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I think it’s good to experiment, but I actually found the experience of being on the site over the last week pretty unpleasant, and I’ve definitely spent much less time here. I initially went through some old ideas I had and tried posting one, but ended up just avoiding LessWrong until the end of the week.
I’m not totally sure right now why I felt this way. Something-like I’m very sensitive to feeling like my normal motivation system is being hijacked? I spent all of my time thinking about the best way to act differently given GHW, rather than just reading the content and enjoying it. This was pretty uncomfortable for me.
If they’re interested in studying confusion, I ask them to tap their leg every time they notice they’re confused.
I tried this! It was enlightening. I didn’t realise it, but I don’t quite understand what my ‘confusion’ label is actually pointing at. I found myself confidently tapping my leg and then pausing, unsure of whether what was going on was truly confusion.
After a couple of days of this, what I think is going on is that I both did and didn’t have separate labels for ‘ignorance’ and ‘predictive error’. Some part of me was confidently tapping my leg whenever I didn’t know something, and another part was saying “I don’t feel confused, though. I just don’t know, and I know that I don’t know”.
I already knew intellectually that the territory is stranger than I give it credit for, but I think this is one of the best examples of observing that first hand. It’s more qualitatively different to listening to somebody say “Here’s a label that confuses me” than I would ever have dreamt.
I’ve updated the Heuristics and Biases tag again btw. I don’t think it’s A-grade based on “I’d like to see more work done on it”, but I think it’s about as good as I personally am going to be able to get it. I’d really like somebody (yes you, fellow user reading this) to have a read through and make any adjustments that make sense and/or make it more comprehensive.
re: fallacies, I thought about it, and I think they’re actually used pretty similarly, at least here on LW. Planning fallacy could easily be described as a bias generated by an ‘imagine your ideal plan going correctly (and maybe add, say, 10%)’ heuristic. At the very least, there’s plenty overlap. Really what I envisioned for that section was making the point that a heuristic can be good (or just ok), because that was something that I didn’t realise for a long time.
To your first point: my intuition is that ACE2 is far too small for the genome to pass through itself. ACE2 is an enzyme that’s bound to the membrane—it actually just cleaves angiotensin 1 to angiotensin 2 (hence ‘angiotensin cleavage enzyme, ACE2). It does pass through the membrane, but it’s not really a ‘channel’—it is simply localised to the cell membrane, and acts on substances extracellularly.
Enveloped viruses can enter cells in many ways (principles of virology chapter 5 is really excellent for this, if you’re interested). It seems that SARS-CoV (the original outbreak) enters cells primarily how it is implied above—simple, direct membrane fusion mediated by the ACE2 receptor. There is some speculation that it may under some circumstances be endocytosed (taken into the cell in a separate sphere of membrane) and then break free of the endosome (the bubble) in a pH-dependent way. Obviously this is further complicated by the fact that this is SARS-CoV-2 that we’re really interested in, so I thought it would be best to leave it blank. You’re right in thinking this process is similar to SER budding, though.
To your second point: I wasn’t actually sure! I’ve done some research, but honestly I’m still not as confident about this as about the rest. As far as I can tell, for most viruses nucleocapsid shedding is either mediated by substances or organelles inside the cytoplasm—ribosomes in particular, apparently, bind to the capsids of some viruses and destabilise them—or is part of the process of receptor binding. Some viruses, for instance, seem to be able to leave their nucleocapsid behind with their envelope so it coats one side of the cell membrane.
Sorry I can’t give a better answer, hope it helps!
I strongly agree with the Johnswentworth’s point! I think my most productive discussions have come from a gears-level/first-example style of communication.
What I’m arguing in this post is very much not that this communication style is bad. I’m arguing that many people will stop listening if you jump straight to this, and you should explicitly track this variable in your head when communicating.
Obviously ‘know your audience and adjust complexity appropriately’ is quite a trivial point, but to me thinking about it with a ‘thought-like-ness’ frame helps me to actually implement tis by asking “how much translating do I need to do for this audience?”
Maybe I should rewrite the post as “Gears in Conversation” or so.
Edited the courage tag, think it’s C-class (Not sure if it needs integrating somehow with the groupthink and/or heroic responsibility tags? certainly some things in each of these don’t fit under the others but there is a fair amount of overlap at present)
Edited self-deception & superstimuli, think they’re now C-class (self-deception in particular, I’d like somebody who’s actually read Elephant in the Brain to have a look over it, because it seems relevant but I’m not overly familiar)
Edited evolution and think it’s now B-class
“The thing about those distinctions is that they are a) useful, and b) curiosity-stoppers. They tell us “don’t worry, you already know this” so you can get back to building a tower of interconnected concepts. Which is a good thing, most of the time, but it is a bad thing some of the time”
I liked this footnote, but I’m not sure why. I’m going to say some things to try to think about it more clearly.
What this footnote seems to me to be about (in part) is something like:
Stop attaching string to your insane-person cork board
Notice that the things you are connecting with string are sketches, not photos
Remain stopped for long enough to fill in your sketches a bit, erase some bits, and add a little colour
On this model, I am truly appalling at [1], and therefore rarely get the opportunity to practice [2] and [3]. I actually quite enjoy the feeling of remaining stopped on its own, but I think adding string feels to me too much like ‘learning things’ for me to look past it very often.
This model is (of course) wrong, but it feels closer to me than other words I have to point to it.
I also noticed that my brain likes first-things to cause (be required by?) second-things, so my initial model of the main text was something like familiarity → facts → identification → models → mastery. This could be intended, and does reflectively seem fairly sensible, but I can imagine having practical mastery over something without a complex (or even correct) model of it. Exercising seems like a good example where I think sufficient experience could create practical mastery without a strong model or many facts.
However, I was surprised when you picked out driving as an example, as I wouldn’t have said I have a strong model of how a car works. This probably means I’ve misunderstood what you mean by ‘models’ and ‘facts’.
I think what’s going on is that I’m getting distracted by the context I usually hear the words ‘model’ and ‘fact’ in, next to words like ‘science’, ‘engineering’ and ‘textbook’. This is getting in the way of me thinking about things like ‘if I exercise when I haven’t in a long time, my arms and legs will feel sore afterwards’ as facts.
Are there any plans to implement tagging of whole sequences? I understand that tagging the first post in a sequence has a similar effect, but it might be more productive in some instances to have, for instance Slack and The Sabbath as the top link under the slack tag, rather than the individual posts from this sequence appearing in an order based on relevance.
Obviously that then creates issues about whether you want posts that appear in sequences to also appear individually or not, and whether you want all sequences to be taggable or not, and so on. I’m not sure if these issues outweigh the benefits; even just on an admin-only basis, it seems like a helpful feature if we expect a significant user base who don’t read the tag descriptions (the other place it might otherwise make sense to put sequence links).
(Other examples where this seems to me it might be more useful than the current method: Philosophy of language & A Human’s Guide To Words, Group Rationality & The Craft And The Community. I imagine there are more)
This is exactly what I’m saying. Using machines in ways they’re not made for is especially risky when the machine controls access to your house.
I’m sure this happens in many areas (maths, for one), but medical language is a pretty well-optimised system I know well. You might like to use it for inspiration:
Medicine: “72yo F BIBA with 3⁄7 hx SOB, CP. Chest clear, HS I+II+0. IMP: IECOPD”
English: 72 year old woman brought in by ambulance because she’s been short of breath and had chest pain for the past 3 days. No noises were audible over her lungs with a stethoscope, both of her heart sounds were clearly audible with no added sounds. I think it’s most likely this is being caused by an infection on top of a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
I am also unsure of exactly what it is, but I used to fairly consistently induce a similar feeling in myself with ‘mindful walks’, also inspired by Original Seeing. For me, it was closely bound up with getting curious about things I’m used to looking at without seeing—what are those marks on pavements? A lichen? Are they raised above the pavement? What do the different colours and shapes look like? Why are they round-ish and spaced out, rather than covering the whole surface, or some other shape?
This might not be ‘true’ curiosity—I never looked up other people’s maps for an explanation of the marks on pavements, for instance—but it does fairly often give me a feeling of ‘realness’. I was struck by how similar your not-a-SIM-key experience was.
Your example of a friend saying ‘let me be real with you’ reminded me of the concept of the ‘press secretary’. Asking the right questions, and having a certain emotional quality, seems to trip up my press secretary for long enough that I can query the things behind her a little.
EDIT 19/03/22: Maybe in future I should finish sequences before I leave comments on them
I’ve edited the Heuristics and Biases tag. I think it’s probably A-grade (I’m still getting a handle on exactly what an A-grade tag should feel like though, honestly).
That said, I’d like it if somebody could check the specifics of the three definitions, because I’m actually not completely sure, and check that it scans ok.
For sure! I figured the team wouldn’t have missed this, just wanted to give my two cents. For what it’s worth I think the tagging system is actually really nicely implemented already; I feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these posts that were just thoroughly inaccessible to me until now.
OK. So you see the grading as being more of a “neglected-o-meter” in the sense that it describes the gap between how a tag currently is and how it would be in an ideal world? (i.e. a more important tag would have a higher bar for being A-grade than a less important one?)
I think that makes more sense than an absolute-quality stamp, but I think the tag grading post as is currently written should make that clear (if it is the case)-- currently it implies almost the opposite, at least as I read it. For instance phrases like “It covers a valuable topic” in A-grade, and “tagged posts may not be especially good.” in C-grade. To me these read as “quality/importance of topic and of posts are as important for grading as description”.
I think actually the way you’re describing tags now is more useful (for e.g. directing peoples attention for improving tags), but I’m not sure if it came across that way (to me) in the initial post. I would be interested to hear how other people read it.
Really great post! The concept I have in my head looks broadly-applicable though slippery
The section below sounded a lot to me like “you form a model from a set of words, and then later on you Directly Observe the Territory™, and this shifts the mental model associated with the words in an important way”.
Running on this model, I think a lot of the sequences was like this for me—it wasn’t until 1-2 years after reading them that I noticed concrete, major changes in my behaviour. Possibly this time was spent observing the part of the territory I call my brain.
But in fact, there really is a kind of deeper, fuller, contextualized understanding, a kind of getting-it-in-your-bones, that often doesn’t show up until later. Because when you first hear the wisdom, it doesn’t really matter to you. You’re usually not in the sort of situation where the wisdom applies, so it’s just this random fact floating around in your brain.
Often, it’ll be years later, and you’ll be in the middle of a big, stressful situation yourself, and that little snippet of wisdom will float back up into your thoughts, and you’ll go “ohhhhhhhh, so that’s what that means!”
You already knew what it meant in a sort of perfunctory, surface-level, explicit sense, but you didn’t really get it, on a deep level, until there was some raw experiential data for it to hook up to.
Thanks for running this survey! I’m looking to move into AI alignment, and this represents a useful aggregator of recommendations from professionals and from other newcomers; I was already focussing on AGISF but it’s useful to see that many of the resources advertised as ‘introductory’ on the alignment forum (e.g. the Embedded Agency sequence) are not rated as very useful.
I was also surprised that conversations with researchers ranked quite low as a recommendation to newcomers, but I guess it makes sense that most alignment researchers are not as good at ‘interpreting’ research as e.g. Rob Miles, Richard Ngo.
Basically any “Beginners set” online should set you right as a cheap way to try it out (though most pros say it’s not worth your time. YMMV).
You will probably find it’s hard with cheap shitty picks, but you’ll (for fairly cheap) get a feel for which different shapes do what, and which you find most intuitive/useful. If you find it useful/fun, you could then either scour Ebay for cheap locks (with no guarantee of ease, but locks-without-keys is niche enough you can sometimes get good deals) or buy an Abus 45 or Masterlock. If I remember correctly, both of those should be 4 or 5-pin with no security pins, so about as easy as real locks get.
Once you feel you’ve graduated from your beginners set and want to splash some cash, you probably want to pick 1-2 pick shapes you got on well with and get really nice ones, or get a nice pick set. Here are some well-regarded vendors. You might also want to look into a practice lock, which seems like pretty good value for money.
Regarding learning, Reddit is pretty good for this one (as seems to often be the case with metis-skills). In particular, the Belts stuff seems like a pretty good curriculum. I don’t expect sitting reading about lockpicking will be very useful compared to, well, picking locks (this is the whole point of this post!).
If you want to feel inspired (and never trust a lock again), LockPickingLawyer is a personal favourite with some educational stuff. He also has an excellent sense of comedic timing.
Let me know what you found useful & how you get on!!
This elicited in me a very specific kind of joy I first experienced reading ZAMM, and for which I have made all too little time ever since. I have nothing substantial to say beyond that I find your prose delightful in the same way I find delight in Original Seeing. Thank you!
I’ve edited the Effective Altruism tag pretty heavily, and I now believe it qualifies as A grade.
I’ve also edited the Epistemic Modesty tag, and think it’s now C or B grade.
I’d also like it if the X-risk and S-risk tags are consistent with one another—I propose that “S-risks (Risk of astronomical suffering)” and “X-risks (Existential risk)” is the best format.
I’d like to suggest not using ibuprofen, or any other anti-inflammatory (NSAID or steroid: also includes aspirin, cortisone, etc. with the presumed exception of pre-prescribed steroids for e.g. asthma).
This is on the basis of this article from the BMJ. In summary, there are a handful of COVID-19 specific cases of young fit people becoming severely ill following ibuprofen use, combined with small studies on SARS-CoV and other illnesses.
Paracetamol should probably be used instead of ibuprofen/NSAIDs.
This seems like a cheap switch as they’re likely roughly equivalent in symptom control excepting this effect. Please let me know if you see or read any reason this may be dangerous/untrue. (Is this an appropriate place to post this? Or does it belong in the generalised advice thread?)