Like, the one from youtube. But not the sexy model one. I do modeling, but it’s all in my head.
keltan
Karma: 59
Ramble dot points of thoughts I had around this.
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I like this idea
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When I listen to very high power or smart people debate, what I’m looking for is to absorb their knowledge.
Tacit and semantic.
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Instead, as the debate heats up, I feel myself being draw into one of the sides.
I spend more time thinking about my bias than the points being made.
I’m not sure what I’m picking up from heated debate is as valuable as it could be.
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If the interlocutors are not already close friends, perhaps having them complete a quick bonding exercise to gain trust?
I image playing on the same team in a video game or solving a physical problem together.
Really let them settle into a vibe of being friends. Let them understand what it feels like to work with this new person toward a common goal.
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Big fan of Cal’s work. He’s certainly someone who is pushing the front lines in the fight against acrasia. I’m currently reading “how to win at college”. It’s a super information dense package. Feels a bit like rationality from a-z, if it were specifically for college students trying to succeed.
Why did you decide to share this quote? I feel like I’m missing some key context that could aid my understanding.
Is it not normal to sub vocalise?
Could people react to this comment with a Tick if they do, and a cross if they don’t?
I was diagnosed as a kid. I went through a. lot. of. therapy. Lots of special classes and making two thumbs up then pushing your knuckles together to make a bed that spells bed. That all helped a lot. But three things helped to the point where I hardly think about it these days.
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Minecraft PVP servers. You need to be able to effectively communicate with your team and taunt the enemy. And you need to be able to do it while someone is running at you with a sword.
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Fighting with Antivax people as a teenager on Facebook. The biggest slip up someone could make in a Facebook argument was mixing up “you’re” and “your”
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Talking to girls I liked who could actually spell things correctly. I got very good at rapidly googling how to spell words as I was typing a response.
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That’s a great idea, Thank you!
And here it is: https://manifold.markets/keltan/will-there-be-a-lessonline-2025
“Whiteboards everywhere” and my non-ironic favourite band are debuting songs!!!
But, I’m only a year old rationalist and I live in Australia on a uni student budget. Still… I’m considering flying out. It would be pretty incredible to run some abstract improv workshops with other truth seeking nerds. I think I need to sit down and calculate.
Is this the type of event that a first year rationalist could attend and get value from/be welcome at? What is the likelihood that it will run again next year? Is there a prediction market for that?
Edit: There is now. https://manifold.markets/keltan/will-there-be-a-lessonline-2025
That’s a great question! I’ve been teaching arts classes for a youth charity for 5 years now. Ages range from 5-18. I myself am 23.
I’d say this has happened twice? I’m counting a one off lesson with some 16-18 year olds a few years ago. And a series of weeks in which I had extremely little control over some 8-10 year olds. In that case I was able to control individuals if they had my full attention. But would ‘lose’ them when I focused on the next kid.
Your question caused me to think of why these things may have happened. Though I’m curious to hear what you think before I spill my guts.
The moment that I dread as a teacher and that has happened to me a few times. Is when the students realise that your authority is totally made up. I guess this is why we don’t teach philosophy in schools. I have never figured out a way to recover from this blunder. If anyone has any advice, I’d love to hear it.
Related to your principals comment. I can’t speak too much about the situation. Though am close with a former principal of a mid sized rural town. A real tricky job, and they knew that taking it on. It happened to be a town that (if I understand correctly) our government was sending a lot of refugees to. This resulted in a school where a large minority couldn’t speak English. In top of that, it’s a rural school. Notorious for horrible shit. Anyway, this principal made a small slip up and publicly apologised in a video. It then went locally viral and the state wide news picked it up. This principle was dragged through the mud for half a year. They couldn’t go to the grocery store or walk down the street. The news just kept going. I live pretty far away from them, but people know I know them. I had people come up and give condolences because of how harsh the treatment had been in the media.
I’m not sure how much this adds to the discussion. But I hope it helps to update someone’s model. A principle is a public figure with power over a tiny domain. They are sometimes attacked in the same way as a politician, but without the defences that politicians have.
Teacher here, can confirm.
While an odd answer, it is true for me that music helps to install rational thinking. I think I’ve done maybe 3 fermi estimates in my day to day after making and listening to this song.
The Fermi Estimate Jig—LessWrong Inspired https://youtu.be/M_DN3Hl8YzU
Having it stuck in my head has been effective for me. I hope it works for others.
Very quick google search. But something like this link for the “targeted NIR interference therapy”?
Duct-tape fixes are common in the wake of anything that goes publicly wrong. When people get hurt, they demand change, and they pressure whoever is in charge to give it to them. But implementing a proper fix is generally more complicated (since you have to perform a root cause analysis), less visible (therefore not earning the leader any social credit), or just plain unnecessary (if the risk was already priced in). So the incentives are in favor of quickly slapping something together that superficially appears to be a solution, without regards for whether it makes sense.
Wow, I kinda already knew this. But it had never been said so clearly and brought to the front of my mind in this way. It perfectly describes the strategies YouTube has used through its various apocalypses.
I rewrote this as lyrics and fed it into Udio for 5 hours until it gave me this. I think music helps internalize rationalist skills.
I agree! I’ve been writing then generating my own LW inspired songs now.
I wish it was common for LW posts to have accompanying songs now.
To help remember this post and it’s methods I broke it down into song lyrics and used Udio to make the song.
I now realize that my thinking may have been particularly brutal, and I may have skipped inferential steps.
To clarify, If someone didn’t know, or was reluctant to repeat a password, I would end contact or request an in person meeting.
But to further clarify, that does not make your points invalid. I think it makes them stronger. If something is weird and risky, good luck convincing people to do it.
I went with Udio because it was popular and I was impressed by “dune to musical”. I think I’ll give Suno a try today, but I get what you’re saying about the objective quality. It does have that “tin” sound that Udio is good at avoiding.
If you’ve got tricks or tips I’d love to hear anything you’ve got!
A potentially good way to avoid low level criminals scamming your family and friends with a clone of your voice is to set a password that you each must exchange.
An extra layer of security might be to make the password offensive, an info hazard, or politically sensitive. Doing this, criminals with little technical expertise will have a harder time bypassing corporate language filters.
Good luck getting the voice model to parrot a basic meth recipe!
I think it would be correct to say that therapy was effective for my reading. By the end of primary school I could read at a normal level. However, my reading out loud ability seems not to have improved too much since then. I hadn’t realised until just now. But I still have to memorise how to say new words. I can, with a small effort, look at a simple word I have never encountered and pronounce it. Though, the word has to be quite simple. I host trivia as a side gig, and any question with a name that isn’t spelled traditionally trips me up badly. It can be pretty embarrassing trying to say “Sarrah” and not realising it’s just pronounced “Sarah”.
That’s the thing that leads me to think, at least with reading out loud, I have to explicitly memorise a words pronunciation before I can say it. Instead of what I assume others can do, and just look at a word and know how to say it.
In writing, it was necessity and cultural pressure. By the time I was reading out loud alright I was still writing like “i fond how to Mack a YouTube account” “ken i”. That’s a real quote my mother sent me a few weeks ago. When I realised I wasn’t getting what I wanted, (Winning MC battles, Reddit upvotes, winning Facebook wars, girls would comment on my spelling and I didn’t want them to) I would look around at the way others were writing things and cargo cult type copy whatever they were doing. Actually, that’s still what I do.
I don’t think it was high intelligence that caused me to notice these fixes. It took far too long to be intelligence. Instead, I think I’m really competitive and like showing off. Eventually I found methods that got the results I was going for.
I also watched a lot of JacksFilms YGS https://youtu.be/NARxgXEdlzs?si=1rGyQMAnMxQo0x-2