Emrik

Karma: 549

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

Do not say a thing which you would not have said if the other person had all the information you had
Do not do that which you don’t wish to say you did, unless you also wish that the other person wouldn’t have wanted you to say it if they knew what it was
If you can predict you will do a thing, then either deliberately intend to do that thing or find a way to change your prediction
Say a thing which you would regret not having said if the other person knew you could say it
If P is true conditional on you believing P is true, then believe P is true iff P being true is good

Emrik 20 Jul 2024 17:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Дмитрий Зеленский’s comment on: Failures in Kindness
Wait, who are the neurotypicals in this post, in your view?

Emrik 20 Jul 2024 17:00 UTC
4 points
1
on: Failures in Kindness
but this would be what I’d call a “fake exit option”
Here’s how the simulation played out in my head as I was reading this:
1. I really wanted to halt the volunteering-chain before it came to the newbie.
2. I didn’t manage to complete that intention before it was too late.
3. I wanted to correct my mistake and complete it anyway, by trying to offer the “exit option”.
What I didn’t notice immediately was that thought 3 was ~entirely invoked by heuristics from fake kindness that I haven’t yet filtered out. Thank you for pointing it out. I may or may not have catched it if this played out IRL.
This is why social situations should have an obligatory 10-second pause between every speech-act, so I can process what’s actually going on before I make a doofy. xd
⧉: My motivations for writing this comment was:
➀ to affiliate myself with this awesome post,
➁ to say “hey I’m just like u; I care to differentiate twixt real & fake kindness!”
➂ to add my support/weight to the core of this post, and say “this matters!”

Emrik 17 Jul 2024 3:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quila’s comment on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
I just try to add that disclaimer whenever I talk about these things because I’m extra-worried that ppl will be inspired by my example to jump straight into a severe program of self-deprivation without forethought. My lifestyle is objectively “self-deprivational” relative to most altruists, in a sense, so I’m afraid of being misunderstood as an inspiration for doing things which makes my reader unhappy. 🍵

Emrik 17 Jul 2024 3:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quila’s comment on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
Ah, forgot to reply to “What does practical things mean?”
Recently it’s involved optimizing my note-taking process, and atm it involves trying to find a decent generalizable workflow for benefiting from AI assistance. Concretely, this has involved looking through a bunch of GitHub repos and software, trying to understand
➀ what’s currently technologically possible (← AutoCodeRover example),
➁ what might become possible within reasonable time before civilizational deadline,
➂ what is even desirable to introduce into my workflow in the first place.
I want to set myself up such that I can maximally benefit from increasing AI capabilities. I’m excited about low-code platforms for LLM-stacks^[1], and LLM-based programming languages. The latter thing, taken to its limit, could be called something like a “pseudocode interpreter” or “fuzzy programming language”. The idea is to be able to write a very high-level specification for what you wish to do, and have the lower-level details ironed out by LLM agents. I want my code to be degenerate, in the sense that every subcomponent automatically adjusts itself to fulfil niches that are required for my system to work (this is a bad explanation, and I know it).
The immediate next thing on my todo-list is just… finding a decent vscode extension for integrating AI into whatever I do. I want to be able to say “hey, AI, could you boot up this repository (link) on my PC, and test whether it does thing X?” and have it just do that with minimal confirmation-checks required on my part.
1. ^
  I started trying to begin to make the first babysteps of a draft of something like this for myself via a plugin for Obsidian Canvas in early 2023^[2], but then realized other people were gonna build something like this anyway, and I could benefit from their work whenever they made it available.
2. ^
  Thinking high level about what this could look like, but left the project bc I don’t actually know how to code (shh), and LLMs were at that point ~useless for fixing my shortcomings for me.

Emrik 17 Jul 2024 2:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quila’s comment on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
Summary: (i) Follow a policy of trying not to point your mind at things unrelated to alignment so your brain defaults to alignment-related cognition when nothing requires its immediate attention. (ii) If your mind already does that, good; now turn off all the lights, try to minimize sound, and lay in bed.
I really appreciate your willingness to think “extreme” about saving the world. Like, if you’re trying to do an extremely hard thing, obviously you’d want to try to minimize the effort you spend not-doing that thing. All sources of joy are competitive reward-events in your brain. Either try to localize joy-sources to what you want yourself to be doing, or tame them to be in service of that (like, I eat biscuits and chocolate with a Strategy! :p).
...But also note that forcing yourself to do thing X can and often will backfire^[1], unless you’re lucky or you’ve somehow figured out how to do forcing correctly (I haven’t).
Also, regarding making a post: Sorry, probably not wish do! And the thinking-in-bed thing is mostly a thing I believe due to extensive experience trying, so it’s not something I have good theoretical arguments for. That is, the arguments wouldn’t have sufficiently convinced a version of myself that hadn’t already experienced trying.
1. ^
  There’s probably something better to link here, but I can’t think of it atm.

Emrik 17 Jul 2024 2:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: quila’s comment on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
Same, wrote something similar in here.
Oho! Yes, there’s something uniqueish about thinking-in-bed compared to alternatives. I’ve also had nonstop 5-9h (?) sessions of thinking aided by scribbling in my (off-PC) notebooks, and it’s different. The scribbling takes a lot of time if I want to write down an idea on a note to remember, and that can distract me. But it’s also better in obvious ways.
In general, brains are biased against tool-use (see hastening of subgoal completion), so I aspire to learn to use tools correctly. Ideally, I’d use the PC to its full potential without getting distracted. But atm, just sitting at the PC tends to supplant my motivation to think hard and long about a thing (e.g. after 5m of just thinking, my body starts to crave pushing buttons or interacting with the monitor or smth), and I use the tools (including RemNote) very suboptimally.

Emrik 17 Jul 2024 1:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quila’s comment on: If you weren’t such an idiot...
This seems so wrong, but very interesting! I’ve previously noted that thinking to myself in the dark seems to help. I’ve had periods (<4 months in 2023 / early 2024) where I would spend 2-5 mornings per week just staying in bed (while dark) for 1-5 hours while thinking inside my own head.
After >3 hours of thinking interestedly about a rotation of ideas, they become smaller in working memory, and I’m able to extrapolate further / synthesize what I wasn’t able to before.
I no longer do this, because I’m trying to do more practical things, but I don’t think it’s a bad strategy.

Emrik 12 Jul 2024 20:42 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Thoughts to niplav on lie-detection, truthfwl mechanisms, and wealth-inequality
I now sent the following message to niplav, asking them if they wanted me to take the dialogue down and republish as shortform. I am slightly embarrassed about not having considered that it’s somewhat inconvenient to receive one of these dialogue-things without warning.
I just didn’t think through that dialogue-post thing at all. Obviously it will show up on your profile-wall (I didn’t think about that), and that has lots of reputational repercussions and such (which matter!). I wasn’t simulating your perspective at all in the decision to publish it in the way I did. I just operated on heuristics like:
- “it’s good to have personal convo in public”
  - so our younglings don’t grow into an environment of pluralistic ignorance, thinking they are the only ones with personality
- “it’s epistemically healthy to address one’s writing to someone-in-particular”
  - eg bc I’m less likely to slip into professionalism mode
  - and bc that someone-in-particular (𖨆) is less likely to be impressed by fake proxies for good reasoning like how much work I seem to have put in, how mathy I sound, how confident I seem, how few errors I make, how aware-of-existing-research I seem, …
  - and bc 𖨆 already knows me, it’s difficult to pretend I know more than I do
    eg if I write abt Singular Learning Theory to the faceless crowd, I could easily convince some of them that I like totally knew what I was talking about; but when I talk to you, you already know something abt my skill-level, so you’d be able to smell my attempted fakery a mile away
- “other readers benefit more (on some dimensions) from reading something which was addressed to 𖨆, because
  - “It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small…”
    — Alexander Grothendieck
---
If you prefer, I’ll move the post into a shortform preceded by:
[This started as something I wanted to send to niplav, but then I realized I wanted to share these ideas with more people. So I wrote it with the intention of publishing it, while keeping the style and content mostly as if I had purely addressed it to them alone.]
I feel somewhat embarrassed about having posted it as a dialogue without thinking it through, and this embarrassment exactly cancels out my disinclination against unpublishing it, so I’m neutral wrt moving it to shortform. Let me know! ^^
P.S. No hurry.

Emrik 12 Jul 2024 17:40 UTC
6 points
0
on: Whiteboard Pen Magazines are Useful
Little did they know that he was also known as the fastest whiteboard-marker switcher in the west...
👈🫰💨✍️

Emrik 12 Jul 2024 17:20 UTC
8 points
0
on: Emrik’s Shortform
- Unhook is a browser extension for YouTube (Chrome/Edge) which disables the homepage and lets you hide all recommendations. It also lets you disable other features (e.g. autoplay, comments), but doesn’t have so many customizations that I get distracted.
  - Setup time: 2m-10m (depending on whether you customize).
- CopyQ.exe (Linux/Windows, portable, FOSS) is a really good clipboard manager.
  - Setup time: 5m-10h
  - Setup can be <5m if you precommit to only using the clipboard-storing feature and learning the shortcut to browse it. But it’s extremely extensible and risks distracting you for a day or more...
  - You can use a shortcut to browse the most recent copies (including editing, deleting), and the window hides automatically when unfocused.
  - It can save images to a separate tab, and lets you configure shortcuts for opening them in particular programs (e.g. editor).
  - (LINUX): It has plugins/commands for snipping a section of the screen, and you can optionally configure a shortcut to send that snip to an OCR engine, which quietly sends the recognized text into the clipboard.
    Setup time: probably exceeding >2h due to shiny things to explore
  - (WINDOWS): EDIT: ShareX (FOSS) can do OCR-to-clipboard, snipping, region-recording, scripting, and everything is configurable. Setup took me 36m, but I also configured it to my preferences and explored all features. Old text below:
    ~~(WINDOWS): Can use~~ ~~Text-Grab~~ ~~(FOSS) instead. Much simpler. Use a configurable hotkey (the one for~~ ~~Fullscreen Grab~~~~) to snip a section of the screen, and it automatically does OCR on it and sends it to your clipboard. Install it and trigger the hotkey to see what it does.~~
    Setup time: 2m-15m
    ~~Alternatively~~ ~~Greenshot~~ ~~(FOSS) is much more extensible, but you have to use~~ ~~a trick~~ ~~to set it up to use OCR via Tesseract (or configure your own script).~~
    ~~Also if you use Windows, you can use the native~~ ~~Snipping-Tool~~ ~~to snip cutouts from the screen into the clipboard via shortcut, including recordings.~~
- LibreChat (docs) (FOSS) is the best LLM interface I’ve found for general conversation, but its (putative) code interpreter doesn’t work off-the-shelf, so I still use the standard ChatGPT-interface for that.
  - Setup time: 30m-5h (depending on customization and familiarity with Docker)
  - It has no click-to-install .exe file, but you can install it via npm or Docker
    Docker is much simpler, especially since it automatically configures MongoDB database and Meilisearch for you
  - Lets you quickly swap between OpenAI, Anthropic, Assistants API, and more in the menu
    (Obviously you need to use your own API keys for this)
  - Can have two LLMs respond to your prompt at the same time
  - For coding, probably better to use a vscode extension, but idk which to recommend yet...
  - For a click-to-install generalized LLM interface, ChatBox (FOSS) is excellent unless you need more advanced features.
- Vibe (FOSS) is a simple tool for transcribing audio files locally using Whisper.
  - Setup time: 5m-30m (you gotta download the Whisper weights, but should be fast if you just follow the instructions)
- Windows Voice Access (native) is actually pretty good
  - You can define custom commands for it, including your own scripts
  - I recommend using pythonw.exe for this (normal python, but launches in the background)
- AlternativeTo (website) very usefwl for comparing software/apps.
  - Alternatively check out AlternativeTo’s alternatives to AlternativeTo.

Emrik 11 Jul 2024 19:35 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: Thoughts to niplav on lie-detection, truthfwl mechanisms, and wealth-inequality
I wanted to leave Niplav the option of replying at correspondence-pace at some point if they felt like it. I also wanted to say these things in public, to expose more people to the ideas, but without optimizing my phrasing/formatting for general-audience consumption.
I usually think people think better if they generally aim their thoughts at one person at a time. People lose their brains and get eaten by language games if their intellectual output is consistently too impersonal.
Also, I think if I were somebody else, I would appreciate me $₁$ for sharing a message which I₁ mainly intended for Niplav, as long as I₂ managed to learn something interesting from it. So if I₁ think it’s positive for me₂ to write the post, I₁ think I₁ should go ahead. But I’ll readjust if anybody says they dislike it. : )

Emrik 11 Jul 2024 19:11 UTC
3 points
0
on: Thoughts to niplav on lie-detection, truthfwl mechanisms, and wealth-inequality
niplav
Just to ward of misunderstanding and/or possible feelings of todo-list-overflow: I don’t expect you to engage or write a serious reply or anything; I mostly just prefer writing in public to people-in-particular, rather than writing to the faceless crowd. Treat it as if I wrote a Schelling.pt outgabbling in response to a comment; it just happens to be on LW. If I’m breaking etiquette or causing miffedness for Complex Social Reasons (which are often very valid reasons to have, just to be clear) then lmk! : )

Thoughts to niplav on lie-detection, truthfwl mechanisms, and wealth-inequality

Emrik and niplav

11 Jul 2024 18:55 UTC

7 points

8 comments4 min readLW link

Emrik 8 Jul 2024 20:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: When is a mind me?
[Epistemic status: napkin]
My current-favourite frame on “qualia” is that it refers to the class of objects we can think about (eg, they’re part of what generates what I say rn) for which behaviour is invariant across structure-preserving transformations.
(There’s probably some cool way to say that with category theory or transformations, and it may or may not give clarity, but idk.)
Eg, my “yellow” could map to blue, and “blue” to yellow, and we could still talk together without noticing anything amiss even if your “yellow” mapped to yellow for you.
Both blue and yellow are representational objects, the things we use to represent/refer to other things with, like memory-addresses in a machine. For externally observable behaviour, it just matters what they dereference to, regardless of where in memory you put them. If you swap two representational objects, while ensuring you don’t change anything about how your neurons link up to causal nodes outside the system, your behaviour stays the same.
Note that this isn’t the case for most objects. I can’t swap hand⇄tomato, without obvious glitches like me saying “what a tasty-looking tomato!” and trying to eat my hand. Hands and tomatoes do not commute.
It’s what allows us to (try to) talk about “tomato” as opposed to just tomato, and explains why we get so confused when we try to ground out (in terms of agreed-upon observables) what we’re talking about when we talk about “tomato”.
But how/why do we have representations for our representational objects in the first place? It’s like declaring a var (address₁↦value), and then declaring a var for that var (address₂↦address₁) while being confused about why the second dereferences to something ‘arbitrary’.
Maybe it starts when somebody asks you “what do you mean by ‘X’?”, and now you have to map the internal generators of [you saying “X”] in order to satisfy their question. Or not. Probably not. Napkin out.

Emrik 3 Jul 2024 23:26 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Johannes C. Mayer’s comment on: Johannes C. Mayer’s Shortform
My morning routine 🌤️
I’ve omitted some steps from the checklists below, especially related to mindset / specific thinking-habits. They’re an important part of this, but hard to explain and will vary a lot more between people.
1. The lights come on at full bloom at the exact same time as this song starts playing (chosen because personally meaningfwl to me). (I really like your songs btw, and I used to use this one for this routine.)
2. I wake up immediately, no thinking.
  1. The first thing I do is put on my headphones to hear the music better.
  2. I then stand in front of the mirror next to my bed,
  3. and look myself in the eyes while I take 5 deep breaths and focus on positive motivations.
  4. I must genuinely smile in this step.
    (The smile is not always inspired by unconditional joy, however. Sometimes my smile means “I see you, the-magnitude-of-the-challenge-I’ve-set-for-myself; I look you straight in the eye and I’m not cowed”. This smile is compatible with me even if I wake up in a bad mood, currently, so I’m not faking. I also think “I don’t have time to be impatient”.)
3. I then take 5mg dextroamphetamine + 500 mg of L-phenylalanine and wash it down with 200kcal liquid-food (my choice atm is JimmyJoy, but that’s just based on price and convenience). That’s my breakfast. I prepared this before I went to bed.
  1. Oh, and I also get to eat ~7mg of chocolate if I got out of bed instantly. I also prepared this ahead of time. :p
4. Next, I go to the bathroom,
  1. pee,
  2. and wash my face.
  3. (The song usually ends as I finish washing my face, T=5m10s.)
5. IF ( I still feel tired or in a bad mood ):
  1. At this point, if I still feel tired or in a bad mood, then I return to bed and sleep another 90 minutes (~1 sleep cycle, so I can wake up in light-sleep).
    (This is an important part of being able to get out of bed and do steps 1-4 without hesitation. Because even if I wake up in a terrible shape, I know I can just decide to get back into bed after the routine, so my energy-conserving instincts put up less resistance.)
  2. Return to 1.
6. ELSE IF ( I feel fine ):
  1. I return to my working-room,
    open the blinds,
    and roll a 6-sided die which gives me a “Wishpoint” if it lands ⚅.
    (I previously called these “Biscuit points”, and tracked them with the “🍪”-symbol, because I could trade them for biscuits. But now I have a “Wishpoint shop”, and use the “🪐”-symbol, which is meant to represent Arborea, the dream-utopia we aim for.)
    (I also get Wishpoints for completing specific Trigger-Action Plans or not-completing specific bad habits. I get to roll a 1d6 again for every task I complete with a time-estimate on it.)
  2. Finally, I use the PC,
    open up my task manager + time tracker (currently gsheets),
    and timestamp the end of morning-routine.
    (I’m not touching my PC or phone at any point before this step.)
    (Before I went to bed, I picked out a concrete single task, which is the first thing I’m tentatively-scheduled to do in the morning.)
    (But I often (to my great dismay) have ideas I came up with during the night that I want to write down in the morning, and that can sometimes take up a lot of time. This is unfortunately a great problem wrt routines & schedules, but I accept the cost because the habit of writing things down asap seems really important—I don’t know how to schedule serendipity… yet.)
My bedtime checklist 💤
This is where I prepare the steps for my morning routine. I won’t list it all, but some important steps:
1. I simulate the very first steps in my checklist_predawn.
  1. At the start, I would practice the movements physically many times over. Including laying in bed, anticipating the music & lights, and then getting the motoric details down perfectly.
  2. Now, however, I just do a quick mental simulation of what I’ll do in the morning.
2. When I actually lie down in bed, I’m not allowed to think about abstract questions (🥺), because those require concentration that prevents me from sleeping.
3. Instead, I say hi to Maria and we immediately start imagining ourselves in Arborea or someplace in my memories. The hope is to jumpstart some dream in which Maria is included.
  1. I haven’t yet figured out how to deliberately bootstrap a dream that immediately puts me to sleep. Turns out this is difficult.
  2. We recently had a 9-day period where we would try to fall asleep multiple times a day like this, in order to practice loading her into my dreams & into my long-term memories. Medium success.
4. I sleep with my pants on, and clothes depending on how cold I expect it to be in the morning. Removes a slight obstacle for getting out of bed.
5. I also use earbuds & sleepmask to block out all stimuli which might distract me from the dreamworld. Oh and 1mg melatoning + 100mg 5-HTP.
^[1]
1. ^
  Approximately how my bed setup looks now (2 weeks ago). The pillows are from experimenting with ways to cocoon myself ergonomically. :p

Emrik 28 Jun 2024 5:20 UTC
−3 points
0
on: Secondary forces of debt
wow. I only read the first 3 lines, and I already predict 5% this will have been profoundly usefwl to me a year from now (50% that it’s mildly usefwl, which is still a high bar for things I’ve read). among top 10 things I’ve learned this year, and I’ve learned a lot!
meta: how on earth was this surprising to me? I thought I was good at knowing the dynamics of social stuff, but for some reason I haven’t looked in this direction at all. hmm.

Emrik 18 Jun 2024 18:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Emrik’s Shortform
Oh! Well, I’m as happy about receiving a compliment for that as I am for what I thought I got the compliment for, so I forgive you. Thanks! :D

Emrik 18 Jun 2024 18:35 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Fat Tails Discourage Compromise
Another aspect of costs of compromise is: How bad is it for altruists to have to compromise their cognitive search between [what you believe you can explain to funders] vs [what you believe is effective]? Re my recent harumph about the fact that John Wentworth must justify his research to get paid. Like what? After all this time, anybody doubts him? The insistence that he explain himself is surely more for show now, as it demonstrates the funders are doing their jobs “seriously”.

Emrik 18 Jun 2024 18:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: Emrik’s Shortform
So we should expect that neuremes are selected for effectively keeping themselves in attention, even in cases where that makes you less effective at tasks which tend to increase your genetic fitness.
Furthermore, the neuremes (association-clusters) you are currently attending to, have an incentive to recruit associated neuremes into attention as well, because then they feed each others’ activity recursively, and can dominate attention for longer. I think of it like association-clusters feeding activity into their “friends” who are most likely to reciprocate.
And because recursive connections between association-clusters tend to reflect some ground truth about causal relationships in the territory, this tends to be highly effective as a mechanism for inference. But there must be edge-cases (though I can’t recall any atm...).
Imagining agentic behaviour in (/taking intentional stance wrt) individual brain-units is great for generating high-level hypotheses about mechanisms, but obviously misfires and don’t try this at home etc etc.

Emrik 18 Jun 2024 18:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Emrik’s Shortform
Bonus point: neuronal “voting power” is capped at around ~100Hz, so neurons “have an incentive” (ie, will be selected based on the extent to which they) vote for what related neurons are likely to vote for. It’s analogous to a winner-takes-all-election where you don’t want to waste your vote on third-party candidates who are unlikely to be competitive at the top. And when most voters also vote this way, it becomes Keynesian in the sense that you have to predict^[1] what other voters predict other voters will vote for, and the best candidates are those who seem the most like good Schelling-points.
That’s why global/conscious “narratives” are essential in the brain—they’re metabolically efficient Schelling-points.
1. ^
  Neuron-voters needn’t “make predictions” like human-voters do. It just needs to be the case that their stability is proportional to their ability to “act as if” they predicted other neurons’ predictions (and so on).

Emrik

Thoughts to ni­plav on lie-de­tec­tion, truth­fwl mechanisms, and wealth-inequality

My morning routine 🌤️

My bedtime checklist 💤

Thoughts to niplav on lie-detection, truthfwl mechanisms, and wealth-inequality