Good to know I’m not the only one!
For me, the strategy you describe works sometimes but fails when I block out my schedule for a day to allow myself to focus and then unexpectedly sleep poorly the night before.
An1lam
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I remember reading somewhere that meditation has been shown to reduce the need for sleep but was skeptical. If there’s any literature on this that you consider trustworthy, please share!
Sitting next to a big window and spending a lot of time people-watching. I don’t understand why it worked, but I noticed it would put me in a rhythm where I would make slow but consistent progress with my work.
Going for a long walk similarly seemed to help temporarily.
You seem to assume that your lowered ability is caused by sleep deprivation. Is that an assumption? If so, I would encourage you to track your sleep quality and your cognitive performance and see if they really correlate, if you can think of a way to do it.
This is an assumption in the sense that I haven’t compared any formal cognitive test results between days when I do/don’t sleep well. However, there are two factors that make me skeptical that it’s placebo-like, as you seem to be indicating:
I’ll often get up and be surprised to find I’m struggling more than usual with hard cognitive tasks, so it can’t just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I do feel fairly confident that on days when I sleep under a certain amount, I struggle more to make progress on math & programming, which at the very least measure my ability to concentrate for long periods of time and think without external aids. Specifically, I’ve noticed that on days when I sleep less, I can’t manage complicated trains of thought as well without writing stuff down.
That said, hopefully getting a Dreem as ChristianKI suggested will help me better measure my sleep quality and get a better sense of whether low sleep quality actually aligns with days on which I struggle.
Thanks, I’ll try this out! Zeo had already been shut down when I went to buy one, so I’m excited to see there’s a similar product on the market.
I’m not perfect about avoiding blue light but I do usually sleep in a cold room, stop eating well before bed, and wear an eye mask (although my room isn’t as dark as it should be).
Hopefully the Dreem will still help me get a better understanding of the factors that impact my sleep though.
I’ve recently been obsessing over the idea of trying to “make math more like programming”. I’m not sure if it’s just because I feel fluent at programming and still not very fluent at abstract math or also because programming really does have a feedback loop that you don’t get in math.
Regardless, based on my reading it seems like there’s a general consensus in math that even the most modern theorem provers, like Lean and Coq, are much less efficient than typical “informal” math reasoning. That said, I wonder if this ignores some of the benefits that programmers get from writing in a formal language, i.e. automatic refactoring tools, fast feedback loops, and code analysis/search tools. Also, it seems like a sufficiently user-friendly math theorem proving tool could be useful for education. If kids can learn how to program in Javascript, I have to believe they can learn to prove theorems, even if the learning curve’s relatively steep.
Maybe once I play around with Lean more, I’ll change my mind, but for now, I’m sticking to my contrarian viewpoint.
[Question] What are effective strategies for mitigating the impact of acute sleep deprivation on cognition?
The discussion of planning across domains seems to ignore the fact that often the best solution to planning a project in a domain with which you’re not familiar is to hire/get help from another person. Of course, once you turn planning into a multi-person activity, which I think any comprehensive model of planning should treat it as, you also need to factor in uncertainty about others’ plans, which complicates the model quite a bit.
So you want to be a wizard
I like PredictionBook.com for this sort of thing. You make predictions with confidences and then set a date on which they’ll be ready to be judged. By default, predictions you make are public, but you can also easily make private predictions.
Really enjoyed the post, thanks!
I started the Earley book and it’s definitely a struggle. I usually can handle “soft skills” books like this one without getting frustrated by the vague, hand-wavy models—I really enjoyed Gendlin’s Focusing, for example—but this one’s been especially hard. That said, having your model in mind while I’m reading has kept me going as I’m using it as a sort of Rosetta’s stone for some of Earley’s claims.
You should promote this to a full answer rather than a comment! It more than qualifies.
Regarding 1, I suspect a lot of recent progress in neuroscience has come from applying computational and physics-style approaches to existing problems. See, for example, the success Ed Boyden has had in his lab with applying physics thinking to building better neuroscience tools–optogenetics, expansion microscopy, and most recently implosion fabrication.
I think nanotechnology is a prime example of 2. AIUI, a lot of the component technologies for at least trying to build nano-assemblers exist but we lack the technology/institutions/incentives/knowledge to engineer them into coherent products and tools.
FYI: I’ve updated the post to focus solely on the “what’s the bottleneck to do X” question and not on safety, as I think the former question is less discussed on LW and what I wanted answers to focus on.
FYI: I’ve updated the post to not talk about alignment at all, since I think focusing only on bottlenecks to progress in terms of capabilities makes the post clearer. Thanks to ChristianKI for pointing this out.
John_Maxwell_IV, would love feedback on how you feel about the edited version.
Can you be more specific? If you help me understand how/if I’m misrepresenting, I’d be happy to change it. My sense is that Paul’s view is more like, “through working towards prosaic alignment, we’ll get a better understanding of whether there are insurmountable obstacles to alignment of scaled up (and likely better) models.” I can rephrase to something like that or something when more nuanced. I’m just wary of adding too much alignment-specific discussion as I don’t want the debate to be too focused on the object-level alignment debate.
It’s also worth noting that there are other researchers who hold similar views, so I’m not just talking about Paul’s.
Thanks a lot! This definitely clears things up and also highlights the difference between recursive reward modeling and typical amplification/the expert imitation approach you mentioned.
I agree with many of the existing answers, in particular Kaj’s, but wanted to point out another factor, which in my own experience, contributes to not publishing many ideas despite having many half-baked ideas.
I think, even among people who have a lot of ideas, where having ideas is defined as having them appear (or be produced) within your conscious awareness, actually formalizing and publishing ideas requires overcoming multiple hurdles.
In this blog post about researcher productivity, the author summarizes a paper by William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, that posits and tries to explain why researcher productivity levels fit a log-normal distribution. I quote:
Shockley suggest that producing a paper is tantamount to clearing every one of a sequence of hurdles. He specifically lists:
1. ability to think of a good problem
2. ability to work on it
3. ability to recognize a worthwhile result
4. ability to make a decision as to when to stop
and write up the results5. ability to write adequately
6. ability to profit constructively from criticism
7. determination to submit the paper to a journal
8. persistence in making changes (if necessary as a result of
journal action).Shockley then posits, what if the odds of a person clearing hurdle #i from the list of 8 above is pi? Then the rate of publishing papers for this individual should be proportional to p1p2p3…p8. This gives the multiplication of random variables needed to explain the lognormal distribution of productivity (Shockley goes on to note that if one person is 50% above average in each of the 8 areas then they will be 2460% more productive than average at the total process).
In my own experience, the ideas to published piece of writing pipeline is similar. In order to go from idea to post, I have to:
have a good idea;
write it down;
block out time to expand upon it;
(in some cases) find data that supports it;
survey literature to see if someone’s had it or disproven it before;
(in some cases) write a program or do some math to flesh it out; and
write something coherent explaining it.
Reinforcement/rewards help individuals summon the extrinsic or intrinsic motivation to persist through these phases. That said, I also think it makes sense for individuals to figure out in which of these phases they typically fail.
In my own life, I’ve recently been experimenting with lowering my own expectations for my data-gathering, literature survey, and editing phases in order to get more of my ideas down in writing. My recent Babble, Learning, and the Typical Mind Fallacy is an example of my attempts at this. Given its low popularity on LessWrong, I may have bulldozed my way through hurdles I should’ve still jumped, but it’s better than nothing.
[Question] How do we identify bottlenecks to scientific and technological progress?
Babble, Learning, and the Typical Mind Fallacy
I’d be very curious to hear more about your general dislike of predictive processing if you’d be willing to share. In particular, I’m curious whether it’s a dislike of predictive processing as an algorithmic model for things like perception or predictive processing/the free energy principle as a theory of everything for “what humans are doing”.
Thanks! These are good recommendations!
I used to do cold showers but stopped a while back. Maybe I’ll revive the practice.
I’m curious about this one. You find that eating low carb/less keeps you sharper on days when you sleep very little? I’ve anecdotally noticed that fasting gives me an energy boost on days when I sleep well, although at the cost of making me a bit more jittery, but haven’t noticed the same effects on days when I don’t sleep enough. Is this purely anecdotal or can you share some articles/papers about this?