NoSignalNoNoise

Think­ing Faster

• NoSignalNoNoise 3 May 2025 20:42 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Does trans­lat­ing a post with an LLM af­fect its rat­ing?

  This is perhaps a bit off topic, but why translate using a general purpose LLM rather than a tool that’s specifically for translation like Google Translate?

• NoSignalNoNoise 6 Apr 2025 4:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: How much progress ac­tu­ally hap­pens in the­o­ret­i­cal physics?

  Take a fixed number of humans with a fixed intelligence (both average and outliers) then let mathematics advance. It will advance to the point that there is a vanishingly small number of people who can even understand the state of the art

  This ignores the possibility of advances in the teaching of math (or physics, or any other discipline). If improved teaching methods lower the level of intelligence required to reach a given level of knowledge, then a field can advance considerably.

  Not to mention that the human population has been growing, and average intelligence has been increasing.

  Finally, there’s specialization. It doesn’t take much intelligence to know everything that was known about genetics when Darwin was alive, but probably nobody is smart enough to know everything that was known about it in 2000. But there have still been make advances since then thanks to people specialized in subfields like DNA sequencing.

• NoSignalNoNoise 28 Mar 2025 22:59 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Con­se­quen­tial­ism is for mak­ing decisions

  if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism

  This is missing the point. Consequentialism is about making decisions, not about judging past decisions. Consequentialism says that if punishing the manager would (in expectation) have better consequences than not punishing them, then they should be punished, and otherwise they shouldn’t. Deontology says that if the rules say to punish the manager, they should be punished, and if the rules say not to punish the manager, they shouldn’t be punished.

Crock, Crocker, Crockiest

• NoSignalNoNoise 4 Mar 2025 4:18 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: The Com­pli­ment Sand­wich 🥪 aka: How to crit­i­cize a normie with­out mak­ing them up­set.

  Does this still work? I’ve often heard it referred to as the “shit sandwich method” (by STEMish non-rationalists), so I wonder if people are sufficiently inoculated to it for it to no longer work

Prac­tic­ing Be­ing Wrong

Think­ing Physics and Think­ing Faster

• NoSignalNoNoise 2 Feb 2025 16:40 UTC

  6 points

  5

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: False­hoods you might be­lieve about peo­ple who are at a ra­tio­nal­ist meetup

  This whole time I thought it started with a capital I. TIL.

• NoSignalNoNoise 26 Jan 2025 18:37 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: If you wanted to ac­tu­ally re­duce the trade deficit, how would you do it?

  Border adjustment taxes generally consist of an X% tax on imports coupled with an X% subsidy on exports, so that would already increase exports.

  Making the import tax and export subsidy the same is also more economically efficient, because it doesn’t impose a net tax on cross border supply chains (imagine manufacturing a car in the US, attaching the wheels in Canada, and then selling it in the US)

Cal­ibra­tion Practice

• NoSignalNoNoise 9 Jan 2025 5:51 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: LVSN’s comment on: Don’t fall for on­tol­ogy pyra­mid schemes

  Are those genuine flaws with the model, or is the terminology just suboptimal? Put another way, if you know someone’s 5 factor conscientiousness and agreeableness scores, how useful is that for predicting their behavior?

• NoSignalNoNoise 16 Nov 2024 3:48 UTC

  9 points

  1

  on: Here­sies in the Shadow of the Sequences

  I like what you’re doing, but I feel like the heresies you propose are too tame.

  Here are some more radical heresies to consider:

  1. Most people are far more bottlenecked on some combination of akrasia and prospective memory, not on the accuracy of their models of the world. Rationalists in particular would be better off devoting effort to actually doing the obvious things than to understanding the world better.

  2. Self deception is very instrumentally useful a large fraction of real world situations we find ourselves in, and we should use more of it.

     1. Mormons seem to be especially good at coordinating on good lifestyle choices, so we should all consider becoming Mormon.

  3. Among groups of 10+ people, it’s usually more useful to get everyone all working on implementing the same plan than it is to come up with the best plan.

  4. Intelligence (of the sort measured by exams and IQ tests) is only moderately important to success.

EAG After-After-Party

Poli­ti­cal Prereqs

• NoSignalNoNoise 11 Sep 2024 14:12 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Phys­i­cal Ther­apy Sucks (but have you tried hid­ing it in some peanut but­ter?)

  I generally watch videos I enjoy while doing physical therapy exercises. I didn’t conceptualize it as hiding the “reward” from myself as an incentive for exercising; I conceptualize it as making the rather boring, sometimes aversive activity less salient by focusing my attention on something else.

  As an example, I find it much easier to hold a plank when I’m focused on the video I’m watching than when I’m just starting at the timer counting down.

• NoSignalNoNoise 11 Sep 2024 14:01 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: RamblinDash’s comment on: Phys­i­cal Ther­apy Sucks (but have you tried hid­ing it in some peanut but­ter?)

  I’ve tried this approach, and although it works well during the early part of the game, in the late game, a single turn can take 5-10 minutes, which is much less helpful as an exercise interlude.

• NoSignalNoNoise 11 Sep 2024 14:00 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Phys­i­cal Ther­apy Sucks (but have you tried hid­ing it in some peanut but­ter?)

  I’ve found that watching videos I enjoy while doing PT exercises helps. A key component of this strategy was to get a laptop stand with an adjustable angle so that I can position my screen somewhere I can see it (different places depending on how I’m physically positioned for each exercise).

• NoSignalNoNoise 18 Aug 2024 20:29 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jan Betley’s comment on: Mu­sic in the AI World

  I think the current diversity of music is largely caused by artists’ different lived experiences. You feel something, this is important for you, you try to express that via music. As long as AIs don’t have anything like “unique experiences” on the scale of humans, I’m not sure if they’ll be able to create music that is that diverse (and thus interesting).

  If the AI customized it for each listener (and does a good job), then music will reflect the unique experiences of the listeners, which would result in a more diverse range of music than music that only reflects the unique experiences of musicians.

  Of course, we could end up in an awkward middle ground where AI only generates variations on a successful pop music formula, and it all becomes a bland mush. But I think in that case, people would just go back to human-generated music on Spotify and YouTube.

• NoSignalNoNoise 17 Aug 2024 19:54 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: New blog: Ex­pe­di­tion to the Far Lands

  I like this collection of concepts, but I feel like I may not be understanding them very well without examples. Do you have any cached examples?