Morpheus

• Morpheus 28 Jun 2022 19:30 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: TurnTrout’s short­form feed

  I remember the magazine I read as a kid (Geolino) had a section like this (something like 7 news stories from around the World and one is wrong). It’s german only, though I’d guess a similar thing to exist in english media?

• Morpheus 21 Jun 2022 1:47 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Re­la­tion­ship Ad­vice Repository

  I’d add the pragmatist guide to relationships (has material on seeking as well as on maintaining relationships) I read like half the book (the parts remotely relevant to me (the book has ~660 pages)) and is very much written from a more selfish livehacking/​”munchkinism”/​economist (markets and contracts) kind of perspective, which I found entertaining, but which might be off-putting for some. The authors also know and seem to practice their Bayesian epistemology, and the book held up pretty well to online spot checks, and asking people. I still felt like sometimes the authors didn’t add enough uncertainty disclaimers around their theories about humans, but it’s not like I wouldn’t have similar complaints about some lw posts. and

  The pragmatist guide to sexuality(lots of data on what people’s sexuality is actually like! 100% recommended (though maybe just skip the authors interpretations and look at the tables))

  What links here?

  • Re­la­tion­ship Ad­vice Repository by Ruby (20 Jun 2022 14:39 UTC; 89 points)

• Morpheus 19 May 2022 12:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: phdead’s comment on: We have achieved Noob Gains in AI

  Mostly abstract arguments that don’t actually depend on DL in particular (or at least not to a strong degree). Eg. stupid evolution was able to do it with human brains. This spreadsheet is nice for playing with the implications for different models (couldn’t find Ajeya’s report this belongs to). Though I haven’t taken the time to thoroughly think through this, because playing through resonable values gave distributions that seemed to broad to bother.

  The point I wanted to make is that you can believe that things are slowing down (I am more empathetic to the view where AI will not have a big/​galactic impact until things are too late) and still be worried.

• Morpheus 18 May 2022 21:39 UTC

  4 points

  on: We have achieved Noob Gains in AI

  I would not have expected progress to have sped up. But I agree that lots of recent progress could be naively Interpreted this way. So it makes sense to keep in mind that the current deep learning paradigm might come to a halt. Though the thing that worries me is that deep learning already has enough momentum to get us to AGI while slowing down.

• Morpheus 5 May 2022 19:15 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: bvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbv’s comment on: Start­ing too many pro­jects, finish­ing none

  Nice. You might have solved the problem (will see if I actually like using it) where making a tool like this was on my list to prioritize my list, but I never got to it because the system did not exist.

• Morpheus 5 May 2022 17:57 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: TurnTrout’s short­form feed

  I really liked your concrete example. I had first only read your first paragraphs, highlighted this as something interesting with potentially huge upsides, but I felt like it was really hard to tell for me whether the thing you are describing was something I already do or not. After reading the rest I was able to just think about the question myself and notice that thinking about the explicit likelihood ratios is something I am used to doing. Though I did not go into quite as much detail as you did, which I blame partially on motivation and partially as “this skill has a higher ceiling than I would have previously thought”.

• Morpheus 1 May 2022 23:54 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: How to be skep­ti­cal about med­i­ta­tion/​Buddhism

  Daniel Ingram got also interviewed on the clearerthinking Podcast (reccomended if you have only heard about the mindfullness stuff like I had).

• Morpheus 25 Apr 2022 21:07 UTC

  1 point

  on: Book Re­view: A PhD is Not Enough

  While he pushed that he could have more substantial results in 6-12 months, other job candidates had had 2-3 projects done in the same timespan as Tom, and all he could muster up was a “maybe perhaps possibly”?

  This trap reminded me of this gem I recently stumbled upon. Here’s the bottom line, so you can determine whether this seems unintuitive/​worth exploring:

  Many of our default intuitions about how to pursue uncertain ideas are counterproductive:

  We often try easier tasks first, when instead we should try the most informative tasks first. We often conflate a high-level approach with a low-level instantiation of the approach. We are often too slow to try to disprove our own ideas.

  Building frameworks that reify the research process as a concrete search problem can help unearth these incorrect intuitions and replace them with systematic reasoning.

• Morpheus 7 Apr 2022 20:12 UTC

  1 point

  on: Dun­can Sa­bien On Writing

  Thank you for sharing!

  the thing that I think is like most unusual that most other people don’t do, is when I’m actually writing the text. Let’s say I’ve written like five paragraphs, and then I sort of peter out, like I run out of steam. What I do for everything I write from like emails to essays to fiction, I’ll go back up like two or three paragraphs, hit return a few times, and then I’ll just start literally re typing those last paragraphs. Literally just straightforwardly word for word, kind of reading as I read/​type, and maybe I’ll like start changing one little thing here or there if I notice a sentence is dissatisfying. But usually by the time I get to where I previously petered out, I’ve caught the flow again, and I just flow forward and write another five paragraphs

  This sounds really interesting. I will write another comment once I’ve tried this a few times.

• Morpheus 6 Apr 2022 16:07 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: mukashi’s comment on: Don’t die with dig­nity; in­stead play to your outs

  Sometimes (especially when thinking about evidence in baysean updates) Log odds can be useful because one bit of evidence just adds 1 bit to your log odds (in Base 2). Eliezer goes into more detail here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/​​0-and-1-are-not-probabilities

• Morpheus 4 Apr 2022 20:58 UTC

  3 points

  on: Fram­ing Practicum: Bistability

  • The speed of something thrown up has two equilibria, falling back down (0) or reaching escape velocity and moving away indefintely.

  • Bottles spend most of their time either empty or filled.

  • A problem you understand vs a problem you don’t. Trying to solve a rubics cube through the CFOP or ROUX-method, you will consistently move the cube to the solved state, even if someone messed with it. Trying to solve a rubics cube without ever having done it before, you will probably not move very close to a solved state.

• Morpheus 4 Apr 2022 20:15 UTC

  3 points

  on: Fram­ing Practicum: Stable Equilibrium

  Examples:

  • the temperature of boiling water (or boiling things) which get heated by a source above the boiling temperature (as long as there is water left of course).

  • Average temperature of/​on earth. Changing the composition of the atmosphere means moving the equilibrium.

  • genetic mutations have the two equilibria of dying out if does not increase the fitness of the bearer or getting fixed in the population if it is advantagous.

• Morpheus 22 Mar 2022 21:09 UTC

  4 points

  on: Jet­lag, Nausea, and Diar­rhea are Largely Optional

  Personally, I found a weekly pill organizer very helpful because I could tell whether I had already taken my meds or not.

• Morpheus 21 Mar 2022 17:58 UTC

  1 point

  on: Shah and Yud­kowsky on al­ign­ment failures

  I think some of your confusion may be that you’re putting “probability theory” and “Newtonian gravity” into the same bucket.

  Seems like Scott Aaronson shares a similar view on Quantum Mechanics which he views as “a certain generalization of probability theory”? From Quantum Computing since Democritus:

  So, what is quantum mechanics? Even though it was discovered by physicists, it’s not a physical theory in the same sense as electromagnetism or general relativity. In the usual “hierarchy of sciences”—with biology at the top, then chemistry, then physics, then math—quantum mechanics sits at a level between math and physics that I don’t know a good name for. Basically, quantum mechanics is the operating system that other physical theories run on as application software (with the exception of general relativity, which hasn’t yet been successfully ported to this particular OS). There’s even a word for taking a physical theory and porting it to this OS: “to quantize.”

• Morpheus 1 Mar 2022 22:56 UTC

  LW: 2 AF: 1

  AF

  in reply to: Jacob Pfau’s comment on: ELK Thought Dump

  Thanks! Exactly what I was looking for :)

• Morpheus 1 Mar 2022 18:48 UTC

  LW: 5 AF: 4

  AF

  on: ELK Thought Dump

  One claim I found very surprising:

  To make computationalism well-defined, we need to define what it means for a computation to be instantiated or not. Most of the philosophical arguments against computationalism attempt to render it trivial by showing that according to any reasonable definition, all computations are occurring everywhere at all times, or at least there are far more computations in any complex object than a computationalist wants to admit. I won’t be reviewing those arguments here; I personally think they fail if we define computation carefully, but I’m not trying to be super-careful in the present essay.

  This sounds very intriguing, as I have encountered this problem “what is computation” in some discussions, but have never seen anything satisfactory so far. I would be very glad for any links to solutions/​definitions or resources that might help one to come up with a definition oneself ;).

• Morpheus 21 Feb 2022 19:54 UTC

  9 points

  on: Seek­ing mod­els of LW’s aver­sion to religion

  One explanation why you would not find religion discussed much on Lesswrong: The sequences are definitely anti-religion in a lot of places, so this might filter out people who are good at epistemology all else being equal, but feel insulted by Eliziers writing. Someone wanting to discuss religion on LessWrong is therefore probably a strong signal for someone clueless who “doesn’t get it”. So discussing religion here is low status.

• Morpheus 16 Feb 2022 0:37 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: Ep­silon is not a prob­a­bil­ity, it’s a cop-out

  Wait now I think that might have been your point.

• Morpheus 16 Feb 2022 0:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Ep­silon is not a prob­a­bil­ity, it’s a cop-out

  Well if you consciously put down 0.001% (maybe even wrote down your argument) and it happens I’d think you might learn something.

Re­turns on cog­ni­tion of differ­ent board games