I haven’t looked into this, but I’m guessing the IQ results are from some form of language barrier?
Many people have tried very hard to find explanations for the IQ results that are something other than “low intelligence” for decades. If a replicating result that provides such an explanation had been established, it would have been broadly publicized in popular media and even laymen would know about it. Instead, we’re being told we are not supposed to look into this topic at all.
It seems like the neologism is mostly capturing the meaning of signal from Shannon’s information theory (which “signal and noise” points towards anyway), where you frame things by having yes/no questions you want to have answered and observations that answer your questions are signals and observations that do not are noise. So if you need to disambiguate, “signal (in the information-theoretic sense)” could be a way to say it.
The dark age might have gotten darker recently. Everyone’s scrabbling around trying to figure out what AI will mean for programming as a profession going forward, and AI mostly only boosts established languages it has large corpora of working code for.
I’ve been following the Rust project for the last decade and have been impressed at just how much peripheral scutwork contributes to making the language and ecosystem feel solid. This stuff is a huge undertaking. I’m not terribly excited any more about incremental improvement languages. They seem to be mostly a question of not making crippling foundational design errors (hello C++) and expending enormous engineering effort on tooling and libraries. What might be more interesting is something that targets a specific niche and does something very cool for exactly that niche (Inform 7, dhall), or languages that go for a shoot-for-the-moon paradigm shift like Unison or the “we need to make large programs writable in 100x smaller codebases” from Alan Kay’s VPRI research team.
I’ve got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion “there’s a red apple on that table”, you might start thinking “my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table”. You’ll still assume there’s probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you’re meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion “I’m a person who’s awake, aware and feeling experiences”, and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table.
But the representation “me, in this body here which I’m aware of” within your sensory landscape isn’t the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.
Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge—How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch is a sort of grand tour for technological underpinnings of industrial civilization and how you might bootstrap them. Might be a bit dry, but it’s popular writing and if the kid’s already reading encyclopedias it should fit right in. Lots of concrete details about specific technologies.
Might go for a left field option and see what he makes of Euclid’s Elements.
I haven’t tried galantamine, but didn’t find the drugless techniques all the same. The standard advice of keeping a dream diary and psyching yourself to have a lucid dream and to do reality checks never worked at all for me. Wake-back-to-bed on the other hand got me dozens of lucid dreams and often worked the first time I tried it after a break. It’s also annoying to do because it involves messing with your sleep cycle and waking yourself up in the early morning, and it seems to always stop working if I try to do it multiple nights in a row.
Agree with the other parts though, the lucid dreams are generally pretty short, kind of samey. Maybe it takes a longer dream for the narrative to get properly weird, and the WBTB lucids are more often short dreams that start out of nowhere than becoming lucid midway through an involve dream. They’re also too sporadic to get any sort of ongoing active imagination practice going since I don’t have any routine of trying to WBTB once every week or something. There’s Robert Waggoner’s lucid dreaming book that talks more about possible ongoing psychological development you could make happen with repeated lucid dreams, as opposed to just the “hey, lucid dreams are a thing” books, but I guess a regular routine and some kind of intentful approach would help a lot here.
One thing I’ve been thinking is that the stories about shamanic journeys sound a whole lot like lucid dreaming, so maybe you could take a page from there. Try to travel to the underworld or overworld, meet some spirit entities, ask them what’s up and maybe have a nice chat about large integer factorization.
Everyone who participates probably isn’t a github-using programmer, but if they were, a stupid five-minute solution might be to just set up a private github project and use its issue tracker for forum threads.
I had the same problem, then I started mixing cottage cheese in the oatmeal and that fixed it.
Back when I read about people claiming a RepRap can reproduce itself, I felt like the claim implied it would build the electronics of the new RepRap from scratch as well and was confused since obviously a 3D printer can’t double as a chip fab. The gold standard for a self-replicating machine for me is something like plants, which can turn high-entropy raw materials like soil and ores into itself given a source of energy. I guess you could talk about autotrophic self-reproducing machines that can do their thing given a barren planet and sunlight, and heterotrophic self-reproducing machines that have selling machined components over the internet and using the income to buy CPU chips and hire workers to assemble the skeleton of a new automated workshop as a valid strategy.
It’s testing for conformity to folk values, not mythic values.
Great post. I’ve been trying to find SF reviews that aren’t just blurbs to get an idea about what’s going on with the scene currently. With the exception of Tchaikovsky, most authors whose names keep popping up seem to still be ones who started publishing back in the 20th century. Unfortunately, I already know about most of the books on this list. So I’m going to write a wishlist of books I’ve heard of but don’t know that much about and would like to see reviews of,
Radix series by AA Attanasio
Starfishers series by Glen Cook
The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson
David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler
The Truth Machine by James Halperin
Appleseed by John Clute
Light and Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
Gridlinked by Neal Asher
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
Silo series by Hugh Howey
Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Crystal trilogy by Max Harms
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone
The Last Astronaut by David Welligton
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
XX by Rian Hughes
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
Virtua by Karl Olsberg
James Gleick’s Genius cites a transcript of “Address to Far Rockaway High School” from 1965 (or 1966 according to this from California Institute of Technology archives for Feynman talking about how he got a not-exceptionally-high 125 for his IQ score. Couldn’t find an online version of the transcript anywhere with a quick search.
I’ve stopped trying to make myself do things I don’t want to do. Burned out at work, quit my job, became long-term unemployed. The world is going off-kilter, the horizons for comprehensible futures are shrinking, and I don’t see any grand individual-scale quest to claw your way from the damned into the elect.
How many users you can point to who started out making posts that regularly got downvoted to negative karma and later became good contributors? Or, alternatively, specific ideas that were initially only presented by users who got regularly downvoted that were later recognized as correct and valuable? My starting assumption is that it’s basically wishful thinking that this would happen much under any community circumstances, people who write badly will mostly keep writing badly and people who end up writing outstanding stuff mostly start out writing better than average stuff.
On the exponentially self-improving part, No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices.
Please do not vote without an explanatory comment (votes are convenient for moderators, but are poor intellectual etiquette, sans information that would permit the “updating” of beliefs).
This post has terrible writing style, based on your posting history you’ve been here for a year, writing similarly badly styled posts, people have commented on the style, and you have neither engaged the comments nor tried to improve your writing style. Why shouldn’t people just downvote and move on at this point?
Is this your first time running into Zack’s stuff? You sound like you’re talking to someone showing up out of nowhere with a no-context crackpot manuscript and has zero engagement with community. Zack’s post is about his actual engagement with the community over a decade, we’ve seen a bunch of the previous engagement (in pretty much the register we see here so this doesn’t look like an ongoing psychotic break), he’s responsive to comments and his thesis generally makes sense. This isn’t drive-by crackpottery and it’s on LessWrong because it’s about LessWrong.
Record-keeping isn’t enough to make you a scientist. People might be making careful records and then analyzing them badly, and if there’s no actual effect going on selection effect will leave you with a community of misanalyzers.
The PDF is shown in full for me when I scroll down the academia.edu page, here’s an archive.is capture in case this is some sort of intermittent A/B testing thing.
Was it the title? I always thought Scott used the phrase as commentary on why he was posting the story, same as gwern is doing here. As in, he tried to clearly say “an omnipresent personal AI agent that observes your life and directly tells you the best way to act in every situation you encounter would be a bad thing because building up your own mind into being able to overcome challenging situations is necessary for a meaningful life”, people didn’t buy it, and then he went “okay, let’s try this untitled short story to illustrate the idea”.
For this gwern thing though, I’ve no idea what the failed preceding non-mysterian attempt was.