Also, I’m curious what factors you consider when judging someone’s “performance in life”.
Arjun Pitchanathan
Karma: 55
It’s an interesting exercise to take your last paragraph and switch the roles of love and ambition. I wonder if there’s anything productive to be explored between those two perspectives, or if those are just terminal value differences.
most people either have or want children
What group of people is this claim supposed to refer to, LessWrong readers? The world population?
Motivated by getting real-world results ≠ motivated by the status and power that often accrue from real-world results. The interestingness of problems does not exist in a vacuum outside of their relevance. Even in theoretical research, I think problems that lead towards resolving a major conjecture are more interesting, which could be construed as a payoff-based motivation.
the opener in John Psmith’s review of Reentry by Eric Berger: “My favorite ever piece of business advice comes from a review by Charles Haywood of a book by Daymond John...”
I found this nesting very funny. Bravo if it was intentional
In the “all positions” page, why is the second sentence of most summaries referring to a “detail” or “full description”? I see no way to access anything like that
It’s worth highlighting that the two expectations do not condition on the same event. This explains why we can have E[A | all even] < E[B | even] even though A ≥ B almost surely: the two “all even”s actually refer to different events.
He says that he only cares about the learning aspect, and that AI cannot help, because he isn’t bottlenecked by typing speed, i.e., it would take as much time for him to write the code as to read it. But it’s easier to learn from a textbook than figure things out yourself? Perhaps he meant that he only cares about the “figuring out” aspect.
Just to be sure, are you on the “Latest” feed? (as opposed to “Enriched” or “Recommended”)
Would you say that you knew they wouldn’t like the new thing, but you didn’t care because it wasn’t against the rules?
I would like to practice your form of relaxation, do you have some channel suggestions?
You can try to make a prediction about what future you will think. For example, “in 2 years, I will think that working on project X was a good idea”. If other people don’t want to bet on those terms (since you can technically say whatever you want at the end), you can just write down predictions and then see whether your predictions in the past were correct.
You might object that now you don’t have skin in the game, but I think you do, if you care about trying to win the game of writing down good predictions.
You need to have beliefs to test how well-calibrated your beliefs are. Studying is one way to form new beliefs. You could avoid that effort by just testing your existing beliefs.
Suleyman acknowledges that consciousness as a concept is ill defined and tautological.
Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of a subjective experience.
I don’t think the quote from the article supports your claim here. “Elusive” does not mean “ill-defined”, and “seemingly circular” does not mean “tautological”.
Thank you for the post, I found it very informative on Suleyman’s views.
Serious decisions which have consequences that will effect billions of lives, and potentially billions more minds, should not be made on the basis of “Invisible” concepts which cannot be observed, measured, tested, falsified, or even defined with any serious level of rigor.
I don’t think that the difficulty of ascertaining whether something results in qualia is a valid basis to reject its importance. I would say that one has to extrapolate from oneself to the entity in question and evaluate whether its features suggest associated qualia.
(Some reject that substrate could be a relevant feature and others claim that substrate is the only relevant feature… I have not yet undersood why people hold these beliefs. Prima facie, behavior, algorithm and substrate all seem like they could be relevant.)
Yes, and this might be a crux between “successionists” and “doomers” with highly cosmopolitan values.
Yeah, and to nitpick, “minimum” seems redundant with “necessary” anyway
Active noise cancellation is a huge quality of life improvement when flying.
I think it’s a feature of the local dialect. I’ve seen it multiple times around here and never outside.
Couldn’t one argue that getting good writing from an LLM would require skill as well?
The same is true of visual art—you can usually tell when art is DALL-E / Midjourney “house style” (though not always). (Edit: my guess is you know this, but do not have the same reaction to LLM smell in text as to DALL-E smell in visual art. I think that’s pretty interesting because my artistically inclined friends have a uniformly negative reaction to both.)