Music Video maker and self professed “Fashion Victim” who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
CstineSublime
Karma: 536
then anything they wrote (or said) above the bottom line is worthless toward determining whether the bottom line is true.
To be fair, i don’t even know what their bottom line is—I only caught a vague sense that it had something to do with health. Not what specific benefits they were promising, nor how much they hedged those claims.
Reading this post today, I realized I don’t actually know what the difference is between a belief and a model. I still don’t.
Models, as I understand it, are comprised of assumptions about cause-effect relationships which are themselves beliefs. I’m thinking about decision making models—where these anticipated causal effects influence what conclusion (i.e. option) is reached by a model. So a model is basically are a cluster of beliefs. But that doesn’t appear to be the idiomatically correct way to refer to both (I believe I am wrong in my usage/understanding).
Certainly in the post linked, beliefs are seen to be at odds with models. A model itself is not “believed”. And I suspect some kind of internal, intuitive meta-model of self is drawing that conclusion, and producing that belief.
Does anybody here have any advice or thoughts on the “two list” approach?
I can’t remember who it suggested it and I’m likely conflating different anecdotes—but the gist was you have two lists: a traditional to-do list which has tasks and actions; and a second list that I’ve seen described as a “to think” list—which might contain a series of problems or questions that are important but for which you are unable to progress.
In my case my “to think” or “problems” list would be as long as my arm, my to-do list would be filled obvious stuff: with whatever is the immediate next step on a project for a client, grocery lists, paying bills, booking tickets to a show etc. But on average shorter than the other list.
I’m not sure how to convert individual items from the the longer non-actionable list, into actionable things to do.
Inverting Argument from authority, when is it good practice? I saw someone watching a daytime television show where they brought in someone to do an infomercial about health-marketed products. Instinctively, I didn’t listen to any of the claims, instead all I could think of was “Well they’re a salesperson, everything they’re going to say is biased towards selling the products they brought today. This person shouldn’t be watching this”.
I’m sure you see my mistake here. It’s convenient, it’s easy, just filter out everyone who doesn’t seem credible or who you suspect of having a bias: but is it optimal?
I’ve always been annoyed by how much “the wisdom to know the difference” is load bearing in this ‘prayer’. I feel like it is yet another underpants-gnomes/draw-the-rest-of-the-owl thing. Is that the point? Humility?
Edit: Why is this being disagreed with—What I mean is—what point(s) do people disagree with? The Humility? That the statement is doing the heavy lifting? The idea it’s a “prayer”? The underpants gnomes bit? The Owl bit? (I see them as two examples of the same phenomenon—why and how can one disagree with one comparison and not the other?).
Please take pity on me and explain what exactly you disagree with and why.
As an experiment I like it. The difficult and nitty gritty part I see is getting consistency across all the articles in the first iteration. Even if the risk of it tailoring it’s articles for any specific user, pandering to their particular profile, the output will be beholden to whatever meta-prompt is being used.
And I don’t know enough about the quality of training data to know if it is possible to get such consistency out of it: as in consistent editorial guidelines.
As someone with no knolwedge of how LLMs work beyond some vague stuff about “tokens” “Multilayer perceptrons”, I wonder also, will any given article be simply biased towards the “average” or most popular or common facts or repeated memes about the articles topic as found in the training data, or does every prompt in effect throttle to a certain amount of training data.
Let me put it another way, it’s not very hard to find online the “Hanging Munchkin” myth. There’s certainly a lot of pixels spilled on that topic. Now imagine that this was a disproportionate amount of the training data about the Wizard of Oz—would this be reflected in the article about the Wizard of Oz? Or would the prompt be engineered to ensure such spurious legends won’t be included? And I think ensuring that same editorial consistency on all topics gets really hard and requires a lot of bespoke prompt-engineering.
I’ve never learned the method of loci or Memory Palace, I’ve certainly never tried to take my childhood home and use it to remember things. I find it interesting then that the standup comedy routines I’ve memorized after multiple YouTube viewings, I don’t remember the actual videos, I don’t recall the gestures, the set design, the media qualities of the video transfer. Instead I seem to recall images conjured in my imagination.
Emo Philips saying “My brain started to bleed” calls to mind a vivid memory of him as a youngster, eyes rolling in his head, blood coming out of his ear. There is no such thing in the Youtube video.
I haven’t attached this to a memory palace. This is just a vivid imaginary tableau that is a literal interpretation of a line in standup.
I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this. Maybe I’ve found a lousy “we got memory palace at home” version of the technique? or is this how most people who aren’t aphantasic memorize things?
And what sense did Jimmy present it as? I am unfamiliar with it.
What use of the term hypnosis do you mean? The practice associated with figures like Émile Coué that is represented in cartoons by magicians with spiral disks, or the idea of a state of focused attention?
Reflections on writing 15 daily blog posts
I was taught in High School she’s lamenting the suffix “o”. Rome-o, Benvoli-o, Mercuti-o, while her clan all have names that end with “t”. Cuplet, Juliet, Tybalt. As in, “why aren’t you named Romus? Then we could be together”
I don’t buy it personally. But I assume there’s a wealth of Shakespearean scholarship that has investigated this to a deeper level than you or I care to.
How to be a good planner?
What do I mean by that? Given a goal which you do not have domain knowledge or previous experience related to executing it how do you maximize the chances of choosing a sequence of actions to succeed at that goal—to give some sundry examples:A. running a bakery as a profitable business—with no prior baking or management experience,
B. writing a plugin for GIMP using Python—with no prior python knowledge, no prior knowledge of GIMP’s APIs or standards for plugins,
C. filming a three car chase sequence for a action movie—with no prior knowledge of the local laws or which permits are required to close down stretches of road from the public, nor any knowledge of how stunt drivers choreograph such sequences.
Maybe the examples I’ve given are too vague—they’re just examples—so imagine a charitable version which is much more specific. Hold it in your mind. Now assuming you don’t have the domain expertise, don’t know how to execute them yet: how would you plan to achieve it?
What skills would be transferable for the planning stages of all three examples? Skills not traits. Sure “curiosity” “cautious optimism” “creativity” “pragmatism”—yeah yeah yeah - what skills would produce better plans that aren’t execution skills themselves. So obviously—baking, coding, stunt-drivinig are not general planning skills.
”Research skills?” Okay, a little vague, but sure. What else?
”Cognitive Flexibility?”—as in that when presented with new information from their research they are willing to abandon previously held parts of the plan.
”Self Awareness?”—not sure if that’s a trait or a skill. I suspect that challenging your own assumptions and specifying the degree of confidence you have in any given bit of knowledge or expectation is a skill.
What makes someone a good planner?
Thank you for that reply specifying the controversy and history within the lesswrong community—and therefore that being the chosen platform for “coming out”, does seem to me to increase the risks.
I have to reflect more on this. But I think it’s important to acknowledge your reply in the meantime.
I think my current question or crux is sort of “okay, but if you don’t have a substantial posting history—why will you become stalked out of all the others?”. And that is probably case-by-case thing that depends, even within the localized environment of Lesswrong, important factors like: what actual topic or taboo they are coming out about, even how much it resonates with the community so how it gets displayed on the front-page and therefore how visible it might be to r/sneerclub-ers, other aspects of their identity could also make them more vulnerable—even gender.
I think I need to think more fine-grain about this.
It’s very easy, these days, to gain enough internet fame to acquire stalkers. A bit of social media activity / blogging / other forms of poasting, a few of people talk about you a few times, and bam—you’re there.
No it’s not easy to gain internet fame. I know. I’ve tried it.
Some people are crazy. “Parasocial stalkers” usually are. That’s facts.
What is a fact exactly, what specifically do you mean by they are “crazy”? Why is that the most unambiguous word you can think of?
But that’s not relevant to what we’re discussing here, which is the scenario where someone acquires a stalker (or multiple stalkers) as a consequence of publicly revealing things about themselves (“coming out”).
A scenario which is statistically unlikely. Not all 21% of non-personal stalkers are triggered by a single internet post. For example, erotomaniacs, most of them fixate on people who are famous.
Can you point to even a single instance of a “confessional” “out of the closet blog post” causing someone to become a stalker with no prior personal contact, and the person who wrote the blog post not having a previous history of revealing things about their life.
There’s nothing “dehumanizing” about that
The dictionary definition of dehumanizing is “To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, [1]compassion, or civility.”—whenever you dismiss a large group of people as “crazy” you are depriving them of their individuality, therefore dehumanize them. I think my assessment was correct.
And the research shows that most people who seek out information on someone have a preexisting relationship with them, a smaller group become fixated on famous people—neither conform to a single “out of the closet” post.
- ^
Cambridge Dictionary: “to remove from a person the special human qualities of independent thought...”
Merriam-Webster: “To address or portray (someone) in a way that obscures or demeans that person’s humanity or individuality”
- ^
79% of stalkers are people the victim knows [1]- not parasocial famous relationships. Of parasocial stalkers, erotomanic is most common: men who have power and wealth and older than the stalker are the common victims. Erotomaniacs tend to be women from lower socio-economic classes, as I said in my other comment—I would guess that this means they have less access to mental health support, may in fact be victims of domestic violence of some sort, have low self-confidence or control over their own lives which leads them to project fantasies onto someone, such as David Letterman, whom she might see every night from the television in her home, while she is drifting off to sleep.
Stalkers tend to be crazy people
I think that’s unnecessarily dehumanizing and doesn’t cut at the joints of reality because ignores a huge body of research that does in fact tell us about the various different types of stalking profiles and what precipitates them. Most stalkers are motivated by personal connection, not fame—tiny or otherwise—at all. I elaborate on that in this comment. Those who are motivated by fame it is not “tiny fame” but repeat exposure, usually by the media, that amplifies relevance to the stalker. Not a “tiny bit of fame.”
- ^
79% of victims were acquainted with their pursuer (N = 62), and half of all stalking emerged specifically from romantic relationships (M = 49%, N = 53). (meta-analysis of 175 studies)
The state of the art of stalking: Taking stock of the emerging literature. Brian H. Spitzberg. William R. Cupach.
- ^
Few people will see your post, but the ones who do see it might be exactly the people who can hurt you the most — those who specifically sought it out in order to gain information on you.
If few people see your post, then this almost by definition means it is unlikely anyone will seek to “gain information over you”. The kind of people who obsessively try to collect information about other people tend to fall into two broad groups: anti-fans—which are people who were stans and then were shut out, or people who had some kind of direct personal relationship or interaction with the person that went sour.
Anti-Fans may be in some cases be catalyzed by someone “coming out of the closet” if they have been misrepresenting themselves in a way which was intrinsic and important to the ongoing parasocial relationship they had with their stans (think of cruxy things, like Bob Dylan going electric, or more recently MAGA supporters enraged over the lack of disclosure about Epstein). More often than not, it is actually provoked by something very different: the sudden radio silence or “taking a step back for my privacy”—in a sense, going into a closet. This lack of closure causes resentment and fans begin trying to find out everything they can to reach the previous level of exposure. (Does this remind you of “ghosting”?)
This behavior is very similar to stalker behavior is interconnected to domestic violence. A romantic partner or potential suitor is rejected, but unable to accept why—as it is said “To stalk is to seek relevance.” (Not all stalking behaviour is caused by a sudden step back, but it is the most common[1]. Erotomanic delusions almost always involve repeated exposure to the victim, which is why they tend to be very famous and powerful people like Kings, Late Night TV show hosts, famous baseballers, or movie idols: people for whom media exposure is great- in a sense their obsession is a subset of the media’s obsession. Victims are tends to be males who are older and wealthier than the stalker, stalkers tend to be women with low socio-ecoonomic status (which I would guess means less mental health support, less self-confidence, more likely to be victims of abuse too—but that’s my speculation) dreaming of ‘escape’)
Not so fun fact: “approach behaviour” of stalkers is a counterintuitive indicator of likelihood of harm—threats are less likely to lead to acting on threats[2]. This again leads me to suspect that one single blog post isn’t going to trigger an obsessive information gatherer. They need to already have some kind of investment in the confessor.
Simply put—a post unlikely to be seen by anyone means that no one is sufficiently invested in their parasocial relationship with you to obsessively seek information over you. What does trigger that kind of behavior—is suddenly ghosting an audience.
So a couple of years ago I wanted to write about why people get obsessive and start collections—and part of that lead me to collect a lot of anecdotes and research on stalking behaviour, vexatious litigants, chronic complainers, OCD and Schizophrenia. I wrote a first draft of the book but never polished it since the topic is too vague to be cohesive. Might turn it into a Youtube series. It’s less about stalking—more about collecting—lot’s of stuff about Pinterest boards, wardrobes, sneakerheads and the bus-ticket theory of genius. Hopefully you’re not worried why I have all this info now.- ^
79% of victims were acquainted with their pursuer (N = 62), and half of all stalking emerged specifically from romantic relationships (M = 49%, N = 53). (meta-analysis of 175 studies)
The state of the art of stalking: Taking stock of the emerging literature. Brian H. Spitzberg. William R. Cupach. - ^
″...stalkers who communicate hateful, threatening, or obscene messages or content are the least likely to physically attack their target. This is especially true when the unwelcome communications are made anonymously. However, if such communications persist, the risk increases with each successive contact. Stalkers who express a desire to meet their target in person and to travel for that purpose are much more likely to be dangerous. But paradoxically, those who express a desire to have children with their target are typically less of a threat.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/machiavellians-gulling-the-rubes/201810/the-many-stalkers-taylor-swift
- ^
You’re only barely dedicated enough to do it in the first place, so if they weren’t more dedicated than you, they probably wouldn’t be doing it at all.
It takes time to catch up.
This reminds me why I’m starting to believe it is useful to hack the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Being slightly overconfident as a beginner, believing you have a noticeable but not overwhelming natural advantage or talent. Like if it on average takes people 3 years to become a good snowboarder, believing you can manage it in 2.5, probably will make you more enthused and dedicated.
I don’t expect it to become an accurate self-fulfilling prophecy. But it will make you stick with it at all, it will make you persevere even as your expectations become revised by reality.
Stanley Kubrick said he was motivated to go into filmmaking simply because he saw the films in cinemas and felt “I can’t do any worse than these”. By all accounts his first two feature films were stinkers. Larry David’s first time as a standup has a similar flavour, he simply asked if he could go on because he saw what standups were doing and thought “I can do that.” Gilbert Gottfried’s entry to standup was similar—but he would say years later that it was “crazy” that he ever considered turning it into a career. “Even collecting cans for the deposit makes more sense!”
Orson Welles attributes all the innovations in Citizen Kane to the confidence of ignorance—he didn’t know what couldn’t be done—nor did he know the proper hierarchy on a film set. And graciously his cinematographer Gregg Toland allowed his crew to listen directly to Welles, and follow his orders, just to see what Welles would do. Bringing his knowledge of theater lighting to cinema.
So maybe, rather than guess you’re in the top 10% for participating at all. Just lie to yourself and say you’re destined to be in the top 4% - because what’s the worst that can happen? You stick with it and then revise your expectations back to top-10%? But you stuck with it, so now you’ve actually developed the skill.
Interesting to see that more than one comment had the sentiment “yeah it’s a scam—but let’s use this as an experiment.”
Does this apply for people who don’t have a bottom-line written first? I’m thinking about, say, how I like hearing the opinions of people who view modern art, but have no art history or formal art education: I like hearing their naive judgements—now if they argue why a artwork is good that I find convincing, is this analogous to hearing a salesman who obviously has their bottom-line written first why this supplement or food product is good for, I dunno, sleep, and making a surprisingly bad or good argument in favour of that?
In both cases: the naive judge of art, the salesperson—I have a certain expectation about how convincing they will be.
Actually, I tend to expect television salespersons will not be convincing. I find the type of arguments (or lack of argumentation) and rhetoric they deploy just don’t work well with me. And I realize I’m in the minority. I expect their style works on the majority of television viewers.