Conversations from inside early singularity

Everything is getting better all the time:

Prelude

JB:Later, Garfunkel’s father bought him a wire recorder and from then on, Garfunkel spent his afternoons singing, recording, and playing it back, so he could listen for flaws and learn how to improve.

heh

R:This appears to be one of the patterns for all the skills

DA:hmm

should that entire conversation about ‘everyone getting better at everything all at once’ be a blog post

JB:the primordial skill is noticing

DA:or posted to lesswrong actually

R:A blog post, at least

DA:it feels like it was a useful product of the chat channel and should be saved

JB:do you feel like writing it

or would you just copypaste the convo

DA:maybe, will anyone read it?

JB:i think so

Everything is getting better all the time:

Opening

[link one: osteen...]

DA:damn

are the replay analysis queens of esports

actually uh

better at learning and self-development than baseline humanity

and getting better at any skill is the same ur-skill, which could be developed better for literally everyone, including men of the fine cut

does western society have an underdeveloped understanding of the state of the art of theory of learning?

[link deux: there was a moment in sports...]

[link three: most surgery is done in your head...]

DA: maybe, idk

if the cost of masterful action is humility, it might be too expensive

JC:@DA Nice find. This isn’t news to me—I’ve seen similar about coaching in surgery before. Yes. Society is systematically underdeveloped in the theory of of learning. It’s not an accidental failure. Before you try to change it, you need to understand why.

DA: i mean, i have to have an explanation for why useful new information hasn’t spread to saturation yet

the answers are normally going ot be ‘communication hard’ ‘emotions hard’ or ‘pricing /​ extracting value hard’ from my general expectations about efficiency

but sometimes it’s just because ‘nobody has put the work into spreading the idea yet’

those would be the ‘ideas’ to try to build a business or school of philosophy off of

e.g. i am very confident that the lakoffian theory of language as metaphor just never spread yet, and has low-hanging fruit everywhere if i push it on enough people or try to develop it

R: It’s also a benefit to know it and not spread it, if you try to spread it and no one’s willing to listen, might as well just use it for yourself, and then when you win with it enough, they’ll start copying you.

DA: I’m not in the practice of trying to disgorge all of my knowledge to all people all of the time, that would be wrong

but releasing some things i think are valuable to some people sometimes is a way of showing i have ‘skin in the game’ i think

DA:yud had to push for a decade straight and write a harry potter fanfiction describing his canon to try to get people to think about ai threat

JC:just because ‘nobody has put the work into spreading the idea yet’

No. I think the system is actively inefficient and deskilling. It’s not as if learning techne is completely unknown.

DA:that is also possible!

JB:why

DA:I don’t let myself use organized opposition as the ‘first reason’ why something good hasn’t happened yet

JB:and if you know how to learn techne please tell me

DA:it can be allowed in second passes of reasoning but not the first pass

it’s too easy, it can explain too many things

JC:@JB: Ian Hyslop had some good historical content about how schools had been designed to keep the trades in their places.

Our schools are descended from those.

DA:haven’t i made some remarks on this too JB?

maybe it was in this chat

math pedagogy is inefficient because it’s an exercise in teaching children to not ‘look ahead’ in lists of tasks even if they’re capable

and the primary goal of math pedagogy is to teach heirarchy, not to teach math

JB:sorry i have rona brainrot apparently

ah yeah ok

DA:this is why math teaching levels aren’t like, tuned to developmental neurology and how much a kid can learn at a certain developmental stpe

with branch paths for children that finish certain capacities early and certain ones late

JB:ok i get the general argument now

JC:@JB: if you want to increase your learning techne, the areas for attention are around managing motivation—sorely neglected most places.

DA:managing motivation means combing out tangles in your reward function

i mean your emotional life

JC:Yes.

JB:it’s funny because if you want to “figure out your motivation” you have to be ready to change your focus for something that motivates you better

in any case, that’s what I did

JC:I spent a year in Trinity College Dublin working as a visiting research fellow on their innovative new pedagogy research initiative.

It was nothing like as innovative or new as it should have been, and they could not see that.

@JB: What would you actually like to learn, and why?

JB:is that a rhetorical question or are you really asking

JC:I am really asking. Heck, let’s not waste time.

JB:oh, i’m fine on the motivation end

JC:But are you? Tell me what you would like to learn?

...

JC:But hacking motivation should be consensual.

Whose playing skills do you admire?

...

Everything is getting better all the time:

‘views from inside early singularity’

[link four: “yet money isn’t the whole story...”]

JB:i’m not sure about this

DA:people have been gushing this for athletics for a long time

JB:ok yeah

but what changed

DA:i don’t know

JB:what’s happening

DA:maybe it was the flouride in the water supply

JB:it’s very strange

DA:i think it’s ‘things getting cheaper’

JB:more learning material available?

i can’t see what changed in classical music pedagogy in recent years

DA:as electronics get cheaper, more people pick up more electronics engineering projects for more spurious reasons

if speakers cost 100x what they do now, i wouldn’t have gotten multiple breadboarded filter circuits for torn apart rebuilt speakers from one of my friends

because the components cost pennies, the barrier to action for ‘doing the thing you learn from’ plummets

JB:one thing that changed is that it’s very cheap to record yourself

DA:small decreases in ux friction cause huge increases in quality, right?

that would be one change

i bet we’re in the middle of like

20 sigmoid curves

stacked on top of each other

and we keep puncturing new prerequisites to unlock new sigmoid curves faster and faster

JB:especially, nowadays, in video

i film myself playing all the time and can thus easily pinpoint technique problems

and presence problems

and also rewatch myself for the ego boost

DA:and that’s what a singularity is made from

winning became easier

people win more

people experience winning more, they want to win more

the growth in the want causes investment of time and energy and communication into making winning easier

i’m convinced it’s a feedback loop where wins build emotional strength to win harder

JC:@JB: YES! And that (recording) allows feedback after the event, in the same way that chess analysis does. Or video for basketball. [If you have the emotional strength to face it.]

JB:oh i record in video as much as possible

storage is no issue at all thanks to google

DA:What is obsolete about scholasticism?

even as materials drop to price:0

and winning is easier than ever

there’s no deliberate ‘classes in winning’

JB:google will have enough videos of my playing that they’ll be able to recreate arbitrary performances once im dead

DA:to teach this motive drive to explode into perfection

JB:but cheap tape recorders exist since the 70s or maybe earlier

DA:the recorders also sucked

JC:The trick is to align the different feedbacks.

DA:but also JB, the cultural awareness of how and why to use the tape recorders had to spread

that takes years

decades?

trying new things is emotionally and mentally expensive

JB:we have for example home tape recordings of nick drake practicing

but i think they were mostly used for demos

JC:(And with really cheap tape recorders you’d be distracted by the recording artefacts)

JB:but! tape was expensive I think

DA:the quality of the cheap recorder matters too yeah

JB:so you couldn’t keep archives

you can’t play the piano over the phone these days either

because it’s vocoded

i would use audacity for my sketch recordings but it takes a lot of RAM on my machine for some reason :disappointed:

and the playback head is invisible when it plays

anyway

still haven’t found a webcam recorder that doesn’t crash

DA:but really it seems more like being able to produce new insights is a skill that can be developed or super-developed and ambitious people should drip business cases off their back when they sweat

CD:Currently the brand name for this is “Design Thinking.” It’s a terrible grand but IDEO sucked up the mind share in the 80s

DA:oh yeah CD, i read some retrospectives on that, it sounded like the idea has tainted mindshare from lazy ‘design’ branding

wow, what an incredible wikipedia 2 line history of brain drain into complete irrelevance

[firefox_2020-09-30_15-30-56.png]

[firefox_2020-09-30_15-30-56.png]

JB:one company’s brain drain is another company’s brain gain

maybe

DA:one man’s brain droll, another man’s brain swole

JB:pay the mole toll

CD:Yeah David Kelley was the OG. He knew what made their process special, then it became commodotized as they let researchers study them in order to market to HBR subscribed consultants

DA:also like, why ‘spend design on underprivileged communities’

why not hire poor people to work as designers in your palo alto offices where they make you 10 million a year each minimum

very ‘doling out power’ and not ‘creating new power from nothing’

tsk tsk

CD:Long tail innovation

DA:so its sounding again like stanford in the 80s was literally the most interesting place on earth

CD:It was the reason for the success of Rocket Internet and others like it

DA:what went right there?

hmm, it sounds like calcification happened in concert with and or because of attempts to turn the design group into ‘university education plans’

did this happen because the people who worked there got literally old

and started to turn narcissistic and obsessed with legacies

this is all wikipedia level analysis, which is my favorite kind of analysis because wikipedia is consistently low information in such precise ways that it becomes a valuable source of information again

through what is missing from the wikipedia page, you learn all that you need to know about the organization

CD:I should mention that innovation consulting is work you only get once every 10 years or so, because clients have to scale the thing you built for them, so IDEO thought they would fill in the time between by helping clients assemble their own internal innovation organizations

Turns out that was a bad move as it commodotized their process

Bing Crosby → magnetic tape → semi-conductors → mainframes → darpanet → pc’s → www → web 2.0

DA:so it was all bing crosby this whole time

damn

JB:what about bob crosby

he had a good voice too

c.f. fallout 3

im not sure i would have gotten into jazz without that game

CD:I guess I should also mention radio and sigint/​cointelpro which was first funded at Stanford

That was pre-Crosby, but the reason he dumped private money into magnetic tape

DA:hold up

they invented laugh tracks in the same team that commissioned

a million magnetic tape recording units

CD:Yup

DA:ok so tape recording was actually responsible for part of the explosive growth in human talent

CD:Yup

JB:yeah tape is compositional, you literally, well, tape bits of tape together

see musique concrete shit

[Pierre Henry (& Pierre Schaeffer) - Bidule En Ut [1950]]

so DA when you said samplers were the most important invention in the history of music

you were correct

DA:i mean, yeah jolly

it destroys the distinction between ‘things that are instruments or musical voices’ and ‘things that are not’

JB:good observation

DA:this track still holds up btw

JB:yup

i think you’d like these electronic music innovators

they had pretty extensive theory about classifications of sounds

which is still taught in french music schools, but is otherwise unknown

conceiving of sounds as motions of energy

sound-objects

CD:France used to be the center of all art and then lost it when the commies are ate their lunch (edited)

JB:hm wait what do you mean by commies ate their lunch

CD:It all moved to global communes after that. The Surrealist Manifesto tore hegemony from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Artes lifeless mortised hands

And art became a people’s project. Trotsky evangelized with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for a people’s movement of art, and then the Bolsheviks adopted the strategy and formalized it with Communist International and the Proletkult

JB:I see

CD:No one institution, or country, has been able to claim art since. The French have been trying to hang onto cinema but I don’t think anyone actually believes it still lives there (edited)

Maybe Tokyo owns fashion

Czech owns puppetry I guess

JB:netflix lol

CD:The French won’t even let them into Cannes

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