papetoast’s Shortforms
[Draft] are relatively undeveloped ideas + ideas that I think I can add more to it.
They are closer to personal reminders that I hope will eventually become posts if the idea is good. They may get drastically edited.
Explicitly welcomed:
Help to develop the ideas
Link to related concepts/pre-existing posts
Writing critique of everything
I think people (myself included) really underestimated this rather trivial statement that people don’t really learn about something when they don’t spend the time doing it/thinking about it. People even measure mastery by hours practiced and not years practiced, but I still couldn’t engrave this idea deep enough into my mind.
I currently don’t have much writable evidence about why I think people underestimated this fact, but I think it is true. Below are some things that I have changed my mind/realised after noticing this fact.
cached thoughts, on yourself
Personally, I am a huge procrastinator and I can really flinch away from doing something even when it is weeks overdue. I was trying out BaaS and Beeminder to build up some good habits, but even with the tools I still somethings have procrastination episodes. Only after quite a lot of cycles of the procrastination episodes, I realised that I basically completely wasted the time when I was procrastinating, and I was overall actually worse than before I started the procrastination episode.
Therefore, what I concluded is that you should expect yourself to be the exact same if you haven’t put in the time to think about that topic, especially high-level topics like math. (I acknowledge that motor skills require less thinking) It is a mere wish to be a different person since the last time; You don’t just learn a new theorem automatically.
cached thoughts, on modelling human
There was this bias that you assume other people are at around the same level as you, that is obviously false, but it is quite hard to internalize this. People really don’t automatically improve themselves either, there must be a push for that to happen. Also you can probably see many of those people that just stopped changing themselves.
there’s a very limited amount you can learn by just reading a few summaries:
Some texts are better than others, but even if you only read the best text on the topic you are trying to learn, with the text being paraphrased by a magical AI to maximize for your learning efficiency, there is still a maximum bandwidth on learning. Don’t expect to replicate what other people is able to do in just a few hours. Though I should acknowledge that there are actually very short texts that can change your mind greatly, I suspect that growth mindset is one of them but I’m not sure.
Alternatively, if the questions you ask are specific enough, then you may just be able to somewhat master that concept in a short amount of time. This seems to be how the “Learn in <very short amount of time>” courses out there do.
version history
There are at least a few different dimensions to “learning”, and this idea applies more to some than to others. Sometimes a brief summary is enough to change some weights of your beliefs, and that will impact future thinking to a surprising degree. There’s also a lot of non-legible thinking going on when just daydreaming or reading fiction.
I fully agree that this isn’t enough, and both directed study and intentional reflection is also necessary to have clear models. But I wouldn’t discount “lightweight thinking” entirely.
^the above is a reply to a slightly previous version
Agree with everything here, and all the points the first paragraph I have not thought about. I’m curious if you have a higher resolution model to different dimensions of learning though, feels like I can improve my post if I have a clearer picture.
Btw, your whole reply seem to be a great example of what do you mean by “it’s probably best to acknowledge it and give the details that go into your beliefs, rather than the posterior belief itself.”
[Draft] It is really hard to communicate the level/strength of basically anything on a sliding scale, but especially things that could not make any intuitive sense even if you stated a percentage. One recent example I encountered is expressing what is in my mind the optimal tradeoff between reading quickly and thinking deeply to achieve the best learning efficiency.
Not sure what is the best way to deal with the above example, and other situations where percentage doesn’t make sense.
But where percentage makes sense, there are still two annoying problems. 1. sometimes you don’t have (haven’t generated) a fixed percentage in your mind. 2. You still need to express the uncertainty of that percentage. (vague example: 70% +- 20% vs 70% +- 5%).
I think it could be worth it to establish a common knowledge for what percentages do the uncertainty-hinting keywords represent. Say, “seems like” = 75% +- 30%
Unsorted Ideas Below
A lot of people don’t seem to realise this problem because their models are too black and white.
It is more difficult to communicate that the other person is being slightly too confident, than to tell them that they are way too overconfident.
For most topics, it’s probably not worth going very deep in the rabbit hole of “what does a probability mean in this context”. Yes, there are multiple kinds of uncertainty, and multiple kinds of ratio that can be expressed by a percentage. Yes, almost everything is a distribution, most not normal, and even when normal it’s not generally specified what the stddev is. Yes, probability is causally recursive (the probability that your model is appropriate causes uncertainty in the ground-level probability you hold). None of that matters, for most communication. When it does, then it’s probably best to acknowledge it and give the details that go into your beliefs, rather than the posterior belief itself.
For your example, the tradeoff between fast and careful, I doubt it can be formalized that way, even if you give yourself 10 dimensions of tradeoff based on context. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” is the classic physical training adage, and I can’t think of a numeric representation that helps.
4 reasons to talk about your problem with friends
This is an advice I would tell myself 5 years ago, just storing it somewhere public and forcing myself to write. Writing seems like an important skill but I always feel like I have nothing to say.
It forces you to think. Sometimes you aren’t actually thinking about solutions to a problem even though it has been bothering you for a long time.
for certain problems: a psychological feeling of being understood. For some people, getting the idea that “what I’m feeling is normal” is also important. It can be a false sense of comfort, but sometimes you need it.
a hidden “contract” that makes the stake of not fixing your problem higher, you now risk looking unimpressive to more people if you fail to fix your problem, since now your friend also knows you’re struggling. This increases the motivation of solving the problem. Related: akrasia??
also the slim possibility that even though you think your friend cant help you but actually they can.
Since we have meta search engines that aggregate search results from many search engines, is it time for us to get a meta language model* to get results from chatGPT, Bing, Bard, and Claude all at the same time, and then automatically rank them, perhaps even merging all of the replies into a single reply.
*meta language model is an extremely bad name because of the company Meta and the fact that the thing I am thinking of isn’t really a language model, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I always thought that the in-page redirects are fucking stupid, it should bring the text I want to see closer to eye level, not exactly at the top where even browser bars can block the text (happens when you go back from footnotes to article on LW).
For some screen size/shape, for some browser positioning, for some readers, this is probably true. It’s fucking stupid to believe that’s anywhere close to a majority. If that’s YOUR reading area, why not just make your browser that size?
It should be pretty easy to write a tampermonkey or browser extension to make it work that way. Now that you point it out, I’m kind of surprised this doesn’t seem to exist.
I admit that 30-50% is arbitrary and shouldn’t be brought up like a fact, I have removed it. (I didn’t mean to have such a strong tone there, but I did) What I really want to say is that the default location for the target text to be somewhere closer to the middle/wherever most people usually put their eyes on. (Perhaps exactly the height where you clicked the in-page redirect?)
I still stand by that it should not be exactly at the top for ease of reading (I hope this doesn’t sound too motte-and-bailey). The reason that it is redirected to the top is probably because it is a very objective location and wouldn’t get affected by device size. But it is very much not a standard location where the current line of text you are reading will be. I am willing to bet that <3% of people read articles where they scroll their currently reading line up to the top three visible lines.
Documenting a specific need of mine: LaTeX OCR software
tl;dr: use Mathpix if you use it <10 times per month or you are willing to pay $4.99 per month. Otherwise use SimpleTex
So I have been using Obsidian for note taking for a while now and I eventually decided to stop using screenshots but instead learn about LaTeX so the formulas look better. At first I was relying on the website to show the original LaTeX commands but some websites (wiki :/) doesn’t do that, and also I started reading math textbooks as PDF. Thus started my adventure to find a good and ideally free LaTeX OCR software.
An initial google search takes me to Mathpix, it honestly is pretty good except for the limit of 10 free OCRs per month ($4.99/month subscription). But for the worry that I will exceed the 10 free snips soon (it actually haven’t happened for 3 months now), I started finding free ones on github, including LaTeX-OCR and Pix2Text, but their GUI kind of suck. Then I also tried SimpleTex and this is the one I will probably use when I run out of free snips on Mathpix.
How likely are people actually clicking through links of related materials in a post, seems unlikely to me, actually unlikely to the point that I am thinking about whether it is actually useful.
related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JZuqyfGYPDjPB9Lne/you-don-t-have-to-click-the-links
Depends on the post and the links. I click through about 15% of Zvi’s links, for instance, but I appreciate the others as further information and willingness to cite, even if I don’t personally use them. Other posts, I skim rather than really examining, and links still add value by indicating that the author has actually done a bit of research into the topic.
Thanks for the datapoint. Also links serving as indicator of effort rather than actually expanding on the amount of information on the passage is a good point. If links are mainly indicator of effort, I think this imply that people should not try as hard to make sure the relevance of the links.
FWIW: My click through rate is probably <5%.
[Draft] Are memorisation techniques still useful in this age where you can offload your memory to digital storage?
I am thinking about using anki for spaced repetition, and the memory palace thing also seem (from the surface level) interesting, but I am not sure whether the investments will be worth it. (2023/02/21: Trying out Anki)
I am increasingly finding it more useful to remember your previous work so that you don’t need to repeat the effort. Remembering workflow is important. (This means remembering things somewhere is very important, but im still not sure if that somewhere being your brain is as important)
example 1: I download music from youtube and I have been using online downloader for years until one day I learned about yt-dlp, and I spend half an hour reading the document to type the correct command for my use and I didn’t save it down somewhere else, so the next time that I want to download music again I had to spend another half an hour reading the doc. Now I have a txt file storing the command.
examples to be written: lyrics (css shit), writing down ideas immediately on the nearest place.
Agree with Dagon that indexing is very important.
trial of using github to host version history
Some certainly are. For many facts, memorized data is orders of magnitude faster than digitally-stored knowledge. This is enough of a difference to be qualitative—it’s not worth looking up, but if you know it, you’ll make use of it.
There’s the additional level of internalizing some knowledge or techniques, where you don’t even need to consciously expend effort to make use of it. For some things, that’s worth a whole lot.
If you’re a computer nerd, think of it as tiered storage. On-core registers are way faster than L1 cache, which is faster than L2/3 cache, which is again faster than RAM, which is faster than local SSD storage which is faster than remote network storage. It’s not a perfect analogy, because the limits of each tier aren’t as clearly defined, and it’s highly variable how easy it is to move/copy knowledge across tiers.
Indexing and familiarity matters a lot too. Searching for something where you think it’s partway through some video you saw 2 years ago is NOT the same as looking up a reminder in your personal notes a week ago.
[Draft]
Filter Information Harder (TODO: think of a good concept-handle)
Note: Long post usually mean the post is very well thought out and serious, but this comment is not quite there yet.
Many people are too unselective on what they read, causing them to waste time reading low value material[1].
2 Personal Examples: 1. I am reading through rationality: A-Z and there are way too many comments that are just bad, and even the average quality of the top comments may not even be worth it to read, because I can probably spend the time better with reading more EY posts. 2. I sometimes read the curated posts instead of finishing rationality: A-Z first which I also think is a suboptimal order.
Too unselective comes in two ways: Not skipping enough parts of what you’re reading, and not choosing hard enough.
Not skipping enough parts of what you’re reading
I have the tendency of trying to read everything in a textbook, even if it is quite low in information density, with many filler stories or sentences served as conjunctions. I probably should be trying to skip sentences, paragraphs and sections where I have sufficient confidence of either 1. I have already learned it and don’t need a refresher, or 2. They are not important for me (filler material or unimportant knowledge)
Not choosing hard enough
Sometimes there are things that even stop reading halfway is giving it too much attention. there are many things that you should just not read[2]. You can filter a lot of content based on the title, the author, the website which hosts the material, the “genre” of the text (most novels, most social media).
The Best Textbook on Every Subject
Related Reading: Lessons I’ve Learned From Self Teaching (TODO: make a short summary here about why it is related)
Further Question: When you don’t read all parts of textbook / posts, are you eligible[3] to comment on it?
Unsorted Ideas
There is a few rationality: A-Z posts that I want to link here, which talks about how you would accidentally believe in things you heard from other people.
Breadth first learning method seem to be better than depth first because it clears the unknown unknowns. Also in general it seems to be better to first have a vague understanding of something and then increase the resolution of the model, using a sort of iterative learning approach.
This idea can generalize too, but it may start to become useless. First generalizarion would be to filter more on what you listen to, and then to choosing carefully what you do, but then it just becomes rationality.
During highschool, one heuristic I learned is to ignore basically every question that people have asked because most of them are just stupid, as in thay are either irrelevant or deducible from previous public knowledge (like what the teacher just said)
This applies to this shortform: think about whether it is worth continue reading, or just close this page and read other stuff
History: feels like most of history only serves as interesting stories to add in conversations to show that you are knowledgeable, unless you are actively trying to learn psychology/human dynamics. One of my friend wanted to give me a Chinese History book and I really dont think reading that would help me.
this word is vague, I know
If you could turn this into advice or guidance, it’d be really helpful. Even sharing a metric so we could say “you should be more selective if X, less selective if Y” would be better than a direction with no anchor (“too unselective”, no matter what). I don’t know if I’m in your target audience, but I’m at least somewhat selective in what I read, and I’m quite willing to stop partway through a {book, article, post, thread} when I find it low-value for me.
Clarifications:
What I had in mind when I say “people” is myself, and the average non-LW friends around me.
Worthless is a bad word choice, I just mean that there are better things to read.
Additionally:
I also think I have the tendency of trying to read everything in a textbook, even if it is quite low in information density, with many filler stories or sentences served as conjunctions. I probably should be trying to skip sentences, paragraphs and sections where I have sufficient confidence of either 1. I have already learned it and don’t need a refresher, or 2. They are not important for me (filler material or unimportant knowledge)
I will try to make a more quantitative metric, but I don’t have one right now, just intuitions.
Thanks, “don’t read everything in a textbook” is good practical advice. Learn to skim, and to stop reading any given segment when you cross the time/value threshold. Importantly, learn to NOTICE what value you expect from the next increment of time spent. Getting that meta-skill honed and habitual pays dividends in many many areas.
My comment at the point of time of his reply:
Many people are too unselective on what they read, causing them to spend a lot of time reading worthless material (This applies to this shortform).
I don’t necessarily disagree generally, but I do somewhat disagree for myself. Since I don’t have visibility into other people’s reading habits or selectivity, I’m unsure if I’m an outlier or if I actually do disagree. What does “many people” mean, and more importantly how can an individual (specifically: me) tell if they are too unselective, on what dimensions?
Just read free will, really disappointed.
not many interesting insights.
a couple posts on determinism, ok but I already believed it
some unrelated stuff: causality, thinking without notion of time… these are actually interesting but not needed
moral consequence of ‘no free will’: I disregard the notion of moral responsibility
EY having really strong sense of morality makes everything worse
low quality discussions: people keep attacking strawmans
You should always include a summary when recommending anything
You are the one who is interested in that thing, the other person isn’t (yet). It saves time for the other person to quickly determine whether they want to learn about it or not.
Related: include a tl;dr in posts?
I think i’m going to unite all my online identities. Starting to get tired of all my wasted efforts that only a single person or two will see.
Do you think a united/reused identifier will change who sees which efforts? Or do you mean “I’m going to focus attention where I’m more widely read, and stop posting where I’m not known”?