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: 91
I have some hard data that disproves I’m a realist, but suggests I’m a pessimist (i.e. more than 50% of the time my best expectations of personal outcomes are worse than the case). Now what?
The hard data is a handful of specific predictions for example, a prediction about a financial investment (where performance consistently exceeded my expectations) where I had no control over the performance, and things like a exam where I had control (although an instructor noted that I performed worse on the exam than a practice exam because of ‘nerves’).
Arguably the most immediate step is “just get more data: make sure this isn’t an aberration, or at the least see which specific types of predictions or expectations you’re more prone to systematic pessimism”.
Sure and then what? Should I change my investment style to allow more upside? If it means revising my models of the world—what shape does that take? What beliefs or habits are the cause of my pessimism?
[Question] Is there an idiom for bonding over shared trials/trauma?
In biological organisms, physical pain [say, in response to limb being removed] is an evolutionary consequence of the fact that organisms with the capacity to feel physical pain avoided situations where their long-term goals [e.g. locomotion to a favourable position with the limb] which required the subsystem generating pain were harmed.
How many organisms other than humans have “long term goals”? Doesn’t that require a complex capacity for mental representation of possible future states?
Am I wrong in assuming that the capacity to experience “pain” is independent of an explicit awareness of what possibilities have been shifted as a result of the new sensory data? (i.e. having a limb cleaved from the rest of the body, stubbing your toe in the dark). The organism may not even be aware of those possibilities, only ‘aware’ of pain.
Note: I’m probably just having a fear of this sounding all too teleological and personifying evolution
How often is signalling a high degree of precision without the reader understanding the meaning of the term more important than conveying a imprecise but broadly within the subject matter understanding of the content?
I’m confused, is the death to discomfort comparison based on the cumulative experience that the loved ones and friends of a person who has died might experience in grief and despair that someone they cared about died? Or are you suggesting that a death is a superlatively uncomfortable event for the individual who is dying?
I can’t see a way of making discomfort to death fungible, at least partly because to experience discomfort requires someone to continue on living.
Does “normie” crossover with “(I’m) just a regular guy/girl”? While they are obviously have highly different connotations, is the central meaning similar?
I tend to assume, owing to Subjectivism and Egocentric Bias, that at times people are more likely to identify as part of the majority (and therefore ‘normie’) than the minority unless they have some specific reason to do so. What further complicates this like a matryoshka doll is not only the differing sociological roles that a person can switch between dozens of times a day (re: the stereotypical Twitter bio “Father. Son. Actuary. Tigers supporter”) but within a minority one might be part of the majority of the minority, or the minority of the minority many times over. Like the classic Emo Phillips joke “Northern Conservative Baptist, or Northern Liberal Baptist” “He said “Northern Conservative Baptist”, I said “me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist...”″ itself a play on “No True-Scotsman”.
I’m not sure what actually constitutes the Renaissance? Is just an art movement, or does it describe the totality of what was happening in European courts at the time? Is it just a propagandistic term? However two major trends that are associated with it—linear perspective paintings, and the rediscovery of Greco-Latin Literature both are at least partly indebted to developments in the Middle East.
The Book of Optics by Ibn al-Haytham appears to be particularly important in the developments of painting and the understanding of how light transmits. It contains a rejection of the emission theory of optics (rays come from the eyes) in favour of the intromission theory that light bounces off of objects before entering the eye. And translated into Latin in the late 12th century. I would surmise that it had at least an influence in the popularity and use of Linear Perspective in Renaissance Art.Greco-Latin Literature was preserved, albeit in various translated forms, across the Islamic World and highly popular. As Wikipedia puts it:
The line between Greek scholarship and Arab scholarship in Western Europe was very blurred during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Sometimes the concept of the transmission of Greek Classics is often used to refer to the collective knowledge that was obtained from the Arab and Byzantine Empires, regardless of where the knowledge actually originated.
It is important to note that like the Renaissance itself, this was not some single catalytic moment, but both serial and parallel transmissions that happened over a number of centuries. Most interestingly at first these texts arrived in Europe being translated from some intermediary language like Syriac or Arabic. A Greek classic may have reached early modern Europeans only after being translated into Latin, then Syriac, and back into Latin.
Andalusian scholars began translating from Islamic sources from at least the early 10th century. Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) set out to learn Arabic so he could read Ptolemy’s Almagest and later translated works of Aristotle, Euclid, Jabir ibn Aflah and Al-Khwarizmi. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) eventually facilitated Dutch scholar Willem van Moerbeke coming into contact and translating works of Aristotle, Hero of Alexandria, and Archimedes.
I assume these developments culminated in the artistic trademarks of the Renaissance.
This study seems relevant here. It explores the idiomatic difference, from a Embodied Cognition standpoint, between the metaphor of “difficulty is heavy” and “difficulty is solidity” (and the inverse: easy = light). It is not the only literature on embodied cognition I recall to make the connection between difficulty and the physicality of lifting an object.
With this cross-linguistic study, we have come up with some findings regarding the status of two primary metaphors, “DIFFICULTY IS WEIGHT” and “DIFFICULTY IS SOLIDITY,” through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of their linguistic manifestations in English and Chinese. While the linguistic findings do support the validity and applicability of the two primary metaphors in both languages, their linguistic manifestations, however, vary considerably in degree across and within language boundaries.
Ning Yu & Jie Huang (2019) Primary Metaphors across Languages: Difficulty as Weight and Solidity, Metaphor and Symbol, 34:2, 111-126, DOI: 10.1080/10926488.2019.1611725
Could you give a concrete example, the only one that comes to mind is the hipster paradox that someone who to all appearances is a hipster never admits or labels themselves as a hipster?
Does an Agentic AGI possess a different, and highly incorrigible, list of attributes compared to say—an Ethical Altruist trying to practice “acting more agentically?”
I ask because the whole word ‘agency’ in these parts is one I’ve struggled to wrap my head around—and I often wonder if tricker archetypes like Harpo Marx are agentic? Agency seems to have clear meaning outside of Lesswrong -
″ the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power : OPERATION”[1]
the ability to take action or to choose what action to take[2]
Further confusing me, is I’ve been told Agency describes acting with ‘initiative’ but also been told it is characterized by ‘deliberateness’. Not simply the ability to act or choose actions.
This is why I like your attempt to produce a list of attributes an Agentic AGI might have. Your list seems to be describing something which isn’t synonymous with another word, specifically a type of agency (outside definition of ability to act) which is not cooperative to intervention from its creators.- ^
“Agency.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agency. Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
- ^
“Agency.” Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus. Cambridge University Press. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/agency Accessed 9 Apr. 2024.
- ^
Note: I’ve only just realized all my suggestions are from actual film directors. No theorists or critics.
Subject of filmmaking, the best textbooks are Jerry Lewis’s (yes, glavin) The Total Filmmaker which being transcribed from lectures he gave at USC around the time that George Lucas was a student it presents a soup to nuts overview of the nuts and bolts of screenwriting, principal photography including camera coverage, directing actors, editing and post production. Including some of the most salient observations on the avant-garde artistry of Stanley Kubrick/2001:A Space Odyssey I have read anywhere. It is a highly practical treatise, including tips such as how to develop mnemonics to remember shots, or how to balance the self-criticism of being a performer-director, or why you should leave an extra frame between a cut from an A to B camera.Surprising to an outsider, but not surprising to those who know how much Lewis longed to be taken ‘seriously’ not much of the book is about comedy and there is a very simple reason for this—because the technical information is much the same irrespective of tone or genre.
While Lewis avoids explicating a ‘theory of comedy’ he does have some salient observations such as “the snowball is always thrown at the top hat, not the battered fedora”. It also introduced me to what has become a mantra for me
Who is doing what to whom?
Every time I write a scene, make an edit, direct someone I ask myself this question.
I would rate it above Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Film Technique especially for beginners. Pudovkin’s book is still great, as Stanley Kubrick opined in a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis
“The most instructive book on film aesthetics I came across was Pudovkin’s Film Technique, which simply explained that editing was the aspect of film art form which was completely unique, and which separated it from all other art forms.”
I’m inclined to agree. In the book Pudovkin gives the example of a rally or parade down the street and describes all the different types of camera coverage that could be used to frame the events that take place within it. Pudovkin was also clearly a great observer of the innovations of storytelling that were happening in Hollywood at the time and internalized the way to produce a good climax.
Kubrick compares Pudovkin’s book to the essays and in particular the book The Film Sense of his contemporary Sergei Eisenstein (the Battleship Potemkin) and I’m inclined to agree that the latter’s work is much more opaque and preoccupied with a prescriptive use of juxtaposition to create a visual equivalent of Marxist Dialectic whereas Pudovkin’s book I felt was much more Descriptivist and observational of technique.
That being said I found the most illuminating explanation of Eisenstein’s theories wasn’t the Film Sense at all but an essay found in Grierson on Documentary by John Grierson. Grierson was a propagandist for the British Empire, including Canada, and was instrumental in setting up the documentary industries. He manages to describe the importance rhythm in Eisenstein’s theories with much more lucidity than any translator of Eisenstein ever has.
The go-to text book in most Film Schools is of course Michael Rabinger’s Film Techniques and Aesthetics. When I studied documentary film my supervisor pointed us to Rabinger’s other book “Directing the Documentary”. While my memory is foggy I remember Directing the Documentary being a fine book on the topic, discussing many of the practical (and interpersonal) difficulties a documentary filmmaker may face.
I could name many other useful or practical books (especially Judith Weston’s Directing Actors), but I’ve tried to restrict this comment to all-encompassing textbooks on the techniques and aesthetics and practicalities useful for film directors.
Sometimes it means “you’re incorrectly predicting worse average/median outcomes than is true”
That is the sense it is being used in though. What is it about my post that caused you to assume otherwise? And, how can I determine if my predictions are biased to be worse than the truth, and by what degree?
[Question] How to best measure if and to what degree you’re too pessimistic or too optimistic?
What’s interesting about those examples is the domestication of the Horse and the mass production of the motor vehicle have changed the (intuitive?) intelligibility of distance, perhaps in a way that is not comparable to our interpretation of heat? But also that both are measured in days which implies rest and sleep.
I don’t read much sensationalist tabloid, but my impression is that the things that get a lot of attention in the press, is things people can reasonable take either side of.
A cursory glance suggests that it is not the case, take a top story headline on the Australian Daily Mail over the last 7 days: “Miranda, Sydney: Urgent search is launched for missing Bailey Wolf, aged two, who vanished yesterday” it is not reasonable for someone to hope that a two year old who has vanished not be found. This is exactly the kind of thing you’re suggesting AI should be trained on, because of how uniform responses are to this headline. Keep in mind this is one of the most viewed stories, and literally top of the list I found.
I’ve read Scott’s article, but are you trying to understand what get’s attention or what is the nexus or commonly agreed upon moral principles of a society?
I wonder what other qualities or continuums are analogous to this? Hearing doesn’t seem to be the same in that unlike heat it scales up logarithmically (what is the scale between perceived temperature and the actual energy per part?). Nor does colour partly because we perceive colour through the combination of Red, Green (to which we are most sensitive) and Blue (to which we are least sensitive), although if you think about light as a narrow window of electromagnetic radiation then perhaps there is some comparison to be made between gamma rays and fight jet exhausts, and Terrestrial Radio signals to liquid nitrogen for example.
What about distance? I’m thinking in particularly about how in English use Deixis words like “here”, “there” (and in the past: “hither”, “thither”, and “yonder”) - I wonder if nomadic peoples have a more nuanced even if non-numeric standardized way of describing proximity which is very anthropic in measurement? “1,000 miles” is not a tangible distance to consider.
Sounds like it is not a good idea for me then. I feel I already know a lot about the history of Formula One and while I am by no means an expert and there is no doubt more opportunity to learn, it sounds like these bias-avoiding skills won’t be very transferable into real life. I was wondering if the unique mix of high density of statistics as well as my interest in the subject would be a good launching off point but it sounds like you believe it’s non-transferable- correct?
Thank you for the response!
Sensationalist tabloid news stories and other outrage porn are not the opposite. These are actually more of the same. More edge cases. Anything that is divisive have the problem I’m talking about.
Could you explain how are they edge cases if they are the lowest common denominator? Doesn’t that make them the opposite of an edge case? Aren’t they in fact the standard or yardstick necessary to compare against?
Fiction is a better choice.
Why is is it different let alone better choice? Fiction is a single author’s attempt to express their view of the world, including morality, and therefore an edge case. While popular literature is just as common denominator as tabloid journalism, since the author is trying to be commercial.
This is an extremely relatable post, in both ways. I often find myself on the other side of the these interactions too and not knowing how to label and describe my awareness of what’s happening without coming across as Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I think they are just using that as an example of a strongly opinionated sub-agent which may be one of many different and highly specific probability assessments of doom.
As for “survival is the default assumption”—what a declaration of that implies on the surface level is that the chance of survival is overwhelming except in the case of a cataclysmic AI scenario. To put it another way:
we have a 99% chance of survival so long as we get AGI right.
To put it yet another way—Hollywood has made popular films about the human world being destroyed by Nuclear War, Climate Change, Viral Pandemic, and Asteroid Impact to name a few—different sub-agents could each give higher or lower probabilities to each of those scenarios depending on things like domain knowledge and in concert it raises the question of why we presume that survival is the default? What is the ensemble average of doom?
Is doom more or less likely than survival for any given time frame?