Epistemic status: low status, not feeling good, discouraged by life and the future, feeling sick of life in general; permanent state of inaction. Need help/advice. The post is bad written, will probably make you feel that I’m an idiot, but I’m just a human truly looking for help/ some light
Five years ago, I thought “these app developers, they are so dumb! If I only knew what they know, I would be creating life-changing applications, helping millions of people”. Then I learned to program, and now I know how to solve problems step-by-step and how to create mobile apps, web apps, databases, etc. Finding LW 1 year behind gave me true purposes, and I want to minimize the number of seconds living beings are suffering and also maximize the number of seconds living beings are enjoying.
I finally realized that most people are not that interesting, because they don’t care neither about minimizing the number of seconds living beings are suffering nor maximizing the number of seconds living beings are enjoying life.
Although my goals are clear for me, my highest priority NOW is my grandmother. She doesn’t have all teeth on her mouth, and I don’t have enough money to fix it. She called me this weekend crying, saying that she doesn’t have money to pay the treatment and saying that it hurts a lot to do each meal. And my grandfather just died with coronavirus (two months ago). My reality is that I get $300 monthly by teaching on a school (I am considered a successful person for getting this much, most people (>60%) on my country earn less than $200.00), but I spend $200 just to pay the basic: rent, the condominium, the electricity bill, water, internet and mobile… and the fucking dental treatment is $2000.00, it is easy to see why I should leave the current job and dedicate myself full time for applying my software development skills and monetize it (which I never did, i.e, all my applications I published as free software), but I am not sure how to help without killing even more people.
While you grow on software development, you know how far your actions can go. When you make further research on scaling solutions, on the end all is about numbers, how far, how wide, how many people you will get.
When I try to gather ideas from local tribe or even distant tribes on online forums, all they say is: “WOW YOU HAVE THESE INCREDIBLE SKILLS FOR DEVELOPING MULTI-PLATFORM-APPS, so create this >application that will make 100,000 people watch ads for 5 seconds< and you will get rich quickly. They are so stupid that they can’t shut up and multiply, they can’t feel the meaning of creating a timeline in which you feel the 500,000 seconds of human experience of watching ads.
This is what I feel from quite every company and quite every person, they are trying to get “money”, this universal unit of power in trading of souls. You kill five, but you profit $1000.00, so that’s fine. You create billions of seconds of watch-ads-human-experience, and they suck every human every second of their souls to desire to buy products that will kill living beings. No apps for fighting disease. No application for fighting death, no one talks about it, no one wants to brainstorm that. When I talk seriously about preventing death and disease, people disengage. “This is not how to make money”, they say. They say: “you should think on yourself first, later you can solve all problems in the world”. First kill them, then you live!
Sometimes I think, “Ok, this food delivery app that everyone uses, I could create a local competition, people on my small city would use it and I would get enough money”. But wouldn’t I be optimizing for food delivery? Isn’t food delivery the “buy dead animal corpses from online stores”? Maybe I could think on some vegan app food delivery, but although it is totally feasible with my abilities, it will still take a lot of time to develop it by myself. So I come back to my state of mind that I can’t think on any solutions where I can get money on short-term without making people lose money and time (games) or without facilitating the killing of animals (food related solutions), or without destroying the environment (selling useless products to users), or without making people addicted to sliding their fingers on glass screens without caring about everyone dying around them (social networks, games). Because, on the end, all we do is moving our muscles, some beings die, and some smiles appears. How can I get money ethically (besides teaching math on school)? Why is this so hard? Why I’m not finding anyone to financially support developing solutions for the community? I don’t like proprietary software and for me it is not the way to go. Can you see the confusion on my mind? I am always afraid of developing solutions because I think it will ultimately make people addicted to uselessly move their fingers on the glass screen; maybe I should create an education app? But education should be free, how I would get money with it? I won’t force users to watch useless ads. How can I get the fucking $2000.00 for the dental treatment? I am nervous, I am angry because I feel I am useless and I can’t help my grandmother, I feel stupid for knowing so many libraries and so many random theorems, but I don’t understand where the money comes from and why it is so hard to get money ethically.
Is there any application that YOU, LessWrong user that is reading my babble until now, is there anything you would pay me for develop? Think about it, you say the specifications. I can develop anything (not AGI, please, this is impossibly hard. When I say >I can develop anything< actually I mean >I can manipulate lists, strings, dictionaries, on web, Android, desktop (linux, windows), the basic machine learning toolbox, databases, etc, i.e, practically any application you normally use on your phone, or your desktop, I could replicate it, provided enough time).
I know you love betting, maybe I could create related to it? Something that would help the LW community, something that is ethical, but something you would pay for? You could pay after I finish developing it; the software would necessarily be free software and anyone would be able to read it and modify it. I don’t know, I am lost. I don’t even know if I should continue searching or I should already give up on this useless babble.
Until today I haven’t listened anyone suggesting great solutions for the community. Although I can make apps, I don’t have great ideas to put in life. Actually I have a lot of ideas, but don’t have the time to implement them when I am still struggling for the bread of each day. How to minimize poverty, how to stop killing animals on a daily basis, how to provide health for the masses. I don’t know what I should do to get there, although if someone gave me a good idea with the math behind it, and it were clear to me how much seconds I would not be sacrificing for the evil gods, I can take it.
I am sorry for making you read this. I feel desperate, angry, I have no one to talk to in my circle of friends, no one understands programming, no one has interesting goals, I am poor and just a number that can vanish on all the useless numbers that don’t even count. Please, help me to leave inaction, my grandmother is suffering, give me some idea, some light, I don’t even know how to express myself well in English, please forgive me for all stupidity I just said, just help me
2. Speaking of mistakes, I’m also regretting some comments I made a while ago suggesting that the brain doesn’t do backpropagation. Maybe that’s true in a narrow sense, but Randall O’Reilly has convinced me that the brain definitely does error-driven learning sometimes (I already knew that), and moreover it may well be able to propagate errors through at least one or two layers of a hierarchy, with enough accuracy to converge. No that doesn’t mean that the brain is exactly the same as a PyTorch / Tensorflow Default-Settings Deep Neural Net.
3. My long work-in-progress post on autism continues to be stuck on the fact that there seem to be two theories of social impairment that are each plausible and totally different. In one theory, social interactions are complex and hard to follow / model for cognitive / predictive-model-building reasons. The evidence I like for that is the role of the cerebellum, which sounds awfully causally implicated in autism. Like, absence of a cerebellum can cause autism, if I’m remembering right. In the other theory, modeling social interactions in the neurotypical way (via empathy) is aversive. The evidence I like for that is people with autism self-reporting that eye contact is aversive, among other things. (This is part of “intense world theory”.) Of those two stories, I’m roughly 100% sold on the latter story is right. But the former story doesn’t seem obviously wrong, and I don’t like having two explanations for the same thing (although it’s not impossible, autism involves different symptoms in different people, and they could co-occur for biological reasons rather than computational reasons). I’m hoping that the stories actually come together somehow, and I’m just confused about what the cerebellum and amygdala do. So I’m reading and thinking about that.
4. New theory I’m playing with: the neocortex outputs predictions directly, in addition to motor commands. E.g. “my arm is going to be touched”. Then the midbrain knows not to flinch when someone touches the arm. That could explain why the visual cortex talks to the superior colliculus, which I always thought was weird. Jeff Hawkins says those connections are the neocortex sending out eye movement motor commands, but isn’t that controlled by the frontal eye fields? Oh, then Randall O’Reilly had this mysterious throwaway comment in a lecture that the frontal eye fields seem to be at the bottom of the visual hierarchy if you look at the connections. (He had a reference, I should read it.) I don’t know what the heck is going on.
modeling social interactions in the neurotypical way (via empathy) is aversive
Is it too pessimistic to assume that people mostly model other people in order to manipulate them better? I wonder how much of human mental inconsistency is a defense against modeling. Here on Less Wrong we complain that inconsistent behavior makes you vulnerable to Dutch-booking, but in real life, consistent behavior probably makes you even more vulnerable, because your enemies can easily predict what you do and plan accordingly.
I was just writing about my perspective here; see also Simulation Theory (the opposite of “Theory Theory”, believe it or not!). I mean, you could say that “making friends and being nice to them” is a form of manipulation, in some technical sense, blah blah evolutionary game theory blah blah, I guess. That seems like something Robin Hanson would say :-P I think it’s a bit too cynical if you mean “manipulation” in the everyday sense involving bad intent. Also, if you want to send out vibes of “Don’t mess with me or I will crush you!” to other people—and the ability to make credible threats is advantageous for game-theory reasons—that’s all about being predictable and consistent!
Again as I posted just now, I think the lion’s share of “modeling”, as I’m using the term, is something that happens unconsciously in a fraction of second, not effortful empathy or modeling.
Hmmm… If I’m trying to impress someone, I do indeed effortfully try to develop a model of what they’re impressed by, and then use that model when talking to them. And I tend to succeed! And it’s not all that hard! The most obvious strategy tends to work (i.e., go with what has impressed them in the past, or what they say would be impressive, or what impresses similar people). I don’t really see any aspect of human nature that is working to make it hard for me to impress someone, like by a person randomly changing what they find impressive. Do you? Are there better examples?
I have low confidence debating this, because it seems to me like many things could be explained in various ways. For example, I agree that certain predictability is needed to prevent people from messing with you. On the other hand, certain uncertainty is needed, too—if people know exactly when you would snap and start crushing them, they will go 5% below the line; but if the exact line depends on what you had for breakfast today, they will be more careful about getting too close to it.
I’m in school at the undergraduate level, taking 3 difficult classes while working part-time.
For this path to be useful at all, I have to be able to tick the boxes: get good grades, get admitted to grad school, etc. For now, my strategy is to optimize to complete these tasks as efficiently as possible (what Zvi calls “playing on easy mode”), in order to preserve as much time and energy for what I really want: living and learning.
Are there dangers in getting really good at paying your dues?
1) Maybe it distracts you/diminishes the incentive to get good at avoiding dues.
2) Maybe there are two ways to pay dues (within the rules): one that gives you great profit and another that merely satisfies the requirement.
In general, though, I tend to think that efficient accomplishment is about avoiding or compressing work until you get to the “efficiency frontier” in your field. Good work is about one of two things:
Getting really fast/accurate at X because it’s necessary for reason R to do Y.
Getting really fast/accurate at X because it lets you train others to do (or better yet, automate) X.
In my case, X is schoolwork, R is “triangulation of me and graduate-level education,” and Y is “get a research job.”
X is also schoolwork, R is “practice,” and Y is learning. But this is much less clear. It may be that other strategies would be more efficient for learning.
However, since the expected value of my learning is radically diminished if I don’t get into grad school, it makes sense to optimize first for aceing my schoolwork, and then in the time that remains to optimize for learning. Treating these as two separate activities with two separate goals makes sense.
I suspect “dues” are less relevant in today’s world than a few decades ago. It used to be a (partial) defense against being judged harshly for your success, by showing that you’d earned it without special advantage. Nowadays, you’ll be judged regardless, as the assumption is that “the system” is so rigged that anyone who succeeds had a headstart.
To the extent that the dues do no actual good (unlike literal dues, which the recipient can use to buy things, presumably for the good of the group), skipping them seems very reasonable to me. The trick, of course, is that it’s very hard to distinguish unnecessary hurdles (“dues”) from socially-valuable lessons in conformity and behavior (“training”).
What are you using the word “rationalist” to mean? If you just mean “members of any subculture bearing some line of memetic descent from early Less Wrong” (which I don’t think deserves the pretentious term rationalist, but putting that aside), why is “communication platform” a useful way to chop up that social grouping? A lot of the same people use Less Wrong and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and Google Docs, and a lot of the people who use the same platform wouldn’t be in the same cluster if you were to analyze the graph of what actual conversations people are using these platforms to have.
It’s a natural way to cut it up from one’s own experience. Each platform has different affordances and brings out different aspects of people, and I get pretty different experiences of them on the different platforms mentioned.
Yesterday, I spent some time thinking about how, if you have a function f:R2→R and some point x∈R2, the value of the directional derivative from x could change as a function of the angle. I.e., what does the function ϕ:[0,2π]→R+ look like? I thought that any relationship was probably possible as long as it has the property that ϕ(α)=−ϕ(2π−α). (The values of the derivative in two opposite directions need to be negatives of each other.)
Anyone reading this is hopefully better at Analysis than I am and realized that there is, in fact, no freedom at all because each directional derivative is entirely determined by the gradient through the equation ∇vf(x)=⟨∇f(x),vN⟩ (where vN=v||v||). This means that ϕ has to be the cosine function scaled by ||∇vf(x)||, it cannot be anything else.
I clearly failed to internalize what this equation means when I first heard it because I found it super surprising that the gradient determines the value of every directional derivative. Like, really? It’s impossible to have more than exactly two directions with equally large derivatives unless the function is constant? It’s impossible to turn 90 degree from the direction of the gradient and having anything but derivative 0 in that direction? I’m not asking that ϕ be discontinuous, only that it not be precisely ||∇f(α)||cos(α). But alas.
This also made me realize that cos if viewed as a function of the circle is just the dot product with the standard vector, i.e.,
cos:S2→[−1,+1]cos:x↦⟨x,(1,0)⟩
or even just cos(x,y)=x. Similarly, sin(x,y)=y.
I know what you’re thinking; you need sin and cos to map [0,2π] to S2 in the first place. But the circle seems like a good deal more fundamental than those two functions. Wouldn’t it make more sense to introduce trigonometry in terms of ‘how do we wrap R around S2?’. The function that does this is γ(x)=(cos(x),sin(x)), and then you can study the properties that this function needs to have and eventually call the coordinates cos and sin. This feels like a way better motivation than putting a right triangle onto the unit circle for some reason, which is how I always see the topic introduced (and how I’ve introduced it myself).
Looking further at the analogy with the gradient, this also suggests that there is a natural extension of cos to Sn for all n∈N. I.e., if we look at some point x∈Rn, we can again ask about the function ϕ that maps each angle to the value of the directional derivative on x in that direction, and if we associate these angles with points of Sn−1, then this yields the function ϕ:Sn−1→R, which is again just the dot product with (1,...,0) or the projection onto the first coordinate (scaled by ||∇f(x)||). This can then be considered a higher-dimensional cos function.
There’s also the 0-d case where S0={1,−1}. This describes how the direction changes the derivative for a function f:R→R.
I found it super surprising that the gradient determines the value of every directional derivative. Like, really?
When reading this comment, I was surprised for a moment, too, but now that you mention it—it’s because if the function is smooth at the point where you’re taking the directional derivative, then it has to locally resemble a plane, just like a how a differentiable function of a single variable is said to be “locally linear”. If the directional derivative varied in any other way, then the surface would have to have a “crinkle” at that point and it wouldn’t be differentiable. Right?
I have since learned that there are functions which do have all partial derivatives at a point but are not smooth. Wikipedia’s example is f(x,y)=y3x2+y2 with f(0,0)=0. And in this case, there is still a continuous function ϕ:S2→R that maps each point to the value of the directional derivative, but it’s ϕ(x,y)=y3, so different from the regular case.
So you can probably have all kinds of relationships between direction and {value of derivative in that direction}, but the class of smooth functions have a fixed relationship. It still feels surprising that ‘most’ functions we work with just happen to be smooth.
What to do if you suddenly need to rest your hands
On Monday I went from “computer work seems kind of uncomfortable, I wonder if I should be worried” to “oh crap oh crap, that’s actually painful”. Everything I’ve ever heard says not to work through RSI pain, so what now? I decided to spend a week learning hands free input. I wanted to a) get some serious rest and b) still be productive. And guess what? Learning hands free input is like the one activity that does not suffer a productivity penalty from not being able to use your hands.
When I started it was really slow going. Lots of yelling “no don’t type ‘delete word’ delete the f**king word!!!”[1] But then I found this talk, which was just .. woah. Since then, I have been using Talon, and I am in love.
The key to understanding Talon, and the reason I think it’s heads and shoulders above everything else I’ve tried, is the basic insight that most of the time the input you want to do is not writing. Talon has the concept of modes, and most of the time you’re in the command mode.[2] And because there’s a limited set of commands, there’s much less ambiguity between inputs.
After one week, I’m able to dictate an existing code file painlessly albeit still slowly. The thing that feels important to me, is that I’m no longer living in fear of my career being taken away from me by my wrists.
So my recommendation to you, if you find yourself in the situation I was is to rest your hands, and try learning this thing. If you do, reach out to me! I’m (at least currently) sufficiently excited about this that I would very much enjoy help you out.
Epistemic postscript: I’m writing this while still excited about it, which is providing the motivation to do the writeup, but also makes me believe that in the future I will be less optimistic, and you should take that into account when evaluating its implicit predictions.
***
[1] A word to the wise, if you have dictation software listening, yelling at your computer is the opposite of productive (this is good, a frustrating experience with quick negative reinforcement for outbursts induces a zen-like experience).
I hadn’t before actually, thanks for the recommendation. I checked it out. Talon seems more like “teach yourself the alphabet, then program using vim.” Whereas Serenade is more like “teach yourself to program using our macros.” This makes Talon easier to learn, and more flexible, Serenade has the following benefits as I see them:
Programming in large well defines chunks, which it makes it easier to incorporate “pick which one you meant, or continue to use our default”
It uses more natural language, which makes me think that the accuracy has a higher ceiling
The answer to this seems obvious in isolation: shaping helps with credit assignment, rescaling doesn’t (and might complicate certain methods in the advantage vs Q-value way). But I feel like maybe there’s an important interaction here that could inform a mathematical theory of how a reward signal guides learners through model space?
Is spaced repetition software a good tool for skill development or good practice reinforcement?
I was recently considering using an Anki prompt to do a mental move rather than to test my recall, like tense your muscles as though you were performing a deadlift. I don’t actually have access to a gym right now, so I didn’t get to put it into action immediately. Visualizing the movement as vividly as possible, and tensing muscles like the movement was being performed (even when not doing it) are common tricks reported by famous weightlifters.
But I happened across an article from Runner’s World today which described an experiment where all they did was tell a group of runners the obvious things that everyone already knows about preventing injury. The experimental group saw ~13% fewer injuries.
This suggests to me that my earlier idea is probably a good one, even though it isn’t memory per se. The obvious hitch is that what I am after isn’t actually recall—it isn’t as though runners forget that overtraining leads to injury if you were to ask them, and I have never forgotten how to do a deadlift.
Rather the question is how to make it as correct and instinctive as possible.
This feels like a physical analogue of my earlier notion about Ankifying the elements of a problem, so as to integrate it into my perspective and notice relevant information.
Maybe a better way to say this is using an Anki prompt to help respond to a physical prompt, that being the task itself.
A physical action in response to the physical task instinctively already has a name; it is called muscle memory.
Personally I’ve found the biggest problem with spaced repetition for skills and habits is that it’s contextless.
Adding the context from multiple skills with different contexts makes it take way more time, and not having the context makes it next to useless for learning the skils.
Personally I’ve found the biggest problem with spaced repetition for skills and habits is that it’s contextless.
Could you talk a bit more about this? My initial reaction is that I am almost exactly proposing additional value from using Anki to engage the skill sans context (in addition to whatever actual practice is happening with context).
I review Gwern’s post pretty much every time I resume the habit; it doesn’t look like it has been evaluated in connection with physical skills.
I suspect the likeliest difference is that the recall curve is going to be different from the practice curve for physical skills, and the curve for mental review of physical skills will probably be different again. These should be trivial to adjust if we knew what they were, but alas, I do not.
Maybe I could pillage the sports performance research? Surely they do something like this.
I review Gwern’s post pretty much every time I resume the habit; it doesn’t look like it has been evaluated in connection with physical skills.
My take is pretty similar to cognitive skills: It works well for simple motor skills but not as well for complex skills.
My initial reaction is that I am almost exactly proposing additional value from using Anki to engage the skill sans context (in addition to whatever actual practice is happening with context).
My experience is basically that this doesn’t work. This seems to track with the research on skill transfer (which is almost always non-existent or has such a small effect that it can’t be measured.)
While researching past technological discontinuities, I came across some interesting anecdotes. Some follow. I also looked at technology readiness levels, but this didn’t prove fruitful.
Anecdotes and patterns
Watt’s safety concerns
As the 18th century advanced, the call was for higher pressures; this was strongly resisted by Watt who used the monopoly his patent gave him to prevent others from building high-pressure engines and using them in vehicles. He mistrusted the boiler technology of the day, the way they were constructed and the strength of the materials used.
…Oliver Evans in his turn was in favour of “strong steam” which he applied to boat engines and to stationary uses. He was a pioneer of cylindrical boilers; however Evans’ boilers did suffer several serious boiler explosions, which tended to lend weight to Watt’s qualms.
Source
This narrative has been later disputed, however, it does seem possible that awareness of the high risk of high-pressure engines, which were more susceptible to boiler explosions, delayed their development and adoption somewhat. In any case, the anecdote might be interesting for those who may seek to delay development of the capabilities of AI until safety technologies have been developed, either as a historical example or as a talking point.
Monetary bounties to incentivize progress
In April 1900, Henri offered the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize, also simply known as the Deutsch prize, of 100,000 francs to the first machine capable of flying a round trip from the Parc Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and back in less than 30 minutes. The winner of the prize needed to maintain an average ground speed of at least 22 km/h (14 mph) to cover the round trip distance of 11 km (6.8 mi) in the allotted time. The prize was to be available from May 1, 1900, to October 1, 1903.[7]
To win the prize, Alberto Santos-Dumont decided to build the Santos-Dumont No. 5, a larger airship than his earlier craft. On August 8, 1901, during one of his attempts, the dirigible began to lose hydrogen gas. It started to descend and was unable to clear the roof of the Trocadero Hotel. Santos-Dumont was left hanging in a basket from the side of the hotel. With the help of the Paris fire brigade, he climbed to the roof without injury.[8]
On October 19, 1901, after several attempts and trials, Santos-Dumont launched his Number 6 airship at 2:30 pm. After only nine minutes of flight, Santos-Dumont had rounded the Eiffel Tower, but then suffered an engine failure. To restart the engine, he had to climb back over the gondola rail without a safety harness. The attempt was successful, and he crossed the finish line in 29 minutes 30 seconds. However, a short delay arose before his mooring line was secured, and at first the adjudicating committee refused him the prize, despite de la Meurthe, who was present, declaring himself satisfied. This caused a public outcry from the crowds watching the flight, as well as comment in the press. However a face-saving compromise was reached, and Santos-Dumont was awarded the prize. In a charitable gesture, he gave half the prize to his crew and then donated the other half to the poor of Paris.[9]
The first carriage-sized automobile suitable for use on existing wagon roads in the United States was a steam-powered vehicle invented in 1871 by Dr. J.W. Carhart, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Racine, Wisconsin.[1][11][self-published source] It induced the State of Wisconsin in 1875 to offer a $10,000 award to the first to produce a practical substitute for the use of horses and other animals. They stipulated that the vehicle would have to maintain an average speed of more than 5 miles per hour (8 km/h) over a 200-mile (320 km) course. The offer led to the first city to city automobile race in the United States, starting on 16 July 1878 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and ending in Madison, Wisconsin, via Appleton, Oshkosh, Waupun, Watertown, Fort Atkinson, and Janesville. While seven vehicles were registered, only two started to compete: the entries from Green Bay and Oshkosh. The vehicle from Green Bay was faster, but broke down before completing the race. The Oshkosh finished the 201-mile (323 km) course in 33 hours and 27 minutes, and posted an average speed of six miles per hour. In 1879, the legislature awarded half the prize.[12][13][14]
After the Scilly naval disaster of 1707 where four ships ran aground due to navigational mistakes, the British government offered a large prize of £20,000, equivalent to millions of pounds today, for anyone who could determine longitude accurately. The reward was eventually claimed in 1761 by Yorkshire carpenter John Harrison, who dedicated his life to improving the accuracy of his clocks. In 1735 Harrison built his first chronometer, which he steadily improved on over the next thirty years before submitting it for examination. The clock had many innovations, including the use of bearings to reduce friction, weighted balances to compensate for the ship’s pitch and roll in the sea and the use of two different metals to reduce the problem of expansion from heat.
Non-neurotypical pioneers
Pioneers show a wide range of motivations. In particular, throughout the historical record, (lone) a non-neurotypical pioneer will occasionally obsess over a technology, refine it, make some progress, or leave a record of failed approaches. This may prove a hurdle for some safety approaches.
The following quotes are taken from their respective Wikipedia pages:
In the 1820s British inventor George Pocock developed man-lifting kites, using his own children as guinea pigs
In 1801, the French officer André Guillaume Resnier de Goué managed a 300-metre glide by starting from the top of the city walls of Angoulême and broke only one leg on arrival
The Jesuits were another major contributor to the development of pendulum clocks in the 17th and 18th centuries, having had an “unusually keen appreciation of the importance of precision”. In measuring an accurate one-second pendulum, for example, the Italian astronomer Father Giovanni Battista Riccioli persuaded nine fellow Jesuits “to count nearly 87,000 oscillations in a single day”. They served a crucial role in spreading and testing the scientific ideas of the period, and collaborated with contemporary scientists, such as Huygens.
Blyth’s 10 m high, cloth-sailed wind turbine was installed in the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk in Kincardineshire and was used to charge accumulators developed by the Frenchman Camille Alphonse Faure, to power the lighting in the cottage, thus making it the first house in the world to have its electricity supplied by wind power. Blyth offered the surplus electricity to the people of Marykirk for lighting the main street, however, they turned down the offer as they thought electricity was “the work of the devil.” Although he later built a wind turbine to supply emergency power to the local Lunatic Asylum, Infirmary and Dispensary of Montrose, the invention never really caught on as the technology was not considered to be economically viable
In 1941 the world’s first megawatt-size wind turbine was connected to the local electrical distribution system on the mountain known as Grandpa’s Knob in Castleton, Vermont, United States. It was designed by Palmer Cosslett Putnam and manufactured by the S. Morgan Smith Company. This 1.25 MW Smith–Putnam turbine operated for 1100 hours before a blade failed at a known weak point, which had not been reinforced due to war-time material shortages. No similar-sized unit was to repeat this “bold experiment” for about forty years
In 1741 de Vaucanson was appointed by Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, as inspector of the manufacture of silk in France. He was charged with undertaking reforms of the silk manufacturing process. At the time, the French weaving industry had fallen behind that of England and Scotland. During this time, Vaucanson promoted wide-ranging changes for automation of the weaving process. In 1745, he created the world’s first completely automated loom, drawing on the work of Basile Bouchon and Jean Falcon. Vaucanson was trying to automate the French textile industry with punch cards—a technology that, as refined by Joseph-Marie Jacquard more than a half-century later, would revolutionize weaving and, in the twentieth century, would be used to input data into computers and store information in binary form. His proposals were not well received by weavers, however, who pelted him with stones in the street and many of his revolutionary ideas were largely ignored.
David Unaipon, Australian inventor, had a lifelong fascination with perpetual motion. One of his studies on Newtonian mechanics led him to create a shearing machine in 1910 that converted curvilinear motion into straight line movement. The device is the basis of modern mechanical shears.
Shockley was upset about the device being credited to Brattain and Bardeen, who he felt had built it “behind his back” to take the glory. Matters became worse when Bell Labs lawyers found that some of Shockley’s own writings on the transistor were close enough to those of an earlier 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld that they thought it best that his name be left off the patent application.
Due to Shockley’s earlier work on FETs and the existence of the Lilienfeld patent, Bell Labs left Shockley off their patent on the point-contact design. Shockley was incensed and decided to demonstrate who was the real brains of the operation. Only a few months later he invented an entirely new type of transistor with a layer or “sandwich” structure. This new form was considerably more robust than the fragile point-contact system, and would go on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s. It would evolve into the bipolar junction transistor.
Technology Readiness Levels
Technology readiness levels (TRLs) are an interesting way of measuring the maturity of a given technology. They originated at NASA to be used in the context of the space program, and then generalized to the point of uselessness, after which they were implemented in some projects of the European Union.
Originally I thought that trying to map out something akin the technology readiness level of each technology in my list would be worth doing, and created the following scale:
L1. Earliest reference
L1-a: In a fictional story.
L1-b: Somewhere else.
L2. Concept rigorously formulated.
L3. Creation stage.
L3-a. First person working on the area towards a prototype.
L3-b. Proof of concept or prototype: A hobbyist has built the technology in their own laboratory, garage or basement, or as a private demonstration, or as a toy, but perhaps with no further intention of bringing it to market.
L3-c. Further development: The technology starts to be invested on and improved; there may be concrete plans about bringing it to market.
L4. Technology is available.
If commercial: The product can be bought, even if it’s expensive. This does not ask whether a sufficiently motivated billionaire could buy it, but rather whether the product is being produced in order to be sold.
If military: The product can be employed in action. One could not buy a nuclear weapon, but it was still available to the USA by 1945.
L4-a: Technology is available and cheap.
L5. Technology is available and decent among the relevant dimensions
L5-a: Technology is decent and cheap.
L6. Technology is pretty good.
L6-a: Technology is pretty good and cheap.
L7. Technology is really good.
L7-a: Technology is really good and cheap.
L8. Widespread adoption.
L9. Societal influence. The invention has influenced society.
Although I did gather the information, this proved to be an unfruitful idea. The data was often not available, there were category errors, the scale asks for absolute quality when I mostly have a comparison with current levels, etc. I did get the insight that by the time a product is cheap, it’s often of much better quality than early versions of the same product. Thinking about TRLs might have clarified my thinking about the evolution of some technologies, but overall I’d say it probably wasn’t worth it.
Your AI doesn’t figure out how to do a reasonable “values handshake” with a competitor (where two agents agree to both pursue some appropriate compromise values in order to be Pareto efficient)...
I think it refers to something like this: Imagine that a superintelligent human-friendly AI meets a superintelligent paperclip maximizer, and they both realize their powers are approximately balanced. What should they do?
For humans, “let’s fight, and to the victor go the spoils” is the intuitive answer, but the superintelligences can possibly do better. If they fight, they have a 50% chance of achieving nothing, and a 50% chance of winning the universe… minus whatever was sacrificed to Moloch, which could possibly be a lot. If they split the universe to halves, and find out a way how to trust each other, that is better that war. But there is a possibility of even better solution, when both of them would agree on acting as if they were a single superintelligence that values both humans and paperclips equally.
The cooperative solution can be better than a 50% split of the universe, because you could build paperclip factories on places humans care less about, such as uninhabitable planets; or perhaps you could find a way how to introduce paperclips to human environment without reducing the human quality of life. For example, would you mind using paperclips to reinforce the walls of your house? Would you mind if almost all materials used to build stuff for humans contained little paperclips inside? Would you mind living in a simulation implemented on paperclip-shaped circuits? So maybe at the end, humans could get like 70% of the potential utility of the universe, while 70% of potential material would be converted to paperclips.
I can’t wrap my brain around the computational theory of consciousness.
Who decides how to interpret the computations? If I have a beach, are the lighter grains 0 and darker grains 1? What about the smaller and bigger grains? What if I decide to use the motion of the planets to switch between these 4 interpretations.
Surely under infinite definitions of computation, there are infinite consciousnesses experience infinite states at any given time, just from pure chance.
That’s why you need to use some sort of complexity-weighting for theories like this, so that minds that are very hard to specify(given some fixed encoding of ‘the world’) are considered ‘less real’ than easy-to-specify ones.
I think that only makes sense to do if those minds are literally “less conscious” than other minds though. Otherwise why would I care less about them because they’re more complex?
It does make sense to me to talk about “speed” and “number of observer moments” as part of moral weight, but “complexity of definition” to me only makes sense if those minds experience things differently than I do.
Description complexity is the natural generalization of “speed” and “number of observer moments” to infinite universes/arbitrary embeddings of minds in those universes. It manages to scale as (the log of) the density of copies of an entity, while avoiding giving all the measure to Boltzmann brains.
Is it an empirical question? It seems more like a philosophical question(what evidence could we see that would change our minds?)
Here’s a (not particularly rigorous) philosophical argument in favour. The substrate on which a mind is running shouldn’t affect its moral status. So we should consider all computable mappings from the world to a mind as being ‘real’. On the other hand, we want the total “number” of observer-moments in a given world to be finite(otherwise we can’t compare the values of different worlds). This suggests that we should assign a ‘weight’ to different experiences, which must be exponentially decreasing in program length for the sum to converge.
Is it an empirical question? It seems more like a philosophical question(what evidence could we see that would change our minds?)
We could talk to different minds and have them describe their experience, and then compare the number of observer moments to their complexity.
But the question then becomes how you sample these minds you are talking to. Do you just go around literally speaking to them? Clearly this will miss a lot of minds. But you can’t use completely arbitrary ways of accessing them either, because then you might end up packing most of the ‘mind’ into your way of interfacing with them. Weighting by complexity is meant to provide a good way of sampling minds, that includes all computable patterns without attributing mind-fulness to noise.
(Just to clarify a bit, ‘complexity’ here is referring to the complexity of selecting a mind given the world, not the complexity of the mind itself. It’s meant to be a generalization of ‘number of copies’ and ‘exists/does not exist’, not a property inherent to the mind)
It seems like you can get quite a bit of data with minds that you can interface with? I think it’s true that you can’t sample the space of all possible minds, but testing this hypothesis on just a few seems like high VoI.
What hypothesis would you be “testing”? What I’m proposing is an idealized version of a sampling procedure that could be used to run tests, namely, sampling mind-like things according to their description complexity.
If you mean that we should check if the minds we usually see in the world have low complexity, I think that already seems to be the case, in that we’re the end-result of a low-complexity process starting from simple conditions, and can be pinpointed in the world relatively simply.
What hypothesis would you be “testing”? What I’m proposing is an idealized version of a sampling procedure that could be used to run tests, namely, sampling mind-like things according to their description complexity.
I mean, I’m saying get minds with many different complexities, figure out a way to communicate with them, and ask them about their experience.
That would help to figure out if complexity is indeed correlated with observer moments.
But how you test this feels different from the question of whether or not it’s true.
I think we’re talking about different things. I’m talking about how you would locate minds in an arbitrary computational structure(and how to count them), you’re talking about determining what’s valuable about a mind once we’ve found it.
Suppose that consciousness were not a no-place function, but rather a one-place function. Specifically, whether something is conscious or not is relative to some reality. (A bit like movement relative to reference frames in physics.)
Specifically, whether something is conscious or not is relative to some reality
How does this relate back to the example with the sand? Is there a sand-planet reality that’s just like ours, but in that reality the sand is conscious and we’re not?
I don’t think I quite get what a reality is in the function.
I was thinking of the computational theory of consciousness as basically being the same thing as saying that consciousness could be substrate independent. (E.g. you could have conscious uploads.)
I think this then leads you to ask, “If consciousness is not specific to a substrate, and it’s just a pattern, how can we ever say that something does or does not exhibit the pattern? Can’t I arbitrarily map between objects and parts of the pattern, and say that something is isomorphic to consciousness, and therefore is conscious?”
And my proposal is that maybe it makes sense to talk in terms of something like reference frames. Sure, there’s some reference frame where you could map between grains of sand and neurons, but it’s a crazy reference frame and not one that we care about.
And my proposal is that maybe it makes sense to talk in terms of something like reference frames. Sure, there’s some reference frame where you could map between grains of sand and neurons, but it’s a crazy reference frame and not one that we care about.
I mean, from that reference frame, does that consciousness feel pain? If so, why do we not care about it? It seems to me like when it comes to morality, the thing that matters is the reference frame of the consciousness, and not our reference frame (I think some similar argument applies to longtermism). Maybe we want to tile the universe in such a way that there more infinitely countable pleasure patterns than pain patterns, or something.
And how does this relate back to realities? Are we saying that the sand operates in separate reality?
It seems to me like when it comes to morality, the thing that matters is the reference frame of the consciousness, and not our reference frame (I think some similar argument applies to longtermism).
For the way I mean reference frame, I only care about my reference frame. (Or maybe I care about other frames in proportion to how much they align with mine.) Note that this is not the same thing as egoism.
My sense is that reference frame for you is something like “how externally similar is this entity to me” whereas for me the thing that matters is “How similar internally is this consciousness to my consciousness.” Which, if the computational theory of consciousness is true, the answer is “many consciousnesses are very similar.”
Obviously this is at the level of “not even a straw man” since you’re gesturing at vague intuitions, but based on our discussion so far this is as close as I can point to a crux.
Hmm, it’s not so much about how similar it is to me as it is like, whether it’s on the same plane of existence.
I mean, I guess that’s a certain kind of similarity. But I’m willing to impute moral worth to very alien kinds of consciousness, as long as it actually “makes sense” to call them a consciousness. The making sense part is the key issue though, and a bit underspecified.
Well, Hamlet doesn’t really exist in our universe, so my plan for now is to not consider him a consciousness worth caring about. But if you start to deal with harder cases, whether it exists in our universe becomes a trickier question.
But if you start to deal with harder cases, whether it exists in our universe becomes a trickier question.
To me this is simply empirical. Is the computational theory of consciousness true without reservation? Then if the computation exists in our universe, the consciousness exists. Perhaps it’s only partially true, and more complex computations, or computations that take longer to run, have less of a sense of consciousness, and therefore it exists, but
I don’t have a well-developed theory here. But a few related ideas:
simplicity matters
evolution over time matters—maybe you can map all the neurons in my head and their activations at a given moment in time to a bunch of grains of sand, but the mapping is going to fall apart at the next moment (unless you include some crazy updating rule, but that violates the simplicity requirement)
accessibility matters—I’m a bit hesitant on this one. I don’t want to say that someone with locked in syndrome is not conscious. But if some mathematical object that only exists in Tegmark V is conscious (according to the previous definitions), but there’s no way for us to interact with it, then maybe that’s less relevant.
Ahh I see. Yeah, I think that assigning moral weight to different properties of consciousness might be a good way forward here. But it still seems really weird that there are infinite consciousnesses operating at any given time, and makes me a bit suspicious of the computational theory of consciousness.
Warning: This is a personal vent on my personal situation. I doubt it will be worth your time.
High school days were the peak of my life. School was easy, and I was fortunate enough to find interest and some talent in math olympiad. I climbed my way through before getting stopped just before the TST.
I remember them giving out big π-shaped chocolates for the IMO contestants that year, and getting really bitter because it looked so cool.
After I hit that wall I parted way with math to become a CS major because startups were a thing and I believed I could start the next Google by my own hands.
Fortunately I got accepted to a pretty good university.
So all in all, I didn’t quite get there but still, I worked hard, and was able to take pride in my achievements.
Good times.
Anyways, after that I had multiple breakdowns, flunked the school, and spent 10 years mostly playing card games and masturbating.
It’s not that I didn’t try—rather I did multiple times. I was full with great ideas, some I still believe are viable, but overconfidence and lack of diligence got me and I underperformed quite bad.
Not one project was persisted until fruition and tens of half-assed unfinished ones were only a burden. For each ambitious projects, ultimately I hurt multiple people, and isolated myself more.
I can only attribute my failures to myself.
It’s a really bad feedback loop. I start a project, get anxious fearing failure, fail because of lack of confidence and diligence, go back to cry in bed wondering where it all went wrong.
One time I needed to do a simple CSS work, couldn’t make myself to do it, and just stared at the monitor for a whole day. Work was a simple static 3 pager for 2 weeks. I did not finish it. I got into a legal trouble for that. Fun times.
I can feel time and youth slipping away. I am clearly aware of how important this time is in my life. I also can feel the deteriorating working memory, and no longer feel like the smart guy good at math. I recently tried to solve some MO problems trying to recall fond memory of my AoPS days, and failed miserably.
I know. I should get a good sleep, exercise, reconnect with my friends, network with people, feel good about myself again, pick up new skills, finish that damn GTD book once and for all, diligently work on my projects, and it will be all good. Priviledge alarm is ringing left and right and I’m in my mom’s basement furiously masturbating to a deepfake porn.
I do not know why I felt the need to post this here. I lurk this site a lot because it fits my worldview of putting logical thinking above most things. Maybe I wanted to reflect on my situation somewhat objectively by placing myself in public.
Not sure how I should wrap up this post. So I will not try.
Check that you are not missing any neurodiversity diagnoses such as aspergers or adhd. Your problems sound a lot like my problems. Internalized ablism could be really depowering. One wouldn’t run a marathon with a hearth condition. It is true that these kinds of things can have alot of blurry lines and sceptics can have easy time to not believe it even exists but most of the time taking correctly a problem into account is way better than ignoring it completely.
Thank you for writing this post. It can be hard to realize that one is in a persistent rut and harder to write it up publicly.
As someone similar to you (math competitions during high school, CS major, ambition often outruns my capacity, trying to avoid reverting to the mean during my adult years), I believe that I’m susceptible to failure modes like this. DM me if you want to video call to exchange advice or something; this would be valuable enough to me that I’m willing to pay a fair rate if you need funding.
I can relate to parts of this. School was simple, math olympiad was the peak of my life, then I switched to CS because I hoped I could make lots of money and retire early. (Spoiler: didn’t happen.)
Then I failed to get a PhD, and realized I also suck at life outside of the school system. I was able to keep a job, but I switched jobs quite often. I don’t finish most of the things I start, I waste a lot of time, and I neglect my health.
From outside I probably seem quite successful—I make decent money, own an appartment in the city center, have a wife and two kids—but if you know me closer, you can see a lot of stupid or self-destructive behavior. Life feels very difficult to me, and I don’t know what to do to make it better. (Or like, I know on some level, but I am unable to follow my own advice. Turning off the internet would probably immediately greatly improve my quality of life.)
I have some evidence of being an undiagnosed asperger (or something very similar to it). Reading descriptions of people on the spectrum feels very familiar, except they usually feel things even stronger than me, so what is “possible, but with great suffering” for me, is “impossible” for them.
Seems to me that some problems are a vicious circle. Doing stupid things brings problems, problems make me mentally tired, being tired makes me do stupid things. Lack of interaction with friends makes me sad, being sad makes me less likely to reach out to my friends. Not finishing my projects makes me pessimistic about my abilities, being pessimistic about my abilities reduces the motivation to work hard on my projects. Predicting bad future makes me feel bad right now.
Building good habits is hard, and it is easy to lose them. I wish I could give some actionable advice here, but I can’t. The best I have is… sometimes things get okay by a lucky coincidence, then the vicious cycle is broken, and things keep being okay for a while… until another coincidence disrupts them. I mostly know how to maintain the okay state, but I don’t know how to regain it when I lose it.
It feels like there should be an easy solution… but maybe that’s like telling a depressed person “why don’t you simply smile and be happy?”. Similarly, why don’t I simply try to get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and meet my friends often? Dunno. I had time like this in the past, and it was great. But when something disrupts the routine, it is very difficult to build it again.
If you are similar to me, I would suggest ignoring the “GTD” and “picking up skills” for a moment, and focus on getting the fundamentals (friends, sleep, exercise—probably in this order) right. That will give you the energy necessary for the rest of your life. On the other hand, focusing too much on other things may take your attention away from the fundamentals, and shortly afterwards everything will fall apart again. Also, friends need to be in real life, online doesn’t work; you need to interrupt the internet, not to use friends as yet another excuse to get online.
There’s a list of things to do every day (which I chose), and when I do them, I fill in the bubble for that task and day. Habits I have tracked include brushing my teeth 2x/day, meditating, excercisizing, working towards my goals, clearing Anki, and writing a short “mission statement” every day (I have also recently reserved a few pages for weekly habits, such as playing chess, shaving, or doing my laundry, which I have found so far to be valuable). Of course, you could choose whatever you think would help you live a better life. It should be fairly easy to recreate this system using blank paper, especially using graph paper.
I find that it has provided a good amount of value to me, and would recommend it to anybody who wants to build stronger habits.
I don’t have anything helpful to say, but I’m commenting because it’s important to me that you know that you’re not just shouting into the void. Life’s tough. You matter, and I am confident that in the right conditions, you could do amazing and valuable things.
As far as actually getting into those right conditions… I’m reluctant to say anything, because I don’t know your situation, and I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of the obvious refrains many, many, many times
I’ve been wanting to set LessWrong as my home page for a while but kept avoiding it because the site is so visibly bright.
I looked up ways of viewing the site without hurting my eyes and found https://www.greaterwrong.com, but didn’t really like it.
Then I found https://github.com/lfaucon/lessbright, which looked right, but wasn’t technically the real LessWrong site (which meant it couldn’t tell I was logged in, among other things).
But I already use Stylus to apply stylesheet modifications to webpages, so I looked at lessbright’s source code, found the CSS code it used to change the site’s appearance, and applied that to a new Stylus style (although my second monitor doesn’t have very good contrast, so I used 100% instead of 92%):
html {
margin:0px;
filter:invert(92%);
}
And now the site looks exactly how I want it!
Just figured I’d share this, in case the site’s excessive brightness annoys anyone else.
Great! For people who are bothered by the brightness, this seems like a decent solution for now. We are thinking about creating styling for a proper dark mode, but really unclear what the timeline on that is atm.
I was having a bad day today. Unlikely to have time this weekend for something I’d wanted to do. Crappy teaching in a class I’m taking. Ever increasing and complicating responsibilities piling up.
So what did I do? I went out and bought half a cherry pie.
Will that cherry pie make me happy? No. I knew this in advance. Consciously and unconsciously: I had the thought, and no emotion compelled me to do it.
In fact, it seemed like the least-efficacious action: spending some of my limited money, to buy a pie I don’t need, to respond to stress that’s unrelated to pie consumption and is in fact caused by lack of time (that I’m spending on buying and eating pie).
BUT. What buying the pie allowed me to do was tell a different story. To myself and my girlfriend who I was texting with. Now, today can be about how I got some delicious pie.
And I really do feel better. It’s not the pie, nor the walk to the store to buy it. It’s the relief of being able to tell my girlfriend that I bought some delicious cherry pie, and that I’d share it with her if she didn’t live a three-hour drive away. It’s the relief of reflecting on how I dealt with my stress, and seeing a pie-shaped memory at the end of the schoolwork.
If this is a correct model of how this all works, then it suggests a couple things:
This can probably be optimized.
The way I talk about that optimization process will probably affect how well it works. For example, if I then think “what’s the cheapest way to get this effect,” that intuitively doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to be cheap. I need to find the right language, the right story to tell, so that I can explain my “philosophy” to myself and others in a way that gets the response I want.
Is that the darks arts? I don’t think so. I think this is one area of life where the message is the medium.
So the “stupid solutions to problems of life” are not really about improving the life, but about signaling to yourself that… you still have some things under control? (My life may suck, but I can have a cherry pie whenever I want to!)
This would be even more important if the cherry pie would somehow actively make your life worse. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, but at the same time keep eating cherry pie every day in order to improve the story of your day. Or if instead of cherry pie it would be cherry liqueur.
The way I talk about that optimization process will probably affect how well it works.
Just guessing, but it would probably help to choose the story in advance. “If I am doing X, my life is great, and nothing else matters”—and then make X something useful that doesn’t take much time. Even better, have multiple alternatives X, Y, Z, such that doing any of them is a “proof” of life being great.
I do chalk a lot of dysfunction up to this story-centric approach to life. I just suspect it’s something we need to learn to work with, rather than against (or to deny/ignore it entirely).
My sense is that storytelling—to yourself or others—is an art. To get the reaction you want—from self or others—takes some aesthetic sensitivity.
My guess is there’s some low hanging fruit here. People often talk about doing things “for the story,” which they resort to when they’re trying to justify doing something dumb/wasteful/dangerous/futile. Perversely, it often seems that when people talk in detail about their good decisions, it comes of as arrogant. Pointless, tidy philosophical paradoxes seem to get people’s puzzle-solving brains going better than confronting the complexity of the real world.
But maybe we can simply start building habits of expressing gratitude. Finding ways to present good ideas and decisions in ways that are delightful in conversation. Spinning interesting stories out of the best parts of our lives.
Consider the vector-valued velocity as a function of time, v:t↦R3. Scale this by the object’s mass and you get the momentum function over time. Imagine this momentum function wiggling around over time, the vector from the origin rotating and growing and shrinking.
The third law says that force is the derivative of this rescaled vector function—if an object is more massive, then the same displacement of this rescaled arrow is a proportionally smaller velocity modification, because of the rescaling!
And also, forces have opposite reactions (by conservation of momentum) and equal reactions (by conservation of energy).
I think there are multiple kinds of attacks, which matter in this matrix. Destruction/stability is a different continuum from take control of resources/preserve control of resources.
I also think there’s no stasis—the state of accessible resources (heat gradients, in the end) in the universe will always be shifting until it’s truly over. There may be multi-millenea equilibria, where it feels like stasis on a sufficiently-abstract level, but there’s still lots of change. As a test of this intuition, the Earth has been static for millions of years, and then there was a shift when it started emitting patterned EM radiation, which has been static (though changing in complexity and intensity) for 150 years or so.
I agree with Daniel, as well, that coordination and attack-to-control leads to singleton (winner takes all). I think coordination and attack-to-destroy may lead to singleton, or may lead to cyclic destruction back to pre-coordination levels. Defense and coordination is kind of hard to define—perfect cooperation is a singleton, right? But then there’s neither attack nor defense. I kind of hope defense and coordination leads to independence and trade, but I doubt it’s stable—eventually the better producer gets enough strength that attack becomes attractive.
Shouldn’t the singleton outcome be in the bottom right quadrant? If attack is easy but so is coordination, the only stable solution is one where there is only one entity (and thus no one to attack or be attacked.) If by contrast defense is easier, we could end up in a stable multipolar outcome… at least until coordination between those parties happen. Maybe singleton outcome happens in both coordination-is-easy scenarios.
Ted Kaczynski as a relatively apolitical test case for cancellation norms:
Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics professor who decided that industrial society was terrible, and waged a terroristic bombing campaign to foment a revolution against technology. As part of this campaign, he wrote a manifesto titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” and said that if a major newspaper printed it verbatim he would desist from terrorism. He is currently serving eight life sentences in a “super-max” security prison in Colorado.
My understanding is that his manifesto (which, incidentally, has been updated and given a new title “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”, the second edition of which was released this year) is lucid and thought-out. Here are some questions the answers to which are not obvious to me:
Should anybody read “Industrial Society and Its Future”, given its origin?
Suppose an EA group wrote to Kaczynski in prison, asking him to write a letter about opposition to technology to be read aloud and discussed in an EA meetup, and he complied. Would it have been unacceptable for the EA group to do this, and should it be unacceptable for the EA group to hold this meetup?
Generally speaking, if someone commits heinous and unambiguous crimes in service of an objective like “getting people to read X”, and it doesn’t look like they’re doing a tricky reverse-psychology thing or anything like that, then we should not cooperate with that objective. If Kaczynski had posted his manifesto on LessWrong, I would feel comfortable deleting it and any links to it, and I would encourage the moderator of any other forum to do the same under those circumstances.
But this is a specific and unusual circumstance. When people try to cancel each other, usually there’s no connection or a very tenuous connection between their writing and what they’re accused of. (Also the crime is usually less severe and less well proven.) In that case, the argument is different; either the people doing the cancelling think that the crime wasn’t adequately punished, and are trying to create justice via a distributed minor punishment. If people are right about whether the thing is bad, then the main issues are about standards of evidence (biased readings and out-of-context quotes go a long way), proportionality (it’s not worth blowing up peoples’ lives over having said something dumb on the internet), and relation to nonpunishers (problems happen when things escalate from telling people why someone is bad, to punishing people for not believing or not caring).
There’s no need to cancel anyone who’s failing to have influence already. I suspect there are no apolotical test cases: cancellation (in the form of verbally attacking and de-legitimizing someone as a person, rather than arguing against specific portions of their work) is primarily politically motivated. It’s pretty pure ad-hominem argument: “don’t listen to or respect this person, regardless of what they’re saying”. In this case, I’m not listening because I think it’s low-value on it’s own, regardless of authorship.
The manifesto is pretty easy to find in PDF form for free. I wasn’t able to get very far—way too many crackpot signals and didn’t seem worth my time. To your bullet points:
I can read this two ways: “should anybody” meaning “do you recommend any specific person read it” or “do you object to people reading it”. My answers are “yes, but not many people”, and “no.”. Anybody who is interested, either from a direct curiosity on the topic (which I predict won’t be rewarded) or from wanting to understand this kind of epistemic pathology (which might be worthwhile) should read it.
It’s absolutely acceptable. I wouldn’t enjoy it, but I’m not a member of the group, so no harm there. To decide whether YOUR group should do it, try to identify what you’d hope to get out of it, and what likely consequences there are from pursuing that direction. If your group is visible and sensitive to public perception (aka politically influenced), then certainly you should consider those affects.
To be explicit, here are some reasons that the EA community should cancel Kaczynski. Note that I do not necessarily think that they are sound or decisive.
EAs are known as utilitarians who are concerned about the impact of AI technology. By associating with him, that could give people the false impression that EAs are in favour of terroristic bombing campaigns to retard technological development, which would damage the EA community.
His threat to bomb more people and buildings if the Washington Post (WaPo) didn’t publish his manifesto damaged good discourse norms by inducing the WaPo to talk about something it wasn’t otherwise inclined to talk about, and good discourse norms are important for effective altruism.
It seems to me (not having read the manifesto) that the policies he advocates would cause large amounts of harm. For instance, without modern medical technology, I and many others would not have survived to the age of one year.
His bombing campaign is evidence of very poor character.
Who wrote these: “(which, incidentally, has been updated and given a new title “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”, the second edition of which was released this year)”?
How long is “eight life sentences”, and how much time does he have left?
Yes, there were no further bombings after its publication.
He did.
“eight life sentences”, IIUC, means that he will serve the rest of his life, and if the justice system decides that one (or any number less than 8) of the sentences should be vacated, he will still serve the rest of his life. I’m not sure what his life expectancy is, but he’s 78 at the moment.
Epistemic status: low status, not feeling good, discouraged by life and the future, feeling sick of life in general; permanent state of inaction. Need help/advice. The post is bad written, will probably make you feel that I’m an idiot, but I’m just a human truly looking for help/ some light
Five years ago, I thought “these app developers, they are so dumb! If I only knew what they know, I would be creating life-changing applications, helping millions of people”. Then I learned to program, and now I know how to solve problems step-by-step and how to create mobile apps, web apps, databases, etc. Finding LW 1 year behind gave me true purposes, and I want to minimize the number of seconds living beings are suffering and also maximize the number of seconds living beings are enjoying.
I finally realized that most people are not that interesting, because they don’t care neither about minimizing the number of seconds living beings are suffering nor maximizing the number of seconds living beings are enjoying life.
Although my goals are clear for me, my highest priority NOW is my grandmother. She doesn’t have all teeth on her mouth, and I don’t have enough money to fix it. She called me this weekend crying, saying that she doesn’t have money to pay the treatment and saying that it hurts a lot to do each meal. And my grandfather just died with coronavirus (two months ago). My reality is that I get $300 monthly by teaching on a school (I am considered a successful person for getting this much, most people (>60%) on my country earn less than $200.00), but I spend $200 just to pay the basic: rent, the condominium, the electricity bill, water, internet and mobile… and the fucking dental treatment is $2000.00, it is easy to see why I should leave the current job and dedicate myself full time for applying my software development skills and monetize it (which I never did, i.e, all my applications I published as free software), but I am not sure how to help without killing even more people.
While you grow on software development, you know how far your actions can go. When you make further research on scaling solutions, on the end all is about numbers, how far, how wide, how many people you will get.
When I try to gather ideas from local tribe or even distant tribes on online forums, all they say is: “WOW YOU HAVE THESE INCREDIBLE SKILLS FOR DEVELOPING MULTI-PLATFORM-APPS, so create this >application that will make 100,000 people watch ads for 5 seconds< and you will get rich quickly. They are so stupid that they can’t shut up and multiply, they can’t feel the meaning of creating a timeline in which you feel the 500,000 seconds of human experience of watching ads.
This is what I feel from quite every company and quite every person, they are trying to get “money”, this universal unit of power in trading of souls. You kill five, but you profit $1000.00, so that’s fine. You create billions of seconds of watch-ads-human-experience, and they suck every human every second of their souls to desire to buy products that will kill living beings. No apps for fighting disease. No application for fighting death, no one talks about it, no one wants to brainstorm that. When I talk seriously about preventing death and disease, people disengage. “This is not how to make money”, they say. They say: “you should think on yourself first, later you can solve all problems in the world”. First kill them, then you live!
Sometimes I think, “Ok, this food delivery app that everyone uses, I could create a local competition, people on my small city would use it and I would get enough money”. But wouldn’t I be optimizing for food delivery? Isn’t food delivery the “buy dead animal corpses from online stores”? Maybe I could think on some vegan app food delivery, but although it is totally feasible with my abilities, it will still take a lot of time to develop it by myself. So I come back to my state of mind that I can’t think on any solutions where I can get money on short-term without making people lose money and time (games) or without facilitating the killing of animals (food related solutions), or without destroying the environment (selling useless products to users), or without making people addicted to sliding their fingers on glass screens without caring about everyone dying around them (social networks, games). Because, on the end, all we do is moving our muscles, some beings die, and some smiles appears. How can I get money ethically (besides teaching math on school)? Why is this so hard? Why I’m not finding anyone to financially support developing solutions for the community? I don’t like proprietary software and for me it is not the way to go. Can you see the confusion on my mind? I am always afraid of developing solutions because I think it will ultimately make people addicted to uselessly move their fingers on the glass screen; maybe I should create an education app? But education should be free, how I would get money with it? I won’t force users to watch useless ads. How can I get the fucking $2000.00 for the dental treatment? I am nervous, I am angry because I feel I am useless and I can’t help my grandmother, I feel stupid for knowing so many libraries and so many random theorems, but I don’t understand where the money comes from and why it is so hard to get money ethically.
Is there any application that YOU, LessWrong user that is reading my babble until now, is there anything you would pay me for develop? Think about it, you say the specifications. I can develop anything (not AGI, please, this is impossibly hard. When I say >I can develop anything< actually I mean >I can manipulate lists, strings, dictionaries, on web, Android, desktop (linux, windows), the basic machine learning toolbox, databases, etc, i.e, practically any application you normally use on your phone, or your desktop, I could replicate it, provided enough time).
I know you love betting, maybe I could create related to it? Something that would help the LW community, something that is ethical, but something you would pay for? You could pay after I finish developing it; the software would necessarily be free software and anyone would be able to read it and modify it. I don’t know, I am lost. I don’t even know if I should continue searching or I should already give up on this useless babble.
Until today I haven’t listened anyone suggesting great solutions for the community. Although I can make apps, I don’t have great ideas to put in life. Actually I have a lot of ideas, but don’t have the time to implement them when I am still struggling for the bread of each day. How to minimize poverty, how to stop killing animals on a daily basis, how to provide health for the masses. I don’t know what I should do to get there, although if someone gave me a good idea with the math behind it, and it were clear to me how much seconds I would not be sacrificing for the evil gods, I can take it.
I am sorry for making you read this. I feel desperate, angry, I have no one to talk to in my circle of friends, no one understands programming, no one has interesting goals, I am poor and just a number that can vanish on all the useless numbers that don’t even count. Please, help me to leave inaction, my grandmother is suffering, give me some idea, some light, I don’t even know how to express myself well in English, please forgive me for all stupidity I just said, just help me
Dear diary...
[this is an experiment in just posting little progress reports as a self-motivation tool.]
1. I have a growing suspicion that I was wrong to lump the amygdala in with the midbrain. It may be learning by the same reward signal as the neocortex. Or maybe not. It’s confusing. Things I’m digesting: https://twitter.com/steve47285/status/1314553896057081857?s=19 (and references therein) and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11523425_Parallels_between_cerebellum-_and_amygdala-dependent_conditioning
2. Speaking of mistakes, I’m also regretting some comments I made a while ago suggesting that the brain doesn’t do backpropagation. Maybe that’s true in a narrow sense, but Randall O’Reilly has convinced me that the brain definitely does error-driven learning sometimes (I already knew that), and moreover it may well be able to propagate errors through at least one or two layers of a hierarchy, with enough accuracy to converge. No that doesn’t mean that the brain is exactly the same as a PyTorch / Tensorflow Default-Settings Deep Neural Net.
3. My long work-in-progress post on autism continues to be stuck on the fact that there seem to be two theories of social impairment that are each plausible and totally different. In one theory, social interactions are complex and hard to follow / model for cognitive / predictive-model-building reasons. The evidence I like for that is the role of the cerebellum, which sounds awfully causally implicated in autism. Like, absence of a cerebellum can cause autism, if I’m remembering right. In the other theory, modeling social interactions in the neurotypical way (via empathy) is aversive. The evidence I like for that is people with autism self-reporting that eye contact is aversive, among other things. (This is part of “intense world theory”.) Of those two stories, I’m roughly 100% sold on the latter story is right. But the former story doesn’t seem obviously wrong, and I don’t like having two explanations for the same thing (although it’s not impossible, autism involves different symptoms in different people, and they could co-occur for biological reasons rather than computational reasons). I’m hoping that the stories actually come together somehow, and I’m just confused about what the cerebellum and amygdala do. So I’m reading and thinking about that.
4. New theory I’m playing with: the neocortex outputs predictions directly, in addition to motor commands. E.g. “my arm is going to be touched”. Then the midbrain knows not to flinch when someone touches the arm. That could explain why the visual cortex talks to the superior colliculus, which I always thought was weird. Jeff Hawkins says those connections are the neocortex sending out eye movement motor commands, but isn’t that controlled by the frontal eye fields? Oh, then Randall O’Reilly had this mysterious throwaway comment in a lecture that the frontal eye fields seem to be at the bottom of the visual hierarchy if you look at the connections. (He had a reference, I should read it.) I don’t know what the heck is going on.
Is it too pessimistic to assume that people mostly model other people in order to manipulate them better? I wonder how much of human mental inconsistency is a defense against modeling. Here on Less Wrong we complain that inconsistent behavior makes you vulnerable to Dutch-booking, but in real life, consistent behavior probably makes you even more vulnerable, because your enemies can easily predict what you do and plan accordingly.
I was just writing about my perspective here; see also Simulation Theory (the opposite of “Theory Theory”, believe it or not!). I mean, you could say that “making friends and being nice to them” is a form of manipulation, in some technical sense, blah blah evolutionary game theory blah blah, I guess. That seems like something Robin Hanson would say :-P I think it’s a bit too cynical if you mean “manipulation” in the everyday sense involving bad intent. Also, if you want to send out vibes of “Don’t mess with me or I will crush you!” to other people—and the ability to make credible threats is advantageous for game-theory reasons—that’s all about being predictable and consistent!
Again as I posted just now, I think the lion’s share of “modeling”, as I’m using the term, is something that happens unconsciously in a fraction of second, not effortful empathy or modeling.
Hmmm… If I’m trying to impress someone, I do indeed effortfully try to develop a model of what they’re impressed by, and then use that model when talking to them. And I tend to succeed! And it’s not all that hard! The most obvious strategy tends to work (i.e., go with what has impressed them in the past, or what they say would be impressive, or what impresses similar people). I don’t really see any aspect of human nature that is working to make it hard for me to impress someone, like by a person randomly changing what they find impressive. Do you? Are there better examples?
I have low confidence debating this, because it seems to me like many things could be explained in various ways. For example, I agree that certain predictability is needed to prevent people from messing with you. On the other hand, certain uncertainty is needed, too—if people know exactly when you would snap and start crushing them, they will go 5% below the line; but if the exact line depends on what you had for breakfast today, they will be more careful about getting too close to it.
Fair enough :-)
Paying your dues
I’m in school at the undergraduate level, taking 3 difficult classes while working part-time.
For this path to be useful at all, I have to be able to tick the boxes: get good grades, get admitted to grad school, etc. For now, my strategy is to optimize to complete these tasks as efficiently as possible (what Zvi calls “playing on easy mode”), in order to preserve as much time and energy for what I really want: living and learning.
Are there dangers in getting really good at paying your dues?
1) Maybe it distracts you/diminishes the incentive to get good at avoiding dues.
2) Maybe there are two ways to pay dues (within the rules): one that gives you great profit and another that merely satisfies the requirement.
In general, though, I tend to think that efficient accomplishment is about avoiding or compressing work until you get to the “efficiency frontier” in your field. Good work is about one of two things:
Getting really fast/accurate at X because it’s necessary for reason R to do Y.
Getting really fast/accurate at X because it lets you train others to do (or better yet, automate) X.
In my case, X is schoolwork, R is “triangulation of me and graduate-level education,” and Y is “get a research job.”
X is also schoolwork, R is “practice,” and Y is learning. But this is much less clear. It may be that other strategies would be more efficient for learning.
However, since the expected value of my learning is radically diminished if I don’t get into grad school, it makes sense to optimize first for aceing my schoolwork, and then in the time that remains to optimize for learning. Treating these as two separate activities with two separate goals makes sense.
This isn’t “playing on easy mode,” so much as purchasing fuzzies (As) and utilons (learning) separately.
If you haven’t seen Half-assing it with everything you’ve got, I’d definitely recommend it as an alternative perspective on this issue.
I suspect “dues” are less relevant in today’s world than a few decades ago. It used to be a (partial) defense against being judged harshly for your success, by showing that you’d earned it without special advantage. Nowadays, you’ll be judged regardless, as the assumption is that “the system” is so rigged that anyone who succeeds had a headstart.
To the extent that the dues do no actual good (unlike literal dues, which the recipient can use to buy things, presumably for the good of the group), skipping them seems very reasonable to me. The trick, of course, is that it’s very hard to distinguish unnecessary hurdles (“dues”) from socially-valuable lessons in conformity and behavior (“training”).
Relevant advice when asked if you’ve paid your dues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG0YKVafAe8
My current taxonomy of rationalists is:
LW rationalists (HI!)
Facebook rationalists
Twitter rationalists
Blog rationalists
Internet-invisible rationalists
Are there other types of rationalists? Maybe like group-chat rationalists? or podcast rationalists? google doc rationalists?
Alternative taxonomy:
rationalists belonging to Eliezer
cryopreserved rationalists
rationalists trained by CFAR
aspiring rationalists
rationalists working for MIRI
legendary rationalists
metarationalists
those commenting on this taxonomy
those that tweet as if they were mad
Bayesians
et cetera
Zvi
those that from afar look like paperclips
:)
This made me chuckle. More humor
Rationalists taxonomizing rationalists
Mesa-rationalists (the mesa-optimizers inside rationalists)
carrier pigeon rationalists
proto-rationalists
not-yet-born rationalists
literal rats
frequentists
group-house rationalists
EA forum rationalists
academic rationalists
meme rationalists
:)
I like this one.
I am a google doc rationalist! (Or I would like to be. Google docs are great.)
What are you using the word “rationalist” to mean? If you just mean “members of any subculture bearing some line of memetic descent from early Less Wrong” (which I don’t think deserves the pretentious term rationalist, but putting that aside), why is “communication platform” a useful way to chop up that social grouping? A lot of the same people use Less Wrong and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and Google Docs, and a lot of the people who use the same platform wouldn’t be in the same cluster if you were to analyze the graph of what actual conversations people are using these platforms to have.
It’s a natural way to cut it up from one’s own experience. Each platform has different affordances and brings out different aspects of people, and I get pretty different experiences of them on the different platforms mentioned.
I think there is a community of discord rationalists and tumblr rationalists.
Yesterday, I spent some time thinking about how, if you have a function f:R2→R and some point x∈R2, the value of the directional derivative from x could change as a function of the angle. I.e., what does the function ϕ:[0,2π]→R+ look like? I thought that any relationship was probably possible as long as it has the property that ϕ(α)=−ϕ(2π−α). (The values of the derivative in two opposite directions need to be negatives of each other.)
Anyone reading this is hopefully better at Analysis than I am and realized that there is, in fact, no freedom at all because each directional derivative is entirely determined by the gradient through the equation ∇vf(x)=⟨∇f(x),vN⟩ (where vN=v||v||). This means that ϕ has to be the cosine function scaled by ||∇vf(x)||, it cannot be anything else.
I clearly failed to internalize what this equation means when I first heard it because I found it super surprising that the gradient determines the value of every directional derivative. Like, really? It’s impossible to have more than exactly two directions with equally large derivatives unless the function is constant? It’s impossible to turn 90 degree from the direction of the gradient and having anything but derivative 0 in that direction? I’m not asking that ϕ be discontinuous, only that it not be precisely ||∇f(α)||cos(α). But alas.
This also made me realize that cos if viewed as a function of the circle is just the dot product with the standard vector, i.e.,
cos:S2→[−1,+1]cos:x↦⟨x,(1,0)⟩
or even just cos(x,y)=x. Similarly, sin(x,y)=y.
I know what you’re thinking; you need sin and cos to map [0,2π] to S2 in the first place. But the circle seems like a good deal more fundamental than those two functions. Wouldn’t it make more sense to introduce trigonometry in terms of ‘how do we wrap R around S2?’. The function that does this is γ(x)=(cos(x),sin(x)), and then you can study the properties that this function needs to have and eventually call the coordinates cos and sin. This feels like a way better motivation than putting a right triangle onto the unit circle for some reason, which is how I always see the topic introduced (and how I’ve introduced it myself).
Looking further at the analogy with the gradient, this also suggests that there is a natural extension of cos to Sn for all n∈N. I.e., if we look at some point x∈Rn, we can again ask about the function ϕ that maps each angle to the value of the directional derivative on x in that direction, and if we associate these angles with points of Sn−1, then this yields the function ϕ:Sn−1→R, which is again just the dot product with (1,...,0) or the projection onto the first coordinate (scaled by ||∇f(x)||). This can then be considered a higher-dimensional cos function.
There’s also the 0-d case where S0={1,−1}. This describes how the direction changes the derivative for a function f:R→R.
When reading this comment, I was surprised for a moment, too, but now that you mention it—it’s because if the function is smooth at the point where you’re taking the directional derivative, then it has to locally resemble a plane, just like a how a differentiable function of a single variable is said to be “locally linear”. If the directional derivative varied in any other way, then the surface would have to have a “crinkle” at that point and it wouldn’t be differentiable. Right?
That’s probably right.
I have since learned that there are functions which do have all partial derivatives at a point but are not smooth. Wikipedia’s example is f(x,y)=y3x2+y2 with f(0,0)=0. And in this case, there is still a continuous function ϕ:S2→R that maps each point to the value of the directional derivative, but it’s ϕ(x,y)=y3, so different from the regular case.
So you can probably have all kinds of relationships between direction and {value of derivative in that direction}, but the class of smooth functions have a fixed relationship. It still feels surprising that ‘most’ functions we work with just happen to be smooth.
What to do if you suddenly need to rest your hands
On Monday I went from “computer work seems kind of uncomfortable, I wonder if I should be worried” to “oh crap oh crap, that’s actually painful”. Everything I’ve ever heard says not to work through RSI pain, so what now? I decided to spend a week learning hands free input. I wanted to a) get some serious rest and b) still be productive. And guess what? Learning hands free input is like the one activity that does not suffer a productivity penalty from not being able to use your hands.
When I started it was really slow going. Lots of yelling “no don’t type ‘delete word’ delete the f**king word!!!”[1] But then I found this talk, which was just .. woah. Since then, I have been using Talon, and I am in love.
The key to understanding Talon, and the reason I think it’s heads and shoulders above everything else I’ve tried, is the basic insight that most of the time the input you want to do is not writing. Talon has the concept of modes, and most of the time you’re in the command mode.[2] And because there’s a limited set of commands, there’s much less ambiguity between inputs.
After one week, I’m able to dictate an existing code file painlessly albeit still slowly. The thing that feels important to me, is that I’m no longer living in fear of my career being taken away from me by my wrists.
So my recommendation to you, if you find yourself in the situation I was is to rest your hands, and try learning this thing. If you do, reach out to me! I’m (at least currently) sufficiently excited about this that I would very much enjoy help you out.
Epistemic postscript: I’m writing this while still excited about it, which is providing the motivation to do the writeup, but also makes me believe that in the future I will be less optimistic, and you should take that into account when evaluating its implicit predictions.
***
[1] A word to the wise, if you have dictation software listening, yelling at your computer is the opposite of productive (this is good, a frustrating experience with quick negative reinforcement for outbursts induces a zen-like experience).
[2] This is similar to vim, if you’re familiar.
Have you seen Serenade?
I hadn’t before actually, thanks for the recommendation. I checked it out. Talon seems more like “teach yourself the alphabet, then program using vim.” Whereas Serenade is more like “teach yourself to program using our macros.” This makes Talon easier to learn, and more flexible, Serenade has the following benefits as I see them:
Programming in large well defines chunks, which it makes it easier to incorporate “pick which one you meant, or continue to use our default”
It uses more natural language, which makes me think that the accuracy has a higher ceiling
The answer to this seems obvious in isolation: shaping helps with credit assignment, rescaling doesn’t (and might complicate certain methods in the advantage vs Q-value way). But I feel like maybe there’s an important interaction here that could inform a mathematical theory of how a reward signal guides learners through model space?
This is a test to see if latex works somewhere=overthe⋅rainbow
Is spaced repetition software a good tool for skill development or good practice reinforcement?
I was recently considering using an Anki prompt to do a mental move rather than to test my recall, like tense your muscles as though you were performing a deadlift. I don’t actually have access to a gym right now, so I didn’t get to put it into action immediately. Visualizing the movement as vividly as possible, and tensing muscles like the movement was being performed (even when not doing it) are common tricks reported by famous weightlifters.
But I happened across an article from Runner’s World today which described an experiment where all they did was tell a group of runners the obvious things that everyone already knows about preventing injury. The experimental group saw ~13% fewer injuries.
This suggests to me that my earlier idea is probably a good one, even though it isn’t memory per se. The obvious hitch is that what I am after isn’t actually recall—it isn’t as though runners forget that overtraining leads to injury if you were to ask them, and I have never forgotten how to do a deadlift.
Rather the question is how to make it as correct and instinctive as possible.
This feels like a physical analogue of my earlier notion about Ankifying the elements of a problem, so as to integrate it into my perspective and notice relevant information.
Maybe a better way to say this is using an Anki prompt to help respond to a physical prompt, that being the task itself.
A physical action in response to the physical task instinctively already has a name; it is called muscle memory.
Gwern covers a bit of research here on when spacing does and doesn’t work:
https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition#subjects
Personally I’ve found the biggest problem with spaced repetition for skills and habits is that it’s contextless.
Adding the context from multiple skills with different contexts makes it take way more time, and not having the context makes it next to useless for learning the skils.
Could you talk a bit more about this? My initial reaction is that I am almost exactly proposing additional value from using Anki to engage the skill sans context (in addition to whatever actual practice is happening with context).
I review Gwern’s post pretty much every time I resume the habit; it doesn’t look like it has been evaluated in connection with physical skills.
I suspect the likeliest difference is that the recall curve is going to be different from the practice curve for physical skills, and the curve for mental review of physical skills will probably be different again. These should be trivial to adjust if we knew what they were, but alas, I do not.
Maybe I could pillage the sports performance research? Surely they do something like this.
It is hard to find, but it’s covered here: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition#motor-skills
My take is pretty similar to cognitive skills: It works well for simple motor skills but not as well for complex skills.
My experience is basically that this doesn’t work. This seems to track with the research on skill transfer (which is almost always non-existent or has such a small effect that it can’t be measured.)
Ah, the humiliation of using the wrong ctrl-f inputs! But of course it would be lower level.
Well that’s reason enough to cap my investment in the notion; we’ll stick to cheap experiments if the muse descends.
While researching past technological discontinuities, I came across some interesting anecdotes. Some follow. I also looked at technology readiness levels, but this didn’t prove fruitful.
Anecdotes and patterns
Watt’s safety concerns
This narrative has been later disputed, however, it does seem possible that awareness of the high risk of high-pressure engines, which were more susceptible to boiler explosions, delayed their development and adoption somewhat. In any case, the anecdote might be interesting for those who may seek to delay development of the capabilities of AI until safety technologies have been developed, either as a historical example or as a talking point.
Monetary bounties to incentivize progress
Non-neurotypical pioneers
Pioneers show a wide range of motivations. In particular, throughout the historical record, (lone) a non-neurotypical pioneer will occasionally obsess over a technology, refine it, make some progress, or leave a record of failed approaches. This may prove a hurdle for some safety approaches.
The following quotes are taken from their respective Wikipedia pages:
Technology Readiness Levels
Technology readiness levels (TRLs) are an interesting way of measuring the maturity of a given technology. They originated at NASA to be used in the context of the space program, and then generalized to the point of uselessness, after which they were implemented in some projects of the European Union.
Originally I thought that trying to map out something akin the technology readiness level of each technology in my list would be worth doing, and created the following scale:
L1. Earliest reference
L1-a: In a fictional story.
L1-b: Somewhere else.
L2. Concept rigorously formulated.
L3. Creation stage.
L3-a. First person working on the area towards a prototype.
L3-b. Proof of concept or prototype: A hobbyist has built the technology in their own laboratory, garage or basement, or as a private demonstration, or as a toy, but perhaps with no further intention of bringing it to market.
L3-c. Further development: The technology starts to be invested on and improved; there may be concrete plans about bringing it to market.
L4. Technology is available.
If commercial: The product can be bought, even if it’s expensive. This does not ask whether a sufficiently motivated billionaire could buy it, but rather whether the product is being produced in order to be sold.
If military: The product can be employed in action. One could not buy a nuclear weapon, but it was still available to the USA by 1945.
L4-a: Technology is available and cheap.
L5. Technology is available and decent among the relevant dimensions
L5-a: Technology is decent and cheap.
L6. Technology is pretty good.
L6-a: Technology is pretty good and cheap.
L7. Technology is really good.
L7-a: Technology is really good and cheap.
L8. Widespread adoption.
L9. Societal influence. The invention has influenced society.
Although I did gather the information, this proved to be an unfruitful idea. The data was often not available, there were category errors, the scale asks for absolute quality when I mostly have a comparison with current levels, etc. I did get the insight that by the time a product is cheap, it’s often of much better quality than early versions of the same product. Thinking about TRLs might have clarified my thinking about the evolution of some technologies, but overall I’d say it probably wasn’t worth it.
Ahm, this comment looks completely broken to me, like you accidentally copy-pasted your whole frontpage into it.
Fixed, thanks
Lesswrong posts that I want someone to write:
Description of pair debugging
Description of value handshakes
Maybe I’ll think of more later.
I found a reference to “value handshakes” here:
I think it refers to something like this: Imagine that a superintelligent human-friendly AI meets a superintelligent paperclip maximizer, and they both realize their powers are approximately balanced. What should they do?
For humans, “let’s fight, and to the victor go the spoils” is the intuitive answer, but the superintelligences can possibly do better. If they fight, they have a 50% chance of achieving nothing, and a 50% chance of winning the universe… minus whatever was sacrificed to Moloch, which could possibly be a lot. If they split the universe to halves, and find out a way how to trust each other, that is better that war. But there is a possibility of even better solution, when both of them would agree on acting as if they were a single superintelligence that values both humans and paperclips equally.
The cooperative solution can be better than a 50% split of the universe, because you could build paperclip factories on places humans care less about, such as uninhabitable planets; or perhaps you could find a way how to introduce paperclips to human environment without reducing the human quality of life. For example, would you mind using paperclips to reinforce the walls of your house? Would you mind if almost all materials used to build stuff for humans contained little paperclips inside? Would you mind living in a simulation implemented on paperclip-shaped circuits? So maybe at the end, humans could get like 70% of the potential utility of the universe, while 70% of potential material would be converted to paperclips.
I can’t wrap my brain around the computational theory of consciousness.
Who decides how to interpret the computations? If I have a beach, are the lighter grains 0 and darker grains 1? What about the smaller and bigger grains? What if I decide to use the motion of the planets to switch between these 4 interpretations.
Surely under infinite definitions of computation, there are infinite consciousnesses experience infinite states at any given time, just from pure chance.
That’s why you need to use some sort of complexity-weighting for theories like this, so that minds that are very hard to specify(given some fixed encoding of ‘the world’) are considered ‘less real’ than easy-to-specify ones.
I think that only makes sense to do if those minds are literally “less conscious” than other minds though. Otherwise why would I care less about them because they’re more complex?
It does make sense to me to talk about “speed” and “number of observer moments” as part of moral weight, but “complexity of definition” to me only makes sense if those minds experience things differently than I do.
Description complexity is the natural generalization of “speed” and “number of observer moments” to infinite universes/arbitrary embeddings of minds in those universes. It manages to scale as (the log of) the density of copies of an entity, while avoiding giving all the measure to Boltzmann brains.
Again this seems to be an empirical question that you can’t just assume.
Is it an empirical question? It seems more like a philosophical question(what evidence could we see that would change our minds?)
Here’s a (not particularly rigorous) philosophical argument in favour. The substrate on which a mind is running shouldn’t affect its moral status. So we should consider all computable mappings from the world to a mind as being ‘real’. On the other hand, we want the total “number” of observer-moments in a given world to be finite(otherwise we can’t compare the values of different worlds). This suggests that we should assign a ‘weight’ to different experiences, which must be exponentially decreasing in program length for the sum to converge.
We could talk to different minds and have them describe their experience, and then compare the number of observer moments to their complexity.
But the question then becomes how you sample these minds you are talking to. Do you just go around literally speaking to them? Clearly this will miss a lot of minds. But you can’t use completely arbitrary ways of accessing them either, because then you might end up packing most of the ‘mind’ into your way of interfacing with them. Weighting by complexity is meant to provide a good way of sampling minds, that includes all computable patterns without attributing mind-fulness to noise.
(Just to clarify a bit, ‘complexity’ here is referring to the complexity of selecting a mind given the world, not the complexity of the mind itself. It’s meant to be a generalization of ‘number of copies’ and ‘exists/does not exist’, not a property inherent to the mind)
It seems like you can get quite a bit of data with minds that you can interface with? I think it’s true that you can’t sample the space of all possible minds, but testing this hypothesis on just a few seems like high VoI.
What hypothesis would you be “testing”? What I’m proposing is an idealized version of a sampling procedure that could be used to run tests, namely, sampling mind-like things according to their description complexity.
If you mean that we should check if the minds we usually see in the world have low complexity, I think that already seems to be the case, in that we’re the end-result of a low-complexity process starting from simple conditions, and can be pinpointed in the world relatively simply.
I mean, I’m saying get minds with many different complexities, figure out a way to communicate with them, and ask them about their experience.
That would help to figure out if complexity is indeed correlated with observer moments.
But how you test this feels different from the question of whether or not it’s true.
I think we’re talking about different things. I’m talking about how you would locate minds in an arbitrary computational structure(and how to count them), you’re talking about determining what’s valuable about a mind once we’ve found it.
Suppose that consciousness were not a no-place function, but rather a one-place function. Specifically, whether something is conscious or not is relative to some reality. (A bit like movement relative to reference frames in physics.)
Would that help?
How does this relate back to the example with the sand? Is there a sand-planet reality that’s just like ours, but in that reality the sand is conscious and we’re not?
I don’t think I quite get what a reality is in the function.
I was thinking of the computational theory of consciousness as basically being the same thing as saying that consciousness could be substrate independent. (E.g. you could have conscious uploads.)
I think this then leads you to ask, “If consciousness is not specific to a substrate, and it’s just a pattern, how can we ever say that something does or does not exhibit the pattern? Can’t I arbitrarily map between objects and parts of the pattern, and say that something is isomorphic to consciousness, and therefore is conscious?”
And my proposal is that maybe it makes sense to talk in terms of something like reference frames. Sure, there’s some reference frame where you could map between grains of sand and neurons, but it’s a crazy reference frame and not one that we care about.
I mean, from that reference frame, does that consciousness feel pain? If so, why do we not care about it? It seems to me like when it comes to morality, the thing that matters is the reference frame of the consciousness, and not our reference frame (I think some similar argument applies to longtermism). Maybe we want to tile the universe in such a way that there more infinitely countable pleasure patterns than pain patterns, or something.
And how does this relate back to realities? Are we saying that the sand operates in separate reality?
For the way I mean reference frame, I only care about my reference frame. (Or maybe I care about other frames in proportion to how much they align with mine.) Note that this is not the same thing as egoism.
How do you define reference frame?
I don’t have a good answer for this. I’m kinda still at the vague intuition stage rather than clear theory stage.
My sense is that reference frame for you is something like “how externally similar is this entity to me” whereas for me the thing that matters is “How similar internally is this consciousness to my consciousness.” Which, if the computational theory of consciousness is true, the answer is “many consciousnesses are very similar.”
Obviously this is at the level of “not even a straw man” since you’re gesturing at vague intuitions, but based on our discussion so far this is as close as I can point to a crux.
Hmm, it’s not so much about how similar it is to me as it is like, whether it’s on the same plane of existence.
I mean, I guess that’s a certain kind of similarity. But I’m willing to impute moral worth to very alien kinds of consciousness, as long as it actually “makes sense” to call them a consciousness. The making sense part is the key issue though, and a bit underspecified.
Here’s an analogy—is Hamlet conscious?
Well, Hamlet doesn’t really exist in our universe, so my plan for now is to not consider him a consciousness worth caring about. But if you start to deal with harder cases, whether it exists in our universe becomes a trickier question.
To me this is simply empirical. Is the computational theory of consciousness true without reservation? Then if the computation exists in our universe, the consciousness exists. Perhaps it’s only partially true, and more complex computations, or computations that take longer to run, have less of a sense of consciousness, and therefore it exists, but
I don’t have a well-developed theory here. But a few related ideas:
simplicity matters
evolution over time matters—maybe you can map all the neurons in my head and their activations at a given moment in time to a bunch of grains of sand, but the mapping is going to fall apart at the next moment (unless you include some crazy updating rule, but that violates the simplicity requirement)
accessibility matters—I’m a bit hesitant on this one. I don’t want to say that someone with locked in syndrome is not conscious. But if some mathematical object that only exists in Tegmark V is conscious (according to the previous definitions), but there’s no way for us to interact with it, then maybe that’s less relevant.
Ahh I see. Yeah, I think that assigning moral weight to different properties of consciousness might be a good way forward here. But it still seems really weird that there are infinite consciousnesses operating at any given time, and makes me a bit suspicious of the computational theory of consciousness.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain .
Yeah, this has always been my worry as well
Warning: This is a personal vent on my personal situation. I doubt it will be worth your time.
High school days were the peak of my life. School was easy, and I was fortunate enough to find interest and some talent in math olympiad. I climbed my way through before getting stopped just before the TST.
I remember them giving out big π-shaped chocolates for the IMO contestants that year, and getting really bitter because it looked so cool.
After I hit that wall I parted way with math to become a CS major because startups were a thing and I believed I could start the next Google by my own hands.
Fortunately I got accepted to a pretty good university.
So all in all, I didn’t quite get there but still, I worked hard, and was able to take pride in my achievements.
Good times.
Anyways, after that I had multiple breakdowns, flunked the school, and spent 10 years mostly playing card games and masturbating.
It’s not that I didn’t try—rather I did multiple times. I was full with great ideas, some I still believe are viable, but overconfidence and lack of diligence got me and I underperformed quite bad.
Not one project was persisted until fruition and tens of half-assed unfinished ones were only a burden. For each ambitious projects, ultimately I hurt multiple people, and isolated myself more.
I can only attribute my failures to myself.
It’s a really bad feedback loop. I start a project, get anxious fearing failure, fail because of lack of confidence and diligence, go back to cry in bed wondering where it all went wrong.
One time I needed to do a simple CSS work, couldn’t make myself to do it, and just stared at the monitor for a whole day. Work was a simple static 3 pager for 2 weeks. I did not finish it. I got into a legal trouble for that. Fun times.
I can feel time and youth slipping away. I am clearly aware of how important this time is in my life. I also can feel the deteriorating working memory, and no longer feel like the smart guy good at math. I recently tried to solve some MO problems trying to recall fond memory of my AoPS days, and failed miserably.
I know. I should get a good sleep, exercise, reconnect with my friends, network with people, feel good about myself again, pick up new skills, finish that damn GTD book once and for all, diligently work on my projects, and it will be all good. Priviledge alarm is ringing left and right and I’m in my mom’s basement furiously masturbating to a deepfake porn.
I do not know why I felt the need to post this here. I lurk this site a lot because it fits my worldview of putting logical thinking above most things. Maybe I wanted to reflect on my situation somewhat objectively by placing myself in public.
Not sure how I should wrap up this post. So I will not try.
If you can’t effectively work on your own projects, it might be worth getting a job so that you have a structure.
Happy to just chat if you’d like. I’ve battled with similar problems of lack of focus, and done a lot of work myself. Happy to listen.
Check that you are not missing any neurodiversity diagnoses such as aspergers or adhd. Your problems sound a lot like my problems. Internalized ablism could be really depowering. One wouldn’t run a marathon with a hearth condition. It is true that these kinds of things can have alot of blurry lines and sceptics can have easy time to not believe it even exists but most of the time taking correctly a problem into account is way better than ignoring it completely.
Thank you for writing this post. It can be hard to realize that one is in a persistent rut and harder to write it up publicly.
As someone similar to you (math competitions during high school, CS major, ambition often outruns my capacity, trying to avoid reverting to the mean during my adult years), I believe that I’m susceptible to failure modes like this. DM me if you want to video call to exchange advice or something; this would be valuable enough to me that I’m willing to pay a fair rate if you need funding.
I can relate to parts of this. School was simple, math olympiad was the peak of my life, then I switched to CS because I hoped I could make lots of money and retire early. (Spoiler: didn’t happen.)
Then I failed to get a PhD, and realized I also suck at life outside of the school system. I was able to keep a job, but I switched jobs quite often. I don’t finish most of the things I start, I waste a lot of time, and I neglect my health.
From outside I probably seem quite successful—I make decent money, own an appartment in the city center, have a wife and two kids—but if you know me closer, you can see a lot of stupid or self-destructive behavior. Life feels very difficult to me, and I don’t know what to do to make it better. (Or like, I know on some level, but I am unable to follow my own advice. Turning off the internet would probably immediately greatly improve my quality of life.)
I have some evidence of being an undiagnosed asperger (or something very similar to it). Reading descriptions of people on the spectrum feels very familiar, except they usually feel things even stronger than me, so what is “possible, but with great suffering” for me, is “impossible” for them.
Seems to me that some problems are a vicious circle. Doing stupid things brings problems, problems make me mentally tired, being tired makes me do stupid things. Lack of interaction with friends makes me sad, being sad makes me less likely to reach out to my friends. Not finishing my projects makes me pessimistic about my abilities, being pessimistic about my abilities reduces the motivation to work hard on my projects. Predicting bad future makes me feel bad right now.
Building good habits is hard, and it is easy to lose them. I wish I could give some actionable advice here, but I can’t. The best I have is… sometimes things get okay by a lucky coincidence, then the vicious cycle is broken, and things keep being okay for a while… until another coincidence disrupts them. I mostly know how to maintain the okay state, but I don’t know how to regain it when I lose it.
It feels like there should be an easy solution… but maybe that’s like telling a depressed person “why don’t you simply smile and be happy?”. Similarly, why don’t I simply try to get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and meet my friends often? Dunno. I had time like this in the past, and it was great. But when something disrupts the routine, it is very difficult to build it again.
If you are similar to me, I would suggest ignoring the “GTD” and “picking up skills” for a moment, and focus on getting the fundamentals (friends, sleep, exercise—probably in this order) right. That will give you the energy necessary for the rest of your life. On the other hand, focusing too much on other things may take your attention away from the fundamentals, and shortly afterwards everything will fall apart again. Also, friends need to be in real life, online doesn’t work; you need to interrupt the internet, not to use friends as yet another excuse to get online.
Now maybe I should go and follow my own advice.
On building and keeping habits, I have a notebook with little bubbles for keeping track of daily habits:
There’s a list of things to do every day (which I chose), and when I do them, I fill in the bubble for that task and day. Habits I have tracked include brushing my teeth 2x/day, meditating, excercisizing, working towards my goals, clearing Anki, and writing a short “mission statement” every day (I have also recently reserved a few pages for weekly habits, such as playing chess, shaving, or doing my laundry, which I have found so far to be valuable). Of course, you could choose whatever you think would help you live a better life. It should be fairly easy to recreate this system using blank paper, especially using graph paper.
I find that it has provided a good amount of value to me, and would recommend it to anybody who wants to build stronger habits.
I don’t have anything helpful to say, but I’m commenting because it’s important to me that you know that you’re not just shouting into the void. Life’s tough. You matter, and I am confident that in the right conditions, you could do amazing and valuable things.
As far as actually getting into those right conditions… I’m reluctant to say anything, because I don’t know your situation, and I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of the obvious refrains many, many, many times
I’ve been wanting to set LessWrong as my home page for a while but kept avoiding it because the site is so visibly bright.
I looked up ways of viewing the site without hurting my eyes and found https://www.greaterwrong.com, but didn’t really like it.
Then I found https://github.com/lfaucon/lessbright, which looked right, but wasn’t technically the real LessWrong site (which meant it couldn’t tell I was logged in, among other things).
But I already use Stylus to apply stylesheet modifications to webpages, so I looked at lessbright’s source code, found the CSS code it used to change the site’s appearance, and applied that to a new Stylus style (although my second monitor doesn’t have very good contrast, so I used 100% instead of 92%):
And now the site looks exactly how I want it!
Just figured I’d share this, in case the site’s excessive brightness annoys anyone else.
Great! For people who are bothered by the brightness, this seems like a decent solution for now. We are thinking about creating styling for a proper dark mode, but really unclear what the timeline on that is atm.
I’m glad to hear there’s a proper solution planned at some point since mine is somewhat hacky, but I’m not surprised there’s no clear timeline.
We do things so that we can talk about it later.
I was having a bad day today. Unlikely to have time this weekend for something I’d wanted to do. Crappy teaching in a class I’m taking. Ever increasing and complicating responsibilities piling up.
So what did I do? I went out and bought half a cherry pie.
Will that cherry pie make me happy? No. I knew this in advance. Consciously and unconsciously: I had the thought, and no emotion compelled me to do it.
In fact, it seemed like the least-efficacious action: spending some of my limited money, to buy a pie I don’t need, to respond to stress that’s unrelated to pie consumption and is in fact caused by lack of time (that I’m spending on buying and eating pie).
BUT. What buying the pie allowed me to do was tell a different story. To myself and my girlfriend who I was texting with. Now, today can be about how I got some delicious pie.
And I really do feel better. It’s not the pie, nor the walk to the store to buy it. It’s the relief of being able to tell my girlfriend that I bought some delicious cherry pie, and that I’d share it with her if she didn’t live a three-hour drive away. It’s the relief of reflecting on how I dealt with my stress, and seeing a pie-shaped memory at the end of the schoolwork.
If this is a correct model of how this all works, then it suggests a couple things:
This can probably be optimized.
The way I talk about that optimization process will probably affect how well it works. For example, if I then think “what’s the cheapest way to get this effect,” that intuitively doesn’t feel good. I don’t want to be cheap. I need to find the right language, the right story to tell, so that I can explain my “philosophy” to myself and others in a way that gets the response I want.
Is that the darks arts? I don’t think so. I think this is one area of life where the message is the medium.
So the “stupid solutions to problems of life” are not really about improving the life, but about signaling to yourself that… you still have some things under control? (My life may suck, but I can have a cherry pie whenever I want to!)
This would be even more important if the cherry pie would somehow actively make your life worse. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, but at the same time keep eating cherry pie every day in order to improve the story of your day. Or if instead of cherry pie it would be cherry liqueur.
Just guessing, but it would probably help to choose the story in advance. “If I am doing X, my life is great, and nothing else matters”—and then make X something useful that doesn’t take much time. Even better, have multiple alternatives X, Y, Z, such that doing any of them is a “proof” of life being great.
I do chalk a lot of dysfunction up to this story-centric approach to life. I just suspect it’s something we need to learn to work with, rather than against (or to deny/ignore it entirely).
My sense is that storytelling—to yourself or others—is an art. To get the reaction you want—from self or others—takes some aesthetic sensitivity.
My guess is there’s some low hanging fruit here. People often talk about doing things “for the story,” which they resort to when they’re trying to justify doing something dumb/wasteful/dangerous/futile. Perversely, it often seems that when people talk in detail about their good decisions, it comes of as arrogant. Pointless, tidy philosophical paradoxes seem to get people’s puzzle-solving brains going better than confronting the complexity of the real world.
But maybe we can simply start building habits of expressing gratitude. Finding ways to present good ideas and decisions in ways that are delightful in conversation. Spinning interesting stories out of the best parts of our lives.
Epistemic status: not an expert
Understanding Newton’s third law, F=ddt(mv).
Consider the vector-valued velocity as a function of time, v:t↦R3. Scale this by the object’s mass and you get the momentum function over time. Imagine this momentum function wiggling around over time, the vector from the origin rotating and growing and shrinking.
The third law says that force is the derivative of this rescaled vector function—if an object is more massive, then the same displacement of this rescaled arrow is a proportionally smaller velocity modification, because of the rescaling!
And also, forces have opposite reactions (by conservation of momentum) and equal reactions (by conservation of energy).
Two-by-two for possibly important aspects of reality and related end-states:
I think there are multiple kinds of attacks, which matter in this matrix. Destruction/stability is a different continuum from take control of resources/preserve control of resources.
I also think there’s no stasis—the state of accessible resources (heat gradients, in the end) in the universe will always be shifting until it’s truly over. There may be multi-millenea equilibria, where it feels like stasis on a sufficiently-abstract level, but there’s still lots of change. As a test of this intuition, the Earth has been static for millions of years, and then there was a shift when it started emitting patterned EM radiation, which has been static (though changing in complexity and intensity) for 150 years or so.
I agree with Daniel, as well, that coordination and attack-to-control leads to singleton (winner takes all). I think coordination and attack-to-destroy may lead to singleton, or may lead to cyclic destruction back to pre-coordination levels. Defense and coordination is kind of hard to define—perfect cooperation is a singleton, right? But then there’s neither attack nor defense. I kind of hope defense and coordination leads to independence and trade, but I doubt it’s stable—eventually the better producer gets enough strength that attack becomes attractive.
Shouldn’t the singleton outcome be in the bottom right quadrant? If attack is easy but so is coordination, the only stable solution is one where there is only one entity (and thus no one to attack or be attacked.) If by contrast defense is easier, we could end up in a stable multipolar outcome… at least until coordination between those parties happen. Maybe singleton outcome happens in both coordination-is-easy scenarios.
Testing whether images work in spoiler tags
Apparently they don’t.
Alternative hypothesis: His smile lights up even the darkest spoiler tag.
then it would be
Take my upvote.
Ted Kaczynski as a relatively apolitical test case for cancellation norms:
Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics professor who decided that industrial society was terrible, and waged a terroristic bombing campaign to foment a revolution against technology. As part of this campaign, he wrote a manifesto titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” and said that if a major newspaper printed it verbatim he would desist from terrorism. He is currently serving eight life sentences in a “super-max” security prison in Colorado.
My understanding is that his manifesto (which, incidentally, has been updated and given a new title “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”, the second edition of which was released this year) is lucid and thought-out. Here are some questions the answers to which are not obvious to me:
Should anybody read “Industrial Society and Its Future”, given its origin?
Suppose an EA group wrote to Kaczynski in prison, asking him to write a letter about opposition to technology to be read aloud and discussed in an EA meetup, and he complied. Would it have been unacceptable for the EA group to do this, and should it be unacceptable for the EA group to hold this meetup?
Generally speaking, if someone commits heinous and unambiguous crimes in service of an objective like “getting people to read X”, and it doesn’t look like they’re doing a tricky reverse-psychology thing or anything like that, then we should not cooperate with that objective. If Kaczynski had posted his manifesto on LessWrong, I would feel comfortable deleting it and any links to it, and I would encourage the moderator of any other forum to do the same under those circumstances.
But this is a specific and unusual circumstance. When people try to cancel each other, usually there’s no connection or a very tenuous connection between their writing and what they’re accused of. (Also the crime is usually less severe and less well proven.) In that case, the argument is different; either the people doing the cancelling think that the crime wasn’t adequately punished, and are trying to create justice via a distributed minor punishment. If people are right about whether the thing is bad, then the main issues are about standards of evidence (biased readings and out-of-context quotes go a long way), proportionality (it’s not worth blowing up peoples’ lives over having said something dumb on the internet), and relation to nonpunishers (problems happen when things escalate from telling people why someone is bad, to punishing people for not believing or not caring).
There’s no need to cancel anyone who’s failing to have influence already. I suspect there are no apolotical test cases: cancellation (in the form of verbally attacking and de-legitimizing someone as a person, rather than arguing against specific portions of their work) is primarily politically motivated. It’s pretty pure ad-hominem argument: “don’t listen to or respect this person, regardless of what they’re saying”. In this case, I’m not listening because I think it’s low-value on it’s own, regardless of authorship.
The manifesto is pretty easy to find in PDF form for free. I wasn’t able to get very far—way too many crackpot signals and didn’t seem worth my time. To your bullet points:
I can read this two ways: “should anybody” meaning “do you recommend any specific person read it” or “do you object to people reading it”. My answers are “yes, but not many people”, and “no.”. Anybody who is interested, either from a direct curiosity on the topic (which I predict won’t be rewarded) or from wanting to understand this kind of epistemic pathology (which might be worthwhile) should read it.
It’s absolutely acceptable. I wouldn’t enjoy it, but I’m not a member of the group, so no harm there. To decide whether YOUR group should do it, try to identify what you’d hope to get out of it, and what likely consequences there are from pursuing that direction. If your group is visible and sensitive to public perception (aka politically influenced), then certainly you should consider those affects.
To be explicit, here are some reasons that the EA community should cancel Kaczynski. Note that I do not necessarily think that they are sound or decisive.
EAs are known as utilitarians who are concerned about the impact of AI technology. By associating with him, that could give people the false impression that EAs are in favour of terroristic bombing campaigns to retard technological development, which would damage the EA community.
His threat to bomb more people and buildings if the Washington Post (WaPo) didn’t publish his manifesto damaged good discourse norms by inducing the WaPo to talk about something it wasn’t otherwise inclined to talk about, and good discourse norms are important for effective altruism.
It seems to me (not having read the manifesto) that the policies he advocates would cause large amounts of harm. For instance, without modern medical technology, I and many others would not have survived to the age of one year.
His bombing campaign is evidence of very poor character.
Did a newspaper print it verbatim?
Did he desist? Did he start again later?
Who wrote these: “(which, incidentally, has been updated and given a new title “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”, the second edition of which was released this year)”?
How long is “eight life sentences”, and how much time does he have left?
Yes, it was published by the Washington Post.
Yes, there were no further bombings after its publication.
He did.
“eight life sentences”, IIUC, means that he will serve the rest of his life, and if the justice system decides that one (or any number less than 8) of the sentences should be vacated, he will still serve the rest of his life. I’m not sure what his life expectancy is, but he’s 78 at the moment.
I just updated my cryonics cost-benefit analysis with
a general Caveats section
incorporating the Quality of Cryopreservation for different age groups
some more Caveats on Future Life Years specifically on discounting future life years & putting diminishing returns on future life years
along with some small fixes and additions.
The basic result has not changed, though. It’s still worth it.