Wanting compressions to be universalizable makes sense, it would be an additional compression bonus to be able to throw out all the contextual data about when the compression isn’t a good fit for part of reality. I think it’s mostly incoherent as a principle even though as a process it can be a good intuition to follow (E=MC^2 and Natural Selection sure are useful). We don’t actually need a ground to push off of, we create our own control surfaces, like wingsuits.
romeostevensit
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I had some thoughts about what I was calling ‘visual schema’ as a way of talking about deliberate practice, using tetris as an example for learning where your eyes should go. It seems like a useful lead in for talking about mindfulness of attention in meditation. The move is the same between visual attention and more general attention voluntarily vs involuntarily moving and what and how it moves between objects.
You are one of the people I am least confident in simulating accurately.
Written down if I need to multiply a few values to get a ballpark. In head if it’s just a direct guess.
Same as posts on fermi estimates. I just make a guess to whatever level of effort seems appropriate for the query (often pretty casual, but will take a bit more time if it’s about something I feel is important or especially uncertain about). Then when I am getting the piece of info I can reflect on reasons I might have been off. This often helps structure my inquiry into the piece of info also as I map out model differences that are why it surprised me.
I did wind up with some personal katas.
Calibration using search: anytime I am searching for something with a quantitative answer I have the chance to do a fermi estimate/reference class forecasting and getting feedback on how I did.
Selection effects/Straussian readings: trying to figure out what incentives drove a particular piece of information to be in front of me in this moment.
Stack trace: finding the provenance of internal maps and noticing that they are often predicated on extremely sparse data which is then overgeneralized.
Schematic thinking: An extension of narrative fallacy bias. Noticing when alternatives would be equally valid when replacing parts of arguments. The implied degrees of freedom make the proposed explanation weaker than it might otherwise seem.
I expect the big breakthrough to come when we figure out why the paradoxes in things like VNM and Arrow’s impossibility don’t in fact preclude radically better preference aggregation and thus much better coordination tech. I expect it will have turned out that those results were an artifact of the representation chosen for preferences. I expect that we will move from a bit estimate at particular times (e.g. voting) to some more fluid and continuous representation. I expect the new representations won’t just measure preferences over specific inputs and outputs (e.g. representatives and policy prescription) but something about the structures of the beliefs about how inputs map to outputs. This sounds complicated exactly because we haven’t found the nice formalism yet. It will seem elegant and obvious in hindsight.
I understand, thought it was worth commenting on anyway.
Processed protein is something that there isn’t a great definition for precisely because our models are missing something. There’s something about preserved and processed meats that does something bad but we don’t know what.
Similarly we aren’t sure why natural short chain carbs (honey, high GI fruits) seem to elicit less negative effects than processed short chain carbs. Our causal models are missing something.
the small size of the human genome suggests that brain design is simple
Bounds, yes but the bound can be quite high due to offloading much of the compression to the environment.
Slightly tangential To expand on Hamming’s point slightly: Any problem handed to you is almost certainly formulated wrong. Why can you be confident in that? If it were formulated right it would already be solved and not coming into your awareness as a problem. This is helpful for scientific problems, but also personal problems. Traversing the same representation of your problem for the nth time isn’t going to do much other than agitate you. This is part of why new self help techniques work for a time then stop working. The problems you had that were amenable to those representations are now solved.
I wonder if we can think of a physical metaphor for an inversion of this, when pushing harder on one pole lowers the transition cost such that a sudden flip becomes more likely.
I’ve been hoping for a long time for someone to do a nice write-up on factor analysis. This is great.
Intersections are what kill mostly. The energy delta between two fast moving cars going the same direction is low. The energy delta between even moderatly moving cars at orthogonal or directly head to head is huge.
whoops, meant metformin. Always confuse those two.
have there been any updates on the wellbutrin (edit: meant metformin) front? My understanding is that berberine has a similar mechanism of action and is OTC.
It would also dovetail with the other mysteries: despite investigation we can’t seem to figure out exactly why processed sugar seems so much worse for you than matched amounts from fruit and dairy. Similarly, despite investigation, we can’t seem to figure out why highly processed protein is so much worse for you than non processed protein. My guess is that alterations to the molecular structure of substances winds up in a negative goldilocks zone: not altered enough that the body rejects it thus getting incorporated as functional structure (cell walls, say), but altered enough that some bio processes either don’t work or work at significantly reduced efficiency or with weird side effects. This will eventually be measurable, we don’t have the right proxy metrics currently.
related to curse of dimensionality
I don’t believe nutritional RCTs are going to give a resolution of evidence necessary to support or refute.
You might enjoy Nozick’s Invariances which takes a similar approach to the Is-Ought problem in claiming that the ontological assumptions of the problem as stated are incoherent. We don’t have firm Is’s and firm Oughts we need to bridge. We already are the bridge (of theseus) one end of which is built from heuristics that return Is-like answers, and one end of which is built from heuristics that return Ought-like answers.
I believe Nozick was partially responding to The View from Nowhere.