Gust

Karma: 172

Gust 21 Apr 2026 11:56 UTC
3 points
3
in reply to: XelaP’s comment on: Quality Matters Most When Stakes are Highest
I think safety standards (in the sense of preventing experiments from being ran on the basis of potential adverse effects) are very different from scientific research standards. The first wants to limit bad effects of the act of research, the second wants to ensure the things you learn and communicate actually approximate truth.
If you run a study with bad methodology, your conclusions are unreliable, and no amount of arguing tradeoffs will make them reliable

Gust 25 Jan 2026 13:14 UTC
1 point
0
on: Gust’s Shortform
It’s been so long since I wrote anything.
I work from home. I don’t love it—I feel bad at the end of the day unless I spend some time outside the house. I usually try to make time to go out for coffee after lunch or in the morning. Sometimes I work while I am there, sometimes it’s more about escaping from work for a few hours.
I have 4 places that are usually on the cards:
The big chain coffee place
This is closest to home, a 10 minute walk. Their flat white is ok. The ambiance is nice and they have some reasonable cake slices. The wi-fi is, surprisingly, crap.
I rarely go there these days. One reason is my wife disagrees with me about the ambiance being nice. The wi-fi being crap also blocks me from working from there properly. Also the other places are mostly better.
The small chain bakery place
This is just a little further away, the difference barely matters. Their flat white is, erm, not terrible. They have one or two eats that I like, including savory options that can pass for lunch. There’s usually plenty of seats available. The wi-fi is good.
I don’t love the ambiance. It’s one big open room. Close to lunch time it gets very noisy with people and kids and babies. Nothing that decent ANC headphones can’t handle, though.
This is the most practical option if I want to actually get work done away from home. Get there, grab a snack and coffee, put on the headphones, get focused. I think this is also what pushes me away from this place when I don’t want to focus on work. Really, if I wanted to stay inside my headphones I would have stayed inside my home.
It’s good, it’s practical, and I feel absolutely no emotional pull to go there.
The café at the bookstore
What you have to know is I was a bookstore kid. My family would go to the mall and there was this giant bookstore and I’d read entire books there. That bookstore had a café which was the family headquarters at the mall. Each one of us might go elsewhere to browse or buy or stretch our legs, but at least one of us had to stay so we did not lose our table for the day. And gladly I’d stay.
The bookstore where I live now is a tiny one. It’s a big chain store, but it has its charm. And it has a small café on the first floor.
This is across the square from the bakery place, so basically the same distance from where I live.
A few tables, not too many. I can usually grab one by the window, which is nice. You can see the people walking outside to my left, and I can also see the books on display if I look to the right. Decent flat white. Some tea options that, I’m told, are very good. Good cake.
Sadly, no savory snacks to my liking, so if I go there in the morning I end up leaving for lunch. Once I do that, it feels a bit weird to come back to the same café after lunch. I don’t know why.
The lady in charge knows me by now. She does not know my name—she did not ask, I have not volunteered. I haven’t yet figured out how the British learn peoples’ names, since they never ask. In any case, she knows my face and knows I order the flat white and sit by the window.
I like it there.
The good coffee place
Another thing you need to know is I don’t really like flat whites. I mean, they are ok, you make some espresso, then you add some milk and it hides the fact that your espresso was not that good. Most espresso is not that good, so yeah.
What I really like is filter coffee. Beautiful brown-red, the right amount of sweet and acid, a hint of bitter. And for some reason it tastes better if someone else makes it.
The good coffee place is some 10 minutes further away after I walk past the bakery. It’s the only good coffee place in the entire town. I go there several times a week.
The baristas all recognize me; it’s possible some of them remember my name, which I mentioned once while talking to another regular customer. There are quite a few regulars and we politely nod to each other. Their dogs know me and my wife by now.
Alas, the eats.
Seriously, I don’t know where they get those sad cakes. Thankfully they now have cinnamon rolls, edible, ⁶⁄₁₀.
They have 2 (two) good sandwich options. These are pretty large, I get them when I go there in the morning and want to stay over lunch. It’s a good lunch. They don’t quite go well with coffee, though. And if I just want a small savory snack, no luck.
Besides the food, there’s another alas: it closes down at 3pm.
SERIOUSLY
3PM
WHY
(The bookstore café closes at 5pm, the other two at 6pm.)
In a sense this keeps the purity of the good coffee experience. It lasts maybe 2 hours tops, and is focused on the coffee. If I go in the morning: I drink the coffee, I maybe do some work on my laptop, and soon I leave for lunch. If I go after lunch: I drink the coffee, I maybe do some work on my laptop, and soon I leave because they are closing down.
Screw that. I wish they had better cakes and other snacks and stayed open until 8pm. They would get even more money from me and I’d be happy about it.
Conclusion
There is no conclusion. I just wanted to write.

Gust 19 Dec 2019 13:24 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Book Recommendations for social skill development?
A more charitable interpretation is that they are trying to assume less, going a little more meta and explaining the general problem, instead of focusing on specifics that they thing are important, but might not really be.
A failure mode when people don’t try to do this is the user that asks a software developer to “just add a button that allows me to autofill this form”, when maybe there’s an automation that renders the form totally unnecessary.

Gust 11 Aug 2018 16:56 UTC
3 points
0
on: São Paulo SSC Meetup
Hi, I’m the organizer. If you’re in São Paulo or nearby, please show up! We’ll have an introduction to rationality for newcomers, and talk about Systems 1 and 2, Units of Exchange and Goal Factoring.

You can get more details on the Meetup.com event https://www.meetup.com/pt-BR/Racionalidade-em-Sao-Paulo/events/253667078/ or the Facebook event https://www.facebook.com/events/255536928394025/

Gust 26 Jun 2018 14:01 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Problem Solving with Mazes and Crayon
There’s this http://miegakure.com/ in development for several years now

Gust 31 Oct 2017 18:32 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Interactive model knob-turning
What do you mean, in this context?

Gust 29 Mar 2017 11:06 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: 5 Project Hufflepuff Suggestions for the Rationality Community
I follow several programming newsletters, and I don’t have context to fully understand and appreciate most links they share (although I usually have a general idea about what they are talking about). It’s still very valuable to me find out about new stuff in the field.

I’d patreon a few dollars for something like this.

Gust 8 Nov 2015 11:18 UTC
0 points
0
on: Meetup : LessWrong Sao Paulo monthly meetup
Going!

Gust 21 Sep 2015 19:22 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gleb_Tsipursky’s comment on: Ideas for rationality slogans?
Second one!

Gust 31 Aug 2015 16:25 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Predict—“Log your predictions” app
Thanks! I’ll look into adding tags and timeframes. I’m not sure how to do that without the layout getting too crowded.

Gust 26 Aug 2015 17:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Bobertron’s comment on: Predict—“Log your predictions” app
Check the link below, v0.2. Should be working now!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/59redws46ncdiax/predict_v0.2.apk?dl=0

Gust 25 Aug 2015 0:40 UTC
3 points
0
on: The virtual AI within its virtual world
You mean, instead of programming an AI in a real life computer and showing it a “Game of Life” table to optimize, you could build a turing machine inside a Game of Life table, program the AI inside this machine, and let it optimize the table in which it is? Makes sense.

Gust 24 Aug 2015 12:27 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Bobertron’s comment on: Predict—“Log your predictions” app
This is weird. I’ll test to see if I can reproduce and report back (hopefully with a fix).

Gust 18 Aug 2015 14:41 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: dutchie’s comment on: Predict—“Log your predictions” app
Thanks!
- I’m not getting the flickering here… are you on a low-end device? Which version of android are you on?
- No difference at all. I just thought it would make sense to phrase the predictions in the form of questions and answers—so you could e.g. pick a question from a pre-made list and just choose your answer.
- Good to know, I thought “long press to edit” was a common enough pattern that everybody would discover it.

Gust 18 Aug 2015 4:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Predict—“Log your predictions” app
I’m not sure I get what kind of roulette you mean… something like a ring pie chart?

I thought of using a target, but I’m not sure if that would be much more effective than the sliding bar.

Gust 14 Aug 2015 12:21 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Rationality Reading Group: Part G: Against Rationalization
Good point!

Gust 13 Aug 2015 14:43 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Gram_Stone’s comment on: Rationality Reading Group: Part G: Against Rationalization
The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with. That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”

Gust 7 Aug 2015 4:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Building Phenomenological Bridges
I’m sad the original FB posts were deleted. Now I can never show my kids the occasion where Eliezer endorsed a comment of mine =(

Gust 7 Aug 2015 4:01 UTC
0 points
0
on: Building Phenomenological Bridges
Brain dump of a quick idea:

A sufficiently complex bridge law might say that the agent is actually a rock which, through some bizarre arbitrary encoding, encodes a computation[1]. Meanwhile the actual agent is somewhere else. Hopefully the agent has some adequate Occamian prior and he never assigns this hypothesis any relevance because of the high complexity of the encoding code.

In idea-space, though, there is a computation which is encoded by a rock using a complex arbitrary encoding, which, by virtue of having a weird prior, concludes that it actually is that rock, and to whom them breaking of the rock would mean death. We usually regard this computation as irrelevant for moral purposes—only computations corresponding to “natural” interpretations of physical phenomena count. But this distinction between natural and arbitrary criterions of interpretation seems, well, arbitrary.

We regard a person’s body as “executing” the computation that is a person that thinks she is in that body. But we do not regard the rock as actually “executing” the computation that is a weird agent that thinks it’s the computation encoded by the rock (through some arbitrary encoding).

Why?

The pragmatic reason is obvious: you can’t do anything to help the rock-computation in anyway, and whatever you do, you’d be lowering utility for some other ideal computation.

But maybe the kind of reasoning the rock-computation has to make to keep seeing itself as the rock is relevant.

A rock-as-computation hypothesis (I am this rock in this universe = my phenomenological experiences correspond to the states os atoms in several points of this rock as translated by this [insert very long bridge law, full of specifics] bridge law) is doomed to fail at the few next steps in the computation. Because the bridge law is so ad hoc, it won’t correctly predict the next phenomena perceived by the computation (in the ideal or real world where it actually executes). So if the rock-computation does induction at all, it will have to change the bridge law, and give up on being that rock.

In other words, if we built a robot with a prior that privileges the bridge law hypothesis that it’s a computation encoded in a rcok though some bizarre encoding, it would have to abandon that hypothesis very very soon. And, as phenomelogical data came in, it would approach the correct hypothesis that it’s the robot. Unless it’s doing some kind of privileged-hypothesis anti-induction where it keeps adopting increasingly complex bridge laws to keep believing it is that one rock.

So, proposal: a substrate is regarded to embody a computation-agent if that computation-agent is one that, by doing induction in the same sense we do to find out about ourselves, will eventually arrive at the correct bridge law that it is being executed in said substrate.

--

[1] Rock example is from DRESCHER, Gary, Good and Real, 2006, p. 55.

Gust 31 Jul 2015 18:28 UTC
5 points
0
on: The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine

The ULH suggests that most everything that defines the human mind is cognitive software rather than hardware: the adult mind (in terms of algorithmic information) is 99.999% a cultural/memetic construct.

I think a distinction worth tracing here is the diferrence between “learning” in the neural-net-sense and “learning” in the human pedagogical/psychological sense.

The “learning” done by a piece of cortex becoming a visual cortex after receiving neural impulses from the eye isn’t something you can override by teaching a person (in the usual sense o the word “teaching”) - you’d need to rewire their brain. I don’t think you can call it cultural/memetic because this neural learning does not (seem to) occur through the mechanism(s) that deals with concepts, ideas and feelings, which is involved in learning a language or a social custom or a scientific theory.

In the same way, maybe the availability heuristic isn’t genetically coded, but is learned through the type of data certain parts of the brain have to work with. That would mean you could fix it through some input rewiring during gestation, but doesn’t mean you can change it through a new human education system—it may be too low level, like a generic part of the cortex becoming the visual cortex. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t say it’s a cultural/memetic construct (although it is an environmental construct).

Gust

The big chain coffee place

The small chain bakery place

The café at the bookstore

The good coffee place

Conclusion