Oh wow, welcome. I’ve read many essays on your blog and I think they are great.
I believe you’ll find a lot of content (and people) here, who also share the noble pursuit of your blog.
eigen
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This is an excellent answer and I want to highlight that making Anki flashcards is especially useful in this case. I rarely make a mistake when I’m working with mathematics only because of the fact that I have made myself a lot of Anki cards thoroughly analyzing the concepts I use.
Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics, an essay by Michael Nielsen was really useful for me when initially investigating this idea.
Besides this, I have—what may be an eccentric idea—that when working I set special music soundtrack for the specific work I do. See here for more details about this. Further, I think this idea about having a “ritual” is very related to not making mistakes, “getting in the zone”, etc.
[Link] Book Review: ‘The AI Does Not Hate You’ by Tom Chivers (Scott Aaronson)
The fact that it’s a joke is non-important; the fact that it’s a bad joke is.
Maybe don’t make a bad joke and think that people cannot take it, consider that maybe it’s just bad.
As part of my own pursuit of truth, I’ve developed methods, techniques, and attitudes that could be thought of as an approach to “rationality”. These techniques, methods, etc., differ from those I’ve seen promulgated by rationalists, so hopefully there’s room for a good discussion, and maybe we can bridge some inferential distance :).
Quite interested about this, hopefully you write more about it.
Welcome!
Got it. Thank you for the suggestions; we’ll see!
How likely is it now that you are going to miss any more assignments? Not likely at all!
I find this wildly untrue, although I will try it.
Is this a joke?
Anyways, I find that if I don’t clean my glasses or whatever; that somehow evolves on to not cleaning my office, etc. Quite the slippery slope for me, so it’s definitely a NO.
This was a beautiful read, thank you hunterglenn.
not thinking about certain, specific truths, doesn’t mean thinking falsehoods instead, and it doesn’t mean running away from the truth.
Much of what you wrote I hold really close. Truths which are at the forefront of my mind.
Once you get rid of falsehoods; you need to move on to choose truths.
your brain has a miniature explosion, a little burst of positive emotion, as it accurately models how the child feels about this.
That is an awesome thing everyone should feel. That’s how deep the rabbit hole goes, deep truth hides in that; the nihilism, the ‘nada’ is easy to have! Not worth it.
Thank you for an excellent answer and for sharing your experience. I’m glad you’re doing better now!
I agree very much, BTW, on the ‘rationality vs emotion dichotomy’ view of Yudkowsky and I’m glad he addressed that early in the sequences.
Yes!
It may be more apt for the fifth post in his sequence (Stories About Progress) but it’s not posted yet. But I think it sort-of works in both and it’s more of a shortform comment than anything!
I remember the narrative breaking, really hard, in two particular occasions:
The twin towers attack.
The 2008 mortgage financial crisis.
I don’t think, particularly, that the narrative is broken now, but I think that it has lost some of its harmony (Trump having won the 2014 elections, I believe, is a symptom of that).
This is very close to what fellows like Thiel and Weinstein are talking about. In this particular sense, yes, I understand it’s crucial to maintain the narrative although I don’t know anymore whose job it’s—to keep it from breaking out entirely (for example, say, in a explosion of the American student debt, or China going awry with its USD holdings).
These stories are not part of any law of our universe, so they are bound to break at anytime. It takes only a few smart, uncaring individuals to tear at the fabric of reality until it breaks—that is not okay!
So that it’s why I believe is happening at the macro-narrative; but to be more directed towards the individual, which is what your post seems to hint at, I don’t think for a second that your life does not run from narrative, maybe that’s a narrative itself. I believe further that some rituals are important to keep and to have an individual story is important to be able to do any work we deem important.
Quite the contrary; my point being, since I do not care for that being on the episode I classified it as “meh”, thus I do not care for that in LessWrong. If there’s one thing which I agree strongly with the sequences is that Politics is the Mind-Killer.
I think about this a lot. I’m currently dangling with the fourth Hypothesis, which seems more correct to me and one where I can actually do something to ameliorate the trade-off implied by it.
In this comment, I talk what it means to me and how I can do something about it, which ,in summary, is to use Anki a lot and change subjects when working memory gets overloaded. It’s important to note that mathematics is sort-of different from another subjects, since concepts build on each other and you need to keep up with what all of them mean and entail, so we may be bound to reach an overload faster in that sense.
A few notes about your other hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1c:
it doesn’t seem obvious why the computations of doing math would be more costly than those for watching TV.
It’s because we’re not used to it. Some things come easier than other; some things are more closely similar to what we have been doing for 60000 years (math is not one of them). So we flinch from that which we are not use to. Although, adaptation is easy and the major hurdle is only at the beginning.
This seems plausible for the activity of doing math, which involves many moments of frustration, which might be meaningfully micro-painful.It may also mean that the reward system is different. Is difficult to see on a piece of mathematics, as we explore it, how fulfilling it’s when we know that we may not be getting anywhere. So the inherent reward is missing or has to be more artificially created.
Hypothesis 1d:
It seems plausible that mentally taxing activities are taxing to the extent that they involve processing ambiguity, and doing a search for the best template to apply.This seems correct to me. Consider the following: “This statement is false”.
Thinking about it for a few minutes (or iterations of that statement) is quickly bound to make us flinch away in just a few seconds. How many other things take this form? I bet there are many.
For the monkeys that had “really good” plans for how to achieve their goals, never panned out for them. The monkeys that were impulsive some of the time, actually did better at the reproduction game?Instead of working to trust System 2 is it there a way to train System 1? It seems more apt to me, like training tactics in chess or to make rapid calculations.
Thank you for the good post, I’d really like to further know more about your findings.
Yes, fiction has a lot of potential to change mindsets. Many Philosophers actually look at the greatest novel writers to infer the motives and the solutions their heroes to come up with general theories that touch the very core of how our society is laid out.
Most of this come from the fact that we are already immersed in a meta-story, externally and internally. Much of our efforts are focused on internal rationalizations to gain something where a final outcome has been already thought out, this being consciously known to us or not.
I think that in fiction this is laid out perfectly. So analyzing fiction is rewarding in a sense. Specially when realizing that when we go to exams or interviews we’re rapidly immersing ourselves in an isolated story with motives and objectives (what we expect to happen), we create our own little world, our own little stories.
I like “decision-making” the most.
I think if your aim is to communicate then indeed we have communicated by using any of the three forms. But for me, the three are slightly different. I think it depends on the context most of the time. For example, “decision-making”, for me, relates more to the cognitive process as it’s studied and its research and “decision making” to the act of making decisions.
I’ve listened to the episode a few days back (this is an excellent post and transcript btw).
Even though they pin-point varies issues in society such as radical leftism, stagnation in the Scientific community, the student debt, etc; In my opinion, most of the episode was “meh” (Ignoring also that they are two outsiders of academia criticizing it so much and that Weinstein claims that he has a unifying theory of Physics!).
The thing which interested me the most was the bit about Mimetic Theory. I’m surprised at how evident it’s what he is saying.
How the theories of Rene Girard are an antidote to strong libertarian impulses.
So, I think there’s so much more to Rene Girard than an antidote to “libertarian impulses”. For me, this was the biggest takeaway of the entire podcast and shed a new light on Thiel’s book: Zero To One and his investment philosophy (e.g. Facebook).
We are so worried about the desires of our neighbors that we do not realize the web of opportunities that hides on what we’re not seeing. Re-contextualizing our desires and analyzing them is key in creative and innovative work and much of these ideas I take from Thiel and Rene Girard.
But assuming there’s something as “a loneliness crisis” (which I don’t think there is, at least not in the west).
Then what would be a solution to it: friendship or community?
Basing community on your definition which I agree.
You can really test the waters and see for yourself; it’s not that the content is going to go anywhere.
With that said, I started with the sequences (R:A-Z) and while reading it, I also read HPMOR (which being fiction, it was a really fast read). Then I mixed some of CODEX in there. (So that’s the order I recommend following).
HPMOR really ruined a big chunk of fiction for me; there are no characters with the self-awareness that those on HPMOR have.
In The CODEX, when Scott Alexander tries to find if AA works, he cannot resist himself but to dig deeper and look at the underlying reason of why something is the way it’s. Just like a physicist looking at natural phenomena, he investigates, just as well, human nature.
The Sequences changed my mind.