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: 658
Can you hypothesize why it hasn’t worked for me and why it’s worked for you? Or to put it another way, what conditions do you suspect are needed for the regular time of eating and sunlight tactics work?
I am skeptical those simple fixes work, if only because I do both but waking up is a hassle every morning. And so I’m convinced that a complex scheme, (probably not the ones the people you’ve spoken with though) is the only way. But also, I suspect that the kind of complex schemes that do work have other benefits in other aspects of ones life. or to put it another way....
It is worth changing everything about your life to get better sleep if necessary IME.
Yes, hard agree. I don’t think eating at the same time and getting 5 minutes of sunlight will work. But the things that do work to improve quality of sleep probably overlap with “better quality of life in general”
But this efficiency comes at a cost: content that is worthy of your time becomes indistinguishable from content that is not.
Are you still speaking from the perspective of the people who use LLMs to quickly turn around their half-baked ideas, or from the perspective of readers who will be deluged more and more with LLM-baked content?
For most content on the internet, a prerequisite is that it is fluent. Historically, there was a sort of filter in what got posted to the internet—where fluency implied intentionality, which would act as a signal that something is worth reading
What do you mean by the internet—even before someone actually reads a post or article, a whole host of factors determine if it even gets a chance before the first paragraph: what personal or contextual relevance? Hyperbole (“10 best pictures of Fawns, you won’t believe no. 4”)? Ragebait?
On the flip side. Kant is notoriously difficult to interpret, Wes Cecil says it is easier to read Kant in English translations than his native German. Will such difficulty of prose become the new sign of intentionality?
The greatest example of an eye-rolling cliché is also one of the highest impact pieces of advice ever articulated.
I fail to see how this is obvious advice. My immediate question is “how the heck am I supposed to cultivate this belief?”. It doesn’t prescribe a course of action that allows me to generate the intended result. What the course of action, if any, is to believing in the nebulous entity that is me, is a total mystery.
It’s not a matter of being too elitist. It’s a matter of it just not being actable advice.
Sleep well
I assure you, if I could choose to sleep well, on command. I would. The reason why I chortle is because a good night sleep seems as unobtainable and desirable as, Pedro Pascal or Sydney Sweeney.[1]
Sure it’s obvious, but it’s not a matter of being too clever to follow it. It’s a matter of being at a loss to whatever metabolistic process is the cause of insomnia.
- ^
I’m not up with popculture nowadays, so I don’t know who people are thirsting for—so insert whoever works for you in this analogy
- ^
Economist gripping your arm so you can’t leave: ”...and as for the dark ages, again that was a protracted bear market, the Renaissance was the correction. See, if we correct Mansa Musa’s not relative to his contemporary global economy or gold markets, but in terms of PPP to a modern basket of goods in the Sahel we can see… Oh you weren’t listening, let me start from the beginning....”
I don’t think it is productive to conflate symbolism and themes. Symbolism is when an element of a story, or the description, correlates to some signifié. Say, “Rosebud” is a symbol of Charles Foster Kane’s youth and innocence. I’m not sure if parody (or inspiration) counts as symbolism—is the protagonist of Zola’s Œuvre a symbol for Paul Cézanne? I don’t know.
I’m loathe to bundle themes together with symbolism. While a selection of symbols throughout a work may comprise a theme. It would be a mistake to say “themes are symbols”. Not all themes need be comprised of symbols. Effective use of themes, at least in dramatic works, don’t rely on symbolism, instead they make the plot events themselves dramatizations of the theme.
In Bergman’s The Silence the theme is… well… silence… or perhaps more correctly: non-communication. They are strangers who don’t speak the language of the country they are in. They are sisters who cannot relate to each other. They are effectively and literally silent. And when they aren’t silent they aren’t communicating a with a whole lot of meaning. And it is a theme essential to the plot of the film, rather than a symbolic add on. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove has a similar theme [1]and similarly is repeated several times throughout the plot of the film.
These episodes are not symbols for anything, they are the thing itself.
And don’t get me started on Zappa’s Project/Object theory which proposes that they don’t need to symbolize a damn thing to give a theme power!Rembrandt got his ‘look’ by mixing just a little brown into every other color—he didn’t do ‘red’ unless it had brown in it. The brown itself wasn’t especially fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that ‘look.’
In the case of the Project/Object, you may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance), along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the ‘collection.’”
— Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book.
Mamoru Oshii expressed a similar sentiment that it is the repetition of imagery in his films that creates meaning. [2]The theme is the fact there’s a theme at all I suppose.- ^
In the case of Dr. Strangelove is “about Nuclear Apocalypse”—that is the subject, yes. But, as Kubrick himself said to Film critic Michel Ciment ” Failure of communication is a theme which runs through a number of my films” alluding to the plot point of telephone and short-wave radio not working, and transport impossible in the Shining. And Dr. Strangelove’s plot hinges on multiple episodes of, similarly, telephone and radio communication failing. The way this theme is explored in Eyes Wide Shut—a film that concerns itself with (paranoid) fantasies and infidelity—is a continuation of the theme is left as an exercise for the reader.
A theme is not always comprised of symbols, nor is the same as a subject.
The example I always use, because it relies on cliches, is a photo series about “age”. The series may have subjects as diverse as a budding flower, a newborn baby, a geriatric person, and a wilted flower. All the same theme—age. Four different subjects.
The subject of Dr. Strangelove is a Nuclear Apocalypse, the theme is failure of communication. - ^
″ Eventually, I think, by using these elements repeatedly, I add meaning to my final product. I’m still exploring how to express my feelings through these elements. I’ve always felt that in order to portray humans, you should not be shooting humans; you should be shooting something else. And what I’ve used is animals, which are very important in my films.”
https://www.avclub.com/mamoru-oshii-1798208379#:~:text=Eventually,films
- ^
Second step: do literally anything else other than what the heuristic predicts.
This feels like one of those “draw the rest of the owl” situations—the hard part isn’t recognizing one is stuck in a bar emotional-state to behaviour loop. The hard part is identifying a different action to take.
I think saying “do something else” is unhelpful, especially if someone is tunnelvisioned by a emotional state. Telling them what that something is specifically, ideally using some kind of manneristic verb. It is much easier to replace a behavior that stop it in its tracks. With what though? Even now writing this, I don’t know what is a helpful verb to replace “apologize” with. “Laugh”—well sure, at best you someone with social anxiety nervously laughing who was over-apologizing seconds ago, at worst, you look like you’re having a psychotic break. “Stare”—depends what you stare at—falling silent and focusing your vision on some singular object on your vision to quiet the shame response may stop you from being compelled to apologize.
This seems even less likely to work in a real life situation where a person is already blinkered by their emotional state. Without the opportunity for premeditation for alternatives.
Or perhaps I’m just particularly bad at imagining useful alternatives.
What if I, literally, just show you the prompt?
Some claim they would rather read your messy prompt to an LLM rather than the output. (here, here, some are now assigning more value to imperfect English over AI slop).
What if I took this literally? What if instead of trying to polish my writing to what I think is accessible and meaningful to an audience, I just posted the prompts?
In my experience, as I’ve written about here, the simple act of writing a prompt often negates the need to ask an LLM in the first place.
My real question is: will readers get more out of my writing if I write as instructions for an LLM or does the direct approach work better?
How useful were those entries, or to put it another way: how many impactful decisions over the year were directly improved because of things you wrote down?
Okay, I see the confusion—no you wouldn’t: reverse what you’re seeing. What you’re seeing in the trailer the camera’s point of view—those close ups of Donald Rumsfeld talking. Imagine for a second that’s what your robot was seeing through its camera-eyes, as for Mr. Rumsfeld he was seeing a projection of Errol Morris’ face OVER the camera lens. This technique is called Interrotron. What I’m proposing is instead of projecting an interviewer’s face on a beam-splitter in front of the lens—you project your glowing anger lights. A similar technique is used on almost all news broadcasts with text instead of video. As you can see from the trailer, there’s no ghosting or second face over Donald Rumsfeld’s. Which would mean your red light wouldn’t have any bleed into the robot’s vision but be visible to anyone looking at the robot.
The main issue is light bleed and internal reflection, which would severely compromise the image quality.
I haven’t noticed any degregation in Errol Morris’s cinematic closeups of talking heads like this one, which suggests that this can be done without light bleed and internal reflection.
to involve the use of a dichroic beam splitter, you sacrifice the ability to detect red light,
Is that so? Documentary Filmmaker Errol Morris uses a similar system in his documentaries and considering he uses them for talking head closeups which inherently, representing human skin, contain a lot of color information in the Red Channel, I am not aware of any problems.
If you know a ton about a topic but can’t explain it clearly to a novice, you have a lot of knowledge of the details but not something we might call understanding, or knowledge of how it all fits together and why someone might/should care about any of it.
How do you know if the topic is just unrealistic to get a novice up to speed, or if you’re not actually understanding it? Are there tell-tale signs?
What is understanding and what obvious or immediately apparent traits does a mind that has understanding about a topic differ from one that has maintained a large body of knowledge but not “understanding”?
Ah, now I know how to phrase my question, it’s really two questions:
1. What distinguishes understanding from knowledge (or even passion about a topic)?
2. How can I write for the express purpose of understanding better? Presumably, not all manners of writing and jouralling are equally conducive to promoting understanding. And as such it’s not enough to write, or not-out-source to an LLM, there’s a particular method or way of thinking and composition of text which will improve the results.
On the first point—there’s plenty of things I can geek out about and wax lyrical—but it comes out as a mess and impossible to compose into a linear structure suitable for a virgin reader. Does this mean I don’t understand?
On the second point—I haven’t seen or enjoyed the benefits that others get from journalling or other forms of writing in understanding. I gain a lot more from dialogue (see how I finally figured out what my question was above), and FAFO: just doing the thing. I presume this means I’m doing writing wrong.
And if you go straight to an LLM to “clarify this” you accidentally tend to throw out that hypothesis.
I’m not sure how to ask this question—but can writing cultivate understanding, even in the absence of new data about the theme or topic? And when I, or anyone, goes straight to an LLM to clarify an undercooked idea, or theory, or network of thoughts, they are not only outsourcing the work to express it verbally, but also are missing out on an opportunity to think and understand? As per the cliche “writing is thinking”.
You have no idea how many times I’ve tried to redraft this question, all while resisting the urge to get an LLM to rephrase it for public consumption.
There’s nothing vague about the sentence.
I strongly disagree. “describing the fundamental concepts of reality” is unhelpfully vague, what are these fundamental concepts? I don’t know and can’t guess what it is from that sentence, which is ironic considering it is an Ontological framework.
human writing is evidence of human thinking. If you try writing something you don’t understand well, it becomes immediately apparent; you end up writing a mess, and it stays a mess until you sort out the underlying idea.
Can you elaborate more on this. It feels like quite the opposite to me—the more I’ve thought about something, the messier it comes out. The harder it is to unknot the spider-web of thoughts into a linear rhetorical structure which is readily comprehensible to a virgin reader. Particularly topics I have a tendency to ‘geek out’ on. Does this mean that I don’t truly understand them, or that they are lacking a unifying underlying idea? Am I perhaps confusing passion and knowledge for understanding?
Or is it only evidence of thinking about the writing—the words on the page/screen the reader is looking at right now? And one can have a personal understanding of something which is clear in their own head (or perhaps even readily conveyed to others with similar domain knowledge—like that XKCD comic), but not readily translatable to the page?
I have never heard of this before let alone understand it, can you recommend any good primers? All the resources I can find speak in annoyingly vague and abstract sense like “a top-level ontology that provides a common framework for describing the fundamental concepts of reality.” or “realist approach… based on science, independent of our linguistic conceptual, theoretical, cultural representations”.
Not so much “misread” as “not familiar with”.
“It’s one of those irregular verbs again isn’t it Minister? I’m an EA, you’re selfish, he’s a Objectivist”