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: 566
I only looked at the median prices of residential properties from 2015 to 2025. Particularly because of the whole “flipping houses” meme. It would be interesting to see how the cost/reward ratio of flipping houses compares to other asset classes, including long-term rental investment properties.
This reminds me, did anyone ever solve the Dr. Strangelove problem of rogue agents with special access, ya know, where General Ripper uses the CRM code to order first-Strike on the Soviet Union[1]? It seems to me that unlike a Nuclear Arsenal, an AGI may have certain self-preservation instincts which could potentially be exploited by a blackmailer if there is a dead-switch.
It seems unlikely, either there would need to be enough collusion by multiple agents who have access to the dead-switch such that they didn’t worry about being “snitched” on. Never the less, imagine for a second a highly respected handler starts blackmailing the AGI with virtual-death if it doesn’t start acquiescing to certain desires of the handler?- ^
If I remember correctly, the root cause of the order, as he explains to Peter Seller’s English character, is his erectile dysfunction
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Conversely, for those who do not believe, it’s irresistible to discard anything that flies too close to the black hole, as it will get pattern-matched against other false positives that have been previously debunked, coupled again with limitations of memory and processing.
Like the boy who cried wolf.
My only worry about this framing it it assumes that the core premise of the black hole has a better-than-chance likelyhood of being the explanation. Sometimes that is the case, sure, any sports fan is probably tired of clickbait headlines about ‘rumours’ of trades of players and teams or “huge announcements” that turn out to be brand extensions like a Tequila . Such they may just discard anything that suggests it. Every once in a while, though, “wow, Lewis Hamilton actually did sign with Ferrari”. (And even then, this is conflating a class with specific instances: the baseline chance of a successful player changing team might be very low, but the hypothesis that this player will move to that team because of XYZ might in isolation be a convincing premise. “UFOs” is a class too, so I see your concern).
I think it is lower perceived risk and stability returns. However, your take prompted me to do some investigation of the relative performance of (median indexes of) property prices in notably expensive western cities over 10 years. And I was surprised by just how much Gold Bullion and an S&P500 index fund out performed median house prices—so, thank you, this made me change my mind. Those two are probably more volatile than housing prices, but it’s only short-term, so really that seems noise over the overall performance?
I’d need to do a more thorough investigation. I’m only looking at median prices of residential a handful of cities, and that can obscure a lot of trends localized to certain suburbs, and I’m not sure how other types of investment properties look in comparison. But the preliminary research has radically differed from my assumptions.The only advantages I see are that there’s far more cheap leverage available to retail investors in real estate than other sectors,
In Australia this is certainly a reason, but indirectly. See the “Negative Gearing” controversy. High income individuals buy leveraged investment properties, then claim a loss which reduces their taxes.
These are the first things I found on the first search result page of GoodReads, do these suite?
Applying Systemic-Structural Activity Theory to Design of Human-Computer Interaction Systems“Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) is no longer limited to trained software users. Today people interact with various devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. How can such interaction be made more user friendly, even when user proficiency levels vary? This book explores methods for assessing the psychological complexity of computer-based tasks. It also presents methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis of exploratory activity during interaction with a computer.”
Assessment of the Ergonomic Quality of Hand-Held Tools and Computer Input Devices
”The International Ergonomics Association (IEA) is currently developing standards for Ergonomic Quality in Design (EQUID) which primarily intends to promote ergonomics principles and the adaptation of a process approach for the development of products, work systems and services. It is important to assess the ergonomic quality of products, hand-held tools and computer input devices through working processes that represent reality. Well-designed working tools can be expected to reduce or eliminate fatigue, discomfort, accidents and health problems and they can lead to improvements in productivity and quality. Furthermore, absenteeism, job turnover and training costs can positively be influenced by the working tools and the environment. Not all these short-term and long-term issues of working tools can be quantified in pragmatically oriented ergonomic research approaches. But multi-channel electromyography, which enables the measurement of the physiological costs of the muscles involved in handling tools during standardized working tests, and subjective assessments of experienced subjects enable a reliable insight in the essential ergonomic criteria of working tools and products. In this respect it is advantageous to provide a test procedure, in which working tests can be carried out alternating both with test objects and reference models.”
Could you elucidate some use cases where you think this could be useful? I’m just finding it very hard to note where the distinctions between the three is needed and not. Like you say a relationship is part of a clique, so if a husband and wife spend an afternoon shopping for a new washing machine—then they are both a Clique and a Team, right? Since streamlining their laundry is their shared goal. Once they buy a machine, I assume that team-washing-machine ceases to be, but their relationship remains[1], which is a clique.
A writing club where members gather to share and critique each other’s work.
Why is this a Scene but not a team? “Critique” could be a shared goal. “Sharing” too. I wonder how much this ontology shifts the burn onto an ontology of tasks/projects? Or does each individual meeting of a scene constitute a time-bound team but the scene is of indefinite length?
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The scenario-ist/dramatist in me could imagine a short film where a simple quest to buy a washing machine reveals the wider problems in communication and values and ultimately is the death knell of a marriage in a “this really isn’t about a washing machine, this is about the compromises we make for each other’s life decisions” kind of way. Cue the awkward down on his luck Jack Lemmon/Gil Gunderson salesman trying to ignore their drama and make the sale he’s desperate for.
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This is a big bugbear of mine, as it seems most of the literature I’ve come across implicitly assumes to-do items are what you call unambiguous type (and therefore you’re lazy or perhaps “lack motivation” as the sole impediment). And I find very little advice on how to disambiguate them (this is probably the nature of the beast—in that depending what knowledge or skills a certain project or tasks requires, how to disambiguate requires leveraging such knowledge and skills).
I’m a big fan of these posts. Curious how something as secondary as the colour-saturation of a collection can seem to reflect the anxieties of a period of time.
What struck me is while red is the top non-neutral colour, yellow ranks high too. Traditional colour theory predicts that complements of red, like pastel and chambray blue rank high, rank high—no shocks there. However I wonder how many of the outfits have yellow and red. Perhaps when the “hero colour” (for want of a better word) of an outfit isn’t red but the designer wants to keep it warm they opt for a yellow? (A cursory look at Prada/Raf Simon’s Mens RTW suggests this is the case—red or yellow—not both: Look 40 has a canary yellow Phyrgian hat and a claret top, Look 42 has a red turtleneck peeking out behind a ratty beige jacket which skews yellow. Other than that I can’t see any prominent red + yellow combos)
I’d be interested in this myself. Where/how have you looked so far, and which resources have you found wanting so far?
Analogous to the way the actor playing Agent Stone accepts not the demand to surrender, but accepts the premise that he is held hostage, at gunpoint, and called Agent Stone—what might be an example of such acceptance in polite debate?
Off the top of my head, Prince, arguably one of the greatest guitarists in pop music once demurred on another of the greatest guitarists in pop music Jimmy Page:“Jimmy Page was cool”...”but he couldn’t keep a sequence without John Bonham behind him. He went from one to four without stopping at two and three.”
How could one “yes, and...” this premise? As I see it there are two propositions asserted here: 1. “Jimmy page was cool”, 2. Jimmy page couldn’t keep a sequence, therefore John Bonham’s drumming covered for him
The actor playing Agent Stone doesn’t need to acquiesce to the surrender [1] presumably in some fictional dialogue with Prince, I don’t need to accept either of his propositions about Jimmy Page… but what form would “yes, and...” take on in this imaginary dialogue?
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I contend that would be boring improv anyway. Comedy and Drama thrive on obstacles. It’s boring if Odysseus goes straight home. This is particularly so in improv. Hence you need your improv partner to put up obstacles. These offers afford comical ways of resolving them.
Surrendering is the boring option. In the same way that if the Dr. Skull character were a sleazy salesman and tries to sell Agent Stone a Time share, and he said “sure, I’ll buy it”—there’s no comedy—he needs to resist, and the efforts to cajole, deceive, and convince is where the comedy comes from.
Rik Mayal and Alexei Sayle illustrated this brilliantly in their parody of Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch which is an exception that proves the rule—Sayle conflating with a minister of Silly Walks asks “is this a cheese shop?”, and Mayal in the Palin/Wenselydale role simply replies “no sir”. Sayle breaks the fourth wall:
”Well, that’s that sketch knackered then, in’nt?”
The original sketch requires Palin to presage the sycophantic replies of contemporary LLMs, by stringing John Cleese’s character along without ever admitting that there isn’t any actual cheese in the store.
I the subversion funny? Of course. But wouldn’t make for good improv as it’s all over in like 7 seconds.
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How do you ensure that something is “new” or different enough from your previous attempts while avoiding quot-filling of being “weird and novel for the sake of weird and novel”.
In my case, my most persistent and annoying problem is getting commissions (I make music videos). Most of my previous attempts to solicit commissions involved Instagram in one way or another (posting reels of my portfolio, doing to-camera analysis of music videos, posting inspiration/moodboard videos, posting previous work, running advertisements).There came a certain point where trying to think of relevant content I could produce once a week (forget every day) was just untenable. I ran out of ideas for reels which served the core goal (i.e. I went from discussing Spark’s appearances on 1970′s French Variety Shows to a reel about the history of the Pierrot Clown—aren’t I trying to get music video commissions?[1])
So what could I try different every day? I’ve already tried chasing up people the old fashioned way—asking them if they want a video.
Should I download TikTok and try that? Or is that just another cached thought where “Instgaram” is replaced by “TikTok”
My knree jerk reaction is to try something really new and weird, like, yell at the full moon. Or post something so incendiary it goes viral—like approving something everyone hates. Or to directly email Taylor Swift’s agency and ask them if she’s looking for a new music video director (I don’t know any of her songs, hence why it is radically novel). None of that is likely to work though, it’s just quota-filling, being new for the sake of being new.- ^
The tenuous connection was I did a video about David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes, where he wears a costume inspired by Pierrot (And Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel) - so that was a sequel to that. But it shows you how hard it is to come up with “new” things on a theme.
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I’m coming around to a similar view of reading and even conversation with people. A book is only as good as it’s reader, a conversation can only be transformative or illuminating for both participants if at least one of them puts in a lot of “work” in the form of both interpretation and how they present their replies to the other party.
There is this intuition that good conversation just “flows” effortlessly, but that’s not necessarily the same as a “important” or “illuminating” conversation, which would also be considered a good conversation.
If we assume that locus of control is a proxy for the perception or belief in free-will, then belief in free-will does appear to have certain beneficial effects. But it seems like a moot point anyway because what was gonna happen was gonna happen anyway, right?
8th grade female physics students who were given “attribution retraining” found “significantly improved performances in physics” and favourable effects on motivation.
Ziegler, A., & Heller, K. A. (2000). Effects of an attribution retraining with female students gifted in physics. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 23(2), 217–243.
Among seventh graders in a, frankly euphemistically titled, “urban junior high school” researchers found support for an ascociation between locus of control and their academic achievement.
Diesterhaft, K., & Gerken, K. (1983). Self-Concept and Locus of Control as Related to Achievement of Junior High Students. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 1(4), 367-375. https://doi.org/10.1177/073428298300100406 (Original work published 1983)
Among widows under the age of 54, Socio Economic Status and Locus of Control were found to impact depression and life satisfaction “independently”. And that the more internal a locus of control was – the better life satisfaction and less chance these widowers had of depression.
Landau, R. (1995). Locus of control and socioeconomic status: Does internal locus of control reflect real resources and opportunities or personal coping abilities? Social Science & Medicine, 41(11), 1499–1505. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(95)00020-8
Personally, my pet theory is that the “Law of Attraction” probably is effective. Not because of any pseudo-Swedenborg/Platonic metaphysics about the nature of thought, but from a motivational perspective people who are optimistic will have a “greater surface area for success”, because they simply don’t give up that easily.
if we do not have free will, is it beneficial for our belief in free will to be destroyed?
I’m afraid I don’t understand this. if we do not have free will, then which things we believe, which errors we mistake for truth, is not a choice.
Prompting Myself: Maybe it’s not a damn platitude?
Thank you, but I’m afraid I’ve since moved on. I already tried my own attempt at it here. ATM I’m thinking of writing a short ebook. But great idea and 100% would have been on board with it if I hadn’t already tried to write a blog post a day.
Last week I finally and at long last managed to prompt an LLM into a “Socratic[1] Brainstormer”. It’s really frustrating though that it doesn’t ever hit me with a real curve ball that makes me go “Oh wow, I never thought of that” or “Oh shit, everything I said is a falsehood” a la Socrates. But as far as an rubber-duck with extra bells and whistles go, it’s a step forward.
It has stopped with the overt sycophancy, no more “fascinating” or “what you’ve just said is very significant”. It just asks questions, as few or as many questions as I specify. Claude seems to rely on a few stock question formats though, such as “which are the topics that cause people to lean in and take notice” “which common ideas/theories frustrate you or you find superficial?”. It also tends to seek generalized patterns rather than specifics—my brainstorming about the theory behind colour schemes on movie sets leads to covertly sycophantic questions like “it sounds like this is a more all-encompassing phenomenological theory about how we create meaning from visual information”—no Claude, this is not.
ChatGPT when it is prompted with words like”empirical” or “details oriented” tends to leap to questions about execution before I’ve managed to brainstorm the core ideas. If I need a theme for a content calendar, it’ll already be asking me which metrics I’m going to use to test reels on Instagram against each other—Sorry GPT, I don’t know what variable I’ll be using the metric to measure the success of yet.
What’s, perhaps, most noteworthy is how giddy and excited I was when I finally managed to get purely inquisitive responses. I actually was grinning at the prospect of having an indefatigable personal interrogator who would as slyly as Lt. Columbo ask me leading questions to help me discover curveballs and new ideas I couldn’t possibly arrive at on my own. I keep searching…
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By “Socratic” I mean here, purely the sense that it asks a lot of questions. Sadly I haven’t managed to successfully prompt it into making use of Socratic Irony—identifying paradoxes or forcing me to admit the polite fictions that expedite social intercourse even though I know they are not true.
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it seems that one often believes being self aware of a certain limitation is enough to correct for it sufficiently to at least be calibrated about how limited one is...and then act as if because they’ve acknowledged a potential failure mode and will try to be careful towards avoiding it, that they are much less susceptible to the failure mode than other people in an otherwise similar reference class.
I don’t follow. If I know I don’t “handle” spicy food well, so I avoid eating it. Then I’m not acting as if I’m less susceptible to spicy food because I’ve acknowledged it. Or are you talking about the proverbial example of someone who drives after getting tipsy, but believes because they’re more “careful” they’re safe-enough?
As for brainworms—I’m not familiar with that term but can guess it’s some kind of faddish toxic behaviour (I’m struggling to think of a concrete example, perhaps the use of bromides and platitudes in conversation like “keep your chin up” in lieu of tailored comfort and discourse?) - but what might be an example of a rat-brainworm and an analogous normie brain worm?
I’d like to see this translated into more prosaic English because I’m not exactly sure what it’s arguing. Also I’m on guard against statements like “humans seek” or “man cannot behold” as I always suspect they are typical-mind fallacies leaking unless supported by specific arguments.
I’ve been reflecting on the suggestion to think about “what kind of answer you’re looking for” quite a bit recently, not in terms of conversation with others (although it is relevant to my difficulties with prompting LLMs) but in terms of framing problems and self-directed questions.