Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 3,339
It’s subconscious so it’s hard to say but it’s clearly not “reading every word in order” and probably doesn’t involve reading every word. I think it’s a combination of being a fast but not exceptionally fast reader, plus a lot of domain knowledge so I can understand the stuff I am reading as fast as I read it, plus a ton of domain-specific skimming skill / pattern recognition to bring the interesting part to conscious attention.
I learned to program young enough that I don’t really remember the process, and I have about 25 years of experience, so I agree with the diagnosis.
I can certainly have a blind spot about logical reasoning related to a program, but I don’t recall having a “it says it right there” kind of blind spot.
How does one “read the docs?”. Sometimes I ask how a senior dev figured something out, and they say “I read the documentation and it explained it.” And I’m like “okay, duh. but… there’s so much fucking documentation. I can’t possibly be expected to read it all?”
I have a pet hypothesis that there is some skill or ability like this which comprises a huge amount of variation in programming ability. Here is an experience I had many times while working with my professional programmer colleagues:
My coworker has a confusing bug and asks me to walk over and take a look at it.
They start trying to explain the bug from their perspective while clicking around doing stuff like building the program or paging through the code.
While they do that, I am reading everything on their screen while they talk, so then I notice some random thing in their codebase that doesn’t make sense to me and point out that thing, which is something they hadn’t realized, and that solves the bug.
Alternately:
I ask some question about the bug that involves figuring out how something works.
They put some search query into Google and it opens up a bunch of search results. They take about three seconds and click one of them that doesn’t look very useful to me. I say, “why don’t you go look at the sixth result which said it was a forum post from a person wondering the exact same thing?” They just didn’t read it.
Alternately:
They run the program and it starts producing about half a page of startup log output per second.
I interrupt them and say “why did it say X?” They say “where did it say that?” I say “about two pages up in the log.” One minute later, they have found the thing in the log that I read while the log was scrolling at half a page per second.
So there is some large difference in reading ability here that seems to be doing a huge amount of work, and I actually have no clue how I would even operate if I didn’t have that ability. It seems to me like I would just never know what was going on.
You could say the same for reading for sure. I think mimicry is more reliable. Actions speak louder then words. The only issue is that you often don’t have good access to someone successful to mimic for a complex behavior. But if you do have access, then you should mimic them more than you pay attention to what they say or write.
Mimicry is at least A-tier. Every person relies purely on mimicry for the first years of their life to learn the most important behaviors for them in the world. For most skills, at most times, an hour spent trying to mimic an expert is going to pay off more than an hour spent reading or reasoning.
I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two views. They can both be true simultaneously. Since both sides can produce compelling examples, they both probably are true simultaneously.
Neither is there an obvious conflict between Cummings’ and Pahlka’s solutions. It’s easy to imagine a civil service that is both more accountable to politicians, and also has a better feedback loop to those politicians. In fact, the solutions seem synergistic, because if the civil servants may be fired for under-delivering, they should be more motivated to get problems fixed via the feedback loop.
(Of course there is still a question as to which is the “bigger problem”.)
I agree. I think “existential” basically isn’t enough common parlance for most people to not just round it off to “big”, in the same way that “literally” becomes “very”.
This post makes me feel like you have a nail in your head. If you want to relate to other people you may have to accept that it’s possible to value different things.
I think if you are an unusual person, then “imagining how you would feel if you were physically in their position” isn’t really that useful a form of empathizing, and you have to take into account a lot of the real psychology of other people in order for it to be an informative exercise. I don’t know whether that will in itself produce kindness or gentleness but it’s probably a precondition.
I agree that one person isn’t very much evidence, but in general, the fact that there are many talented young chess players all up and down the distribution of chess ability, does seem like good evidence that children can become the intellectual peers of adults if they are put into a position to spend lots of time doing so.
For example, if you took the student population of a magnet school and put it up against the population of some random Google department, and gave them all three months to prepare for a chess tournament, I wouldn’t consider the magnet school to be underdogs.
Great stuff, I was quite surprised that current models can solve this now. I predicted they would not.
I appreciate your urge to put the edit at the top but I think it’s better to move it to the bottom, so it doesn’t spoil people trying to guess whether the models can solve it.
I just skimmed your downvoted post and linked doc. (I agree that there was no way I would have clicked through to the doc outside the context of this question.)
The post read like a big series of platitudes, or applause lights. The claims were too generic to be interesting to me. I agree with some, I don’t agree with others, but either way it wasn’t giving me anything I couldn’t generate myself.
The linked doc actually started out strong. You say that you have personally experienced how your own behavior and thinking change when you are materially deprived, and that you actually tested different kinds of deprivations and rewards on yourself over time, and observed patterns. That’s very interesting! I don’t know anything about that. I want to hear what you experienced and think about whether it has anything to do with my life and what I can see. I would upvote a post about that.
I think you’re writing these things to try to pitch your project, but people on LW mostly aren’t sitting around wanting to get pitched on projects. They want to read intellectually stimulating new ideas. And it’s not a convincing pitch either unless you show people you have the goods.
I don’t have anything special to say about this, but this direction excites me, so I am leaving a comment. Thanks for running it and writing up these thought-provoking ideas.
Looks like LLM content.
There’s another blogger, Nathan Tankus, who is also reporting accounts directly from his sources within the BFS. He wears his bias on his sleeve and goes wild with the hyperbole, but he is a prolific public intellectual of some sort so he may be accurately reporting the basic facts. He also did an interview on Odd Lots but it didn’t really have anything new.
Correct me if I’m wrong but this looks substantially LLM-written.
I would be surprised if it were ethically important for you to donate that much. LW has made a pretty big difference to my life (e.g. my career, marriage, and a big chunk of my bank account are causally downstream of LW existing) and I estimated that there are probably something like $100m dollars worth of people for whom it was similarly impactful as me, and then a long tail of more people for whom it was somewhat less impactful, so I owed on the order of 1% of my net worth, such that if everyone like me who saw this fundraiser did the same then it would have enough money to thrive.
So unless LW was really important to you or unless you are sure that you will be a millionaire in the future and you are just donating in advance, I don’t think you owe $1000. But if you want to donate it, then do.
Thanks for this elaboration. One reason I would be more hopeful than in the case of private airplanes (less so potable water) is that it seems like, while providing me a private airplane may mostly only benefit me and my family by making my life more leisurely, providing me or my children genetic enhancement may be very socially productive, at least improving our productivity and making us consume less healthcare resources. So it would seem possible to end up with an arrangement where it’s socially financed and the surplus is shared.
It’s interesting that you describe humans as remaining “equal in the biological lottery”. Of course, to the humans, when the lottery is decided before they are born, and they are given only one life to live, it doesn’t feel very equal when some of them win it and others lose. It’s not obvious to me that inequality based on who spends money to enhance themselves or their family’s biology is worse than inequality based on random chance. It seems like effects on social cohesion or group conflict may result either way regardless of the source of the inequality.
Do you have any suggestions for how genetic enhancement technology could hypothetically be developed in a better way so that the majority is not left behind? Or in your view would it be best for it to never be developed at all?
Can you elaborate on why you think that genetic modification is more prone to creating inequality than other kinds of technology? You mentioned religious reasons in your original comment. Are there other reasons? On priors, I might expect it to follow a typical cost curve where it gets cheaper and more accessible over time, and where the most valuable modifications are subsidized for some people who can’t afford them.
I don’t think I understand the gist of this essay. It sounds like you want to claim that it didn’t make someone “knowledgeable” to read (and retain?) the contents of books like that. Why not? It sounds knowledgeable to me.