CS student, blogging and editing at https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/
NicholasKross
Karma: 115
I’ve noticed a thing happening (more? lately? just in my reading sample?) similar to what you describe, where the emphasis goes more onto the social/community side of rationality as opposed to… the rest of rationality.
The Moral Mazes examples are related to that. Also topics like reputation, and virtues ‘n’ norms, and what other people think of you.
At some point, a person’s energy and resources are finite. They can try to win at anything, but maybe the lesson from recent writings is “winning at social anything is hard enough (for a LW-frequenting personality) to be a notable problem”.
Some thoughts on this issue:
-
Codify, codify, codify. Most people in the LW community are lacking in some social skills (relative to both non-members and the professional-politician standard). Those who have those skills: please make long detailed checklists and email-extensions of what works. That way, the less-socially-skilled among us can avoid losing-at-social without turning into Mad-Eye Moody and losing our energy.
-
Is there a trend where communities beat around the bush more over time? Many posts do what I’ve heard called “subtweeting”. “Imagine a person X, having to do thing Y, and problem Z happens...”. Yes, social game theory exists and reputation exists, but at least consider just telling people the details.
Common/game-theory/vague/bad: “Let’s say somebody goes to $ORG, but they do something bad. We should consider $ORG and everyone there to be infected with The Stinky.”
Better/precise/detailed/good: “Hey, Nicholas Kross went to MIRI and schemed to build a robot that outputs anti-utils. How do we prevent this in the future, and can we make a preventative checklist?” [1]
If you are totally financially/legally dependent on an abusive organization or person, obviously writing a call-out post with details is game-theoretically bad for you. In that case, don’t leave in those details. For everyone else: either write a postmortem or say “I’m under NDA, but...”.
We get it, we need Slack, and society doesn’t give enough of it for our purposes. Can somebody with higher dopamine coordinate or promote any method so we can setup living arrangements to escape mainstream social pressures?
(If your AGI-will-give-us-Slack timeline is shorter than a community-Slack-project, how much should you really worry about long-term politics-style social/reputational-game-theoretic threats to the community’s Slack?)
Interested in more thoughts on this.
This is a fictional example. Plus, it’s not even slyly alluding to any situations! (Well, as far as I know.) ↩︎
-
My normie-paradigm mindset translates this to something like “the variable is a pointer to a result, and the result needs to be computed once (same as a source file may need to be computed once to use)”. Is this accurate, or am I missing more of it?
Ah, yeah 64x64 is pretty good there. (Now I wonder how much you could lower the framerate...)
Godspeed for ML on raw videos / running OBS + other things on a normal computer. (Related: I’d bet training on way-lower-resolution game footage would generalize to higher-resolution footage).
Not sure how contrarian “Few Quotes” is. I’ve gotten that advice at least once in college. Then again, a lot of books (especially nonfiction) quote a bit too much, so maybe this is contrarian advice in such contexts.
Roundabout Strategy
Yes! It turned out I had undiagnosed ADHD, and I’m getting treatment for it. It’s not solving everything (otherwise I probably wouldn’t have asked the question), but it’s helping.
This ties in well with the Procrastination Equation. Useful overconfidence means setting your “expectancy” term really high, even outside your comfort zone or social convention/rules.
Posts like this are correct on the emotional confidence stuff. In turn, more of them could link to Conviction without self-deception. (Or maybe the good kind of “self-deception” is less “sky is green” , and more “using Newtonian physics instead of quantum physics to build an airplane”.)
Nooooo, that doesn’t work for me, because my situation is definitely unique and not solvable! You see, I have too much energy to [sleep, rest, or not be jittery], but also too little energy to [do activities I’ve conditioned myself to think are harder than they are, despite having done them easily before]. /s
Put zero effort into--
Finally, a tip I can at least get started on. Zing!
Yeah, the systemization thing is definitely a common theme with a lot of agenty behaviors.
The world-state idea is interesting, like the shift in perception is to make the options salient (and therefore more likely to be taken).
On the extreme end basically guaranteed to work
Hey, that’s what I’m here for. Thanks for the tips! (Although I’d prolly end up using a raspi for mine).
I’ve wondered about the roleplaying thing myself. Your example reminds me of Ulillillia and his “mind game” system.
Haven’t thought of these, thanks for the ideas!
[Question] Ways to be more agenty?
This was cool! Definitely looking forward to the next challenge and using what I learned from this.
STR +3, WIS +3, INT +0, CHA +2-4, evenly distribute among the rest. Pretty unsophisticated, and misses out from larger gains from adding many points to a stat in one go.
Ah, okay thanks!
I tried to do this with a Twitter alt account, to get info about one specific topic. Then I got lazy and used it as a dumping ground to follow any account I came across. But maybe this could’ve worked there, too.