Software engineering, parenting, cognition, meditation, other
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Gunnar_Zarncke
OK. I already mentioned that I’m preparing a longer post about it, but I didn’t brag about it:
Despite being left by my wife for a younger guy after 15 years and 4 children I have acted sensible, rational you might say, and bought a house, negotiated a fair marriage contract (separation of property), completed a much overdue freelance project and cared for the children a lot. I didn’t break. I didn’t hate. I didn’t run away. I think I succeeded in saving my sanity (salvaging instead of destroying emotions from the relationship), providing a dependable, caring and safe environment for the children now and in the future (the house is on the other side of the street). And get along well with my future ex-wife and her new partner and avoid alienation of her by family and friends.
Actually all of that didn’t happen in December but it is effectively done now. The children moved into the new house on Jan, 1st and all paperwork and such is done.
I have taken the survey. I like the new format.
I wondered what “processed meat” means exactly and looked it up in one of the studies:
“Red meat” was defined as unprocessed meat from beef, hamburgers, lamb, pork, or game and excluding poultry, fish, or egg; “processed meat” was defined as any meat preserved by smoking, curing, or salting or addition of chemical preservatives, such as bacon, salami, sausages, hot dogs, or processed deli or luncheon meats, and excluding fish or eggs; and “total meat” was defined as the total of these 2 categories.
I also looked up “resistance training,” but it is not clear exactly what is meant, and I have to assume that it is strength training.
I recommend adding this post to the boring advice repository.
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
-- Alfred Adler
ADDED: Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler
Quoted in: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939), ch. 5
Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories (1929)
: People in and adjacent to MIRI/CFAR manifest major mental health problems, significantly more often than the background rate.
I think this is true
My main complaint about this and the Leverage post is the lack of base-rate data. How many people develop mental health problems in a) normal companies, b) startups, c) small non-profits, d) cults/sects? So far, all I have seen are two cases. And in the startups I have worked at, I would also have been able to find mental health cases that could be tied to the company narrative. Humans being human narratives get woven. And the internet being the internet, some will get blown out of proportion. That doesn’t diminish the personal experience at all. I am updating only slightly on CFAR or MIRI. And basically not at all on “things look better from the outside than from the inside.”
- 19 Oct 2021 20:41 UTC; 358 points) 's comment on My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage) by (
Most comments show exactly one downvote without a clear pattern why. I’d guess that a single person downvoted all these short comments. Can it be that this user doesn’t know the custom of upvoting survey-takers?
ADDED 2014-10-25T16:20 UTC: The single downvotes disappeared.
ADDED 2014-10-26T21:10 UTC: The single downvotes reappeared again (at least for a lot of high scoring comments).
I’m really surprised by the clear logic of this. Lots of interesting corollaries follow:
Roles are an efficient optimization to use instead of acting dumb (provided you got trained in the right ones).
To train your chosen roles is a good idea.
Roles can be tuned to better match your needs.
It should be possible to look for missing roles covering interesting behavior patterns.
All of the above implies rational behavior can be trained.
The clear exposition makes this Main material although I wonder whether that applies to cross-posted material. I also wonder how to place this in the sequences context. Seems to be related to Teachable Rationality Skills and Rationality Dojo. It also reminds me of Geek Fu—which I did consider as rather humorous until now.
EDIT: Typos fixed.
I want to remind everybody how efficient molecular machinery is in terms of thermodynamics:
this molecule [RNA] operates quite near the limit of thermodynamic efficiency [7 kcal/mol] set by the way it is assembled [~10 kcal/mol].
and
these calculations also establish that the E. coli bacterium produces an amount of heat less than six times (220npep/42npep) as large as the absolute physical lower bound dictated by its growth rate, internal entropy production, and durability.
From an article Statistical Physics of Self-replication by Jeremy England
deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4818538That said I think that there may be many sweet spots for a combination of macroscopic and microscopic processes. Many industrial chemical processes are such combinations by providing very specialized baths of nutrients and substrates and combining efficient macroscopic flow and transport with microscopic chemical and organic reactions. But there may be more spots that allow for efficiently building up small-scale structures.
- Contra Yudkowsky on AI Doom by 24 Apr 2023 0:20 UTC; 110 points) (
- Contra Yudkowsky on Doom from Foom #2 by 27 Apr 2023 0:07 UTC; 101 points) (
- How did LW update p(doom) after LLMs blew up? by 22 Apr 2023 14:21 UTC; 24 points) (
- 24 Apr 2023 6:19 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Contra Yudkowsky on AI Doom by (
- 24 Apr 2024 0:28 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Contra Yudkowsky on AI Doom by (
The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.
Mark Twain
Actually I found this in The topology of Seemingly impossible functional programs which is using topological methods to ‘check’ infinitely many cases in finite time. Which might even be applicable to FAI research.
I have done both things with my boys.
My kids like sleeping in the living room—but often don’t clean up in the morning. I used a bond for that and it worked. In a family conference, we later decided on a ban to not sleep in the living room for a week if it is not cleaned up but that was not my preferred way.
I also often require a bond if the kids want to borrow money or something but e.g. have open dues.
I bet with them quite often and they bet among themselves—including nonequal odds. I win more often than not and they learned from that. I once did lose 50 EUR at 10:1 odds to my oldest son because I was very confident about one of our house rules but it turned out my wife had changed it shortly before. With the smaller boys, I require that they do the bet in front of an arbiter and I may limit the amount they bet.
We also play Bluff, Yahtzee, and other board games with dice and I guess that also helps with an understanding of probability.
Kind of related to that: A fun game is “random walks”: Talk a walk and at every corner throw a die and continue into the randomly chosen direction. Repeat as desired. Can lead to interesting places especially in parks.
Analysts do not achieve objective analysis by avoiding preconceptions; that would be ignorance or self-delusion. Objectivity is achieved by making basic assumptions and reasoning as explicit as possible so that they can be challenged by others and analysts can, themselves, examine their validity.
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer, Jr. page 10
This should at least be in Discussions. It is very valuable high level feedback about the value of LessWrong.
If you agree and if you want to avoid duplicating it you can remove the body of the text and replace it with a link to the Discussions post.
Judging from the votes and quality couldn’t this go to Main? At least with minimum further streamlining?
And if not why not?
I think you should make this explanation part of the article. It’s crucial.
This reminded me of a summary of the job of real estate developers by Scott Alexander:
I started the book with the question: what exactly do real estate developers do? … Why don’t you or I take out a $100 million loan from a bank, hire a company to build a $100 million skyscraper, and then rent it out for somewhat more than $100 million and become rich?
As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination. This often means blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated multi-step catch-22 like that. The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. The trick is to lie to the right people in the right order, so that by the time somebody checks to see whether they’ve been conned, you actually do have the signatures you told them that you had.
Now I wonder whether it is actually “blatant lies” or more like the pretend to pretend to develop the real estate.
I completed the full survey.
Blue whales are exploring a gigantic three-dimensional space: All the worlds oceans:
And in contrast to the maps of birds, this map is not mostly empty. Their food is distributed in three dimensions—and has dynamically changing patterns.
I would predict that the brain regions of a whale responsible for spatiotemporal learning and memory are a big part of their encephalization.
On page 8 at the end of section 4.1:
Due to the need to iterate the vs until convergence, the predictive coding network had roughly a 100x greater computational cost than the backprop network.
This seems to imply that artificial NNs are 100x more computationally efficient (at the cost of not being able to grow and probably lower fault tolerance etc.). Still, I’m updating to simulating a brain requiring much less CPU than the neurons in the brain would indicate.
- 6 Apr 2021 17:14 UTC; 29 points) 's comment on Predictive Coding has been Unified with Backpropagation by (
- Estimating Brain-Equivalent Compute from Image Recognition Algorithms by 27 Feb 2022 2:45 UTC; 14 points) (
- 12 Oct 2021 10:32 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on NVIDIA and Microsoft releases 530B parameter transformer model, Megatron-Turing NLG by (
- 4 Jan 2022 20:38 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Self-Organised Neural Networks: A simple, natural and efficient way to intelligence by (
We need more posts like this that lay out how different people deal with the pain space.
There are at least four quadrants (I’m in the lower middle I guess):
Low pain High pain Low happiness Withdrawn depressed people The example from from Pain is not the Unit of Effort where you signal pain High happiness Normies lsusr is here I guess
Took it.
EDIT: I was surprised to find the BEM test in it. I took it some time ago and it resulted in 65-70% F and 50-60% M (as far as I can see largely because of my strong and caring relationship to my children).
I didn’t determine my digit-ratio during the test but did right now. I arrive at totally different values (between 0.91 and 1.05) depending and hand and exact points and the copier print reading gives still different values. My best guess is that it is somewhere around 0.96.