GDC3

Karma: 194

GDC3 15 Jun 2013 6:04 UTC
3 points
on: Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments—Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way!
Upvoted without reading for the trigger warning. Maybe I’ll read it later: I suppose if it hate the article I might change my vote, but probably not. Sometimes it’s in one’s best interests to be a single issue voter.

GDC3 19 May 2013 8:43 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Power of Pomodoros
Interesting. I’m familiar with the “This taks is too nebulous-what am I even doing?” but it isn’t a source of procrastination for me exactly. Usually it’s a cause of spending well over 25 minutes stuck in thought loops trying to figure out what to do, and what I actually need to do is talk it through with somebody or at least think out loud.

“A few minutes of browsing won’t matter” matches procrastination for me, but even your short comment suggests a different context for the quoted phrase than I experience. For me “A few minutes of browsing won’t matter,” isn’t part of the problem, it’s a symptom of it, or even an instinctive attempt to solve it. You are implying that thinking such things causes you to browse instead of starting the task. For me I say that in order to guilt myself into not starting a longer-more immersive fun activity, thus giving up on the task.

For me procrastination consists of cycles of (look at website-try to start task-attempt fails-stare at nothing until boredom requires me to seek a stimulus-seek stimulus in something like browsing where the attention chunks are smaller so I’ll be able to try again sooner-look at website...)

Is this not the usual phenomenon? To clarify “attempt fails”, what failing looks like is this, my mind seeks to give the command to do the first step of the task, but afterward I notice my muscles have not moved.

GDC3 15 May 2013 7:37 UTC
7 points
on: The Power of Pomodoros
I feel like this comes close to the definite proof that I should stop paying attention to articles about procrastination on less wrong, because you are all talking about a completely different problem than I have. (Plausible because I’m definitely neurologically weird.)

But just in case: can somebody explain to me how this isn’t completely circular? If I knew how to implement the instruction “Work on one thing for that 25 minutes, nothing else.” as an atomic action, I wouldn’t have a procrastination problem. I notice that I’m confused and I’m not sure that I know what the word “procrastination” commonly refers to anymore.

GDC3 14 Apr 2013 8:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Pay other people to go vegetarian for you?
I’m aware of the opposite problem and I try to avoid being desensitized too. But it seems to me that city people frequently actively lie to themselves and each other in order to be willing to eat meat. I’m willing to give examples if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

GDC3 12 Apr 2013 18:08 UTC
15 points
on: Pay other people to go vegetarian for you?
I avoid meat (not vegetarian, just eat as little as I conveniently can) because of what I and my friends call the Stuffed-Animal-Principle. The idea is that it’s bad utility function maintenance to allow stuffed animals to be abused. (Stanford burned teddy bears in the pre big game rally.) The idea is that stuffed animals are basically a technological superstimulus for empathy and you risk damage to your actual utility function by desensitizing yourself to that. (I don’t have actual studies on the specific fact, but it makes sense with things that are known.)

Actual animal suffering is far more upsetting to actually witness. Mostly our society avoids this problem by putting it out of mind and just enjoying the results. We also do this for many problems that affect humans allowing them to continue and I really don’t want to train my own ability and willingness to ignore suffering I’m complicit in just because it happens to not actually matter as much as it looks.

I have various friends who do meat limitation for this reason; one is even a full vegetarian. I have no idea how common it is though.

GDC3 10 Mar 2013 8:53 UTC
11 points
on: The Need for Human Friendliness
Related worry that I’ve been meaning to ask about for a while:

Given that is there is still plenty of controversy over which types of unusual human minds to consider “pathological” instead of just rare variants, how is MIRI planning to decide which ones are included in CEV? My skin in the game: I’m one of the Autistic Spectrum people who feel like “curing my autism” would make me into a different person who I don’t care about. I’m still transhumanist; I still want intelligence enhancements, external boosts to my executive function and sensory processing on demand, and the ability to override the nastiest of my brain chemistry. But even with all of that I would still know myself as very different from neurotypicals. I naturally see the world in different categories that most, and I don’t think in anything like words or a normal human language. Maybe more relevantly, I have a far higher tolerance—even a need—for sphexishness, than most people of comparable intelligence to me.

Fun theory for me would be a little different, and I think that there really are a lot of people who would consider what I did with eternity to be somewhat sad and pathetic, maybe even horrifying. I think it could be an empathic uncanny valley effect or just an actual basic drive people have, to make everybody be the same. I’m worried that this could be an actual terminal value for some people that would hold up under reflective equilibrium.

I’m not too freaked out because I think the consensus is that since Autistic people already exist and some are happy, we should have a right to continue to exist and even make more of ourselves. But I actually believe that if we didn’t exist it would be right to create us, and I worry that most neurotypicals extrapolated volition would not create all the other variations on human minds that should exist but don’t yet.

If it matters, up to $1000 for MIRI this year could be at stake in answering this concern. I say this in a blatant and open effort to incentivize Eliezer etc. to answering me. I hope that I’m not out of line for waving money around like this, because this really is a big part of my choice about whether FAI is good enough. I really want to give what I can to prevent existential threats, but I consider a singularity overly dominated by neurotypicals to be a shriek.

GDC3 6 Jan 2013 6:20 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Rationality Quotes January 2013
I put sometimes.

I believe all kinds of crazy stuff and question everything when I’m lying in bed trying to fall asleep, most commonly that death will be an active and specific nothing that I will exist to experience and be bored frightened and upset by forever. Something deep in my brain believes a very specific horrible cosmology as wacky and specific as any religion but not nearly as cheerful. When my faculties are weakened it feels as if I directly know it to be true and any attempt to rehearse my reasons for materialism feels like rationalizing.

I’m neither very mentally healthy nor very neurotypical, which may be part of why this happens.

GDC3 1 Dec 2012 2:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Playing the student: attitudes to learning as social roles
In my case the usual reason they’re demotivating is that I usually know that they think I can do it; they’re just spelling out their model of me. Usually the model of me is so bad that I’m led to further discount their opinion, but they’re signaling that they care which makes them more likely to be painfully disappointed in me. Basically those motivation talks are more than one kind of legitimate bad news. I don’t need a script to be upset by them, but sometimes scripts make me care more. Childhood is one big lesson that your purpose in life is to impress and entertain adults. It can be very hard to shake.

GDC3 4 Nov 2012 7:26 UTC
52 points
on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I took the survey and all the optional questions. I love answering multiple choice questions.

GDC3 13 Oct 2012 17:33 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
Mechanism is beside the point. Mechanism is just causal nodes in between. Having no mechanism just means there is a direct connection.

GDC3 13 Oct 2012 17:29 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Fabric of Real Things
It doesn’t rule it out. Unless you’re directly observing those epiphenominal nodes, Occam’s razor heavily decreases the likelihood of such models though, because they make the same predictions with more nodes.

GDC3 7 Oct 2012 20:41 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Benya’s comment on: We won’t be able to recognise the human Gödel sentence
You shouldn’t include things we know only by experience as part of our theoretical system, for the purpose of “the human Godel sentence.” At best learning a theorem from experience would add an axiom, but then our Godel sentence changes. So if we knew our Godel sentence it would become something else.

GDC3 7 Oct 2012 19:14 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Bruno_Coelho’s comment on: Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms
You’re right. I think the lesson we should take from all this complexity is to remember that the wording of a sentence is relevant to more than just it’s truth conditions. Language does a lot more than state facts and ask questions.

GDC3 7 Oct 2012 19:11 UTC
5 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms
As I understand it, the sky does let red-yellow light through. It scatters blue light and lets red light through relatively unchanged. So it looks red-yellow near the light source and blue everywhere else.

GDC3 7 Oct 2012 5:13 UTC
3 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms
When the sky is white, it’s not the sky; it’s clouds blocking the sky. When the sky is black it’s just too dark to see the sky. At least that was my intuition before I knew that the sky wasn’t some conventionally blue object. I guess its a question of word usage whether the projective meaning of “blue” which is something like “looks blue under good lighting conditions” should still be applied when it’s not caused by reflectance. Though it’s not blue from all directions is it?

GDC3 6 Oct 2012 18:52 UTC
35 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms
Specifically they’re different because of the pragmatic conversation rule that direct statements should be something your conversation partner will accept, in most normal conversations. You say “X” when you expect your conversation partner to say something like “oh cool, I didn’t know that.” You say “I believe X” when they may disagree and your arguments will come later or not at all. “It’s true that X” is more complicated; one example of use would be after the proposition X has already come up in conversation as a belief and you want to state it as a fact.

A: “I hear that lots of people are saying the sky is blue.” B: “The sky is blue.”

The above sounds weird. (Unless you are imagining it with emphasis on “is” which is another way to put emphasis on the truth of the proposition.) “The sky is blue” is being stated without signaling its relationship to the previous conversation so it sounds like new information; A will expect some new proposition and be briefly confused; it sounds like echolalia rather than an answer.

B: “The sky really is blue.

or

B: “It’s actually true that the sky is blue.”

sounds better in this context.
What links here?
- Vladimir_Nesov's comment on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms by Eliezer Yudkowsky (6 Oct 2012 20:35 UTC; 11 points)

GDC3 2 Oct 2012 6:08 UTC
4 points
in reply to: VKS’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2012
Relatedly, a mathematician friend said that he uses “obvious” to mean “there exists a very short proof of it.” He has been sometimes known to say things like “I think this is obvious but I’m not sure why yet.”

GDC3 15 Apr 2012 21:31 UTC
3 points
on: Decision Theories: A Semi-Formal Analysis, Part III
There’s a gap in the proof that X and Y cooperate. You may know how to close it, but if it’s possible it’s not obvious enough so the extra steps should be added to the article. More importantly, if it can’t be closed the theorem might not be true.

The gap: We hypothesize that statement S is provable in (system of X). Therefore X will Cooperate. This guarantees that T is true, by definition, but not that Y will prove that T is true. Presumable Y can recreate the proof of S being true, but it cannot conclude that X will cooperate unless it also can prove that X will prove it.

I cannot see how to resolve this without stepping out of a specific formal system, which would make Lob’s Theorem unusable.

Am I missing something?

GDC3 10 Apr 2012 17:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: pleeppleep’s comment on: Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World
I suppose you mean they have different positions. But if indistinguishable particles in quantum mechanics can freely switch places with each other whenever, and which is which has no meaning, then what argument do you have that the universe can even keep different versions of you apart itself?

Not very formal, but I’m trying to convey the idea that certain facts that seem important have no actual meaning in the ontology of quantum physics.

GDC3 9 Apr 2012 22:02 UTC
6 points
in reply to: pleeppleep’s comment on: Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World
I think you’re missing the part where “their points of view” are exactly the same. What would it mean to see more than one of them when they’re exactly the same. Are you picturing them lined up next to each other in your field of view so you can count them?

Similarly there is no “I just definitely died” feeling that we know of. (How would we know?) You shouldn’t picture “dying and then waking up in another universe.” You should picture “I experience passing out knowing I may die, but that there is a least one of me that probably doesn’t. So when I wake up it will turn out that I was one of them.”

Does this make more sense? I think the barrier to intuition is in just how indistinguishable,” indistinguishable” is. You can be a billion exact copies and you’ll never notice, because they’re exact.