Former tech entrepreneur (co-creator of the music software Sibelius). Among other things I now play the stock market, write software to predict it, and occasionally advise tech startups. I have degrees in philosophy.
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This is really good stuff.
A minor suggestion: the list in prompt 5 is so important, I suggest it should be in bullets rather than a single paragraph, and ideally people should spend at least a minute or two thinking about each one.
On a detail (!) there are mouth guards (‘sleep clench inhibitors’) that you wear in your sleep to train you not to clench/grind your teeth both at night & in the daytime. I’ve used one; my dentist got one custom made to fit my teeth. You wear them nightly for a week initially, then just once every week or two. Unpleasant the first couple of nights, but you soon get used to them. Worked for me!
Thanks!
Otter (a smartphone app) is very good. So I’ve started using it recently for taking notes. Haven’t tried using it to write an extended post about anything, though it could be a useful way of getting a first draft.
I like this idea of getting others to help write up ideas. I find writing up ideas vastly more time-consuming and difficult than thinking them up, or explaining them verbally. Even Eliezer, an expert writer, seems to have taken years to get round to writing up his recent list of AI risks.
When I was halfway through this and read about the 4 stages, they immediately seemed to me to correspond to four types of news reporting:
Accurate reporting
Misleading reporting (i.e. distorting real events, and fooling many people)
Fake news (i.e. completely made up, but still pretending to be news, and fooling some people)
Obviously false or ‘pure fiction’ (i.e. not even pretending to be news, and fooling no-one). You do get this kind of thing in the crappiest tabloids like the UK’s Sunday Sport or maybe the US’s National Enquirer. A well-known example in the UK was the front-page headline ‘Freddie Starr [a TV comedian] ate my hamster’. (Such absurd stories evade the UK’s strong libel laws if no reasonable person would believe them, so the more outrageous, the better.)
Which isn’t exactly what the post is about, but might be a useful analogy, or source of terminology.
The focus produced by caffeine is enhanced by theanine (or L-theanine), which also counteracts jitters/headaches caffeine can otherwise induce. You can buy theanine in capsule form. Take 1-2 times as much theanine as caffeine. So for a cup of coffee (either brewed, or containing 2 shots espresso), which contains roughly 150mg caffeine, take say 200mg theanine.
You probably shouldn’t routinely have more than 1 cup of (caffeinated) coffee a day if you want to avoid becoming tolerant of it, which removes its effects. And don’t drink it in the afternoon or evening, to avoid disturbing your sleep (which may not be obvious, as your sleep can be disturbed even if you have no trouble falling asleep).
Alternatively drink tea, which has far less caffeine than coffee—so you can have as many cups as you like. Tea also contains some theanine (though rather less than the optimal dose).
I heard recently that sleepio is now prescribed by the UK’s National Health Service, so has presumably been clinically demonstrated to be very effective.
I suspect AI like GPT-3 is good enough now to identify bad arguments quite well, maybe also things like cognitive biases
Mark Forster, the best productivity author I’ve read (even though I don’t agree with all of his ideas), makes a similar point in one of his books. Though he doesn’t frame it as finding the weakest link in the negative chain. Rather, as identifying the break in the positive chain that normally makes you act correctly, in cases where you usually get it right, e.g. if usually show up on time for a meeting, but sometimes fail to. You have to think through what actually happened this time that made it go wrong—exactly where did the chain break, and why, and what can you do to avert it? E.g. the traffic is usually OK but this time was bad, so you should always check the traffic in advance, or aim to arrive early.
Indeed. In fact IIRC the fact nuclear missiles were based there was secret at the time and long afterwards
Third Time means ‘1/3 of the time’ (referring to break time = 1⁄3 of work time) and also ‘the 3rd occasion’. It’s only half a pun because ‘the 3rd occasion’ doesn’t refer to anything here, but it’s a common phrase like first time, second time etc. (E.g. ‘the first time I ate caviar I didn’t like it, nor the second time, but the third time I enjoyed it’.)
As for puns in the other names suggestions, there are too many to explain, I’m afraid!
Re the Malmstrom incident, there have been various reports over the decades of UFOs appearing at nuclear missile sites and even apparently interfering with (eg disabling) the missiles. Eg the Rendlesham Forest incident in 1980 at a USAF nuclear base in the UK, in which deputy base commander Lt Col Charles Halt and many other personnel spent hours observing (and filming, photographing etc.) UFOs over two nights.
(I’d link to the Wikipedia article, but last time I checked a while back it was being gatekept by ultra-skeptics who reverted any changes. I have however seen Col Halt describe the incident at great length & detail. An audio recording he made as the events were unfolding is also in the public domain, though he says radar tapes, film and photos were all taken away on higher orders and never seen again.)
Great post.
‘Fabricated’ doesn’t seem quite the right adjective, as it implies deliberate deception, whereas your examples suggest it’s usually unintentional. Indeed I initially assumed your post was about some kind of rhetorical trick rather than a mistake. So, how about something more along the lines of ‘incoherent’? (Or see related terms below.)
In any case, I’m a bit wary of the introduction of new terms for apparently-new concepts, because they are often already quite well-known and built into English via established phrases, which to save brain space should be used as well or instead. (E.g. ‘desperado’ and ‘chasing losses’ for the otherwise perhaps surprising ‘discovery’ of risk-seeking behaviour in a loss situation.)
That said, I haven’t thought of any existing phrases which precisely capture fabricated options; but FWIW here are some related ones:
You can’t have your cake and eat it too (which you touched on)
Hand-waving
Utopian / Fantasy world / Dream world / La-la land
Wishful thinking / Pipe dream / Chasing rainbows / When pigs fly / Pie-in-the-sky / Castles in the air.
Utopia(n) is actually an #EXAMPLE—cf the meme about communism leading to Utopia via an unspecified intermediate step. Which IIRC Scott Alexander said seemed to be Marx’s position—Utopia just follows automatically, no further elaboration or detail required.
Also, a couple of nitpicks:
The Twin Earth example was originally (AFAIK) from Saul Kripke in his book Naming and Necessity
‘The actual price of the goods and services’ should read ‘The actual cost...’
An issue I find with debugging a complex program is that when you write tests (which put inputs into part of the program and then check whether the expected output is produced), your tests can themselves contain bugs, and often do (if they’re not trivially simple). That is, your experiments isolating a small set of variables can produce confusing results due to the experimental design, not just unpredictability in what they’re trying to test. Eg maybe your way of measuring the slope angle or sled weight is flawed. (Cf assumptions about the speed/straightness of light or a steady-state universe messing up your astronomical observations). As philosophers of science say, all observation is theory-laden.
I don’t know anyone enlightened, so I’m not making a claim either way. Just that if this is roughly what enlightened is meant to mean (I surmise via the drawing analogy), then this might be an expected consequence, hence test, of it.
If Looking is something like bypassing one’s own mental machinery that interprets & somewhat distorts reality, then maybe someone who’s enlightened has few cognitive biases, or at least is capable of noticing & maybe bypassing them when they arise?
Agreed. I found reading so many comments exhausting and, et, unenlightening, and after a while I just gave up
[EDITED] I recommend tea (black, green, oolong or white—i.e. white leaves, not with milk). As well as being rather lower in caffeine than coffee, tea includes L-theanine, which (a) increases the benefits of caffeine (viz. attention, accuracy, energy) and (b) counteracts jitters and headaches from caffeine.
Oolong tea usually has a bit more caffeine than the others, though green & white teas have a somewhat better ratio of L-theanine to caffeine. But caffeine and L-theanine contents are very variable anyway.
https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/research/#nutrient-nutrient-interactions_caffeine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4787341/
Indeed—or simply break after completing a task—which also counts as a reward, hence an incentive to complete it. With the downside that you may be less motivated to resume work than if you’re breaking in the middle of something.