habryka

• habryka 16 Aug 2019 1:26 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: MichaelA's comment on: The Rob­bers Cave Experiment

  Note that this ar­ti­cle isn’t in­cluded in the lat­est edi­tion of Ra­tion­al­ity: AI to Zom­bies, for roughly the rea­sons listed here (if I re­mem­ber cor­rectly).

• habryka 16 Aug 2019 0:08 UTC

  7 points

  on: Beliefs Are For True Things

  I don’t think the “Copy­book head­ings” are a di­rect refer­ence to truth. Some ran­dom googlings sug­gest that the fol­low­ing is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive ex­am­ple of those copy­book head­ings, which seem more to me like proverbs and refer­ences to old wis­dom, than to some core con­cept of truth:

  “Eter­nal vigilance is the price of suc­cess.”

  “If wishes were horses then beg­gars would ride.”

  “All is not gold that glit­ters.”

  “Well be­gun is half done.”

  I do think the poem works well for the point you are try­ing to make, but figured I would provide a bit of con­text.

• habryka 15 Aug 2019 21:00 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  (That was in­deed the piece that crys­tal­lized this in­tu­ition for me, and I think Ray got this broader con­cept from me)

• habryka 15 Aug 2019 16:38 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: FactorialCode's comment on: Fac­to­ri­alCode’s Shortform

  You can or­der the com­ments by old­est first, which gives you at least some of that.

  We do also record when all the votes are cast, so a timema­chine is pos­si­ble, though query­ing and ag­gre­gat­ing all the votes for a large thread might be too much for a browser client.

• habryka 14 Aug 2019 19:17 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Slider's comment on: Slider’s Shortform

  In­ter­est­ing. Do you have a link to the doc­u­ment that sparked this thought?

• habryka 13 Aug 2019 0:19 UTC

  36 points

  in reply to: Jacobian's comment on: Di­ana Fleischman and Ge­offrey Miller—Au­di­ence Q&A

  I am quite glad you posted it, and don’t think that com­ment should dis­cour­age you from post­ing more similar things.

  In gen­eral I am very ex­cited to see more con­ver­sa­tions be­ing writ­ten up as tran­scripts and posted on­line, and would be re­ally sad if this would pre­vent that trend from tak­ing hold more.

• habryka 13 Aug 2019 0:13 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Brangus's comment on: Bran­gus’s Shortform

  Ok, let me give it a try. I am try­ing to not spend too much time on this, so I pre­fer to start with a rough draft and see whether there is any­thing in­ter­est­ing here be­fore I write a mas­sive es­say.

  You say the fol­low­ing:

  Do chakras ex­ist?

  In some sense I might be miss­ing the point since the an­swer to this is ba­si­cally just “no”. Though ob­vi­ously I still think they form a mean­ingful cat­e­gory of some­thing, but in my model they form a mean­ingful cat­e­gory of “men­tal ex­pe­riences” and “men­tal pro­ce­dures”, and definitely not a mean­ingful cat­e­gory of real atom-like things in the ex­ter­nal world.

  Another way might be that you think chakras do not liter­ally ex­ist like planes do, but you can make a pre­dic­tive profit by pre­tend­ing that they do exist

  I don’t think the epistem­i­cally healthy thing is to pre­tend that they ex­ist as some ex­ter­nal force. Here is an anal­ogy that I think kind of ex­plains the ideas of “auras”, which is a broader set than just chakras:

  Imag­ine you are talk­ing to a chess­mas­ter who has played 20000 hours of chess. You show him a po­si­tion and he re­sponds with “Oh, black is re­ally open on the right”. You ask “what do you mean by ‘open on the right’?”. He says: “Black’s defense on the right is re­ally weak, I could push through that im­me­di­ately if I wanted to”, while mak­ing the mo­tion of pick­ing up a piece with his right hand and push­ing it through the right side of black’s board.

  As you poke him more, his sense of “open­ness” will prob­a­bly cor­re­spond to lots of pro­pri­o­cep­tive ex­pe­riences like “weak”, “frag­ile”, “strong”, “force­ful”, “smash­ing”, “soft”, etc.

  Now, I think it would be ac­cu­rate to de­scribe (in bud­dhist/​spiritual terms) the ex­pe­rience of the chess­mas­ter as read­ing an “aura” off the chess­board. It’s use­ful to de­scribe it as such be­cause a lot of its men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion is cached out in the same at­tributes that peo­ple and phys­i­cal ob­jects in gen­eral have, even though its refer­ent is the state of some chess-game, which ob­vi­ously doesn’t have those at­tributes straight­for­wardly.

  My read of what the deal with “chakras” is, is that it’s ba­si­cally try­ing to talk about the pro­pri­o­cep­tive sub­sets of many men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tions. So in think­ing about some­thing like a chess­board, you can bet­ter un­der­stand your own men­tal mod­els of it, by get­ting a sense of what the nat­u­ral clusters of pro­pri­o­cep­tive ex­pe­riences are that tend to cor­re­late with cer­tain at­tributes of mod­els (like how feel­ing vuln­er­a­ble around your stom­ach cor­re­sponds to a con­cept of open­ness in a chess po­si­tion).

  You can also ap­ply them to other peo­ple, and try to un­der­stand what other peo­ple are ex­pe­rienc­ing by try­ing to read their body-lan­guage, which gives you ev­i­dence about the pro­pri­o­cep­tive ex­pe­riences that their cur­rent thoughts are caus­ing (which tend to feed back into body-lan­guage), which al­lows you to make bet­ter in­fer­ences about their men­tal state.

  I haven’t ac­tu­ally looked much into whether the usual set of chakras tend to be par­tic­u­larly good cat­e­gories for the re­la­tion­ship be­tween pro­pri­o­cep­tive ex­pe­riences and model at­tributes, so I can’t speak much about that. But it seems clear that there are likely some nat­u­ral cat­e­gories here, and refer­ring to them as “chakras” seems fine to me.

• habryka 12 Aug 2019 20:11 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Matthew Barnett's comment on: Matthew Bar­nett’s Shortform

  The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the pain-plea­sure axis as the pri­mary source of value (Ben­tham).

  I will mark that I think this is wrong, and if any­thing I would de­scribe it as a philo­soph­i­cal dead-end. Com­plex­ity of value and all of that. So list­ing it as a philo­soph­i­cal achieve­ment seems back­wards to me.

• habryka 12 Aug 2019 16:52 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Unreal's comment on: Ma­chine Learn­ing Anal­ogy for Meditation

  I am con­fused, like ob­vi­ously my thoughts cause some changes in be­hav­ior. Maybe not im­me­di­ately (though I am highly du­bi­ous of the whole “you can pre­dict my ac­tions be­fore they are men­tally con­scious bit”), but definitely in the fu­ture (by caus­ing some kind of back-prop­a­ga­tion of up­dates that change my fu­ture ac­tions).

  The op­po­site would make no sense from an evolu­tion­ary adap­tive­ness per­spec­tive (hav­ing a whole sys­tem-2 like thingy would be a gi­ant waste of en­ergy if it never caused any change in ac­tions), and doesn’t at all cor­re­spond to high-level plan­ning ac­tions, isn’t what the whole liter­a­ture on S1 and S2 says (which does in­deed make the case that S2 de­ter­mines many ac­tions), and doesn’t cor­re­spond well to my in­ter­nal ex­pe­rience.

• habryka 12 Aug 2019 6:52 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Power Buys You Dis­tance From The Crime

  I do think that I tend to up­date down­wards on the like­li­hood of a piece be­ing true if it seems to have ob­vi­ous al­ter­na­tive gen­er­a­tors for how it was con­structed that are un­likely to be very truth track­ing. Ob­vi­ous ex­am­ples here are ad­ver­tise­ments and poli­ti­cal cam­paign speeches.

  I do think in that sense I think it’s rea­son­able to dis­trust pieces of writ­ing that seem like they are part of some broader con­flict, and as such are un­likely to be gen­er­ated in any­thing close to an un­bi­ased way. A lot of con­flict-the­ory-heavy pieces tend to be part of some con­flict, since ac­cus­ing your en­e­mies of be­ing evil is memetic war­fare 101.

  I am not sure (yet) what the norms for dis­cus­sion around these kinds of up­dates should be though, but did want to bring up that there ex­ist some valid bayesian in­fer­ences here.

• habryka 9 Aug 2019 22:48 UTC

  32 points

  on: What is the state of the ego de­ple­tion field?

  This has been my de­fault refer­ence for the past few years:

  https://​​repli­ca­tion­in­dex.com/​​2016/​​04/​​18/​​is-repli­ca­bil­ity-re­port-ego-de­ple­tion­repli­ca­bil­ity-re­port-of-165-ego-de­ple­tion-ar­ti­cles/​​

  It’s from 2016, so I don’t ac­tu­ally know where things are right now. But pre­sum­ably not that much has changed.

• habryka 9 Aug 2019 22:32 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Sherrinford's comment on: Is there a stan­dard dis­cus­sion of veg­e­tar­i­anism/​ve­g­anism?

  The cost of do­ing so has an effect on pro­duc­tivity (due to nu­tri­tional effects, but also effects on at­ten­tion and gen­eral has­sle, as well as co­or­di­na­tion costs), and us­ing a frac­tion of that ad­di­tional pro­duc­tivity to help an­i­mals re­sults in a much larger re­duc­tion in net an­i­mal suffer­ing (be­cause of the abun­dance of easy op­por­tu­ni­ties for helping an­i­mals, due to the hor­rible state of an­i­mal lives).

• habryka 8 Aug 2019 20:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: Matt Gold­en­berg’s Short Term Feed

  My gen­eral take­away from that post was that in terms of psy­cho­me­t­ric val­idity, most de­vel­op­men­tal psy­chol­ogy is quite bad. Did I miss some­thing?

  This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean the un­der­ly­ing con­cepts aren’t real, but I do think that in terms of the qual­ity met­rics that psy­cho­met­rics tends to as­sess things on, I don’t think the ev­i­dence base is very good.

• habryka 8 Aug 2019 19:57 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Illia's comment on: Map­ping of en­nea­gram to MTG per­son­al­ity types

  The Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject cre­ated an up­dated ver­sion (I am not a huge fan of it, but itt does have a lot of the things you care about): https://​​www.open­philan­thropy.org/​​blog/​​new-web-app-cal­ibra­tion-training

• habryka 8 Aug 2019 19:28 UTC

  3 points

  on: 100,000 USD to pre­dict so­cial and be­hav­ioral sci­ence results

  Du­pli­cate of: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​Xzetp­pcF8BNoDqFBs/​​help-fore­cast-study-repli­ca­tion-in-this-so­cial-science

• habryka 7 Aug 2019 22:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: [Site Up­date] Be­hind the scenes data-layer and caching improvements

  Huh, weird. I will look into it. Just to check, by the green com­ment thing do you mean the fol­low­ing in­ter­ac­tion? (which takes less than a sec­ond for me as you can see)

  http://​​www.gi­phy.com/​​gifs/​​hoy4Fbck­KeEWCAUk5r

  Post-pages also take less than a sec­ond for me to load (ini­tially, though there is some JS ini­tial­iza­tion af­ter­wards), so that’s also con­fus­ing:

  http://​​www.gi­phy.com/​​gifs/​​lStCmWRImaotNqIFoo

  Might be browser spe­cific, or some­thing else weird go­ing on.

• habryka 7 Aug 2019 19:48 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pattern's comment on: Help fore­cast study repli­ca­tion in this so­cial sci­ence pre­dic­tion market

  Yeah, bug on our side. Just merg­ing a PR that fixes it. Will be fixed within the day.

  https://​​github.com/​​LessWrong2/​​Less­wrong2/​​pull/​​2264#pul­lre­questre­view-272171432

• habryka 7 Aug 2019 17:41 UTC

  2 points

  on: Edit Nickname

  Ping us on In­ter­com (the chat icon in the bot­tom right cor­ner, and I can help you change it to what­ever you want). Sorry for the has­sle with the Google lo­gin, it’s been on my to-do list for a while to fix that.

[Site Up­date] Be­hind the scenes data-layer and caching improvements

• habryka 6 Aug 2019 22:49 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Rob Bensinger's comment on: Oc­cam’s Ra­zor: In need of sharp­en­ing?

  This seems right, though some­thing about this still feels con­fus­ing to me in a way I can’t yet put into words. Might write a com­ment at a later point in time.