Old man 1: Life is one trouble after another. I’d be better off dead, better yet, I wish I was never born
Old man 2: True, true, but who has such luck ?.. maybe one in a thousand.
My blog: https://blog.cerebralab.com
I’m also building an open source generic ML library: https://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb & https://github.com/mindsdb/lightwood …. which I guess might be of interest to some people here
Ah, ok, maybe I was discussing the wrong thing then.
I think sleeping 4-6 hours on some days ought to be perfectly fine, even 0, I’d just argue that keeping the mean around 7-9 is probably ideal for most (but again, low confidence, think it boils down to personalized medicine).
The theory I heard postulated (by the guy that used to record the ssc podcast) is that once people start thinking “better” in reductionist frameworks they fail to account non quantifiable metrics (e.g. death is quantifiable in qaly, being more isolated isn’t)
The rest of your arguments (bpm, cortisol..) apply fully to sports as well I believe.
I don’t think so. BPM is slower when one practices sports (see athletes heart), in that it will be higher during the activity itself, but mean BPM during the day and especially at night is lower.
Personally I’ve observed this correlation as well and it seems to be causal~ish, i.e I can do 3 days on / 3 days off physical activity and notice decreased resting & sleeping heart rate on the 2nd day of activity up until the 2nd day of inactivity after which it picks back up.
With cortisol, the mechanism I’m aware of is the same, i.e. exercising increases cortisol afterwards but decreases the baseline. Though here I’m not 100% sure.
This might not hold for the very extreme cases though (strongmen, ultra-marathon runners, etc). Since then you’re basically under physical stress for most of the day instead of a few minutes or hours.
re: not encountering info re dangers of oversleep: do you want to comment on the bit about sleep deprivation therapy? Isn’t this rather compelling evidence of sleep directly causing bad mood?
Sleep deprivation, I’d assume, would work through cortisol and adrenaline, which do give a “better than awfully depressed mood” but can’t build up to great moods and aren’t sustainable (at least if I am to trust models ala the one championed by Sapolsky about the effects of cortisol).
Granted, I think it depends, and afaik most people don’t feel the need to sleep more than 8-9 hours. The ones I know that “sleep” a lot tend to just hang around in a half-comatosed state after overeating or while procrastinating. I think it becomes an issue of “actual sleep” vs “waking up every 30 minutes, checking phone, remembering life is hard and trying to sleep again | rinse and repeat 2 to 8 times”.
I’d actually find it interesting to study “heavy sleepers” in a sleep lab or with a semi-capable portable EEG (even just 2-4 electrodes should be enough, I guess?) and see if what they do is actually “sleep” past the 9 hour mark. But I’m unaware of any such studies.
But I have low confidence in all of these claims and I personally dislike epidemiological evidence, I think that there’s a horrible practice of people trying to “”“control””” shitty experiments with made-up statistics models that come with impossible assumptions built-in. My main decisions about sleep come from pulse-oximeter based monitoring and correlating that with how I feel plus other biomarkers (planning to upgrade to an openbci based eeg soon, been holding out for a freeEEG32 for a while, but I see only radio silence around that). So ultimately the side I fall on is that I dislike the evidence on way or another and think that, much like anything that uses epidemiology as it’s almost sole source of evidence, you could just scrap the whole thing in favour of a personalized goal-oriented approach.
Oh gosh, you’re right… both here and on my blog. Sometimes things go wrong during translation to markdown and I don’t even notice. Thanks for pointing it out, corrected.
The “think” here is more prosaic, as in, it’s just not my intuition that this is the case and I think that applies for most other people based on the memeplexes I see circulating out there.
As for why my intuition is that I can boil it down to, say I said in the post: Everyone told me so and everyone warned me about the effects of not sleeping but not vice versa.
Is this correct if analyzed on a rational basis?
I don’t know, it’s not relevant as far as the post is concerned.
From personal experience I know that for myself I associate shorter sleep with:
increase cortisol (urine, so arguable quality)
Increased time getting into ketosis (and overall lower ketone+glucose balance, i.e. given an a*G + b*BhB = y where y is the number at which I feel ok and seems in-line with what epidemiology would recommend as optimal glucose levels for lifespan | I will tend to fall constantly bellow y given lack of sleep, which manifests as being tired and sometimes feeling lightheaded and being able to walk, lift and swim less … hopefully that makes sense? I’m not sure how mainstream of a nutrition framework this is )
increased heart rate (significant, ~9bpm controlling~ish for effort and, ~7bpm o.o at night), *
feeling a bit off and feeling time passes faster.
But that’s correlated, not causal, e.g. if I smoke or vape during a day I’m likely to sleep less that night, so is smoking/vaping fucking my body or is lack of sleep or is the distinction even possible given the inferential capabilities of biology in the next 500+years? I don’t know
More broadly I know that looking back to months with plenty of sleep I feel much better than when i sleep less. But maybe that’s because I sleep less overall when I’m feeling down and also feel less happy (by definition) and am less productive, and maybe low sleep is actually a mechanism against feeling even worst.
Overall I assume most people notice these correlations, though probably less in-depth, based on how commonly people seem to complain about bad sleep, needing to get more sleep… etc and how rarely the opposite is true.
That is the best example I had of how one could, e.g, disagree with a scientific field by just erring on scepticism rather than taking the opposite view.
***
To answer your critique of that point, though again, I think it bares no or little relation to the article itself:
The “predictions” by which the theory is judges here are just as fuzzy and inferentially distant.
I am not a cosmologist, what I’ve read regrading cosmology have been mainly papers around unsupervised and semi-supervised clustering on noisy data, incidental evidence from those has made me doubt the complex ontologies proposed by cosmologists, given the seemingly huge degree of error acceptable in the process of “cleaning” data.
There are many examples of people fooling themselves into making experiments to confirm a theory and “correcting” or discarding results that don’t confirm it (see e.g. phlogiston, mass of the electron, the pushback against proton gradients as a fundamental mechanism of cell energy production, vitalism-confirming experiments, roman takes on gravity)
One way science can be guarded against modelling an idealized reality that no longer is related to the real world is by making something “obviously” real (e.g. electric lightbulb, nuclear bomb, vacuum engines).
Focusing on real-world problem also allows for different types of skin-in-the-game, i.e. going against the consensus for profit, even if you think the consensus is corrupt.
Cosmology is a field that requires dozens of years to “get into”, it has no practical applications that validate it’s theories, it’s only validation comes from observational evidence using data that is supposed to describe objects that are, again, a huge inferential distance away in both time/space and SNR… data which is heavily cleaned based on models created and validated by cosmology.
So I tend to err on the side of “bullshit” provided lack of relevant predictions that can be validate by literally anyone other than a cosmologist or a theoretical physicist, could be someone that’s proveably good in high energy physics validating an anomaly (e.g. gravitational anomaly causing a laser to behave weird around the time it was predicted that two black holes would be validated).
Hopefully this completes the picture to exhibit my point better.,
And what I’m saying is that I agree. As in, I’m not arguing that there’s no reason for the slope to be the way that is, I’d think most slopes are asymmetric exactly because of very real asymmetric risks/rewards they map to.
yes, that’s what I had intended, thanks for correcting that.
Isn’t that kind of the point I’m making?
That most people want to sleep as much as they can and sleep hacking is the controversial choice, but nobody will bat an eyelid if you want to try sleeping more than average.
That was not part of the original problem.
It is part of the problem though, it’s actually THE problem here.
You can use normal language to describe anything that would be of use to me, anything relevant about the world that I do not understand, in some cases (e.g. an invention) real-world examples would also be required, but in others (e.g. a theory), words, almost by definition ought to be enough.
But anyway, as far as I can see we’re probably in part talking past each other, not due to ill intention, and I’m not exactly sure how, but I was recently quite immersed reading the comment chains here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mELQFMi9egPn5EAjK/my-attempt-to-explain-looking-insight-meditation-and && https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh, and it seems like we’re probably talking past each other in very similar ways.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
I will note that the 10,000 years-old thing is hardly ruled out by “history”, more so by geology or physics, but point taken, even very little data and bad models of reality can lead to ruling out a lot of things with very high certainty.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
This is however the kind of area where I always find history doesn’t provide enough evidence, which is not to say this would help my point or harm yours. Just to say that I don’t have enough certainty that statements like the above have any meaning, and in order to claim what I’d have wanted (what I was asking the question about) I would have to make a similar claim regarding history.
In brief I’d want to argue with the above statement by pointing out:
Ongoing process since the ancient Greeks, with some interruptions. But most of the “important stuff” was figured out a long time ago (I’m fine living with Greek architecture, crop selection, heating, medicine and even logic and mathematics).
“Progress” bringing about issues that we solve and call “progress”, i.e. smallpox and the bubonic plague up until we “progressed” to cities that could make them problematic. On the whole there’s no indication lifespan or happiness has greatly increased, the increases in lifespan exist, but once you take away “locked up in a nursing home” as “life” and exclude “death of kids <1 year” (or, alternatively, if you want to claim kids <1 year are as precious as a fully developed conscious human, once you include abortions into our own death statistics)… we haven’t made a lot of “progress” really.
A “cause” being attributed to the burst of technology in some niches in the 20th century, instead of it just being viewed as “random chance”, i.e. the random chance of making the correct 2 or 3 breakthroughs at the same time.
And those 3 points are completely different threads that would dismantle the idea you present, but I’m just bringing them up as potential threads that would dismantle your idea. Overall I hold very little faith in them besides (3), I think your view of history is more correct. But there’s no experiment I can run to find out, no way I can collect further data, nothing stopping me from overfitting a model to agree with some subconscious bias I have.
In day to day life, if I believe something (e.g. neural networks are the best abstractions for generic machine learning) and I’m face with an issue (e.g. loads of customers are getting bad accuracy from my NN based solution) I can at least hope to be open minded enough to try other things and see that I might have been wrong (e.g. gradient tree boosting might be a better abstraction than NNs in many cases) or, failing to find a better working hypothesis that provides experimental evidence, I can know I don’t know (e.g. go bankrupt and never get investor money again because I squanderd it away).
With the study of history I don’t see how I can go through that process, I feel a siren call that says “I like this model of the world”, and I can fit historical evidence to it without much issue. And I have no way to properly weighting the evidence and ultimately no experimental proof that could increase or decrease my confidence in a significant way. No “skin in the game”, besides wanting to get a warm fuzzy feeling from my historical models.
But again, I think this is not to say that certain hyptohesis (e.g. the Greek invented a vaccum based steam engine) can’t be certainly discounted, and I think that in of itself can be quite useful, you are correct there.
We’ve seen drastic differences between different societies and different species in this respect, so there clearly is some kind of property here
Is there?
Writing, agriculture, animal husbandry, similar styles of architecture and most modern inventions from flight to nuclear energy to antibiotics seem to have been developed in a convergent way given some environmental factors.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias. So I guess it may be that there’s no way to actually argue against or for either of the positions here, now that I think about it.
So thanks for your answer, it cleared a few things up for me, I think, when constructing this reply.
You can send DNA sequences to businesses right now that will manufacture the proteins that those sequences encode
Have you ever tried this ? I have, it comes with loads of *s
Developing a good theory of proteins seems pretty much a pure-Reason problem
Under the assumption that we know all there is about proteins, which I’ve seen no claims of made by anyone. Current knowledge is limited and in-vitro, and doesn’t generalize to “weird” families of proteins”.
“Protein-based nanotechnology” requires:
weird proteins with properties not encountered yet
complex in-vivo behavior, i.e. where we still have no clue about basically anything, since you can’t crystalize a protein to tell how it’s folding, those nice animation you saw on youtube, I’m afraid, are pure speculation
So no, not really, you can maybe get a tomato to be a bit spicy, I saw a stream where one of the most intelligent and applied biology-focused polymath I ever saw (Though Emporium) tried to figure out if there was a theoretical way to do it and gave up after 30 minutes.
You can get stuff to glow, that too, and it can be really useful, but we’ve been doing that for 200+ years.
You can make money by simply choosing a good product on Alibaba, making a website that appeals to people, using good marketing tactics and drop-shipping, no need for any physical interaction. The only thing you need is a good theory of consumer psychology. That seems like an almost-pure-Reason problem.
It seems completely obvious to me that reason is by far the dominant bottleneck in obtaining control over the material world.
I think the thing you fail to understand here is randomness, chance.
You think that “Ok, this requires little physical labour, so 100% of it is thinking” but you fail to grasp even the possibility that there could be things where there is not enough information for reason to be useful, or even worst, that almost everything falls into that category.
If I chose 1,000,000 random products from alibab and resell them on amazon at 3x, I’m bound to hit gold.
But if I hit gold with 1⁄100 products, I’m still, on the whole, losing 98% of my investment.
You think “but I know a guy that sold X and he chose X based on reason and he made 3x his money back”
And yes, yes you might, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of another 99 guys you don’t know of that tried the same thing and lost because they usually don’t make internet videos telling you about it.
Granted, I’m being coy here, realistically the way e.g. reselling works is on a “huge risk of collapse” model (most things make back 1.1x but you’re always 1x deep into the thing you are buying not coming through, not being in demand or otherwise not facilitating the further sale), but the above model is easier to understand.
And again, the important thing here is that “will X resell on amazon” can be something that is literally impossible to figure out without buying “X” and trying to sell it on amazon.
And “will 10X resell on amazon” and “will 100X resell on amazon” are, similarly, no the same question, there’s some similarity between them, but figuring out how that number before “X” scales might in itself only be determinable by experiments.
***
Then again, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in any of those fields, but neither are you, and the thing that I don’t get is why you are so certain that “reason” is the main bottleneck when in any given field, the actual experts seem to be clamoring for more experiments, more, better labs… and smart grad students go for a dime a dozen.
Or, forget the idea of consensus, who’s to say what the consensus is. But why assume you can see the bottleneck at all? Why not think “I have no idea what the bottleneck is”? To be perfectly fair, if you queried me for long enough, that’s probably the answer I’d give.
The perspective you expose paints a world that makes no sense, where a deep conspiracy has to be at play for the most intelligent people not to have taken over the world.
I believe this echos out my thoughts perfectly, I might quote it in full if I ever do get around to reviving that draft.
The bit about “perfect” as not giving slack for development, I think, could be used even in the single individual scenario if you assume any given “ideal” action as lower chance of discovering something potential useful than a “mistake”. I.e. adding:
Actions have unintended and unknown consequences that reveal an unknown landscape of possibilities
Actions have some % chance of being “optimal”, but one can never be 100% certain they are so, just weigh them as having a higher or lower chance of being so
“optimal” is a shifting goal-post and every action will potentially shift it
I think the “tinkerer” example is interesting, but even that assumes “optimal” to be goals dictates by natural-selection, and as per the sperm bank example, nobody care about those goals per-say, their subconscious machinery and the society they live in “cares”. So maybe a complementary individual-focused example would be a world in which inactivity is equivalent to the happiest state possible (i.e. optimal for the individual) or at least some form of action that does not lend to itself or something similar to it’s host being propagated through time.
This, I assume, you’d base on a “hasn’t happened before, no other animal or thing similar to us is doing it as far as we know, so it’s improbable we will be able to do it” type assumption? Or something different?
I don’t necessarily think you have to take the “AI” example for the point to make sense though.
I think “reasoning your way to a distant inference”, as a human, is probably a far less controversial example that could be used here. In that most people here seem to assume there are ways to make distant inferences (e.g. about the capabilities of computers in the far off future), which historically seems fairly far fetched, it almost never happens when it does it is celebrated, but the success rate seems fairly small and there doesn’t seem to be a clear formula for it that works.
The point of focusing on AI Alignment isn’t that it’s an efficient way to discover new technology but that it’s a way that makes it less likely that humanity will develop technology that destroys humanity.
Is “proper alignment” not a feature of an AI system, i.e. something that has to be /invented/discovered/built/?
This sound like semantics vis-a-vis the potential stance I was referring to above.
The aliens seem to have also included with their boon:
Cheap and fast eec GPU RAM with minute electricity consumptions
A space time disruptor that allows you to have CMOS transistors smaller than electrons to serve as the L1&L2
A way of getting rid of electron tunneling at a very small scale
12 OOMs better SSDs and fiber optic connections and cures for the host of physical limitations plaguing mere possibility of those 2.