This is the sort of in-person, hands-on, real-life, and social exercise that didn’t occur to me, or Anna, or anyone else helping, while we were trying to design the Bayes’s Theorem unit. Our brains just didn’t go in that direction, though we recognized it as embarrassingly obvious in retrospect.
There’s something important here. Problem solving. That’s the use of intelligence that got us to the Moon. That’s the use of intelligence which gave us Bayes theorem. And the best way you can spend your time is focussing on this. It does not help you a whole lot if you can very rationally pick between two ways of teaching the students, if you cant generate those ways. For success, one needs, first and foremost, problem solving abilities. There may be general intelligence factor, but there is also a lot of very high IQ people who are comparatively bad at free form problem solving, and even at fairly basic combinatorial things like fitting most items into a box carefully so they won’t break when transported. The rationality may help you de-bias yourself wrt which items you consider more and less ‘important’ - you may be able to rid yourself of bias of how dear an item is to you—but it won’t so much help you process the immense number of combinations and generate the best one, and your packing will still be much less effective than the packing of someone irrational who puts a nearly indestructible object that is dear to them on the top, if they are just a bit better at processing the huge solution space.
Simple left-brain vs right-brain. The problem you refer to isn’t that hard to fix, it’s just that very few people know about it. Reading through the sequences will, in most cases, make people want to exercise their minds in daily life. Eventually, the right brain will activate despite the left-brain dominance of english-speaking culture.
to put it simply. The left brain’s job is to process individual points of data in series as a pattern. The right brain’s job is to process all points of data in parallel as a chaotic fractal flow.
Granted, most of the sequences on here are about how to use the left brain more efficiently. And in scientific society as a whole, right-brain concepts are generally shunned except by the few people who already know about them.
However, at the very least, Eliezer himself is capable of using his right brain, even if he thinks that the general problem of society is solvable by increasing efficiency of left-brain usage. The result of this is that right-brain concepts are hidden in the sequences. Anyone who reads through deeply enough will start to be influenced by this.
But yes, I also partially agree. The fact that Eliezer tried to explain wisdom as modified pattern recognition from left-brain intelligence in HPMOR shows that either Dumbledore is hiding his wisdom, or Eliezer doesn’t know what the right brain is capable of.
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I’m looking at the long term here. This website is a good stepping stone into right-brain usage by left-brained people (it is MUCH more right-brained than standard education), and hopefully also has the ability to help right-brained people learn how to use their left brain.
If nothing else, Eliezer is seriously trying to improve the functionality of the world. That means that some time in the future, he will have to learn about how the right brain works. And until then, I’m gonna keep trying to plant the seeds for this.
When I have a full, concrete understanding with the ability to really explain it in-depth to a left-brain dominant person, I will post my solutions on this website. Until then, the game you seem to be trying to play is impossible to win.
I do think theres truth to here being two ways to using the thought but I don’t think its simply one side vs other side in humans. The left side (of right-handed individuals) has the speech centre, and thus is more involved in process of making sequences of chirps that achieve particular social purpose, and subsequently less involved in the decision making or reasoning.
In the split brain patients, when left side is presented with chicken, and right side is presented with snow, and the right side picks shovel as related, the left side explains that the shovel is for cleaning chicken shit. The left side doesn’t have slightest clue why shovel was chosen, nor does have any need-to-know what so ever (even when the corpus callosum is present) as the optimum chirps are entirely dependent to listener and independent of motivation. The left side still has to employ massively parallel process to generate the chirps to the specific purpose—that’s the only way brain can do it—clearly there’s a lot of parallel processing required for coming up with an explanation how the shovel is related to chicken—but the chirps themselves are sequential in nature and so it appears as if there is some sort of serial process going on. It even looks like some sequences of chirps are consequences of other sequences of chirps, when the chirp making rule requires them to be produced in that order.
Then the people here have trouble with ‘procrastination’, ‘akrasia’, and the like, which is inevitable outcome of the disconnect between decision making (which decides not to do something) and speech synthesis (which talks of wanting something), and are generally a case of the pirate ship’s parrot complaining of the weather. Letting the part-brained parrot take over the pirate ship is generally a bad idea, even if the parrot is very extensively trained. For one thing, the part-brained parrot doesn’t know one thing about navigation and can’t read the maps or charts, which are non verbal in nature. I would guess the parrot take-over corresponds to psychiatric disorders.
Furthermore, an unusually high fraction of accomplished people (e.g. presidents) are left handed, which is a proxy for unusual brain architecture that doesn’t implement standard clueless parrot. The evolution may easily have over-fitted us to some very specific situation where the speech is just noise, entirely unrelated to reasoning (which is the case for all smaller brained animals).
The left side still has to employ massively parallel process to generate the chirps to the specific purpose.
What makes you say that? In your example, the left brain has 2 inputs, and only needs to find a plausible connection between the two.
Although, in hindsight, You’re right. The brain uses many neurons in parallel no matter what or where it is processing.
I will now proceed to twist my words to attempt to better communicate what I mean. In reality, i spoke too hastily, generalized too greatly, and still obviously don’t know the correct words to use to communicate my partial, incomplete theory to a left-brain dominant culture.
If we take what I stated for the two “jobs” of the two brains:
The left brain’s job is to process individual points of data in series as a pattern. The right brain’s job is to process all points of data in parallel as a chaotic fractal flow.
Then, take “individual points of data in series as a pattern” and “all points of data in parallel as a chaotic fractal flow”, and call each of those 2 quotes a complete concept or set, labeled A and B respectively. Then, as if putting grammar in the correct/different location, say that the left brain processes set A, and the right brain processes set B; where “processes” specifies neither parallel nor sequential, but implies “however the brain does it”. If what I stated is grammatically edited to mean this, then it fits more closely with what I intended and satisfies your examples (as far as I can tell).
To describe in a different, probably better way, I consider the right brain as being used to build interacting, interweaving probability clouds of all data even remotely related to the subject (more neuron connections = more remote). The result of this is sections and points of higher or lower concentration. I then consider the left brain to take this information, and determine the direct connections between the important pieces, especially how they directly relate to an initial goal (more neuron connections = more and farther-reaching direct connections). The combination of the two thus gives the person the decision on the “best” course of action. And of course, this process can be iterated, as well as be initiated by the left brain’s direct connections instead of the right brain’s probability clouds.
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I just noticed an interesting difference between my concepts and your concepts.
decision making (which decides not to do something) and speech synthesis (which talks of wanting something).
And I just further (after quoting) figured out a way it relates to left-right brain difference.
I had thought of decision making as being positive (deciding “to do” instead of “not to do”). I think, however, that this is once again the difference between right brain and left brain (respectively). What I mean by this can be summarized and generalized (or analogized) as the difference between the concept of “syntropy” (a receiving antenna) and entropy (a projecting antenna).
Likewise, I thought of speech synthesis as, instead of “wanting something”, “choosing something”, as in “cutting out everything else”. Negative instead of positive. This obviously relates to what I think of right vs left, but I’m not sure exactly how; especially since you input that the left brain has the speech center (I didn’t know that).
rationality[...] won’t [...] help you process the immense number of combinations and generate the best one
Intelligence is the lens which sees it’s own flaws. This is a flaw. See that clearly, and you should be able to fix it.
In fact, when I see intelligent people fail at such situations, I immediately want to drag them on to LessWrong and have them read all the sequences, because somewhere in there (and I’m not quite sure where), I figured out all sorts of incredible techniques for actually dealing with exactly that.
Did you magically transform your life to 10x the awesome? There are solutions that make it so. They are incredibly hard to arrive at, but there are.
Look at what people do here. Spending very non-trivial fraction of the time thinking about problems with very narrowly defined range of solutions, usually below 10. I have suspicion that such trains you to fail the real-world situations where you deal with > 101000 possible solutions. People do love familiar approaches, meaning, in those cases they’ll latch on <10 most obvious solutions that come up instantly or were chosen by others, then rationally choose among those, because that’s what the methods here deal with, that’s what they tried to improve. Of course it is better to choose the best one out of easily available solutions, than not the best one, but that doesn’t get anyone any heaps of utility; there are some cases where it looks like it does (market speculation), but it still does not as the system is multiplicative, follows specific sort of power law distribution, and one of the fools with coin tosses is still expected on the top, and still, coming up with methods for trading is a problem with enormous number of solutions.
Did you magically transform your life to 10x the awesome?
I have trouble imagining what an entire magnitude of awesomeness would even look like. I tend to intuitively model the question as “what percentage of your life are you satisfied with?” and the answer has almost always been “more than 10% of it”, so you can’t multiply by ten in this context. I’m not really sure of a way to phrase the question where a 10x multiplier is meaningful.
Look at what people do here. Spending very non-trivial fraction of the time thinking about problems with very narrowly defined range of solutions, usually below 10.
My area of greatest gain is self-awareness, dealing with various mental illnesses/abnormalities, and dealing with relationships (friends, work, romantic). One of my friends recently commented “I run in to the issue when meeting new people—there’s thousands of things I could say, and I can’t figure out where to start!” and my immediate thought was “Oh! I learned how to fix that problem from reading the sequences.”
In general, before LessWrong, I could handle basic “shut up and multiply” without any trouble—a problem with only a few solutions was generally trivial. Where I ran in to issues was exactly that “huge solution space”, and that is where LessWrong has really helped me.
I have definitely noticed that the sequences seem to be surprisingly well written for a wide range of rationality levels—they seem to help you build skills whether you have a little bit or a lot of rationality coming in to this. A lot of what I’ve personally gained from the sequences is simply that “aha!” moment of the final missing piece of the puzzle clicking in to place, because a lot of this is stuff I’ve spent years thinking about.
The other big thing I’ve gained from LessWrong is having very coherent explanations that I can share with others. It makes it very easy to quickly get one of my friends trained up sufficiently to help me bounce around ideas and come up with solutions to problems that are stumping me.
There’s something important here. Problem solving. That’s the use of intelligence that got us to the Moon. That’s the use of intelligence which gave us Bayes theorem. And the best way you can spend your time is focussing on this. It does not help you a whole lot if you can very rationally pick between two ways of teaching the students, if you cant generate those ways. For success, one needs, first and foremost, problem solving abilities. There may be general intelligence factor, but there is also a lot of very high IQ people who are comparatively bad at free form problem solving, and even at fairly basic combinatorial things like fitting most items into a box carefully so they won’t break when transported. The rationality may help you de-bias yourself wrt which items you consider more and less ‘important’ - you may be able to rid yourself of bias of how dear an item is to you—but it won’t so much help you process the immense number of combinations and generate the best one, and your packing will still be much less effective than the packing of someone irrational who puts a nearly indestructible object that is dear to them on the top, if they are just a bit better at processing the huge solution space.
Simple left-brain vs right-brain. The problem you refer to isn’t that hard to fix, it’s just that very few people know about it. Reading through the sequences will, in most cases, make people want to exercise their minds in daily life. Eventually, the right brain will activate despite the left-brain dominance of english-speaking culture.
to put it simply. The left brain’s job is to process individual points of data in series as a pattern. The right brain’s job is to process all points of data in parallel as a chaotic fractal flow.
Granted, most of the sequences on here are about how to use the left brain more efficiently. And in scientific society as a whole, right-brain concepts are generally shunned except by the few people who already know about them.
However, at the very least, Eliezer himself is capable of using his right brain, even if he thinks that the general problem of society is solvable by increasing efficiency of left-brain usage. The result of this is that right-brain concepts are hidden in the sequences. Anyone who reads through deeply enough will start to be influenced by this.
But yes, I also partially agree. The fact that Eliezer tried to explain wisdom as modified pattern recognition from left-brain intelligence in HPMOR shows that either Dumbledore is hiding his wisdom, or Eliezer doesn’t know what the right brain is capable of.
-
I’m looking at the long term here. This website is a good stepping stone into right-brain usage by left-brained people (it is MUCH more right-brained than standard education), and hopefully also has the ability to help right-brained people learn how to use their left brain. If nothing else, Eliezer is seriously trying to improve the functionality of the world. That means that some time in the future, he will have to learn about how the right brain works. And until then, I’m gonna keep trying to plant the seeds for this.
When I have a full, concrete understanding with the ability to really explain it in-depth to a left-brain dominant person, I will post my solutions on this website. Until then, the game you seem to be trying to play is impossible to win.
I do think theres truth to here being two ways to using the thought but I don’t think its simply one side vs other side in humans. The left side (of right-handed individuals) has the speech centre, and thus is more involved in process of making sequences of chirps that achieve particular social purpose, and subsequently less involved in the decision making or reasoning.
In the split brain patients, when left side is presented with chicken, and right side is presented with snow, and the right side picks shovel as related, the left side explains that the shovel is for cleaning chicken shit. The left side doesn’t have slightest clue why shovel was chosen, nor does have any need-to-know what so ever (even when the corpus callosum is present) as the optimum chirps are entirely dependent to listener and independent of motivation. The left side still has to employ massively parallel process to generate the chirps to the specific purpose—that’s the only way brain can do it—clearly there’s a lot of parallel processing required for coming up with an explanation how the shovel is related to chicken—but the chirps themselves are sequential in nature and so it appears as if there is some sort of serial process going on. It even looks like some sequences of chirps are consequences of other sequences of chirps, when the chirp making rule requires them to be produced in that order.
Then the people here have trouble with ‘procrastination’, ‘akrasia’, and the like, which is inevitable outcome of the disconnect between decision making (which decides not to do something) and speech synthesis (which talks of wanting something), and are generally a case of the pirate ship’s parrot complaining of the weather. Letting the part-brained parrot take over the pirate ship is generally a bad idea, even if the parrot is very extensively trained. For one thing, the part-brained parrot doesn’t know one thing about navigation and can’t read the maps or charts, which are non verbal in nature. I would guess the parrot take-over corresponds to psychiatric disorders.
Arguably one of the best scientists, Albert Einstein, has lacked the parrot portion of the brain entirely.
Furthermore, an unusually high fraction of accomplished people (e.g. presidents) are left handed, which is a proxy for unusual brain architecture that doesn’t implement standard clueless parrot. The evolution may easily have over-fitted us to some very specific situation where the speech is just noise, entirely unrelated to reasoning (which is the case for all smaller brained animals).
What makes you say that? In your example, the left brain has 2 inputs, and only needs to find a plausible connection between the two.
Although, in hindsight, You’re right. The brain uses many neurons in parallel no matter what or where it is processing.
I will now proceed to twist my words to attempt to better communicate what I mean. In reality, i spoke too hastily, generalized too greatly, and still obviously don’t know the correct words to use to communicate my partial, incomplete theory to a left-brain dominant culture.
If we take what I stated for the two “jobs” of the two brains:
Then, take “individual points of data in series as a pattern” and “all points of data in parallel as a chaotic fractal flow”, and call each of those 2 quotes a complete concept or set, labeled A and B respectively. Then, as if putting grammar in the correct/different location, say that the left brain processes set A, and the right brain processes set B; where “processes” specifies neither parallel nor sequential, but implies “however the brain does it”. If what I stated is grammatically edited to mean this, then it fits more closely with what I intended and satisfies your examples (as far as I can tell).
To describe in a different, probably better way, I consider the right brain as being used to build interacting, interweaving probability clouds of all data even remotely related to the subject (more neuron connections = more remote). The result of this is sections and points of higher or lower concentration. I then consider the left brain to take this information, and determine the direct connections between the important pieces, especially how they directly relate to an initial goal (more neuron connections = more and farther-reaching direct connections). The combination of the two thus gives the person the decision on the “best” course of action. And of course, this process can be iterated, as well as be initiated by the left brain’s direct connections instead of the right brain’s probability clouds.
-
I just noticed an interesting difference between my concepts and your concepts.
I had thought of decision making as being positive (deciding “to do” instead of “not to do”). I think, however, that this is once again the difference between right brain and left brain (respectively). What I mean by this can be summarized and generalized (or analogized) as the difference between the concept of “syntropy” (a receiving antenna) and entropy (a projecting antenna).
Likewise, I thought of speech synthesis as, instead of “wanting something”, “choosing something”, as in “cutting out everything else”. Negative instead of positive. This obviously relates to what I think of right vs left, but I’m not sure exactly how; especially since you input that the left brain has the speech center (I didn’t know that).
Intelligence is the lens which sees it’s own flaws. This is a flaw. See that clearly, and you should be able to fix it.
In fact, when I see intelligent people fail at such situations, I immediately want to drag them on to LessWrong and have them read all the sequences, because somewhere in there (and I’m not quite sure where), I figured out all sorts of incredible techniques for actually dealing with exactly that.
Did you magically transform your life to 10x the awesome? There are solutions that make it so. They are incredibly hard to arrive at, but there are.
Look at what people do here. Spending very non-trivial fraction of the time thinking about problems with very narrowly defined range of solutions, usually below 10. I have suspicion that such trains you to fail the real-world situations where you deal with > 101000 possible solutions. People do love familiar approaches, meaning, in those cases they’ll latch on <10 most obvious solutions that come up instantly or were chosen by others, then rationally choose among those, because that’s what the methods here deal with, that’s what they tried to improve. Of course it is better to choose the best one out of easily available solutions, than not the best one, but that doesn’t get anyone any heaps of utility; there are some cases where it looks like it does (market speculation), but it still does not as the system is multiplicative, follows specific sort of power law distribution, and one of the fools with coin tosses is still expected on the top, and still, coming up with methods for trading is a problem with enormous number of solutions.
I have trouble imagining what an entire magnitude of awesomeness would even look like. I tend to intuitively model the question as “what percentage of your life are you satisfied with?” and the answer has almost always been “more than 10% of it”, so you can’t multiply by ten in this context. I’m not really sure of a way to phrase the question where a 10x multiplier is meaningful.
My area of greatest gain is self-awareness, dealing with various mental illnesses/abnormalities, and dealing with relationships (friends, work, romantic). One of my friends recently commented “I run in to the issue when meeting new people—there’s thousands of things I could say, and I can’t figure out where to start!” and my immediate thought was “Oh! I learned how to fix that problem from reading the sequences.”
In general, before LessWrong, I could handle basic “shut up and multiply” without any trouble—a problem with only a few solutions was generally trivial. Where I ran in to issues was exactly that “huge solution space”, and that is where LessWrong has really helped me.
I have definitely noticed that the sequences seem to be surprisingly well written for a wide range of rationality levels—they seem to help you build skills whether you have a little bit or a lot of rationality coming in to this. A lot of what I’ve personally gained from the sequences is simply that “aha!” moment of the final missing piece of the puzzle clicking in to place, because a lot of this is stuff I’ve spent years thinking about.
The other big thing I’ve gained from LessWrong is having very coherent explanations that I can share with others. It makes it very easy to quickly get one of my friends trained up sufficiently to help me bounce around ideas and come up with solutions to problems that are stumping me.