Is the metric calibration?
RomanHauksson(Roman Hauksson-Neill)
Karma: 202
Someone did a survey of users’ IQs and CodeForce scores and the results showed that IQ might have a slight positive correlation with competitive programming ability.
Leetcode has been goodharted long past the point where what it is selecting for has any signal.
Yes, Leetcoding is essentially unrelated to actual software engineering, but isn’t one’s Leetcoding ability also an indirect test of intelligence + conscientiousness? I doubt that it’s the entire industry standard only because it’s fashionable.
Also see my question asking about the future of AI-assisted software development.
Potential issues with this thought:
Conflates attractiveness and status. Talks about them as if they have the same properties, which might not be the case.
Do people actually see the pursuit of increased attractiveness and status negatively? For example, if someone said “I want to go to the gym to look better”, I think that would be seen as admirable self-improvement, not vanity.
Is the norm of judging vanity negatively actually a result of the zero-sum game? I don’t know enough about sociology to know how societal norms form.
Is irrational vanity actually common? Maybe doing things like buying extravagant cars is less common than I think, or these sorts of acts are more “rationally vain” than I think, i.e. they really are cost-effective ways to increase status.
What are some others things that school teaches us about writing that aren’t useful when we write in the “real world”? I know this depends on the type of writing: different techniques are useful for writing blog posts than books.
I’ll start with another idea: it’s fine to steal good wording. Sometimes inserting a quote or rewording a sentence isn’t the best way to integrate an idea from another source into your writing, so you can just “steal” the wording that another writer uses and cite them.
rational vanity
epistemic status: literal shower thought, uncertain
Gaining social status and becoming more attractive are useful goals because more attractive and higher-status people are treated better (see Halo Effect) and because they increase one’s self-confidence. But the desire to improve on these fronts is seen as vain, as a negative virtue. I think there are three reasons this could be:
Our evolutionary ancestors who sought status were more likely to have children, so this desire is biologically hardwired into us. Someone who takes action to increase their status might be doing so out of a cold, rational calculation that says it would help them to achieve their goals, but it’s more likely that they’re doing it because it feels good.
Often, out of this irrational motivation, people take actions which increase their status but aren’t useful in achieving their goals. For example, buying a fancy, expensive car probably isn’t worth the money because there are more efficient ways to convert money into status and it might make one come off as extravagant and douchey instead of classy.
Status and attractiveness are zero-sum games because they only mean anything in relation to other people. Everyone buying cosmetic plastic surgery would be a waste of surgeons’ time because humanity wouldn’t be better off overall.[1] This means that spending resources to move up the status ladder is like defecting against the rest of humanity (see tragedy of the commons). To prevent people from defecting, society established a norm of judging negatively those who are clearly chasing status, and so people have to be sneaky about it. They either have to have some sort of plausible deniability (“I only bought these expensive clothes because I like how they look, not because I’m chasing status”) or a genuine reason other than “I want people to treat me better” (“I only got plastic surgery because my unattractiveness was having an especially negative effect on my mental health”).
So, here’s the result: someone who rationally chases status and makes themselves more attractive in order to better achieve their goals, even if altruistic, is seen instead as someone succumbing to their natural instinct and defecting against the societal norm of not playing the status game.
- ↩︎
Although, I’ve heard the argument that if beauty is intrinsically valuable, humanity would be better off if everyone bought plastic surgery because there would be more beauty in the world.
Originally, I wanted to write this as a piece of advice, as in “you should consider using social media to motivate yourself in positive habits”, but I tentatively think this is a bad writing habit of mine and that I should be more humble until I’m more confident about my conclusions. What do you think?
I try to avoid most social media because it’s addicting and would probably have negative effects on my self-image. But I’ve found it motivating to join social media websites that are catered to positive habits: Strava and Goodreads leverage my innate desire for status and validation to make me run and read more often. They still have dark patterns, and probably still negatively affect my self-image a bit, but I think my use of them is net positive.
[Question] What are some ideas that LessWrong has reinvented?
Why didn’t GPT-3.5 also copy it if it was in the training data?
Two possible answers:
The quine wasn’t in the training data of GPT-3.5 but was in the training data of GPT-4
GPT-4 is better at “retrieving” answers from the training data
That being said, I also briefly tried to search for this quine online and couldn’t find anything. So I agree, it probably does exhibit this new ability. The reason I was suspicious at first is because the quine prompt seemed generic enough that it could have existed before, but I see that’s not the case.
How do we know it didn’t copy this code from somewhere on the internet?
Should the cause differentiate adults from children? Adults continue to say they are happy with their own lives despite not being happy with things in general (source).
Perhaps there is one change that started making everyone less happy since 2011, and another change that started making adults more happy, and it cancelled out the effects of the first thing, but not for children.
Wow, religious service attendance correlates so much more with life satisfaction than I would have guessed. At first glance, even more than income or college education??
Maybe I should join a church group. Or create a secular social group that emulates whatever it is about religious service that makes people happy.
Concision is especially important for public speakers
If I was going to give a talk in front of 200 people, it being 1 minute unnecessarily less consise wastes ~3 hours of the audience’s time in total, so I should be willing to spend up to 3 hours to change that.
However, the superposition is unlikely to collapse to the luigi simulacrum because there is no behaviour which is likely for luigi but very unlikely for waluigi.
If I understand correctly, this would imply that a more robust way to make an LLM behave like a Luigi is to to prompt/fine-tune it to be a Waluigi, and then trigger the wham line that makes it collapse into a Luigi. As in, prompting it to be a Waluigi was also training it to be a Luigi pretending to be a Waluigi, so you can make it snap back into its true Luigi form.
Maybe someone should make a dating app for effective altruists, where people can indicate which organizations they work for / which funds they receive, and conflicts of interest are automatically detected. Potential solution to the conflict between professional and romantic relationships in this weird community. Other ideas:
Longer profiles, akin to dating docs
Calendly date button
OK Cupid-style matching algorithm, complete with data such as preferred cause area
Tools for visualizing your polycule graph
Built-in bounties or prediction markets to incentize people to match-make
A feature which is just a clone of reciprocity.io, where you can anonymously indicate who you’d be open to dating and if two people indicate each other, they both get notified
This is half a joke and half serious. At least it’s an interesting design challenge. How would you design the ideal dating app for a unique community without traditional constraints like “must be gamified to make people addicted”, “needs a way to be profitable”, “must overcome network effects”, and “users aren’t open-minded to strange features”?
Medlife Crisis: “Why Do People Keep Falling For Things That Don’t Work?”
Just makes you calmer, subtlety. I take it before bed.
In 95%-ile isn’t that good, Dan Luu writes: