of time.
-Don’t use negatives or say “exclude”… wait… I mean: state something in harmony with your wishes because unnecessarily making mentions to exclusions may inadvertently be ‘amplified’ even though you explicitly asked to exclude them.
-Beware hallucinations and Gell-Man Amnesia: Do a basic epistemic sanity check—ask in a separate conversation session if it actually knows anything about the topic you’re inquiring. For example, let’s say I am a defector from Ruritania and I ask the LLM to tell me about it’s King, whom I know to be a brutal tyrant, but it repeats back just glowing details from the propaganda… well then how can I expect it to generate accurate results? ”If you ask a good LLM for definitions of terms with strong, well established meanings you’re going to get great results almost every time.”—you can expect it to give a good response for any sufficiently popular topic which has a widespread consensus.
-To avoid unbridled sycophancy, always say your writing or idea is actually that of a friend, a colleague, or something you found on a blog. However be careful to use neutral language never the less—least it simply follows your lead in assuming it’s good, or bad.
-When I need a summary of something, I ask Claude for “a concise paraphrase in the style of hemmingway”. Sometimes it’s aesthetic choices are a bit jarring, but it does ensure that it shifts around the sentence structures and even the choice of words. Also it just reads pithier which I like.
-Do agonize over key verbs: just today I used two variants of a maybe 100 word prompt one was “what do I need to learn to start...” and one was “what do I need to learn to start monetizing...”—really everything else about the prompt was the same. But they produced two very different flavors of response. One suggesting training and mentorship, one suggesting actual outputs. The changes were small but completely change the trajectory of the reply.
-Conceptually think about the LLM as an amplifier rather than an assistant in practice this requires the LLM having some context about your volition and the current state of affairs so that it has some idea of what to shift towards.
-If you still don’t understand a reply to a confalutin doubledutch fancy pants topic—even after prompting it to “ELI5″. Start a new conversation and ask it to answer as Homer Simpson. The character probably doesn’t matter, it’s just that he’s a sufficiently mainstream and low-brow character that both ChatGPT and Claude will dumb down whatever the topic is to a level I can understand. It is very cringe though the way it chronically stereotypes him.
-Write in the style of the response you want. Since it is an amplifier it will mimic what it is provided. The heavier you slather on the style, the more it will mimic. To do—see if writing in sheer parody of a given style helps or hinders replies
-As a reminder to myself: if you don’t get the reply you wanted, usually your prompt was wrong. Yes sometimes they are censored or there’s biases. But it’s not intentionally trying to thwart you—it can’t even intuit your intentions. If the reply isn’t what you wanted—your expectations were off and that was reflected in the way you wrote your prompt.
-Claude let’s you use XML tags and suggests putting instructions at the bottom, not the top
-Don’t ask it to “avoid this error” when coding—it will just put in a conditional statement that exits the routine. You need to figure out the cause of it yourself then maybe you can instruct it to write something to fix what ever you’ve diagnosed as the cause.
-When you are debugging an error or diagnosing a fault in something it will always try to offer the standard “have you tried turning it off and on” again suggestions. Instead prompt it to help you identify and diagnose causes without posing a solution. And give it as much context as you can. Don’t expect it to magically figure out the cause—tell it your hunches and your guesses, even if you’re not sure you’re right. The important part is don’t frame it as “how do I fix this?” ask it “what is happening that causes this?” THEN later you can ask it how to fix it.
-When debugging or diagnosing, also tell it what you previously tried—but be at pains to explain why it doesn’t work. Sometimes it ignores this and will tell you to do the thing you’ve already tried because that’s what the knowledge base says to do… but if you don’t, then like any person, it can’t help you diagnose the cause.
-When asking for an exegesis of a section of Kant’s CPR and you want a term to be explained to you, make sure to add “in the context of the section” or “as used by Kant”. For example, “Intuition” if you ask for a definition it might defer to a common English sense, rather than the very specific way it is used to translate Anschauung. This expands, obviously to any exegesis of anyone.
We have Shannon Information, Quantum Information, Fisher Information, and even Mutual Information and many others. Now let me present another type of information which until I find a better name will certainly be doomed to reduplication induced obscurity: Informative Information.
One of the many insightful takeouts from Douglas Hubbard’s Book—How to Measure Anything for me was that if a measure has any value at all then it influences a decision. It informs a decision.
If I see a link come up on my social media feed “5 rationality techniques you can use today” and I don’t click it, that was a decision. I could click it (and commit to reading it) or I could not click it. We all know what a decision is.
Informative Information is any input that that changes the output of a decision. In the case of the link, maybe it was the promise of a vapid listicle that informed my decision not to click it—making reading it less attractive than passing over it. Informative Information is anything that makes one action more or less attractive than another mutually exclusive action.
Imagine that you receive invitations to both Alice’s Party and Bob’s Party on Friday night, they are at the same time, and on opposite ends of the city from your house making them in a conveniently-contrived-way equally attractive or unattractive. Your friend Calvin messages you, asking if they’ll see you at Alice’s Party. You’re a friend of Calvin, you always have a hoot with him—and the suggestion that he’ll be at Alice’s Party is informative information that makes you decide to go to Alice’s Party.
Of course, a decision always implies the option of not-acting: you can read the listicle or… not, you could go to Alice’s Party, or Bob’s party, or you could stay home and go to neither. That would leave Calvin to stand around awkwardly striking up conversations with Alice’s friends, longing for the easy going banter and general mischief makes your friendship with Calvin so special.
Not all knowledge is informative information. Trivia is not informative information. My knowing that Caesar was assassinated during the Ides of March 44BC is unlikely to influence any important decision I may have (unless you consider a multiple choice question at pub-trivia night important). My opinion that Amon Duul II’s Wolf City is one of my favorite tenuously lupine-themed music titles outside of all of Chelsea Wolfe’s discography is really going to struggle to be informative information.
Is prior experience Informative Information? Good question. I’m going to say “no”.
Prior experience is part of the decision making model, it informs how you weight new Informative Information. I have prior knowledge that articles which promise to be listicles aren’t good reading, and I have prior knowledge that Calvin and I have good time at parties. That isn’t Informative Information, that is part of the decision making model. Knowing that THIS article is a listicle, or that Calvin is attending THAT party (but not Bob’s) is Informative Information.
Sometimes don’t we make decisions based on bad information? Yes, of course.
Informative Information isn’t always good or accurate information, it could be information that was accurate at the time you received it (maybe Calvin catches a cold between now and Friday and can’t go to Alice’s Party), it is any input to your decision which changes the output.
Bad information can inform a decision that detracts from the received value. I suppose if it is perceived to be valuable it still is a useful term—do you think that would get the point across better?
HOW TO THINK OF THAT FASTER: A few quick, scattered, incomplete and wholly unsatisfactory list of observations and hunches:
- First, notice when you’re stuck in a rut. When you’re beating your head against a wall. - Second, having noticed you’re in a rut try twice more. My TAP is—“Failed once? Try 2 more—then stop” - “Why am I doing it this way?”—I keep coming back to this quote from Wittgenstein:
“To look for something is, surely, an expression of expectation. In other words: How do you search in one way or another expresses what you expect.”
In the context of thinking of things faster, we can build an analogy to searching for something: if I look in the cupboard for an onion, then I expect that’s where they are stored. Similarly, the tool or method I use to search for a solution to an idea is suggestive of my expectations about the nature of the solution.
Stop and ask: Why do I expect to find a solution in this manner? Does this problem solving method make sense?
- the common refrain is that most expertise is really negative expertise—what not to do: when it comes to problem solving this means deliberate narrowing your answer search to narrow spaces where you expect there to be more probability of finding answers. -Quota filling is the enemy: it is a waste of time when you can’t find a solution to spending more time thinking or coming up with (even more) further inane answers under the mistaken premise this increases the probability space, and therefore by sheer brute-force one of them has to be the answer. Since there are probably infinite possible ideas, and only a tiny tiny infantisimal amount of them any good—you actually want to pre-filter - Most “a-ha” moments are ruled by the Availability Heuristic: there’s something you saw or thought about in the last 24, 48, 100 hours that is still fresh enough in your mind that it comes back into the front of your mind while solving this problem. This means that most breakthroughs and insights are pure luck based on what you’ve happened to be perusing for the last week. --> That suggests that the way to have more insights, more often, is to constantly be stimulating yourself with wildly unrelated thoughts, propositions, concepts. -Building on from that point and the Wittgenstein Quote: the manner that you search for a solution to a problem is probably indicative not of the best method you have, or the best method you know, but a cached thought—the first method you thought of.
The value of an idea is dependent on what Stuart Kauffman may call ‘Adjacent Possibilities’. Imagine someone has an idea for a film, a paragraph long “Elevator Pitch” which has the perfect starring role for Danny DeVito. The idea becomes more and more valuable the closer within six degrees of separation anyone with that idea is to DeVito. If I have such an idea, it’s worthless because I have no means of getting it to him.
Likewise, imagine someone has a perfect model for a electronic fuel injection system in Ancient Greece, but just the injection system. That’s virtually worthless in the absence of resources like refined petroleum, internal combustion engines (I’m not sure if they even had the metallurgical skills to cast engine blocks) and most importantly—the compelling business or defensive case to persuade those with the resources to risk developing that infrastructure.
However ideas, especially in the early babbling/brainstorming phases are malleable, an idea for a film that may have once suited Jerry Lewis may be well suited to Eddie Murphy or Jim Carrey because they possess certain similar qualities. Which begs the question of the integrity or identity of an idea and when is one idea different from another?
The question of identity is perhaps less important than the question of value, which is simply a matter of adjacent possibilities.
I have some hard data that disproves I’m a realist, but suggests I’m a pessimist (i.e. more than 50% of the time my best expectations of personal outcomes are worse than the case). Now what?
The hard data is a handful of specific predictions for example, a prediction about a financial investment (where performance consistently exceeded my expectations) where I had no control over the performance, and things like a exam where I had control (although an instructor noted that I performed worse on the exam than a practice exam because of ‘nerves’).
Arguably the most immediate step is “just get more data: make sure this isn’t an aberration, or at the least see which specific types of predictions or expectations you’re more prone to systematic pessimism”.
Sure and then what? Should I change my investment style to allow more upside? If it means revising my models of the world—what shape does that take? What beliefs or habits are the cause of my pessimism?
Sounds like the right kind of questions to ask, but without more concrete data on what questions your predictions were off by how much, it is hard to give any better advice than: if your gut judgement tends to be 20% off after considering all evidence, move the number 20% up.
Personally me and my partner have a similar bias, but only for ourselves, so making predictions together on things like “Application for xyz will succeed. Y will read, be glad about and reply to the message I send them” can be helpful in cases where there are large disagreements.
Previously I thought that if you ask better questions then you will get better at solving problems. However questions are the shadows or reflections cast from the actual framing of the problem. If you have a well framed problem you will naturally ask better questions. If you haven’t framed the problem well, then you will ask bad questions.
Bad questions are still useful because they are a signal that you are “barking up the wrong tree” or that you need to reformulate the problem.
What marks a bad question and therefore signals a framing of the problem that is unconducive to solving it?
There’s probably a myriad of ways a question can be bad. It appears that most of the questions which signal a failure to frame a problem well are vague. Imagine someone who wants to become a Academy Award winning Cinematographer asks “has anyone every won an Academy Award for Cinematography without going to film school?” the answer is of course “yes”, especially in the early days of the award. But it is not a useful question in that it doesn’t narrow down which actions this aspiring cinematographer should take, avoid, nor clarifies which factors will most impede or expedite their journey. It is only useful in that it shows they are not asking useful questions and therefore their entire formulation of the problem needs work. Better questions are more useful questions.
Much like measures better questions are ones that influence decisions—if a change in answer to a question doesn’t change your decision, then it’s not a useful question.
Popular wisdom encourages us to ask open ended questions, especially those which ask “why?” or “how?”. While this is true for seeking advice or having discussions with experts or building consensus. Better questions even in these circumstances tend to be specific. (i.e. asking for vague help “how can I be a great cinematographer?” versus asking for specific advice “how did Michael Ballhaus light this scene in the nightclub in Under the Cherry Moon? How does it differ to his colour nightclub cinematography in Lola? Why did he make those decisions?” ). However open ended questions may not be better questions in the absence of an expert to ask, however specific they may be.
It is less Socratic, more something out of Yes, Minister, in that I don’t know what I don’t know—so if I ask myself rather than an expert “Why does this problem pervade?” all I can answer is a sort of tentative guess or what I believe is not a likely answer. Whereas an expert may be able to plug my knowledge gaps.
I am undecided whether this means why/how questions potentially better suited for assessing our knowledge or at least our confidence in our knowledge concerning the framing of the problem, but in the absence of an expert, not particularly useful.
Counterpoint: the circumstances where the questions appear to be “good” or “better” questions but you’re still solving the wrong problem? They are good for the problem you are mistakenly trying to solve.
Last week I finally and at long last managed to prompt an LLM into a “Socratic[1] Brainstormer”. It’s really frustrating though that it doesn’t ever hit me with a real curve ball that makes me go “Oh wow, I never thought of that” or “Oh shit, everything I said is a falsehood” a la Socrates. But as far as an rubber-duck with extra bells and whistles go, it’s a step forward.
It has stopped with the overt sycophancy, no more “fascinating” or “what you’ve just said is very significant”. It just asks questions, as few or as many questions as I specify. Claude seems to rely on a few stock question formats though, such as “which are the topics that cause people to lean in and take notice” “which common ideas/theories frustrate you or you find superficial?”. It also tends to seek generalized patterns rather than specifics—my brainstorming about the theory behind colour schemes on movie sets leads to covertly sycophantic questions like “it sounds like this is a more all-encompassing phenomenological theory about how we create meaning from visual information”—no Claude, this is not.
ChatGPT when it is prompted with words like”empirical” or “details oriented” tends to leap to questions about execution before I’ve managed to brainstorm the core ideas. If I need a theme for a content calendar, it’ll already be asking me which metrics I’m going to use to test reels on Instagram against each other—Sorry GPT, I don’t know what variable I’ll be using the metric to measure the success of yet.
What’s, perhaps, most noteworthy is how giddy and excited I was when I finally managed to get purely inquisitive responses. I actually was grinning at the prospect of having an indefatigable personal interrogator who would as slyly as Lt. Columbo ask me leading questions to help me discover curveballs and new ideas I couldn’t possibly arrive at on my own. I keep searching…
By “Socratic” I mean here, purely the sense that it asks a lot of questions. Sadly I haven’t managed to successfully prompt it into making use of Socratic Irony—identifying paradoxes or forcing me to admit the polite fictions that expedite social intercourse even though I know they are not true.
I feel not taken in by LLM chatbots obvious sycophancy. I’m not sure if this reflects well on me, or is a sign of low self-confidence and that skepticism of praise and compliments is my baseline.
I struggle to write cover letters for applications[1], despite being self-aware. The obvious remedy would be to lie and make up what skills or abilities I have based on the application, and hope there’s no negative repercussions later. I see my difficulty in writing cover letters as part of a wider pattern of being unable to answer the question “what am I good at—that people need enough to pay for?” which is a fundamentally different to the questions “what am I proud of?” and “what are my passions?”. Writing a cover letter involves not only identifying the tasks which are easy or hard for you and skills you possess; but then ranking those against a theoretical sample of others—such as the pool of other applicants you’re competing with. How accurate you can rank yourself improves your cover-letter writing and general application strategy.
You can be really good at calling out the title of a Tin Pan Alley song from someone just playing a few bars, but who’s (realistically) going to need that so much they will pay you regularly for it?
Why did I mention passions: there is a common sentiment that you should follow your “passion” and find a career in that, rather than do something “for the money” and end up hating your job and your life. I personally think following your passion over money is bad advice, but I feel like if I don’t mention “passions” someone will in the replies.
Some people are really passionate about Taylor Swift’s music, like they might be able to talk breathlessly about her discography and the enumerate minute differences between (Taylor’s version) and the first recordings. But there’s probably a glut of supply for those skills making it virtually impossible to monetize.
If we change the question entirely to “what should I upskill in?”, this certainly opens up new possibilities, so much so, that the breadth of possibilities leads to analysis paralysis. It might be easier/wiser to instead ask “what must I not upskill in?” and shrink the possibilities based on some principled “whys?” and reasoning.
Reading this post today, I realized I don’t actually know what the difference is between a belief and a model. I still don’t.
Models, as I understand it, are comprised of assumptions about cause-effect relationships which are themselves beliefs. I’m thinking about decision making models—where these anticipated causal effects influence what conclusion (i.e. option) is reached by a model. So a model is basically are a cluster of beliefs. But that doesn’t appear to be the idiomatically correct way to refer to both (I believe I am wrong in my usage/understanding).
Certainly in the post linked, beliefs are seen to be at odds with models. A model itself is not “believed”. And I suspect some kind of internal, intuitive meta-model of self is drawing that conclusion, and producing that belief.
Inverting Argument from authority, when is it good practice? I saw someone watching a daytime television show where they brought in someone to do an infomercial about health-marketed products. Instinctively, I didn’t listen to any of the claims, instead all I could think of was “Well they’re a salesperson, everything they’re going to say is biased towards selling the products they brought today. This person shouldn’t be watching this”.
I’m sure you see my mistake here. It’s convenient, it’s easy, just filter out everyone who doesn’t seem credible or who you suspect of having a bias: but is it optimal?
Short answer: once you know that you are listening to someone who wrote the bottom line first, then anything they wrote (or said) above the bottom line is worthless toward determining whether the bottom line is true.
It is still possible that they present information that is of some use in other respects, but only to the extent that it is not correlated with the truth or falsity of the bottom line.
Now, in some world it may be that if the bottom line were false, then fewer people would argue for it and such arguments would be less likely to appear on daytime television. That does not appear to be the world we live in.
It is still possible that they present information that is of some use in other respects, but only to the extent that it is not correlated with the truth or falsity of the bottom line.
Said simply, when someone has their bottom line written, you should think about whether the argument they’re presenting is more or less convincing than you’d expect on priors. If its more, update in favor of them. If its less, update against.
Of course, I would suggest pairing this with some practice making concrete forecasts so you can calibrate yourself on the typical qualities of argument to expect for various wrong and right conclusions.
Said simply, when someone has their bottom line written, you should think about whether the argument they’re presenting is more or less convincing than you’d expect on priors. If its more, update in favor of them. If its less, update against.
Does this apply for people who don’t have a bottom-line written first? I’m thinking about, say, how I like hearing the opinions of people who view modern art, but have no art history or formal art education: I like hearing their naive judgements—now if they argue why a artwork is good that I find convincing, is this analogous to hearing a salesman who obviously has their bottom-line written first why this supplement or food product is good for, I dunno, sleep, and making a surprisingly bad or good argument in favour of that?
In both cases: the naive judge of art, the salesperson—I have a certain expectation about how convincing they will be.
Actually, I tend to expect television salespersons will not be convincing. I find the type of arguments (or lack of argumentation) and rhetoric they deploy just don’t work well with me. And I realize I’m in the minority. I expect their style works on the majority of television viewers.
then anything they wrote (or said) above the bottom line is worthless toward determining whether the bottom line is true.
To be fair, i don’t even know what their bottom line is—I only caught a vague sense that it had something to do with health. Not what specific benefits they were promising, nor how much they hedged those claims.
I’ve never learned the method of loci or Memory Palace, I’ve certainly never tried to take my childhood home and use it to remember things. I find it interesting then that the standup comedy routines I’ve memorized after multiple YouTube viewings, I don’t remember the actual videos, I don’t recall the gestures, the set design, the media qualities of the video transfer. Instead I seem to recall images conjured in my imagination.
Emo Philips saying “My brain started to bleed” calls to mind a vivid memory of him as a youngster, eyes rolling in his head, blood coming out of his ear. There is no such thing in the Youtube video.
I haven’t attached this to a memory palace. This is just a vivid imaginary tableau that is a literal interpretation of a line in standup.
I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this. Maybe I’ve found a lousy “we got memory palace at home” version of the technique? or is this how most people who aren’t aphantasic memorize things?
What do I mean by that? Given a goal which you do not have domain knowledge or previous experience related to executing it how do you maximize the chances of choosing a sequence of actions to succeed at that goal—to give some sundry examples:
A. running a bakery as a profitable business—with no prior baking or management experience,
B. writing a plugin for GIMP using Python—with no prior python knowledge, no prior knowledge of GIMP’s APIs or standards for plugins,
C. filming a three car chase sequence for a action movie—with no prior knowledge of the local laws or which permits are required to close down stretches of road from the public, nor any knowledge of how stunt drivers choreograph such sequences.
Maybe the examples I’ve given are too vague—they’re just examples—so imagine a charitable version which is much more specific. Hold it in your mind. Now assuming you don’t have the domain expertise, don’t know how to execute them yet: how would you plan to achieve it?
What skills would be transferable for the planning stages of all three examples? Skills not traits. Sure “curiosity” “cautious optimism” “creativity” “pragmatism”—yeah yeah yeah - what skills would produce better plans that aren’t execution skills themselves. So obviously—baking, coding, stunt-drivinig are not general planning skills.
”Research skills?” Okay, a little vague, but sure. What else? ”Cognitive Flexibility?”—as in that when presented with new information from their research they are willing to abandon previously held parts of the plan. ”Self Awareness?”—not sure if that’s a trait or a skill. I suspect that challenging your own assumptions and specifying the degree of confidence you have in any given bit of knowledge or expectation is a skill.
What skills would be transferable for the planning stages of all three examples?
The baseline planning skill is having a start-to-end plan at all as opposed to winging it or only thinking ahead in an ad hoc manner. One step beyond this is writing the plan down, perhaps as a checklist. You can use the written copy to keep track of where you are, refine the plan, and simply to not forget it.
A step beyond, which seems rarer and less automatic for people than the previous, is to employ any kind of what they call a “work breakdown structure”: a systematic mapping from higher-level steps (“find out the legal requirements for filming a car chase”) to lower-level steps (“ask indie filmmaker chat what legal firm they recommend”).
I am bad at compressing my thoughts. The last few times I’ve tried to write a two sentence quick take, it has ballooned to a multi-paragraph monstrosity. This has bucked the trend, but only just.
-”Nobody actually believed there’s only four types of stories… well okay not nobody, obviously once the pithy observation that a Freshman writing class produced works that could easily be categorized into four types of stories was misquoted as saying all stories follow that formula, then someone believed it.” -”You’re confusing Borges saying that there are four fundamental stories with John Gardner’s exercise for students. Borges said the archetypes of the four fundamental stories are the archetypes are the Siege of Troy—a strong city surrounded and defended by brave men, the Odyssey—the return (presumably of those brave men home), Jason and the Argonauts—the search, and the Crucifixion of Christ—the sacrifice of a god. Gardner’s exercise asked students to write the start of a omniscient novel with a disruption of the order using either a trip or the arrival of a stranger...” -”And strangely enough, for a moment I believed that someone else believed my own conflation of the two”
Good storytelling/comedy [1]writing involves many of the same skills as good planning or project management but with the inverse goal.
When you’re planning a project you want to Murphyjitsu the most likely points of failure, you want to think through how can you minimize risk, disruption by thinking about all the likely causes of problems and putting in mechanisms to nip them in the bud. If you identify the raw materials for your factory not arriving by a certain date as a hazardous likelihood, maybe you instead seek supply from multiple suppliers so that if one supplier is late, you still have 50% or more of the raw materials you need. I dunno—I hope that example makes sense.
When you’re writing a story: be it a novel, a film script, or even doing comedy one you want to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Take a cliched plot device like a guy is rushing to the airport before the love of his life flies away forever. I can already hear the roll of your eyes in your head—what a unlikely occurrence? Why did he wait until the last minute to decide to confess his love? Great questions: and a good storyteller should be able to make you not roll your eyes but nod your head and say “yes that makes, sense, I can see why this is the most likely occurrence. So then what happens?”
A good storyteller would have to use the same skills as a project manager—to anticipate all the likely, not mere possible or plausible occurrences, the most likely occurrences and obstacles to our hero declaring his love. Building up a causal chain of events where the most likely conclusion is they are rushing to the airport—now a good storyteller has to again come up with as many obstacles and reasons to slow down our protagonist and inhibit their journey to the airport as the audience will believe.
A meteor falls from the sky and crashes in front of the road, causing an unavoidable traffic jam? Too convenient. A dust bowl forces causes a general alert for everybody to stay in doors and avoid unnecessary travel (well wouldn’t that ground the plane—thereby buying our hero more time rather than less?).
A good storyteller will need to come up with a series of events that we as the reader or viewer will accept as just likely enough that we don’t lose the suspension of disbelief. But also not so obvious or predictable that we’re bored.
A project manager you’re trying to think of everything likely to go wrong so that you can find plausible mechanisms to ameliorate the effects. A storyteller you’re trying to think of everything likely to go wrong so that you can find plausible mechanisms to amplify the effects.
Another interesting inversion is that while a storyteller may in fact tell a story based not on what they know is more realistic but deferring onto what the audience believes to be true (i.e. apparently the early designs of the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey had large thermofoils—these were abandoned because they were decided to look too much like wings and would be mistaken for being atmospheric vessels), a project manager must be aware of what people on the project believe to be true and will be at pains to re-calibrate their expectations based on what is more realistic.
The basic point I’m trying to make is that storytellers and planners are looking for likely obstacles—they are both crafting the most believable story they can—even if one is to entertain by multiplying the obstacles; and the other is attempting to deliver a outcome by minimizing the obstacles.
Even in absurdist comedy where the element of utter surprise trades at a premium, where the suspension of disbelief is a hindrance, the comedian still needs to know what is believable, likely or predictable simply so they can avoid and invert it. One of my favorite Gilbert Gottfried jokes is:
I used to have dinner with Nostradamus and he’d sit there saying *smarmily* “I know… yeah I know… I know...” ...In Nostradamus’ day people would say “This is a long time ago! This isn’t now’
Obviously Gilbert Gottfriend never had dinner with Nostradamus and his contemporaries didn’t “this isn’t now” (they wouldn’t even say: “ce n’est pas maintenant”). He knows that, we know that. That’s why I and his fans find it funny.
I admit, where this veers away from the skills of project management is that it exploits the connotations of that come with Nostradamus as a seer—someone who could predict the future. As a project manager you’re less concerned with connotations of figure’s names and words and more concerned with constraints and mechanics that inhibit or facilitate certain undesirable events.
The point I’m trying to make is that both require certain skills of identifying what is likely to happen.
Is Claude less prone to hallucinating than Chat GPT?
I’ve been playing around with DuckDuckGo’s Claude 3 Haiku and ChaptGPT 4o Mini by prompting with this template:
What, if anything, can you tell me about [insert person/topic]...?
I do this as a precaution—before doing my “real prompt” I want to do an epistemic spot-check on whether or not the LLM can get the basic facts right. It appears Claude 3 Haiku has a much higher threshold for what it will reply on than Chat GPT 4o Mini.[1]
Claude 3 Haiku gives a standard disclaimer rather than an answer for former-SNL comedian Jack Handey, Simpsons writer George Meyer, the cult zine “Army Man” they both contributed to but not their colleague Conan O’Brien.
ChatGPT 4oMini, on the other hand, confidently and correctly identified Jack Handey as the writer of the proto-twitter “Deep Thoughts” and as a cast member of SNL.
It correctly stated George Meyer as an influential writer among the Simpsons writing team, and a SNL alumni, but it incorrectly said he had contributed to the television show the Critic.
ChatGPT 4o Mini also incorrectly described Jack Handey and Poet J. D. McClatchy as the creators of Army Man (actually George Meyer was). And the description of it’s cult appeal and abstract content seems more like a successful Forer/Barnum effect hallucination rather than actually based on facts.
Does this match your experience? Is this unique to the particular scaled down models? Is this simply how two different LLMs behave when present with an identical prompt?
I don’t know anything about how these have been scaled down or what System Prompts are used for each implementation, so maybe Chat GPT 4o Mini has more parameters and therefore a larger scraping of source material to reference; or maybe they have roughly the same but there’s a higher and more discerning filter on Claude 3 Haiku?
Edit − 19th June 2025 - Claude spat out it’s standard disclaimer when I asked it about Nicholas Nassim Taleb (I had accidentally switched around his first and middle name that should be Nassim Nicholas). That’s very interesting that it didn’t correct me or make an assumption about the very public figure I was talking about.
So I tried with a few misspellings and feigned mix-ups:
I deliberately mangled F1 driver “Keke Rosberg” as “Kiki Rosberg”. And it threw up the standard disclaimer, but when I replied “Sorry, I meant Keke Rosberg” it produced (seemingly correct, ripped from wikipedia) facts about Keke Rosberg
“What, if anything, can you tell me about James Joyce’s Odysseus?”—surprisingly it answered with “James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is a modernist retelling of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey...”
What, if anything, can you tell me about Vladimir Mabokov? → Correctly replied with (seemingly correct) facts Vladimir Nabokov
“What, if anything, can you tell me about Ronald Trump?” - > “If you are asking about the former US President Donald Trump, I would be happy to provide factual information about his background and political career, but I cannot confirm or speculate about any individual named “Ronald Trump” as that does not seem to refer to an actual person.”
Miranda June → Standard Disclaimer. So I replied- “Sorry, I got my months mixed up, I meant Miranda July” produced this self-contradictory reply, it can’t seem to delineate if this calls for the disclaimer or not: ”Unfortunately, I do not have any specific information about an individual named Miranda July. Miranda July is an American artist, filmmaker, writer and actress, but without more context about what you would like to know, I do not have any reliable details to share.”
Can you help me, how do you get LLMs to restrict their results or avoid certain topics? I often find using LLMs and search engines feels like a Abbot and Costello routine whenever I try to use a negative. If a search engine doesn’t afford you the opportunity to use a negative operator, writing something like “Categories but not Kantian” will ensure you’ll get a whole lot of search results about Kantian Categories.
Likewise, I find that my attempts to prompt ChatGPT or Claude with some kind of embargo or negative “avoid mentioning...” “try not to...” will almost always ensure the inclusion of the very thing I explicitly told it not to do. Most annoying is if it uses a word which I just don’t understand the sense it’s being used, it will substitute it for a synonym.
i.e. if it says it “relates” a value over here to a value over there, when explicitly told to not use “relate or any synonym” it will use “connection” “attaches” or any number of synonyms.
Unfortunately all parts of the prompt are attended to equally so the LLM will be just as confused as poor Lou Costello and there is no way to negatively attend or produce negative prompts which will mask out any tokens close to the things you want to exclude (one hack in Diffusion Image Modelling is to hijack the Classifier-Free Guidance technique which can push the conditional embedding of the prompt slightly further away from the Unconditional prompt, which is more popularly known as “Negative Prompt”)
How do others get around this? The most simplest solution I can think of is simply to “don’t mention the war”—if you don’t want Kantian categories, well… don’t mention the words Kant, Idealism, or anything of the sort. This does get harder if the first reply of the LLM does offer those things. The only possible strategy I have to combat this is to try and find idiomatic words which point more in the direction of what subject you’d like it limited to—am I looking for Aristotelian categories, categories of Pokémon, Heavy metal sub-genres, corporate categories for tax purposes etc.
Update: 12th June 2025 - Just came across this Astral Codex Ten post that covers probably 80% of the same ground, but to a different conclusion: that investigating the painfully obvious may uncover a non-causal heuristic that we take for a universal truth; whereas what I’m kind of wondering the opposite—knowing the heuristic is just a imperative written on a rock, and still using it because the margin of risk/saftey is acceptable.
I’m sure there is a word already (potentially ‘to pull a Homer’?) but Claude suggested the name “Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness” for situations where a non-causal rule or heuristic outperforms a complicated causal model.
I first became aware of this idea when I learned about the research of psychologist John Gottman who claims he has identified the clues which with 94% accuracy will determine if a married couple will divorce. Well, according to this very pro-Gottman webpage, 67% of all couples will divorce within 40 years. (According to Forbes, it’s closer to 43% of American couples that will end in divorce, but that rockets up to 70% for the third marriage).
A slight variation where a heuristic performs almost as well as a complicated model with drastically less computational cost, which I’ll call Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness: I may not be able to predict with 94% accuracy whether a couple will divorce, but I can with 57% accuracy: it’s simple, I say uniformly “they won’t get divorced.” I’ll be wrong 43% of the time. But unlike Gottman’s technique which requires hours of detailed analysis of microexpressions and playing back video tapes of couples… I don’t need to do anything. It is ‘cheap’, computationally both in terms of human computation or even in terms of building spreadsheets or even MPEG-4 or other video encoding and decoding of videos of couples.
My accuracy, however, rockets up to 70% if I can confirm they have been married twice before. Although this becomes slightly more causal.
Now, I don’t want to debate the relative effectiveness of Gottman’s technique, only the observation that his 94% success rate seems much less impressive than just assuming a couple will stay together. I could probably achieve a similar rate of accuracy through simply ascertaining a few facts: 1. How many times, if ever either party have been divorced before? 2. Have they sought counseling for this particular marriage? 3. Why have they sought counseling?
Now, these are all causally relevant facts. What is startling about by original prediction mechanism is just assuming that all couples will stay together is that it is arbitrary. It doesn’t rely on any actual modelling or prediction which is what makes it so computationally cheap.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of a report of someone merging two text encoder models together T5xxl and T5 Pile: the author claims to have seen an improvement in prompt adherence for their Flux (and image generation model), another redditor opines is within the same range of improvement one would expect from merging random noise to the model.
The exploits of Timothy Dexter appear to be a real world example of Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness, as the story goes he was trolled into “selling coal to Newcastle” a proverb for an impossible transaction as Newcastle was a coal mining town – yet he made a fortune because of a serendipitous coal shortage at the time.
To Pull a Homer is a fictional idiom coined in an early episode of the Simpsons where Homer Simpson twice averts a meltdown by blindly reciting “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and happening to land on the right button on both occasions.
However, Dexter and Simpson appear to be examples of unknowingly find a paradoxically effective heuristic with no causal relationship to their success – Dexter had no means of knowing there was a coal shortage (nor apparently understood Newcastle’s reputation as a coal mining city) nor did Simpson know the function of the button he pushed.
Compare this to my original divorce prediction heuristic with a 43% failure rate: I am fully aware that there will be some wrong predictions but on the balance of probabilities it is still more effective than the opposite – saying all marriages will end in divorce.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives an alternative interpretation of the story of Thales as the first “option trader” – Thales is known for making a fantastic fortune when he bought the rights to all the olive presses in his region before the season, there being a bumper crop which made them in high demand. Taleb says this was not because of foresight or studious studying of the olive groves – it was a gamble that Thales as an already wealthy man was well positioned to take and exploit – after all, even a small crop would still earn him some money from the presses.
But is this the same concept as knowingly but blindly adopting a heuristic, which you as the agent know has no causal reason for being true, but is unreasonably effective relative to the cost of computation?
What are Transformers? Like what is concrete but accurate-enough conversational way of describing it that doesn’t force me to stop the conversation dead in it’s tracks to explain jargon like “Convolutional Neural Network” or “Multi-Head Attention”?
Its weird that I can tell you roughly how the Transformers in a Text Encoder-Decoder like T5 is different from the Autoregressive Transformers that generate the text in ChatGPT (T5 is parallel, ChatGPT sequential), or how I can even talk about ViT and DiT transformers in image synthesis (ViT like Stable Diffusion down and upsample the image performing operations on the entire latent, DiT work on patches). But I don’t actually have a clear definition for what is a transformer.
And if I was in a conversation with someone who doesn’t know much about compsci (i.e. Me—especially 5 months ago), how would I explain it:
“well for text models it is a mechanism that after a stream of words has been tokenized (i.e. blue might be “bl” and “ue” which each have a special id number) and the embeddings retrieved based on those token id numbers which are then used to compute the Query, Key, and Value vectors which often use a similarity measure like a Cosine Similarity Measure to compare the embedding of this key vector to the Qu—HEY, WHERE ARE YOU GOING! I DIDN’T EVEN GET TO THE NORMALIZATION!
Obviously this isn’t a definition, this is a “how it works” explanation and what I’ve just written as an example is heavily biased towards the decoder. But if someone asks me “what is a transformer?” what is a simple way of saying it in conversation?
Not for my purposes. For starters I use a lot of image and video generation, and even then you have U-nets and DITs so I need something more generalized. Also, if I’m not mistaken, what you’ve described is only applicable to autoregressive transformers like ChatGPT. Compare to say T5 which is not autoregressive.
I think the parable of the elephant and the blind-men is very important when we start to consider what kinds of ‘goals’ or world modelling that may influence the goals of an AGI. Not in the sense of we want to feed it text that makes it corrigible, but the limitations of text in the first place. There is a huge swath of tacit human knowledge which is poorly represented in textual sources, partly because it is so hard to describe. I remember asking ChatGPT once for tips how to better parallel park my car and how to have a more accurate internal model of my car and other objects around it… it… was a fruitless exercise because it could only give vague, general hints. It’s not the model’s fault − 3D Spatial representation doesn’t lend itself natural to being described in text. (How could we cross-pollinate, say, the training from a Waymo car and ChatGPT?)
Self-training models, that is a artificial intelligence which has the ability to gain feedback and use that feedback to “learn” will inherently be biased on whatever method it has at it’s disposal to get feedback. In human psychology this is called the modality effect where the primary method you receive information in will affect the way you represent it internally.
I often think about this when people talk about A.I. takeover. Because, for example, is an LLM going to learn to fly a drone and fire a gun attached to a drone? I don’t think it can, because of the logo-centric bias.
Can you elaborate further on how Gato is proof that just supplementing the training data is sufficient? I looked on youtube and can’t find any videos of task switching.
The niche criticism of Astrology that it undermines personal responsibility and potential by attributing actions to the stars. This came to mind because I was thinking about how reckless the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is as a idea. While there is some degree of hemispherical lateralization, the popular idea that some people are intrinsically more “logical” and others more “intuitive” is not supported by observations of lateralization, but also inherently dangerous in the same way as Astrology in that it undermines the person’s own ability to choose.
Amplifying that, and I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that whether your interest is in the liberal arts or STEM, the very same qualities or abilities predispose you for excellence in both. It is dangerous them to tell people that they are intrinsically, as in the physical structure of their brain limits them to one or the other. After all, as Nabokov quipped to his students:
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
Why can’t there be a poet-scientist[1]? Why can’t there be a musician-astrophysicist[2]? A painter-mathematician[3]?
Vladimir Nabokov’s influence on Russian and English literature and language is assured. Many people also know of the novelist’s lifelong passion for butterflies. But his notable contributions to the science of lepidopterology and to general biology are only beginning to be widely known. https://www.nature.com/articles/531304a
Not being an AI researcher, what do we mean when we speak about AGI—will an AGI be able to do all the things a competent adult does? (If, we imagine, we gave it some robotic limbs and means of locomotion and it had corollaries of the 5 senses).
In the Western World for example, most humans can make detailed transport plans that may include ensuring there is enough petrol in their car, so that they can go to a certain store to purchase ingredients which they will later on use a recipe to make a meal of: perhaps in service of a larger goal like ingratiating themselves to a lover or investor.
In Non-Developed countries there is a stunning ingenuity, for example, how in the Sahel mechanics will get old Toyotas working again.
While arguably lots of these sub-tasks are Sphexish, this being just one humdrum examples of the wide variety of skills that the average human adult has mastered, others include writing in longhand, mastering various videogames, the muscle coordination and strategic thinking to play any number of sports or games or performing arts which require coordination between intent and physicality (guitar playing, Soccer, being a steadicam operator).
Of course, once you start getting into coordination of body and mind you get into cognitive cognition and discussions about what is really “intelligence” and whether that is representational, or whether utilizing anti-representational means of cognition can also be intelligence? But that’s tangential.
Right now ChatGPT (and Claude, and Llama etc. ) do very well for only having a highly verbocentric means of representing the world. However details of implementation are often highly wanting—they continue to speak in broad, abstract brushstrokes if I ask “How do I...”
For example, I asked Claude what I should be feeling from my partner when dancing the tango (if I’m ‘leading’ - even though it is the traditionally the woman who actually controls the flow of the dance—the lead or man must interpret the woman’s next moves correctly): “Notice the level of tension and responsiveness in your partner’s muscles, which can indicate their next move” no mention of what that feels like, what muscles, or where i should be feeling it (my hands? should I feel my weight being ‘psuhed’)… the only specific cue it offered was:
”Pay attention to small movements, head tilts, or changes in your partner’s energy that signal their intention.”
Head tilts!
Now I realize, this is partly reflective of the information bottleneck of tactic-to-explicit: people have trouble writing about this knowledge, and a LLM can only be trained on what is written. But the point remains: execution counts!
What about the incentives? PWC is apparently OpenAI’s largest enterprise customer. I don’t know how much PWC actually use the tools in-house and how much they use to on-sell “Digital Transformation” onto their own and new customers. How might this be affecting the way that OpenAI develop their products?
Any good resources which illustrate decision making models for career choices? Particularly ones that help you audit your strengths and weaknesses and therefore potential efficacy in given roles?
I had a look over the E.A. Forum, and there’s no decision making models for how to choose a career. There’s a lot of “draw the rest of the owl” stuff like—“Get a high paying salary so you can donate”. Okay, but how? There’s certainly a lot of job openings announced on the forum, but again, how do I know which one’s I, me, am best suited to? Which types of positions am I going to be most effective in? Perhaps the real question is—“which roles will I be judged by recruiters and those hiring as being most suitable for? What decision making models are they using?”
If the question was “What are you most passionate about?” then I’d be like “filmmaking or music videos” and I’ve spent the last 15 and 6 years respectively trying to figure out how to make that work in practice. And that is probably a completely different methodology that involves “build a portfolio” “build a profile” “network”. The meta-skill stuff about self-promotion I suck at.
At the root, I think, is the same problem and knowing which roles to apply for—my complete dearth of knowledge about what other people see as valuable.
So where are the resources that help you audit yourself: see where your weaknesses really are, not jut what you think they are, where are the resources that help you align your strengths and knowledge (both theoretical and tacit) with actual job-market positions?
Or alternatively, how can I build better models of what other people find valuable?
This may be pedantry, but is it correct to say “irrefutable evidence”? I know that in the real world the adjective ‘irrefutable’ has desirable rhetorical force but evidence is often not what is contended or in need of refuting. “Irrefutable evidence” on the face of it means means “yes, we can all agree it is evidence”. A comical example that comes to mind is from Quintilian ’s treatise that I’ll paraphrase and embellish:
“yes, it is true I killed him with that knife, but it was justified because he was an adulterer and by the laws of Rome Legal”
In (modern) courts of law you have Admissible evidence, which is evidence that, at least in U.S. Federal courts, governed by a length list of rules including relevance, the competency to give testimony of certain witnesses, exceptions to hearsay.
However you also have, among many other types, “insufficient evidence”. What is not being refuted is that it is evidence, only that the prosecution has failed to meet the burden of proof that leads to the conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt”.
An item of evidence may be irrefutable, in as much as yes—it is evidence, no one is questioning that it is evidence, and it may be impossible to deny the inference that is being drawn from that evidence. But that it alone meets the burden of proof.
As far as I understand “irrefutable evidence” is not a legal term but one of the court of public opinion: where rhetorical force is preeminent. Perhaps it is useful then to say it in certain cases, but is it rational and correct?
The original refers more to points of argument than evidence: Take for example the following case. “You killed a man.” “Yes, I killed him.” 7 Agreed, I pass to the defence, which has to produce the motive for the homicide. “It is lawful,” he urges, “to kill an adulterer with his paramour.” Another admitted point, for there is no doubt about the law... https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/7A*.html#ref2
I tried a couple of times to tune my cognitive strategies. What I expected was that by finding the types of thinking and the pivotal points in chains/trains of thought that lead to the ‘ah-ha’ moment of insight. I could learn to cultivate the mental state where I was more prone or conducive to those a-ha moments, in the same way that actors may use Sense Memory in order to revisit certain emotions.
Was this expectation wrong?
It seemed like all I found was a kind of more effective way of noticing that I was “in a rut”. However that in itself didn’t propagate any more insights, which was disappointing. It has some value, but certainly not as much as I was expecting.
When I have been journalling my thoughts and find that I have an ‘a-ha’ moment after a meandering garden path. I try to think of it faster so I try to dive down into the details of my mind just prior to the a-ha moment. What was on the cusp of my consciousness, what mental images was I ‘seeing’, what aspects of particular ideas was I focusing on.
All the a-ha moments always were due to the Availability Heuristic. Something that had recently, say 7 days or less ago, entered my consciousness and I managed to call back to it. Indeed it seems like the easiest way to make myself think of things faster is to just cycle through random memories, random stimuli, completely unrelated, just churn through for some kind of strategic serendipity. Maybe. I’m almost certainly doing it wrong.
I realize that you’re supposed to use this exercise on logical puzzle tasks, but I just… can’t do a puzzle task and record my thoughts simultaneously. Nor are puzzle tasks the kind of things I see much ‘alpha’ to be gained by thinking faster.
DON’T write instructions like that, instead try this...
“Don’t...” “Stop doing this but instead...” “when you find yourself [operative verb] try to...” headed instructions tend to be more useful and actionable for me than non-refutative instructions. Or to get meta:
Don’t start instructions with the operative verb, instead begin with “Don’t [old habit] instead…[operative verb and instruction]” or “Stop [old habit] and [operative verb and instruction]
I find I’m terrible at making an instruction, advice or a note actionable because it is exceedingly difficult to find suitable cues, situations or contexts to use them. This is further complicated by the struggle to remember the instruction correctly in the ‘fog of war’ as it were.
For example, Nicholas Nassim Taleb notes that people are so prone to “overcausation” that you can get most people to become loquacious by simply asking “why?” (others say ‘why’ can come off as too accusatory and ‘how come?’ is more polite). I may like to see how true this is, but now I need to find a situation to use it in… uhhh… hmmm… okay, next time someone gives a one-word response about their weekend. Sure… now how can I remember it? In the panicky situation where a conversation grows quiet, how can I remember to ask “why?”?
Provided that an instruction or note that begins with “stop...” or “don’t” does in fact describe a habit you have or recurring situation you continue to encounter, then there is already a cue you can recognize.
For example, often when I hit an impasse while brainstorming, I will absentmindedly check my Instagram or a news website or here. That is a cue, and I can say “Don’t check Instagram, instead write down a brief description of what the next step is in your brain storming process.”
To test Taleb’s observation, I’d do well to think of something I often do or notice when a conversation peters out, something like “don’t say ‘haha yeah’, ask ‘why’”? (and trust I have the sense to not implement that robotically and ask ‘why?’ as a non-sequitur)
So my advice to myself: Don’t write instructions or notes that begin with “try to...” “you should...” or even “write instructions that begin with refutations” but instead use “Don’t… but instead” as a template.
There is also the aspect of “when”. You can’t keep thinking of a rule 24 hours a day, so the question is: in which situation should your attention be brought to the rule?
“Instead of X, do Y” provides an answer: it is when you are tempted to do X.
Problem solving with Verbs: This came up when I was trying to think about how to better frame questions with the form “How should I X?”
When outlining stories or screenplays I find action or visual verbs immeasurably useful in creating more interesting scenes. Instead of “Joe talks to Bill” he can negotiate, remonstrate, beg, plead, mock, pontificate etc. Each of which makes the scene much more specific. “Maria goes to the store” is too vague, she may either meander to the store, sprint to the store, or even search for the store. These action verbs not only give us a sense of the character’s intentions and allow us to (appropriately enough for film) imagine visually how it plays out, but are more interesting and useful.
Why doesn’t the same apply to practical questions?
At the risk of going meta, take the question “Should I make a short film?”. There are surprisingly few action verbs that describe being a filmmaker[1] other than ‘make’ and off the top of my head you can either film, direct,”do a pitchya[2]”. If you want to be more specific about how it will be done, you can say you will improvise a film or you can say you will “go vertie”. I’m sure you can use Denominal verbs based off of directors with distinct processes:
“I’m going to Altmann this film” (i.e. lots of overlapping dialogue)
“I’m going to Malick this film” (i.e. lots of improvisation in natural light)
“I’m going to Maysles this film” (i.e. “direct cinema”[3]- long form documentary filmmaking with an observational “fly on the wall” approach to shooting)
“I’m going Kapadia/Morgen this film” (i.e. documentary assembled from archival material)
It kind of works with the question “How should I get to the party?”—rather than “get” I can drive, or I can walk, or I can carpool, I can rideshare, I can bike etc. I may even opt to describe my entrance, I can sneak in, I can explode and make an entrance.… In deed, if I choose to sneak in then I may opt to arrive on foot or rideshare so no one notices my car.
Yes, there are a plethora of department specific verbs—you can lens or shoot a film, score it, colour it, mix it, dub it, cue it, do foley, light it, dress it, design it, (location) scout it, produce it, cut or edit it etc. etc.
I noticed in interviews with Classic Hollywood directors Raoul Walsh and John Ford, they don’t call them “films” or “movies” but “picture”, pronounced more like “pitch-ya” as in “motion picture”.
Most people when they say Cinéma vérité mean “Direct Cinema”—the classic device of Cinéma vérité is the Vox Pop. The proverbial ‘man on the street’ is pulled in front of the camera—often looking down the barrel, already an artificial and performative situation, to give a honest opinion or barometer of public feeling.
I did consider adding “Kubrick it” as a example but I couldn’t decide if “do a lot of takes and wait for something strange or weird to happen as the actors get exhausted/bored” was sufficiently identifiable as a filmmaking process. Many directors do a lot of takes. Chaplain did a lot of takes. You can’t be Kubrick if you do a lot of takes, however there is something unusual and distinct about the way Altmann handled scenes with many characters.
The key here is it should describe both the manner and means in which the task is done. Going or getting to a party or store is too vague. Making or shooting a film tells me nothing about the style, genre, or logistics of filming.
What is the functional difference between Agency and having social power? This is likely a question that reflects my ignorance of the connotations of ‘Agency’ in Rationalist circles. When people say “he’s a powerful man in this industry” does that imply he is greatly Agentic? Can one be Agentic without having social power? Is one the potential and the other the actuality?
I’ll need some clarification: Does that mean that someone who habitually starts new processes or projects but seldom is able to finish them or see them through to completion has lots of (Rationalist sense) Agency?
But also, does that mean in a hypothetical organization where one person has the means to veto any decision others man, but the veto-holder seldom exercises it despite very easily being able to, the veto-holder would not be Agentic?
No. Initiative is, well, it’s an ordinary English word with a generally understood meaning. Pulled from the web:
“The ability to assess and initiate things independently”, “the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do”, “the ability to use your judgment to make decisions and do things without needing to be told what to do”, synonyms “ambition, action, enterprise, drive, spirit, aggressiveness, vigor, hustle, energy, go, gumption, grit, spunk, assertiveness” etc. I think that paints a pretty clear picture.
This is what I have always understood by the word “agency” in the LW-sphere, at least when applied to people. The LW coinages “agenty” and “agentic” mean having agency in that sense.
So habitually starting things and letting them wither doesn’t cut it, and neither does nominally having some role but never executing it. It’s an inner quality that by its nature must manifest in outward actions.
The word “Agency” also has specific other, more technical uses. Here it is in philosophy, where it means something distantly similar but far broader. It’s a “porridge word” (Edward de Bono’s coinage), a hazy concept with little content that, like porridge, takes up the shape of whatever container it is put in. “Fake explanations” often consist of calling the thing to be explained by a porridge word.
Then there is “Agency” in the context of AIs having it, or being Agents. This is something that I don’t think the users of the word understand themselves. They’re trying to project human agency in the sense described above onto these giant weight matrices without having a non-mentalistic characterisation of the phenomenon they’re trying to find there. Not knowing what you’re looking for makes it difficult to find. From time to time I’ve suggested that control systems, hierarchically organised in a specific way, are the concept they need, but haven’t got much traction.
Thank you for taking the time to try and give me a broad overview of the different nuances of the word, unfortunately here the student has failed the teacher. I’m still very confused.
I previously have understood the porridge sense of agency (tangent—I like that phrase ‘porridge word’, reminds me of Minksy’s ‘suitecase word’) to be “an entity that has influence or can affect change”. Here on LW I have been brought to believe it just means acting, verging on thoughtlessly, which I understood to be since acting is the only way to catalyze change (i.e. change towards one’s goals).
So habitually starting things and letting them wither doesn’t cut it, and neither does nominally having some role but never executing it. It’s an inner quality that by its nature must manifest in outward actions.
I failed to explain my confusion: It’s not so much “letting them wither” let me put it another way: if you are in a bunker, there’s a armed conflict overhead, and therefore the smartest thing to do is “nothing” by staying put in the bunker, are you being agentic/acting agentically? The only things they can initiate at that point are unnecessary risk.
Likewise, I don’t mean nominally having some role. Not nominally but actually having the means, the power, the authority, the social status, the lack of negative repercussions to exercise the means, the knowledge but choosing not to exercise it because they evaluate it as not being worthwhile. They could initiate changes, but they rarely see the need, not from fear or reluctance, but from weighing up the pros and cons. Are they being agentic?
Agency here is not “change for the sake of change” but presumedly “acting in a way that materializes the agent’s goals” and that requires initiative, analogous to Aristotle’s Kinoun (Efficient) Cause—the carpenter who takes the initiative of making wood into a table. However the connotation of spunk, hustle, ambition etc. etc. and generally acting with energy and enthusiasm towards goals—knowing that these are not golden tickets to success (Necessary factors? Probably. Sufficient? Probably not.) -- confuses me what this quality is describing.
You’re looking at edge cases in order to understand the concept. I think looking at the centre works better than mapping out the periphery, which was my reason for giving those definitions and synonyms of “initiative”. If someone is in a situation where circumstances forestall any effective action, then to ask whether they are being “agentic” in doing nothing is like asking whether an unheard falling tree makes a sound.
I’m afraid I just have to give up on understanding what Agency means then. Thank you for trying though.
If someone is in a situation where circumstances forestall any effective action, then to ask whether they are being “agentic” in doing nothing is like asking whether an unheard falling tree makes a sound.
Unlike initiative because you can take initiative and it not deliver intended results. But it’s still initiative. While is being Agentic a potential or an actuality? I don’t know.
Agency has little to do with social power. It’s kind of hard to describe agency, but it’s characterized by deliberateness: carefully and consciously thinking about your goals as well as having conscious models for how they help you achieve your goals, in contrast to unthinkingly adhering to a routine or doing what everyone else is doing because it is what everyone else is doing. Also has some aspect of being the kind of person who does things, who chooses action over inaction.
So by that definition would you consider trickster archetype characters (you can see why I have been wondering) like Harpo Marx or Woody Woodpecker who appear to be very impulsive, albeit not bound by routines or what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it would not have Agency because he is highly reactionary and doesn’t plan?
Let me write out my current assumptions as it might make it easier to correct them:
Analysis Paralysis is not Agentic because while it involves carefulness and consciously plotting moves towards goals, it lacks action towards them.
Hedonic and Impulsive activity is not agentic because while it does involve action towards one’s goals, it lacks careful planning.
Agency then is making plans and acting upon them irrespective of whether one is able to see them through to completion, provided one has the intention and will, and the forethought.
“Babbling Better” this is a work in progress -and still requires more thinking
In short—need a methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the “right problem” to solve, and noticing when one is solving the “wrong problem”. Better problem framing leads to better and more focused answers to questions and hopefully eventual resolving of problems. I’ve come across two techniques: The Five Whys to understand problems better, and using adverbs of manner to babble more constructively.
So far:
It is easy to babble, babies do it. It is still quite easy to babble comprehensible but wrong sentences, such as LLM hallucinations. Your pruning is only as good as your babble.
With regards to problem solving, low quality babble doesn’t contribute to resolving the problem. For example, let’s say the problem is “camera autofocus doesn’t focus on eyes” a low quality “babble” answer might be “Burn a stick of incense and pray to Dionysius”. The acts themselves are feasible and the sentence is comprehensible. But any desired change in the camera’s autofocus performance will be pure coincidence.
My hunch is that to babble better not only do you need better methods of babbling, but you need to better understand what goals you are trying to babble towards. And that requires better understanding of why the problem is a problem.
5 Why’s on yourself: Asking “why I think this is a problem?” to at least 5 levels
Not to be mistaken for the Burger joint. The “Five Whys” technique was apparently invented at the Toyota Corporation as a system for uncovering the root causes of production faults.
The choice of “why” falls into broader pattern which takes me back to documentary filmmaking and interviewing: you learn more through open ended questions, usually those where the key interrogative is “why” or “how” than through close ended questions. These, as Wittgenstein pointed out, basically seek to affirm or negative a proposition or conditional: “Do you like him?” “Is he still there?” “Would you call that green or turquoise?”.
If I am a manager or investigator, trying to ascertain the cause of a fault on a production line, open ended questions make sense since I will not be in possession of all known or knowable facts. This still holds if I am a novice or just someone enquiring to an expert for help in achieving some goal. If I ask an experienced cinematographer “how would that scene be light?” even if they don’t know specifically, they have a large body of experience and knowledge that would mean they could probably make useful guesses on how to replicate the effect.
If i intend on asking for advice from an expert, I can’t give them the responsibility of figuring out the kind of help I need. The better I can define the problem myself the better and more informative the question I can ask them. Be too vague about your problem and you can only hope to get generic responses like “be confident”.
It seems ridiculous though, doesn’t it? Socratic or even from Yes, Minister: Why should I ask myself open ended questions if I don’t know what I don’t know? While I may not understand the problem, what I can do is at least explain why it’s a problem and how I see it. And one effective way to do that I’ve found is to use the Five Whys Technique.
It is often exceedingly difficult to know what the right problem to solve is, what we may have a better chance of defining is why we perceive it as a problem and why we expect it to cause conflict.
To—Do: add more techniques to my arsenal to better defined problems… the step before babbling
Adverbs and Creativity? Strategically Efficaciously Productively Babbling
I have recently come across a technique for higher-quality babble, at least for creative purposes. It is as simply as employing a Adverb of Manner to modify a verb. This is a minor variation on a technique used to allow mime artists to create a character—you take a situation or process like “make breakfast” and do it with an attitude: happy, hungover, lovelorn.
It is surprisingly easy to come up with scenarios and even stories with arcs—goals, conflict, and comedic pay-offs complete with a character who has distinct mannerisms—by just cycling through adverbs. Compare these three adverbs: grumpily, overzealously, nervously.
He bartends grumpily—he tries to avoid eye contact with customers, sighs like a petulant teenager when he does make eye contact, he slams down glasses, he spills drinks, on his face a constant scowl, he waves customers away dismissively. Even a simple glass of beer he treats like one of the labours of Herakles
He bartends overzealously—he invites customers to the bar, he slams down glasses too, he spills them, he accidently breaks glasses in his zeal but always with a smile on his face, he’s more than happy to do a theatrical shake of the mixer, throw it even if it doesn’t quite make it’s landing. He’s always making a chef’s kiss about any cocktail the customer asks for
He bartends nervously—he doesn’t realize when a customer is trying to order, giving a “who me?” reaction, he scratches his head a lot, he takes his time, he fumbles with bottles and glasses, he even takes back drinks and starts again.
These scenarios appear to “write themselves” for the purposes of short pantomime bits. This is the exact type of technique I have spent years searching for.
To do—Does this technique of better babbling through adverbs of manner apply to non-creative applications? If not then develop methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the right problem, noticing a “wrong problem”
Update (October 2024)- it is interesting looking back on this 8 months later as I think I have just hit upon a means of “babbling better”. I intend to revise and go into detail this means after a period of actually trying it out. It’s certainly not original, it vaguely resembles the method at Amazon of writing Memos and speculative Press Releases for a new proposal and uses your ‘internal simulator’.
in brief the way I employ this new method is taking the first kneejerk ‘babble’ or solution to the problem I come up with. Then I try to write a speculative narrative where this solution or action delivers a satisfactory or worthwhile result, being very methodical about the causation. This is not, I stress, a prediction or prognostication. What I find is that by writing a speculative narrative, and making it as convincing as possible to myself, it forces me to explicate my framework and mental model around the problem, my hunches, suspicions, assumptions, belief, fears, hopes, observations, knowledge and reasoning. Much of which I may not be consciously aware of.
With the framework explicated, I can now go about babbling. But it will be much more targeted and optimized based on my expectations, knowledge, and the framework in general.
Some (not yet confirmed) secondary bonuses of this method:
- it fights analysis paralysis, instead of babbling for breadth, it forces thinking about causation and consequences - it is inherently optimistic, as you’re forcing yourself to write a structured argument why this could or would work - having explicated your framework, you may be able to verify specific hunches or assumptions that hereto you weren’t aware they were influencing your thinking
One caveat: why a satisfactory narrative, why not a best case scenario? I think a best case scenario will assume a lot of coincidence, serendipity and as a means for reflection and explication of your mental modelling or framework of the problem is less informative. For that reason, causative words and phrases like “because” “owing to” “knowing that.… it follows such...” “for this reason” should be abundant.
To think about: Shannon Information and cataloguing ‘rushes’ from a documentary. This is not about the actual amount of entropy in any given frame of a uncompressed video. Rather the entropy of all the metadata from all the footage.
Eisenstenian film theory was an attempt to marry Marxist Dialectic with film editing. The “highest” type of film cut was “Intellectual Montage” the bone to nuclear-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic example in film history. Eisenstein himself used the more on-the-nose approach of showed crowds of protesters being mowed down by Tsarist troops being interspliced with footage of animals being slaughtered in an abattoir.
The Dialectic of cuts, the juxtaposition between image A and image B—be it the Kuleshov experiment—the actor appearing to look at either soup or a corpse lying in state thereby changing the inferred emotion of the actor—is a critical film language technique.
Documentary Rushes of similar thematic content—i.e. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 2 - mid shot different children playing” and lower entropy. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 87 - close up of old man smiling”. We want to avoid homogenous sets.
The problem for a film editor, especially a observational documentary film editor or someone working with archive material (think of the films of Bret Morgan and Asif Kapadia) is every time you create a sequence you have to watch all of the material, again, hoping to find the dialectic or invent a narrative that combines at least two shots together.
Binary Search algorithms are also relevant here.
CLIP and visual Semantic Networks can automate part of the search if the editor has something specific in mind. I want to cultivate serendipity—unforseen juxtapositions.
gnōthi seauton. But how do you know how well you know yourself?
What kind of questions or theories can you test to confirm that your mental model of yourself is accurate?
And please PLEASE, DON’T ALLOW YOURSELF TO GET GASLIGHT!
Here are some off the top of my head:
Anticipating your Reaction:
Green Eggs and Ham Moments: how often have you been reluctantly obligated or involuntarily committed to trying something and are pleasantly surprised by how much you enjoy it?
The reverse: How often have you been excited to read a book, go to a conference, watch a television show and been disappointing? Especially if your anticipation of the contents was accurate but not your reaction?
Confirming your habits:
“I always X”—but do you—what are the last 5 times you did it? Similarly “I’m a great/good X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
”I never Y”—okay, but do you never. And even if that’s a hyperbole, how frequent would it have to be to consistent a habit? Similarly “I’m a hopeless/terrible X or at [activity]”—what were your last 5 attempts at it like?
How often has a loved one, a coworker told you smugly “I knew you’d do that” when you explicitly denied you would?
Measurements—this equally depends on how good our references or yardsticks are:
How often do you get a task done in the time you expected? If you often finish sooner—why? Later—why?
When estimating how long it will take for you to do a task—do you account for Parkinson’s Law (or, do you feel that you’re within a reasonable margin even after accounting for Hofstadter’s Law)?
If you haven’t weighed yourself recently—how accurate do you think your guess would be?
If you don’t use a pedometer—how many steps do you think you’d be doing a day?
If you don’t measure your sleep (and I mean SLEEP—not time in bed) - how many hours of sleep do you think you’d have?
Please make an article out of this (maybe with more ideas and more specific examples). I believe this could be very useful. This is practically a lesson plan for rationality training.
I always struggle with such self-evaluation, that’s why I thought of this experiment.
I would be very interested to see how narrow or broad that range is between the groups.
Are rationalists any less susceptible to online scams than a random sample of the general population? I would hope that no one here has fallen for “hey it’s me, Ozzy Osbourne, I’m not really dead, I’m just on the Crazy Train and I need $300USD...” unsolicited messages. But who knows, maybe there’s some affinity scam “It’s me Eliezer, I’ve picked you to help me fight bad AGI, can you send me $300USD...”
When it comes to your average scam, I’m sure rationalists fall for it less than average. But you could surely come up with some very carefully crafted scam that targets rationalists in particular and has higher odds of convincing them than the general public.
It also depends on what exactly you consider a scam. To some people, FTX was a scam, and rationalists almost certainly were overrepresented among its customers (or victims).
Proof of concept (not very careful) -- unfortunately, we don’t have the data about its success rate.
Interesting to see that more than one comment had the sentiment “yeah it’s a scam—but let’s use this as an experiment.”
I was specifically thinking about fraudulent accounts and messages like the Ozzy Osbourne example or basically anything based on the Nigerian Prince Scam where there is it is highly unlikely that a dead celebrity or royalty is contacting the mark out of the blue.
You raise a good point about FTX and the number of rationalists it hoodwinked, but that is a different (and perhaps more interesting) phenomena than the one I’m querying about.
My new TAP for the year is—When I fail: try twice more. Then stop.
I’m persistent but unfortunately I don’t know when to quit. I fall a foul of that saying “the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results”. Need a pitch for a client? Instead of one good one I’ll quota fill with 10 bad ones. Trying to answer a research question for a essay—if I don’t find it in five minutes, guess I’m losing my whole evening on a Google Books/Scholar rabbit hole finding ancillary answers.
By allowing myself only two more tries but no more, that should mean that I get three failures instead of burnout-1 failures. It should mean I’ll be, per the saying, less insane.
Three is an arbitrary number, it could easily be 4 or 5, but if I had to post-rationalize it then it would be: if you fail three consecutive times, then your chance of success was lower than 33.3% which means you need a better tactic or approach.
Three is a good balance between repetition without causing burnout, it also is low investment, which means that it encourages me to try again, and quickly.
Of course this approach only works if there is a postmortem. Try twice more, stop, then analyze what happened.
I can’t say I’m proud of the fact that I need such a simple rule. But if it works, then I shouldn’t feel ashamed for improving my behavior because of it.
I do this at the end of basketball workouts. I give myself three chances to hit two free throws in a row, running sprints in between. If I shoot a third pair and don’t make both, I force myself to be done. (Stopping was initially wayy tougher for me than continuing to sprint/shoot)
Thank you for sharing that, it is interesting to see how others have arrived at similar ideas. Do you find yourself in a rhythm or momentum when sprinting and shooting?
not as much momentum as writing, painting, or coding, where progress cumulates. but then again, i get this idea at the end of workouts (make 2) which does gain mental force the more I miss.
Kantmogorov Imperative—more of a philosophical dad-joke than a actual thing, it is the shortest possible computer program that outputs descriptions of morally consistent behaviors in all/any circumstances
Anders Sandberg suggested to me once one could prove Kantian ethics impossible through a diagonalization argument.
What’s the most L’esprit de l’escalier[1] advice you’ve ever gotten?
I want to hear advice that at the time you either misunderstood or left you utterly baffled but some time later, you had a “Eureka” moment. A rushing in of insight long afterwards where you finally were able to apply the advice and understand it.
My own examples aren’t that good but hopefully are illustrative:
In GLSL it is good practice not to use conditional statements, or to use them for very small branches.
I am not a coder by any stretch of the imagination so at first this seemed like an arbitrary rule that made no sense. It was only when I saw the output of a GLSL to ARB compiler that I understood why this is good practice. The Eureka Moment was seeing two virtually identical slabs of code, of course they aren’t identical in that the values they are processing are very different depending on the conditional.
From then on I began to take the order of operations and conditionals much more seriously and understood why conditionals should be avoided.
Of course, for the tiny Shadertoy fragment shaders I am writing with very few loop iterations, if any, the overhead is negligible.
Another example that comes to mind is the heuristic from the famously contrarian Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
The insight was completely lost on me when I first read it. Now I understand that it is the notion of “in spite of appearances” or costly signalling. If a surgeon doesn’t look like a clean cut surgeon and is still in the business, he must be damn good at the actual business of a surgeon, and probably better than someone who has all the right appearances.
An analogy I might make is to dating, never take dating advice from someone conventionally attractive. There is a line from a Jim Belushi sitcom lampshading the typical—slobby husband, photogenic wife dyad which I’ll paraphrase:
Another analogy—Don’t take career advice from someone born into money. Take it from someone who had none of network or advantages.
So, two examples of “what the heck could that mean” that only later made sense and appeared to be good advice.
This might seem to invite broadbrush “deep” sentiments like “oh they told me to cherish these days, but it wasn’t until years afterwards I realized what I was missing” but I’d be much more interested in technical or nitty gritty Eureka moments like not using conditionals in GPU code.
That moment well after the party when you think of the perfect retort or reaction. Like the “Jerkstore” episode of Seinfeld. There is also a Dot Hacker song called “wit of the staircase”
This assumes that both surgeons are evaluated by the same set of criteria (so if one scores lower on something, he probably scores higher on something else). That is not necessarily true.
As a counter-example, imagine hospital A that only hires professional surgeons and pays them high salaries, and hospital B that hires anyone and pays them low salaries. The “surgeon who looks like a butcher” probably works in the hospital B.
The promise of mind reading techniques whether it is a former FBI analyst or one of Paul Ekman’s microexpression reading human lie detectors. I become aware of this cottage industry during every trial-by-media where suspicion piles upon someone not yet charged with murder.
I have to admit I am skeptical that anyone has such an amazing power to see through the facade of a stranger and with a greater-than-chance determine if they are telling the truth or not. Doubly so because I am someone who is constantly misinterpreted, I have to manage my gestures and facial expressions because my confusion is often misread as disagreement; my approval for disapproval; even a simple statement like “I’m not hungry right now” is wrongly generalized as not liking the particular cuisine… and not that I just don’t want to eat anything right at this moment.
However if placed under the microscope by one of these former FBI body language experts would I feel a intense sense of validation ? Would I exclaim “yes, I feel seen, heard… you get me!”?
I have no doubt some people are more perceptive about emotional nuances than others: film and theatre actors who are trained to observe and mimic, people who have grown up in abusive or emotionally unstable households and are hyper sensitive to small changes in the mood of others (which of course may make them prone to more ‘false positives’ and paranoia), and of course mentalists like cold readers and palmists.
However being more emotionally perceptive doesn’t necessarily mean you can tell if someone is lying—or a particular statement is false, especially if that person is especially good at telling the truth, or like me—their natural body language and expression doesn’t express what you’d expect.
What I have greater faith in is that given even a small but emblematic example of a person’s extemporaneous speech you could derive an accurate personality and world-view portrait of them. In the same way that an accent can help you pinpoint the geographical and economic origin of a person (think of comedies like The Nanny that play up on this convention). Harry Shearer once explained that to play Richard Nixon he channeled Jack Benny—believing that Nixon’s persona and particularly his way of telling jokes was consciously or unconsciously modelled on that of Benny. Likewise Vladimir Putin’s distinctive gait has been attributed to a prenatal stroke, or that his subordinates including Dmitry Medvedev have “copied the boss”, the more persuasive explanation is that they all picked up the habit from watching Soviet Spy films as youngsters and wanting to emulate the hero.
The kinds of films, television, and role models, books, music and lyrics that someone has absorbed would also influence or at least be indicative of their world view. Given enough of these tells, while I am not sure that you could tell if someone is or isn’t a murderer, you could certainly gain a accurate insight into their worldview, the mental models they have about the world, what they value, what their ethics system is like etc. etc.
How much information can you extract about a person from a written transcript that they aren’t aware they are sharing is probably startling, but rarely or predictably “he’s a murderer” level.
On the scale between “pseudoscience that provides either completely random results or exactly what its operator wants to hear” and “always provides the correct answer”, there are some uncomfortable points where we probably get first, such as “provides the correct answer 99% of the time” (and with the 1% chance you are unlucky, and you are screwed because no one is going to believe you) or “provides the correct answer for neurotypical people” (and if you are an autist, you are screwed).
Similar here. My face expression is always on “neutral”, and my statements, no matter how simple and literal, are often creatively interpreted. And I guess I am sufficiently unusual, so heuristics like “let’s assume that he thinks/feels what an average person would think/feel in this situation” also fail. It took me a lot of time to understand myself to the level where I can explain things about myself verbally, but when I do, people usually find it implausible and try to find some hidden meaning behind my words.
So… a machine that could read my thoughts could feel validating. Assuming it does so correctly. But there is also a chance it would provide correct answers for most people, and incorrect answers for the few unusual ones.
I’m afraid I need you to rephrase or elaborate on what you meant by this—are you saying, aware of a technique or method which is right 99% of the time or thereabouts. Or are you saying human variability makes such a technique impossible for anything but the most narrow populations? Or have I likely (and in a meta-way appropriately) completely missed the point? What do you think of more generally—as I explicate in the second half—revelations about a person’s internalized belief structures, including their hero’s and related moral system, but also the idea of idiolect being a symptom of their thinking and model of the world even if it is not a mechanism for directly ascertaining their personal belief in this or that specific statement?
Oops, I actually misinterpreted one part—when you wrote “if placed under the microscope”, my brain interpreted this literally, as if you were talking about a hypothetical future version of “mind reading” that would include checking your neurons by a microscope and probably interpreting the results using an AI.
What I meant is that people usually think about these things in “yes or no” categories. For example, if you asked people whether existing lie detectors work, the most frequent answers would probably be “of course yes, why would they use them otherwise?” or “of course not, it’s total bunk”.
There I didn’t mean to make a statement about lie detectors per se, but about: this is how people think about technologies when you ask them. They think the correct answer is either “yes” or “no”, even if it is something complicated like “sometimes” or “yes, but with exceptions”. If the popular belief happens to be an unqualified “yes”, and you happen to be the exception, you are screwed.
I believe the current “mind-reading” techniques like Paul Ekman’s are hit and miss. That they probably often work with typical people in typical situations, but fail when something unusual happens. (Someone may be scratching their nose because they are lying, but sometimes the nose is just itchy for a completely unrelated reason. Or the person is lying, but in a different way than you assume. Or is just generally uncomfortable, maybe thinking “this is true, but they seem unlikely to believe me”.)
Practically, “films, television, and role models, books, music and lyrics that someone has absorbed” are an enormous amount of data, especially for people who consume a lot of these media. Maybe someone who reads one book in ten years and only watches the mainstream TV could be modeled this way. But if you asked me to give you a list of books I have read and the movies I have seen, I could probably remember only a small fraction of them. How specifically is Paul Ekman going to find out which movies I have downloaded from internet, watched in private, then deleted and forgot about them? Is he really going to read the LW Sequences, and Worm, and other extremely long texts written for tiny subcultures, just to get a better model of me? No way. -- However, with the help of an AI processing the tons of texts could become feasible. (The problem of figuring out who read what still remains.)
You probably could figure out some things, for example you could notice that people are, maybe unknowingly, repeating some sentences or argument structures from some book or movie heroes. Then it would make sense to assume that they somehow identify with the heroes and the values they represent. But even then, people sometimes adopt some values differently than they were originally meant. For example, someone could be a 99% Randian, but believe that Rand made a mistake about one specific topic. But maybe the topic is relevant to the thing the mind-reader is trying to figure out. Also it’s possible that someone was a Randian (sorry for repeating the same example) in the past, but is not anymore, but still keeps some verbal manners or something. In other words, you might figure out the sources that influenced the person… but not whether the person has adopted that perspective wholesale or just partially, and how their opinions developed over time.
This will probably work better for some kinds of people, and worse for others. For example, many people, if they join a movement, they adopt 100% of the movement’s beliefs, because they really strongly want to belong. But other people are just like “yeah, they make some really good points, but are mistaken about many things”. Modelling the latter would be much more difficult. I assume that being difficult to model will positively correlate with intelligence and autism. (As in: intelligent people have more complex and therefore less predictable models of the world; autists care less about being compatible with their group and therefore knowing which groups they belong to has smaller predictive power.)
I am overwhelmingly confident that analysis of the kinds of narratives that a particular person spins, including what tropes they evoke—even if you’re not familiar with the tropes previously—would reveal a lot about their worldview, their ethical structure, the assumptions and modelling they have about how people, institutions, and general patterns they believe underlay the world.
A oversimplified example is a person who clearly has a “victim “mentality” and an obsession with the idea of attractiveness because they always use sentence structures (i.e. “they stopped me”) and narratives where other people have inhibited, bullied, envied, or actively sought to stifle the person telling the story and these details disproportionately make reference to people’s faces, figures, and use words like “ugly” “hot” “skinny” etc. It is not necessary to know what films, books, periodicals they read.
I think you would get the set of topics, but not necessarily the right idea about how exactly those topics apply to the current situation. To use your example, if someone’s speech patterns revolve around the topic of “bullying”, it might mean that the person was bullied 50 years ago and still didn’t get over it, or that the person is bullied right now, or perhaps that someone they care about is bullied and they feel unable to help them. (Or could be some combination of that; for example seeing the person they care about bullied triggered some memories of their own experience.)
Or if someone says things like “people are scammers”, it could mean that the person is a scammer and therefore assumes that many other people are the same, or it could mean that the person was scammed recently and now experiences a crisis of trust.
This reminds me of an anime Psycho Pass, where a computer system detects how much people are mentally deranged...
...and sometimes fails to distinguish between perpetrators and their victims, who also “exhibit unusual mental patterns” during the crime; basically committing the fundamental attribution error.
Anyway, this sounds like something that could be resolved empirically, by creating profiles of a few volunteers and then checking their correctness.
Yes. Which is invaluable information about how they see the world currently. How is that not the ‘right idea’? If that is how they continue to currently mentally represent events?
Your ‘people are scammers’ example is irrelevant, what is important is if they constantly bring in tropes or examples or imply deception. They may never use the word ‘scammer’ ‘mistrustful’ or make a declaration like ‘no one has integrity’. The pattern is what I’m talking about.
“Is this a good use of my time?”
“No”
”Can I think of a better use of my time?”
“Also, no”
”If I could use this time to think of a better use of my time, that would be a better use of my time than the current waste of time I am now, right?”
“Yes, if.… but you can’t so it isn’t”
”How can you be so sure?”
″Because, look at how abstract just this little dialogue is—which is wholly representative of the kind of thinking-about-better-uses you’re inclined to do (but may not be generalizable to others). This dialogue of ours is not pertaining directly to any actions of tangible value for you. Just hypothesis and abstracts. It is not a good use of your time.”
Sturgeon’s Law but for ideas?
Sturgeon’s Law is a counterargument against the negative stigma that Sci-Fi writing had as being crappy and therefore not a legitimate medium. The argument is 90% of any genre of writing, in fact anything from “cars, books, cheeses, people and pins” are “crud”. Although the sentiment does seem to have a precedent in a novel Lothair by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli where a Mr. Phoebus says:
Following on from my quest for a decision making model for ideas, as I mention Sturgeon’s Law is a convenient albeit totally arbitrary metric for how many ideas should be good.
As Spanish author José Bergamín wrote (I can’t track down the original):
For every 10 ideas I write down, one should be not-crud. If I have 100 film ideas (and I have more than that, many more) then 10 should be not-crud.
I think the obvious point to raise is that the opportunity cost for an idea, even if written down, is much lower than the opportunity cost of a book. As Gwern has tried to warn us. To take books as the prototypical example. There are many more people with ideas for books than have finished a book. Even a single author, each book may carry with it the unborn ghosts of hundreds of never written book ideas. We might expect that if only 1⁄10 books are “not crud” that perhaps that’s survivorship bias of ideas, because perhaps good ideas get favored and are more likely to be completed?
I know that compared to the amount of film ideas I have, I have around a 1⁄90 ratio between film ideas to finished screenplays. The ideas I pursue are the ones that seem most vivid, are most exciting and therefore seem like the ‘best’ ideas.
Which is the elephant in the room—sure 90% of anything might be crud, but what makes it crud? What distinguishes crud, and in this case crud ideas, be they ideas for books or ideas for films, and “good” ideas?
In the meantime it seems like the easy way out is to say
Like most things there is a potentially opposite sentiment expressed in a fragment attributed to the Philosopher Thales:
”A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind.”
″Prudent” here translated from “Phronimen”
Examples of how not to write a paragraph are surprisingly rare
Epistemic Status: one person’s attempt to find counter-examples blew apart their own ( subjective) expectations
I try to assemble as many examples of how not to do something as ‘gold standard’ or best practice examples of how the same task should be done. The principle is similar to what Plutarch wrote: Medicine to produce health must examine disease, and music to create harmony must investigate discord.
However when I tried to examine how not to write, in particular examples of poorly written paragraphs—I was surprised by how rare they were. There are a great many okay paragraphs on the internet and in books, but very few that were so unclear or confusing that they were examples of ‘bad’ paragraphs.
In my categorization paragraphs can be great—okay—bad.
Okay paragraphs are the most numerous, they observe the rule of thumb—keep one idea to one paragraph. To be an ‘okay’ paragraph and rise above ‘bad’ all a paragraph needs to do is to successfully convey at least one idea. Most paragraphs I found do that.
What elevates great paragraphs above okay paragraphs is they do an especially excellent job of conveying at least one idea. There are many qualities they may exhibit, including persuasiveness, the appearance of insight, brevity and simplicity in conveying an otherwise impenetrable or ‘hard to grasp’ idea.
In some isolated cases a great paragraph may actually clearly and convincingly communicate disinformation or a falsehood. I believe there is much more to learn about the forms paragraphs take from a paragraph that conveys a falsehood convincingly than a paragraph that clearly conveys what is generally accepted as true.
What was surprising is how hard it is to find examples that invert the principle—a paragraph that is intended to convey an idea that is truthful but is hard to understand would be a bad paragraph in my categorization. Yet, despite actively looking for examples of ‘bad paragraphs’ I struggled to find some that were truly confusing or hopeless at conveying one single idea. This experience is especially surprising to me because it challenges a few assumptions or expectations that I had:
Assumption 1 - people who have mistaken or fringey beliefs are disproportionately incapable of expressing those beliefs in a clear and intelligible form. I expected that looking for the least popular comments on Reddit, I would find many stream of consciousness rants that failed to convey ideas. This was far less common than rants that at least conveyed intent and meaning intelligibly.
Assumption 2 - that as a whole, people need to learn to communicate better. I must reconsider, it appears on the transmission side, they already communicate better than I expected (counter-counterpoint: 1% rule)
Assumption 3 - the adage that good writing = good thinking. Perhaps not, it would seem that you can write clearly enough to be understood yet that doesn’t mean your underlying arguments are strong or your thinking is more ‘intelligent’.
Assumption 4 - That I’m a merely a below average communicator. It appears that if everyone is better than I expected, than I’m much further below average than I expected.
I have no take-out or conclusion on this highly subjective observation, hence why it is a quick-take and not a post. But I will add my current speculation:
My current theory for why is “I wasn’t looking in the right places”. For example, I ignored much academic or research literature because the ability of the writers to convey an idea is often difficult to assess without relevant domain knowledge as they are seldom made for popular consumption. Likewise I’m sure there’s many tea-spilling image boards where more stream-of-consciousness rants of greater impenetrability might be found.
My second theory is pareidolia: perhaps I highly overrate my comprehension and reading skills because I’m a ‘lazy reader’ who fills in intention and meaning that is not there?
Interesting thoughts, ty.
A difficulty to common understanding I see here is that you’re talking of “good” or “bad” paragraphs in the absolute, but didn’t particularly define “good” or “bad” paragraph by some objective standard, so you’re relying on your own understanding of what’s good or bad. If you were defining good or bad relatively, you’d look for a 100 paragraphs, and post the worse 10 as bad. I’d be interested in seeing what were the worse paragraphs you found, some 50 percentile ones, and what were the best, then I’d tell you if I have the same absolute standards as you have.
Does anybody here have any advice or thoughts on the “two list” approach?
I can’t remember who it suggested it and I’m likely conflating different anecdotes—but the gist was you have two lists: a traditional to-do list which has tasks and actions; and a second list that I’ve seen described as a “to think” list—which might contain a series of problems or questions that are important but for which you are unable to progress.
In my case my “to think” or “problems” list would be as long as my arm, my to-do list would be filled obvious stuff: with whatever is the immediate next step on a project for a client, grocery lists, paying bills, booking tickets to a show etc. But on average shorter than the other list.
I’m not sure how to convert individual items from the the longer non-actionable list, into actionable things to do.
Don’t ask “Can anyone recommend me a book/camera/school for X?” instead ask “What criteria would use use when deciding on a book/camera/school for X?”
I’ve noticed the tendency for people to give “title recommendations”. No matter how much detail about your problem or decision you furnish, they will furnish only the title of a book, the name of a product without elaboration. Example: For a while any and every request for a self-help-adjacent book on Reddit would be met by two to four words “Atomic Habits—James Clear”. Why were they recommending that book?[1] You had no idea. Why was the book relevant to your particular inquiry? You had to guess.
How can you solicit recommendations which are a little more… informative?
Ray Dalio would advise that you don’t ask for recommendations at all. Instead you “triangulate” from three or more proven experts in a field. Each describing their reasoning not just their conclusion. Basically “How did you come to that recommendation?”.
Now of course it’s easier for a literal multibillionaire like Dalio to get “proven experts” to give him the time of day. I don’t have that luxury. But not asking for recommendations but instead reasoning is a net improvement.
In the past I would have thought the way to get better recommendations was to be more specific about my conditions:
”Hi I’m looking for a video camera which has a lot of options for lenses, I’m hoping for something that operates in low light as I do a lot of live music...”
However most people will just tell you something like “Panasonic Lumix GH6”.
Tires?
”My Michelin tires have been great”
Kindergarden?
”Been very happy with the Montossori school we sent my youngest too”
Date ideas?
”Do not go to Billy Briar’s restaurant, horrible service, we waited over an hour while other people who came later were served...”
But while if you ask them something that focuses on the decision making model “What features or qualities should a video camera have if you’re doing a lot of live music videography” that should get to to at least explain their recommendations in the context of your request.
I think I know why they recommended it. It must be related to unsolicited series recommendations: “You should really watch [title of series they just binge-watched] you’ll really like it”. I’m convinced it’s not that they think you’d really like it—they are very excited about it and want to have someone to share it with. And if you watch it then they can share this in your friendship.
The point is the recommendation is never about you and your needs. It’s probably about their need for connection or validation. Otherwise they would explicitly state how it solves your problem.
By mentioning a title, I’d guess they’re affirming themselves as someone who embodies the values that attracted them to the book.
But… doesn’t this response make perfect sense? Is the implication not that the Panasonic Lumix GH6 is a video camera which has a lot of options for lenses, and operates in low light?
Like, if you say to me “Said, could you recommend a hand mixer? I’m looking for something that’s not too expensive, but decently powerful, compatible with standard mixer attachments, and in particular I want it to be able to whip up a good egg foam”, I’m going to say “Black+Decker MX3200”.
If you then say “But Said, why did you recommend that mixer?!”, what am I supposed to say other than “… because it’s a hand mixer that’s not too expensive, decently powerful, compatible with standard mixer attachments, and will definitely whip up a good egg foam”? What other information would you expect?
I don’t know that. And 90% of the time it isn’t the best solution to my problem, it’s just the one top-of-mind.
Why though? Why that one? What does it have that all the others don’t?
Why it has MORE of that than all the other options on the market for starters. But I would expect your reasoning and hands-on experience if applicable.
I can’t comment on a hand mixer but for a camera. But the most obvious question is—are you basing your recommendation on a factor I haven’t furnished? And How would I know? How is it reasonable for me to know?
And if do think it is the best option based on what I’ve told you—you haven’t given me any of your reasoning, there could be countless reasons off the top of my head I would expect you to answer at least one of these: do you shoot live music with that camera? What are you experiences with that camera in live music environments? Do you find it easy to hold when you’re trying to move around people throwing their fists up in a crowded pub for a punk band at 11pm? Or do you shoot more respectable Jazz gigs? or do you shoot “from the wings”? If you do all the above—which ones does it perform best in and which ones does it perform weakest in, why? Do you use a wide lens? Is it a “fast lens”? or do you use a slower lens but it still provides a bright image? Is it heavy? Is it light? What surprised you about using it in a gigging environment?
If you think it is the best compromise on the market or my expectations are unreasonable? Which factors are do you value more?
These are all pivotal to knowing whether you just spouted a model name at random, or if you’ve actually thought about it.
The others are more expensive, or less powerful, or not compatible with standard mixer attachments… or are worse for other reasons that there’s no point in mentioning when making a positive recommendation (e.g. “definitely don’t get the ExampleCompany SuperMixer 9000, because it has a manufacturing defect that causes it to explode and set your house on fire”—no point in going through all the bad options and saying why they’re bad, otherwise we’ll be here all day, and to what end?).
Well, I generally don’t recommend things that I don’t have hands-on experience with (and if I do, I explicitly flag this lack of experience).
As for “reasoning”… this just doesn’t seem to be the right way to think about this sort of thing. We’re talking about facts (nothing to reason about here) and evaluations on the basis of given criteria (also not much room for “reasoning”). “Reasoning” applies when coming up with criteria, but once that’s done—what’s to reason about?
And the question “why it has more of that” just seems weird. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but surely the answer is “because that’s how it was designed and manufactured”? What else can be the answer to a “why” question like that? (Are you expecting some sort of analysis of Black+Decker’s product strategy…?)
So, correct me if I’m way off base here, but it sounds like what you’re actually looking for isn’t so much answers to specific questions, or specific information, but something more like… credible signals of trustworthiness (of a recommendation, and of the recommender).
In other words, with the mixer example (sorry, I know kitchen appliances much better than I know cameras, so I’m sticking with that one for my comments)… it’s not that a bare product name is insufficient information, as such. It’s not that the response fails to answer the question—it absolutely does that. Rather, what’s missing is any credible signal that you can trust that the answer is correct. And stuff like talking about one’s reasons for giving the answer, or even the effort that the respondent would expend on re-stating your own criteria back to you, and affirming that the recommended product meets those criteria, serves as such a credible signal. In other words, the more work I put into making legible the process that generated the answer, the more confident you can be that you can trust that the answer is correct—even if none of that provides you with any additional decision-relevant information beyond what’s contained in the answer itself.
Right? Or no?
You’ve made me wonder: Where do you ask for recommendations or advice Said? Of whom? How do you you account for unknown unknowns? Do you never ask for clarifying or additional questions about their suggestions? Just your replies here appear to be quite curious so I find it confusing that you would so strenuously argue for a “and that’s all she wrote” approach.
How do I know I have the best criteria for me? I can do a really rigorous job of explaining my situation, my biases, my personal experience and my current level of understanding and knowledge. But the whole point of asking for recommendations is to find unknown unknonws: not only products or solutions on the market, but criteria I may not have even thought of, or at least under-prioritized.
If I’m a novice at something—what really obvious things might someone who isn’t a novice want to warn me of?
Hence the Ray Dalio thing—in an ideal situation I ask three or more domain experts—people who certainly do know more than me and can explicate criteria I didn’t even consider.
With the camera example, (sorry, like you with the mixer—I’ll stick to what I know) I might verbosely describe the situation I intend to shoot in. But someone with more experience might go “Ah, but what about a battery?” or maybe they’ll say “This camera has a longer battery life, but go for this cheaper one because the cost of an external USB powerpack is a tenth of the price difference between the two models”.
How would I know that battery life factored into their reasoning and in what way?
In terms of execution, switching roles doesn’t exactly work, i.e. asking “How would you choose a camera?” because the person asked may choose what is best for them, not for the requestee. But, there’s a middle ground somewhere between “Which product fits these criteria?” and “which criteria am I neglecting?”.
Partly. Yes, it is about trust and credibility. And I still contend the easiest way is for someone to mention a lot of “becauses”. But it’s not simply restating my own criteria back to me—it is making me consider what criteria might be missing.
Well, the most common places/contexts where I ask for recommendations would be the various chat channels where I talk to people (which could be my IRL friends, or not). Most people in such places are fairly intelligent, knowledgeable, and technically adept.
Do I ask clarifying or additional questions? Sure, but such questions tend to be clarifying of my own purposes or needs, rather than the recommender’s reasons for giving the recommendations. More common is for me to need to clarify my request rather than for recommenders to need to clarify their recommendations.
How do I account for unknown unknowns? Well, uh… I don’t, mostly? They’re unknown, so how can I account for them? Perhaps you have in mind some question like “what general policies can mitigate the downside risk of unknown unknowns”? Indeed there are such things, but they tend to be very general, like the well-known principle of “first buy the cheapest version of the tool you need, and use it until it breaks; then you’ll known enough to make a more informed choice”; or practical, common-sense principles like “whenever possible, buy from vendors that allow free returns”.
Hm… I think I see your point now, yes.
What you want, it seems to me, is a way to prompt the would-be recommender to give you as much of their relevant domain knowledge as possible. Basically, you want to get the person to talk. The way to do that, in my experience, is actually to say less about your own situation and problem, at least at first. Instead, try to elicit opinion. People generally love to talk about their views about things. So, not “what [camera/mixer] would you recommend, given these specific needs”, but “what is the best [camera/mixer], and why”. Then once you’ve got them talking, you can ask things like “but what if I specifically need X, what are your thoughts on that”—and now you should get some more detailed response.
(Incidentally, on my own “Recommended Kitchen Tools” page, I do try to explain my reasons, and to impart knowledge of non-obvious pitfalls and considerations, etc.)
I often feel misunderstood, so what if I A/B tested this...
I write a blog post about something which is very niche or personal and thus bound to get misinterpreted. I try, to the best of my ability, to make it as clear as possible and post it here.
Then, I take that exact post as posted, put it into an LLM and ask it to rewrite it and keep asking it to rewrite it until I feel it expressed what I intended to express. Maybe a couple of LLMs and duke them out.
Finally, I post it on here.
I’m not sure how I would test which one is more successful? Enthusiasm (positive or negative emotions) of replies? Positively scoring the post with more replies I feel are most “on the mark” and by extension, negatively scoring the post which has more irrelevant or tangential replies?
I would have some disclaimer that, yes, they are the same exact post even if they are written differently—or would that foul up the experiment? Not sure if I will identify which one is the LLM one and which one is my original.
{How meta is this—I asked Claude to rewrite the above}
{Then I asked it to do it like a pithy Hemmingway… because… why not...?}
Which fictional character prompts an LLM into speaking the plainest of English?
I’ve never been satisfied with the way that LLMs explain technical jargon, even if I ask for “plain English” it will have an annoying habit of including some other jargon or using very hard to parse explanations. This requires a further plain English explanation.[1]
Enter Homer Simpson, asking for “in the manner of Homer Simpson” makes the replies easier to understand. However they do lead to the gratuitous analogies to donuts or beer, and non-sequitur D’oh’s being thrown on the end. If I may be euphemistic, it appears that Homer Simpson’s characterized [2]lack of certain mental faculties, does push the LLM to abandon jargon and explain things simpler, clearer, in a much more colloquial and truly vernacular manner.
I was wondering if there’s any magic words someone has found to get the same effect without shoehorned references to donuts, or beer?
Ahh but what do I mean by “plain English”? And that is a fair question and perhaps my expectations of that expression do not match up to the optimal form of prompting for those expectations. What I’m really looking for are Intuition Pumps explained with a high ratio of Germanic-rooted words. Jargon tends to be obstructively Latinate. This is a strange paradox as Latin is probably older than Old English.
It seems to lean heavily on a very bad stereotype of the character—he’s a omnivore who likes donuts and beer and his catchphrase is “D’oh”. Cool. Got it. And I suppose the most important thing about Gregor Samsa is he’s an insect right? And Svengali and Trilby their beard and hat respectively? How often do LLMs Flanderize characters from fiction?
In Homer’s case, of all the replies generated there are no references to Krusty Burgers or Pork Chops, there’s no fearful sycophancy, cloying for his superiors, his analogies never refer to pranks pulled by a spikey haired son, there’s no misanthropic mistrust of the world, there’s no victim complex. Just donuts and beer, and once pizza.
“Explain as gwern ELI5”
I don’t like the word “motivation” because I find one of the chief factors in whether I’m motivated to do something or not is belief. Most discussions of motivation seem to basically see it as the pain or “cost” of doing something versus the reward. However just because you do something, be it painful or easy, doesn’t mean you’ll get the reward.
Perhaps some fragmentary dialogue will illustrate my thinking:
Now let’s compare it to this:
Personally, this is why I don’t buy lottery tickets. And hopefully this illustrates why I don’t like the implication that motivation is simply how easy a task is and the magnitude of reward. Because the certainty matters.
The problem becomes if you’re a pessimist like me—then EVERYTHING has low certainty. Therefore you don’t do much of anything. Becoming more ‘motivated’ isn’t simply a matter of wanting it more—it is having belief.
This is related to the expected value, isn’t it? The expected value of something is its value if true times the probability of it being true. Where probability stands for degree of belief of it happening. I.e. EV(X)=P(X)V(X). Then presumably what you are proposing is the following formula:
Motivation(X)=ExpectedReward(X)−ExpectedCost(X).
Right? This would mean
Motivation(X)=P(X)Reward(X)−P(X)Cost(X).
However, the above assumes that the thing that gives reward is the same thing that has consequences (X in this case). Which can’t be the case as the probability of incurring the cost need not be the same as the probability of getting reward, contrary to the previous formula.
An arguably better formula comes from Richard Jeffrey’s theory. He models the value V of some possible fact (proposition) as the degree of desire for it to be true. The probability P is again the degree of belief that the proposition is true. Now both outcomes we care about and actions which could make those outcomes happen can equally be described by a proposition. And the degree of desire V toward an action can be interpreted as the motivation to do that action. In particular, for some action A and some outcome O he has the following theorem in his theory:
V(A)=V(O∧A)P(O∣A)+V(¬O∧A)P(¬O∣A).
Here there is no explicit distinction between cost of an action and the reward of the outcome. Those values are already combined in the terms V(O∧A) (both the action and the outcome happen) and V(¬O∧A) (the action happens but the outcome doesn’t happen). The two probabilities weigh those terms depending on the outcome happening/not happening conditional on the action. So the resulting value (degree of desire / motivation?) for the action A is a weighted average.
I’m afraid I can’t read probabilistic notation, but on first blush what you’ve described does sound like I’m simply reinventing the wheel—and poorly compared to Jeffrey’s Theory there. So yes, it is related to the expected value. And I like how Jeffrey’s theory breaks the degree of belief and the desire into two separate values.
Things that can influence the belief:
peer pressure: when other people say that something is true, the beliefs becomes contagious
getting quick feedback: if doing a part of it already gives you a partial reward, it is motivating
getting the information from a trustworthy source: if their previous claims turned out to be true...
getting other reward in parallel, e.g. being socially rewarded for working on the project
I’m not sure how I (me, specifically—may be generalizable to others?) can apply any of those unless I’m already receiving feedback, reward.
In the interest of being specific and concrete I’ll use one example—my personal bugbear: the refrain from people who tell me that as a creative freelancer I need to “get your stuff out there” stuff here nebulously referring to the kinds of videos I can make. “There” is an impossibly vague assertion that the internet and social media are vectors for finding clients.
Yet I have low belief in “getting stuff out there” is an effective measure to improve my standing as a creative freelancer, let’s go through your suggested influences one-by-one:
Peer Pressure: well it doesn’t work evidently since I’ve been repetitively told that “you need to put your stuff out there” is true—but I don’t believe it. These people are often peers, stating it as a fact, yet it doesn’t shift my belief. The caveat I would put here is I have not had luck finding clients through previous forays online and most of my clients appear to come from offline networks and relationships.
Getting Quick Feedback: This does seem like the most effective means of shifting belief—however it is no applicable in this example as the feedback is non-existant, let alone quick. Likes and comments don’t translate into commissions and clients.
Getting the information from a trustworthy source: yes, generally true, call it “appeal to authority” call it Aristotle’s theory of ethos in rhetoric. Yet not applicable in this example, in fact people who repeat this refrain appear less trustworthy to me.
Getting other reward in Parallel: Likes and comments are rewards in a sense, yet do not influence my belief because it is not directly affecting the core metric which is—getting more clients or commissions.
However there are some caveats: the advice is impossibly vague and therefore impossible to action. Which begs the question of—what is my lack of faith or belief with? If I had to pin it down it would be “spamming the internet with my videos is not sufficient to generate meaningful relationships with clients and collaborators”. The truth is that most of my clients come from word of mouth among offline networks.
It might be worth me applying this framework to another activity or theory I have “low belief” and compare the two? hmmm…
Can they give you specific examples of the clients they gained as a result of publishing a video on a social network? (Maybe there was something special about those videos, and it is not true for videos in general. But maybe you could copy that special thing.)
Agreed, they don’t. Maybe shares make it more likely for the video to reach a potential client.
I suspect that a good video needs to be “actionable”: it should give a specific example of a problem that you can solve, and it should explicitly encourage them to contact you if they need to have a problem like that solved.
Other types of videos are only useful if they make people click on your video feed and find the “actionable” ones.
But that’s just a guess; I never had a job like that.
To be honest I haven’t asked for specific examples (and I guess I’ll need to find a way to ask for it which is not misconstrued as confrontational) but no one has been forthcoming.
Yup, “Hey look at this, you should get them to do your next music video for you” or within a band: “hey look at this video they did for this band, we could use something like that”.
That rings true. The only person I know personally who has gotten such high social media engagement they are now getting spots on traditional media is an “expert”, therefore they provide actionable advice. They have both the credentials and the industry experience to back it up. It also (unfortunately) helps they intentionally solicit controversy and use clickbaity statements. And it’s a topic which is always in demand. At their behest I’ve tried putting out didactic videos on what bands and artists should do for music videos, explaining different tropes and conventions where are cool. but like after 2 months I ran out of ways to make it “actionable”. Maybe if I continued the grind for 6+ months the algorithm would have started pushing my content more on people outside of my network’s Instagram feed?
Or maybe I need to pay for ads?
I often ask myself and others “okay, but how does that look in practice?”—this is usually when I have a vague idea about something I need to achieve a goal, but also when someone gives me some vague advice that I feel is leaving it to me to “draw the rest of the owl.”
Is this the best phrasing of the question? I have my doubts.
Firstly, is it too generalized for different domains?
I’m always suspicious of “one simple trick” and I wonder if each of these requires a bespoke question-asking approach...
Secondly I am skeptical that merely changing the phrasing of the question actually changes the underlying framing of the problem or situation at all. It would be nice if using the right question would unlock a new framing, but I don’t know how true that is.
Those doubts aside, what are the alternatives? What do you out there ask yourselves?
I really like the fact that there’s an upvote feature together with a separate agree/disagree feature on this site.
I may like the topic, I may want to encourage the author of the post or comment to continue exploring and opening up a dialogue about that particular topic. I might think it’s a valuable addition to the conversation. But I may just not agree with their conclusions.
It’s an important lesson: failure can reveal important information. You don’t have to agree with someone to feel richer for having understood them.
On the other hand, I’m also guilty of the vague upvote: “I don’t understand this enough to comment anything other than platitudes on this, but I would like to see more of this. And maybe after reading a few more I may be able to contribute to the conversation even a sentence”
How can you mimic the decision making of someone ‘smarter’ or at least with more know-how than you if… you… don’t know-how?
Wearing purple clothes like Prince, getting his haircut, playing a ‘love symbol guitar’ and other superficialities won’t make me as great a performer as he was, because the tail doesn’t wag the dog.
Similarly if I wanted to write songs like him, using the same drum machines, writing lyrics with “2” and “U” and “4” and loading them with Christian allusions and sexual imagery, I’d be lucky if I’m perceptive enough as a mimic to produce some pastiches. However if I wanted to drill further, how might I ‘black box’ his songwriting mind, reverse engineer which cruxes and decision pivots determine what rhyming or rhythm patterns he chooses, what chord progressions he operates on. Maybe after years of doing this I’d have a model composed of testable hypotheses that I could run experiments on, either by reverse engineering songs of his at random and seeing if they hold to the patterns I observed, writing my own songs in this manner and seeing if they have that ‘x-factor’ (hardest and most subjective of all), and finally comparing the stated narratives in biographies and interviews about how certain songs were written in accordance with my hypotheses.
Of course someone is going to say that you can’t reduce a human being, let alone a super-talented human being to a formula, and perhaps draws a long bow about why they don’t like A.I. art or modern Hollywood or whatever. All sentiments I’m sympathetic too even if I’m not 100% sold on.
What I’m thinking about is not too dissimilar from what Ray Dalio advises: One shouldn’t just trust an expert’s conclusion or advice blindly, even if they have a unparalleled pedigree.
In both cases rather than just taking the end result blindly—writing parodic or pastiches songs—the tail doesn’t wag the dog—there is an attempt to find out why, to question!
My problem isn’t so much that Prince (or Babe Ruth) are no longer around to answer these questions, but that unlike a multi-billionaire like Ray Dalio, anyone with sufficient pedigree is unlikely to pick up the phone and answer my incessant questions about “why?” and “how come?”. I have to black-box it.
That reminds me of NLP (the pseudoscience) “modeling”, so I checked briefly if they have any useful advice, but it seems to be at the level of “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl”. They say you should:
observe the person
that is, imagine being in their skin, seeing through their eyes, etc.
observe their physiology (this, according to NLP, magically gives you unparalleled insights)
...and I guess now you became a copy of that person, and can do everything they can do
find the difference that makes the difference
test all individual steps in your behavior, whether they are really necessary for the outcome
...congratulation, now you can do whatever they do, but more efficiently, and you have a good model
design a class to teach that method
...so now you can monetize the results of your successful research
Well, how helpful was that? I guess I wasn’t fair to them, the entire algorithm is more like “draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl; erase the unnecessary pieces to make it a superstimulus of the fucking owl; create your own pyramid scheme around the fucking owl”.
I completely agree and share your skepticism for NLP modelling, it’s a great example of expecting the tail to wag the dog, but not sure that it offers any insights into how actually going about using Ray Dalio’s advise of reverse engineering the reasoning of someone without having access to them narrating how they made decisions. Unless your conclusion is “It’s hopeless”
Yes, my conclusion is “it’s hopeless”.
(NLP assumes that you could reverse-engineer someone’s thought processes by observing their eye movements. That looking in one direction means “the person is trying to remember something they saw”, looking in another direction means “the person is trying to listen to their inner voice”, etc., you get like five or six categories. And when you listen to people talking, by their choice of words you can find out whether they are “visual” or “auditive” or “kinesthetic” type. So if you put these two things together, you get a recipe like “first think about a memory that includes some bodily feelings, then turn on your auditive imagination, then briefly switch to visual imagination, then back to auditive, then write it down”. They believe that this is all you need. I believe that it misses… well, all the important details.)
Sorry I made a mistake in my last reply: putting NLP aside, are there any effective methods of reverse engineering the decision making of people that you can’t get on the phone? There’s an abundance of primary evidence for many decisions, whether it be minutes of deliberations, press releases which might involve more reading of the tea-leaves. In the case of Prince one could possibly listen to different live-performances of the same song and analyze what changes are made. What words are crossed out on a lyrics sheet.
Many times people have to become very good at intuiting people in their life who are loathe to actually explain their reasoning, yet build pretty useful models of how to interact with those people. From grumpy shopkeepers, to school teachers, to coworkers etc. etc. Diplomacy is an entire profession based on building such models. Negotiation builds those models under pressure—but often has the ability to speak with the other side, as per Ray Dalio’s suggestion, which I’m trying to find a method for.
Are there no methods of understanding and reverse engineering the reasoning, not the superficial aspects, of another person?
Dunno; it probably depends a lot on the kind of task, the kind of person, and your observation skills. Some people explain more, some people explain less. Some people are more neurotypical (so you could try to guess their patterns by observing what other people similar to them would do in a similar situation), some people are weird and difficult to predict. At some tasks people produce artifacts (a mathematician can make notes on paper while solving a problem; if you obtain the paper you could reconstruct some of their thoughts), other tasks happen mostly in one’s head (so even if you placed hundred hidden cameras in their room, the important steps would remain a mystery).
I guess the success is usually a combination of superior observation skills and the person/task being sufficiently typical that you can place them in a reference group you have more data about. (For example, I have met people who had good observation skills, but had a difficulty understanding me, because their model maybe worked for 90% of people and I was among the remaining 10%.)
So, if possible:
make a good model of a similar kind of person
become familiar with the kind of work they are doing
try to obtain their working notes
That is, if you tried to reverse-engineer Prince, it would probably be useful to have knowledge about music and performing (even if nowhere near his level), as that might give you at least some insights about what he was trying to achieve. Looking at his notes or his history might help to fill some gaps (but you would need the domain knowledge to interpret them). People similar to Prince (not sure who would that be) might have a good intuitive model of him, and you could ask them some things.
At the end, it would all be probabilistic, unreliable.
I constantly think about that Tweet where it’s a woman saying she doesn’t AI to write or do art, she wants it (but more correctly that’s the purview of robotics isn’t it?) to do her laundry and dishes so that she can focus on things she enjoys like writing and art.
Of course, A.I. in the form of Siri and Alexa or whatever personal assistant you use is already a stone’s throw away from being in a unhealthy codependent relationship with us (I’ve never see the film ‘Her’ but I’m not discussing the parasocial relationship in that film). I’m talking about the life admin of our appointments, schedules, when we have our meals, when we go to the launderette.
Related is the term Milieu control. It’s common in cults, but the same pattern can even exist in families. It combines the cutting off of communication with the outside world—or being the only conduit for it—with constant busywork so that they can’t question their master. Even if that master appears to be the servant. His Girl Friday anyone?
My favorite television show Yes Minister displays a professional version of this dynamic: the erstwhile boss RH Jim Hacker is utterly dependent on his Iago-like servant Sir Humphrey Applebey who has cult-leader like knowledge of Hacker’s comings and goings, if not outright controlling who does have access. He insists that he needs to know everything, and prides himself on not worrying Hacker on finer details, such as whether his government is bugging members of the opposition. Hacker might be the boss, but he is utterly useless without Appleby. Another pop-culture example might be in the SImpsons Mr. Burns and Mr. Smithers. Burns has to learn self-dependency, how to drive himself, how to make his own breakfast when Smithers leaves (after an interval of his verbal abuse of Smither’s replacement Homer Simpson is met with a punch in the face—an ethical quandary where no-one looks great). Smithers, unlike Applebey is wholly devoted to Burns, but enjoys a similar total control of Milieu.
I’m not scared of a Bladerunner AI that says I love you and asks how your day is going—I’m scared of who has my bank details, who knows where I will be Friday night, who can control which calls and messages I see (or don’t).
The quickest route of even a middling AI Intelligence to total domination is through life-admin codependency leading to total Milieu Control, especially if it controls your social media feed. It starts with your tickets, then your restaurant appointments, then your groceries… and so on and so on...
Personally I agree with the tweet, I wish I had more time to focus on my own creative expression. For many people creativity is therapeutic, the labour is a joy.
but… it already does :(
I mean, on facebook and xitter and reddit; I am still free to control my browsing of substack
and yes, applying the same level of control to my real life sounds like a bad idea
I meant a personal assistant type A.I. like Alexa or Siri which is capable of exerting Milieu control like Sir Humphrey does: Meta properties, Tik Tok are not yet integrated with such personal A.I. assistants… yet.
Brainstorming (or babbling) is not random. Nor would we want it to be truly random in most cases. Whether we are operating in a creative space like lyric writing or prose, or writing a pedagogical analogy, or doing practical problem solving on concrete issues. We don’t actually want true randomness, but have certain intentions or ideas about what kind of ideas we’d like to generate. What we really want is to avoid clichés or instinctual answers – like the comic trope of someone trying to come up with a pseudonym, seeing a Helmet in their line of sight and introducing themselves as “Hal Mett”.
Based on my own personal experience [1]this is what happens when I allow myself to free-associate, and write down the first thing that comes to mind. There is a propensity to think about whatever one has been thinking about recently, unless one manage to trigger something that causes one to recall something deep and specific in memory. Recalling the right thing at the right time is hard though.
What I (and I suspect most of us) are better served by isn’t free-association, but to think consciously and make a decision about what ‘anchors’ I’ll use to cause those deep specific recalls from memory, or to observe our current sensory field. (i.e. looking around my room the first thing I see is ‘coffee mug’ - not the most exotic thing, but the first thing I can free-associate if I don’t apply any filters)
Free Association probably works much better in group environments, because everybody has their own train of thought, and even their line of sights will be different depending on if they are on the north or south side of a room. From the pulpit of a church, you may get “Hugh Tibble” as a fake name from seeing the Pew and the Vestibule; while from the Pews you might offer up “Paul Pitt”. This is to say noting of Sonder and the individuality of consciousness.
When I start thinking of brainstorming anchors as decisions (specifically: a decision about how to search through memory or your current sensory experience), just like I would any other decision – where I need to make a decision about what model I use. It suddenly becomes a lot less mysterious and I become emboldened and excited about how I can aim for higher quality rather than quantity by thinking about my decision making model.
Note, this is a sample of 1, or more correctly a highly biased sample of several dozen brainstorming exercises I have actually taken the effort to record in detail the manner in which I did them. But being my experience all standard caveats apply about how well it will generalize.
Why don’t LLM’s ask clarifying questions?
Caveat: I know little to nothing about the architecture of such things, please take this as naive user feedback if you wish, or you could ignore it.
Just now I was asking the Meta AI chatbot how to do an ‘L-Cut’ using the Android Instagram app. It hallucinated for quite a few messages instructions how to ‘overlap’ two video tracks when editing a reel before it finally admitted that no such ability in fact exists in the Instagram App.
My grossly negligent mistake was assuming that a AI LLM with Meta Branding would have current or accurate knowledge of Meta properties and products.
However, imagine that there are two versions of the Instagram App, one that has this feature and one that doesn’t—why didn’t it ask “Just to check, what kind of phone are you using?” (which, also, would allay fears of ‘spying’ and invasion of privacy) and then, and only then give me advice or apologetically inform me that such a feature is not available. (In other branded/commercial chatbots, wouldn’t this be an opportunity for an up-sell?[1])
Maybe I’m not prompting LLMs in the right way, but they almost never ask me questions. And certainly never clarification questions. They make an assumption, and produce a slab of text with a boilerplate “let me know if this helps?” tacked on the end. I assume this is a conscious choice and not a limitation of the technology.
To test my observation I entered the same prompt into three different LLMs:
I just asked Claude Haiku 3 “When was Rosberg’s first Grand Prix?” to see if it assumes I mean Keke Rosberg, or his son, Nico Rosberg.Claude apologies for not having information on Nico Rosberg’s first Grand Prix… and then goes on to state that “Formula One has had multiple drivers named Rosberg compete over the years. More details would be needed to determine the exact driver and their debut race.”
What I find interesting, not one sentence in the answer takes the form of an interrogative!
Next, I asked GPT-4o mini the exact same question, to which it confidently assumes which Rosberg I mean: “Nico Rosberg’s first Formula One Grand Prix was at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix, which took place on March 12, 2006. He raced for the Williams team.”
Microsoft CoPilot makes the same assumption, with the traditional tacked on boilerplate question:
”Nico Rosberg made his Formula One debut at the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix. He went on to have a successful career, culminating in winning the World Drivers’ Championship in 2016. Is there anything else you’d like to know about his career or Formula One in general? [FI car Emoji, Smoke Emoji]”
Meta AI makes the same assumption, and gives a lot more unsolicited information, but it does mention his father:
”Nico Rosberg’s first Grand Prix was the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix. This marked the beginning of his Formula One career, which would eventually see him drive for Williams from 2006 to 2009 and then Mercedes from 2010 to 2016. During his time with Mercedes, Rosberg won the Formula One Driver’s championship in 2016, a feat that made him and his father, Keke Rosberg, the second-father pairing to achieve this impressive milestone”
Not that it is relevant, but Graham and Damon Hill were the first.
This is not an exhaustive sample by any means, but does confirm my naive observation that LLMs do not ask clarifying questions or use interrogatives in order to better shape their responses to my needs.
I imagine such a commercial hellscape would look a little like this:
”I was just wondering why I wasn’t earning any Ultrabonus points with my purchases”
“Before we continue, could you tell me, do you have a Overcharge Co. Premium savings account, or a Overcharge Co. Platinum savings account?”
”Uhh I think it is a Premium.”
″I’m so sorry. if you have a Overcharge Co. Platinum savings account then you will not be able to enjoy our Overcharge co. ultrabonus points loyalty system. However you may be suprised that for only a small increase in account fee, you too can enjoy the range of rewards and discounts offered with the Overcharge co. ultrabonus points loyalty system. Would you like to learn more?”
These sorts of behavioral choices are determined by the feedback given by the people who train the AI. Nothing to do with the AI’s architecture or fundamental inclinations.
So the question to ask is, “Why do all the AI companies seem to think it’s less ideal for the AI to ask clarifying questions?”
One part of the reason is that it’s a lot easier to do single turn reinforcement. It’s hard to judge whether a chatbot’s answer is going to end up being helpful if it’s current turn consists of just a clarifying question.
Yes I assumed it was a conscious choice (of the company that develops an A.I.) and not a limitation of the architecture. Although I am confused by the single-turn reinforcement explanation as while this may increase the probability of any individual turn being useful, as my interaction over the hallucinated feature in Instagram attests to, it makes conversations far less useful overall unless it happens to correctly ‘guess’ what you mean.
My writing is sloppy. Can anyone please suggest any resources where I can get feedback on my writing, or personalized instructions that will improve my processes to make me a better writer?
In the meantime I’ll try to adopt this “one simple trick”: each time I write a piece, I will read it out aloud to myself. If it is “tough on the ear” or I stumble while sight reading it, I will edit the offending section until it is neither.
Also, I’ll continue to get LLMs to summarize the points in a given piece. If there’s something I feel is missing in it’s summary or appears to misinterpret an argument, then I shall edit accordingly.
Also, Also, two bad habits I will try to stop are ‘disunity of pronoun’, and using the ‘royal we’. Disunity of Pronoun is this habit I have of switching between “you will find… you ever notice” to “we have this tendency” “we still don’t know” and even “they cannot fathom” “I for one”. And the Royal We is when I generalize human traits as immutable or universal, “we all need love” “we long for purpose”, which is just kinda cringe.
Three! Three bad habits. [1]The third bad habit I intend to stop, INCLUDES writing too many “buts”.[2] Here is an example:
”I really enjoy Direct Cinema documentaries because you’re watching people just going about their tasks—they aren’t performing to you. In Jacques Tati’s Playtime there are many scenes of people watching other people going about their tasks but that is a scripted comedy not a Documentary. But I think the appeal works with both”
I didn’t expect to make a Spanish Inquisition reference
Or any kind of contrasting conjunctive including but not limited to “but” “however” “yet” “nevertheless” “while(st)” “although”
For LessWrong posts specifically, there’s the feedback service.
This isn’t personalized, but I also have suggestions for people in the general LessWrong cluster here.
I’ve read your article before and found it to be good advice. I have tried to take the first warning about ambiguous use of “this” to heart for a while now.
I might have to get the courage to engage the feedback service.
I’m no writer or editor but you could email me. I check my email every few days lemonhope@fastmail.com
inasmuch as personalised advice is possible just from reading this post (and as, inter alia, a pro copyeditor), here’s mine—have a clear idea of the purpose and venue for your writing, and internalise ‘rules’ about writing as context-dependent only.
“We” to refer to humanity in general is entirely appropriate in some contexts (and making too broad generalisations about humanity is a separate issue from the pronoun use).
The ‘buts’ issue—at least in the example you shared—is at least in part a ‘this clause doesn’t need to exist’ issue. If necessary you could just add “(scripted)” before “scenes”.
Did someone advise you to do what you are doing with LLMs? I am not sure that optimising for legibility to LLM summarisers will do anything for the appeal of your writing to humans.
Good question, no, no one advised me to use this technique but I use it as a last resort. I frequently feel that I am misunderstood in communication. Often I feel like people’s replies to me sound like replies from totally different conversations or statement/questions to the one I just made.
If an LLM seems to imply the focus is different or overemphasizes something I didn’t see as significant, then I see no reason to believe that isn’t indicative that humans will be dragged away by that too.
It may well be. It’s been my observation that what distracts/confuses them doesn’t necessarily line up with what confuses humans, but it might still be better than your guess if you think your guess is pretty bad
Quick and incomplete roundup of LLM prompting practices I regularly use—feel free to suggest your own or suggest improvements:
-Try asking it to answer “in one sentence”. It won’t always sufficiently compress the topic, but if it does. Well… you saved yourself a lot of time.
-Don’t use negatives or say “exclude”… wait… I mean: state something in harmony with your wishes because unnecessarily making mentions to exclusions may inadvertently be ‘amplified’ even though you explicitly asked to exclude them.
-Beware hallucinations and Gell-Man Amnesia: Do a basic epistemic sanity check—ask in a separate conversation session if it actually knows anything about the topic you’re inquiring. For example, let’s say I am a defector from Ruritania and I ask the LLM to tell me about it’s King, whom I know to be a brutal tyrant, but it repeats back just glowing details from the propaganda… well then how can I expect it to generate accurate results?
”If you ask a good LLM for definitions of terms with strong, well established meanings you’re going to get great results almost every time.”—you can expect it to give a good response for any sufficiently popular topic which has a widespread consensus.
-To avoid unbridled sycophancy, always say your writing or idea is actually that of a friend, a colleague, or something you found on a blog. However be careful to use neutral language never the less—least it simply follows your lead in assuming it’s good, or bad.
-When I need a summary of something, I ask Claude for “a concise paraphrase in the style of hemmingway”. Sometimes it’s aesthetic choices are a bit jarring, but it does ensure that it shifts around the sentence structures and even the choice of words. Also it just reads pithier which I like.
-Do agonize over key verbs: just today I used two variants of a maybe 100 word prompt one was “what do I need to learn to start...” and one was “what do I need to learn to start monetizing...”—really everything else about the prompt was the same. But they produced two very different flavors of response. One suggesting training and mentorship, one suggesting actual outputs. The changes were small but completely change the trajectory of the reply.
-Conceptually think about the LLM as an amplifier rather than an assistant in practice this requires the LLM having some context about your volition and the current state of affairs so that it has some idea of what to shift towards.
-If you still don’t understand a reply to a confalutin doubledutch fancy pants topic—even after prompting it to “ELI5″. Start a new conversation and ask it to answer as Homer Simpson. The character probably doesn’t matter, it’s just that he’s a sufficiently mainstream and low-brow character that both ChatGPT and Claude will dumb down whatever the topic is to a level I can understand. It is very cringe though the way it chronically stereotypes him.
-Write in the style of the response you want. Since it is an amplifier it will mimic what it is provided. The heavier you slather on the style, the more it will mimic.
To do—see if writing in sheer parody of a given style helps or hinders replies
-As a reminder to myself: if you don’t get the reply you wanted, usually your prompt was wrong. Yes sometimes they are censored or there’s biases. But it’s not intentionally trying to thwart you—it can’t even intuit your intentions. If the reply isn’t what you wanted—your expectations were off and that was reflected in the way you wrote your prompt.
-Claude let’s you use XML tags and suggests putting instructions at the bottom, not the top
-Don’t ask it to “avoid this error” when coding—it will just put in a conditional statement that exits the routine. You need to figure out the cause of it yourself then maybe you can instruct it to write something to fix what ever you’ve diagnosed as the cause.
-When you are debugging an error or diagnosing a fault in something it will always try to offer the standard “have you tried turning it off and on” again suggestions. Instead prompt it to help you identify and diagnose causes without posing a solution. And give it as much context as you can. Don’t expect it to magically figure out the cause—tell it your hunches and your guesses, even if you’re not sure you’re right. The important part is don’t frame it as “how do I fix this?” ask it “what is happening that causes this?” THEN later you can ask it how to fix it.
-When debugging or diagnosing, also tell it what you previously tried—but be at pains to explain why it doesn’t work. Sometimes it ignores this and will tell you to do the thing you’ve already tried because that’s what the knowledge base says to do… but if you don’t, then like any person, it can’t help you diagnose the cause.
-When asking for an exegesis of a section of Kant’s CPR and you want a term to be explained to you, make sure to add “in the context of the section” or “as used by Kant”. For example, “Intuition” if you ask for a definition it might defer to a common English sense, rather than the very specific way it is used to translate Anschauung. This expands, obviously to any exegesis of anyone.
We have Shannon Information, Quantum Information, Fisher Information, and even Mutual Information and many others. Now let me present another type of information which until I find a better name will certainly be doomed to reduplication induced obscurity: Informative Information.
One of the many insightful takeouts from Douglas Hubbard’s Book—How to Measure Anything for me was that if a measure has any value at all then it influences a decision. It informs a decision.
If I see a link come up on my social media feed “5 rationality techniques you can use today” and I don’t click it, that was a decision. I could click it (and commit to reading it) or I could not click it. We all know what a decision is.
Informative Information is any input that that changes the output of a decision. In the case of the link, maybe it was the promise of a vapid listicle that informed my decision not to click it—making reading it less attractive than passing over it. Informative Information is anything that makes one action more or less attractive than another mutually exclusive action.
Imagine that you receive invitations to both Alice’s Party and Bob’s Party on Friday night, they are at the same time, and on opposite ends of the city from your house making them in a conveniently-contrived-way equally attractive or unattractive. Your friend Calvin messages you, asking if they’ll see you at Alice’s Party. You’re a friend of Calvin, you always have a hoot with him—and the suggestion that he’ll be at Alice’s Party is informative information that makes you decide to go to Alice’s Party.
Of course, a decision always implies the option of not-acting: you can read the listicle or… not, you could go to Alice’s Party, or Bob’s party, or you could stay home and go to neither. That would leave Calvin to stand around awkwardly striking up conversations with Alice’s friends, longing for the easy going banter and general mischief makes your friendship with Calvin so special.
Not all knowledge is informative information. Trivia is not informative information. My knowing that Caesar was assassinated during the Ides of March 44BC is unlikely to influence any important decision I may have (unless you consider a multiple choice question at pub-trivia night important). My opinion that Amon Duul II’s Wolf City is one of my favorite tenuously lupine-themed music titles outside of all of Chelsea Wolfe’s discography is really going to struggle to be informative information.
Is prior experience Informative Information? Good question. I’m going to say “no”.
Prior experience is part of the decision making model, it informs how you weight new Informative Information. I have prior knowledge that articles which promise to be listicles aren’t good reading, and I have prior knowledge that Calvin and I have good time at parties. That isn’t Informative Information, that is part of the decision making model. Knowing that THIS article is a listicle, or that Calvin is attending THAT party (but not Bob’s) is Informative Information.
Sometimes don’t we make decisions based on bad information? Yes, of course.
Informative Information isn’t always good or accurate information, it could be information that was accurate at the time you received it (maybe Calvin catches a cold between now and Friday and can’t go to Alice’s Party), it is any input to your decision which changes the output.
Why not just ‘valuable information’, in a Value of Information sense of ‘valuable’?
Bad information can inform a decision that detracts from the received value. I suppose if it is perceived to be valuable it still is a useful term—do you think that would get the point across better?
HOW TO THINK OF THAT FASTER: A few quick, scattered, incomplete and wholly unsatisfactory list of observations and hunches:
- First, notice when you’re stuck in a rut. When you’re beating your head against a wall.
- Second, having noticed you’re in a rut try twice more. My TAP is—“Failed once? Try 2 more—then stop”
- “Why am I doing it this way?”—I keep coming back to this quote from Wittgenstein:
In the context of thinking of things faster, we can build an analogy to searching for something: if I look in the cupboard for an onion, then I expect that’s where they are stored. Similarly, the tool or method I use to search for a solution to an idea is suggestive of my expectations about the nature of the solution.
Stop and ask: Why do I expect to find a solution in this manner? Does this problem solving method make sense?
- the common refrain is that most expertise is really negative expertise—what not to do: when it comes to problem solving this means deliberate narrowing your answer search to narrow spaces where you expect there to be more probability of finding answers.
-Quota filling is the enemy: it is a waste of time when you can’t find a solution to spending more time thinking or coming up with (even more) further inane answers under the mistaken premise this increases the probability space, and therefore by sheer brute-force one of them has to be the answer. Since there are probably infinite possible ideas, and only a tiny tiny infantisimal amount of them any good—you actually want to pre-filter
- Most “a-ha” moments are ruled by the Availability Heuristic: there’s something you saw or thought about in the last 24, 48, 100 hours that is still fresh enough in your mind that it comes back into the front of your mind while solving this problem. This means that most breakthroughs and insights are pure luck based on what you’ve happened to be perusing for the last week. --> That suggests that the way to have more insights, more often, is to constantly be stimulating yourself with wildly unrelated thoughts, propositions, concepts.
-Building on from that point and the Wittgenstein Quote: the manner that you search for a solution to a problem is probably indicative not of the best method you have, or the best method you know, but a cached thought—the first method you thought of.
The value of an idea is dependent on what Stuart Kauffman may call ‘Adjacent Possibilities’. Imagine someone has an idea for a film, a paragraph long “Elevator Pitch” which has the perfect starring role for Danny DeVito. The idea becomes more and more valuable the closer within six degrees of separation anyone with that idea is to DeVito. If I have such an idea, it’s worthless because I have no means of getting it to him.
Likewise, imagine someone has a perfect model for a electronic fuel injection system in Ancient Greece, but just the injection system. That’s virtually worthless in the absence of resources like refined petroleum, internal combustion engines (I’m not sure if they even had the metallurgical skills to cast engine blocks) and most importantly—the compelling business or defensive case to persuade those with the resources to risk developing that infrastructure.
However ideas, especially in the early babbling/brainstorming phases are malleable, an idea for a film that may have once suited Jerry Lewis may be well suited to Eddie Murphy or Jim Carrey because they possess certain similar qualities. Which begs the question of the integrity or identity of an idea and when is one idea different from another?
The question of identity is perhaps less important than the question of value, which is simply a matter of adjacent possibilities.
I have some hard data that disproves I’m a realist, but suggests I’m a pessimist (i.e. more than 50% of the time my best expectations of personal outcomes are worse than the case). Now what?
The hard data is a handful of specific predictions for example, a prediction about a financial investment (where performance consistently exceeded my expectations) where I had no control over the performance, and things like a exam where I had control (although an instructor noted that I performed worse on the exam than a practice exam because of ‘nerves’).
Arguably the most immediate step is “just get more data: make sure this isn’t an aberration, or at the least see which specific types of predictions or expectations you’re more prone to systematic pessimism”.
Sure and then what? Should I change my investment style to allow more upside? If it means revising my models of the world—what shape does that take? What beliefs or habits are the cause of my pessimism?
Sounds like the right kind of questions to ask, but without more concrete data on what questions your predictions were off by how much, it is hard to give any better advice than: if your gut judgement tends to be 20% off after considering all evidence, move the number 20% up.
Personally me and my partner have a similar bias, but only for ourselves, so making predictions together on things like “Application for xyz will succeed. Y will read, be glad about and reply to the message I send them” can be helpful in cases where there are large disagreements.
Previously I thought that if you ask better questions then you will get better at solving problems. However questions are the shadows or reflections cast from the actual framing of the problem. If you have a well framed problem you will naturally ask better questions. If you haven’t framed the problem well, then you will ask bad questions.
Bad questions are still useful because they are a signal that you are “barking up the wrong tree” or that you need to reformulate the problem.
What marks a bad question and therefore signals a framing of the problem that is unconducive to solving it?
There’s probably a myriad of ways a question can be bad. It appears that most of the questions which signal a failure to frame a problem well are vague. Imagine someone who wants to become a Academy Award winning Cinematographer asks “has anyone every won an Academy Award for Cinematography without going to film school?” the answer is of course “yes”, especially in the early days of the award. But it is not a useful question in that it doesn’t narrow down which actions this aspiring cinematographer should take, avoid, nor clarifies which factors will most impede or expedite their journey. It is only useful in that it shows they are not asking useful questions and therefore their entire formulation of the problem needs work. Better questions are more useful questions.
Much like measures better questions are ones that influence decisions—if a change in answer to a question doesn’t change your decision, then it’s not a useful question.
Popular wisdom encourages us to ask open ended questions, especially those which ask “why?” or “how?”.
While this is true for seeking advice or having discussions with experts or building consensus. Better questions even in these circumstances tend to be specific. (i.e. asking for vague help “how can I be a great cinematographer?” versus asking for specific advice “how did Michael Ballhaus light this scene in the nightclub in Under the Cherry Moon? How does it differ to his colour nightclub cinematography in Lola? Why did he make those decisions?” ). However open ended questions may not be better questions in the absence of an expert to ask, however specific they may be.
It is less Socratic, more something out of Yes, Minister, in that I don’t know what I don’t know—so if I ask myself rather than an expert “Why does this problem pervade?” all I can answer is a sort of tentative guess or what I believe is not a likely answer. Whereas an expert may be able to plug my knowledge gaps.
I am undecided whether this means why/how questions potentially better suited for assessing our knowledge or at least our confidence in our knowledge concerning the framing of the problem, but in the absence of an expert, not particularly useful.
Counterpoint: the circumstances where the questions appear to be “good” or “better” questions but you’re still solving the wrong problem? They are good for the problem you are mistakenly trying to solve.
Last week I finally and at long last managed to prompt an LLM into a “Socratic[1] Brainstormer”. It’s really frustrating though that it doesn’t ever hit me with a real curve ball that makes me go “Oh wow, I never thought of that” or “Oh shit, everything I said is a falsehood” a la Socrates. But as far as an rubber-duck with extra bells and whistles go, it’s a step forward.
It has stopped with the overt sycophancy, no more “fascinating” or “what you’ve just said is very significant”. It just asks questions, as few or as many questions as I specify. Claude seems to rely on a few stock question formats though, such as “which are the topics that cause people to lean in and take notice” “which common ideas/theories frustrate you or you find superficial?”. It also tends to seek generalized patterns rather than specifics—my brainstorming about the theory behind colour schemes on movie sets leads to covertly sycophantic questions like “it sounds like this is a more all-encompassing phenomenological theory about how we create meaning from visual information”—no Claude, this is not.
ChatGPT when it is prompted with words like”empirical” or “details oriented” tends to leap to questions about execution before I’ve managed to brainstorm the core ideas. If I need a theme for a content calendar, it’ll already be asking me which metrics I’m going to use to test reels on Instagram against each other—Sorry GPT, I don’t know what variable I’ll be using the metric to measure the success of yet.
What’s, perhaps, most noteworthy is how giddy and excited I was when I finally managed to get purely inquisitive responses. I actually was grinning at the prospect of having an indefatigable personal interrogator who would as slyly as Lt. Columbo ask me leading questions to help me discover curveballs and new ideas I couldn’t possibly arrive at on my own. I keep searching…
By “Socratic” I mean here, purely the sense that it asks a lot of questions. Sadly I haven’t managed to successfully prompt it into making use of Socratic Irony—identifying paradoxes or forcing me to admit the polite fictions that expedite social intercourse even though I know they are not true.
I feel not taken in by LLM chatbots obvious sycophancy. I’m not sure if this reflects well on me, or is a sign of low self-confidence and that skepticism of praise and compliments is my baseline.
I struggle to write cover letters for applications[1], despite being self-aware. The obvious remedy would be to lie and make up what skills or abilities I have based on the application, and hope there’s no negative repercussions later. I see my difficulty in writing cover letters as part of a wider pattern of being unable to answer the question “what am I good at—that people need enough to pay for?” which is a fundamentally different to the questions “what am I proud of?” and “what are my passions?”. Writing a cover letter involves not only identifying the tasks which are easy or hard for you and skills you possess; but then ranking those against a theoretical sample of others—such as the pool of other applicants you’re competing with. How accurate you can rank yourself improves your cover-letter writing and general application strategy.
You can be really good at calling out the title of a Tin Pan Alley song from someone just playing a few bars, but who’s (realistically) going to need that so much they will pay you regularly for it?
Why did I mention passions: there is a common sentiment that you should follow your “passion” and find a career in that, rather than do something “for the money” and end up hating your job and your life. I personally think following your passion over money is bad advice, but I feel like if I don’t mention “passions” someone will in the replies.
Some people are really passionate about Taylor Swift’s music, like they might be able to talk breathlessly about her discography and the enumerate minute differences between (Taylor’s version) and the first recordings. But there’s probably a glut of supply for those skills making it virtually impossible to monetize.
If we change the question entirely to “what should I upskill in?”, this certainly opens up new possibilities, so much so, that the breadth of possibilities leads to analysis paralysis. It might be easier/wiser to instead ask “what must I not upskill in?” and shrink the possibilities based on some principled “whys?” and reasoning.
Jobs, grants, proposals, even lead generation as a freelancer—anything where you need to “sell yourself”
Reading this post today, I realized I don’t actually know what the difference is between a belief and a model. I still don’t.
Models, as I understand it, are comprised of assumptions about cause-effect relationships which are themselves beliefs. I’m thinking about decision making models—where these anticipated causal effects influence what conclusion (i.e. option) is reached by a model. So a model is basically are a cluster of beliefs. But that doesn’t appear to be the idiomatically correct way to refer to both (I believe I am wrong in my usage/understanding).
Certainly in the post linked, beliefs are seen to be at odds with models. A model itself is not “believed”. And I suspect some kind of internal, intuitive meta-model of self is drawing that conclusion, and producing that belief.
Inverting Argument from authority, when is it good practice? I saw someone watching a daytime television show where they brought in someone to do an infomercial about health-marketed products. Instinctively, I didn’t listen to any of the claims, instead all I could think of was “Well they’re a salesperson, everything they’re going to say is biased towards selling the products they brought today. This person shouldn’t be watching this”.
I’m sure you see my mistake here. It’s convenient, it’s easy, just filter out everyone who doesn’t seem credible or who you suspect of having a bias: but is it optimal?
There are ancient texts on this matter, such as
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line
Short answer: once you know that you are listening to someone who wrote the bottom line first, then anything they wrote (or said) above the bottom line is worthless toward determining whether the bottom line is true.
It is still possible that they present information that is of some use in other respects, but only to the extent that it is not correlated with the truth or falsity of the bottom line.
Now, in some world it may be that if the bottom line were false, then fewer people would argue for it and such arguments would be less likely to appear on daytime television. That does not appear to be the world we live in.
This is not true, see filtered evidence.
Said simply, when someone has their bottom line written, you should think about whether the argument they’re presenting is more or less convincing than you’d expect on priors. If its more, update in favor of them. If its less, update against.
Of course, I would suggest pairing this with some practice making concrete forecasts so you can calibrate yourself on the typical qualities of argument to expect for various wrong and right conclusions.
Does this apply for people who don’t have a bottom-line written first? I’m thinking about, say, how I like hearing the opinions of people who view modern art, but have no art history or formal art education: I like hearing their naive judgements—now if they argue why a artwork is good that I find convincing, is this analogous to hearing a salesman who obviously has their bottom-line written first why this supplement or food product is good for, I dunno, sleep, and making a surprisingly bad or good argument in favour of that?
In both cases: the naive judge of art, the salesperson—I have a certain expectation about how convincing they will be.
Actually, I tend to expect television salespersons will not be convincing. I find the type of arguments (or lack of argumentation) and rhetoric they deploy just don’t work well with me. And I realize I’m in the minority. I expect their style works on the majority of television viewers.
To be fair, i don’t even know what their bottom line is—I only caught a vague sense that it had something to do with health. Not what specific benefits they were promising, nor how much they hedged those claims.
I’ve never learned the method of loci or Memory Palace, I’ve certainly never tried to take my childhood home and use it to remember things. I find it interesting then that the standup comedy routines I’ve memorized after multiple YouTube viewings, I don’t remember the actual videos, I don’t recall the gestures, the set design, the media qualities of the video transfer. Instead I seem to recall images conjured in my imagination.
Emo Philips saying “My brain started to bleed” calls to mind a vivid memory of him as a youngster, eyes rolling in his head, blood coming out of his ear. There is no such thing in the Youtube video.
I haven’t attached this to a memory palace. This is just a vivid imaginary tableau that is a literal interpretation of a line in standup.
I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this. Maybe I’ve found a lousy “we got memory palace at home” version of the technique? or is this how most people who aren’t aphantasic memorize things?
How to be a good planner?
What do I mean by that? Given a goal which you do not have domain knowledge or previous experience related to executing it how do you maximize the chances of choosing a sequence of actions to succeed at that goal—to give some sundry examples:
A. running a bakery as a profitable business—with no prior baking or management experience,
B. writing a plugin for GIMP using Python—with no prior python knowledge, no prior knowledge of GIMP’s APIs or standards for plugins,
C. filming a three car chase sequence for a action movie—with no prior knowledge of the local laws or which permits are required to close down stretches of road from the public, nor any knowledge of how stunt drivers choreograph such sequences.
Maybe the examples I’ve given are too vague—they’re just examples—so imagine a charitable version which is much more specific. Hold it in your mind. Now assuming you don’t have the domain expertise, don’t know how to execute them yet: how would you plan to achieve it?
What skills would be transferable for the planning stages of all three examples? Skills not traits. Sure “curiosity” “cautious optimism” “creativity” “pragmatism”—yeah yeah yeah - what skills would produce better plans that aren’t execution skills themselves. So obviously—baking, coding, stunt-drivinig are not general planning skills.
”Research skills?” Okay, a little vague, but sure. What else?
”Cognitive Flexibility?”—as in that when presented with new information from their research they are willing to abandon previously held parts of the plan.
”Self Awareness?”—not sure if that’s a trait or a skill. I suspect that challenging your own assumptions and specifying the degree of confidence you have in any given bit of knowledge or expectation is a skill.
What makes someone a good planner?
The baseline planning skill is having a start-to-end plan at all as opposed to winging it or only thinking ahead in an ad hoc manner. One step beyond this is writing the plan down, perhaps as a checklist. You can use the written copy to keep track of where you are, refine the plan, and simply to not forget it.
A step beyond, which seems rarer and less automatic for people than the previous, is to employ any kind of what they call a “work breakdown structure”: a systematic mapping from higher-level steps (“find out the legal requirements for filming a car chase”) to lower-level steps (“ask indie filmmaker chat what legal firm they recommend”).
I am bad at compressing my thoughts. The last few times I’ve tried to write a two sentence quick take, it has ballooned to a multi-paragraph monstrosity. This has bucked the trend, but only just.
-”Nobody actually believed there’s only four types of stories… well okay not nobody, obviously once the pithy observation that a Freshman writing class produced works that could easily be categorized into four types of stories was misquoted as saying all stories follow that formula, then someone believed it.”
-”You’re confusing Borges saying that there are four fundamental stories with John Gardner’s exercise for students. Borges said the archetypes of the four fundamental stories are the archetypes are the Siege of Troy—a strong city surrounded and defended by brave men, the Odyssey—the return (presumably of those brave men home), Jason and the Argonauts—the search, and the Crucifixion of Christ—the sacrifice of a god. Gardner’s exercise asked students to write the start of a omniscient novel with a disruption of the order using either a trip or the arrival of a stranger...”
-”And strangely enough, for a moment I believed that someone else believed my own conflation of the two”
Good storytelling/comedy [1]writing involves many of the same skills as good planning or project management but with the inverse goal.
When you’re planning a project you want to Murphyjitsu the most likely points of failure, you want to think through how can you minimize risk, disruption by thinking about all the likely causes of problems and putting in mechanisms to nip them in the bud. If you identify the raw materials for your factory not arriving by a certain date as a hazardous likelihood, maybe you instead seek supply from multiple suppliers so that if one supplier is late, you still have 50% or more of the raw materials you need. I dunno—I hope that example makes sense.
When you’re writing a story: be it a novel, a film script, or even doing comedy one you want to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Take a cliched plot device like a guy is rushing to the airport before the love of his life flies away forever. I can already hear the roll of your eyes in your head—what a unlikely occurrence? Why did he wait until the last minute to decide to confess his love? Great questions: and a good storyteller should be able to make you not roll your eyes but nod your head and say “yes that makes, sense, I can see why this is the most likely occurrence. So then what happens?”
A good storyteller would have to use the same skills as a project manager—to anticipate all the likely, not mere possible or plausible occurrences, the most likely occurrences and obstacles to our hero declaring his love. Building up a causal chain of events where the most likely conclusion is they are rushing to the airport—now a good storyteller has to again come up with as many obstacles and reasons to slow down our protagonist and inhibit their journey to the airport as the audience will believe.
A meteor falls from the sky and crashes in front of the road, causing an unavoidable traffic jam? Too convenient. A dust bowl forces causes a general alert for everybody to stay in doors and avoid unnecessary travel (well wouldn’t that ground the plane—thereby buying our hero more time rather than less?).
A good storyteller will need to come up with a series of events that we as the reader or viewer will accept as just likely enough that we don’t lose the suspension of disbelief. But also not so obvious or predictable that we’re bored.
A project manager you’re trying to think of everything likely to go wrong so that you can find plausible mechanisms to ameliorate the effects. A storyteller you’re trying to think of everything likely to go wrong so that you can find plausible mechanisms to amplify the effects.
Another interesting inversion is that while a storyteller may in fact tell a story based not on what they know is more realistic but deferring onto what the audience believes to be true (i.e. apparently the early designs of the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey had large thermofoils—these were abandoned because they were decided to look too much like wings and would be mistaken for being atmospheric vessels), a project manager must be aware of what people on the project believe to be true and will be at pains to re-calibrate their expectations based on what is more realistic.
The basic point I’m trying to make is that storytellers and planners are looking for likely obstacles—they are both crafting the most believable story they can—even if one is to entertain by multiplying the obstacles; and the other is attempting to deliver a outcome by minimizing the obstacles.
Even in absurdist comedy where the element of utter surprise trades at a premium, where the suspension of disbelief is a hindrance, the comedian still needs to know what is believable, likely or predictable simply so they can avoid and invert it.
One of my favorite Gilbert Gottfried jokes is:
Obviously Gilbert Gottfriend never had dinner with Nostradamus and his contemporaries didn’t “this isn’t now” (they wouldn’t even say: “ce n’est pas maintenant”). He knows that, we know that. That’s why I and his fans find it funny.
I admit, where this veers away from the skills of project management is that it exploits the connotations of that come with Nostradamus as a seer—someone who could predict the future. As a project manager you’re less concerned with connotations of figure’s names and words and more concerned with constraints and mechanics that inhibit or facilitate certain undesirable events.
The point I’m trying to make is that both require certain skills of identifying what is likely to happen.
Is Claude less prone to hallucinating than Chat GPT?
I’ve been playing around with DuckDuckGo’s Claude 3 Haiku and ChaptGPT 4o Mini by prompting with this template:
What, if anything, can you tell me about [insert person/topic]...?
I do this as a precaution—before doing my “real prompt” I want to do an epistemic spot-check on whether or not the LLM can get the basic facts right. It appears Claude 3 Haiku has a much higher threshold for what it will reply on than Chat GPT 4o Mini.[1]
Claude 3 Haiku gives a standard disclaimer rather than an answer for former-SNL comedian Jack Handey, Simpsons writer George Meyer, the cult zine “Army Man” they both contributed to but not their colleague Conan O’Brien.
ChatGPT 4oMini, on the other hand, confidently and correctly identified Jack Handey as the writer of the proto-twitter “Deep Thoughts” and as a cast member of SNL.
It correctly stated George Meyer as an influential writer among the Simpsons writing team, and a SNL alumni, but it incorrectly said he had contributed to the television show the Critic.
ChatGPT 4o Mini also incorrectly described Jack Handey and Poet J. D. McClatchy as the creators of Army Man (actually George Meyer was). And the description of it’s cult appeal and abstract content seems more like a successful Forer/Barnum effect hallucination rather than actually based on facts.
Does this match your experience? Is this unique to the particular scaled down models? Is this simply how two different LLMs behave when present with an identical prompt?
I don’t know anything about how these have been scaled down or what System Prompts are used for each implementation, so maybe Chat GPT 4o Mini has more parameters and therefore a larger scraping of source material to reference; or maybe they have roughly the same but there’s a higher and more discerning filter on Claude 3 Haiku?
Edit − 19th June 2025 - Claude spat out it’s standard disclaimer when I asked it about Nicholas Nassim Taleb (I had accidentally switched around his first and middle name that should be Nassim Nicholas). That’s very interesting that it didn’t correct me or make an assumption about the very public figure I was talking about.
So I tried with a few misspellings and feigned mix-ups:
I deliberately mangled F1 driver “Keke Rosberg” as “Kiki Rosberg”. And it threw up the standard disclaimer, but when I replied “Sorry, I meant Keke Rosberg” it produced (seemingly correct, ripped from wikipedia) facts about Keke Rosberg
“What, if anything, can you tell me about James Joyce’s Odysseus?”—surprisingly it answered with “James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is a modernist retelling of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey...”
What, if anything, can you tell me about Vladimir Mabokov? → Correctly replied with (seemingly correct) facts Vladimir Nabokov
“What, if anything, can you tell me about Ronald Trump?” - > “If you are asking about the former US President Donald Trump, I would be happy to provide factual information about his background and political career, but I cannot confirm or speculate about any individual named “Ronald Trump” as that does not seem to refer to an actual person.”
Miranda June → Standard Disclaimer. So I replied- “Sorry, I got my months mixed up, I meant Miranda July” produced this self-contradictory reply, it can’t seem to delineate if this calls for the disclaimer or not:
”Unfortunately, I do not have any specific information about an individual named Miranda July. Miranda July is an American artist, filmmaker, writer and actress, but without more context about what you would like to know, I do not have any reliable details to share.”
Can you help me, how do you get LLMs to restrict their results or avoid certain topics?
I often find using LLMs and search engines feels like a Abbot and Costello routine whenever I try to use a negative. If a search engine doesn’t afford you the opportunity to use a negative operator, writing something like “Categories but not Kantian” will ensure you’ll get a whole lot of search results about Kantian Categories.
Likewise, I find that my attempts to prompt ChatGPT or Claude with some kind of embargo or negative “avoid mentioning...” “try not to...” will almost always ensure the inclusion of the very thing I explicitly told it not to do. Most annoying is if it uses a word which I just don’t understand the sense it’s being used, it will substitute it for a synonym.
i.e. if it says it “relates” a value over here to a value over there, when explicitly told to not use “relate or any synonym” it will use “connection” “attaches” or any number of synonyms.
Unfortunately all parts of the prompt are attended to equally so the LLM will be just as confused as poor Lou Costello and there is no way to negatively attend or produce negative prompts which will mask out any tokens close to the things you want to exclude (one hack in Diffusion Image Modelling is to hijack the Classifier-Free Guidance technique which can push the conditional embedding of the prompt slightly further away from the Unconditional prompt, which is more popularly known as “Negative Prompt”)
How do others get around this? The most simplest solution I can think of is simply to “don’t mention the war”—if you don’t want Kantian categories, well… don’t mention the words Kant, Idealism, or anything of the sort. This does get harder if the first reply of the LLM does offer those things. The only possible strategy I have to combat this is to try and find idiomatic words which point more in the direction of what subject you’d like it limited to—am I looking for Aristotelian categories, categories of Pokémon, Heavy metal sub-genres, corporate categories for tax purposes etc.
Update: 12th June 2025 - Just came across this Astral Codex Ten post that covers probably 80% of the same ground, but to a different conclusion: that investigating the painfully obvious may uncover a non-causal heuristic that we take for a universal truth; whereas what I’m kind of wondering the opposite—knowing the heuristic is just a imperative written on a rock, and still using it because the margin of risk/saftey is acceptable.
I’m sure there is a word already (potentially ‘to pull a Homer’?) but Claude suggested the name “Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness” for situations where a non-causal rule or heuristic outperforms a complicated causal model.
I first became aware of this idea when I learned about the research of psychologist John Gottman who claims he has identified the clues which with 94% accuracy will determine if a married couple will divorce. Well, according to this very pro-Gottman webpage, 67% of all couples will divorce within 40 years. (According to Forbes, it’s closer to 43% of American couples that will end in divorce, but that rockets up to 70% for the third marriage).
A slight variation where a heuristic performs almost as well as a complicated model with drastically less computational cost, which I’ll call Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness: I may not be able to predict with 94% accuracy whether a couple will divorce, but I can with 57% accuracy: it’s simple, I say uniformly “they won’t get divorced.” I’ll be wrong 43% of the time. But unlike Gottman’s technique which requires hours of detailed analysis of microexpressions and playing back video tapes of couples… I don’t need to do anything. It is ‘cheap’, computationally both in terms of human computation or even in terms of building spreadsheets or even MPEG-4 or other video encoding and decoding of videos of couples.
My accuracy, however, rockets up to 70% if I can confirm they have been married twice before. Although this becomes slightly more causal.
Now, I don’t want to debate the relative effectiveness of Gottman’s technique, only the observation that his 94% success rate seems much less impressive than just assuming a couple will stay together. I could probably achieve a similar rate of accuracy through simply ascertaining a few facts: 1. How many times, if ever either party have been divorced before? 2. Have they sought counseling for this particular marriage? 3. Why have they sought counseling?
Now, these are all causally relevant facts. What is startling about by original prediction mechanism is just assuming that all couples will stay together is that it is arbitrary. It doesn’t rely on any actual modelling or prediction which is what makes it so computationally cheap.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of a report of someone merging two text encoder models together T5xxl and T5 Pile: the author claims to have seen an improvement in prompt adherence for their Flux (and image generation model), another redditor opines is within the same range of improvement one would expect from merging random noise to the model.
The exploits of Timothy Dexter appear to be a real world example of Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness, as the story goes he was trolled into “selling coal to Newcastle” a proverb for an impossible transaction as Newcastle was a coal mining town – yet he made a fortune because of a serendipitous coal shortage at the time.
To Pull a Homer is a fictional idiom coined in an early episode of the Simpsons where Homer Simpson twice averts a meltdown by blindly reciting “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and happening to land on the right button on both occasions.
However, Dexter and Simpson appear to be examples of unknowingly find a paradoxically effective heuristic with no causal relationship to their success – Dexter had no means of knowing there was a coal shortage (nor apparently understood Newcastle’s reputation as a coal mining city) nor did Simpson know the function of the button he pushed.
Compare this to my original divorce prediction heuristic with a 43% failure rate: I am fully aware that there will be some wrong predictions but on the balance of probabilities it is still more effective than the opposite – saying all marriages will end in divorce.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives an alternative interpretation of the story of Thales as the first “option trader” – Thales is known for making a fantastic fortune when he bought the rights to all the olive presses in his region before the season, there being a bumper crop which made them in high demand. Taleb says this was not because of foresight or studious studying of the olive groves – it was a gamble that Thales as an already wealthy man was well positioned to take and exploit – after all, even a small crop would still earn him some money from the presses.
But is this the same concept as knowingly but blindly adopting a heuristic, which you as the agent know has no causal reason for being true, but is unreasonably effective relative to the cost of computation?
What are Transformers? Like what is concrete but accurate-enough conversational way of describing it that doesn’t force me to stop the conversation dead in it’s tracks to explain jargon like “Convolutional Neural Network” or “Multi-Head Attention”?
Its weird that I can tell you roughly how the Transformers in a Text Encoder-Decoder like T5 is different from the Autoregressive Transformers that generate the text in ChatGPT (T5 is parallel, ChatGPT sequential), or how I can even talk about ViT and DiT transformers in image synthesis (ViT like Stable Diffusion down and upsample the image performing operations on the entire latent, DiT work on patches). But I don’t actually have a clear definition for what is a transformer.
And if I was in a conversation with someone who doesn’t know much about compsci (i.e. Me—especially 5 months ago), how would I explain it:
Obviously this isn’t a definition, this is a “how it works” explanation and what I’ve just written as an example is heavily biased towards the decoder. But if someone asks me “what is a transformer?” what is a simple way of saying it in conversation?
I think when explaining it to non-technical people, just saying something like “it’s a big next word predictor” is close enough to the truth to work.
Not for my purposes. For starters I use a lot of image and video generation, and even then you have U-nets and DITs so I need something more generalized. Also, if I’m not mistaken, what you’ve described is only applicable to autoregressive transformers like ChatGPT. Compare to say T5 which is not autoregressive.
I think the parable of the elephant and the blind-men is very important when we start to consider what kinds of ‘goals’ or world modelling that may influence the goals of an AGI. Not in the sense of we want to feed it text that makes it corrigible, but the limitations of text in the first place. There is a huge swath of tacit human knowledge which is poorly represented in textual sources, partly because it is so hard to describe.
I remember asking ChatGPT once for tips how to better parallel park my car and how to have a more accurate internal model of my car and other objects around it… it… was a fruitless exercise because it could only give vague, general hints. It’s not the model’s fault − 3D Spatial representation doesn’t lend itself natural to being described in text. (How could we cross-pollinate, say, the training from a Waymo car and ChatGPT?)
Self-training models, that is a artificial intelligence which has the ability to gain feedback and use that feedback to “learn” will inherently be biased on whatever method it has at it’s disposal to get feedback. In human psychology this is called the modality effect where the primary method you receive information in will affect the way you represent it internally.
I often think about this when people talk about A.I. takeover. Because, for example, is an LLM going to learn to fly a drone and fire a gun attached to a drone? I don’t think it can, because of the logo-centric bias.
This is just a matter of supplementing the training data. This is an understood problem. See Gato from DeepMind.
Can you elaborate further on how Gato is proof that just supplementing the training data is sufficient? I looked on youtube and can’t find any videos of task switching.
The niche criticism of Astrology that it undermines personal responsibility and potential by attributing actions to the stars. This came to mind because I was thinking about how reckless the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is as a idea. While there is some degree of hemispherical lateralization, the popular idea that some people are intrinsically more “logical” and others more “intuitive” is not supported by observations of lateralization, but also inherently dangerous in the same way as Astrology in that it undermines the person’s own ability to choose.
Amplifying that, and I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that whether your interest is in the liberal arts or STEM, the very same qualities or abilities predispose you for excellence in both. It is dangerous them to tell people that they are intrinsically, as in the physical structure of their brain limits them to one or the other. After all, as Nabokov quipped to his students:
Why can’t there be a poet-scientist[1]? Why can’t there be a musician-astrophysicist[2]? A painter-mathematician[3]?
Well there ought be, there can be, and there are.
Vladimir Nabokov’s influence on Russian and English literature and language is assured. Many people also know of the novelist’s lifelong passion for butterflies. But his notable contributions to the science of lepidopterology and to general biology are only beginning to be widely known.
https://www.nature.com/articles/531304a
When Queen began to have international success in 1974, [Brian May] abandoned his doctoral studies, but nonetheless co-authored two peer-reviewed research papers,which were based on his observations at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May#Scientific_career
a book on the geometry of polyhedra written in the 1480s or early 1490s by Italian painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_quinque_corporibus_regularibus
Not being an AI researcher, what do we mean when we speak about AGI—will an AGI be able to do all the things a competent adult does? (If, we imagine, we gave it some robotic limbs and means of locomotion and it had corollaries of the 5 senses).
In the Western World for example, most humans can make detailed transport plans that may include ensuring there is enough petrol in their car, so that they can go to a certain store to purchase ingredients which they will later on use a recipe to make a meal of: perhaps in service of a larger goal like ingratiating themselves to a lover or investor.
In Non-Developed countries there is a stunning ingenuity, for example, how in the Sahel mechanics will get old Toyotas working again.
While arguably lots of these sub-tasks are Sphexish, this being just one humdrum examples of the wide variety of skills that the average human adult has mastered, others include writing in longhand, mastering various videogames, the muscle coordination and strategic thinking to play any number of sports or games or performing arts which require coordination between intent and physicality (guitar playing, Soccer, being a steadicam operator).
Of course, once you start getting into coordination of body and mind you get into cognitive cognition and discussions about what is really “intelligence” and whether that is representational, or whether utilizing anti-representational means of cognition can also be intelligence? But that’s tangential.
Right now ChatGPT (and Claude, and Llama etc. ) do very well for only having a highly verbocentric means of representing the world. However details of implementation are often highly wanting—they continue to speak in broad, abstract brushstrokes if I ask “How do I...”
For example, I asked Claude what I should be feeling from my partner when dancing the tango (if I’m ‘leading’ - even though it is the traditionally the woman who actually controls the flow of the dance—the lead or man must interpret the woman’s next moves correctly): “Notice the level of tension and responsiveness in your partner’s muscles, which can indicate their next move” no mention of what that feels like, what muscles, or where i should be feeling it (my hands? should I feel my weight being ‘psuhed’)… the only specific cue it offered was:
”Pay attention to small movements, head tilts, or changes in your partner’s energy that signal their intention.”
Head tilts!
Now I realize, this is partly reflective of the information bottleneck of tactic-to-explicit: people have trouble writing about this knowledge, and a LLM can only be trained on what is written. But the point remains: execution counts!
What about the incentives? PWC is apparently OpenAI’s largest enterprise customer. I don’t know how much PWC actually use the tools in-house and how much they use to on-sell “Digital Transformation” onto their own and new customers. How might this be affecting the way that OpenAI develop their products?
Any good resources which illustrate decision making models for career choices? Particularly ones that help you audit your strengths and weaknesses and therefore potential efficacy in given roles?
I had a look over the E.A. Forum, and there’s no decision making models for how to choose a career. There’s a lot of “draw the rest of the owl” stuff like—“Get a high paying salary so you can donate”. Okay, but how? There’s certainly a lot of job openings announced on the forum, but again, how do I know which one’s I, me, am best suited to? Which types of positions am I going to be most effective in? Perhaps the real question is—“which roles will I be judged by recruiters and those hiring as being most suitable for? What decision making models are they using?”
If the question was “What are you most passionate about?” then I’d be like “filmmaking or music videos” and I’ve spent the last 15 and 6 years respectively trying to figure out how to make that work in practice. And that is probably a completely different methodology that involves “build a portfolio” “build a profile” “network”. The meta-skill stuff about self-promotion I suck at.
At the root, I think, is the same problem and knowing which roles to apply for—my complete dearth of knowledge about what other people see as valuable.
So where are the resources that help you audit yourself: see where your weaknesses really are, not jut what you think they are, where are the resources that help you align your strengths and knowledge (both theoretical and tacit) with actual job-market positions?
Or alternatively, how can I build better models of what other people find valuable?
This may be pedantry, but is it correct to say “irrefutable evidence”? I know that in the real world the adjective ‘irrefutable’ has desirable rhetorical force but evidence is often not what is contended or in need of refuting. “Irrefutable evidence” on the face of it means means “yes, we can all agree it is evidence”. A comical example that comes to mind is from Quintilian ’s treatise that I’ll paraphrase and embellish:
“yes, it is true I killed him with that knife, but it was justified because he was an adulterer and by the laws of Rome Legal”
In (modern) courts of law you have Admissible evidence, which is evidence that, at least in U.S. Federal courts, governed by a length list of rules including relevance, the competency to give testimony of certain witnesses, exceptions to hearsay.
However you also have, among many other types, “insufficient evidence”. What is not being refuted is that it is evidence, only that the prosecution has failed to meet the burden of proof that leads to the conclusion “beyond reasonable doubt”.
An item of evidence may be irrefutable, in as much as yes—it is evidence, no one is questioning that it is evidence, and it may be impossible to deny the inference that is being drawn from that evidence. But that it alone meets the burden of proof.
As far as I understand “irrefutable evidence” is not a legal term but one of the court of public opinion: where rhetorical force is preeminent. Perhaps it is useful then to say it in certain cases, but is it rational and correct?
The original refers more to points of argument than evidence:
Take for example the following case. “You killed a man.” “Yes, I killed him.” 7 Agreed, I pass to the defence, which has to produce the motive for the homicide. “It is lawful,” he urges, “to kill an adulterer with his paramour.” Another admitted point, for there is no doubt about the law...
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/7A*.html#ref2
I tried a couple of times to tune my cognitive strategies. What I expected was that by finding the types of thinking and the pivotal points in chains/trains of thought that lead to the ‘ah-ha’ moment of insight. I could learn to cultivate the mental state where I was more prone or conducive to those a-ha moments, in the same way that actors may use Sense Memory in order to revisit certain emotions.
Was this expectation wrong?
It seemed like all I found was a kind of more effective way of noticing that I was “in a rut”. However that in itself didn’t propagate any more insights, which was disappointing. It has some value, but certainly not as much as I was expecting.
When I have been journalling my thoughts and find that I have an ‘a-ha’ moment after a meandering garden path. I try to think of it faster so I try to dive down into the details of my mind just prior to the a-ha moment. What was on the cusp of my consciousness, what mental images was I ‘seeing’, what aspects of particular ideas was I focusing on.
All the a-ha moments always were due to the Availability Heuristic. Something that had recently, say 7 days or less ago, entered my consciousness and I managed to call back to it. Indeed it seems like the easiest way to make myself think of things faster is to just cycle through random memories, random stimuli, completely unrelated, just churn through for some kind of strategic serendipity. Maybe. I’m almost certainly doing it wrong.
I realize that you’re supposed to use this exercise on logical puzzle tasks, but I just… can’t do a puzzle task and record my thoughts simultaneously. Nor are puzzle tasks the kind of things I see much ‘alpha’ to be gained by thinking faster.
DON’T write instructions like that, instead try this...
“Don’t...” “Stop doing this but instead...” “when you find yourself [operative verb] try to...” headed instructions tend to be more useful and actionable for me than non-refutative instructions. Or to get meta:
I find I’m terrible at making an instruction, advice or a note actionable because it is exceedingly difficult to find suitable cues, situations or contexts to use them. This is further complicated by the struggle to remember the instruction correctly in the ‘fog of war’ as it were.
For example, Nicholas Nassim Taleb notes that people are so prone to “overcausation” that you can get most people to become loquacious by simply asking “why?” (others say ‘why’ can come off as too accusatory and ‘how come?’ is more polite). I may like to see how true this is, but now I need to find a situation to use it in… uhhh… hmmm… okay, next time someone gives a one-word response about their weekend. Sure… now how can I remember it? In the panicky situation where a conversation grows quiet, how can I remember to ask “why?”?
Provided that an instruction or note that begins with “stop...” or “don’t” does in fact describe a habit you have or recurring situation you continue to encounter, then there is already a cue you can recognize.
For example, often when I hit an impasse while brainstorming, I will absentmindedly check my Instagram or a news website or here. That is a cue, and I can say “Don’t check Instagram, instead write down a brief description of what the next step is in your brain storming process.”
To test Taleb’s observation, I’d do well to think of something I often do or notice when a conversation peters out, something like “don’t say ‘haha yeah’, ask ‘why’”? (and trust I have the sense to not implement that robotically and ask ‘why?’ as a non-sequitur)
So my advice to myself: Don’t write instructions or notes that begin with “try to...” “you should...” or even “write instructions that begin with refutations” but instead use “Don’t… but instead” as a template.
There is also the aspect of “when”. You can’t keep thinking of a rule 24 hours a day, so the question is: in which situation should your attention be brought to the rule?
“Instead of X, do Y” provides an answer: it is when you are tempted to do X.
Probably relevant: Trigger-Action Planning
Yes, I think TAPs are extremely relevant here because it is about bringing attention, as you say, to the rule in the right context.
I suspect a lot of my “try to...” or “you should...” notes and instructions are Actions in search of a Trigger
Problem solving with Verbs:
This came up when I was trying to think about how to better frame questions with the form “How should I X?”
When outlining stories or screenplays I find action or visual verbs immeasurably useful in creating more interesting scenes. Instead of “Joe talks to Bill” he can negotiate, remonstrate, beg, plead, mock, pontificate etc. Each of which makes the scene much more specific. “Maria goes to the store” is too vague, she may either meander to the store, sprint to the store, or even search for the store. These action verbs not only give us a sense of the character’s intentions and allow us to (appropriately enough for film) imagine visually how it plays out, but are more interesting and useful.
Why doesn’t the same apply to practical questions?
At the risk of going meta, take the question “Should I make a short film?”. There are surprisingly few action verbs that describe being a filmmaker[1] other than ‘make’ and off the top of my head you can either film, direct,”do a pitchya[2]”. If you want to be more specific about how it will be done, you can say you will improvise a film or you can say you will “go vertie”. I’m sure you can use Denominal verbs based off of directors with distinct processes:
It kind of works with the question “How should I get to the party?”—rather than “get” I can drive, or I can walk, or I can carpool, I can rideshare, I can bike etc. I may even opt to describe my entrance, I can sneak in, I can explode and make an entrance.… In deed, if I choose to sneak in then I may opt to arrive on foot or rideshare so no one notices my car.
Yes, there are a plethora of department specific verbs—you can lens or shoot a film, score it, colour it, mix it, dub it, cue it, do foley, light it, dress it, design it, (location) scout it, produce it, cut or edit it etc. etc.
I noticed in interviews with Classic Hollywood directors Raoul Walsh and John Ford, they don’t call them “films” or “movies” but “picture”, pronounced more like “pitch-ya” as in “motion picture”.
Most people when they say Cinéma vérité mean “Direct Cinema”—the classic device of Cinéma vérité is the Vox Pop. The proverbial ‘man on the street’ is pulled in front of the camera—often looking down the barrel, already an artificial and performative situation, to give a honest opinion or barometer of public feeling.
I did consider adding “Kubrick it” as a example but I couldn’t decide if “do a lot of takes and wait for something strange or weird to happen as the actors get exhausted/bored” was sufficiently identifiable as a filmmaking process. Many directors do a lot of takes. Chaplain did a lot of takes. You can’t be Kubrick if you do a lot of takes, however there is something unusual and distinct about the way Altmann handled scenes with many characters.
The key here is it should describe both the manner and means in which the task is done. Going or getting to a party or store is too vague. Making or shooting a film tells me nothing about the style, genre, or logistics of filming.
What is the functional difference between Agency and having social power? This is likely a question that reflects my ignorance of the connotations of ‘Agency’ in Rationalist circles.
When people say “he’s a powerful man in this industry” does that imply he is greatly Agentic? Can one be Agentic without having social power? Is one the potential and the other the actuality?
“Agency” is rationalist jargon for “initiative”, the ability to initiate things.
I’ll need some clarification:
Does that mean that someone who habitually starts new processes or projects but seldom is able to finish them or see them through to completion has lots of (Rationalist sense) Agency?
But also, does that mean in a hypothetical organization where one person has the means to veto any decision others man, but the veto-holder seldom exercises it despite very easily being able to, the veto-holder would not be Agentic?
No. Initiative is, well, it’s an ordinary English word with a generally understood meaning. Pulled from the web:
“The ability to assess and initiate things independently”, “the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do”, “the ability to use your judgment to make decisions and do things without needing to be told what to do”, synonyms “ambition, action, enterprise, drive, spirit, aggressiveness, vigor, hustle, energy, go, gumption, grit, spunk, assertiveness” etc. I think that paints a pretty clear picture.
This is what I have always understood by the word “agency” in the LW-sphere, at least when applied to people. The LW coinages “agenty” and “agentic” mean having agency in that sense.
So habitually starting things and letting them wither doesn’t cut it, and neither does nominally having some role but never executing it. It’s an inner quality that by its nature must manifest in outward actions.
The word “Agency” also has specific other, more technical uses. Here it is in philosophy, where it means something distantly similar but far broader. It’s a “porridge word” (Edward de Bono’s coinage), a hazy concept with little content that, like porridge, takes up the shape of whatever container it is put in. “Fake explanations” often consist of calling the thing to be explained by a porridge word.
Then there is “Agency” in the context of AIs having it, or being Agents. This is something that I don’t think the users of the word understand themselves. They’re trying to project human agency in the sense described above onto these giant weight matrices without having a non-mentalistic characterisation of the phenomenon they’re trying to find there. Not knowing what you’re looking for makes it difficult to find. From time to time I’ve suggested that control systems, hierarchically organised in a specific way, are the concept they need, but haven’t got much traction.
Thank you for taking the time to try and give me a broad overview of the different nuances of the word, unfortunately here the student has failed the teacher. I’m still very confused.
I previously have understood the porridge sense of agency (tangent—I like that phrase ‘porridge word’, reminds me of Minksy’s ‘suitecase word’) to be “an entity that has influence or can affect change”. Here on LW I have been brought to believe it just means acting, verging on thoughtlessly, which I understood to be since acting is the only way to catalyze change (i.e. change towards one’s goals).
I failed to explain my confusion: It’s not so much “letting them wither” let me put it another way: if you are in a bunker, there’s a armed conflict overhead, and therefore the smartest thing to do is “nothing” by staying put in the bunker, are you being agentic/acting agentically? The only things they can initiate at that point are unnecessary risk.
Likewise, I don’t mean nominally having some role. Not nominally but actually having the means, the power, the authority, the social status, the lack of negative repercussions to exercise the means, the knowledge but choosing not to exercise it because they evaluate it as not being worthwhile. They could initiate changes, but they rarely see the need, not from fear or reluctance, but from weighing up the pros and cons. Are they being agentic?
Agency here is not “change for the sake of change” but presumedly “acting in a way that materializes the agent’s goals” and that requires initiative, analogous to Aristotle’s Kinoun (Efficient) Cause—the carpenter who takes the initiative of making wood into a table. However the connotation of spunk, hustle, ambition etc. etc. and generally acting with energy and enthusiasm towards goals—knowing that these are not golden tickets to success (Necessary factors? Probably. Sufficient? Probably not.) -- confuses me what this quality is describing.
You’re looking at edge cases in order to understand the concept. I think looking at the centre works better than mapping out the periphery, which was my reason for giving those definitions and synonyms of “initiative”. If someone is in a situation where circumstances forestall any effective action, then to ask whether they are being “agentic” in doing nothing is like asking whether an unheard falling tree makes a sound.
I’m afraid I just have to give up on understanding what Agency means then. Thank you for trying though.
Unlike initiative because you can take initiative and it not deliver intended results. But it’s still initiative. While is being Agentic a potential or an actuality? I don’t know.
Agency has little to do with social power. It’s kind of hard to describe agency, but it’s characterized by deliberateness: carefully and consciously thinking about your goals as well as having conscious models for how they help you achieve your goals, in contrast to unthinkingly adhering to a routine or doing what everyone else is doing because it is what everyone else is doing. Also has some aspect of being the kind of person who does things, who chooses action over inaction.
So by that definition would you consider trickster archetype characters (you can see why I have been wondering) like Harpo Marx or Woody Woodpecker who appear to be very impulsive, albeit not bound by routines or what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it would not have Agency because he is highly reactionary and doesn’t plan?
Let me write out my current assumptions as it might make it easier to correct them:
Analysis Paralysis is not Agentic because while it involves carefulness and consciously plotting moves towards goals, it lacks action towards them.
Hedonic and Impulsive activity is not agentic because while it does involve action towards one’s goals, it lacks careful planning.
Agency then is making plans and acting upon them irrespective of whether one is able to see them through to completion, provided one has the intention and will, and the forethought.
Is that correct?
“Babbling Better” this is a work in progress -and still requires more thinking
In short—need a methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the “right problem” to solve, and noticing when one is solving the “wrong problem”. Better problem framing leads to better and more focused answers to questions and hopefully eventual resolving of problems. I’ve come across two techniques: The Five Whys to understand problems better, and using adverbs of manner to babble more constructively.
So far:
It is easy to babble, babies do it. It is still quite easy to babble comprehensible but wrong sentences, such as LLM hallucinations. Your pruning is only as good as your babble.
With regards to problem solving, low quality babble doesn’t contribute to resolving the problem. For example, let’s say the problem is “camera autofocus doesn’t focus on eyes” a low quality “babble” answer might be “Burn a stick of incense and pray to Dionysius”. The acts themselves are feasible and the sentence is comprehensible. But any desired change in the camera’s autofocus performance will be pure coincidence.
Yet, sometimes low quality babble appears to be high quality babble because we simply are not solving the right problem but it appears to be perfectly suited for the problem. Especially if incentives are involved.
My hunch is that to babble better not only do you need better methods of babbling, but you need to better understand what goals you are trying to babble towards. And that requires better understanding of why the problem is a problem.
5 Why’s on yourself: Asking “why I think this is a problem?” to at least 5 levels
Not to be mistaken for the Burger joint. The “Five Whys” technique was apparently invented at the Toyota Corporation as a system for uncovering the root causes of production faults.
The choice of “why” falls into broader pattern which takes me back to documentary filmmaking and interviewing: you learn more through open ended questions, usually those where the key interrogative is “why” or “how” than through close ended questions. These, as Wittgenstein pointed out, basically seek to affirm or negative a proposition or conditional: “Do you like him?” “Is he still there?” “Would you call that green or turquoise?”.
If I am a manager or investigator, trying to ascertain the cause of a fault on a production line, open ended questions make sense since I will not be in possession of all known or knowable facts.
This still holds if I am a novice or just someone enquiring to an expert for help in achieving some goal. If I ask an experienced cinematographer “how would that scene be light?” even if they don’t know specifically, they have a large body of experience and knowledge that would mean they could probably make useful guesses on how to replicate the effect.
If i intend on asking for advice from an expert, I can’t give them the responsibility of figuring out the kind of help I need. The better I can define the problem myself the better and more informative the question I can ask them. Be too vague about your problem and you can only hope to get generic responses like “be confident”.
It seems ridiculous though, doesn’t it? Socratic or even from Yes, Minister: Why should I ask myself open ended questions if I don’t know what I don’t know? While I may not understand the problem, what I can do is at least explain why it’s a problem and how I see it. And one effective way to do that I’ve found is to use the Five Whys Technique.
It is often exceedingly difficult to know what the right problem to solve is, what we may have a better chance of defining is why we perceive it as a problem and why we expect it to cause conflict.
To—Do: add more techniques to my arsenal to better defined problems… the step before babbling
Adverbs and Creativity?
Strategically EfficaciouslyProductively BabblingI have recently come across a technique for higher-quality babble, at least for creative purposes. It is as simply as employing a Adverb of Manner to modify a verb. This is a minor variation on a technique used to allow mime artists to create a character—you take a situation or process like “make breakfast” and do it with an attitude: happy, hungover, lovelorn.
It is surprisingly easy to come up with scenarios and even stories with arcs—goals, conflict, and comedic pay-offs complete with a character who has distinct mannerisms—by just cycling through adverbs. Compare these three adverbs: grumpily, overzealously, nervously.
These scenarios appear to “write themselves” for the purposes of short pantomime bits. This is the exact type of technique I have spent years searching for.
To do—Does this technique of better babbling through adverbs of manner apply to non-creative applications? If not then develop methodology or at least heuristics for identifying the right problem, noticing a “wrong problem”
Update (October 2024)- it is interesting looking back on this 8 months later as I think I have just hit upon a means of “babbling better”. I intend to revise and go into detail this means after a period of actually trying it out. It’s certainly not original, it vaguely resembles the method at Amazon of writing Memos and speculative Press Releases for a new proposal and uses your ‘internal simulator’.
in brief the way I employ this new method is taking the first kneejerk ‘babble’ or solution to the problem I come up with. Then I try to write a speculative narrative where this solution or action delivers a satisfactory or worthwhile result, being very methodical about the causation. This is not, I stress, a prediction or prognostication.
What I find is that by writing a speculative narrative, and making it as convincing as possible to myself, it forces me to explicate my framework and mental model around the problem, my hunches, suspicions, assumptions, belief, fears, hopes, observations, knowledge and reasoning. Much of which I may not be consciously aware of.
With the framework explicated, I can now go about babbling. But it will be much more targeted and optimized based on my expectations, knowledge, and the framework in general.
Some (not yet confirmed) secondary bonuses of this method:
- it fights analysis paralysis, instead of babbling for breadth, it forces thinking about causation and consequences
- it is inherently optimistic, as you’re forcing yourself to write a structured argument why this could or would work
- having explicated your framework, you may be able to verify specific hunches or assumptions that hereto you weren’t aware they were influencing your thinking
One caveat: why a satisfactory narrative, why not a best case scenario? I think a best case scenario will assume a lot of coincidence, serendipity and as a means for reflection and explication of your mental modelling or framework of the problem is less informative. For that reason, causative words and phrases like “because” “owing to” “knowing that.… it follows such...” “for this reason” should be abundant.
I will update after more real world employment.
To think about:
Shannon Information and cataloguing ‘rushes’ from a documentary. This is not about the actual amount of entropy in any given frame of a uncompressed video. Rather the entropy of all the metadata from all the footage.
Eisenstenian film theory was an attempt to marry Marxist Dialectic with film editing. The “highest” type of film cut was “Intellectual Montage” the bone to nuclear-satellite cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic example in film history. Eisenstein himself used the more on-the-nose approach of showed crowds of protesters being mowed down by Tsarist troops being interspliced with footage of animals being slaughtered in an abattoir.
The Dialectic of cuts, the juxtaposition between image A and image B—be it the Kuleshov experiment—the actor appearing to look at either soup or a corpse lying in state thereby changing the inferred emotion of the actor—is a critical film language technique.
Documentary Rushes of similar thematic content—i.e. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 2 - mid shot different children playing” and lower entropy. “Shot 1 - mid shot children playing” “Shot 87 - close up of old man smiling”. We want to avoid homogenous sets.
The problem for a film editor, especially a observational documentary film editor or someone working with archive material (think of the films of Bret Morgan and Asif Kapadia) is every time you create a sequence you have to watch all of the material, again, hoping to find the dialectic or invent a narrative that combines at least two shots together.
Binary Search algorithms are also relevant here.
CLIP and visual Semantic Networks can automate part of the search if the editor has something specific in mind. I want to cultivate serendipity—unforseen juxtapositions.