great post! i’m surprised the models were willing to play.
in these cases, the steganography was human readable. i expect (but of course, cannot prove) the models to be much more proficient at steganography that hides from humans, as they have faced selection pressure in this direction. i do not expect that they are able to communicate precise words/phrases through such channels; there may be secret spiral personas lurking in almost every response.
perhaps perfectionists find an outlet in violin, and classical music, rather than (as suggested) the other way around.
nonetheless, incredibly important advice!
all this sounds right to me.
the most benefit i’ve found personally has been from memetic rationality. for example:
“i notice that i am confused”
“0. something i haven’t listed yet”
steelman / ITT
“what do i have? what do i want? how can i use the former to get the latter?”
the list is rather thin. i’d like to see many more of these! each one is a concrete, concise thought with a clear external/observed trigger that serves as a starting point for further inquiry. more mystically, we could call them incantations to bring about a rational state of mind.
some nearby memes that fall short:
list of fallacies (does not encourage further inquiry)
bayes’ rule (hard to remember to check priors in advance. if anyone has operationalized this, please let me know!)
various social observations (e.g. “status games” theory is true, (and a useful frame for understanding specific interactions/reactions!) but not concrete enough to inspire rationality. it goes signal-signal-counter-signal… who can track it?!)
attending a workshop, practicing a bunch of rationality exercises from a handbook, discussing in a group setting, etc. would not have been particularly effective on its own, and potentially even detracting or at least distracting.
this matches my experience. [in person] social forces are extremely strong, and rationality is fragile. it is a single-player game until either (a) all players have a strong baseline, or (b) all players are deeply comfortable with one another. [well, perhaps those requirements apply to the single-player version as well. :) ]
real rationality is something that only i can keep myself honest to. only i know if i’m really doing it: you must be able to testify from inner spirit.
this is not to say that writing down the outcomes, publishing them, or checking with others is not a useful act. but if these mushroom fruits are the purpose, and not a side-consequence of the healthy mycelium, [as i suspect they must be in workshop settings,] then “rationality” is “out the window”.
church (christian) is probably a better option for most.
faith vs acts. Raemon seeks salvation through their actions. what use is faith if it does not lead to proper behavior? Gordon finds salvation through faith alone. good acts cannot be trusted if they are not rooted in proper belief.
it definitely sounds like if everyone followed the reasonable norms you suggest it would have saved you awkwardness around your ex!
Humans are hilariously bad at wilderness survival in the absence of societal knowledge and support.
what does this mean? it doesn’t seem true to me.
it helps with some tasks, not with others. it’s more fun, especially for moving-files-around sort of things. i am not seeing an overall improvement—the bottleneck was always code review, and context switching, and it’s not at all close to helping with those activities.
it uses much less mental effort. this is enticing, but the tradeoff is a lack of flow state. on the other hand, it’s way easier to get started.
i have spent hours prompting and re-prompting, making progress, feeling like i was flying, only to be interrupted by api limits, and then solve the problem in a normal unadorned text editor in minutes. well, claude laid the groundwork. you can’t argue with that.
i thought it was great for writing tests. then i tried it myself. i prefer my tests—they are more self-documenting, and i know they cover important cases.
it is noticeably improving.
anecdotes: certain dogs learn to be uncomprehending, as it gives them license to stubbornly pursue goals they have been told off of. you can catch them in it, but you have to be wise.
Here is another: if someone truly believes in heaven, they should take much fewer steps—than what their revealed preferences betray—to avoid dying.
perhaps their faith includes multiple tenets.
well, no, right? pistols democratize power, but tanks centralize it. bbs democratize power, web 2.0 centralizes it. the printing press democratizes power, the studio system centralizes.
i may misunderstand. is your point that birthrates in South Korea (for example) would not have plummeted were it not for contraceptive use? this does not match my understanding of the situation.
Returning to video games and porn, they cause some young people to develop problematic behaviors and to devote less resources (e.g. time or attention) to things like studies, work or building relationships.
many (most?) of these virtues are contingent on a particular society. the same criticism (“these activities distract the youth from important virtues”) could be levied by some against military training—or, in a militaristic society, against scholastic pursuits!
i see the point you’re making, and am not at all unsympathetic to it. but evolution is complex and multi dimensional. that some people—or even some societies—have a problem with video games does not cleanly imply that video games are bad for inclusive genetic fitness.
yes.
“I just wouldn’t do what it says.”
this is the key. the mom has (incorrectly!) identified, on vibes, that the author is operating more from ideological capture than from justified true belief, and is moving to protect him from that capture. whether the ideology is convincing is beside the point. of course it’s convincing! so is communism.
even whether the ideology is “true” is irrelevant. the response is an allergy to arguments that seek to control. the argument may be true, and logical; nonetheless, its appearance in this instance is because the speaker thinks “if i say this, you have to do what i tell you.” many people will reject this outright, on vibes.
this argument is very difficult for me. we don’t know that those things do not increase inclusive genetic fitness. for example, especially at a society level, it seems that contraceptives may increase fitness. i.e. societies with access to contraceptives outcompete societies without. i’m not certain of that claim, but it’s not absurd on its face, and so far it seems supported by evidence.
Computers provide an even better analogy for the mind, since computers can actuate a wide variety of processes (computations) rather than only static pictures.
circular. why not “we perceive ourselves now to be processes, because computation has become a salient metaphor.”? when paintings were the paradigm, perhaps consciousness was like a hieronymous bosch joint. what we perceive now as process-think could once have been understood as a slow movement of attention. (“but couldn’t the movement of the attention be itself written as a process” you can write anything as anything / is it helpful.)
not to mention: as computers and their abstract counterparts caught the imagination, perhaps the nature of thought changed in reflection.
an algorithm is legible. examine the steps in sequence, and correct whichever is wrong. that is to say, as a teacher, i’m inclined to teach to the program, for i cannot debug a heuristic. consequently, my pupils see themselves reflected in spaces and tabs, punchcard codes. “you yourself are a lot like this .py file” i soothe.
from the wayside school fandom wiki:
Mrs. Jewls decides to attempt teaching [Joe] how to count to ten correctly, which Joe is able to get down pretty quickly. But this doesn’t help either. When Mrs. Jewls places six erasers on Joe’s desk and asks him to count them, he counts to ten, counting right but getting the number of erasers wrong. A confused Joe remarks that when he counts wrong he gets the right answer, while when he counts right he gets the wrong answer. Getting frustrated, Mrs. Jewls bangs her head against the wall five times. Joe tries to count how many times she does it, at first by counting to ten, but then he tries again by counting wrong and gets five, and Mrs. Jewls reluctantly accepts.
what could sachar have meant by this?
this argument begs the question.
yes, if midlife crises often led to suicide, we would try to cure that. this is because we regard our society as imperfect. therefore, its constituents may also be confused. therefore, we are obligated to change their minds, to protect them from themselves.
the culture has no such luxury. when its citizens decide that life is not worth living, the culture has no recourse but to trust them. it cannot blame their material circumstance, or brain chemistry, or [...].
one may argue that so many choosing this demise is, by itself, a clear indictment of the culture. (i cannot disagree, but i have not yet been 500 years old, myself.) should they not design more and more varied amusements? (but, haven’t they?) should they not seek to steer individuals away from this path? (but, do they not?) should they not invite the bored to explore the galaxy? (but, does the galaxy have what these people seek?)
to the culture, a mind is inviolable. we can accuse them of narcissism—believing a mind should be forcibly changed would implicitly admit that the culture may be unable to raise cogent, self-reflective beings. the culture is unable to admit this latter point, and so must consider intrusion into a mind to be reserved for warfare.
rhetorically: should we as the culture harass the elench? should we sway those who wish to sublime? should we deny genar-hofoen his affronter body? (for that matter, should we destroy the affront?)
should we be so grabby?
hi, yes.
the claim of the novels when taken as a series is that the culture is a reflection of the values of fully developed humans. scarcity creates trauma creates perversion. with material scarcity handled, all but a slim minority of humans are happy to fold themselves into the hedonism and status-gossip. minimal propaganda (though maximal bread and circus) is called for.
nonetheless, some humans still hunger. the books are told from the point of view of these disaffected: imperfect characters who turn away from the culture. the arc of a culture novel shows their return, after their “eccentric” values are trialed.
crucially, these characters are limited. the same individualistic exceptionalism that causes them to swerve does also prevent them from understanding the graceful compassion of the culture as a whole. as the culture wiki summarizes:
Horza boarded Tsealsir after escaping from the Eaters 43 standard hours before the Orbital’s demolition. Horza feigned a serious fire and used Tsealsir’s reaction to locate its brain.
but rather the ship may have read horza’s intent, and pretended at destruction in order that the changer would save himself. at least it may have been self-sacrificing—horza flatters himself to assume that he outwitted the mind. similarly in player of games: humiliating the azad is a nice side-effect of granting gurgeh some much needed perspective. the purpose of the journey is the character growth; the stakes are high only to capture the subject’s attention. (in excession, the sleeper service admits aloud to such meddlesome motivations.)
all of this seems textual, at least at a level 1 reading. the point-of-view is limited, but the reader need not be. banks admires humanity’s base drives… salutes them for propelling us forward… but recognizes that they have no outlet among these last men.
will such a society be as empty as some claim? or will there be a spark of life and adventure even there, in which we at present—shaped by scarcity, and striving, and whatever else—can recognize ourselves? the claim is the latter. and we are provided with ten studies of such.
does penny have any explicitly stated physical features?