Going from “Parts” to “Self,” you said the Self might be all the Parts processing together. (Capitalized “Self” means the IFS “Core Self.”) How likely is the hypothesis that the Self is an artifact of the therapeutic procedure? When someone says they feel angry at a Part and claims that anger does not come from a Part but is their self, the therapist doesn’t accept it. The therapist tells them they need to unblend. But when they describe the 8 C’s and say that is their self, the therapist does not ask them to unblend, perceiving that as their Self.
IrenicTruth
Karma: 53
The concept of a translator between conceptual frameworks reminds me of the narrator of Blindsight—a man who had special cybernetic enhancements to allow him to do this type of translation.
The earliest citation in Wikipedia is from 1883, and it is a question and answer: “If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?” [The asker] then went on to answer the query with, “No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion.”
So, if this is truly the origin, they knew the nature of sound when the question was first asked.
I’ve wanted to install a bidet for 8+ years. However, I’ve always had higher-priority projects.
Costs that deter me:
What for you is a 20-minute project will be 4-8 hours for me because it involves plumbing (and I want it to not leak). The fastest plumbing project I’ve ever had (cleaning the p-trap beneath the bathroom sink) took 1.5 hours.
Hiring a contractor will be $100 because I live in a high-rent area, and they need to cover the expense of coming out. It will take me 1 hour to choose, schedule, and oversee a contractor.
I don’t know how to choose a bidet. It’ll take me 2-4 hours to research them.
The benefits are lower for me than for you:
I estimate it will save six rolls of toilet paper per year. That comes to about $20. If I value my hours at $50, hiring a contractor is $150, choosing a bidet is $100, and the bidet itself is at least $35. The sum is $285, a 14-year pay-off time.
I mainly want the bidet for comfort and because it will make me cleaner. Comfort and hygiene are lower-priority items for me. $20/year of extra comfort drops the pay-off time to 7 years.
BTW: Aella, a rationalist-adjacent Twitter user, mentioned that she uses a bidet.
Here is the procrastination equation image (since it’s currently broken in the main text).
Motivation = (Expectancy * Value) / (Impulsiveness * Delay) And the same equation in math:
Feature request: some way to keep score. (Maybe a scoring mode that makes the black box an outline on hover and then clicking right=unscored, left-right=correct, and left-left-right=incorrect—or maybe a mouse-out could be unscored and left = incorrect and right = correct).
I found a review on Amazon (quoted at the bottom, since I cannot link to it) that says Ecker is injecting significant personal opinion and slanting his report of the science. I don’t know if this is true, but the gushing praise from readers and psychology’s history of jumping on things rather than evaluating evidence make it seem more likely than not. For me, this means that reading this book will involve getting familiar with the associated papers.
The Review
by “scholar”
Previously I posted a very positive review of this book. On further reflection and study of the relevant research papers, I have a very different view. The science of memory reconsolidation is complex and subtle. Its application to clinical work with real patients remains predominantly hypothetical. Ecker creates the impression that the conditions for memory reconsolidation and updating are now known and clear. They are not. His claims for their application to clinical practice (in my view) go rather beyond the evidence. Moreover, when I read his clinical examples later in the book, I completely fail to see how they relate specifically to the science he earlier quotes—they just seem to be examples of his therapeutic approach called Coherence Therapy (which predates his interest in memory reconsolidation) - and although these are certainly interesting, I cannot grasp how they illustrate the principles of memory reconsolidation. The positive outcome is that this book, which I eventually found confusing and infuriating, prompted me to study further this fascinating field of enquiry. There are undoubtedly potential clinical applications, but I feel Ecker’s enthusiasm is a little premature.
If recoupments occur sparingly, as I’d expect, where should the remaining funds go?
Keep them for “times of national emergency” etc. to hedge against correlated risk.
How big is the risk that the fund will be used in illicit ways, such as tax evasion, despite the fact that donors cannot claim more than they spent?
Modern society strongly incentivizes misusing anything that touches money, so without further evidence, I’d say that the risk is very high (near certainty). If we haven’t found a way to misuse it, it is more likely that we are not clever enough than that the way does not exist.
First thought: I put in $100 to an 80% fund. I wait a year to claim the tax break on the 80% donation netting say 30%*$80=$24 in reduced taxes. Then I take out $95. I’ve made $19 on the trade. Of course, a government would see this right away and not allow tax breaks for such contributions. But this sort of thing seems rife for problems.
Another: I put in $100, $80 goes to a “charity” that gives me a 10% kickback. Then I take out $95 and I’ve made $3.
You might be able to fix this by requiring that contributors maintain almost all of their assets as property of the fund. Then if I make a withdrawal for “an emergency” I can’t keep any profit or buy anything that doesn’t go right back to the fund. But that sounds a lot like the “everything in common” schemes that have failed so often in the past. So, we’d need to modify it to make it viable.
What experimental tests has clash theory survived?
I use the “Bearable” app for very rough time logging. It has a system of toggles for “factors” where you can specify what factor was present in a 6-hour interval of your day. Since I am mainly interested in correlations with other things I measure, a primary purpose of “Bearable,” this low resolution is a good compromise. It also makes it easy to log after the fact. “Did I do this activity in this 6-hour period?” is a much easier question than remembering down to an hour or quarter-hour granularity. The downside is I can’t tell how much time I’ve invested in a particular category.
I do much more detailed time logging at work with Jira and the “Tempo” plugin. I can then look back when I create my monthly reports. And I can use the per-ticket data to estimate the effort required for future tickets.
For lefties:
We put unaligned AIs in charge of choosing what news people see. Result: polarization resulting in millions of deaths. Let’s not make the same mistake again.
For right-wingers:
We put unaligned AIs in charge of choosing what news people see. Result: people addicted to their phones, oblivious to their families, morals, and eroding freedoms. Let’s not make the same mistake again.
Your argument boils down to:
Objectivity is X
Y is not X
(Because you want to be objective) Don’t do Y
I want to Win. Being Pascal Mugged is not Winning. Therefore I will make choices to not be Pascal Mugged. If that requires not being “objective,” according to your definition, I don’t want to be objective.
However, I have my own use of “objective” that comports well with adapting to new information and using my predictive powers. But I don’t want to argue that my usage is better or worse; it will be fruitless. I mention it so readers won’t think I’m hypocritical if I say I’m attempting to be objective.
This is a drive-by comment. I write it with hopes for our mutual benefit. However, do not expect me to check back or reply to anything you say.
I haven’t listened to the video yet. (It’s very long, so I put it on my watch-later list.) Nor have I finished Eliezer’s Sequences (I’m on “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation.”) However, I looked at the above summaries to decide whether it would be worth listening to the video.
Potential Weaknesses
None of the alternative books say anything about statistics. A rough intro to Bayesian statistics is an essential part of the Sequences. Without this, you have not made them superfluous.
A rough understanding of Bayesian statistics is a valuable tool.
Anecdote: I took courses in informal logic when I was a teenager and was aware of cognitive biases. However, the a-ha moment that took me out of the religion of my childhood was to ask whether a particular theodicy was probable. This opened the way to ask whether some of my other beliefs were probable (not possible, as I’d done before). Within an hour of asking the first question, I was an atheist. (Though it took me another year to “check my work” by meeting with the area pastors and elders.) I thought to ask it because I’d been studying statistics. So, for me, the statistical lens helped in the case where the other lenses failed to reveal my errors. I already knew a hoard of problems with the Bible, but the non-probabilistic approaches allowed me to deal with the evidence piece by piece. I could propose a fix for each one. For example, following Origen, I could say that Genesis 1 was an allegory. Then it didn’t count against the whole structure.
The above anecdote took place several years before I encountered LessWrong. I’m not saying that the Sequences/LessWrong helped me escape religion. I’m saying that Bayesian stats worked where other things failed, so it was useful to me, and you should not consider that you’ve replaced the sequences if you leave it out.
Handbook of the History of Logic: The Many Valued and Nonmonotonic Turn in Logic is on the reading list. I haven’t read it, but the title gives me pause. Nonmonotonic logics are subtle and can be misapplied. I misapplied Zadeh’s possibilistic logic to help justify my theism.
The promotion of the LSAT and legal reasoning seems out of place. Law is the opposite of truth-seeking. Lawyers create whatever arguments they can to serve their clients. A quick Google couldn’t dig up statistics, but I’d guess that more lawyers are theists than scientists.
For me, the LessWrong community is a place I can get better data and predictions than other news sources. I know only one person who is also on LessWrong. They live across an ocean from me, and we haven’t talked in 8 months. I don’t think hanging out and playing board games is a major draw. If this is the thesis, it is far from my personal experience.
Potential Strengths
The emphasis of the sequences on epistemic over instrumental rationality.
Other people in the LessWrong community have pointed this out. (I remember a sequence with the word “Hammer” in it that talks about instrumental rationality.)
The alternative reading list does not seem to address instrumental rationality
Treating suffering as interchangeable doesn’t always produce good outcomes. (Though I don’t know how to deal with this—if you can only take one course of action, you must reify everything into a space where you can compare options.)
Other An alternative to piracy in the USA is to request books with the Interlibrary loan system. It is free in most places. Also, academic libraries in public universities frequently offer membership for a small fee ($10-$20 per month) or free to community members—especially students, so if you have a local university, you might ask them.
Reading the comments here, I think I may halve my estimate of self-install time.
Hint for those who want to read the text at the link: go to the bottom and click “view source” to get something that is not an SVG.
The best explanation I have found to explain this discrepancy is that … RLACE … finds … a direction where there is a clear separation,
You could test this explanation using a support vector machine—it finds the direction that gives the maximum separation.
(This is a drive-by comment. I’m trying to reduce my external obligations, so I probably won’t be responding.)
A lot of the steps in your chain are tenuous. For example, if I were making replicators, I’d ensure they were faithful replicators (not that hard from an engineering standpoint). Making faithful replicators negates step 3.
(Note: I won’t respond to anything you write here. I have too many things to respond to right now. But I saw the negative vote total and no comments, a situation I’d find frustrating if I were in it, so I wanted to give you some idea of what someone might disagree with/consider sloppy/wish they hadn’t spent their time reading.)
I haven’t finished reading this; I read the first few paragraphs and scanned the rest of the article to see if it would be worth reading. But I want to point out that starting with Harsanyi’s Utilitarianism Theorem (a.k.a. Harsanyi’s Impartial Observer Theorem) implies that you assume “independence of irrelevant alternatives” because the theorem assumes that its agents obey [1] the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem. The fourth axiom of this theorem (as listed in Wikipedia) is the “independence of irrelevant alternatives.”. Since from the previous article,
The Nash Bargaining Solution is the only one that fulfills the usual three desiderata, and the axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives.
I am not surprised that this results in the Nash Bargaining solution as the solution to Bargaining Games. The last article also points out that the independence of irrelevant alternatives is not an obvious axiom, so I do not find that the Nash Bargaining solution to be more plausible because it is a generalization of the CoCo Equilibria.[2]
- ↩︎
From the abstract here: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228049690_Harsanyi′ s_′Utilitarian_Theorem’_and_Utilitarianism] and the introduction to Generalized UtilitarianismandHarsanyi’s Impartial Observer Theorem
- ↩︎
This is a bit inconsistent on my part because I usually make formal decisions according to Rule Utilitarianism, and most forms of utilitarianism assume Von Neumann–Morgenstern expected utility. However, in my defense, I’m not firmly attached to Rule Utilitarianism; it is just the current best I’ve found.
- ↩︎
You’re trying to bake your personal values (like happy humans) into the rules.
My point is that this has already happened. The underlying assumptions bake in human values. The discussion so far did not convince me that an alien would share these values. I list instances where a human might object to these values. If a human may object to “a player which contributes absolutely nothing … gets nothing,” an alien may object too; if a human may object to “the only inputs are the set of players and a function from player subsets to utility,” an alien may object too; and so forth. These are assumptions baked into the rules of how to divide the resources. So, I am not convinced that these rules allow all agents with conflicting goals to reach a compromise because I am not convinced all agents will accept these rules.[1]
I brought up the “happy humans term” as a way to point out that maybe aliens wouldn’t object to the rule of “contribute nothing … get nothing” because they could always define the value functions so that the set of participants who contribute nothing is empty.
- ↩︎
This sets up a meta-bargaining situation where we have to agree on which rules to accept to do bargaining before we can start bargaining. This situation seems to be a basic “Bargaining Game.” I think we might derive the utilities of each rule set from the utilities the participants receive from a bargain made under those rules + a term for how much they like using that rule set[2]. Unfortunately, except for “Choose options on the Pareto frontier whose utilities exceed the BATNA,” this game seems underdetermined, so we’ll have trouble reaching a consensus.
- ↩︎
To understand why I think there should be a term for how much they like using the rule set, imagine aliens who value self-determination and cooperative decision-making for all sentient beings and can wipe us out militarily. Imagine we want to split the resources in an asteroid both of us landed on. Consider the rule set of “might makes right.” Under this set, they can unilaterally dictate how the asteroid is divided. So they get maximum utility from the asteroid’s resources. However, they recognize that this is the opposite of self-determination and cooperative decision making; so getting all of the resources this way is of less utility to them than getting all the resources under another set of rules.
- ↩︎
Duplicating the description
TimePoints
00:00 intro
0:53 most of the sequences aren’t about rationality; AI is not rationality
3:43 lesswrong and IQ mysticism
32:20 lesswrong and something-in-the-waterism
36:49 overtrusting of ingroups
39:35 vulnerability to believing people’s BS self-claims
47:35 norms aren’t sharp enough
54:41 weird cultlike privacy norms
56:46 realnaming as “doxxing”
58:28 no viable method for calling out rumors/misinformation if realnaming is ‘doxxing’
1:00:16 the strangeness and backwardness of LW-sphere privacy norms
1:04:07 EA: disregard for the homeless and refusal to do politics because it’s messy
1:10:16 EA: largely socially inept, does not understand how truly bad the SBF situation is
1:13:36 EA: treatment of utilitarianism and consciousness is simplistic
1:20:20 EA rigor: vitamin A charity example
1:23:39 extreme techno optimism and weak knowledge of human biology
1:25:24 exclusionary white nerd millennial culture
1:27:23 comfort class culture
1:30:25 pragmatics-agnosticism
1:33:13 shallow analysis of empirical topics
1:34:18 idiosyncrasies of communication, e.g. being extremely obtuse at the thesis level
1:39:50 epistemic rationality matters much more than instrumental rationality
1:43:00 the scene isn’t about rationality, it’s about hanging out and board games (which is fine, just don’t act like you’re doing anything important)
References
sample WAIS report https://www.pearsonassessments.com/co...
what is g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v...
childhood IQ vs. adult IQ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12887...
wonky attempts to measure IQ above 160 https://archive.vn/kFCY1
computer-based verbal memory test https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/verb...
typing speed / IQ https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED022127
simple choice reaction time https://www.psytoolkit.org/lessons/ex...
severity of 83 IQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Ur7...
googleability of WAIS https://nda.nih.gov/data_structure.ht...
uses of WAIS in clinical care https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
drunk reaction time experiment https://imgur.com/a/IIZpTol
how g correlates with WAIS https://archive.vn/gyDcM
low murderer IQ https://archive.vn/SrenV
tom segura bit about the first 48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0l2l...
rarity of perfect LSAT scores (30 out of 100,000) https://archive.vn/KWAzf
limits on human reading speed (1) https://archive.vn/IVU8x
limits on human reading speed (2) https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-1...
kinobody fitness callout by philion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjytE...
summary of lesswrong drama (Jan-Mar. 2022) https://alfredmacdonald.medium.com/su...
leverage / geoff anders pseudo-cult https://archive.vn/BKvtM
the questionability of michael vassar and related organizations https://archive.vn/8A8QO
sharp vs soft culture https://archive.vn/VOpya
something-in-the-waterism https://alfredmacdonald.medium.com/so...
on the fakeness of many bayesian priors https://alfredmacdonald.substack.com/...
criticism of the “postrationalist” subculture and the problems created by pseudonyms and hyper-privacy norms https://alfredmacdonald.substack.com/...
proliferation of “technoyogi” woo in this culture due to lack of BS-calling norms https://alfredmacdonald.substack.com/...
questionability of the vitamin A charity I mentioned https://archive.vn/2AxlK
MIRI support from Open Philanthropy https://archive.vn/JW6WT
MIRI publication record https://archive.vn/9hIhT
MIRI staff https://archive.vn/hJeuT
MIRI budget, 50% of which is spent on research personnel https://archive.vn/z6bvz
benefits of sharp culture (or at least a mean robot boss) https://archive.vn/onIfM
daniel dennett on, among other things, the problems with treating all suffering as interchangeable https://archive.vn/5SLEy
on reading comprehension limits: https://catalog.shepherd.edu/mime/med… -- while a 50th percentile student reads (with retention) at 250wpm and a 75th at 500wpm for “general expository reading (e.g. news)”, this same group reads at a 50th percentile of 149wpm and a 75th percentile of 170wpm for “advanced scientific and/or technical material”. assuming a gaussian distribution, the distance between 50th percentile and 75th percentile is 2/3s an SD—so with an SD of ~31.5, reading said material at 306.5WPM is 5SD from the mean, or about 1/3.5 million. the average audible narration rate is 155wpm, so this severely puts into question those who say they’re 2xing or even 1.75xing advanced audiobooks/lectures.
Duplicating the first comment (@alfredmacdonald’s proposed alternative)
A READING LIST FOR RATIONALITY THAT IS NOT LESSWRONG / RENDERS THE SEQUENCES SUPERFLUOUS
objection: “but I learned a lot about rationality through lesswrong”
response: maybe, but probably inadequately.
while unorthodox, I usually suggest this above everything else: the PowerScore Logical Reasoning Bible, while meant as LSAT prep, is the best test of plain-language reasoning that I am aware of. the kinds of questions you are meant to do will humble many of you. https://www.amazon.com/PowerScore-LSAT-Logical-Reasoning-Bible/dp/0991299221 and you can take a 10-question section of practice questions at https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat/test-format/logical-reasoning/logical-reasoning-sample-questions — many of you will not get every question right, in which case there is room to sharpen your ability and powerscore’s book helps do that.
https://www.amazon.com/Cengage-Advantage-Books-Understanding-Introduction/dp/1285197364 in my view, the best book on argumentation that exists; worth reading either alongside PowerScore’s book, or directly after it.
https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters/dp/B08X4X4SQ4 pinker’s “rationality” is an excellent next step after learning how to reason through the previous two texts, since you will establish what rationality actually is.
https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Reasoning-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521531012 this is a reference text, meaning it’s not meant to be read front-to-back. it’s one of the most comprehensive of its kind.
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-History-Logic-Valued-Nonmonotonic/dp/044460359X — this is both prohibitively and ludicrously expensive, so you will probably need to pirate it. however, this history of logic covers many useful concepts.
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 this is a standard text that established “irrationality” as a mainstream academic concept. despite being a psychologist, some of kahneman’s work won him the nobel prize in economics in 2002, shared with vernon smith.
https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-audiobook/dp/B0014EAHNQ this is another widely-read text that expands on the mainstream concept of irrationality.
https://www.amazon.com/BIASES-HEURISTICS-Collection-Heuristics-Everything/dp/1078432317 it is exactly what it says: a list of about 100 cognitive biases. many of these biases are worth rereading and/or flashcarding. there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
https://www.amazon.com/Informal-Logical-Fallacies-Brief-Guide/dp/0761854339 also exactly what it says, but with logical fallacies rather than biases. (a bias is an error in weight or proportion or emphasis; a fallacy is a mistake in reasoning itself.) there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
here is another fantastic handbook of rationality, which is a wonderfully integrated work spanning psychology, philosophy, law, and other fields with 806 pages of content. https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Rationality-Markus-Knauff/dp/0262045079 (it is quite expensive—no one will blame you if you pirate it from libgen.)
you will learn more through these texts than through the LessWrong Sequences. as mentioned, many of these are expensive, and no one will blame you if you need to pirate/libgen them. many or maybe even most of these you will need to reread some of these texts, perhaps multiple times.
“but I’d rather have a communi - ” yes, exactly. hence the thesis of a video I made: lesswrong is primarily nerds who want a hangout group/subculture, rather than a means of learning rationality, and this disparity between claimed purpose and actual purpose produces most of the objections people have and many of my objections in my video, and why I have created this alternate reading list.