Crackatook

Karma: 48

Crackatook 3 Jun 2021 2:16 UTC
4 points
in reply to: DragonGod’s comment on: Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
There are a list of actual stories and descriptions of creepy sexual harassment. It was enough for me to frown and think to recommend people to choose other branches of medical doctor other than cardiologists. Although I consider myself sensitive to anecdotal evidence and confounding variables, my inner disclaimer didn’t make it explicit this time.
So wow, the last paragraph is talking directly to me.
I suggest this society help people with this issue, to the same degree as poverty, as it is hard to make out of it alone.

Crackatook 3 Jun 2021 1:07 UTC
1 point
on: How I come up with ideas
Some desires are universal among humans.
- I want to be rich without putting in much effort.
This is particularly meaningful message to me. It is about a year ago when I found a youtube channel talking about “small work big money.” It isn’t just a discussion channel, but they try to carry their desire to action, by drawing characters, making hoodies, and communicating with users and running and expanding their business; it was just impressive that they stretch their ability in the theme of “small work big money.”
Since then, I believe human desires have the potential to influence people, even if it is just a dream.

Crackatook 1 Jun 2021 23:37 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Emiya’s comment on: What are your personal (public) Hamming questions?
Efficiency is everybody’s concern, IMAO. I hope you can share progress on this issue later on:)

Crackatook 31 May 2021 16:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: What are your personal (public) Hamming questions?
In online space, I saw several productive people who get reward by just crossing off the to-do list. I also get content feeling when I cross off, but it is not sufficient enough to let me do all the to-do list before sleeping. Lesswrong’s karma system I get every morning is sufficient enough to write a comment constantly. I hope you hack the mechanism and boost our productivity:)

Crackatook 31 May 2021 16:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: What are your personal (public) Hamming questions?
Your project sounds compelling! I think you may consider doing this as open project, so that people who find your project on online can contribute to the wiki site.

Crackatook 31 May 2021 15:57 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mary Chernyshenko’s comment on: Aphantasia
My gaining here is that people without aphantasia still have weakness in creating mental images. Aphantasia people just have more. Writing a visual description, creating a mental image for art, or remembering every moment of life are obviously difficult tasks to normal person, while trained aphantasia person may be able to. In my experience, intention of creating mental image directly turn to the “feeling” of creating the image(most people stops here), which can be scattered easily if I try to look up the image clearly.
Based on unreliable online source, aphantasia comes from the error of response from visual part of brain. Then brain’s memory ability can be unrelated issue. Well, it is intuitive to remember something we know well and vice versa. We can lead to more memory issue.

Crackatook 29 May 2021 4:06 UTC
1 point
in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: Aphantasia
I suspect personality, skill level, and now aphantasia in your case impacted on fiction writing. Right now, I put personality as the top reason for this. I like comic books and web comics, thus my fiction consists of a series of images and motions in my head, and I don’t really write them down in texts. In this path, I am also not confident of writing a description with a variety of vocabulary. Oh, at the end, lack of time is the main issue, sadly;)

Crackatook 29 May 2021 3:54 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Aphantasia
Normally I would say it happens and people forget details. But his case seems like he has a biological issue. I think something serious is happening to him.

Crackatook 29 May 2021 3:51 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Aphantasia
The essay has several shocking parts. I enjoyed reading it.
Besides being aphantasia, I like short, easy and clear writings, few sentences summarizings, and facts without decorations. Generally that is journalism writing. And if this is related to aphantasia...that’s interesting.
Although I am not an aphantasia, I agree that fiction writing will be impacted by it, in addition to limited vocabulary, lack of practice, etc. And the graphic art will be the same case, as reference images and its mental processing are important.

Crackatook 29 May 2021 3:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: uncomputable’s comment on: Aphantasia
After I posted the question, today I experienced a handful of moments when my brain didn’t work to visualize, even though I can. Also I am assured mental images are not the only source of creativity. Thank you for pinpointing out.

Crackatook 29 May 2021 3:09 UTC
2 points
in reply to: beriukay’s comment on: Aphantasia
I am physically nodding to you right now:)
I do hear the voice of comic book/novel characters that my brain synthesizes automatically, everytime. I noticed this when there is an audio/movie version of a book and disparity exists. Actually, audiozation comes more often. I read and write texts with an inner voice, and sound gets clear when I read slower. That’s why I stay to be a slow reader.

Crackatook 29 May 2021 3:03 UTC
3 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Aphantasia
I generally have been a slow reader, so it sounds reasonable that people with aphantasia read fast. I am going to bring this topic to my friends and find out who may have aphantasia haha

Crackatook 29 May 2021 2:54 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Selueen’s comment on: Aphantasia
When I first saw this test, I choose #6 directly without really imagining a red square. And I realized it and tried again. For first some moments I saw #1-3! And could not move to #6 really when I concentrated on. Although at this time, closing my eyes, I tried to “see” the image crystal clear, and it will be a hallucination if it happens.
I am a bit confused now how to balance between aphantasia and hallucination. I know I am not aphantasia based on several moments that mental images striked my memory. I am also not seeing hallucination, it normally does not happen and I haven’t experienced it yet. But I can’t really see the exact and obvious red square except the feeling I am imagining it.
Which one do you think is your case?

Crackatook 29 May 2021 2:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: Aphantasia
Thank you for the detailed description, I can sense how aphantasia is like much better now:)
And I realized I have a very similar experience with you, because visualization is not happening everyday in my brain. Now I feel that It just makes content memorable when it happens, and that makes me think I do visualization often. But when I read a name of someone, I am reading his or her name, not imagining the face of the person. And I still can recall a sense of the person just by reading it. I can grasp your concept of “fundamental” with this. Also In my physics class, I had more comprehension on kinematics than on atomic physics, because I could imagine an object in motion but not the ionization of an atom.
I remember reading Lord of the Rings was tedious at a young age around middle school. I had fun reading the Hobbit and Harry Potter series(by J.K.Rowling), so I suspect Tolkin put something hard-core inside LotR :p
As a native Korean, I find your language analogy working really well! Nowadays I have no problem reading and writing in English, however, I discovered myself generating more humorous and interesting results in Korean. This is similar to the gap between reading paper material and online material.
By the time movie adaptation happens, movie makers modify the book’s contents and charming points, often severely, so I don’t watch them most of the time. I appreciate how you analyze that “ruining” because I didn’t sensitively identify why I don’t like it.
In conclusion, I think our brain processes work pretty similarly regardless of aphantasia. I may consider aphantasia into the personality category rather than biology category.

[Question] Aphantasia

Crackatook28 May 2021 1:55 UTC

7 points

23 comments1 min readLW link

Crackatook 26 May 2021 3:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Questions are tools to help answerers optimize utility
Oh this post surprises me! Similar thoughts are going on your next post and this one.

Crackatook 25 May 2021 19:50 UTC
5 points
on: Starting a Rationalist Meetup during Lockdown
I love this post! This seems like not different from running a high school club haha.

Crackatook 25 May 2021 2:15 UTC
3 points
on: Questions are tools to help answerers optimize utility
- Answerers should generally try to figure out enlightened questions and answer those questions. This method is often the one that will be best for the asker’s utility.
This takeaway makes sense to me, and I would suggest separating questions into different categories(contexts, characters, etc). In a large classroom, people often need clarifications than solutions, as thinking more than one minute here can be counter productive; Professor would answer directly and shortly, especially when questions are simple. In a problem-solving or thesis writing, people stuck, and enlightened-question-answering would help them a lot; People need different perspectives as well as solutions. In the case of daily life questions, like dentist appointment, the answerer would response, or notify in the morning as the answer is predictable, as you said above.
In above 3 cases, the most benefit of enlightened-question-answering comes to the complex and advanced situations like problem-solving. This reveals that your model gives different viewpoints, over giving knowledges.
You also concerned about people asking fewer questions to this answerer, partially because its answers are off-topic in its full force. Yeah, we don’t need diverse viewpoints everytime. It will be frustrating. but…
Correspondingly, I imagine that as AGI gets close, people might ask fewer and fewer questions; instead, relevant information will be better pushed to them. A really powerful oracle wouldn’t stay an oracle for long, they would quickly get turned into an information feed of some kind.
To me, this is already happening. First Youtube comes to my mind. Second is Lesswrong.com. The similarity of the two is that I use search bar rarely as contents are already displayed, by AI-recommender or by Human administrator. Surely this is the place where people want diverse viewpoints more and more.
On the other hand I don’t use search bar because I don’t come with questions. When I have new keywords, I should use search bar to play Baba Yetu or to watch more clip of Thomasin McKenzie.(On the third hand, youtube uses cookies and reflects my recent interest on Sid Meier’s Civilization. It is becoming “the good enough”!!) It is not exact to compare your answer model and youtube recommendation, but this may show the changing paradigm of questioning.

Crackatook 22 May 2021 1:32 UTC
2 points
on: Covid 5/20: The Great Unmasking
My previous prediction was that if the CDC were to update its guidance in sensible ways, that elite opinion would fall in line with that. Those defending the old guidelines would shift to defending the new ones because their actual algorithm is to defend the official line, so opposition to a change before it happens is a very different thing from opposition to a change after it is announced.
This striked my thinking algorithm. In the retrospect of the beginning of COVID crisis, I was in a huge favor of wearing mask because I thought myself was right when medias recommended the opposite. Mask was the correct choice, at the end.
I am still in favor of wearing mask. I personally feel unsafe to unmask primarily because COVID is not over(I am not vaccinated yet). Then CDC announced unmasking, and it sounds logical because it is only for vaccinated, but this goes against my belief. Here I find that myself is somewhat biased to myself over official announcements. At least my brain didn’t work with the officials always. If there’s a conflict, I can imagine myself choose the side of me. So, by this time, I am opening more to this unmasking announcement with skepticism.
Still you’ve written good points the objections to the unmasking and I agree with them. The CDC didn’t explain fully enough to convince people and this may go disastrous if something went bad. Although I expect unmasked people will generally comply well to returned masking policy if that’s the case.

Crackatook 21 May 2021 1:33 UTC
10 points
on: Sabien on “work-life” balance
I thought work-life-balance is the term accusing the exploitation of workers: Chronic overtime work and frequent night work with strict penalty on late coming. Although I know such workplaces exist in America, I expect them to be much more frequent in Asia. If the author haven’t worked in those, he or she may not see the whole picture of the pursuit of work-life-balance. I generally agree about the point of the writing though.