Never mind—I better not go this time, life’s complicated. But thanks for arranging this thing <3
meedstrom
Karma: 145
Hai! Doubt I can make it by 12.27, due to train schedules—would it suit one of you at 14.30 or so or would you be tired by then?
… I’m getting the takeaway that you can influence policy by just emailing good papers to your local policymaker.
True, if you were gonna vomit repeatedly. I suspect the association might be forged after only one or two times. Maybe it fades after one week, so you do it again, then it fades after one month, then a year… like it’s an Anki card.
Counterpoint: This sort of thing seems more efficient for my brain to take in, compared to if it were phrased in a more “friendly” way. At least if that’d mean a long-winded and less passionate phrasing that relies more on the reader’s own motivation to pay attention.
It’s true that this quote is more suitable for informal chat than the front page, but also, a community must be free to be caustic about some things it finds sufficiently basic, else it gets watered down. Sometimes a caustic tone serves a purpose for the current readers.
So there’s a balancing act, where the balance Eliezer strikes tends to cause a new discussion about tone, again and again, and I imagine it gets a bit discouraging after the tenth such comment thread.
Well pointed out.
I’ve done both at different times, so here’s a way to tell the difference between “waiting for a reset” and “running towards a reset”: it’s a good sign if I’m looking forward to waking up!
I recognize myself. Thank you for putting that into words. Out of curiosity, do you have an ADHD diagnosis or consider getting one?
Thanks for the first link, it led me to demand avoidance, where caregivers/friends can make it easier with declarative language. I’ve been working on similar thoughts about “how to talk to someone with ADHD”. E.g. I find it more comfortable to hear “let me know if you want support with that”, rather than be asked “do you need support with that?”. Somehow, no demand for response makes it easier to think and respond.
Zooming in on one of your examples,
Eating something tasty, or going to a party, or otherwise “indulging” yourself, every time you do something that contributes to your long-term aspiration.
AFAICT, this classic indulgence-as-a-reward can aim at one of two things:
it can be something you only think to do after having completed a task, to build positive assocations for the future
it can be something you think of to motivate yourself to start on a task to begin with
I believe that the first thing is generally good advice, but that a lot of people can’t do the second thing. At least brains like mine, I go for the reward regardless of whether or not I earned it!
So I found a different formulation that works better: fist-pump.
Just fist-pump each success. It is no reward in itself, no indulgence: the gesture feels meaningful only after there is something to celebrate, so it can not be short-circuited. And yet, it can still work as something to look forward to: “oh, if I finish up that task, then I’ll get to fist-pump about it”!
P.S.: The “radical cure for sugar enjoyment” described in your linked post (taking emetic drugs when you consume sugar) is a really bad idea.
Not disagreeing, but what’s your reason? Loss of gut flora?
It is currently in a somewhat awkward hybrid state.
And you may see it that way for the rest of your life. Using CLI is like having a taste in coffee, there’s always new frontiers. I’d advise embracing the “hybrid state” you’ve got at any given time as Your System, rather than always be enduring an awkward state of transition.
Well-spotted! My other comment mentions an example of literal “|” in Warcraft 3.
Wow, blast from the past!
|n|n|cfffcc00is in many tooltip strings in Warcraft 3 (with the result of coloring the following text some light gold hue).Lots of examples: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/tooltip-tutorial.51966/ (archived)
Saw it so many times making custom maps,
cffffccis burned into my memory. I guess the first “c” stands for “color”; it’s not part of the hex code.
I’m getting the sentiment “just sort the signal from the noise, same as always”, and I disagree it’s the same as always. Maybe if you already had some habits of epistemic hygiene such as default to null:
The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text. This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)
If you hadn’t already cultivated such habits, it seems to me things have definitely changed since 1993. Amidst the noise is better-cloaked noise. Be that due to Dead Internet Theory or LLMs (not sure if the reason would matter). I understood OP’s question as asking basically how do we sort signal from noise, given such cloaking?
I’ll propose an overarching principle to either read things carefully enough for a gears-level understanding or not read it at all. And “default to null” is one practical side of that: it guards against one way you might accidentally store what you think is a gear, but isn’t.
Nitpick: ”...is extremely bizarre” can sound prescriptive. If you only meant it descriptively, maybe “extremely unusual”.
Basically agree, but not an useful comment.
I’d nuance that as that being alive and energetic is fun—but when my body no longer grants energy, it’s like death already. Say I’m trying to take notes about the content of this thread, but I’m so tired I barely produce anything. If the terms of my body are such that I must first do a timeskip to tomorrow to get more energy, then I want the timeskip.
I guess I understand becoming sleep-deprived and staying up anyway if you don’t notice your IQ dropping...
I think some Rationalists believe everything is supposed to fit into one frame, but Frames != The Truth. [...] we should be able to pick up and drop frames as needed, at will.
Aye—see also In Praise of Fake Frameworks. It’s helped me interface with a lot people that would’ve otherwise befuddled me. That gives me a more fleshed-out range of possible perspectives on things, which shortcuts to new knowledge.
But perhaps it’s worth thinking twice when or at least how to introduce this skill, because it looks like a method of doing Salvage Epistemology and so could invite its downsides if taught poorly. I’m undecided whether that’s worth worrying about.
Gonna reuse the term “fluency escape velocity”!
A major point of the workshop is to just grind on making cruxy-predictions for 4 days, and hopefully reach some kind of “fluency escape velocity”, where it feels easy enough that you’ll keep doing it.
Fits my experience with a lot of mental skills, because it often takes me many months or years after reading about a skill that I actually reach a point where I’ve stacked up enough experience with it that it becomes fluent / natural / a tool in my toolkit.
Gwern’s 1001 PredictionBook Nights is a tour de force.
Disclaimer: I am not sure I’ve done what you think of as Looking, but all your metaphors make sense to me.
If I “get” the general thing, then would you agree that aside from Fake Frameworks, experience with Focusing must help? Especially for people who haven’t yet meditated much or find the idea of a “non-verbal thought” elusive.
I’m thinking of Focusing as targeting something that can also happen in meditation, but could take some beginner meditators a long time until they get direct experience with. It’s the way that your mind can suddenly produce a new awareness or new knowledge, without any conscious chain-of-thought, any verbal reasoning behind it.
Focusing hammers that home again and again, yes, there’s a way and it’s right there. It gave me a lot of confidence to try the mental move of “step back and wait until I See Something” in a variety of contexts.
PS: Thank you for pointing out the purpose of koans. I had “dissolved” them, but now I see, that perhaps I can try to answer them anyway!
Me too, but that’s because I appreciate being “caught red-handed” believing what I’m reading. I see it as a favor done me by the author.
If you weren’t anyway in the mindset that you need to practice weighing the information that’s given to you and calibrating by guessing at the answer before actually reading the real answer, I suppose it could be annoying.