I would not guess this. I would guess instead that the majority of the population has a few “symptoms”. Probably we’re in a moderate dimensional space, e.g. 12, and there is a large cluster of people near one end of all 12 spectrums (no/few symptoms), and another, smaller cluster near the other end of all 12 spectrums (many/severe symptoms) but even though we see those two clusters it’s far more common to see “0% on 10, 20% on 1, 80% on 1″ than “0% on all”. See curse of dimensionality, probability concentrating in a shell around the individual dimension modes, etc.
GuySrinivasan
Karma: 2,741
i would hate pity answers like “not everyone needs to be smart”
the great majority of people who aren’t “smart” also aren’t “stupid”
and if you understood that without having to think about it much, I’m gonna guess you’re one of the great majority
that wouldn’t mean you’re automatically “not stupid” enough to accomplish whatever you want to be “not stupid” enough to accomplish, of course, and trying to increase your cognitive capacity can still be good and helpful and etc, but if you are accidentally thinking “anyone scoring under about 108 on an IQ test is stupid”, then managing to discard that bias might be helpful in its own right
One of the most valuable things I’ve contributed to my workplace is the institution of a set of 3 lightning talks every two weeks. Our data science team is about 30 people and we have a special Slack react that indicates “I want to hear about this in a lightning talk” and the organization is thus (usually) as easy as searching for all posts/comments with the react without the “I’ve already processed this lightning talk request”, DMing the relevant person, and slotting them into the queue.
I wonder if there’s some mutation of this plan that would be valuable for LW. Maybe even to create Dialogues? The really valuable part of the tech is that anyone can look at a snippet that someone else wrote, realize they think they’d like to hear more on that and (thus) probably a lot of people would, and add it to an organizer’s todo list with very little effort.
I would participate. Likely as A, but I’m fine with B if there are people worse-enough. I’m 1100 on chess.com, playing occasional 10 minute games for fun. Tend to be available Th/Fr/Sa/Su evenings Pacific, fine with very long durations.
Yeah I don’t know how much time any of these would take compared to what was already done. Like is this 20% more work, or 100% more, or 500% more?
But good point: I listened to about a quarter, upped the speed to 1.5x, and stopped after about a half. When I decided to write feedback, I also decided I should listen to the rest, and did, but would not have otherwise. And, oddly enough, I think I may have been more likely to listen to the whole thing if I didn’t have visuals, because I would have played it while gardening or whatever. :D
Did you previously know that
these things are quite common—if you just google for severance package standard terms, you’ll find non-disparagement clauses in them
? I mean I agree(d, for a long time prior to any of all this) that these clauses are terrible for the ecosystem. But it feels like this should be like a vegan learning their associate eats meat and has just noticed that maybe that’s problematic?
I think this is how your mind should have changed:
large update that companies in general are antagonists on a personal level (if you didn’t already know this)
small update that Wave is bad to work with, insofar as it’s a company, mostly screened off by other info you have about it
very small update that Lincoln is bad to work with
with a huge update that they are incredibly good to work with on this specific dimension if “does make me think about whether some changes should be made” results in changes way before the wider ecosystem implements them
moderate update that Lincoln isn’t actively prioritizing noticing and rooting out all bad epistemic practice, among the many things they could be prioritizing, when it goes against “common wisdom” and feels costly, which means if you know of other common wisdom things you think are bad, maybe they implement those
Things I think would have improved this a lot, for me:
a visual indicator of who was “speaking”; this could be as simple as a light gray box around the “speaker”
significantly larger “inflection” in the voice. More dynamic range. More variance in loudness and pitch. I don’t know how easy or hard this is to tune with the tools used, but the voices all felt much flatter than my brain wanted them to sound
more visual going on in general; a scrolling transcipt on the right, maybe
It depends.
Chance of a bet paying out? Value them the same.
Amount of information you gained, where you value transferring that learning to other questions, designs, etc? 90% --> 100% is way better.
In a domain where you know you have plenty of uncertainty? 90% --> 100% is a huge red flag that something just went very wrong. ;)
(Note that there are people who do not enjoy board games. Actively do not enjoy. Dislike, even. This is fine—not every meetup appeals to every person. But also beware of treating these people as if they are just an ignorant shell around an inner person who would definitely enjoy board games if only they [x]. Some of them really are, some really aren’t. Yes, even though “board games” is such a broad category. Yes, even though they seem to enjoy [other thing] which seems so similar. Etc.)
The newest versions come with ways to generate random rules. This brings the floor of the experience way up but also brings the ceiling down somewhat. “Oops I guess the rule I made was terrible” was a big problem with the original and newcomers.
I do my best to minimize switches from work to non-work “modes”. When I am done with work for the day, I usually give myself a half hour to chill before switching to non-work.
I do not feel a need to talk about work. But some work anecdotes are still good for personal life, of course, and I do not censor them.
I actually feel… more intensely not like myself now, at work, than I used to, in some sense, because back in the major depression days I tried to feel as little as possible. Now I notice a lot more often when I’m doing things that “aren’t me”. So like previously I was closer to Gordon’s mask description (in fact I described my fake-self as my “shell”) and there was no active tension between shell-actions and identity, just passive drain from using the shell. Whereas now it feels a lot more like “I am always me, but compromise that in certain ways at work”.
One of the most valuable things I have done, for myself, is to let as much of my personal life bleed into my work behaviors as I can, as you define them.
This could have backfired spectacularly. In some work cultures probably it would always backfire.
In mine, I:
make 98%+ of my writing viewable to everyone at the company, and we’re remote, so almost everything of importance makes it into writing
never “try” to display an air of competency—trying to display an air of competency is one of the core behaviors that caused terrible feedback loops and major depression early in my career, now I take joy every time I can display to everyone where I am not competent. In some sense this is signaling extreme competency because who would do that unless they were very comfortable in their position. See also “backfire”. But also this can lead to much more rapid professional competency growth, because other people love to teach you things.
tell jokes, embarrass myself a little, feel okay being silly or weird, literally treat it as a red flag about a person if I feel I need to walk on eggshells around them and bring it up with my manager even if I can’t point to exactly why
push for exploratory “something seems interesting here but IDK what and no I can’t tell you its value” work in general, and in specific do some of it myself whenever the mood strikes and nothing urgent is otherwise going on
I am quite sure that in a world where friendly tool AIs were provably easy to build and everyone was gonna build them instead of something else and the idea even made sense, basically a world where we know we don’t need to be concerned about x-risk, Yudkowsky would be far less “relaxed” about AI+power. In absolute terms maybe he’s just as concerned as everyone else about AI+power, but that concern is swamped by an even larger concern.
What convinced you that adversarial games between friends are more likely a priori? In my experience the vast majority of interactions between friends are cooperative, attempts at mutual benefit, etc. If a friend needs help, you do not say “how can I extract the most value from this”, you say “let me help”*. Which I guess is what convinced me. And is also why I wrote “Maybe I’m bubbled though?” Is it really the case for you that you look upon people you think of as friends and say “ah, observe all the adversarial games”?
*Sure, over time, maybe you notice that you’re helping more than being helped, and you can evaluate your friendship and decide what you value and set boundaries and things, but the thing going through your head at the time is not “am I gaining more social capital from this than the amount of whatever I lose from helping as opposed to what, otherwise, I would most want to do”. Well, my head.
No, that is a cooperative game that both participants are playing poorly.
I believe the common case of mutual “where do you want to go?” is motivated by not wanting to feel like you’re imposing, not some kind of adversarial game.
Maybe I’m bubbled though?
Efficiency trades off with robustness.
If you, the listener/reader, fully understood what I tried to say, it is very very likely that you (specifically you) could have fully understood had I compressed my communication in some ways tailored to you.
collaborative truth-seeking doesn’t exist. The people claiming to be collaborative truth-seekers are lying
Certainly if I wanted to do some collaborative truth-seeking I would choose a partner who believed collaborative truth-seeking existed.
If I didn’t think the possibility for collaborative truth-seeking with a particular individual existed, I would be very tempted to instead just sling gotchas at them.
I tried code interpreter on some of the D&D.Sci challenges here. As expected, it failed miserably at generating any useful insights. It also had some egregious logic errors. I didn’t, but should have, expected this.
For example on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2uNeYiXMs4aQ2hfx9/d-and-d-sci-5e-return-of-the-league-of-defenders the dataset is three columns of green team comp, three of blue team comp, and a win/loss result. To get an idea of which picks win against the known opponent team, it grabbed all games with that team participating, found the games where the other team won, and did some stats on the other team’s comp. Except no, instead, it forgot that it had grabbed games where green was that comp and where blue was that comp, so actually it checked for when blue won and did stats on all of those, aka half the “winning opponent teams” were just the original comp. Its analysis included “maybe just mirror them, seems to work quite well”.
Report:
~”Not that I’m complaining, but why the hug?”
“Two reasons. One, I wanted to hug you. Two, I read a thing from Logan that included tips on how to hug.”
”Well it was a very good hug.”
I used: making sure to “be present” plus attending to whether I am avoiding things because when her arthritis is flaring, they might cause pain, even though right now her arthritis is not flaring. Hugging is common, but something about this hug did cause her to ask why, on this hug, specifically, when ordinarily she does not ask why, ’cause it’s just a hug. Maybe it was longer than normal or maybe it was a better hug than normal but she asked before I said anything about Logan Tips (TM).