nim

Karma: 1,005

nim 11 Apr 2024 16:22 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dentosal’s comment on: Things can be difficult in 3 ways: Painful, time-consuming, or uncontrollable. Is this reasonable to say?
To extend this angle—I notice that we’re more likely to call things “difficult” when our expectations of whether we “should” be able to do it are mismatched from our observations of whether we are “able to” do it.

The “oh, that’s hard actually” observation shows up reliably for me when I underestimated the effort, pain, or luck required to attain a certain outcome.

nim 11 Apr 2024 16:18 UTC
3 points
2
on: Things can be difficult in 3 ways: Painful, time-consuming, or uncontrollable. Is this reasonable to say?
“time-consuming” does not cleanly encapsulate difficulty, because lots of easy things are time-consuming too.

Perhaps “slow to reward” is a better way to gesture at the phenomenon you mean? Learning a language takes a high effort investment before you can have a conversation; getting in shape takes a high effort investment before you see unambiguous bodily changes beyond just soreness. Watching TV and scrolling social media are both time-consuming, but I don’t see people going around calling those activities difficult.

nim 2 Apr 2024 18:48 UTC
2 points
0
on: On green
Green, on its face, seems like one of the main mistakes. Green is what told the rationalists to be more OK with death, and the EAs to be more OK with wild animal suffering. Green thinks that Nature is a harmony that human agency easily disrupts.
The shallow-green that’s easy/possible to talk about characterizes humans as separate from or outside of nature. Shallow-green is also characteristic of scientists who probe and measure the world and present their findings as if the ways they touched the world to measure it were irrelevant—in a sense, the changes made by the instruments’ presence don’t matter, but there’s also a sense in which they matter greatly.
By contrast, imagine a deep-green: a perspective from which humanity is from and of nature itself. This deep-green is impractical to communicate about, and cutting it up into little pieces to try to address them one at a time loses something important of its nature.
One place it’s relatively easy to point at this deep-green is our understanding what time means. It touches the way that we accept base-12 and base-60 in our clocks and calendars, and in the reasons that no “better” alternative has been “better” enough to win over the whole world.
The characterization of green as “harmony through acceptance” in your image from Duncan Sabien points at another interesting facet of green: “denial” of reality is antithetical to both “acceptance” and “rationality”, albeit with slightly different connotations for each.
Then again, in this system I’d describe myself as having arrived at green through black, so perhaps it’s only my biases talking.

nim 1 Apr 2024 18:25 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Back to Basics: Truth is Unitary
I misread it as “murakami-sama” at first, which was also disproportionately charming.

nim 1 Apr 2024 15:42 UTC
13 points
8
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
It’s clear to me from the post that to properly enjoy it as performance art, the audience is meant to believe that the music is AI-generated.

I don’t read the post as disclosing how the music was “actually” made, in the most literal real-world sense.

Pretty cool, regardless, that we live in an era where ‘people pretending to be AI making music’ is not trivial to distinguish from ‘AI trying to make music’ :)

nim 26 Mar 2024 17:42 UTC
4 points
0
on: Barefoot FAQ
I like going barefoot. However, I live in a climate that’s muddy for most of the year. When I’m entering and exiting my house frequently, being barefoot is impractical because the time it takes to adequately clean my feet is much greater than the time it takes to slip off a pair of shoes at the door.

Also, in the colder parts of the year, I find that covering my feet indoors allows me to be generally comfortable at lower ambient temperatures than I would require for being barefoot in the house. This isn’t much of an issue during outdoor activities that promote circulation to the feet, but it’s annoying when reading, at the computer, or doing other activities that involve staying relatively still.

nim 24 Mar 2024 15:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: nim’s Shortform
“to clean house” as implication of violence...

Due to a tragic shortage of outbuildings (to be remedied in the mid term but not immediately), my living room is the garage/makerspace of my home. I cleaned as one cleans for guests last week, because a friend from way back was dropping by. I then got to enjoy a clean-enough-for-guests home for several days, which is a big part of why it is nice to be visited by friends un-intimate enough to feel like cleaning for.

Then my partner-in-crafts came over, and we re-occupied every table with a combination of resin casting and miniature clay sculpting shenanigans. It’s an excellent time.

We also went shopping for fabric together because I plan to make a baby quilt kid-in-progress of the aforementioned friend from way back. Partner-in-crafts idly asked me when I was planning to do the quilt stuff, because historically I would be expected to launch into it immediately as soon as the fabric came out of the dryer.

However, I found something new in myself: A reluctance to start a new project without a clean place to start it in. I’m not sure where this reluctance came from, as I think it seems new, but I also think I like it. So I got to tidying up the stuff that was un-tidyable last night because the resin was still sticky, but is eminently tidyable now because it cured over time, and carefully examining my reluctance-to-tidy as it tried to yell at me.

In that reluctance-to-tidy, I find time travel again: We store information in the position of objects in our environment. Object location encodes memory, so moving someone else’s objects has certain commonalities with the rewriting-of-memory that we call gaslighting when pathological.

For better or worse, my architecture of cognition defaults to relying on empathy twice over when reasoning about moving stuff that someone else was using, or someone else’s stuff. By recognizing an object’s location as a person’s memory of where-they-left-it, I view moving it as rewriting that memory.

The double-empathy thing comes in where I reason about what moves of stuff it’s ok to make. If I put the thing where the person will have an easy time finding it, if I model them well enough to guess correctly where they’ll first look when they want it, then I can help them by moving it. I can move it from somewhere they’d look later to somewhere they’d look sooner, and thereby improve their life at the moment of seeking it, and that’s a clearly good act.

That’s the first empathy layer. The second empathy layer comes of a natural tendency to anthropomorphize objects, which I’ve considered trying to eradicate from myself but settled on keeping because I find it quite convenient to have around in other circumstances. This is the animism of where something “wants” to go, creating a “home” for your keys by the door, and so forth.

So there’s 2 layers of modeling minds—one of complex real minds who are likely to contain surprises in their expectations, and one of simple virtual “minds” that follow from the real-minds as a convenient shortcut. I guess one way to put it is that I figure stuff has/channels feelings kinda like how houseplants do—they probably don’t experience firsthand emotion in any way that would be recognizable to people, but there’s a lot of secondhand emotion that’s shown in how they’re related to and cared for.

Not sure where I’m going with all that, other than noticing how the urge to tidy up can be resisted by the same aesthetic sensibility that says it’s generally bad to erase anybody’s memories.

nim 9 Feb 2024 16:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Running the Numbers on a Heat Pump
Seconding the importance of insulation, especially for disaster preparedness and weathering utility outages.

If any of your friends have a fancy thermal camera, see if you can borrow it. If not, there are some cheap options for building your own or pre-built ones on ebay. The cheap ones don’t have great screens or refresh rates, but they do the job of visualizing which things are warmer and which are cooler.

Using a thermal imager, I managed to figure out the importance of closing the window blinds to keep the house warm. Having modern high-efficiency windows lulls me into a false sense of security about their insulative value, which I’m still un-learning.

nim 9 Feb 2024 16:24 UTC
3 points
0
on: Running the Numbers on a Heat Pump
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that even though the electricity here is mostly produced by burning gas you do actually burn less gas by turning it into electricity and then using it to run a heat pump than just burning it for heat.
Fascinating! I guess it’d fall into the “more moving parts to break” bucket, but it gets me wondering about switching from my current propane HVAC to propane generator + electric heat pump.
Searching the web for models that do both in a single unit, I find a lot of heat pumps using propane as their refrigerant, but no immediate hits using it as their fuel.

nim 5 Feb 2024 23:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: How has internalising a post-AGI world affected your current choices?
I personally suspect we’ll perpetually keep moving the goalposts so whatever AI we currently have is obviously not AGI because AGI is by definition better than what we’ve got in some way. I think AI is already here and performing to standards that I would’ve called AGI or even magic if you’d showed it to me a decade ago, but we’re continually coming up with reasons it isn’t “really” AGI yet. I see no reason that we would culturally stop that habit of insisting that silicon-based minds are less real than carbon-based ones, at least as long as we keep using “belongs to the same species as me” as a load-bearing proxy for “is a person”. (load-bearing because if you stop using species as a personhood constraint, it opens a possibility of human non-people, and we all know that bad things happen when we promote ideologies where that’s possible).

However, I’m doing your point (6) anyways because everybody’s aging. If I believed in AGI being around the corner, I’d probably spend less time with them, because “real AGI” as it’s often mythologized could solve mortality and give me a lot more time with them.

I’m also doing your point (8) to some degree—if I expect that new tooling will obviate a skill soon, I’m less likely to invest in developing the skill. While I don’t think AI will get to a point where we widely recognize it as AGI, I do think we’re building a lot of very powerful new tools right now with what we’ve already got.

nim 31 Jan 2024 23:32 UTC
52 points
16
on: Leading The Parade
If you’re talking about literal parades—I lead them annually at a smallish renaissance fair. Turns out that people with the combination of willingness to run around in front of a group looking silly, and enough time anxiety to actually show up to the morning ones, are in short supply.

That parade goes where I put it. There are several possible paths through the faire and I choose which one the group takes, and make the appropriate exaggerated gestures to steer the front of the crowd in that direction, and then the rest follow.

I also play a conspicuous looking instrument in the parade at a small annual local event that we convene a “band” for, as well. Since the instrument is large and obvious, I’m typically shoved to the front of the group as we line up. I’m pretty sure that if I went off script and took the parade out of the gathering’s area, they’d probably follow me, because nobody else is quite sure where we’re supposed to be going. If I conspired with the other musicians to take the group out of the event, we could almost certainly make that happen. I’m curious how far down the road we could get the dancers following the parade before they realize something is amiss, but also really don’t want to be the individual to instigate that sort of experiment.

Back in high school, I did marching band, I think if our leader had been misinformed about where we should go, we would have followed them anyway. That’s mostly because marching band has an almost paramilitary obedience theme going on, and can get a bit culty about directors or leaders in my experience. Marching as a group also confers a certain immunity to individual responsibility as long as you’re following your orders. There’s this confidence that if the leader takes the group off course, that leader will be the only individual who’s personally in trouble for the error. The group might get yelled at collectively for having followed, but no one person in the group is any more responsible for the error than any other, except for the leader.

From these experiences, I’d speculate that the reason we don’t see literal parades being counterfactually led off course like that on a regular basis is because the dynamic of leading it disincentivizes abusing that power. Being chosen and trusted by a group to lead them in a public setting where any errors you make will be instantly obvious to all onlookers confers a powerful desire to not mess up.

nim 30 Jan 2024 1:31 UTC
1 point
0
on: How to write better?

exceedingly long and complex sentences

Break them down. Long sentences in a comfortable cadence like being punctuated by short ones.

giving masses of detail with little apparent regard for how much information the person at the other end actually needs

Give more regard to what the reader needs.

“stick-on” weird metaphors which appear randomly every time I’m afraid I’m being too technical or annoying (so you get a wall of annoying text with a bit of canned laughter in the middle…)

Have you asked readers whether they dislike the metaphors?

vague sentences that go around for a while as I’m slowly figuring out what I mean to say

Rewrite after discovering your own intent. That’s what editing is for.

long paragraphs, etc.

Fortunately your keyboard has an enter key, with no limit of uses.

Also, I spend ages proofreading anything I write and worrying about it…

Write where you feel that the stakes are low. If the consequences of poor proofreading don’t feel worth worrying about, you can practice the skill of worrying less.

nim 29 Jan 2024 18:06 UTC
2 points
1
on: Natural selection for ingame character build optimisation
I anticipate that if your experiment is successful in discovering underrated synergies between perks, your new perk combos will be adopted more widely, which will affect perk selection behavior in your opponents, which will in turn affect the efficacy of the new synergies.

If you were crowdsourcing the perk combo experiments across many players, the experiment’s complexity would explode when you try to control for the impact of player skill or individual playstyle preferences on the quality of a build.

I wonder if you could simplify the combinatorics of perk combo testing by grouping and rating perks by category of theme. For instance, it may be much better to factor each specific perk or item by its mechanical impact, when there can be multiple impacts per item. Maybe perk X increases your shooting accuracy while decreasing your move speed. When you discover synergies with it, framing those synergies as “with anything that increases accuracy” or “with anything that decreases speed” or “with anything that both increases accuracy and decreases speed” will give you a better “shopping list” in the perk tree. “oh, I know the thing that increases my damage dealt when I’m moving slower works well with anything that makes me move slower”, flavor of insights.

The problem space here also reminds me of a video I saw awhile back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oULEuOoRd0&ab_channel=NightHawkInLight

nim 29 Jan 2024 17:49 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Perhaps’s comment on: nim’s Shortform
I think that’s definitely an aspect of the interesting side: effective encryption relies on deep understanding of how well the opponent can break the encryption. It needs to be strong enough to seem certain it won’t be broken in a reasonable timeframe, but that balances against being fast enough to encrypt/decrypt so it’s practical to use.

The encryption metaphor also highlights a side of rationality as rendering one’s thoughts and actions maximally legible to observers, which strikes me as being true in some ways and interestingly limited in others.

nim 29 Jan 2024 16:21 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Processor clock speeds are not how fast AIs think
It is indeed tricky to measure this stuff.

E.g. I can’t ask an LLM to go found a new company, give it some seed capital and an email account, and expect it to succeed.

In general, would you expect a human to succeed under those conditions? I wouldn’t, but then most of the humans I associate with on a regular basis aren’t entrepreneurs.

There’s a different claim, “we will sooner or later have AIs that can think and act at least 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than a human”. I see that claim as probably true, although I obviously can’t prove it.

Without bounding what tasks we want the computer perform faster than the person, one could argue that we’ve met that criterion for decades. Definitely a matter of “most people” and “most computers” for both, but there’s a lot of math that a majority of humans can’t do quickly or can’t do at all, whereas it’s trivial for most computers.

nim 29 Jan 2024 4:40 UTC
3 points
on: nim’s Shortform
With the core of rationalism being built from provable patterns of human irrationality, I wonder what “irrationalist” philosophy and behavior would look like.

What conclusions would follow from treating the human capacity for rational thought and behavior with the importance or mere obviousness more traditionally poured into attempting to understand and resolve our “irrationalities”?

There’s the side from which the expected results look so obvious (“chaos, duh”) that they don’t seem worth thinking about. It’s the boring one. There are others.

Part of the value of rational thought comes from its verifiability and replicability across many minds and eras. But that’s not a proof that no thought which fails to verify, fails to replicate, is certain to be without value.

(swap in whatever comparable term suits you for ‘value’ in that—I’ve tried playing the whack-a-mole of tabooing each term in turn which slips into that conceptual void, and concluded that having some linguistic placeholder there seems load-bearing for communication).

nim 26 Jan 2024 18:30 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: m_arj’s comment on: What subjects are unexpectedly high-utility?
Choose some trivial, popular self-improvement thing you want. Something you wouldn’t mind changing about your cognition if it was easy, but wouldn’t be heartbroken not to change if it didn’t happen. Find some free self-hypnosis audio for it online, and skim a transcript of the script to make sure it’s content you’re ok with lowering your defenses toward. Then pretend to be the kind of person who just plain thinks it’s interesting and worth a try, and listen to it and relax into it.

If you’ve practiced self-awareness and self-reflection, you will probably have the experience where the parts of your mind you watch yourself with remain normal, while the parts they’re watching get lightly hypnotized. If all of you gets hypnotized, that’s cool too, you’re back to normal at the end of the audio and you might accidentally get a personal change you don’t hate.

It’s tempting to categorize hypnosis as an intellectual pursuit if you haven’t interacted with it much, but it’s really got a lot more in common with physical practices than mental ones. As with many physical pursuits, the important bits happen in the parts of human experience that are the hardest to transfer between minds through language, so reading about it will convey much less useful understanding than just giving it a try.

at least, I’m assuming you want to understand it. Some stuff, trying to understand from language is about as effective as trying to “understand” a cuisine by reading a cookbook that calls for a bunch of spices you’re unfamiliar with. Skim the cookbook to make sure you’re not allergic to any of the known ingredients, maybe, then just go visit the restaurant down the street.

nim 26 Jan 2024 18:19 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: FinalFormal2’s comment on: What subjects are unexpectedly high-utility?
One approach that’s helped me in the executive functioning department is choosing to believe that connecting long-term wants to short-term wants is itself a skill.

I don’t want to touch a hot stove, and yet I don’t frame my “not touching a hot stove” behavior as an executive function problem because there’s no time scale on which I want it. I don’t want to have touched the stove; that’d just hurt and be of no benefit to anybody.

I don’t particularly right-now-want to go do half an hour of exercise and make a small increment of progress on each of several ongoing projects today, but I do frame that as an executive function problem, because I long-term-want those things—I want to have done them.

It’s tempting to default to setting first-order metrics of success: I’ll know I did well if I’m in shape and my ongoing projects are completed on time, for instance. But I find it much more actionable and helpful to look at second-order metrics of success: is this approach causing me better or worse progress on my concrete goals than other approaches?

For me, shifting the focus from the infrequent feedback of project completion to the constant feedback of process efficacy is helpful for not getting bored and giving up. Shifting from optimizing outputs to optimizing the process also helps me look for smaller and more concrete indicators that the process is working. I personally find that the most concrete and reliable “having my shit together” indicator is whether I’m keeping my home tidy, because that’s always the first thing to go when I start dropping the ball on progress on my ongoing tasks in general. Yours may differ, but I suspect that addressing the alignment problem of coordinating your short-term wants with your long-term wants may be a more promising approach than trying to brute force through the wall of “don’t wanna”.

nim 25 Jan 2024 15:43 UTC
3 points
−2
on: Status-oriented spending
Good post on the whole, but I downvoted for the “affiliate link” rickroll. I was genuinely curious, and if it was a real product that seemed good enough to buy I figured I’d make sure they’d tracked my click to get you a payout as a favor to show appreciation for the recommendation. Is that really the kind of behavior you’d like to punish for a laugh?
Or, more to the point, what if they don’t compensate at all and just have the money to afford it? Who cares!
We as social animals care if someone else is getting more, because we’re wired to want to do what they’re doing. In a flock of chickens, when one of them finds something delicious, all the others immediately want some too. Imagine how this impacts the group’s survival in the wild, vs if each individual ignored the others’ discoveries.
Money decouples earning behavior from spending behavior in a way that those ancient survival-relevant artifacts of behavior habits don’t follow well, of course. Just saying it makes sense to me that we have a “that member of my group has what I want so I am going to try to do what they do” reaction wired in at a pretty fundamental level.
With the mattress topper you’d describe buying, I’d say congratulations—amortize the amount you’d spend to climate control your whole room to the target temperatures over the expected life of the item, and it’s probably a pretty efficient way to address the consideration at hand.
With the services, I think it’s also worth considering framing them as education—buying the opportunity to watch experts do a thing, so you can learn to do the thing better yourself. Ultimately I think the role of many experts—therapists, sports trainers, home organizers, whatever—has a large element of education/tutoring/training: offering you the opportunity to inherit the relevant portions of their skillset in a more efficient manner than going out and studying the whole skillset from scratch.

nim 25 Jan 2024 15:26 UTC
3 points
0
on: What subjects are unexpectedly high-utility?
In reflecting on which subjects have been surprisingly powerful and implementable for me, I notice a pattern: Catching up my knowledge of subjects that I bounced off of rather than assimilating on prior encounters with them has disproportionate return.

Your example of connecting body language mirroring to likeability highlights how contextual the condition of “learn and know very little” is: If someone had less experience reading others’ body language and managing their own, mirroring might be an extremely difficult task. But since you happen to have already paid attention to reading and managing body language, “how to use mirroring” is a missing link to connect those existing skills into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Your question and example read to me as “based on FinalFormula2′s current skillset, which subjects will they be surprised at the power and ease of, because they don’t have that skill yet but they do have all the high-effort prerequisites already in place?”

The trouble with trying to give answers you’ll find good is that you’ve offered very little information about where you’re at right now. To turn it around, what subjects seem more difficult than they should be to you?