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: 358
I’m curious, what specific examples of idealizing foreign cultures did you have in mind Laconophilia? Francophilia? Swingjugend? I’m I right in assuming the stereotype/myth of the Circassian beauty doesn’t apply? (despite being a foreign people who were widely idealized).
Mirroring selected authors (and hopefully supporting voting/searching/reply etc) seems to be very different from suggesting to migrate.
I didn’t get that from when you asked: “Why is a significant amount of content by some rationality adjacent people only posted on X/Twitter?”
Which to me seems like you’re asking why those authors aren’t duplicating their content on multiple platforms. Which to me overwhelmingly overlaps with the question of why they don’t migrate because it still involves changing their browsing habits, or at the very least the time and energy of choosing a new platform, setting up an account, and then of course—ensuring cross-posting/resharing. Is that incorrect?
I feel like this is almost identical to the question of “why don’t people migrate to [insert social network/platform]?”.
I also wonder, provided that you got full consent or permission[1] from a certain number of Rationality Adjacent people, what otherwise is stopping you from setting up a scraper or bot to automate so that they don’t have to lift a finger and yet their content is still available elsewhere?- ^
It may go without saying but: if someone has set their account to followers-only then I would presume that increases the likelihood of their reluctance to allow their content to be mirrored elsewhere. Even if whomever is administering the mirror is well meaning and trustworthy.
It would be an interesting exercise to see how many people would or wouldn’t consent to such a project since it promises that they wouldn’t need to lift a finger.
- ^
This post is a rarity: it’s ridiculously concise, addresses a common problem or complaint, and is practical. I want to encourage this kind of format.
Kind of off topic, but I this leads me to wonder: why are so many websites burying the lede about the services they actually provide like this example?
I am unable to reconcile the fact that SBF’s funds collapsed and he is sentenced to a decades long prison term and the idea that he somehow was “careful” and “smart” about how he modeled people as PDFs. At first blush this seems to be an argument to avoid using this model to interact with people, since in purely pragmatic terms this one example doesn’t work.
That being said, yes, broadly speaking when we build a mental model of another person it is a probabilistic assessment of that person. The research of Robin Dunbar is particularly interesting in this regard: larger cortices in social animals correlates to social network size. But are these “Bayseian” or “rule-based” is another argument all together. When I say: “Bob never drinks (alcohol)” is that a hard and fast rule or a probabilistic statement?
How do you think, from a purely pragmatic level, SBF could have modeled more accurately and effectively so that he would be better positioned today to have his funds still operating and not be in prison? How does this directly relate to the model of “people as PDFs” and why is it a more effective way of predicting people’s behaviors than, say, Myer-Briggs or even star signs?
Spices is probably too general and all-encompassing to say that spices are now dirt cheap. While, as is true to this day, the wealthy have better access to spices and other garnishes (saffron and truffles aren’t exactly dirt cheap today) but even in Roman times the use of “spices” was not in itself a signifier of class (perhaps more important is which spices). Now in case you think that literary evidence in the form of cookbooks doesn’t provide a broad cross-section of the average Roman Diet, then perhaps you’d be interested in recent analysis of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum sewers which show not only that most of the food was made from local ingredients (with the exception of Egyptian Grain, North African dates and Indian Pepper) but also the presence of bay, cumin, mallow from a non-elite apartment complex.
And let’s not forget how easily things go the other way, Lobster was often seen as a poorman’s food, most archeological sits of early human settlements will find a pile of oyster or similar shellfish garbage dumps—it often being the easiest source of food.
That’s really disappointing and surprising that so few practitioners seem to check back and validate if the breakthroughs hold.
It also seems like a tremendous lost opportunity because even if a breakthrough lasts or isn’t flaky, there’s no reason to believe it has maximized returns—checking in with former clients and reviewing could mean there is further optimization, further juice to be squeezed out even if at first the technique that caused the breakthrough was effective.
This also begs the question in my mind what differentiates a breakthrough from a “insight”, or even from a illusory moment of bliss that is mistaken for a meaningful breakthrough. In terms of insight: I’m thinking about insightful and potentially useful broad statements about the causes or patterns of a client’s negative behavior “You tie too much self-worth to hours worked, and not output produced” but doesn’t prescribe a list of techniques or a method for rewiring or changing that behavior. The observation may be true and could probably guide how to produce a remedy method, but it is not the method itself. Yet, for a client, hearing that they may have this profound sense of unblockage coming from the revelation, and an elation even that may be mistaken for breaking through.
Edit: I just realized I forgot to say—I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post.
That doesn’t answer my question which was quite simple—does the original author mean Epistemic Collapse in the sense of a “rupture of scientific knowledge” and how does the example, say, of the fascination with the bearded lady illustrate that? You also haven’t addressed the other sources, such as are Althusser or Foucault relevant here?
Please tie it into the original post if you can.
What is Epistemic Collapse? The first result on Google leads to a similar term “Epistemological break” which is “The moment of rupture separating science from its non-scientific past” wherein the latter becomes seen as superstition[1]. Elsewhere I’ve seen it described as the establishing and breaking down of “obstacles” to scientific thought[2]. [3]But in fact the history of science is a series ruptures from previous states of science. Foucault applied this not only to science but the history of prisons and psychiatry. There’s an article here on Althusser’s which being Althusser I honestly do not have the time nor patience to wade through to understand the concept, can I please get the sparknotes?
I lack the perspicuity to link the Amazonian’s fascination with the carpet rods and bearded lady to any specific obstacles in the way of scientific knowledge—what do you mean by Epistemic Collapse? because I don’t see how their interest or fascination is in opposition to scientific knowledge nor is it directly in aid of it beyond some handwavy “curiosity is the essence of science”. Less so the monkey example since in the same way a Monkey can’t know the concept of microorganisms how can they be part of the march of science?
Elsewhere I’ve seen Epistemic Collapse discussed in the context of the European Dark Ages (the term used in the source, not mine) and the loss of attainment and stability. Again I fail to see the parallel since, the Amazonian hasn’t lost anything they’ve been shifted to an environment where their knowledge is no longer applicable—same with the monkey.
I make music videos and my decision I often make poorly is:
“What content should I put on my Instagram profile?”How would you dimensionalize this decision?
Off the top of my head some of the low-leverage dimensions would be the standard metrics like views, like, even reshares. Others might be “timeliness” of the actual content (i.e. what current trends it is very mindful and demure of), and “ethos” which might also be called how “on brand” it is—which I breaks into it’s own series of dimensions.
However in my case the real leverage is: “does this solicit me more music video commissions?”
I’ve tried in the past to break this down into broad categories of dimensions like:
-How Glam Rock is it? i.e. animal print and sparkles.
-Production Values (as in will it install faith in a potentail client in my technical abilities) - i.e. is it shot on a prime lens rather than a mobile phone, is it bright enough, are there interesting camera angles etc.
-Displayed ExpertiseBut like… none seem to have any leverage. What in my approach am I doing wrong?
I, in search of idiohobbies, will ask “what have you done by which I may know you?”.
How do people normally respond to that? Are there any people who, perhaps, feel ashamed of what they have done/made/comes-off-the-tip-of-their-tongue and wish not for it to define how you view them?
Can you give an example of what you mean by aggressive discourse? because I think I’m bringing the baggage of assuming it refers to tone and inclusion of sarcasm, mocking the interlocutor, as well as name calling and Ad hominem arguments etc. etc.
Can you help me, how do you get LLMs to restrict their results or avoid certain topics?
I often find using LLMs and search engines feels like a Abbot and Costello routine whenever I try to use a negative. If a search engine doesn’t afford you the opportunity to use a negative operator, writing something like “Categories but not Kantian” will ensure you’ll get a whole lot of search results about Kantian Categories.
Likewise, I find that my attempts to prompt ChatGPT or Claude with some kind of embargo or negative “avoid mentioning...” “try not to...” will almost always ensure the inclusion of the very thing I explicitly told it not to do. Most annoying is if it uses a word which I just don’t understand the sense it’s being used, it will substitute it for a synonym.i.e. if it says it “relates” a value over here to a value over there, when explicitly told to not use “relate or any synonym” it will use “connection” “attaches” or any number of synonyms.
Unfortunately all parts of the prompt are attended to equally so the LLM will be just as confused as poor Lou Costello and there is no way to negatively attend or produce negative prompts which will mask out any tokens close to the things you want to exclude (one hack in Diffusion Image Modelling is to hijack the Classifier-Free Guidance technique which can push the conditional embedding of the prompt slightly further away from the Unconditional prompt, which is more popularly known as “Negative Prompt”)
How do others get around this? The most simplest solution I can think of is simply to “don’t mention the war”—if you don’t want Kantian categories, well… don’t mention the words Kant, Idealism, or anything of the sort. This does get harder if the first reply of the LLM does offer those things. The only possible strategy I have to combat this is to try and find idiomatic words which point more in the direction of what subject you’d like it limited to—am I looking for Aristotelian categories, categories of Pokémon, Heavy metal sub-genres, corporate categories for tax purposes etc.
I’m sure there is a word already (potentially ‘to pull a Homer’?) but Claude suggested the name “Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness” for situations where a non-causal rule or heuristic outperforms a complicated causal model.
I first became aware of this idea when I learned about the research of psychologist John Gottman who claims he has identified the clues which with 94% accuracy will determine if a married couple will divorce. Well, according to this very pro-Gottman webpage, 67% of all couples will divorce within 40 years. (According to Forbes, it’s closer to 43% of American couples that will end in divorce, but that rockets up to 70% for the third marriage).
A slight variation where a heuristic performs almost as well as a complicated model with drastically less computational cost, which I’ll call Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness: I may not be able to predict with 94% accuracy whether a couple will divorce, but I can with 57% accuracy: it’s simple, I say uniformly “they won’t get divorced.” I’ll be wrong 43% of the time. But unlike Gottman’s technique which requires hours of detailed analysis of microexpressions and playing back video tapes of couples… I don’t need to do anything. It is ‘cheap’, computationally both in terms of human computation or even in terms of building spreadsheets or even MPEG-4 or other video encoding and decoding of videos of couples.
My accuracy, however, rockets up to 70% if I can confirm they have been married twice before. Although this becomes slightly more causal.
Now, I don’t want to debate the relative effectiveness of Gottman’s technique, only the observation that his 94% success rate seems much less impressive than just assuming a couple will stay together. I could probably achieve a similar rate of accuracy through simply ascertaining a few facts: 1. How many times, if ever either party have been divorced before? 2. Have they sought counseling for this particular marriage? 3. Why have they sought counseling?
Now, these are all causally relevant facts. What is startling about by original prediction mechanism is just assuming that all couples will stay together is that it is arbitrary. It doesn’t rely on any actual modelling or prediction which is what makes it so computationally cheap.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of a report of someone merging two text encoder models together T5xxl and T5 Pile: the author claims to have seen an improvement in prompt adherence for their Flux (and image generation model), another redditor opines is within the same range of improvement one would expect from merging random noise to the model.
The exploits of Timothy Dexter appear to be a real world example of Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness, as the story goes he was trolled into “selling coal to Newcastle” a proverb for an impossible transaction as Newcastle was a coal mining town – yet he made a fortune because of a serendipitous coal shortage at the time.
To Pull a Homer is a fictional idiom coined in an early episode of the Simpsons where Homer Simpson twice averts a meltdown by blindly reciting “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and happening to land on the right button on both occasions.
However, Dexter and Simpson appear to be examples of unknowingly find a paradoxically effective heuristic with no causal relationship to their success – Dexter had no means of knowing there was a coal shortage (nor apparently understood Newcastle’s reputation as a coal mining city) nor did Simpson know the function of the button he pushed.
Compare this to my original divorce prediction heuristic with a 43% failure rate: I am fully aware that there will be some wrong predictions but on the balance of probabilities it is still more effective than the opposite – saying all marriages will end in divorce.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives an alternative interpretation of the story of Thales as the first “option trader” – Thales is known for making a fantastic fortune when he bought the rights to all the olive presses in his region before the season, there being a bumper crop which made them in high demand. Taleb says this was not because of foresight or studious studying of the olive groves – it was a gamble that Thales as an already wealthy man was well positioned to take and exploit – after all, even a small crop would still earn him some money from the presses.
But is this the same concept as knowingly but blindly adopting a heuristic, which you as the agent know has no causal reason for being true, but is unreasonably effective relative to the cost of computation?
Related to this there was a period of time maybe 2 years ago where online any and all ills related to self-improvement or productivity were prescribed “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. “I’m having trouble studying, any recommendations?” you’d get a two word response: Atomic Habits. “I’m trying to learn a new skill but can’t keep it together” “You should read Atomic Habits”. People weren’t forthcoming with why it was effective or what lessons they gleaned from it. But were effusive in their praise and insist that it should be read.
This also applies to television shows, everyone told me to watch Game of Thrones[1], and I know there’s an XKCD comic about the mathematics of television timesinks.
My theory - “recommendations” for media are never about you, the potential reader but are the result of availability heuristic and whatever is top-of-mind for the person doing the recommendation.
The flip side is that it causes this terrible imperative to consume content you have no personal interest in just to stay socially relevant. When cultural touchstones should, ideally, be about shared values—not having enough information to remain relevant at the proverbial watercooler- ^
To paraphrase actual conversations: “Why?” “Well they get you really invested in these characters… and then they kill them” “And why would I want to put myself through that?” “Well… it’s just good okay!”
- ^
Can they give you specific examples of the clients they gained as a result of publishing a video on a social network?
To be honest I haven’t asked for specific examples (and I guess I’ll need to find a way to ask for it which is not misconstrued as confrontational) but no one has been forthcoming.
Agreed, they don’t. Maybe shares make it more likely for the video to reach a potential client.
Yup, “Hey look at this, you should get them to do your next music video for you” or within a band: “hey look at this video they did for this band, we could use something like that”.
I suspect that a good video needs to be “actionable”: it should give a specific example of a problem that you can solve, and it should explicitly encourage them to contact you if they need to have a problem like that solved.
That rings true. The only person I know personally who has gotten such high social media engagement they are now getting spots on traditional media is an “expert”, therefore they provide actionable advice. They have both the credentials and the industry experience to back it up. It also (unfortunately) helps they intentionally solicit controversy and use clickbaity statements. And it’s a topic which is always in demand. At their behest I’ve tried putting out didactic videos on what bands and artists should do for music videos, explaining different tropes and conventions where are cool. but like after 2 months I ran out of ways to make it “actionable”. Maybe if I continued the grind for 6+ months the algorithm would have started pushing my content more on people outside of my network’s Instagram feed?
Or maybe I need to pay for ads?
I’m not sure how I (me, specifically—may be generalizable to others?) can apply any of those unless I’m already receiving feedback, reward.
In the interest of being specific and concrete I’ll use one example—my personal bugbear: the refrain from people who tell me that as a creative freelancer I need to “get your stuff out there” stuff here nebulously referring to the kinds of videos I can make. “There” is an impossibly vague assertion that the internet and social media are vectors for finding clients.
Yet I have low belief in “getting stuff out there” is an effective measure to improve my standing as a creative freelancer, let’s go through your suggested influences one-by-one:
Peer Pressure: well it doesn’t work evidently since I’ve been repetitively told that “you need to put your stuff out there” is true—but I don’t believe it. These people are often peers, stating it as a fact, yet it doesn’t shift my belief. The caveat I would put here is I have not had luck finding clients through previous forays online and most of my clients appear to come from offline networks and relationships.Getting Quick Feedback: This does seem like the most effective means of shifting belief—however it is no applicable in this example as the feedback is non-existant, let alone quick. Likes and comments don’t translate into commissions and clients.
Getting the information from a trustworthy source: yes, generally true, call it “appeal to authority” call it Aristotle’s theory of ethos in rhetoric. Yet not applicable in this example, in fact people who repeat this refrain appear less trustworthy to me.
Getting other reward in Parallel: Likes and comments are rewards in a sense, yet do not influence my belief because it is not directly affecting the core metric which is—getting more clients or commissions.
However there are some caveats: the advice is impossibly vague and therefore impossible to action. Which begs the question of—what is my lack of faith or belief with? If I had to pin it down it would be “spamming the internet with my videos is not sufficient to generate meaningful relationships with clients and collaborators”. The truth is that most of my clients come from word of mouth among offline networks.
It might be worth me applying this framework to another activity or theory I have “low belief” and compare the two? hmmm…
I’m afraid I can’t read probabilistic notation, but on first blush what you’ve described does sound like I’m simply reinventing the wheel—and poorly compared to Jeffrey’s Theory there. So yes, it is related to the expected value. And I like how Jeffrey’s theory breaks the degree of belief and the desire into two separate values.
I don’t like the word “motivation” because I find one of the chief factors in whether I’m motivated to do something or not is belief. Most discussions of motivation seem to basically see it as the pain or “cost” of doing something versus the reward. However just because you do something, be it painful or easy, doesn’t mean you’ll get the reward.
Perhaps some fragmentary dialogue will illustrate my thinking:
“digging for gold is hard work and you’re not even sure if you’ll find anything”—low motivation. High cost (hard work) no certainty of reward.
”I’d basically be sitting on my phone all afternoon, and they have to pay me $500″ - high motivation. Low cost (easy) guaranteed reward.
Now let’s compare it to this:
“buying a lottery ticket is easy but you’re not even sure if you’ll find anything”
“You should put it on the internet, you might go viral”
Personally, this is why I don’t buy lottery tickets. And hopefully this illustrates why I don’t like the implication that motivation is simply how easy a task is and the magnitude of reward. Because the certainty matters.
The problem becomes if you’re a pessimist like me—then EVERYTHING has low certainty. Therefore you don’t do much of anything. Becoming more ‘motivated’ isn’t simply a matter of wanting it more—it is having belief.
I’m interested, what form do you anticipate this reflection taking? Do you intend to structure your reflection or have any guidelines or roadmaps? How will it manifest at the most concrete level? (Well, ya know, concrete as an internal process can be): Quiet contemplation? Are you a visual thinker or do you have an internal monologue or both or neither? Or will your journal it? Pen and Paper or in a word processor? Or will you discuss it with an LLM?