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: 646
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”.
What is an example of “perfect” glamorization in everyday conversation, and could you please contrast it with an imperfect glamorization?
How does glamorization differ from exaggeration?
i.e. “My son is a a really good guitar player”, versus the exaggeration “my son is one of best guitarists I’ve ever heard”. Is the exaggeration also glamorization? What would be an exaggeration of the positive qualities of something that isn’t glamorization?
What exactly is the evidence that the Secret uses to claim that thoughts are “atomic”?
I can’t reconcile that with the common writing advice that a sentence should contain only a single thought.“A sentence should contain a complete thought.”[1]
“One thought per sentence. Readers only process one thought at a time.”[2]
“A sentence is a complete thought”[3]
“The point of a sentence is to communicate a thought—that’s basically what a sentence is, a complete thought.”[4]
Some even suggest that only one thought should be expressed in an entire paragraph.
Even looking at a simple sentence like “The Cat is Sleeping” I’m not sure how this could be encoded in a single atom in the mind—because it requires a knowledge of what a cat is, what sleeping is, and how to perform the Categories denoted by “the” and the coupla. Most thoughts are more complex.
What, then, exactly constitutes a thought? Not in the materialist sense, but in the phenomenological sense. At what point would a sentence contain two thoughts rather than one?
I was not aware of lasers as a weapon
U.S. intelligence reported on the danger of Serbian- and French-manufactured laser devices in the former Yugoslavia. Reports from Japan indicated that the cult, Aum Supreme Truth, allegedly planned to attack the Metropolitan Police Department’s main building in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, with a vehicle equipped with some type of laser weapon before the March 20, 1995 sarin nerve gas subway attack. During the Gulf War, British ground forces were issued protective goggles because they were concerned about Russian-made lasers believed to be in service with the Iraqis. German pilots flying over the Iraqi no-fly zone were also issued laser protective goggles.The U.S. Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center has reported, “It is highly probable that laser eye injuries occurred in the Iran/Iraq war, based on numerous reports of such injuries and the known purchases of lasers for the implied purpose of weaponization.
Source: https://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/General1.htmI wonder why that ban has held?
The LEO missiles one is feasible I believe, and I imagine would be hard to detect before being used (so maybe in fact some countries do have the tech ready for deployment in extreme scenarios).
Feasible as in cheap and effective, or feasible as in merely possible? It says it in the Wikipedia article—“Its nuclear payload was drastically reduced relative to that of an ICBM due to the high level of energy needed to get the weapon into orbit” I suspect it has less to do with a ban, and more because there’s more viable alternatives available for Nuclear armed nations.
In crime shows and books they often talk about Means, Motive, and Opportunity… I suspect at least one is missing from each example on your list.
Military Moon Bases. The opportunity requires a well established space program with regular, or at least imminent, Lunar visits. The Means is tremendous amounts of resources. Which diminishes the motive—since the higher the opportunity cost, the higher the returns need to be: what is cheaper to do on the moon than on Earth to such a point where it becomes a profitable venture?
How many of these bans have held after the technology or means to do them have become extremely viable or profitable?
I imagine it would be very easy to have a successful ban on destroying the Pyramids of Giza, this is because even demolishing one of the smaller Pyramids is a difficult and thankless task and hasn’t been attempted in over 800 years. If I may be terribly facetious, it would be incredibly easy to ban a group of typical 15 year old boys from using a Rotary Phone… if they can’t find one, stopping the same group of boys from using scatological humor, likely impossible.
I must admit a poverty of imagination; I can’t see how it can be automated. That would be amazing if it could be.
However, the circumstances of each problem or LLM request are always so unique that outside of certain vague guardrails that apply to all problem solving/advice giving (In my experience these take the form of the questions: What have you tried already? Why did you try that way?/what did you expect to happen? What happened instead?). I see the ritual as attempting to explain why this situation is really unique and different – which seems to me to be the antithesis of automation.However, if the situation isn’t unique, then maybe that can be automated. Realizing “oh this is analogous or really similar to this other thing I did”.
Let’s take two examples of situations I’m likely to ask an LLM for help with – “how do I hear the voices in this video stream better?”, and “what is the word to describe the way professions or taxonomies are divided in Platonic Dialogues? I keep getting the name of the two dots on a vowel[1]”
In the sound example, to avoid the boilerplate answers like “check if your audio drivers are working” or “turn up the volume”. I need to think about what I’m actually expecting here, and what kind of helpI actually want – and realize that what I want it to do is tell me how to route the video stream through OBS so that I can use a compressor in the chain to boost it… and if I know how to do that, maybe I don’t need the LLM to even reply to me: I’ve written a prompt and answered myself. This is what I mean that just the ritual of writing a LLM prompt sometimes clarifies things.
However, with the Platonic word example, any harnesses about OBS, signal chains, or software are not going to be relevant, hence can’t be automated.
When you ask it to be brief, do you actually instruct it to answer in a “concise single sentence”? I find that generally works. Even if the answer is one you expect to be longer than one sentence, it tends to cut down the waffling-on.
Note, I append this to the prompt itself, not the system prompt. So something like “[my question] please answer in a single concise sentence.”
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!
— 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