Elizabeth

• Elizabeth 28 Oct 2020 2:05 UTC

  4 points

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of send­ing some­thing to the moon

  1. Rail gun

  2. Write a let­ter to NASA

  3. Write a let­ter to China

  4. Write a let­ter to Russia

  5. Write a let­ter to SpaceX

  6. Ask [Redacted 1] to ask Elon Musk

  7. Ask [Redacted 2] to ask Elon Musk

  8. Ask [Redacted 2] to get me in­vited to a party where Elon Musk will be so I can ask them

  9. Travel back in time and kid­nap Wener Von Braun to re­cruit him to my space pro­gram instead

  10. Send item back in time and hide it in Apollo 11 land­ing module

  11. Start my own rock­etry company

  12. Does EU have a space pro­gram? Write to them.

  13. Get re­ally good at Ker­bal Space Pro­gram un­til I can start my own rock­etry company

  14. Give money to KSP devs and see if they can make a real rock­etry company

  15. Can­non (won’t work be­cause es­cape ve­loc­ity)

  16. Can­not on ISS.

  17. In­vent tele­por­ta­tion myself

  18. Fund in­ven­tion of teleportation

  19. Develop psy­chic pow­ers, steal se­cret of tele­por­ta­tion from some­one who already knows.

  20. Ask for ideas on twitter

  21. Ask for ideas on FB

  22. Ask for ideas on LW

  23. Ask for ideas on my blog

  24. Ask [Redacted 3] in par­tic­u­lar, he seems good at in­ter­act­ing with the phys­i­cal world.

  25. Re­cruit top rock­etry dude at Space X to my own program

  26. Have child, raise to be rocket sci­en­tist, pol­gar style.

  27. Kick it re­ally hard

  28. Bring enough moon rocks down to Earth to make it count as “The Moon”, walk to it and place item

  29. blow up moon, let dust set­tle on Earth, mak­ing it “the Moon”, place anywhere

  30. Drone but better

  31. Hang around by NASA cam­pus and make small talk till I find some­one who can help.

  32. Find the guy who wrote the moon ju­jitsu class poem, maybe he has ideas.

  33. Por­tal gun

  34. Con­vince DARPA/​IARPA to fund tele­por­ta­tion to the moon

  35. En­dow a prize to who­ever gets item to the moon, see what turns up.

  36. Con­vince some­one else to en­dow said prize.

  37. Get 3D printer on moon, send in­for­ma­tion to spin up my item.

  38. In­vent nanobots, send to moon on a space­ship, have them as­sem­ble item.

  39. In­vent fly­ing nanobots, let them get to the moon them­selves, as­sem­ble item.

  40. Fly­ing nanobots carry item to moon.

  41. Get EM to build space ele­va­tor, launch from top

  42. Get NASA to build space ele­va­tor...

  43. Get China to build space ele­va­tor...

  44. Get EU to build space ele­va­tor...

  45. Get Rus­sia to build space ele­va­tor...

  46. Start moon tourism com­pany, in­clude item as payload

  47. Start prison colony on moon, send item up as payload

  48. Plant idea to place item on moon in EM’s head, In­cep­tion style.

  49. Con­vince China US is about to do it, see if they beat us to it

  50. Will that can­non from Moon is a Harsh Mistress work in re­verse? Seems like it could, es­pe­cially if it was a guided mis­sile in­stead of a rock.

  :::

• Elizabeth 23 Oct 2020 0:41 UTC

  34 points

  on: Open & Wel­come Thread – Oc­to­ber 2020

  I’m Eliz­a­beth.You may re­mem­ber me from such se­ries as Epistemic Spot Checks and the LessWrong Covid Effort, but for the last year my main fo­cus has been de­vel­op­ing a method for Knowl­edge Boot­strap­ping- go­ing from 0 to 1 in an un­fa­mil­iar field with­out un­due defer­ence to cre­den­tial­ism. I’m at the stage where I have a sys­tem that works well for me, and I’ve got­ten feed­back from a few other peo­ple about what works and doesn’t work for them, but there’s a long way to go. A lot of my knowl­edge is im­plicit and not ex­plained on the page, plus I am only one per­son; what works for me will not trans­late perfectly for ev­ery hu­man. So I’m look­ing for test sub­jects.

  One par­tic­u­lar part of my method is break­ing down one large ques­tion into many smaller ques­tions. This has sev­eral pur­poses: it forces you to clar­ify what you ac­tu­ally care about, and makes it more ob­vi­ous what in­for­ma­tion is rele­vant. I de­scribe this pro­cess and the rea­son­ing be­hind it here, but not very well. I’m look­ing for test sub­jects that have a re­search ques­tion, and would like to prac­tice break­ing it down into smaller ques­tions, with the goal of re­fin­ing the tech­nique and my teach­ing of it.

  What This Looks Like

  1. Come up with a ques­tion you might like to re­search.

  2. You book a phone call with me via cal­endly, or email me at eliz­a­beth -at- ace­sounder­glass.com to set up a time.

  3. We dis­cuss your ques­tion in an at­tempt to break it down into smaller parts.

  4. I sure hope some peo­ple ac­tu­ally go off and re­search the new ques­tions but there’s no com­mit­ment re­quired to do so.

  What Are the Ex­pected Out­comes?

  • You will have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what you ac­tu­ally want to know and will be bet­ter po­si­tioned to find an­swers.

  • You will be bet­ter able to break down your next re­search ques­tion, with­out me.

  • I will make some of my metis on break­ing down ques­tions more ex­plicit.

  • I will be­come bet­ter at teach­ing the tech­nique of break­ing down ques­tions.

  • I learn tech­niques from you I couldn’t have learned on my own.

• Elizabeth 22 Oct 2020 23:38 UTC

  5 points

  on: The Trou­ble With Babbles

  6. Draw ideas in­stead of writ­ing them down in words, so there’s more time to think be­tween ideas, a higher bar­rier to com­mit­ting them to pa­per, and you’ll get bored with very similar ones faster.

• Elizabeth 14 Oct 2020 18:02 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: crabman’s comment on: Turns Out In­ter­rup­tions Are Bad, Who Knew?

  Do you write in Roam us­ing a phone?

  Yes, but not as part of this work­flow, be­cause Roam doesn’t sup­port offline yet and not be­ing on­line is pretty crit­i­cal. I will some­times move things I write as part of this work­flow into Roam af­ter the fact.

  Do you read liter­a­ture sources on it as well?

  Not sure what “it” refers to or what you mean by “liter­a­ture sources”. If you mean “do I do the kind of re­search I fre­quently talk about el­se­where us­ing this work­flow?” the an­swer is no.

[Question] What is your elec­tronic draw­ing set up?

• Elizabeth 13 Oct 2020 2:00 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Philos­o­phy of Therapy

  Wikipe­dia defines the dodo bird ver­dict as “the claim that all em­piri­cally val­i­dated psy­chother­a­pies, re­gard­less of their spe­cific com­po­nents, pro­duce equiv­a­lent out­comes”, which is no­tice­ably differ­ent than “talk­ing to a friend pro­duces equiv­a­lent out­comes to ther­apy”. They can both be true, but I don’t think they’re the same thing.

  Similar defi­ni­tions from study.com, Scien­tific Amer­i­can, some journal

• Elizabeth 7 Oct 2020 22:37 UTC

  4 points

  on: [U.S. Spe­cific] Free money (~$5k-$30k) for In­de­pen­dent Con­trac­tors and grant re­cip­i­ents from U.S. government

  I got ner­vous when I heard peo­ple were ap­ply­ing for for­give­ness, so I looked into it. Here’s what I found

  • Some banks are ac­cept­ing for­give­ness ap­pli­ca­tions right now, my bank isn’t and is work­ing on their own sub­mis­sion pro­cess. I dis­cov­ered this my googling “[my bank] PPP loan for­give­ness”.

  • The ab­solute drop dead dead­line be­fore you will be charged in­ter­est is 10 months af­ter the pe­riod the loan cov­ers (source)

  • Sam­ple ap­pli­ca­tion and in­struc­tions here

• Elizabeth 28 Sep 2020 15:58 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Puz­zle Games

  I had fun for as long as I played it (to maybe 70%?), then found out

  :: it went to 200% and the higher level puz­zles were not the kind that ap­pealed to me, so I stopped there.

• Elizabeth 28 Sep 2020 15:41 UTC

  3 points

  on: Puz­zle Games

  I re­ally loved The Swap­per.[ex­pla­na­tion due to fear of spoilers]

  Space Chem is a work of art in the amount of game­play it gets out of a ridicu­lously sim­ple me­chanic (it is also fun).

  QUBE is a to­tally ad­e­quate mem­ber of the genre.

• Elizabeth 24 Sep 2020 15:35 UTC

  74 points

  on: The ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity’s lo­ca­tion problem

  Ad­di­tional fac­tor: availa­bil­ity of com­pat­i­ble peo­ple who didn’t move there for this group. This is im­por­tant for sev­eral rea­sons, in­clud­ing:

  • In­flow of new ideas

  • Ease of join­ing and leav­ing. If ra­tio­nal­ists take over a small town, the only thing there for them is other ra­tio­nal­ists. That makes join­ing and leav­ing into very bi­nary de­ci­sions. It doesn’t let peo­ple slowly no­tice in­com­pat­i­bil­ities and amoeba into an­other so­cial group.

• Elizabeth 3 Sep 2020 3:26 UTC

  2 points

  on: Study Group for Progress – 50% off for LessWrongers

  Is there any policy for a re­fund if some­one drops out suffi­ciently early?

• Elizabeth 13 Aug 2020 1:14 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Matt Gold­en­berg’s Short Term Feed

  A link can be both af­fili­ate and smile, they stack.

• Elizabeth 3 Aug 2020 23:29 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Rae­mon’s Short­form Feed

  There’s a plug in that will look for PDFs for you that match the page you’re on or the text you have high­lighted.

Break­ing Ques­tions Down

• Elizabeth 4 Jul 2020 1:06 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: How to Find Sources in an Un­re­li­able World

  This sure seems like it should work. My ex­pe­rience is that there’s ei­ther noth­ing, or what­ever qual­ity analy­ses ex­ist are drowned out by pap re­views (it is pos­si­ble I should tol­er­ate read­ing more pap re­views in or­der to find the gems). How­ever I think you’re right that for is­sues that have an aca­demic pres­ence, google scholar will re­turn good re­sults.

• Elizabeth 3 Jul 2020 18:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lionhearted’s comment on: How to Find Sources in an Un­re­li­able World

  My ex­pe­rience is that read­abil­ity doesn’t trans­late much to qual­ity and might even be nega­tively cor­re­lated, be­cause re­al­ity is messy and sim­plifi­ca­tions are eas­ier to read. I do think works that make them­selves easy to dou­ble check are prob­a­bly higher qual­ity on av­er­age, but haven’t rigor­ously tested this.

How to Find Sources in an Un­re­li­able World

• Elizabeth 23 Jun 2020 0:26 UTC

  9 points

  on: Types of Knowledge

  I origi­nally named the types of knowl­edge “Type 1”, “Type 2″, and “Type 3”, but was en­couraged by early re­view­ers to ac­tu­ally name them. In light of the con­ver­sa­tion here, I think do­ing that was a mis­take. Un­less I was sure my names were out of the park cor­rect (and maybe not even then), I should have left it generic so I could get in­put on more peo­ple for what the names, and for that mat­ter defi­ni­tions, should be.

• Elizabeth 20 Jun 2020 19:44 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: NaiveTortoise’s comment on: Types of Knowledge

  A thing I re­ally struc­tured to cap­ture was that “i did ac­tual re­search and had ac­tual mod­els for why masks would help against covid, but it’s still not type-3”, which is why “know why” doesn’t feel right to me.

  I ten­ta­tively think that some of what you’re call­ing en­g­ineer­ing knowl­edge would fit into what I call sci­en­tific (which is a strike agains the names), and/​or that I didn’t do a good enough job ex­plain­ing why en­g­ineer­ing knowl­edge is use­ful.

• Elizabeth 20 Jun 2020 18:57 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: NaiveTortoise’s comment on: Types of Knowledge

  Ig­nor­ing the la­bels I put on them, do you feel like you have a good sense of what I mean by each kind of knowl­edge? if so, what would you la­bel them?