DirectedEvolution

Karma: 11,264

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox

Correlation may imply some sort of causal link.

For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.

Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink

Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.

Replications show there’s something new under the sun.

Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?

Are they both controlled by what has already begun?

Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?

DirectedEvolution May 20, 2025, 6:21 AM
2 points
2
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Interesting find. What about the visioning section conveyed “the dream that you are very important?” Or, alternatively, what do you mean by “dream” in this context?

DirectedEvolution May 18, 2025, 6:30 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: Matt Putz’s comment on: David Matolcsi’s Shortform
Pretty much the whole causal estimate comes down to the influence of happiness 6 months after quitting a job or breaking up. Almost everything else is swamped with noise. The only individual question with a consistent causal effect larger than the standard error was “should I break my bad habit?”, and doing so made people unhappier. Even for those factors, there’s a lot of biases in this self-report data, which the authors noted and tried to address. I’m just not sure what we can really learn from this, even though it is a fun study.

DirectedEvolution May 17, 2025, 5:10 AM
7 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Mark Driscoll was raised Catholic, converted to evangelical Christianity at 19, got an MA in theology, connected with others who were associated with “church planting” efforts, and launched the first Mars Hill church in 1996 when he was 26. The church was initially in his home.
So it seems he may have received coaching, training, and some limited support at that early stage, but probably not enormous financial resources.

DirectedEvolution May 11, 2025, 11:13 PM
6 points
3
on: Better Air Purifiers
What would be the business’s moat and addressable market?

DirectedEvolution May 1, 2025, 6:41 PM
1 point
−3
on: Prioritizing Work
I interpret the quote as motivating us to find ways to need our work less—to find ways to obtain abundant satisfaction from other sources, such as our families.
One of the flaws of the EA movement, one that turns many people off and makes it seem like a “cult,” is that it is founded on promoting neediness of participants for personal validation of their life worth through their job. EA works to restrict the number of jobs capable of providing that validation, and to undermine any attempt to establish a sense that one’s job is good enough.

DirectedEvolution Apr 25, 2025, 8:31 PM
8 points
2
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
I use LLMs daily yet I still am not sure they really help all that much with the core productivity bottlenecks. I worry they lower the barrier to excessive perfectionism and “vibe coding” or “vibe learning.” They seem to short-circuit the theory-practice gap by giving users instant but unreliable and often inextensible results.

My fear is that they’ll raise expectations about productivity gains (because AI-assisted workers can bring immediate results in more quickly to a higher apparent standard of polish), while drastically reducing the knowledge gain by the workers about the problem domain. For example, workers may be able to whip up a codebase more quickly but have less familiarity with it at the end of the process, making it much more difficult to make modifications efficiently. Essentially, I suspect AI will generate massive technical debt in exchange for short-term wins, and that bad incentives will tend to perpetuate this in organizations. People will quickly set up new systems using AI, take credit, and exit those projects before serious problems become apparent.

DirectedEvolution Apr 24, 2025, 2:49 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Can you give an example?

DirectedEvolution Apr 23, 2025, 3:04 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
By environment, I mean the setting of the scene. Spoken words are sounds in the setting, like the sound of the wind, a gunshot, or an animal’s cry. It just happens that a human voice box is what’s making those particular sounds. McCarthy’s central theme across all the novels of his that I’ve read is the inhumanity of the Mexican-American frontier, and treating human speech as just a sound among other sounds is a key part of how he expresses that theme in his writing style.

DirectedEvolution Apr 17, 2025, 3:39 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: GPT-4.1 Is a Mini Upgrade
Gemini seems to do a better job of shortening text while maintaining the nuance I expect grant reviewers to demand. Claude seems to focus entirely on shortening text. For context, I’m feeding a specific aims page for my PhD work that I’ve written about 15 drafts of already, so I have detailed implicit preferences about what is and is not an acceptable result.

DirectedEvolution Apr 17, 2025, 8:53 AM
2 points
0
on: GPT-4.1 Is a Mini Upgrade
I gotta say, I have no idea why people are putting Claude 3.7 in the same league as recent GPT models or Gemini 2.5. My experience is that Claude 3.7 deeply struggles with a range of tasks. I’ve been trying to use it for grant writing—shortening text, defining terms in my field, suggesting alternative ways to word things. It gets definitions wrong, offers nonsensical alternative wordings, and gets stuck repeating the same “shortened,” nuance-stripped text over and over despite me asking it to try another way.
By contrast, I threw an entire draft of my grant proposal into Gemini 2.5 and got a substantially shorter and more clear new version out, first try.

DirectedEvolution Apr 7, 2025, 7:07 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: mattmacdermott’s comment on: mattmacdermott’s Shortform
One way to think about this might be to cast it in the language of conditional probability. Perhaps we are modeling our agent as it makes choices between two world states, A and B, based on their predicted levels of X and Y. If P(A) is the probability that the agent chooses state A, and P(A|X) and P(A|Y) are the probabilities of choosing A given knowledge of predictions about the level of X and Y respectively in state A vs. state B, then it seems obvious to me that “cares about X only because it leads to Y” can be expressed as P(A|XY) = P(A|Y). Once we know its predictions about Y, X tells us nothing more about its likelihood of choosing state A. Likewise, “cares about Y only because it leads to X” could be expressed as P(A|XY) = P(A|X). In the statement “the agent cares about X only because it leads to Y, and it cares about Y only because it leads to X,” it seems like it’s saying that P(A|XY) = P(A|Y) ∧ P(A|XY) = P(A|X), which implies that P(A|Y) = P(A|X) -- there is perfect mutual information shared between X and Y about P(A).
However, I don’t think that this quite captures the spirit of the question, since the idea that the agent “cares about X and Y” isn’t the same thing as X and Y being predictive of which state the agent will choose. It seems like what’s wanted is a formal way to say “the only things that ‘matter’ in this world are X and Y,” which is not the same thing as saying “X and Y are the only dimensions on which world states are mapped.” We could imagine a function that takes the level of X and Y in two world states, A and B, and returns a preference order {A > B, B > A, A = B, incomparable}. But who’s to say this function isn’t just capturing an empirical regularity, rather than expressing some fundamental truth about why X and Y control the agent’s preference for A or B? However, I think that’s an issue even in the absence of any sort of circular reasoning.
A machine learning model’s training process is effectively just a way to generate a function that consistently maps an input vector to an output that’s close to a zero output from the loss function. The model doesn’t “really” value reward or avoidance of loss any more than our brains “really” value dopamine, and as far as I know, nobody has a mathematical definition of what it means to “really” value something, as opposed to behaving in a way that consistently tends to optimize for a target. From that point of view, maybe saying that P(A|Y) = P(A) really is the best we can do to mathematically express “he only cares about Y” and P(A|X) = P(A|Y) is the best way to express “he only cares about Y to get X and only cares about X to get Y.”

DirectedEvolution Apr 6, 2025, 8:52 PM
9 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
That’s a valid reaction. However, my take is that removal of the quotes is aesthetically useful precisely because it complicates our ability to parse the words as dialog and muddles that sort of naive clarity. Spoken words are sounds, sounds are part of the environment, and it is both a choice and an effort to parse those sounds as dialog.
Most authors opt to do this work for the reader through punctuation, which also enforces interpreting these passages as dialog first and sounds second, if at all. McCarthy makes it easier to interpret spoken words as sounds that are part of the environment. If your aim as a reader is to parse dialog, it will be harder to do this in a McCarthy novel. If your aim is instead to have an aesthetic experience of spoken words as sensation interlaced with other impressions of the environment, then McCarthy’s method of punctuation makes this simpler (and even plants the suggestion that this might be something you as a reader might want to do, if you hadn’t considered the possibility before).

DirectedEvolution Apr 6, 2025, 7:35 PM
21 points
6
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
I respectfully disagree. As with the minor edit on the Boccaccio quote in another of my comments here, eliminating quotes fundamentally changes the way we interpret the scene.
With quotes (and especially with the way dialog is typically paragraphed), human speech is implicitly shown to be so drastically separate from the sensory component of the scene that it requires completely different formatting from the rest of the text.
By eliminating quotes and dialog paragraphing, human speech becomes just another element in the scene being depicted, not separate or any more or less important than the action of screwing down the plastic cap or the functional importance of the oil in the lamp.
The absence of quotes only makes it harder to read if you, the reader, resist this aesthetic and try to force the dialog to be of greater importance than McCarthy is allowing it to be in his novel.
He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns.
“You can read me a story,” the boy said. “Cant you, Papa?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can.”
See how the social interaction between Papa and the boy is now positioned as separate from and more important than Papa’s work on the lamp?
He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. “You can read me a story,” the boy said. “Cant you, Papa?” “Yes,” he said. “I can.”
Even if you just add quotation marks, the marks call special and separate attention to the dialog, placing it as a separate component of the paragraph.

DirectedEvolution Apr 5, 2025, 7:36 PM
2 points
−3
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Semicolons are unnecessary? That doesn’t go far enough. Cormac McCarthy got rid of quotation marks, most commas, and almost exterminated the colon.

DirectedEvolution Apr 4, 2025, 1:38 AM
26 points
0
on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Interestingly, breaking up long sentences into shorter ones by replacing a transitional word with a period does not quite capture the same nuance as the original. Here’s a translation of Boccaccio, and a version where I add a period in the middle.
Wherefore, as it falls to me to lead the way in this your enterprise of storytelling, I intend to begin with one of His wondrous works, that, by hearing thereof, our hopes in Him, in whom is no change, may be established, and His name be by us forever lauded.
Wherefore, as it falls to me to lead the way in this your enterprise of storytelling, I intend to begin with one of His wondrous works. By hearing thereof, our hopes in Him, in whom is no change, may be established, and His name be by us forever lauded.
By replacing ”, that,” with a period, my revision completely changes our relationship with the narrator. In the original translation, the narrator is both announcing his goal and describing what he plans to do to achieve it.
In the revised version, he’s describing his plan of action and a potential effect of that plan. We might assume that he’s choosing that plan in order to bring about that effect, but it’s no longer explicit in the text. Each sentence stands on its own. It’s up to the reader to perceive the narrator’s intention.
I wonder if inserting periods systematically tends to disrupt explicit links between intention and action. If so, perhaps the shortening of sentences reflects the anomie of the modern era, the gradual decay of an explicit moral framework in the stories we tell.

DirectedEvolution Apr 4, 2025, 12:49 AM
8 points
2
on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Many short sentences can add up to a very long text. The cost of paper, ink, typesetting and distribution would incentivize using fewer letters, but not shorter sentences.

DirectedEvolution Mar 21, 2025, 6:01 AM
16 points
15
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
“I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.”

Some people enjoy attending to their partner and find meaning in emotional labor. Housing’s a lot more expensive than gifts and dates. My partner and I go ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ on expenses and chores. Some people like having long-term relationships with emotional depth. You might want to try exploring out of your bubble, especially if you life in SF, and see what some normal people (ie non-rationalists) in long term relationships have to say about it.

DirectedEvolution Mar 19, 2025, 6:21 PM
8 points
2
on: OpenAI #11: America Action Plan
I cancelled my OpenAI subscription due to this article and I let them know that’s the reason why in their cancellation survey.

DirectedEvolution Mar 18, 2025, 7:07 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Metacognition Broke My Nail-Biting Habit
Unfortunately the level of physical restraint I’d need to stop biting is too costly to be worth it to me.

DirectedEvolution Mar 17, 2025, 3:18 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Metacognition Broke My Nail-Biting Habit
It actually did contain capsaicin IIRC. Sort of a bitter spicy mix. The other issue is it gets on things you touch, including food if you’re preparing or eating it by hand.